The Book of Dark Sentiments, being a collection of skullduggery gleaned from previous incarnations of my LFM Dark Sentiments series combined with previously unseen work, is very near completion. It includes two recent poems that I will pause to tease you with today.

First, The Attic Room, inspired by an old and presently vacant house Mrs. LFM and I routinely visit on behalf of the owners. The only way to the attic is by way of a door leading up from the second floor, and this we noticed was secured with an old timey lock employing a skeleton key. The first time we encountered that door it was locked, and we learned from experience that if we left it unlocked during one of our visits, the owners always locked it again if they came by before our next one. I joked one day to Mrs. LFM that it seemed the lock wasn’t to stop anyone going up, but more likely to keep something from coming down. And so, with apologies to that decidedly non-evil house, The Attic Room was born. Here is an excerpt.

In the old town stands an ancient house,
Where once three children played.
Two daughters of a Vicar,
And the boy child of his Maid.

The house it is a towering pile,
With many a lofty room,
In one of which the Maid’s boy slept
The night he met his doom.

That day the attic playroom was
The scene for something queer.
Three children chanting, holding hands,
To catch a spirit’s ear.

And catch an ear is what they did,
But not the one they sought.
Instead of dear old Auntie May,
A demon’s ear they caught.

Summoned to the attic by
Unwitting childish joy,
It came into the room unseen -
And singled out the boy…

That’s all you’re going to get of that until you support your favourite writer by buying the impending tome.

Next is another ditty called Bertram’s Restaurant that tells the tale of a restaurateur who finds himself, after 30 years and six marriages, at what everyone but he sees as the pinnacle of achievement. A millionaire with a fortune built upon feeding those who consider themselves the elite of society, Bertram has never forgotten how much he despises the very essence of the people who helped him build his reputation atop no small amount of self-loathing. We learn of Bertram’s soul soothing method of annually deleting each year’s most offensive patron.

And so, another teaser:

Bertram had a restaurant
He’d built for thirty years,
From ashes of six marriages,
Secured with sweat and tears.

The place was dark and trendy.
It was famous far and wide,
And gave our Bertram every cause
To bust a gut with pride.

Yet while he seemed quite satisfied,
With everything he’d wrought,
Our Bertram wore upon his soul
How dearly it was bought.

Where once he’d kissed the public’s ass
To get them in his door,
It now was Bertram’s ass they kissed,
And even begged for more…

I’m sure you can see where this is going.

In conclusion dear readers, I sincerely hope you enjoyed this preview. It’s still in the preliminary stages, but we plan to put together a decidedly dark public reading to launch this project nearer to Hallowe’en.

And stay tuned because the Dog Days series is about to enjoy its next installment!

This buck turned up at the end of a road Mrs. LFM and I were simply following to see where it went - as it turned out it went to him. His svelte pre-rut physique and velvet covered antlers can't come close to the raw power expressed by the deer I speak of in what follows, but he's still a fine specimen. (Mrs. LFM photo)

A long time ago, I had a brief and exceedingly primal relationship with the Deer that is the inspiration for this poem. In brief, I had come to kill him but, at the moment we met for the first and only time, he made a compelling argument to the effect that he had more pressing matters to attend to than to die just then. I will never forget his fixed and unafraid gaze, his regal stance, and the twin clouds of his breath as they left his nostrils and drifted away on the late autumn breeze.

Let it not be said that I spared his life, for that would imply that I was in control of the engagement. Neither can it be said that, had my need been more compelling than his, my hand would have been stayed. Nature, in all Her power held sway that day, as on all days.

Long life and many does my Brother.

The mist was in the hollows,
Darkly lit in morning’s still.
I stood at forest’s edge as I
Prepared myself to kill.

Within my heart there burned a Truth
No creature can deny -
For one thing’s life to carry on,
Another thing must die.

And so I sought a harmony
Of purpose crystal clear,
Before my Spirit moved to seek
The Spirit of the Deer.

