Lit Happens

© 2023 Duleigh Lawrence-Townshend. All rights reserved. The author asserts the right to be identified as the author of this story for all portions. This story or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a review or commentary. If you see this story on any website other than Literotica.com, it has been copied without the author's permission.

______________________________________________

LIT HAPPENS

Lit Didn't Save Me but It Helps

Happy 25th Anniversary Literotica!

Duleigh came home from his wars and hung up his sword, tired, but happy to be home... until his wife made it known that she was happier with him being elsewhere. Anywhere elsewhere. Thus he began that quest that all men and dogs of a certain age cut free in the prime of life embark upon - the search for an affordable hobby. Oh... and a job... and maybe somewhere to live. Where does a dachshund that spent the prime years of his life working on, in, under, and with bombers, fighters, gunships, intercontinental ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, thermonuclear warheads, bombs of all shape and yield, and guns that can fire 100 rounds a second, find a meaningful job once the fun is done?

You would be shocked to find out just how many airlines are NOT looking to hire weapons experts. Aircraft weapons specialists are some of the most overlooked potential employees by modern airlines. And you would think that a highly experienced bomb loader would make a perfect fit as a baggage handler, right? WRONG. Airlines think that bomb loaders are too careful. Their painstaking attention to detail and safety slows up the whole show. So where did Duleigh turn to put his skills to use 25 years ago?

How about Fisher Price.

Fisher Price wanted people that were specially trained to show up at the office on time (a skill that is becoming increasingly rare in the business world), they would take care of the rest. Showing up on time is a dog's forte, ever see a dog late for lunch? So Duleigh signed up and before he knew it he was being trained on the cutting edge of toy technology, the Kid Keyboard. It was a great piece of hardware to teach kids about computers, it taught Duleigh quite a bit also, and it was the start of a career in the high-tech industry.

As for affordable hobbies, the search continued. In his off hours that old dog loved to read erotica, because sex is a lot of fun and reading the news is not. Books cost money and the kid left the newspaper on the lawn during a rainstorm. There's got to be something affordable to read out there... As the internet continued to take shape there were a few erotica web sites out there, many came and went, a few stuck around.

I'm not talking porn per se, hell, the internet is little more than house to house porn with the occasional shopping site to distract you between porn fixes. I'm talking about what really gets me off - erotica. Erotica is not, IMHO, porn. True, it can sink as low as the crudest porn, but erotica has to titillate the most complex sex organ, the brain, and that takes talent and skill to accomplish. Look at the average porn reel on the internet - yeah, the little guy with the huge schlong delivering the pizza to the sorority house is visually a great scene, but what is the little guy's motivation? what is his background? What drove him to hopping from sorority house to sorority house, and what about his wife who won't touch him because she hates the smell of pepperoni?

Things that preceded what we know as the internet were Bulletin Boards and Usenet. Bulletin boards were generally locally run forums, Usenet is without a doubt the oldest thing in computers that talk to each other. Usenet was created in the 1970s and is still out there today. It is a series of "news groups" that share information and discussion not entirely unlike the forum at Lit. It had a lot of information, but graphics like you are used to in today's online porn were still in the future. alt.sex.stories and alt.sex.stories.moderated were the news groups where thousands of text-based sex stories were found.

These forums still exist and can be viewed in a news reader app, or at Google Groups. As a viable source of erotica, they're dead. The last entry in alt.sex.stories.moderated was posted on July 3, 2017. The last sex story moderated on usenet was Jenny's Couch Book IV: A House In Gross Disorder, part 8 (Mg, Mgg, b+g, ped, oral, anal, mast, tg, cum, prost, cons, rom) by Rufus Fugit. I don't suggest it, pedophilia was never my thing, but Rufus Fugit seems to like it.

Even though alt.sex.stories.moderated claimed to be moderated, all that meant was that spam entries were eliminated. Other than that, Duleigh was never able to determine what was being moderated. It was wide open, stories staring horses, dogs, motorcycle gangs and nine-year-old hookers filled the database. Several notable authors such as Mary Anne Monanraj (who continues to spurn Duleigh's love letters) got their start there and wisely moved on.

