Isn’t this a cool image? It’s a chrome bumper on a truck in Bezerkistan.

There’s a nice email interview with me by Maxi Kim in the 3 AM webzine. They found some links to videos of my talks that I’d never seen.

Did I show you my Halloween pumpkin yet? He didn’t live long, his skull rotted out very quickly. Lovely sick juice ooze out.

This show shows the shadow of a Viking warrior stalking a hen for Thanksgiving dinner. “The goose hangs high” means, some say, that the fowl is hung, dead, outside for several days to ripen and soften until it’s smell is — high.

“Have you bathed lately?” “I’m high on life.”

I used to think it was a good idea to go to Death Valley, but after my last visit, in September, I’m kind of over it. Well, it’s nicer in the spring.

Following a suggestion by my loyal reader “Alex,” I read a little of Iain M. Bank’s first SF novel, Concerning Phlebas, which has a shapeshifter or “Changer” as a character. In this novel, the shapeshifting is quite slow; it takes several days, like a process of biological growth. But I’m going to want the shapeshifting to be fast, like for Plasticman. Something that I can use from Concerning Phlebas is that a shapeshifter needs to focus fairly steadily on their desired form. I like that idea.

[Rudy in grad school, 1971]

Since my fictional character Alan Turing’s norm is to change shape very rapidly, it could be that any sudden shock can distract Alan from maintaining, say, his Abby shape, and he could then revert to his default Alan shape with the abruptness of a Zeeman catastrophe machine settling into a new minimal energy configuration. By the way, a reader named Mike Hoskins sent me a link to an image of a 1946 letter where Turing talks about his ACE computer’s ability to function as a universal emulator.

Thinking of the next scene now. Neddy Strunk, who’s become a shapeshifter too, slimes up the wall of the Burroughs house, and into Alan’s second-story room. Alan is backing off. Neddy takes on his Strunk look, and Alan is, like, oh no. Seeing this, Neddy has the idea of taking on a crude approximation of Vassar’s appearance, Vassar being a man whom Alan is hot for. He embraces Alan and, almost against his own will, Alan finds himself slipping into the female Abby shape that he’s been using to get it on with Vassar. Soft mood music.

They’re screwing, but it’s more than that, it’s skug conjugation. They’re exchanging cytoplasm. On an impulse, Alan shoots a tendril *thwap* upwards to stick to the ceiling of the Burroughs guest bedroom, and Neddy does the same. They dangle in the air, slowly twisting, like a pair of mating hermaphroditic slugs (check out the video if you’ve never seen it, this one complete with plummy Brit narration). And that’s when Mrs. Burroughs and young Billy Jr. walk in on them.

The wild thing is—after this sight, mother Laura still thinks that this is her son William Burroughs, even though it’s Alan in the Abby shape deformed into a dangling skug. I mean, that’s the kind of guy that Bill is, right? He does this kind of stuff. Laura Lee throws him out of the house.

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