Kayden Kross Official Blog

Eight irrational things you didn’t know about me (because I’m bored)

2012-01-27T16:59:00.000-08:00

One: Mangos- I love them. I love them in a sick, insidious kind of way. One may think for a moment, don’t worry, it’s fruit, it grows on things, you can pronounce all of the ingredients, of which there are exactly one, and on and on, peppered with additive good terms like fair trade and organic and nectar of the gods. But I can’t dwell on all of the good things mangos can be. I have to focus instead on self-control.

I’m convinced that a small part of my mango obsession is really a subconscious drive to make up for lost time. You see, my mom drank guava juice when I was a child. She loved fucking guava juice. She would get it blended with all kinds of other exotic sounding fruits—guava and kiwi, guava and pineapple, guava and passionfruit (the worst), guava and fucking mango. And guava is a sick and insidious thing on it’s own. It never mattered what it was blended with. It only mattered that my innocent and trusting five year old self would reach up with both hands for whatever carton of juice was on the top shelf of the fridge every time she got back from the grocery store, and with care I would set it on the counter, then climb up and pull down from the lowest of the high shelves one of my sweet little Disney themed cups, and finally, with the greatest concentration I could muster, I would fill it to the brim. And without testing the waters I would drink.

And then as I sprayed that vile liquid across the length of the kitchen and dropped my cup in horror I would reestablish the fact that yes, guava still sucked. In time I grew hardened to exotic sounding fruits. I refused to touch them. Yes, I knew guava was the culprit, but I never knew what horrid thing it actually came in. I didn’t know what a guava looked like. If fruit salads and platters were set in front of me I would only touch things I could identify. Apples and bananas and grapes. The occasional peach. Melon. I think cherry-flavored things are shit but that’s another story. At some point I forgot that it was guavas I hated. I just knew I avoided all fruit that wasn’t already on the cleared list.

And then one day, fifteen years later, I smelled something, somewhere, that I was convinced was the best smelling flower in the world. I looked around but couldn’t place it. I don’t remember where I was. Probably heaven. Then I saw the fruit plate. And right then and there I dropped all of my baggage and opened my life up to mangos.

There is nothing better than a perfectly ripe mango. I feel very strongly about this. Bruised or slightly to severely unripe mangos don’t become less appetizing on a gradient scale. They are just dead to me. Mangos are perfect or they are nothing. But I am stern with them because I love them. And that is how I feel about mangos.

Two: I have never met an occasion on which I wouldn’t ride a horse. Take, for instance, my preteen years. My mom’s friends liked to buy discount and/or rescue horses and then work through their various training problems, bond with them, fatten them up. They call them project horses. But before you can work on a project horse you have to gage your starting point. That is where I would come in. They’d lure me in simply by saying the word “horse” and then toss me up on the animal in question and see what kind of vices he had. Did he buck? Good to know. Bite? Kick? Rear? Grab the bit in his teeth and run for the hills? Roll with the rider still on his back? Try to scrape them off under low hanging trees? These were all things that they wanted to be prepared for before getting on themselves. This went on for some time before my mom finally put her foot down. That intervention came after one friend brought home the cutest little Arabian. He was four years old, and had been gelded the week before. They didn’t know anything about him and then when they got him home they didn’t have any bridles that would fit him. Or saddles, for that matter. Also, I’d just been over there to swim that day, so I was wearing a bathing suit. In light of the lack of appropriate riding gear, my mom’s friend decided it would just be best to run the lead rope loosely through the halter (if you’re not up on your horse terms, a halter is basically a head collar. You use them to walk the animals around like you would a dog), but not actually tie it to the halter. This created a flossing effect under the horse’s chin. If I pulled my lead rope “rein” in one direction, then the rein on the other side would get shorter and the horse’s head would stay in the same place. If you’ve ever paid any attention to a horse under saddle, you’ll notice that they are ridden with slim metal pieces that sit in the mouth in a place where horses naturally don’t have teeth. This is called a bit. It makes the horse stop, among other things. Reins are normally attached to the bit. Notice the conspicuous lack of a bit in this scenario.

So with that, the friend launched me up onto her new horse. I was still in a bathing suit and the horse still had no saddle, but I had my little floss-rein contraption. Just to be safe she put a helmet on me. Then she climbed on her tried-and-true dead-broke horse with the nice big saddle and the proper bridle and ten years of riding experience under his belt, and she told me to follow her. With that, she took off down the street at a dead gallop. And we followed her.

I hung on. The horse’s natural instinct is to stick together so I didn’t have to worry so much about giving him any directions. But when the friend slowed down ahead of us mine kept going. And going. And going. Seeing her new pet run towards traffic inspired the friend to maybe try to catch him, so she ran after us again. She never did. The horse got sweatier and sweatier and I ducked down into the mane and held on. I started feeling pretty good about myself. But then we stopped running uphill and started running downhill, which tilted me forward. The horse got sweatier. My bare legs against the slickness of the hide really didn’t stand a chance, and I couldn’t afford to jeopardize my already precarious balance by leaning back to where I should have been for a downward grade of that size. And this is trivial in retrospect, but little horse hairs were being ground into the crotch of my bikini bottom in the most unforgiving way. And that’s what made me bail. I knew it was inevitable. I would eventually fall. It was just a matter of which one of us was gonna pull the trigger.

