MEDITATIONS FROM A BAR STOOL 10

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books, enjoy reading, good read, James McKenna, sex and gender

Sex and the unknown

Rock and roll was a great invention.  The girls twirled at speed, their long skirts lifted and eager young men caught a glimpse of their knickers.  Hence at youth club I became an observer rather than a participant.  Aged 13 that was as close as I got.

I did try the occasional exploration but all such ventures were met with a firm No and slap of the hand.  In those days, No, meant No.

My father was posted to Hong Kong and the family went with him.  I mixed with older boys, some of whom had girlfriends.  At 14 I found one of my own.  Had I arrived, was I to discover the great secrets of what lay beneath a female’s clothes?

We held hands, we kissed, we cuddled and my fingers crept down the back of her skirt.  No!  At night I lay in dream only imagining what sweetness waited beyond my reach.  Then one afternoon while walking her home from school we stopped in the park, we sat on the grass and my hand closed over the front of her shirt.  Paradise opened.  I had made it, but no further.

I began to record my adventures, most churned up from imaginings of what I had never achieved.  Hence a writer was born.

At the grand age of 15 I was sent home to join Boys’ Service in the British Army.  No girls there, just a barrack room with 40 other sex starved adolescents.  Outings and privileges were few, so once more I began to write, my imagination running wild.  Bubbling full of testosterone my scribblings allowed me to access the wildest ambitions of a hopeful young male.  I conquered every female movie star, every female singer, even the vicar’s daughter.  My short stories became much in demand by other boys.  Realising a talent and a market, I began to charge, only pennies, but when we were eventually allowed to go into town I had enough money to ask girls to the cinema.  There I discovered the convenience of the back row where I finally touched the tantalising secrets of what lay beneath the blouse. Sitting in semi-darkness, a caress over the knee and the tentative lifting of a skirt hem may have opened new horizons but instead came a clamping of thighs, the barrier of two hands and a firm, No!  This time in an outraged whisper so as not to draw attention but I was not alone in my endeavours.  Throughout the film, every few minutes somewhere along the back row, the darkness would be punctured with the word, No!  In days of old the maidenhood of Britain set strict boundaries.

For being good, after walking her home I would receive a kiss and if it was not too cold, a little exploration beneath blouse or jumper.  Quite clearly, discovery of the hidden paradise would not come easily.

Go to my website at http://www.crimefiction-jamesmckenna.co.uk

MEDITATIONS FROM A BAR STOOL 9

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books, childrens books, crime novel, enjoy reading, good read, James McKenna

Sex and the long road to understanding.
When I was 3 years old we lived in Kensington, Central London. My father was away fighting in the war, someone I had never met. Under the continuous bombing, occasionally my mother’s nerve broke, then we would visit my aunt in Harrow.

This I loved, for living next door were two little sisters, but big girls to me, may be 5 or 6 years old. They also had a tent in the garden and on summer days they asked if I could play with them.

Lifted over the fence I was quickly led inside the tent and informed we would play a girls game called Doctors and Nurses. This involved them stripping off my clothes then examining me in close detail. They said this was essential to the game because I was a wounded soldier.

Naturally I believed them, mainly because for some reason I did not understand, I quite enjoyed it. Afterwards they would put me in a pair of their knickers and a dress. This, they told me, was because only wounded soldiers and nurses were allowed in the tent and everyone knew that nurses were girls.

They then introduced another game. This involved rolling round on top of each other amidst much laughter and screaming. They called this game Mummies and Daddies. But only girls could play, which is why I had to wear a dress. I was not to meet this game again till my late teens and a lesbian beauty. She seductively informed me that continuation of her games required I put on a dress. But this turned out very different from my adventures in the tent.

Time passed, my interests absorbed by football, cubs, marbles, cowboys, Indians and climbing trees. Then once again I found myself confronted by the siren. Tall, skinny and in a class above me, she would have been 12, I was 11.
“Show me yours and I’ll show you mine,” she said. “You first.”
This seemed reasonable, even though I had been taught that ladies always go first. I obliged. I remember her being unimpressed. That, she said, meant I could not see hers. I thought this most unfair. I had been tricked and not for the last time; but it became my first lesson of seeking the wondrous yet forbidden territory that girls hid beneath their clothes. My mind had been fired.

Some months later I tentatively crept a hand up the jumper of a girl who sat next to me in class. In result I touched something soft yet exciting. I also received a smack in the eye. But I had ventured into what promised to be paradise.

Next blog, journeys into the unknown.

Go to my website http://www.crimefiction-jamesmckenna.co.uk

MEDITATIONS FROM A BAR STOOL 8 Sex and Gender

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James McKenna, sex and gender

Sex, I’m told, makes the world go round.  Certainly without it the human race would be non-existent. So, sex does have its uses, not to mention its pleasures.  Unfortunately it’s the pleasure bit which causes the problems and the taboos some would build around it.