The Alt Sex Stories Text Repository (asstr.org) web site was created in 1992 to gather all those stories together in an unformatted pile that was web accessible. Associated with asstr.org was Kristin's Collection which was a large collection of erotica that was semi-organized by subject and had an attractive web interface. It too had horses, dogs, and motorcycle gangs but the pedo stories were not allowed.

As a website, asstr.org was very plain. There were no readers aids such as story search, there was no feedback, just a plain white page filled with unformatted text, and it's only real option was the ability to download stories via FTP. There were a few authors who created websites with their work using the ASSTR servers but by 2006 contributions to ASSTR dropped considerably due to competition of better sites. The site completely dropped offline in 2022, taking its gems and its crap to that big repository in the sky. Unfortunately, it took Kristin along with it.

Duleigh likes to think that since his first story was published on Literotica in 2006, serious readers abandoned ASSTR and flocked to Literotica because that was the exclusive home of Duleigh's writing. You may claim that I have no evidence to support this, but you have no evidence to refute it. We will just have to agree that Laurel's boon to being the Home of Duleigh is a good thing for the entire internet.

A big site that caused a lot of splash on the news groups was Mr. Double, a site dedicated to stories centered around pedophilia. The name Mr. Double popped up all over alt.sex.stories and it was always associated with the vilest pedo stories you could imagine. The web site owner Tom Arthur didn't care, he had many dedicated readers who regularly hit the click bait ads and made him money. He cares now, he has been charged with three counts of producing, distributing, receiving, and possessing an obscene visual depiction of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct. Child Porn landed him in a Texas prison where he is now learning what it's like to be small and helpless.

While ASSTR.org was at the height of its powers, Literotica was born quietly. Duleigh became an early lurker, poking around the forum and reading the stories. The advantages were (with the exception of the front page) a nice, easy on-the-eye web interface and organization. Stories were separated into different categories where ASSTR only had two categories Old and New. Literotica did not have horses, dogs, and nine-year-old hookers. I know that some writers complained that it was too restrictive, and some still whine about it, but there's a lot of options in the world, go find one. And take your horses and motorcycle gangs with you, those tropes are exhausted.

Around the turn of the century Duleigh found himself in the cable industry, and he found his affordable hobby! A TV show filmed in Australia named Farscape was carried on the American cable Sci-Fi channel. The show was fascinating, quirky, and filled with Muppets (dachshunds love Muppets) and the Sci-Fi channel provided a forum for fans of the show on their website. Duleigh selected the nom de plume PKAmmoTroop (often shortened to PKAT) and the internet was never the same. Together with his on-line dog pack including his pal Pitdog and several others, they crafted round-robin fan fiction that set the internet on its ear. Stunning in their scope and quality these stories were worthy of the big screen treatment, a young Brad Pitt and Demi Moore were considering using the epic "Peacekeepers of the White Star Line" as their short-cut to fame and fortune. But being property of the sci-fi channel the stories were lost, forgotten, then reworked into dreck that featured zombies, piranhas and flying sharks.

Sometime after the 20th century collapsed into ruin but before the WTC collapsed into ruin, Duleigh discovered Literotica. Such a nice-looking erotica site, it had a clean layout, (except for the front page) the stories were divided into categories, you could interact with the authors, you could vote, and you could collect favorites. And best of all, no horses, dogs, or nine-year-old hookers. Duleigh found a new home on the forum moving from one section to the next. At one point the bug bit, he read a story and thought "I can do that," and with his brand-new degree in English burning a hole in his keyboard, and four feet of snow on the driveway that he was trying to ignore, Duleigh began to write.

In 2006 Duleigh wrote a story, Sea Cat and the Dragon Lady a little fantasy about a lit author that he met there on Lit's forum. It was a fun exercise and was followed by two more stories that year. He and that author took the opportunity to meet up. It was a magical weekend full of fun and affection and then, unfortunately, when the long weekend was over they had to return to their real lives. Duleigh followed those stories up in 2008 with three more, even more forgettable stories before the Big Move happened.

