[Note: This story is l-o-n-g and I just wanted to get it out there. So no purty pitchers today! You can search any image database such as Google images to find many lovely artist renditions of Pele, the Volcano Goddess. —Bill]
Preface:
On Quantum Entanglement[1], Christian Compassion[2], and the Aloha Spirit[3] Being All One
What if quantum entanglement were a form of love, but not "love" in the current human understanding of the concept. What if this impersonal form of love (perhaps akin to what we sometimes call "unconditional" love – somewhere, between "soul" and "attraction," perhaps – cosmic specks of cosmic respect) were always present in the universe as an ever-lasting, ever-permeating glow? Kind of like the Star Wars "force", but more of a cool, dark radiance than a force per se.
Taking without giving an offering or permission is not the Hawaiian way and results in a lifelong curse and sometimes death.[4]
December 7
We are at a noisy holiday party in the Hawaiian woods. It is late and I am tired, but Hubby wants to tell everyone goodbye first – linger a bit longer, mingle before leaving, maybe make more friends. Someone introduces us to Greg, who is one of the hosts. Instead of the hand-shaking ritual I am expecting, Greg impulsively gropes my cock, balls, and ass, all in the space of an instant, in full view of my partner, our two best friends on the Island, and two of Greg's friends. Seven of us. I bounce away, shocked and surprised. I shoot Hubby a sideways look – can you believe this? – and I roll my eyes. Greg is laughing at me, unconcerned with my humiliation and dismay:
Laugh lines. Fault lines.
Whose fault is it, anyway?
Pele is laughing at my self-importance. She knows it's her fault, all the time. We are all quake soup. Resistance is futile.
"He was furtive – quick and grasping,"[5] Hubby tells me later. "I could see it was a repeat of your junior high stuff, but I didn't know what to do." Well, yeah, I think, a bit defensively, but at least Greg didn't clock me in the face. My body couldn't tell the difference, anyhow: My hands had shot out in front of Greg, at waist level, creating distance, trying to smooth the lava that was shooting up between us.
All composed things are like a dream,
an illusion, a bubble, or a shadow,
Like dew or like a lightning flash,
Meditate on them in this way.[6]
Normally I am so composed. Greg has broken through my smooth surface, but I think he's about to get cut on that lava: 'A'ā lava, sharp, Pele's molten scream, piercing the darkness.[7]
I restrain myself, however, holding the tension embedded in a chaotic social moment where I am the butt of humor. Tree caught in the lava. Why am I so fucking noble?
Fault lines, laugh lines. In my mind he shrinks from Greg to greg, an improper noun. Now greg starts ripping at the seven buttons on my red aloha shirt. Oh, god, Christmas parties; where's the lampshade for his head? I particularly like this shirt; that's why I wore it to this fucking party. It's a cherished old Christmas present from Hubby, and of course I want to keep it just the way it is. Yet all things change form, and form is an illusion anyhow. Resistance is futile. But I hate destruction. Decay. Chaos. I'm fucked.
I back off. greg backs off. He's going to get a free show. I am sarcastic male burlesque[8] as I unbutton my shirt. I still think greg is smart enough to get the joke and be cool. I overestimate greg by a lot. In fact, greg is only an erg. A very small unit of energy: 10-7 joule. This has always been my lot with losers. Bullies. Pricks. I overestimate them all.
erg is tweaking my nipple – "Ooh, that's BIG!" – and still laughing at me. I'm still trying to play it cool. This is a party. But it's all happening in quantum time, and cool magma is an oxymoron. I don't really know how I am expected to deal with a moron like erg anyhow. It's his house. Later I will wish I'd pushed him into that pretty Christmas tree glowing behind him. THREE Christmas trees, each with seven strings of lights! Zsa Zsa Bill says yes, yes, yes. Scrupulous Bill says, what a waste. No one needs THREE Christmas trees, all strung with lights and pearls!
erg's a fucking swine.
And I'm the big dick. And the big pearly nipple. erg's touch is ticklish, not at all erotic. erg's flesh grasping mine, spark exchanged, a pair of quarks, perky quantum particles entangled[9] forever, his taking mine without permission. Pele smiles. Her teeth are sharp.
He's not unattractive. I might have found erg appealing as a sex partner someday. Y'know, a prayer and a curse are the same thing. They only differ in the details. Such are the erg-onomics of gay party politics.