It was my first time falling. Since then I’ve taken plenty of spills. I do it with grace. Sometimes I even land on my feet. But this particular time was not graceful. I know this because even though I don’t quite remember the details of the time between the horse’s back and a few seconds after the asphalt, I did take my helmet home in two pieces. I understand I fell under him, and got kicked in the head in the process. Possibly while also landing on my head. The horse ran home to his stall. We found out later he had never been ridden before that day. And I was grounded, along with my mom’s friend.

But like most things I got grounded for, I didn’t actually learn from the experience. It just became harder to get away with it. Luckily I’m an adult now. I do what I want. And what I wanted the other night after the X\biz awards was to ride a fucking horse. That was my big adult decision at the bar at the Fleshlight party sometime after midnight when we’d had enough drinks and my accomplice agreed that since we had the limo for the night we might as well use it. We loaded into the car and directed the driver to Burbank. Then we unloaded in front of the combination lock that keeps our little grouping of giant pets safely inside at night. I kicked off my heels for flip flops and he, not being prepared for drunken horseback riding, stayed in his shiny shoes, shiny slacks. Slick, is the word. Slick slacks that slide ride off the horse’s back. That’s what we discovered. A saddle might have helped in this scenario as well but the mare is new and nothing fits her. She’s pretty big. This factor only added to the velocity with which he hit the cement while I tried to smooth down my skirt as it shimmied over my ass when I tried to keep up with the horse. I heard a crack and looked up. I wanted to ask if it was his skull or his spine that made that noise, but I was afraid if I acknowledged it our ride might be over. You’re not supposed to do it like that, I said. Yeah, he grunted from the ground. I climbed on instead. The bare flesh underneath the dress provided a lot more grip. And off we went, down the streets of Burbank, through apartment complexes and quaint one car driveways with their one story houses, behind restaurants and bowling alleys, and finally onto the horse trials that wind by the freeway, where the ground was softer, and I felt safe to put him back on and give him the wheel. Part of my sudden reinspiration to share was due to the horse hairs poking into my panties. I flashed back to my last bathing suit ride and jumped down. The rest went smoothly, aside from our hangovers the next morning. It should be noted that his was probably more intense than mine. Where am I going with this you ask? Exactly nowhere. I’ll stop now.

Three: I am the fairest weather vegan of them all.

I say this, of course, as I am eating a turkey sandwich. But it is a shining example of my fair weatherness. You see, the turkey sandwich is the only thing available, and I haven’t eaten since breakfast, which fortunately did make the vegan cut. I do occasionally pack food ahead of time when I think about it, but for the longer trips the logistics stop working. I can’t take a shopping cart to places like Bulgaria, and even if I could, preservative free food does this funny thing after three days. It goes bad. So when I’m gone for more than a few days, especially overseas, I throw caution to the wind and I do what I want, spoiled child style. I can pseudo justify this though. I’m primarily vegan in the states because I disagree with large-scale livestock operations. They are a gross abuse to the animal and the environment down to the last detail, and the things that go into them would in turn end up in my body, from the antibiotics and chemicals down to the karmic terror they have endured (this is a bit extreme and partly in jest, but just partly. I consider American meat to be haunted by the animal it came from. Again joking. Sorta.). But here is the cool thing about going overseas—it’s not nearly as bad. For example, if you’ve ever had lamb in Melbourne, you’d notice it has a slight sparkle that is not found in, say, Los Angeles. Their lamb eats grass!! They run and play in the sunshine!! I can taste their happiness. Either that or it’s been so long since I’ve eaten lamb that I’ve forgotten how good it is. And the chicken in Thailand!! Holy fuck! Their chickens play in the streets with the barefoot children! So much avian happiness they almost want to be eaten. They have lived well. Of course this doesn’t completely pardon me, because while I can get around the animal welfare aspect abroad I can’t find an ethical travel excuse for the part where all of these mass-produced four legged creatures walk around farting methane all day.

On a side note, I own plenty of leather but no fur, which really makes no sense, because any animal who is missing it’s skin very likely didn’t get to keep it’s hair.

Four: bubblegum scents make me puke. This is not a figure of speech. I will dry heave until the offending thing is removed from the room, and after a while, if it is not, I will actually puke. And then if it’s still there I will die. That is all.

Five: I have an irrational fear of placing my Apple products on the conveyor belts in airport security lines. This is a two fold fear stemming from the same issue. The issue is that the person in front of me and the person behind me will, more times than not, place the exact same product in a safety bin. So there is the rational fear that my Macbook air will be mixed up with the one in front or behind me, and there is the less rational fear that we are programmed drones. Nothing says assembly line like three chemically processed blonds placing three identical computers on the belt next to our three pairs of shoes, all designer, same brand. Fucking Los Angeles.

Six: other irrational fears include Kirsten Dunst.

