IDYLLOPUS PRESS IS A VALIANT LITTLE ROWBOAT

This is one of my husband’s dear (cough) brothers, standing in the background, blinded by the heavenly glow of something like 7 Academy Awards, none of which belong to him, but who cares, he was in the close employ of INSERT BIG NAME HERE who earned one or two of them a few years ago (I pay as close attention as my ego permits me) so he was THERE, standing here behind INSERT ANOTHER BIG NAME, and partying that night and doing what you do when you’re running around taking care of someone’s artistic business because they don’t have time to do it themselves. Anyway, we were all proud of him for not busting apart at the seams from all the stress caused by traveling for weeks and weeks at a time in Russia and Europe and Australia and where else his business took him and kept him so damn busy he sent like one postcard from a place in Spain that looks just like a map because that’s what he sent, a map.

Here’s that photo of my brother-in-law (the dude in the background) which shows he’s much smarter than me. For those who don’t have background to know how this could play with family dynamics, I was once accepted into the NYU film school, back when it meant something, based on a film I did and submitted, but ended up not being able to go. He went to school and got his degree in psychology (what the hell are you going to do with that when you’re not even interested in psychology, I asked) and chucked it and went to New York and London and well…what can I say but he’s got some prodigious (is that the word I want) resume but has never produced a single famous or not famous autograph for H.o.p. And have I ever mentioned anything about any of this to him? No. Except for the autographs.

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“But he’s got something you don’t,” says the Wizard.

“What’s that?” says Dorothy.

“You as a model.”

And Dorothy grokked.

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Saturday, He With The Fat Prodigious Resume Who Thinks I’m A Dolt, was speaking on the phone with my spouse, his brother, and upon being told I was going to have a by-line in a magazine for a photo, said,

“Well, it’s about time she got some recognition.”

No, he didn’t say, “Well, it’s about time she did something.”

Which was sweet of him. He always brings me cookies from a favorite bakery in NY when he comes to visit, and that is sweet, too.

Many years ago, when I was having plays done, he drove down from Athens with a friend for one. He’d missed the first several but here he finally was. Well, no, he wasn’t. I waited and waited and he didn’t show. I went in the theater. Later he called and was upset because he and his friend had arrived but the play had just begun…and the people at the box office wouldn’t let him in. Here they’d driven down and missed the play and he was pissed. I don’t know if he’s ever forgiven me for that, though it’s not my fault. He’s not seen anything I’ve done since then, except for a couple of Waffle House photos that he wants, because he’s crazy about Waffle House. And I’ve promised him those photos and haven’t given them to him yet, but I really do intend to get around to it.

Back to present business. Marty’s brother said to him something down the line of, “Tell her to get her website in order so if anyone goes looking they’ll find her work with her name and not a bunch of 404s so people can contact her to buy…”

I decided to pay some attention to this possibility, though hard to do with a nine-year-old climbing all over me 24 hours a day like Koko the gorilla. (The other night, I watched a special on Koko the gorilla with H.o.p., for science, and the past 9 years finally made sense with the realization I have a gorilla for a son.)

Here I am trying to work and I’m blogging instead and H.o.p. is all over me, “Can we go to Netflix and choose Cirque du Soleil videos?” So we go.

“Mom, can we look up shrews now?” So we go.

“Moles now!”

“Voles now!”

“Dormice now!”

“Sea rats now!”

“House sparrows!”

A couple of hours later, my train of thought lying bleeding on the keyboard (as is par for the course and now you know why), what was I up to…?

Oh, yeah. I’m too old to hide under the bed, and would just be glad (kind of) that no one gives a damn about who I am and only about 2.7 people in the world will ever look me up intentionally, except that I worry over even those 2.7 people doing a search for my name and finding mostly what made it into that drawer by the kitchen sink that catches whatever should be long gone in the trash but you may find a use for that orange juice strainer one day even though you are allergic to oranges. And there’s a lot more out there not immediately attributable to me but very easily could be, partly because I just didn’t care, partly because I believed in web static to muddy the waters just a tad, partly because of poor management on my part in my creating the wrong kind of web static, partly because search engines occasionally change how they rank things, partly because lists I was on that were private in the deep dark days of the internet later made their archives public, and because, these last ten years, I’ve just plain played with my name on the internet in a way that can’t be fixed. I conducted personal business under my real name and professional business under abbreviations of it or nom de plumes. That’s just plain dumb.

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Do you know (of course you don’t) that about the only person (at least of whom I’m aware) who’s ever reached this website googling my name (well, a variation thereof) was someone from the Hungarian Military Defense Institute doing a search for “JKearns 02 UFO” and at that time Google only spat up two results (I wouldn’t even know this but had been looking at my site stats for a couple of days, after not looking for months) one of which was my website (which for some reason it doesn’t any more, I must have changed the J Kearns to Juli, but for years I’d posted my art and photos as j kearns) and the other a page of long word lists used for breaking passwords? And offline that day I was working on a humorous UFO passage in my fiction? And that it was the VERY same day that another jkearns came upon my website while looking for road photos and posted a comment, not knowing what my name was? The only other Kearns to ever write me or comment? And that this happened the very same day I wrote what I said was my final post on this blog (turned out just to be a month’s hiatus), and she didn’t know this but wrote how she was an artist/photographer getting ready to create an art website for herself? As far as I know she never started that website.

