Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

First, thanks to newaddict who helped clear out the porn-o-rama room earlier today! By Sunday it's going to be a real nice chill-out room with a couple couches and such… Just for fun — the footage will be used for the BBQ video (unless something quite remarkable happens).

I'm getting the prizes together for the “I Bet You Will“-style game. So far I have the Raynutz shirts (see below), a couple of JMEAT+FRNX DVDs (JMEAT is a video of various urethral play and subincision procedures, and FRNX is a guy/guy sounding video which also includes footage of a man's stretched frenum being sexually penetrated by another man), a widescreen DVD of the last BBQ, a couple DVDs of older BBQ footage, some of the ORIGINAL stickers (the round silver ones), some packs of trading cards, and some IAM music CDs.

Now I said I would tell more about the right-of-way fight. It's looking like it's going to blow out into a huge lawsuit. We just found out that the city hasn't actually given these people any approval to build townhouses, and they're just trying to sell the land instead. It turns out that the corner garage which is the crux of the problem (as it's built six feet onto their property) was built nearly a hundred years ago (it's been rebuilt of course, it was originally wood).

That garage was built before the now levelled warehouse. When the warehouse was built in the 1930s, they left the right-of-way as it is now. Not only that, but it was the owners of that lot who originally defined the size of the right of way when they put up the parking pylons something like twenty years ago. It's only the greedy folks who are now trying to cash-in who are attempting to do an illegal land grab. So who knows… It's not my problem any more.

Here are some more pictures — you can see that they went into my neighbor's garage (trespassing I guess) and spray painted their property line on the wall (yes, they're ten years old). You can also see where they knocked down the hippies' fence and sprayed their garden. Kooky stuff.

I was having a conversation with my sister — and I'll speak about this more at length in the future — about the value of (biological) family. My feeling is that too often people say “oh, but they're family” and use that as a pitiful excuse to hang out with people they don't really get along with, or worse, allow their children to come in contact with people they shouldn't be with.

How much abuse (mental, physical, sexual, and even political) has the world seen because people chose to leave children with family members who are unsuitable? More importantly perhaps, how much abuse has been covered up? My feeling is the somewhat Dr. Laura-esque “kick 'em to the curb” — we should feel no false loyalty to family, and should feel no obligation to hang out with them or allow them to see your children.

We're not a pack of dogs. Humans exist outside the food chain, and can exist outside of primitive tribal mentality. When I say outside, I don't mean that we don't need that. I mean that we can choose our families. If our biological families cause us harm, we don't have to keep putting ourself in that harms way. I don't know, maybe I'm crazy, but the people I know now — many of you — are more family in my mind than anything else.

PS. Don't forget, you can get Texas BBQ shirts on Allen's page! He needs to sell them so he can host another big one…