Then silently I made my way
To meet and ask my Brother
To give that greatest gift
One can bestow upon another.

On soft shod feet, an hour hence
I knelt beside a clearing,
With heart beat sychronized to his
Whose Spirit I was nearing.

T’was when I stood that there, ahead,
A lying figure rose -
A sweet, fat Doe who soon was nought
But steam from out her nose.

For though my rifle came to bear,
I watched her run away,
Even as I swung it back
To where my Brother lay.

And standing now, he took a step,
Then looked into my soul,
As I did his, and there we stood,
Each fixed upon his goal.

How long we stood I cannot say,
Nor do I think could he;
But much was said between us both,
My Brother Deer and me.

In that time, no other thing
Existed for us two.
Eye to eye, we talked of nought
But what we both should do.

My Brother spoke of business
He had yet the end to see.
His need was more compelling
Than the one I’d brought with me.

And so my Brother made his point
In one lung filling breath.
With snorted steam upon the wind
He said his no to death.

If she sticks with this whole princess and castle thing, I'll start teaching her swordsmanship soon.

Our niece Alyssa – otherwise known as Niece LFM – turned three today. Mrs. LFM and I just got back from celebrating the event. First time on a trampoline for either of us, and I can honestly say that I found it endlessly entertaining once I mastered the rhythm and technique required to repeatedly catapult a small child sitting on her bum nearly three feet in the air like an animated basketball that screams “Again! Again!”

At one point, Mrs. LFM grew thoughtful and then quietly remarked that, given more private circumstances, the item might lend itself to even more entertaining uses – something she was not surprised to learn had also occurred to me while watching her … bouncing. But, as usual, I digress. Never mind your foul thoughts that two such lustful ones as we should never be left to care for a child. But for lust, there would be no children to care for.

Alyssa has a voracious thirst for books and the stories they contain, but at three she hasn’t yet learned to read, so you know what that means. To commemorate Alyssa turning three today, a thing so incomparably unique that we doubt she will ever manage to pull it off again, here is …

Read to Me!

by LFM

“Read to me!”, Alyssa says
As soon as I come in,
Story after story book
She fetches from a bin.

I couldn’t bore her if I tried,
She loves my manly tones.
She’s gone from Homer’s Iliad
To bloody Game of Thrones.

But sad to tell, this reading thing
Served me an awful clout,
When half the way through Moby Dick
My reading bone gave out.

Until it mends, I cannot read,
Though one thing soothes the bite.
It doesn’t really hurt a bit
If all I do is write.

Communicating doesn't need to be this complicated.

Mrs. LFM and I first opened Facebook accounts in 2007. In that time we’ve watched the site evolve and reveal itself, collecting some observations along the way that a lot of what’s been written about so called “social networking websites” in general, and Facebook in particular, never seem to fully grasp. In fact, I am including an entire chapter on the subject in my upcoming The Large Fierce Mammal’s Small But Weighty Book of Etiquette – Volume 1. Recently, and much to the chagrin of some, we announced a long planned, slow but steady withdrawal from the level of Facebook interactions we had previously indulged in, and that for us had the effect of lightening the level of background noise more than a little bit.

So, why do Mrs. LFM and I still have Facebook accounts at all? First off, we actually like, or at least receive some level of uplifting benefit from knowing, the people we connect with there. There are people in our lives right now that we have never met, and are overjoyed to know, first of all because of the internet, but for some of them, the use of Facebook facilitates keeping those lines of communication open. For the most part, our reasons are based on what has been a steady process to simplify our life by eliminating anything that has a net benefit value of zero or less. This means that, for each of us, there are aspects of Facebook that match that definition by being intrusive or otherwise negative while, compartmentalized as it is, we can cherry pick the parts of Facebook that we find to be useful tools in the fulfillment of our own agendas.