She wrote that the name of her website was going to be U Poor Dumb Bastard and said maybe that might not be a good name, for professional reasons.

I thought, “But that’s the secret name of my website!!! Never mind that I’ve never bought the domain. That’s its name! And no it’s not good for professional reasons, not at all. But then what kind of a name is Idyllopus? I’d no clue when I thought that up that anyone would think I’m a cat!”

What has this to do with anything? Nothing! Nothing at all! I’ve just always thought this was an entertaining set of kind of coincidences and this seems as good a post as any to stuff this story into.

The reason it’s entertaining is most of the search queries that land here are so freaking dull.

Except for things like monster breath. I’m proudly the number one Google result for monster breath.

I should tell H.o.p. He will love me forever for that.

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So should I expect anyone to give credence and respect to my Remixing the Hanford Declassified Project or Unending Wonders of a Subatomic World or my art (poorly organized and its categories and web pages in a state of disarray for the past year) when two steps away is my old Bigsofa Playground (which was me hopping up and down on the circa 1998-2000 www, going, WHEEE!!!!) and the what-not in the drawer by the kitchen sink? Like my great-aunt Thelma? She’s another two steps away. And ruminations on colds and toothpaste and the Monkees. And, look, there’s that Whoever woman now nailing jello to the wall!

Want to know about my plays? Of course you don’t, because they were all done over a decade ago now and I don’t much care either, truthfully. But if you did want to know they used to be out there under a truncated version of my name on my website (I’ve changed that). Want to know about my art? Not many do and most of that was out there under yet another initialized version of my name or my aka.

All this shit interconnects on the WWW, one email address and ID eventually and easily linked to another, because I’ve only had a very few and never was good at keeping each paint pot pure and unsullied by what was in another. Too bad it’s mostly what’s in the kitchen sink drawer though that pops up under my real name.

For which reason I have now the disconcerting task of going through and renaming all my art and photos so they walk hand in hand and can be easily attributed to me.

“She should make sure she has metalinks for her jewelry and H.o.p.’s t-shirts. She just needs to make sure everything’s under her name,” Marty’s brother said.

The jewelry, too?!

I’m cranked on coffee and ready to leap out of my skin, which isn’t helping my mood any. And I dropped doing my yoga a month ago and no one’s yelling at me to do it again and I know I’d feel half capable of coping if I was still doing it.

Anyway. I did a personal profile, here, finally. An about page. I fully expect to have to trash it and start over again and do something less crappy. That’s all right. By the time Marty sees it and says, “What?” I’ll be not very attached to it and willing to think of something else.

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I’ve always wanted to write a post about my brother-in-law. That picture’s been burning a hole in my pocket for several years though I don’t even LIKE the movie and its incidentals that racked up all those awards. But when you’ve got a crappy cell phone pic of champagne being uncorked behind a row of Oscars, it’s not something that should sit hidden on your computer.

By the way, a couple of year’s ago, when Marty’s dad was in the process of dying from Lou Gehrig’s disease, Marty’s brother quit his whoop-tee-do job and moved back down South to help his mother and Marty take care of his dad and family affairs.

That, at the core of it, is the kind of person my youngest brother-in-law is.

And a sucker for Waffle Houses.

Drama kings and queens.

Me (to H.o.p.): Don’t be a Drama King.

H.o.p.: What’s a Drama King.

Me: You know what a Drama King is.

H.o.p.: To be or not to be?

I’m stealing that one.

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A while back I pretty much stopped writing about politics because, frankly, after reading the news each day I slide under the desk and can only be tempted back out into the light by chocolate raisins, but like you have any right to criticize me for that when Zapatista rebels start writing and selling “Just sex. Pure pornography” novels, self-satisfyingly drawing on pipes during promotional interviews. What the hell that’s about, I don’t know.

But since I stopped writing about politics one had to have known it was only a matter of time before I started blogging about CELEBS!

What broke the dam? Ms. Spears demanding to be let off a plane right before take-off, apparently causing a delay, because she’d realized they didn’t have any leather seats!

Does Ms. Spears never sit in not-leather seats?

My mind looks for reasons behind the obvious. Like maybe the pure porno novel is all secret code. And maybe Ms. Spears is upset because vinyl will leave creases in your skin or something whereas leather won’t? (Did I just make that up or did I read it somewhere many years ago. And yes I realize now it was probably a cloth seat, which gives you an idea of how often I fly, which I don’t, because I hate flying.) Or maybe she’s just another crazy multi-megarich businessperson? When the music she was lip-syncing to started skipping at a “performance” the other night, she did have the presence of mind to keep on dancing rather than leap off the stage onto the sound techs, screaming they were out to get her, so she knows something about how the show must go on.

I never paid too much attention to celebs, but started reading a couple of star-worship sites a few months ago because I wanted to contemplate the why why why of celebrity worship, and have even written a couple of posts on it but never put them up. One thing I’ve noticed is that celebs, like politicians and big business, don’t often apologize for anything. Am I wrong on this? I don’t think they do though.

Seems one thing I have learned too late is never apologize for anything. I should have known better. After all, what was that myth about George Washington never telling a lie about except a nod and a wink as to the clergy of business-money-politics never having to offer an apology for the actions of their beloved hatchets?

So why in the world do I tell H.o.p. things like it’s the big person who knows when to acknowledge when they’ve done a wrong and apologize, and that people will respect you for it?