Seven: I am entirely dependent on words when it comes to sex. Orgasms can be flipped off like they’re connected to a breaker switch if the partner in question says the wrong thing at the wrong time. I have fired booty calls over retarded comments. This is another thing that I recognize as irrational, because the whole point of booty calls is they’re not supposed to require any redeeming qualities other than the necessary sexual parts and the physical fitness to keep your heart rate up. But one time someone said, with an air of being deep in thought, “wouldn’t it be cool if birds came in all colors of the rainbow.” This comment, in turn, kicked me deep into my own cycle of contemplation, and to this day I am still stuck wondering how that thought ever happened. On the flip side, I have fallen head over heels for people in a matter of minutes, I have switched from exhausted to riding the upswing of the most excruciatingly high, rolling, punch you in the gut orgasms, I’ve let people stay the night based on something said just right. Those somethings usually come packaged in a thick accent, but not always. They’re either highly sexual without being cheesy or they’re so uniquely witty or genius that I’m knocked to the floor with my ass in the air. Either way, words are my kryptonite.

Eight: I was in FFA. It was my other, even less cool extracurricular in High School. Tennis was the passable one. Cute chicks sometimes played tennis. But FFA(That’s Future Farmers of America by the way)—chicks who aspired to help birth calves by sticking their forearms shoulder deep into a cow’s private parts played FFA. They were solid, pear shaped people, often blond, but full body blond, as in, they should probably have shaved. I had the necessary blue corduroy jacket and lack of social ambition. Each member had a project. The project was an animal of their choice that they kept detailed financial logs and showed at county fair. My animal? Rabbits. At the height of this disaster I had 14 of them. My problem was I couldn’t sell the babies. You may have heard about rabbits and babies. My knowledge of the intricacies of their reproductive nuances and how to manipulate genetic probabilities for color to this day has not served me well. Then, out of wisdom or lunacy, my mom took away my rabbits. Four days later I discovered sex. The irrational part of this story is that ten years later I own two of these exalted vermin. They wind through my legs, my guests legs, my furnitures legs. They chew on things that should rightly kill them. But then they shit neatly in a litter box and do cute things with their faces and I find that I still love them. And then I feed them the scraps of my leftover mangos and they love me back.

La Petite Mort

2011-12-16T20:22:00.000-08:00

Do you remember the first time? How you found that there was no such thing as empty space, the motion of one body whooshing air over the other, how it pressed the sweat outwards then gathered it in lines when you pulled them back apart. Remember the way the pads of the fingers ignited on your skin, wrote in braille and in cursive and in lace, the stops and the starts and the eventual path of one fingerprint landing on the next, palms mirrored and in constant flux. Do you remember the hush? Remember how you lost trust in your own body, didn’t recognize it even, all of the things it might do. The pressure and the unending need building there, swelling to a blood-hot flush in your cheeks and in your toes. And that other person—how strange it was that you knew that other person—the two bodies distinct in one moment, freshly exposed, then so blended as to never be undone the same way. What of the hair standing on your neck or goose bumps beneath the sheets? And the fear? Did it bubble in your gut? Did it drip from the tongue of your mother or your god, did it settle in your ear about the ways these things can hurt.

Did you waver at the choice? Remember the movement trembled towards the edge. You shook with the slightest noises you’d never tried before to hide, body so cold in the open, the stiffness, all that bracing for the pain. A breath. Then a lighter flutter in the smile. How long did it take before you plunged and you were back in that place with the indistinct heat, lines running over each other and in. All that beating banging on your veins. Did it make you faint or give you weight? And the skin. Did you notice every place you didn’t feel that other person you felt air.

Remember the breath? Close. Too close. Breath had never been so close to you, not with that body there too, like that, all of the barriers gone—and the clothes. A few words in the ear and you slid your guards down like you’d never been warned before. Remember the last of the fumbles before it was slick, the timid knock of hips testing by pressing back and the quiet consent. The trigger in the lips. An exhale and another exhale, faulty and shaking as you strained against the pull.

Did you slip? Did you blur in the moisture, sweating at the mouth, so much spit falling out that you couldn’t speak. And the mixing? Remember how you stopped ending at the skin and then someone else was there too, pressing through you, closer again, so close you swore you’d lost a fundamental mass. Remember how the knees bent and where the elbows went, one body collapsing onto the next, wondering if one could cleanly untangle again. Remember the thoughts. Endless wide open thoughts. Wordless thoughts. Remember the feeling of never having been touched so much.

Was it the first thrust or the last that slammed your breath back dryly in the throat? Remember where you went. That suspension of edge and of time and of fear and the beat of the build. Remember forgetting it all and then doubling back lunging at those vital things tumbling out and gaining speed. Remember the roll. The build and the roll and the build. The grasp for the hem of a god. The muscles taut. The roll and the build and the sheets in your hands and the heat in your bones. Close. You rolled with your pulse moving at the pace of two souls swelling to a common ache. Close. Inflated life igniting within reach. Close. Remember the needing to scream at a pitch that couldn’t be hit. The build and the build. The build and your sweat and the build and your breath and the build and the beat and the build. Close. Too close and then you rose up on a crest. You broke. Remember rushing over death.