In the quantum model of the universe, any action on (or by) particle a creates an instantaneous reaction on (or by) particle b. Even observing a particle creates a particle reaction. So, for sure, now there will be instantaneous reactions between me and erg for the rest of time. It was all in the script: In spooky quantum science, reality is always non-local. Voodoo quarkonomics.
And my particular version of the quantum particle universe is bouncy! This is how the story goes:
Pele knows we are all entangled, and Pele knows what it means to be treated with a lack of respect. This is why bad things happen to silly haoles[10] who visit the Island and take her lava rocks home with them. They become enmeshed with Pele – in fact, this happens at the very instant of their intention to steal a tangle of her hair without a higher purpose in mind, and only Pele knows what those purposes are. It is a very short list. This mindless action can be remedied, though – the tourists can bounce the lava back to Hawaiian earth, causing a quantum reaction sometimes resembling forgiveness on Pele's part.[11] Like me, Pele forgives but never forgets. As far as we know, entanglement is eternal. Pele's is an impersonal form of forgiveness, just as all true forms of forgiveness are. It's not about you, Pele knows, it's about respect.
So she protects, in a sense, this affronted haole boy, who understands that the only way to resolve unfinished business lies in accepting that, in quantum reality, it is never finished. There is always spooky action at a distance. This is true aloha spirit, Pele knows – after all, it was her idea, though she seldom gets the credit. Respect must be paid. Disrespect must be repaid. Particle b pays particle a.
Or, as Pee-Wee Herman once put it:
''I'm rubber and you're glue. Anything you say bounces off me and sticks to you!''
BOING.
Draw the infinity symbol in the air with your finger, over and over. It's bouncy.
In The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann implied that we are all inpatients in the institution of humanity. I prefer to think that maybe we're all just kids in the plastic Bounce House.
Love makes us bouncy. And children, it is often said, love the most purely of all.
December 26
Three weeks later, I had nearly forgotten about Greg and his rude behavior. The day after Christmas found us entertaining two friends who were spending most of December in the Hawaiian Islands. We treated them to lunch at a phenomenal Mexican restaurant in Pahoa.[12] We all marveled over the flan, the best I've ever tasted. Our spirits were high.
On an impulse, Edmund and Perry asked if we'd like to go see the lava flows. They had been the previous evening and raved over lunch about how spectacular it was. Hubby and I looked at each other expectantly. "Sure, why not?" I replied. What else were we going to do anyhow? It was the day after Christmas, and we both loathed post-holiday sales. So we stopped at the house, where I changed into hiking shoes and grabbed a couple of flashlights, while Hubby packed granola bars and bottled water. With Edmund behind the wheel, we roared off in the rented Infiniti.
We drove to the end of State Highway 130, which stops abruptly where a giant lava flow wiped out most of the town of Kalapana[13] in 1990. From there, it was a longer drive over several miles of dirt road of varying quality. It occurred to me that the rental agency would not have appreciated Edmund's choice of leisure trip in their luxury car. After twenty or so minutes, we arrived. The parking lot at the end of the universe, I smiled to myself. From there, it would be an hour-long hike over lava fields to
see the flows.
I did my best to memorize the lay of the land: the long strip of coconut trees in the distance; the configuration of vehicles and trailers adjacent to the lot; and anything I could commit to memory regarding the shape of the mountains and coast where I stood. I repeated this ritual regularly throughout the first twenty minutes of our hike, until I was convinced that I was familiar enough with the landscape to let it go and enjoy the hike with full attention. The hike to the lava flows was lengthy, and it was important to arrive while there was still light.
Perry had taken the lead with ease. He wore khaki shorts that showed off calves and thighs like sculpted bronze. He spent most of the year in training for the Honolulu Marathon, where they had been until six days ago, when they flew from Oahu to the Big Island.
I love hiking over lava flows, and I didn't have much trouble keeping up with Perry, but I was a bit concerned about leaving Hubby in the dust until I realized that he and Edmund had struck up an extended conversation about particle accelerators. Let the physicists have their quality time, I smirked to myself, but I was feeling just a tad outclassed. If I couldn't be in on their abstractions, I could still enjoy the compelling presence of stone and surf. Actually, that seemed like the better deal to me anyhow.