For example, as professional dog behaviourists, we employ Facebook as an easy and efficient way to communicate both with our clients and respected colleagues in the field. We do the same in maintaining contact with people engaged in other areas we have a personal or professional interest in. I maintain a Large Fierce Mammal Facebook page where I post whenever an article is published here, and is the only way some people will find their way to read it. Therefore, for me, Facebook is a promotional vehicle.

As a tool then, Facebook has its uses. What follows will highlight a few of the pitfalls that you should consider.

Facebook offers a “free” service that encourages virtually unfettered sharing of personal information by its subscribers. People join voluntarily, and can participate in the Facebook “community” to whatever degree floats their boat. Once on Facebook, you can make yourself accessible to no one you haven’t personally chosen to interact with, everyone anywhere who has a Facebook account, or a dizzying variety of iterations in between. You can also choose to apply those same kinds of freedoms and limitations to individual people on a case by case basis. You are even free to delete your account and get out of Facebook altogether provided that you can find the latest hiding place of the menus that permit you to do the one thing Facebook management seems hell bent on protecting you from. All this sounds wonderful, community based, and completely safe, but it’s not.

First of all, notwithstanding that Facebook doesn’t overtly charge its users for access to or use of its services, it still makes a lot of money and continues to increase those revenues at a prodigious rate. It does this by selling information gleaned from site usage and content voluntarily engaged in and submitted by its subscribers – that would be you and me. It has yet to be proven, just as it has yet to be disproven, that Facebook engages solely in the sale or distribution of general site content indicative of social or marketing trends. Its terms of use do not prohibit doing the same with user specific site content – those hot pictures of your wife in her new bikini bottoms on the topless beach in Spain last summer for example – and in fact Facebook lays claim to ownership of everything you have ever posted to it, regardless of your privacy settings, and in spite of any attempts you may have made to delete any damn thing. In the end then, you are actually paying for your use of Facebook by authorizing them to do anything they want with anything you do using your Facebook account, whether within the actual Facebook website, or on any other website that links back to it (clicking “like” on another website’s Facebook icon is going to get recorded by – you guessed it – Facebook), for ever and ever, world without end, amen.

Another issue is the fluid nature of Facebook privacy settings, most particularly the way they often default to less secure levels whenever a new version of the site or its services goes live. Unless you simply decide you don’t give a shit, it’s important to keep an eye on that because it has been known to occur unannounced, leaving an account’s content open to unexpected unauthorized scrutiny.

The next issue is one that flies in the face of all that should be holy to any website or service that purports to foster “social networking” and a sense of “community” – the way that Facebook “friends” can  appear to have actively deleted you from their “friends” list when they have actually done no such thing. Every now and then this happens because of a Facebook brain fart, gets noticed by one of the two people involved, and runs the risk of actually damaging real world relationships.

I used a lot of quotation marks in that last paragraph because I have a hard time typing the word “friend” in the context of Facebook while at the same time struggling to keep my face straight. I find a grim irony in the way a consistently growing population has granted an assemblage of electronic systems, built to serve the agendas of people they have never met, a level of trust and credibility exceeding that previously reserved for the people who are actually in their lives.

Another irony is that, at the same time the quality of education and accepted standards of literacy is engendering a decline in the the ability of people to communicate clearly, we are actively building ourselves a world that relies on written means of making our thoughts and feelings known. It is consistently held that the words used in communicating with someone carry very minor weight in conveying meaning, and in fact one UCLA study went so far as to state that, “… up to 93 percent of communication effectiveness is determined by nonverbal cues.” A second study further defined the components in human communication and their efficacy in conveying meaning:

• Words used = 7 %
• Voice quality = 38%
• Non-verbal cues; i. e, body language = 55%

If you spend any time here, you’ll know I don’t have a lot of trouble expressing myself clearly, and I will state emphatically that I routinely engage in written conversations with people that I have never spoken to personally, but who are of a sort that leaves my day uplifted in absolute certainty that nothing I ever say to them will be misunderstood. Nevertheless, these statistics are supported by my more than 30 years as a professional solver of other people’s problems. They are why there are things I will not communicate about solely in writing because the risk of misinterpretation is too great, most particularly in contentious or otherwise emotionally charged issues.  Add to this the aforesaid dumbing down of the population, the sheer volume of it that regularly participates on Facebook and other text based social networking sites, and you have a recipe for disaster that can send real human relations to hell in a hand cart.