Did your next breath punch at your lungs like it did at birth?

And when it was done did you come down softly? Did you settle into the smoothness of the last kisses in the places you’d least expect. All that wetness and the mess, the way you tried to wipe one from the other, already a little too late, a little too impossible to sort. Remember how it didn’t hurt and it didn’t hurt, wasn’t all that raw. You had a little redness and a smile.

And then remember, looking back, how things grew tangible again. The tangle of the arms and the sheets, the hair in each other’s eyes and the light by the bedside, soles of the feet warming up against the calves and the breathy whispers in the neck. A whole world still revolving past the door. Remember the simple things you said and things you thought. Safe things. Newly common things. You put a hand out and it was met and there was so much that didn’t hurt. And the first time that hand pulled back, did you see how much it could?

This is fiction. Obviously.

2011-11-27T00:41:00.000-08:00

Where were you when the big one hit? 7.5 on the Richter scale and we’d been expecting what all this time? All that talk when we’d lie in bed at night and laugh at the cracks in the ceiling and how we still had separate homes. We’d planned together where we’d go and who we’d call.

I was on my horse. It’s not supposed to be so shocking. We’ve been waiting for San Francisco to fall since 1906. I grew up on a flood zone that had a lifecycle longer than our own so we’d always forget and get a little comfortable but every hundred years they say these things come back around. Fires, floods, quakes—you name it—they remind you not to sit too still.

And it’s not just every hundred years. There are the fifty-year floods and the ten-year blips and El Nino and these 24-hour days we find ourselves sitting through, the short winters and the summers that are slow to get started. And the poles? Did you hear about them? Around here your whole world depends on being able to find yourself in it and one of these days you’re gonna wake up and that compass is gonna point south. The earth is gonna ice over every 100,000 years. Where will the birds go? Nature has a way.

And that’s how it goes. You know about my horse. He’d breathe fire if it served him. He’d been so compact that day the way he’d stood up straighter and made all the movement with his feet prancing circles and his body going nowhere. He’s bred for endurance and was never domestic enough for his own good. When I sat on him I remembered how my father’s boat would rock if I wanted it to and I always wondered when I tipped it if I’d know to pull back just in time or if we’d capsize first and I’d bob back up for air or maybe drown and the last thing I’d think was I was too late.

They say we’ve lost touch with our roots. We think we’ve really evolved but when the tsunami hit Indonesia in ’04 it was the tribesman who got to higher ground. Not us. Not us with our devices in our ears and our fossil fuels and high-speed connections. Our penicillin and our weather forecasts. All the technology in the world didn’t tell us to move while the tribesman watched the ruin spread out in front of them safely from a hill and we thought they had nothing to their name but a couple of painted sticks and some unregistered children. What did we know before we knew better?

My horse knew. It happened at that point on the trail where it bends along a chain link fence. Remember how you’d asked about that fruit hanging so thick off the branches you thought we must be trespassing? You thought things aren’t left unspoiled without a reason. It’s there again, breaking through the fence, untouched, July already come back around. What’s it been now? Five, six years we’ve been doing this, expecting change, both afraid to settle down should something come along and upset it. And I still can’t remember your phone number. You were the first one I wanted to call when the ground rolled. And that deafening noise. Not that you would’ve needed me to tell you. The whole world had to hear that noise.

It didn’t matter anyway. Every cell tower from here to the border was jammed with people confirming their safety or counting their deaths, sirens wailing over their conversations and fires breaking out wherever there was a good reason and something to burn. Freeways weren’t moving in or out of the city and people just turned off their engines and stepped outside and leaned on whatever they could. They waited. There were bound to be aftershocks so they kept their hands near their faces in case the glass blew out. You never knew when it was safe to calm back down.

But the first few waves had clarity. That was when I settled. The horse had to plant all four feet on the ground when it moved under him so I held on and I counted my breaths and it was enough. I thought right then that there was no better and there was no worse and I was still intact and I was well. Those breaths were startling and dense, no oxygen left to pull from the air with that low roar moving through it. They say it taps our most primal fear, that noise. Then silence. Things lost their weight and the world hovered for a moment. Finally a fruit fell off the branch. Another and another. They fell onto piles of themselves, bruised, half ripe or rotted through, some still clinging to their leaves. I’d wanted to tell you that they were inedible and that’s why they were left alone but the only science I’d had to back it up was my gut and I didn’t trust it. I thought of all the things I’d wanted to tell you as I sat watching and the cars started to honk where they’d stalled on the freeway and the sirens wailed, alarms, they screamed with the children, with the women and men all grappling with their own guts trying to hear what they had to say.

The animals climbed the hills. They fought through their fences and constraints and they went. My horse too. He vibrated from the inside out, all that muscle and bone moving with one purpose and he spun and he spun and he spun and it happened outside of time and I then was on the ground and he ran. From where I lay with one side of my face in the dirt and a rigid spine I watched the underside of his back feet glint where the new metal hadn’t worn down. I always thought his feet were too strong to need shoes.