Such hubris. Such crust. I imagine Pele laughing with a Tallulah-like rumble at our self-important ways, the precious arrogance of all humans, barely conceived specks of star-fluff that touched the crusty earth just a minute or two ago. She probably hasn't even noticed us yet, bouncing around like the flecks of foam upon the waves where she mingles with the sea. The world is hers in a way that it can never be ours.
What is a Goddess, anyhow,I mused, if she is not a creation of the collective mind, summoned to bring us perspective, intended to remind us of our proper place in the Universe? How insignificant we are? Not even dandruff on her scalp.
It was just growing dark when we clambered over the final ridge and at last beheld a glowing bar of vertical orange plummeting straight into the ocean. I had seen some photos and a video, but now I understood how vastly they had diminished the astonishing immediacy of this falling fire. The hillside above was aglow with veins of flowing lava, in a formation like the tines of a downward pointing trident. I counted three major arteries and four finer, fainter veins, all of which flowed partway down the hill before disappearing into the earth on its way to meet the water. Occasionally I saw a big chunk of orange breaking off where the lava met the surf, tumbling briefly like a pinwheel through the receding waves before it vanished.
Perry and I stood transfixed, Perry clutching my arm, waiting for Hubby and Edmund to catch up.
"Wow," Edmund panted, as they came to a halt. Everyone was silent. The distant waves filled the air with a faint pounding, nearly a pulse, appearing to echo the fluctuations in the intensity of light that emanated from the glowing hillside. It was as if we were bridging two worlds. All composed things are like a dream.
"This is so special," Hubby murmured, and I could feel the tension between his urge to acknowledge the charged elemental forces at play and his desire not to break the spell.
Soon I noticed volcanic vapors rising from a hole in the ground about 100 yards above us, so I hiked uphill and watched through two adjacent holes in the earth, each about the size of a hula hoop, as a current of molten lava coursed through the exposed lava tube. It really did resemble a rushing river, but this cascade was a brilliant orange with dark, nearly black, sworls running through it. It resembled some unearthly, flowing form of orange marble. Rock, yet not a rock.
I sat alone for five minutes, drinking my fill of this vision before signaling to the others to join me. Together we sat for nearly half an hour, staring into the earth as though it were a campfire.
Unlike Hubby, and a bit to my dismay, Edmund felt no reluctance to break the silence. He was completely overcome, babbling, mantra-like: "Five hundred thousand years old! Risen from the center of the earth! Miles deep!"
Exuberant, he started to charge off and explore yet another band of rising vapor further uphill. Edmund always wants to go further, further, further, I thought, remembering earlier, when he had wanted to detour to the nudist beach for some sun before heading to the lava flows. "Eddy," Perry protested, "We really should get back."
"Yeah," I agreed. We had been at the site for over an hour now, and I knew it would be a bit dodgy, finding our way back to the car over lava fields in the dark, even for highly fit, well fed adults equipped with flashlights and provisions.
Within five minutes of departing our hearth in the earth, the nearly full moon vanished behind a deeply overcast sky, my first confirmation that we were indeed embarked upon a Fool's Journey. Then the formerly rapid-moving Perry disclosed that he had impaired depth perception after dark. "You, too?" said Hubby. "I left my depth-correcting eyeglasses back at the house."
I took a deep breath: This is going to be a long trip home.
Pele, please, be kind to us.
I am blessed with powerful night vision, so for long stretches of time, I kept my flashlight turned off, just in case we ran out of collective battery power.
Then it started raining; just a bit, at first, then moderately hard. Everyone groaned. My T-shirt grew soaked. "Shit," I muttered, "Does anyone have an extra shirt or something I could wear?"
"Perry, I think I've got a rain poncho in that pack you're carrying," Edmund said, taking the canvas sack. "Oh, but won't you need that?" I asked. "Nah," he replied. "I've got a bit more insulation on me." Although we were the same height, Edmund outweighed me by a good and solid thirty pounds. What Edmund lacked in trail-blazing common sense, he almost made up for with sheer confidence. Almost.
Lava fields grow slippery in the rain. I slowed to a crawl, partly for safety but also because I felt hobbled by the even more halting pace of our two vision-impaired members. "We need to keep moving," I stated with grim determination, concerned that the group was making too many stops. "Not too fast, just slow and steady progress. That's what's going to get us back to the car. Keep your weight low and just maintain that steady pace."
I saw that Hubby was shivering a bit. "Are you all right?" I asked him. "Do you want to wear the poncho?"
