My friend Thomas Roche has been in LA for exactly one week. Here is a sample reply to my queries about how things are going:
"The one thing I cannot change is the fucking weather, and I hate it. Sunny and beautiful? That is a crock of shit. It is hot, hazy and smells like ass, all the time. And remember how they tell you ‘Oh, the heat’s not bad, because everywhere in LA is air conditioned.’ But it is not. Nowhere is air conditioned. I walked into a 7-11 today and I thought I was going to pass out from the heat. It was like a fucking oven. Even places that have air conditioning don’t turn it on because they like it warm. Oh, it’s nice and toasty warm and it smells JUST LIKE ASS, how fucking WONDERFUL!!!!"
I sent Thomas these pictures to cheer him up (not work safe, big images). "I love those pictures. Maybe I can make movies like that some time soon. Right after the climate change when LA is buried under 10 feet of snow so I can stand it."
More, I guess he read my blog: "I WOULD NEVER SEND YOU AN "AGGRESSIVE" EMAIL, LET ALONE ONE IN ALL CAPS, AND I AM CERTAINLY NOT A "BEST-SELLER!!!!" IF YOU WANT ANY GIRL SCOUTS YOU BETTER BE GOOD TO ME!!!! SO THERE!!!!"
I couldn’t be happier that he is suffering. I care *that* much.
Meanwhile, I’ve been away from my blog for a bit, with a mixture of time off and major stress. First off, I have had the unlovely discovery that I have been plagiarized in print. It is a terrible feeling. I was in a bookstore and picked up a cute new sex book — only to have the sinking sick feeling of recognizing many sentences I wrote (dozens, with one or two words changed). I wanted to throw up, or possibly become the first Cleis author in their 25-year history to actually put a Mafia hit out on another sex writer. I brought the book home and found whole sentences, every one feeling like another little dart stuck in my skin. A few years ago, while having time off from a robotics show I was working on, I saw a bullfight in a small, dusty, makeshift ring in a tiny town in Portugal. They didn’t kill the bull in the ring, but filled it with darts for hours. That’s how I felt with my highlighter pen going over the books, side by side. I really don’t know what to do.
So I ran away to Denver, Colorado, to visit friends. I am drying out my liver as I write this, and in fact it is over a towel rack in the bathroom. They have the best bar scene there and some of the coolest bars I’ve ever been in, which is probably because there is little to do in Denver except drink. I particularly liked a bar called the Skylark, which you should visit if you ever happen to be there, because it is like the kind of bar Tom Waits would take a classy dame to, and it is not too clean, yet is new, but feels straight out of the American Midwest 1940s. A real Americana dive.
Denver’s bookstores have like *no* sex books in them. I went to a few and found about 20 books, mostly from several years ago, none of mine, and the sections were ghettoized in weird places in stores. Not that I was on an ego trip, I just like to see what’s up in different communities. I was with a friend and she asked if I knew any of the authors on the shelves and I was like, well… I do know most of them but the sex writer business is so weird. I’ve never encountered such a fractured, disconnected, often mean-spirited group of writers. I mean, you think we’d all be friends (or at least supportive colleagues), trying our best for the greater good of fucking and licking and sucking and all. I mean, we’re pretty marginalized as it is, so you’d think that there would at least be a semblance of camaraderie, as in "when the water rises, all the boats rise," you know, that sort of thing.
But I’ve been feeling pretty critical of the whole business lately. Sure, it’s like any other, but it’s pretty easy from my perspective both as a writer and 6+ year sex book reviewer to see who’s in it for a quick buck, who’s in it for fame and ego and "stardom," who thinks it’s a nobility trip, and then the tireless writers and educators. There are plenty of granola-type older female writers who are really just incredibly mean, and have a rep amongst us younger upstarts for being exclusionary and cruel, big time, which totally contradicts their outer personas. And they are all so desperate to be taken "seriously," and be the absolute authority on the subject, so much that they wind up doing some really weird things at appearances and parties and stuff. It’s all incredibly interesting. I’ve been just kind of observing everyone, how they work and what they do and how they treat others, and I have a lot on my mind about it. And especially my role in it.
First of all, the egos and the quests for fame make me feel like I need to do more for things I care about. I’ve been a volunteer for the Stop AIDS Project a bit over the past year, but there needs to be more of that in my life. That’s a start.
Most of all, these cranky, serious "sexperts" really need to be pranked. I don’t know what I want to do yet, but I am inspired by Ali G, the British comedian who came to the US presenting a bizarre comedic persona to everyone he encountered in a public capacity: that of a gangster rapper journalist from Kazakhstan. It seems that he made many appearances on TV and did several interviews with famous TV personalities and US government officials in his persona and they bought it, and he really effectively pranked them in a truly hilarious way. Like when he got Conan O’Brian to touch his penis on the air, goading him onto doing it by accusing him of being a homosexual for *refusing* to touch Ali’s cock. These cranky sex writers need to be pranked like that; harmless, hilarious. I want to put them all in a room together or on some really tweaked reality show and see what happens, see if they can MacGuyver sex toys to help them survive on a desert island or some sort of public version of putting fighting ants in a jar and shaking it up really hard. I had an idea a while back to give a group of "sexperts" the same assignment in a reality-style setting to see if they could each, say, help a couple to perform a certain type of sex act. But that’s not funny enough, and it definitely doesn’t give enough room for diva temper tantrums, arguments about bizarre sex practices and hair-pulling antics over the best lube flavors, etc. I mean, these people need desperately to be made fun of, especially now that sex guide writing as an industry is turning into such an amusing bloodbath, that anyone can copy a bestseller and write a book about sex with no experience, than prance about like a fancy ham thinking they’re all sexy and mysterious because they wrote a book about sex, or worse, thinking they’re hip or extra literary. Come on, these people make up freaky hippie words about sex like "coreplay" and take very serious the fruity names they give sex acts, such as "cradling the yoni" and "tickling the pickle." Cranky sexperts need to be made fun of. After all, it’s just sex.