<><><><><>֎<><><><><>

Colorado is a barren, dry prairie that crashes into the base of the stalwart Rocky Mountains like waves crashing onto a rocky seacoast, just a whole lot slower. Colorado's main products are wheat, cattle, and cannabis, and their state flower is the vacationing skier on crutches. The state word is "Ear." As in "Ear dude, take a hit."

Duleigh moved to Colorado for its beauty, its people, and a hefty paycheck. Continuing on in the high-tech world Duleigh threw himself into his new job and his new home, picking up a new Mrs. and a new doghouse. With regular visits to Literotica Duleigh shelved writing for a decade preferring to burn his eyeballs out on 20 megabytes of semi-formatted data applied to a spreadsheet with a scattergun on a daily basis, and it was all his to fix. It was a living, and it was fun-ish.

In 2013 when a couple of his pups were visiting, Duleigh took them to one of his favorite places, Rocky Mountain National Park. It was a great visit until the pups wanted to get out of the car and go for a walk at 12,000 feet. That is when Duleigh noticed problems. He was breathing with full deep breaths, but they didn't seem to be moving oxygen into the blood and soon he was panting like a much larger dog. He lagged far behind as his puppies scampered over the rock formations and when they returned to the car he kept quiet about it, but he knew something was wrong.

A few weeks later at work he had to move a server down to the warehouse, there wasn't a cart available, but the server only weighed 20 or 25 pounds so what the heck, and he carried it, but just standing in the elevator with that server in his hands wore him out and he was soon out of breath. By the time he stored the server Duleigh was completely out of breath and all the breathing and gasping he did didn't help for a long time.

Not long after that episode Thanksgiving rolled around, Duleigh walked from one end of the doghouse to the other and just that short walk took his breath completely away. His heart was racing as he collapsed in a chair. It was time to see the veterinarian.

In the Emergency room they put him through every test you could subject a dog to and finally came down with prognosis, Pulmonary Hypertension, a rare condition of high blood pressure inside the heart and lungs. The rare condition can be brought on by sleep apnea or COPD or a few other things, but it's super rare, super dangerous and it is "treatable but not curable."

Duleigh was put on a clear plastic leash that the doctors called "Two liters of oxygen per minute" but a leash was still a leash no matter what you called it.

But the treatment wasn't working... more tests, needles, prodding, and pondering and head scratching. Doctors say that when you hear hoofbeats, expect horses, not zebras, meaning when you're trying to diagnose an ailment, the most common causes are most likely so don't go looking for rare and unique ailments. In Duleigh's case they didn't find mules or horses, they didn't even find regular zebras associated with those hoofbeats, they found checkered zebras.

They found CTEPH, Chronic Thromboembolic Pulmonary Hypertension, or high blood pressure in the lungs and heart caused by a series of pulmonary emboli, a fancy way of saying blood clots in the lungs. Maybe one person in a million people will get CTEPH, and in Duleigh's case, with so many other ailments that he has that were caused by exposure to nerve gas in the desert, it's untreatable. Bayer, the aspirin people, makes a drug called Adempas, it only works on CTEPH - how cool is that? (It's $300 a tab, three tabs a day, Tricare takes care of that!)

That was it, this dog's wings were clipped. No more playing in the mountains, no walks downtown, no activities that involved movement or motion. Hauling around an oxygen tank was Duleigh's primary occupation now. Besides his normal job the only place he went was the hospital. Do you know that hospital Wi-Fi systems won't let you log in to Literotica.com? Thank God for the Wi-Fi hotspot on Duleigh's phone, he even shared the website with a couple of nurses. (Why not? He was there often enough.)

Duleigh tried to take it all in stride, dragging an oxygen tank with him wherever he went. Making his way from the parking lot to his desk at work was a marvel of logistics, he had to bring three tanks with him to make it around the building to the different meetings and briefings life was filled with.