"No, that's okay," he said. "Well, all right," I said, unconvinced, "but let me know if you change your mind." I didn't really want to give up the poncho, but at least I was wearing long pants. Hubby's tendency to wear shorts for every occasion exasperated me sometimes. On the other hand, I hadn't done much better by wearing the T-shirt.
In contrast to the others, Edmund moved too quickly and, lacking my acute night vision, had a tendency to lead us onto rises of steep, sharp 'a'ā lava, causing us to re-trace our path at several points. I knew it was best to stick to the lower-lying troughs of the smoother pahoehoe lava, even though it meant taking the long way around the embankments and possibly impairing our sense of direction.
"Edmund, you need to slow down," I pleaded. "Try sticking to the lower path, even if it means taking longer. We can't keep backtracking like this."
"Maybe we should head closer to the ocean," Perry said. "Yeah," Edmund agreed, "It might be easier to find our way back if we could at least hear the water."
I
wish they could see the path the way I can, I thought. Something was guiding me, and it wasn't just memory. It seemed like some kind of cool, dark radiance. This could be so much easier, I thought. Silly Greg and his party flashed across my mind. Strange thoughts emerge under stress. Crossed paths, crossed wires. Spooky energy at a distance.
"That sounds good," I began, "but I think we should do our best to retrace our steps, even though it's confusing sometimes with all these switchbacks." Yet I knew it would be too much to restrain Edmund's impulsiveness for long. For the moment, I was challenged enough, just to keep the rain from dripping into my eyes, and I didn't trust anyone else to lead us
back to safety.
Soon enough, Edmund was hiking ahead of the party again. I tried to maintain a pace somewhere between his and the others', but before long, we were spread out over several hundred yards. Fine, then, I thought. I'll stick with the slower-moving guys and let Edmund run himself aground a few more times. I hope he doesn't lose track of us. It was hard to see around these buttes of lava.
Eventually, though, he stopped and waited for us. The rain had abated, but the lava was still slick, and I was exasperated. "I know I've said this already, but if we go too fast, we risk falling on this lava. If we change our course, we're more likely to overshoot the parking lot altogether." I remembered a story I'd seen on the Internet about a guy who ended up stumbling around for most of a week before he was found.[14] "People do get lost out here." Pele likes boys, I thought. Maybe she's partial to the gay ones. Not so many of us around. And I'll bet we're harder to catch.
Edmund took Perry's hand and surged forward, which I thought was a workable solution, since now he would have to slow down for Perry. Still, he managed to steer them onto a moderate drop-off, which they managed to traverse safely to lower ground.
"Watch, now!" Pele says, as she points her finger toward the ocean, oblivious to the four ants crossing her path as they crawl across the night. The lava hits the water, releasing an unearthly vapor. She draws infinity, over and over. Her island grows larger each year.
Hubby, trailing them, starts to cross the gully, but then he slips and falls on the brittle lava. Badly. It happens nearly in slow motion, but it is bad enough. Now, by the glow of Edmund's flashlight, it becomes evident that Hubby's worn-out tennis shoes have virtually no traction. Why didn't he change into something better when we stopped at the house, like I did? It was reflexive; I hadn't even thought about it, much less about checking with him.
"Fuck," I mutter, as we stand here in the rain, blood streaming from Hubby's badly gashed calf and hands.
Twenty-one miles away, Greg drops the last string of tree lights onto the kitchen countertop with a flourish. He stops for a quick bump off his new glass bong, a secret Christmas present to himself. He starts his micro-torch and draws infinity onto the marble-sized bowl with the pointy blue flame, melting the clear, chunky rock into liquid. He licks his lips, then caresses the stem. A vaporous cloud collects in the tiny bowl. He has filled the chamber with Everclear; now he pulls the white vapor across the clear liquid. The high-octane alcohol bubbles as it mixes with the air and the drug. The mingled vapors shoot up the stem, surging into his eager lungs. He pulls back the torch, but the butane flame flicks his fingertip, a tiny, sharp lick that startles and stings:
"FUCK!!"
The bong slips from his grip and shatters on the kitchen tile. He leaps up, stunned, choking on his hit of meth. He brings his bare foot down on shards of superheated glass. The stinging alcohol flows across the tile and fills the fresh cuts, as the torch sets the highly flammable liquid on fire. Greg catches a whiff of something burning just before he slips and hits his head on the edge of the countertop.