What revelation hit you then that I didn’t catch? Lying in the dirt I thought I’d figured it out and you were it. I was ready—for all of it—the one roof, the two cars, building a life became worth the chance that it might cave in. And you? I thought it was funny in the days and weeks that followed, the strange things people call casualties. The hope. The insurance claims. The news. The neighbors are adding on because a hundred year quake recently passed means they won’t see it again in their lifetimes. The whole street has become a patchwork quilt of brick siding. What they don’t tell you is it’s an average. It means every year there is a one percent chance it will happen again and we’re no better off than we were before it. It means brick still crumbles first.

Where was it you wanted to go? Istanbul? Kiev? Somewhere where you’d thought the bubble had popped and there was no time like the present. At first I thought the disconnection at the end of your line was a fault in the cell tower. Downed wires and poles and overload from all directions. But they repaired and still I couldn’t leave a message. I don’t count my dead because somewhere in my gut I know you’re fine, you just ran to where you knew it was right. Like my horse. The domesticated ones will return at the feeding times they have learned to expect. They get barn sour to the point that it’s the only place they ever want to be. And mine? I never saw mine again.

In case you had nothing to do on a Sunday

2011-10-16T17:05:00.000-07:00

I am stuck inside. I have more than one reason for being here, and granted, with a little applied problem solving I would probably realize how easy my situation would be to resolve, but then I wouldn’t have a blog.

Reason number one for being stuck inside on a beautiful sunny day in California:

I have 5 phone numbers in my entire phone. Of the five contacts, three of them are named Mike. This backs up my long held hypothesis that Mike is the most popular name for people who love naked women and the industries they might find them in. When I was eighteen and working as a house dancer I used to forget names constantly. I still do that, but technology aids me now. Anyhoo, back then, I would ask someone’s name and then forget it before my brain could even register it. I did this because the music was too loud and it was hard to hear over it, and because it was dark, and for some reason I don’t process things well in the dark, and also because I was 18 and the world revolved around me so I wasn’t interested in outside details. But no one caught on. No one caught on because if I was put on the spot I would guess that the stranger at hand was named Mike, and I would mostly be right. My second guess would be Richard, or Robert. I usually got it in three guesses. A study on why this is the case would be fascinating. Maybe we just have no imagination with our baby boy names in Sacramento.

But let’s talk about why there are five numbers in my phone. There are five numbers in my phone because I am retarded. I cannot multitask, and neither can you. Not effectively anyway. Don’t fool yourself. I read the studies. But that doesn’t keep me from doing it. So I had three windows open on my desktop, and I was doing research on chat boards, and I had two windows open on my laptop, and I was toggling between email accounts, and then I decided I needed to sync my phone to both my laptop and desktop, and I needed to make everything streamlined on iCloud, and I plugged it in to one or the other and clicked the mouse on something but the mouse was connected to the desktop and not the laptop and things imploded and I realized I had restored my phone to factory settings. This happened of course just two days after I got a new phone, because I smashed my last one to shit when I decided to try to drunk text and instead let the phone slip between my fingers right into an elegant and nearly unreal faceplant into the asphalt I was stumbling across. I had not synced that phone effectively either. I spent the past two days tracking down all of the numbers I just lost again. So I am rebuilding again, and so far only the Mikes of the world are thinking to text me. To bring it full circle, I am inside because I can’t call anyone to make plans.

Reason number two I’m stuck inside:

I’m supposed to be in Bulgaria. I will be flying out there on the 26th to shoot one very awesome Indie movie. I will be there for three months with a quick trip home for thanksgiving. I have scheduled my life around this, naturally. The first part of my life that required scheduling for a long-term absence was my horse. I couldn’t just leave him sitting in a stall while I flitted around Europe, so I spent Thursday getting him settled in a sweet pasture situation near Santa Barbara. I rode him through some tomato fields. We stopped at a fruit stand. I played at the beach. All in all a good day. And that’s how I would normally spend a sunny day off. Outside. Conquering the world with my horse. Who I just shipped too far away to see regularly. The other thing about the Bulgaria shoot is that I was supposed to fly out on the 10th, before things got moved around, and without enough time to book up the days in between the original departure date and the new one. Blah.

Reason number three I am stuck inside:

I am trying to not get any more freckles. I started swimming every day about a month ago, right after a week running around the desert in the white hot sun at Burningman, and now I look like orphan Annie. Shit’s gotta change. So I got some fun lotion that lightens freckles and was told not to go out in the sun while I’m using it. It’s ok though. The pool is heated. I swim at night, stealth style. But it’s still not ideal. Pre-Africa-trip it might have been more bearable because I was sleeping late and staying up half the night, but adjusting to a 9 hour time difference on the bottom of the globe and then coming back somehow reset me to something resembling healthier. 7am is painfully far from dusk.