The lure of Facebook is multifold. Some of the people who get mired in it actually deserve everything they get. Those are the same people who are living unhappy lives because they have consistently built their real world relationships on the same poor choices and unsound expectations, all the while never cluing into the fact that they are the single consistent ingredient in every failure. Everyone has heard that famous definition of insanity – repeating the same behaviours hoping for a different outcome. I don’t believe I’m trivializing anything by saying that you don’t need to spend much time on Facebook before you’ll turn up something that matches that. Those people are there to get attention and seek to engage others into holding the belief they can help fix what’s broken. When that happens, well meaning people can get embroiled into investing huge amounts of time in trying to help someone they barely know, who may actually be better served by a professional. Worse, they can find themselves unwittingly enabling someone who is opportunistically disinterested in fixing a damn thing because what they actually want is the attention they’re getting.

On this and other levels, Facebook facilitates what I consider to be an erosion of sincerity and manners. Within its confines it’s routinely considered a meaningful gesture of support to click the “like” button if you’re in favour of somebody’s cause, or “share” a status update if you are for or against something, investing nothing tangible and actually helping no one. Someone who actively does this over the span of a year will waste hours of life they’ll never get back just embracing this bullshit. Then there are the, “… send this to 10 of your friends including the one who sent it to you if you believe all people are beautiful …” chain letters, and the endless events that are organized solely on Facebook, end up with half the world’s population saying they’ll come, and ultimately fizzle when three people show up. All this because it’s far too easy to mindlessly click that “like” or “share” button.

So, good reader, if you are an active Facebook user, heed my words and make up your own mind whether it’s you who are using Facebook, or if it’s really the other way around. Think on your real world relationships and reexamine whether you are losing contact with those truly close to you at the same time as you seek constant connectivity to people you barely know or don’t know at all. Look into someone’s eyes and tell them how you really feel. Once in a while, say something that’s truly original and heartfelt that wasn’t copy/pasted from the work of someone smarter or funnier than you. I enjoy a well timed quotation as much as the next guy but this shit is out of hand. Examine why every morning has to start with a public announcement that today, just like every other day you’ve been on Facebook, you let the cat out, poured yourself a cup of coffee, and now you’re listening to the radio before dressing for work. Actually schedule the time to attend events that you reflexively signed up for, and if you want to throw one of your own, send out targeted invitations the old fashioned way. Donate in tangible and meaningful ways to causes you sincerely believe need your support. We humans are social animals. Don’t let “social networking” make you less of one.

For some reason, recent completely unconnected communication with his wife inspired this short poem.

Martin is a crime scene man,
He figures bad things out.
His job is sorting nasty shit,
And sifting truth from doubt.

He sees the things you can’t unsee,
He smells what won’t unsmell.
He’s crusty as so many are
Whose first name’s known in Hell.

And yet his necessary job
Pays bills and feeds his brood.
And I’d be last to call him on
His right to blackest mood.

You see, he’s just like you and me,
With problems of his own,
But Martin has some extra ones,
Straight from the Twilight Zone.

All of this brings me to an item of great annoyance that has confronted me continually throughout my lean, fit, well exercised, and properly fed life – fat, plodding dullards who feel the need to excuse their physical state as compared to mine with some iteration of, “Well, you’re lucky. You have a fast metabolism.” It’s to them I dedicate this rather nasty poem.

You are a bloated, fattened thing,
No woman warms your bed.
You sit in one place and perform
Heroics in your head.

You see my body sleek and lean,
And diagnose the cause -
That every bit of fuel I eat
I burn up without pause.

Yes, of course, oh brilliant one!
THAT must be the reason.
Never mind the crap you eat,
Season after season.