Pele smiles. Her teeth are sharp. She licks her lips.
She is unaware of the silly haole
boy, but she feels the thrilling surge of cool, dark radiance. Somewhere, somehow, disrespect is being repaid.
"Does anyone have a hanky?" I ask. "Anything similar?" Edmund drops his trousers. I rinse out the gash with some of the bottled water and fashion a tourniquet out of the nobly donated underpants; no wasted motion. Black silk, I notice. Matches the car, I smirk. Edmund was nothing if not a bon vivant.
Thus our adventure plummets from the sublime to the ridiculous in one fell swoop. Or, to be a bit more precise, one swooping fall.
December 26, 1946: Two Kulani Prison Camp inmates die and eighteen are hospitalized after a shellac alcohol drinking party at the camp.[15]
Now I was worried about Hubby's possibly going into hypothermia or injury-related shock. I was torn between the need to guide slowest-moving Hubby safely over the lava and the urge to be out front, leading us back to the car.
"Are you sure we shouldn't be heading closer to the coast?" Perry asked.
"Trust me, that parking lot is further inland than you think it is. Now, let's not add to our troubles by changing our mind, okay? We've been through this already."
Perry looked dubious.
"Look. I'll run ahead to that next rise, see? And I'll take a look around from the top, and see what I can see. I don't think we have much further to go now. Just don't split up, okay? Give me two minutes." I flipped on the flashlight and set off.
I came to the crest of the lava bank and stared into the blackness. Nothing. Just then, it started to rain again. I held out my hands, palms upward, beseeching the stars for any kind of sign whatsoever. Dejected, I headed cautiously back down the hillock.
"I can't see anything," I reported. "I – I just don't know anymore. I'm pretty sure we haven't passed the parking lot." I wondered, though, if somehow we had gotten turned around. The hills were still on our left, but I could no longer see the glowing trident mountain. Nothing looked familiar at this point. "Just five more minutes, okay? Five more minutes, and then we'll talk about it again." My voice was losing conviction, like a battery losing power. "I feel like a broken record, but we have got to stay together. And if we go too fast, there will be more spills on this lava. Just stay the course … please just stay the course." I swallowed hard, trying to relieve the sudden tension in my throat. I can't cry now, I thought.
Hubby spoke up: "Actually, I was doing better, walking with Perry. We guide each other well, because of the mutual depth-perception problem." Of course. "That's a good idea," I agreed. "Why don't you two stick together, then?" Perry seemed relieved. "I'd like some water," he said. "That's great," I agreed, a bit too quickly. "Let's all drink some water."
We passed around a plastic bottle in the rain. Hubby's flashlight had fallen apart during the fall, and now he pieced it back together, but I noticed that it was painful for him. I wondered at the countless tiny flecks of lava that must have embedded themselves in his hands when he fell. I had seen his palms, bleeding
and scratched, when I had poured the stream of bottled water onto his hands a few minutes ago. The rain didn't help his grip, either. And the flashlight no longer worked, so I turned on mine. It was too bad I couldn't just venture ahead, fetch the damn Infiniti, and drive it across these god-forsaken lava fields.
Soon we were moving again. The fickle rain abated, but the lava remained slick. We moved at a crawl past the rise I'd climbed, emerging onto a large, flat, lunar-looking plain.
Edmund, who would not be restrained, had marched ahead of the group and saw it first; a quick, whitish flicker, low on the horizon, maybe a quarter mile in front of us. "Holy fuck!" he shouted. "That! Did you see it?"
I thought maybe it was just a meteor flash, but then the pickup truck's headlights came on and stayed on. He must have seen the flicker bouncing from Edmund's flashlight. Now I could see the faint outline of the coconut trees behind the parking lot. "Thank god," I wheezed.
Back at the house, Perry made us a batch of steaming cocoa as I tapped out an email and sent it off to our friends in Kea'au, the same couple who had brought us to Greg's party:
… and I just have to drive the Hubby to the ER in Hilo now. He has a very nasty gash in one calf that I am sure will require antibiotics. For now, I've rinsed it out with purified water and a few rounds of hydrogen peroxide, dressed it with Neosporin, and covered it with a large adhesive pad. I'm also concerned about a possible bruised rib or two. Plus, he has a lot of cuts on his hands, but as far as I can tell, we've extracted most of the lava bits.