So aside from the fact that it just sucks to be inside when the sun is out, I have made an extended list of other reasons it sucks to try to pass time at home, based on data gathered in the past 48 hours:

1. I am not a cook. I have strange whims that are best handled by licensed and experienced professionals. Restaurants. I take standard dishes off the menu and amend them with my own ideas of what should be added or deleted and 15 minutes later it’s brought out on a shiny plate and it’s piping hot. This is a good system. I went off the system though. I went off the system the day I stopped at the fruit stand, my last day with my horse, in an agricultural basin where the fruit is fresh off the trees. The stands are erected on the very piece of property the fruit is picked from. There is no better. And I remembered how I used to feed one of my mares peaches, and then how I used to eat them with her, and I got nostalgic and bought bags full of perfectly ripe, almost overripe peaches. Then my horse didn’t eat them, which ruined the happy nostalgia and left me with a bunch of fruit about to spoil. So I ate peaches for a day and a half….. And then I holed up in my house with canned food that I probably bought years ago. It has probably survived two moves. That is how often I eat at home. And I didn’t want to go to the grocery store because then I would just end up with more canned food that would become an unlikely relic of the past, so I decided to work through what I have. I had some noodles and spaghetti sauce. The spaghetti sauce sounded really good. But then the noodles didn’t sound so good. But I needed something to put the spaghetti sauce on. So I warmed up some canned vegetables and poured sauce over it. Then I realized that was probably not the best idea. I got some groceries. But I still can’t cook to save my life.

2. I have spent too much time on the Internet. This is especially sad for me because I have not lost myself in a gaming site, or reading a favorite blog, or following one link after the next down a rabbit hole. No. Instead I have realized that I have no Internet life. Yes, I update twitter. Tumblr. Formspring. I answer emails. I use Wikipedia from my phone when I want to pretend to have a vast amount of knowledge on a subject I know nothing about. I know not to trust it. But outside of that, I have no sites. I don’t post on chatboards. I don’t have online friends that I recognize in places we frequent together by their cartoon avatars. I don’t have sites I even know to frequent. I don’t care about gossip. I don’t have a favorite news site. I don’t care much for youtube or itunes. I don’t have any papers to do research on for school. I lost my MySpace password right before I lost my facebook password. I am on the outskirts of online life.

3. Things I’ve paid: parking tickets, car registration, property taxes, 2010’s income taxes, my tax guy, horse board for three months, my sister’s tuition for the spring, and an IRA contribution. I did this because of the aforementioned Bulgaria trip. I needed to tie everything up ahead of time. I am not complaining about the money though. The money was gonna be spent on these things anyway. I am complaining that there is literally nothing left to do that would make me feel productive.

4. Things I did to make me feel productive that will only result in me having to follow through with things I don’t actually want to do:

a. dentist apt.

b. eye apt.

c. acting lessons

5. Things I did after I did the other things to be productive:

a. tried being a hypochondriac: I took all of my blood test results from last year’s check up and ran the results against searches on the internet. The diagnosis? I am normal and Kaiser is not lying to me. Even my cholesterol is awesome. Which I know for a fact because I divided my total score by my HDL. Because I am bored. I am a bad hypochondriac. I feel fine now.

b. Went through my stocks. It was not fun. Except for one redeeming stock that made up for the sucky stocks. The problem? Even with this information, which I was only able to gather because it did not require any high level of analysis to achieve, I still don’t know what to do with them. So I left them alone. But I wasted three hours in the process.

c. Laundry. I have washed everything that will fit into my washing machine. Then I sorted through my make up and cleaned the brushes.

But then I had an idea. I realized I could share this experience with you lovely people. Because you know what else I’ve been meaning to do? Blog. And I’m sure you’ve been meaning to waste time reading it.

this shouldn't be all one blog

2011-09-29T03:34:00.001-07:00

I have Internet access but only on the couch in the lobby in a hotel that is surrounded by razor wire and electric fence that you’re not supposed to step outside of after dark. They keep the pool across the street but otherwise it hasn’t been much of an issue for me seeing as I fell asleep at 5:30pm last night—Maybe 6—and slept ‘til 2 am. Then I stared at the ceiling for a while in the dark. I lost interest. I checked my phone and saw that some texts had come through but when I tried to access them the phone hid them away somewhere, not fully downloaded. One text came through though. My aunt wanted me to know that my grandma broke her hip, she’s stable, surgery scheduled in the morning. This is bad for two reasons. 1. My grandma broke her hip. 2. Grandparents who break hips statistically go downhill fast in the six months following the break. I learned this in a death and dying class when I was 19, right along with the Kubler-Ross instructions on how to properly grieve. I can’t do anything about it from here but when I think about it I realize I couldn’t do anything about it from there either. I can just document my feelings on it—step one should be denial.

Up until now I’ve managed to scrape through life with four perfectly intact grandparents, healthy aunts, uncles, cousins, parents. My sister got chicken pox at age 3 and that was the last time anyone worried. I’m impressed but not entirely thrilled that my beta fished has lasted so long.

But that got me out of bed and onto the Spanish tile of the floor, slow and barefoot, cold soaking through to the bone. It felt like home back when home was my grandma’s. I washed my face in cold water and dried off with what smelled like a line-dried towel, like it was scented by the same fruit tree that hangs above my grandma’s with the sun bleached wooden clothes pins and the sagging rope. The difference is she wasn’t stirring real cocoa in the pot on the woodstove when I walked downstairs and I found myself wandering around the hotel with a skeleton key to my room hanging from my fingertips looking through the keyholes of other rooms to see if any lights were on. Nothing stirred and no one stopped me. The security guard was too busy facing the street.