Sex can be the absolute union of love, the pinnacle on which two people unite as one and create new life.  It can also bring the depth of human degradation, sunk in lust, brutality and selfish gratification.

Things start off innocently enough.  Male and female babies pop into the world, each as innocent as the other, until one is dressed in pink, the other in blue.

From there on the division deepens.  One assumed to be pretty but lacking essential mental and physical strength, the other to be stronger, both mentally and physically, or so a bigoted and biased history would make us believe.

But what if at birth both genders were dressed the same, then treated the same all the way through childhood until the onset of puberty?

Who would be calling who to come hither? Who would be flashing their eyes and twitching their hips? Boys, girls or both? Who would lie seductively on their backs?

When allowed leadership and intellectual expression, females prove themselves equal to the male at all levels.  They can be as fit, as strong and as physically able as the male.  When I served in the Paras it was not brute muscle which a mission required but the endurance to keep going against all odds.  If you stop, you fail.

So, is it conditioning during childhood which creates the social inequality of the genders?

For me as I sit smugly on my bar stool, drinking another pint, I am happy with my conditioning. But what about the barmaid in her mini skirt being leched over by male customers?  Well, that’s her place, some say.   She’s sex and men are predators.  Soon she’ll be pregnant, giving birth, breast feeding, helpless, dependent on the man and in the place allocated by society.

OK, so what when the child is free of the breast?  There is no reason why the father should not take over caring responsibility, the cooking, cleaning, washing.  Some, I am sure, already do this.  Most don’t.

Is it because such domestic binding and menial tasks have historically been carried out by women in societies which wish them in a submissive role?

If when children they had been fairly treated as equals, would women now have different roles?  Or better, would the genders consider themselves as sharing equal partners, in work and home, both of them in skirts and trousers, both leading, both giving, both receiving.

Hang on, women are already in trousers, but they’re not buying their rounds.

Go to my website at http://www.crimefiction-jamesmckenna.co.uk

MEDITATIONS FROM A BAR STOOL 7

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books, childrens books, James McKenna

“I think, therefore I am,” said Rene Descartes.

So after reading my last blog, just where are you doing this thinking?  Time present is lost in the infinity of transition between future and past, a segment of time which is mentally conceivable but mathematically impossible.

Just imagine the time phases which occur when you blink.  Immediately before commencement of that blink you are in time future, commencement is time present, transferred instantly to time past, the duration of a blink constantly passing from future to past.  So, if we are aware of that blink, are we mentally in future, present and past simultaneously? Then if our minds can be in future, present and past through the duration of a blink, could our physical presence which is created by our minds, also co-exist in three time zones?  Remember, past is memory, future imagination and present only our mental interpretation through a time spasm which mathematically cannot exist.

Hence my series of young adult books called The Mind Traveller, where Rosie ventures into Mind Space and the parallel worlds http://tinyurl.com/njld54r

What I want to know is why my pint keeps disappearing so quickly. But if I am in three dimensional time zones, perhaps I can travel back and taste it all again.

Go to my website http://www.crimefiction-jamesmckenna.co.uk

MEDITATIONS FROM A BAR STOOL 6

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books, childrens books, enjoy reading, James McKenna

Does time exist or is it purely a mental concept used to control our lives?

Many see time as the ticking of a clock with time present a constant factor.  But does time present even exist?

Think of this, time has three segments.  Future, present and past.  So where are we, here and now?  So where is here and now?

In The Mind Traveller, Uncle Hugo asked Rosie that very question, to which she answered, “Now is now.”  http://tinyurl.com/njld54r

“Then think of this,” Uncle Hugo replied.  “If time is represented by a river flowing passed, and directly in front of us is a line from bank to bank which we call present, where is present?”

“Straight down the middle of that line,” Rosie said.

“OK, so let’s stretch that middle by a hundred miles.  Where is present now?”

“In the middle.”

“So stretch it by a thousand miles and so on ad infinitum, over and over.”

What Uncle Hugo is saying is that time present, that place were we all exist, is where time future transposes into time past, but because time present is forever compressed into infinity by the continual division of future and past, then it cannot possibly exist, except at the ultimate end of infinity, which is impossible.

So, we assume our existence to be in time present but if time present cannot exist except at the end of infinity, where does that leave us?

 

Now let’s make sense from that.  If time future exists only in our imagination, time past only in our memories, time present only in our individual mental interpretations of the passing instant, where future transposes into past, then mentally we are all in three time zones simultaneously.  So, are you really here and now?

See what happens when you stare up at the stars and let your mind travel.

Think I’ll have another pint and watch the football.

Read the second in the series of The Mind Traveller, The Witch’s Shadow, out in June.