Eventually he was laid off from work. The boss said, "Duleigh, you look tired, go home and put your feet up for the rest of your life."

Lots of people were laid off that day, including Duleigh's boss and many of his co-workers. 450 people in all. We received a package explaining the severance system and it said we were not laid off for any other reason than they needed to cut expenses. The huge telecommunications company, I'll just call it X, announced that it definitely wasn't about age, the document claimed that over and over and provided a chart to prove their point, but the chart listed the age of everyone laid off and their sex and it showed that everyone laid off was a male over 47 years old. (Good one Big X. No agism there!)

Laid off for being too old and stuck at home "chained" to an oxygen machine and his wife was addicted to Hallmark movies. Life was pretty bleak for that old dog, but instead of acting out his anger and frustration he wrote it out in stories and essays that he eventually deleted, the works were just too angry, they weren't him. In the end all he could do was to move his family to sea level where it was easier for him to breathe.

While his wife watched yet another Hallmark Christmas movie, Duleigh said, "I could write a better story than that with one eye tied behind my back." His wife gave him the challenge, "Go do it and leave me alone." So he did it, he wrote a Hallmark style Christmas story that he entitled "Our Year" that meandered around without a true plot (like a Hallmark Christmas movie) and was filled lavishly decorated sets (Like a Hallmark Christmas movie) with fun, smart, witty, likeable characters (unlike a Hallmark Christmas movie). He never published it, it really wasn't very good, but it was the seed of what followed. More and more little stories popped up and all this time Duleigh was reading Literotica and it never occurred to him to submit the stories that's he's writing to Lit.

One more time Hallmark came to the forefront. It was "Christmas in July" and it seemed like half the stories were Charles Dickens' a Christmas Carol that were drown in corn syrup. Duleigh tried to snap his fingers (dogs can't do that) and said "I'm going to write a truly new version of a Christmas Carol that takes the story back to what it originally was, a ghost story, a scary Christmas story. So Duleigh sat down and wrote "A Krissmas Karole" expressly for the 2021 Winter Holiday contest and when he was done he turned to submit his first story to Lit in over a decade, and he found out that he missed the contest cutoff date.

He decided to wait and submit it in 2022. But he loved the story and the characters so much he decided to start writing the back story for all the characters in A Krissmas Karole and with another Christmassy play on words and named it We're a Wonderful Wife.

Using some of the characters from We're a Wonderful Wife, Duleigh wrote a little erotic spy thriller based in Luxembourg to be his first submission to Literotica in 13 years. His Christmas present to Laurel, Serendipitous Liaison went live on 12/24/2021. Serendipitous Liaison isn't a bad story, but it has a horrible title for an erotica site. It's a fun sexy story of young newlyweds playing sex games in Europe, but the title is far too cerebral for a sex story. People stay away from it in droves and continue to avoid it like that uncle at the family reunion with hygiene issues.

But it was so good to be contributing again! Duleigh had a fun idea and using the same pool of Characters from We're a Wonderful Wife he wrote a new story staring a Vietnamese college professor and her blind boyfriend who plays a trick on her. Duleigh wanted the story to say, "To a blind man race doesn't exist" and it said that, and a whole lot more. It took that dog a lot of research to write the story properly, to learn how a blind person navigates around a building was his big question. It took days of research but it was a necessary task. Being a disabled dog, Duleigh wanted to put disabled people out front and let others know that we're here. We may be disabled, but we're not manikins.

Blind Sided by the Blind Guy took Lit by storm and still continues to generate a lot of views. Duleigh was overwhelmed by the praise and thanks he received from the blind readers of Lit, and yes, there are blind readers here. They have software of different designs that read the stories to them. There's even a blind author here and he gave Duleigh more tips and hints to flesh out his future blind characters. Duleigh heard from so many of the blind readers who were all happy to find a blind man being portrayed like a real, loving person with a sense of humor and not as an object of pity.

"Thank you Laurel for giving us a platform where people of differing abilities can cast off our shackles and shine." - 🐶