I’d given up on Internet service until I sat down on the lobby couch and magically a bunch of little notifications popped up on my screen, alerting me to a connection for the first time in two days. I caught up on emails and spread the grandma news among other family members and then one of the girls who works here started moving around to prepare breakfast and I cornered her and begged for coffee. She said the kitchen was locked while I watched the keys on the master set swing from her pocket. Like most situations here it’s a little more complicated than that.

But then Stoya woke up and wandered in and also needed coffee, and she doesn’t take no well, and now we had the added power of numbers. We walked to the kitchen that was very much not locked and talked to the women who were standing inside of it. Then we had coffee.

And the sun still wasn’t up. We waited for it. We needed to go places—to the Cradle of Humankind, to the Origins Center, the Apartheid Museum. I needed to form opinions passively, blog about it later. It is the way of my generation. I would tell my friends too and my family. My sister especially with her textbooks thick with anthropology and her favoritism for what she refers to every time as the non-human primates. She says they are better things, speaks in rudimentary French. For my birthday she sent me a genealogy kit with little vials and things to swab the inside of your cheek. She said they would trace my origins back 100, 200 thousand years. Said it was a worldwide project for the greater good. She said to send her my results because my results are hers, and this is really for her.

Monday I made friends with a wart hog living wild on the game preserve who ate French fries from my hand. At least he tried to. I wasn’t sure how far in his mouth he kept his teeth so I kept dropping them. He let me pet him, scratch him behind the ears. I could see the eggs glued to the wiry strands of his hair where the lice had left them. I borrowed a wet wipe from Stoya.

There were baboons. They jumped from branch to branch and made the trees look alive and a herd of bok stood underneath and socialized. They all stopped for a moment to watch us intrude. There were rhinos walking along in pairs and other little dog sized bok that the tour guy called rare. A yellow mongoose ran across the road but it might have been a ground squirrel. Stoya commented on the marketing genius that made rats vulgar and squirrels loveable. By then we were looking for lions as we crept along a dirt road at 20 km an hour scanning the hills that were the same color they would be, looking in between the trees, the rocks, along the banks of the watering hole, hoping they’d just cross the road at the right time and we could be on with it. Zebra began scattering frantically and mixed in with a group of gnu. Stoya got excited and leaned out the window for a better view of whatever predator was large enough to spook them. She wanted to see a kill and she wanted a lion pelt. She wanted to pet a lion too. Maybe not the same one she got the pelt from.

The herd settled back down and my soul fluttered with relief knowing I would go another day without seeing a member of the equine family torn to pieces in front of me. I’m off animal products these days. I’m drinking my coffee black. We found another place that kept large cats in small pens, said they possibly had a connection on Stoya’s lion pelt and disappeared to make some calls. They sent us in with a six-month-old male and two younger females at our own risk. We were told not to pet their mouths or their claws. The new tour guide had one whited out eye and a scar down his face that ended with a permanent chunk missing from his upper lip. We balanced that observation out with the half eaten chicken carcasses starting to rot in their pen. At least they weren’t hungry. We took video and Stoya offered me another wet wipe.

There were other cats. Pumas, tigers, jaguars. Some smaller spotted thing that Stoya saw a pelt in again. She thought they were precious. There were jackals and hyenas, Tamarin monkeys. The female tried to pee on me while she held my hand through the wire. Each cage we passed I wanted to fling the doors off of and run, short circuit the electric fence, carry out the cockatoo with the missing tail and wings in my shirt. Instead I pressed my palms up against the cage and tried to send something calm to the other side. Every time I want to save something it’s either out of my reach or hard to schedule.

The sky got lighter and we moved from the couch to the breakfast room, discovered the humor and the panic in being two foreign girls in a room otherwise filled with a team of soccer players from Ghana. They were ready to pop from the internal pressure caused by being equally polite and testosterone fueled. They sat next to us, across from us, brushed behind us and turned our water cups upright so they could fill them. They introduced themselves and left the surrounding tables empty. Stoya joked in a low voice about how common such a scenario actually is for a porn chick. We chose not mention to them that we were porn chicks.

The apartheid museum was strange. It felt like it had documented a time farther away than it was. We we’re given tickets that classified us as white or non-white like a lottery drawing. I pulled a non-white with our guide and Stoya pulled a white. We get separated at our separate entrances, walked down our respective paths looking at the passes lining the walls, the things people had to document on themselves to be allowed out. Stoya got frustrated and climbed through the divide at the end of the hall, another testament to her incompatibility with the word no. The first exhibition was dedicated to Mandela and his life, his education and his values, his prison cells and dead children, his prison chef in the later years, his gifted Mercedes on the way out. The change he brought. One gets the feeling South Africa will be exiting a golden age when he’s gone. Maybe because it says that somewhere in big plain letters on the wall. By the end of the exhibit I kinda loved him. I thought he had a character face. I decided he was more huggable than Gandhi. I wanted to run up behind him when he least suspected it and attack him with little hugs, then maybe one long one at the end like a fireworks show. I followed the fantasy through and realized he probably gets that a lot. I wondered if it became more or less creepy for him. Maybe he recognizes it as a good thing that he’s a world leader who needs bodyguards to keep people from showering him with physical attention instead of bullets. He seems to be a glass half full kind of guy. Outside of the exhibition we got lost and exited through the gift ship. Reviewing the map on the way to the next place we realized we missed most of it.