Never mind your chosen path
That keeps you rooted still.
Never mind the heaving breath
Just LOOKING up a hill.

You just keep yourself convinced
You’re cursed while I am blessed.
Ignore the fact that, twixt us two,
You look better dressed.

Pretend you’re fat, and I am not
Because I burn fuel faster.
While you do that I’ll run and play,
And find fun things to master.

I’ll take the steps two at a time.
I’ll hunt and catch my prey!
I’ll seduce my Bride no less
Than sixteen times a day!

But all of this, my portly friend,
I give you without spite.
I serve it up instead to turn
Your eyes toward the light.

No superman am I, but yet,
Even if I were,
I am me because of me,
As you are you, good Sir.

Understand that, in the end,
Each one of us, alone,
Must forge the blade the Gods require,
And work it on the hone.

We here at LFM have always had an issue with the dog show industry, most particularly the breeding of dogs exclusively for conformity with an artificially derived physical appearance standard, exclusive of the animal’s suitability for its original purpose, and the “culling” of puppies who don’t measure up. We must never forget that human engineered selective dog breeding first came into being for the purpose of creating solutions to practical problems. We must never forget that, even though most dog shows are little more than beauty pageants as often as not operated and attended by people who have.

Without further preamble, I present Pedigree Dogs Exposed and Pedigree Dogs Exposed – Three Years On. You will find both of these films disturbing, for one reason or another, depending on which side of the issue you place your sensibilities. You already know where ours lie.

Last night Mrs. LFM and I were watching Billy Joel night on American Idol, meaning that each contestant had to choose and perform a song from the Billy Joel play list. We’re both fans of the man himself, and I was delighted to hear a performance of one of my all time favourites – his 1981 hit, She’s Got a Way. Delighted and surprised to learn that Mrs. LFM had never heard the song before. Hearing it with her snuggled up to me last night was like hearing it for the first time myself, seasoned to taste by the fact that 31 years ago I still believed that such women were merely the stuff of romantic legend.

She’s Got a Way was a hit the year before Mrs. LFM was born, and yet it sounds like he wrote it about her. Turn up your volume, sit back, and get yet another glimpse of how it can be when you truly Love a woman, and find your Love returned in kind.

This is an "old tech" remote control vibrator. Nokia's patent application may take sex toy tech into a brave new world.

Let’s go back to that simpler time in the last century, when the internet was in its infancy, e-mail and ICQ were the go to cutting edge communications methods, cellular phones were simply that – phones, and a computer was just a computer. Moving forward from that time, the line has blurred so that hand held devices like phones, tablets, and netbooks now perform a lot of the same functions to the point where, depending on the user’s needs and lifestyle, they’re essentially interchangeable. The trend is obvious – the tools are evolving to integrate a user’s electronic communications needs into a single, highly mobile instrument.

And now, this concept has taken a step further with the announcement that, last September, cellular phone manufacturer Nokia, “… issued a patent for a material that could be attached to human skin and would vibrate to alert the wearer of an incoming call or text message,” for the purpose of creating, “… a material attachable to skin, the material capable of detecting a magnetic field and transferring a perceivable stimulus to the skin, wherein the perceivable stimulus relates to the magnetic field.”

In a 15 March 2012 article by Vlad Bobleanta on the blog unwiredview.com, the proposed “haptic feedbacK” technology is described thus:

In the first described embodiment of the patent, you’d wear a sort of material that’s attachable to the skin. On your forearm, for example. This material can do two things: detect a magnetic field, and emit a vibration.

The material could be paired with a phone, for example, like Bluetooth accessories are paired to electronics. The phone, however, would have to be capable of emitting varying magnetic fields.

So then, for example, when someone calls that phone, it will send out a specific magnetic field. The material will detect that, and will start vibrating in a certain pattern. That pattern could be different according to who’s calling, or it could be different according to what exactly is happening on the phone (a phone call, text message, and so on).