Still, would I do it again, for the lava experience?
Absolutely.
It had taken nearly two and a half hours to hike back to the car, more than twice as long as the trip out to the flows during the rain-free daylight. Soon we had sent Edmund and Perry on their way, and were zooming up the slick black stripe of Highway 130, then up the road that led to Hilo.
As we sat down to fill out paperwork in the emergency room lobby, a pair of paramedics burst through the swinging doors at the back of the hall, wheeling in a horribly disfigured man hooked up to an IV bag of saline solution. What I could see of his skin was blotchy, shiny, and blistered, reminding me of wet lava. Most of his hair seemed to be burned off. "House fire victim in Hawaiian Acres," one of them explained to the intake nurse. "Second-degree burns over maybe forty percent of his body."
Lava lines. Fault lines.
Whose fault is it, anyway?
Pele laughs. She knows it's her fault, all the time.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Herbert, N., 1998, <http://mail.cruzio.com/~quanta/bell.html>:
"One description of The Einstein-Poldalsky-Rosen Experiment (the EPR
Experiment).
Herbert [1] describes the situation of two quantum particles that are once
together flying apart and being measured at two distant locations. There exists
a connection between the particles such that the fact of an observation of
particle A is relayed to the distant particle B, in such a manner that the
communication, 'does not diminish with distance, cannot be shielded, and
travels faster than light.' The fact of the two particles' once being together
is sufficient to mingle the particles’ phases (which the author refers to as
'quantum phase entanglement'). This results in the effect being “non-local”
(whereas all ordinary light-speed-limited forces are referred to as “local”).
[2] http://net-burst.net/revenge/love_and_wrath_of_God.htm:
"Most of us delight in finding people whose sins we can despise. We rarely
analyze why we do this, but it is actually our pathetic way of getting our
minds off our own sins and drowning out the screams of our consciences." (Author
note: A wonderful article. Lots of great Biblical quotes you can toss at any
Fundies who give you a hassle for being your marvelous queer self. Or just
Google on "Christian compassion" and "revenge" – it's the
first hit!)
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha:
Over the decades the word aloha has been used in reference to a complex state
of mind called the Aloha Spirit or sense of aloha. The Aloha
Spirit is often described as a sense of care and hospitality to those
around as well as respect for their personhood, even in the face of stressful
environments, occasions or people.
[5] http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2006/Dec/09/ln/150history.html:
"December 7, 1941: Just before 8 a.m., 183 Japanese planes attack U.S.
aircraft carriers and battleships at Pearl Harbor as well as Hickam Field and
other U.S. air bases on O'ahu. A second wave of 170 planes follow, attacking
Bellows Field and Ford Island. The assaults lasted about 90 minutes, and when
it was over, 2,388 men, women and children had been killed, including 1,177
sailors from the USS Arizona. Among the dead were 49 civilians, many killed by
friendly fire as U.S. forces tried desperately to mount a defense."
[6] The Diamond Sutra, a Prajnaparamita
text
[8] burlesque is originally from
the Spanish word burla, meaning joke.
[9] Entangled is a synonym for enmeshed.
See enmeshment at http://sfhelp.org/pop/enmeshed.htm,
which states in part: "In human relationships, this term means two or more
people who don't have clear identities and boundaries (limits) that separate
one person from the other. Thus an enmeshed person can't distinguish the
difference between my needs, feelings, opinions, and priorities and yours.
This condition suggests both people survived a low-nurturance childhood and have
significant false-self wounds."
[15] http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2006/Dec/26/ln/150history.html
Wishing you a beautiful day,
Bill Brent
[this page last updated: 2007.06.09, 2:30 p.m. Hawaii time]
LitBoy.com is a professional blog. Keeping it online costs me $200 per year. That's before paying me for my writing, photography, or anything else I do here. If you enjoy this blog, please use the Tip Jar at the top of this page. Your two-dollar minimum donation helps keep this banner-free site alive. It's quick and easy!
This meter displays this year's contributions to date in U.S. dollars (after the funds processor takes its cut). Make a donation, watch the meter rise! Usually I post your contribution on my next blog post.
All original materials here on LitBoy.com (writing, photos, drawings, graphics, etc.) belong to Bill Brent. If you want to re-use something here, please ask. Higher resolution images are available.
