E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

One of the consequences of being both bi-polar and autistic is that there are side effects. I get at least two I've monitored: OCD and good old-fashioned paranoia. Not extreme; just enough to be an itch, an irritation. Or to cause problems (or imagine them) with neighbors. My wife, daughter and I share a house in a suburb of Seattle. We have neighbors. An interesting variety, in fact, but that's another story. One of them is a fellow nerd, who also works at home, and is just a (tall) fence away, much like the neighbor character in the Tim Allen sitcom Home Improvement . In fact I really can see him only above eye level unless he's on the second floor deck, where he sometimes appears. Otherwise we have this fence, and on my side is my little park and garden and on his side are, well, two dogs, three (young) children, two adults (parents) and a couple of stray cats. Being a writer, given (and when) we actually have sunshine, at times, in Seattle, I like to sit, or rathe...

Years ago, mostly for a lark, I made a short 'art' film (now listed on the Internet Movie Data Base) called Bad Marion's Last Year , a cheesy takeoff on the Alain Resnais film 'Last Year at Marienbad.' It featured two then-hot actors from the Andy Warhol social circuit: Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn and jazz singer Asha Puthli, along with 'Boys in the Band' star Frederick Combs, complete with a guest appearance by then-producer Dominick Dunne. The real star, however, was a rich ingenue from the Manhattan-Hamptons elite: Gillian Fuller, who kindly loaned us her father's vacant Southampton mansion for the occasion (mind you, this was in January). Gillian played herself: a bored rich girl with nothing at all to do other than pick up boys (Combs--never mind that he was gay) and bring them home to take drugs and get bored together. Enter the two Warhol girls as righteous angels, determined to either make Gillian see the error of her ways, or be carried of...

My oh my, so many of my worst fears coming together in Paris, in a profoundly forgettable week (if only it were so easy). So now the same pundits who've spent years ridiculing and otherwise lampooning the French (Fox News and Sarah Palin come to mind, with their 'Freedom Fries' jibes, and G.W. Bush, who just couldn't help himself and insisted "the French don't even have a word for 'entrepreneur'".) So now they've somehow, incredibly done something I very much doubt our trillion dollar Homeland Security apparatus could have done, and caught two escaped mass murderers in one day. That they died in a hail of gunfire was perhaps fitting, given their Charlie victims were unarmed and never had a chance. How sad, however, that this all revolves around the apparently incompatible issues of free speech versus freedom of religion; tainted by the notion very present here in the U.S.A. as well, that when you are a True Believer, all others are suspect...