Last night, on my way to work, my slave girl/editor sent me a text noting that a Harm City article on choosing drinking partners was tagged for The Lady in Red, yet the young lady was not mentioned in it once. I responded that I obviously mistagged it, but untagging it would take minutes and I don’t have any left to spare.
Twenty minutes later, as I walked into work, who should come in looking for me but The Lady in Red, who is now the Psyche-Warden in Blonde at a local facility for the sane.
I heard her say, as she entered behind me, “Creepy Old Guy! How are you? I see you can walk—and that’s a good thing.”
She then asked me what I thought of a novel inspired in Thomas Hobbes Leviathan, with three themes, The Deep, the Labyrinth, and something we didn’t get to as I had to get to work.
I did tell her, “Due to the legend of Theseus we think of a labyrinth as a maze. But what it means literally, is The House of the Double-Axe. Minoan civilization had a powerful priestess class who seem to have controlled their kings—perhaps executing them when they were spent—and the axe itself was for sacrificial purposes, mostly for aurochs, but possibly taking a bite out of the patriarchy.”
She was thrilled, “That’s just fantastic, Mister Jim, because the opening scene is of a gruesome execution.”
I’ll send her a link to this and hopefully she will serialize some of her story here on our fiction page when she gets the time to write it—when she’s not putting Creepy Old Guys in the Chokee.
Good luck, young lady, with your Hobbesian tale.
Reverent Chandler: The Saga of Fend