Go to my website http://www.crimefiction-jamesmckenna.co.uk

 

MEDITATIONS FROM A BAR STOOL 5

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books, crime fiction, crime thriller, fast paced crime fiction, good read, James McKenna

More about the strangers within, the beautiful and dark characters who lurk around the mind.  And just because you don’t write doesn’t mean they are not there.  You’ll find them in nightmares, daydreams, popping from your subconscious into your imagination.

Each person in this world is unique, with their own set of fears, loves, ambitions and prejudices.  Sure, many are regimented through mass indoctrination by religion, politics and greed, not to mention subliminal hypnotic induction (read The Unseen http://tinyurl.com/c3yjc9l) but most still retain elements of individuality and consequently, the different strangers within.

Knowing the strangers in their subconscious is essential for writers.  From the depth of my imagination I bring forth sadistic killers, mad men, those who lust for death and those who murder for greed and arrogance.  All are characters born from my mind and waiting to cross into the reader’s mind.  And no, I don’t drink a pint of blood every day before breakfast.  Yet these dark creatures live within me.  I must know them, understand their motivations.  If I don’t achieve this depth of intimacy, I cannot portray such characters to the reader, who will then feel cheated.

Many of my characters are female.  To portray the female person in mind and body I must adopt a female persona.  Not always easy for the male writing about female, neither for female portraying males.  It all depends how you were indoctrinated as a child and what social environments you have lived in.  As a child I was told men were men and women were glad of it.  Yo, ho, ho and bottle of rum etc.  But later I became a free thinker, an explorer of the imagination and someone who always questioned what I had been told.  Which is one reason why I became a writer.

That brings me back to the occasions of adopting the opposite gender while writing.  For me this has provided a number of inner revelations that perhaps the genders are more mentally and physically aligned than some would preach.  Sure, procreation calls for physical differences but the mental differences are purely conditioning to achieve social acceptance.  Overcome that difference and a writer can portray opposite gender in much greater intimacy.

In my crime thriller, The Uncounted, about human trafficking, my heroine Jelena is forced through the horrors of modern slavery but her mental and physical strength keeps her above her male tormenters.  I could only portray that by mentally becoming Jelena, not easy, but not impossible.

In my thriller, The Unwanted, both assassins for Directus Iurisdictio, a vigilante organisation, are female.  Mentally strong and physically able, social conditioning places them above suspicion because they are looked upon as female therefore silly and weak.  One is even a transgender male.  Yet both prove to be mentally and physically stronger than their male colleagues.  Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum, etc, etc.

Now do you see how many strangers hide within the writer’s mind, both male and female, good and bad?

Anyone for pink Champagne?

Read The Uncounted http://tinyurl.com/d7zspq2 

Read The Unwantedhttp://tinyurl.com/mbx2fht

and go to my website http://www.crimefiction-jamesmckenna.co.uk

MEDITATIONS FROM A BAR STOOL 4

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books. crime thriller, crime novel, enjoy reading, James McKenna, scary, The Unseen.

Meet the strangers within you.

Strangers, how can that be?  You are who you are, there is only one you.  But not if you are a writer or actor.

Actors have to become the characters they portray, while writers the characters they invent and make vivid with words.  To be a good writer you must become the character you write about.  You must know how they behave, think, react, dress.  What makes them scared, brave, angry, sad?

In my crime thriller novels, The Unseen, The Uncounted and The Unwanted, my protagonist, Sean Fagan, is a large, dependable policeman with a failed marriage, two teenaged daughters, a liking for Guinness, class music and Victoria Lawless, his girlfriend.

Fine, you say, easy character for a male writer to portray.  True, especially if I base his behaviour similar to some of my own.  But when I write from Victoria’s point of view, then I have to mentally change gender.

To truthfully portray her character so the reader believes in her, I must understand her passions, her motivations, her anger.  I must be inside her body to feel the joy of her love making, her sweat, her fear; what clothes she likes, her feelings towards others and the forces which drive her.  I must become Victoria Lawless, in mental vision and physical presence.  If I do not, the reader will see a shallow character, one they cannot believe in.  In which case I fail as a writer.

So, there are two strangers I have, but darker ones lurk in the deep recesses of a writer’s mentality.

In The Unseen I have a brutal psychopath named Zoby who butchers his victims and keeps body parts as trophies.  To portray him as a believable mad man I have to look inside his mind and understand why he commits the horrors he does.  What are his thoughts, his motivations, his pleasures?  I have to become Zoby in the same way I became Sean and Victoria.  That can be scary.  For Zoby and his actions are inventions of my mind.  This is what I mean when I say meet the strangers within you.  Read The Unseen and meet some of my strangers.  Read The Unseen http://tinyurl.com/c3yjc9l

More about characters in my next set of meditations from a bar stool.  How to change gender, how to think like a killer.