For this to work, the phone would have to send out a different magnetic field for each action, because the material would associate a different type of vibration with each kind of magnetic field it detects. The vibrations would happen by magnetically manipulating the material.

I refuse to believe I’m the only one who isn’t thinking “forearm” when considering potential attachment points for this stuff, and the last sentence in the quoted segment above made the little devils that sit on each of my shoulders, and that one who lives in another place, cackle and rub their little red hands even more gleefully. I am predicting, dear reader, that this marks a bold step into the integration of sex toys into the list of human communications “needs” our shiny and ever so portable instruments can accommodate.

Reach out and touch someone indeed.

Testicular harvesting implement deployed.

A seeming lifetime ago, it took me a few years to scrape off a bad marriage like shit from my shoe. Particularly during the last two of those horrendous years, when it was dead in everything but name, the state of things were kept a closely guarded secret for logistical reasons that have no bearing on today’s discussion. The important part is the two year secrecy – when the bomb eventually dropped, it was equivalent in the public mind to a sudden event.

One routinely sees music artists, who have plied their trade for 15 years in a variety of bands, finally find acceptance and get branded an “overnight sensation”. I know how they feel. My relationship with she now spoken of in reverent tones as Mrs. LFM became known to the world two years after my previous marriage augured in for the last time, but at pretty much the same time the Great Unwashed learned of the first event.

Naturally, the conclusion was that I had traded my previous wife in on a newer, faster, hotter model. While Mrs. LFM certainly fits that physical description, that wasn’t what happened, but what the hell. It was small town Nova Scotia, and in a month everybody had new things to gossip about.

The funny thing is, in the short interval between breaking news of the demise of my marriage and the seeming overnight explosion of my new relationship, I received a barrage of unsolicited and in some cases quite graphic advances from ten women and two men, all of whom wanted to console me in the most carnal ways possible. I know I’m nice to look at and fun to be around, but even I had no idea I had such a following. I let each one down as gently as they deserved, and more than a few took it personally.

Anyway, if you come here even once and spend any time at all, you will know I am married, and I will stress for the last time, to a woman of a quality I had previously spent my life believing only existed in exceptionally well written fantasy and erotic fiction. Some cultures accept it as a given that married couples will take lovers, and I completely get this. I have taken both a Wife and a Mistress, and they are both the same woman.

All this having been said, a dynamic, high profile, attractive couple will have its admirers, a few of whom will from time to time get pushy enough to require an adjustment in attitude. We are no different than Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in this regard. We will not tone ourselves down, but will make our position clear in the form of the following poem. While it’s written from a male perspective, I can safely say Mrs. LFM applies the same sentiment.

To break apart a marriage
Requires one thing to be -
That where both thought of “Us” before,
Each feels there’s only “Me”.

Respect departs, and with it trust,
And when that day arrives,
The two are better off alone,
Than living toxic lives.

But when two people really are
As one in soul combined,
No force of Man can intervene
To break that sacred bind.

As long as such as they draw breath
They stand as One in all.
Multiplied by more than two,
And standing miles tall.

Yet there are those who still will try
To find their way between,
Who seek to scale a wall so high
Its top cannot be seen.

Such ones as they believe they can
Have anything they see.
Their rampant fancy struts about
And crows, “Hey! Look at me!”

With nothing in their lives to prove
“I’m married,” means a thing,
They soon forget that no means no,
And why one wears the Ring.

The only code they live by
Is that up to now they’ve won,
And up to now nobody’s come
To interrupt their fun.

But I live by a different code,
Of Honour, and despise
He who disrespects the Love
In my Beloved’s eyes.

No strutting cock can steal away
A woman from her man.
If she is truly his alone,
I say, no other can.

That one forgets a mother’s wish -
To have her grandchild born.
Born to son and wife in pride,
In wedlock legal sworn.

His mother would be horrified
If that day never falls.
Her grandchild never comes to be
For want of father’s balls.

So let me gentle that my boy,
To pacify your mother.
I’ll only take one testicle,
As warning to the other.