Go to my website http://www.crimefiction-jamesmckenna.co.uk

MEDITATIONS FROM A BAR STOOL 3

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books. crime thriller, crime fiction, good read, James McKenna, scary, The Unseen.

Across the world the divide between those who have and those who have not, never seems to lessen.  The curses of disease, famine and war always circle over humanity.  For many, disease is slowly being controlled but with a long road still to travel.  Famine arises from drought and man’s indifference to man while war arises from the power lust of a few.

In my young adults’ book, The Witch’s Shadow, Lady Lucy says “War be the stupidity of kings and greed.”

True, except in modern times, instead of kings there are dictators, corrupt politicians and religious fanatics.  Stir in their craving for wealth and power over the masses and it’s not surprising the result is war.  Unfortunately, such horror usually falls on the poor and down trodden with the West acting as policeman, throwing in help against the fanatics and the dictators.

But for those in the West who sit before their computers with full belly and bank account, beware.  The fanatical few can still ensnare you.  A new and dark element has entered the Internet via the use of subliminal psychotic induction (SPI) or subliminal hypnosis transmitted over the Internet.

SPI was widely used in the West during the mid 20^th century with subliminal advertising on TV and in cinemas, until it was made illegal in America.  Subliminal hypnosis is implemented by images or words repeatedly flashed on a screen so fast they do not register with the conscious mind, but are picked up by the subconscious mind.  Buy this product, buy that product, be afraid.  In result some people felt scared without knowing why.  During the interval or in the supermarket next day they bought goods advertised under SPI, thinking their need for the product was their own decision.  They had been influenced by mass subliminal hypnosis but what if the message had been, vote for this politician, obey the police, pay your taxes, go to war.  Scary.  No wonder it was made illegal. Think of the influence it would have on children and the unaware.   I say this because SPI has returned via the Internet.  Any person who stares at a computer, iPad or phone screen can be affected.

Internet security is notoriously fragile.  Hackers do damage to multinational companies, banks, even a country’s security.  I have tried to highlight the dangers in my crime fiction novel, The Unseen, available on Amazon and Kindle.

If hackers can enter your computer the quantity of subliminal messages they might leave is horrendous to imagine.  Drive to an isolated location, set fire to a school, kill your neighbour.

Not everyone is affected.  If you don’t want to do something then subliminal hypnosis will not make you do it, but if you’re uncertain, even without opinion on the request, then you may well do it, even if you cannot reason why.

Imagine how it could affect a nation if a government began to use SPI via a big service provider.  What if politicians were subjected to SPI, what outrageous laws could be passed?  What if your child or other family member became a victim?  You cannot defend yourself against something you don’t even know exists.  Unrealised mental indoctrination can affect everyone.  But of course no government would use it on the masses, would they?

Read The Unseen http://tinyurl.com/c3yjc9l

My website http://www.crimefiction-jamesmckenna.co.uk

 

MEDITATIONS FROM A BAR STOOL 2

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books. crime thriller, fast paced crime fiction, good read, James McKenna

First buy yourself a drink because if you think deeply and expand on what follows, you’re going to need it, maybe a large one.

How do you prove you exist?  Not so daft as it sounds because only your own mind confirms your existence.  The 17^th century French philosopher, René Descartes arrived at this belief with the statement “I think therefore I am.”

I can accept that. If you think, then you exist.  You see the world, the stars, the mountains, all exist within the sphere of your mental senses.  However, that leaves a question.  I think therefore I am doesn’t prove anybody else exists, save through your own intellectual interpretations giving them existence.

Does one even have a bodily existence?  Is the universe and all it contains the invention of your mind?  Perhaps you are no more than a mental entity floating somewhere favourable to your survival.

Imagine, without you mind, for you, the whole universe, the human race, everything bar nothing, would not be real.  Lying out in the desert staring up at a trillion stars is a great environment for contemplating such thoughts.  When searching over the heavens, all seems possible.

It’s where I first had ideas about settings for my Mind Traveller series, where Rosie ventures into Mind Space and joins the White Angels in their war against the Dark Angels.  And here’s another thought, if you are the singular thinking entity in your universe, you are also responsible for all good and evil in that universe, for without you, the universe you see cannot exist.  Everything depends on your mind.

So, if you want to change the world all you have to do is do it.  Come on, rid the world of poverty. Did it happen? No.  So if you’re the only thinking entity in the universe it means you’re not in control of your mind.  Better buy yourself a drink because if you’re not in charge of you mind, who is?

I think therefore I am.  But could it just be someone else is also thinking that?  Which means you’re not Master of the Universe after all, or maybe each of us has our own universe with each affecting the others’ brains.

I should never have drunk that last beer.

Go to Amazon and have a look at The Mind Traveller available for free until this Friday http://tinyurl.com/njld54r

My website http://www.crimefiction-jamesmckenna.co.uk 

My Amazon’s Author Page http://tinyurl.com/c9ultl3