Then we wound through the caves with the bones of a child from the bipedal species before us at the back end of an 8th grade field trip. The guide called him Little Foot as he gave a pamphlet sized lecture on evolution. He jumped from the Big Bang to Pangaea, asked how many continents there were today. The 8th grade class guessed everything but seven. He finally answered for them but when he rattled them off by name he forgot Australia and replaced it with India. We had a mild epileptic fit on the inside. And in closing he shook his head at the Little Foot monument and asked that God rest his soul. Underground, the 8th graders giggled and whispered, pulled out their phones, sent us into a more external round of epileptic fits with the sudden burst of rapid light bouncing from the cave walls when they snapped their pictures. I had to crawl on my hands and knees through the tunnels and ease myself down the steeper drops. The guide told us to lick the rocks to see if they are fossils. He said that bones would stick. The soap wouldn’t dispense in the bathroom. Stoya offered me a wet wipe.

We went to the Origins Center at Wits. We fingered the eyeholes of molded skulls and commented on their brows. We wondered why their teeth were so straight and where we went wrong. Then we watched videos on the art and extermination of the Sans people with two classes of third graders and of the three groups ours had the hardest time sitting still. We tried to buy the priceless nickel plated Gnu skull in the gift shop display window and Stoya turned away from a book that would be otherwise knowledge packed if the title weren’t so god damn offensive. She hung her head in sadness. We walked through Mandela’s house and drove past Winnie’s and realized the most peaceful place we’ve been in years is the dining patio at a restaurant in Soweto. We passed out at 7:30 in the evening with no cash left and no energy for anything else.

I keep thinking about grandmas. Mine of course, and everybody’s. They came to visit last week and I raced around the house stuffing current issues of Time magazine in front of the Penthouses, the Hustlers, Cheri. I shoved the awards in the shoe cabinets, the mouse pad in the drawer, changed the background on my desktop. I hid Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins behind Orwell. I know their tastes.

And when they got there my grandpa studied my bookshelf. The history teacher in him approved. My grandma looked in my fridge, my vitamin drawer. The nurse in her approved. They pet my rabbits and told me about their theories and their children and I asked questions and I laughed. We stood to leave. I’d promised them something organic for lunch, all natural, farm fresh like they used to pick in the gardens. My grandma went white. She grasped at something in her chest, dropped her chin and lost the strength in her knees. Then she was on the floor and I was on the phone with 911. Her face was frozen. The paramedics came, ran their tests. She refused to let them take her when they left.

That night I thought I could help things. I thought I’d get her a bird, maybe send her a ticket to join me on my next trip, spread the wealth on all of these once in a lifetime opportunities that grandmas didn’t have. I’d told her she needed to see Europe soon, and by soon, I’d meant while she still can but I’d kept that part to myself. I’d doodled on a little post-it and looked up cockatiels. Then I’d jumped a plane to Africa and figured I’d take care of it when I got back.

Fun Saturday Creative Writing. If you're in to that kind of thing.

2011-08-06T23:31:00.000-07:00

Plank

The sleep would spit you out into mornings that were so harsh you would stay behind with the rustle of the tent, all of the canvas and the weatherproofing, still slick with dream and the sound of the sleeping bag rubbing on itself. Then you would know where you were and slowly come back into the world. You’d feel the rocks beneath you through your spine, feel like a princess high on a stack of mattresses, discerning, feel like a cowboy in the muscle, like a pauper and a king and every necessary piece of a conflicting whole. You feel your part in it. You feel like your roots might to go straight back through the fabric and to the ground.

You feel the heat and where it ends, right at the line of your body, hard where it stayed on the surface and blurred where your energy absorbed into the dirt. You feel constant. You note the outline as proof of yourself when you shift your shoulders to the side and listen to the voices through the tent, close, close enough to bind together and bring themselves back to the source, to drop their guards and tell their stories, mix their children, lay the world out to dry by the fire and stare openly over the flame. You hear them with their pots and their pans banging together, mixed and matched, their coffee that you’re too young to need. You hear the water being poured from one thing to the next and you know it’s freezing or it’s boiling and it came straight up out of the land. You know that it matters. You hear the dogs barking, one, two, three, four, one for every family, dog sized dogs, the hardware on their collars hitting a high note where they spin and carrying for miles on the clean lines of clean air. You can name each person by the footstep, by the motions muffled in their shirtsleeves and the layers underneath. You can hear their buttons done up to the neck.

You turn over and you listen again. Now it is to the breathing of your brother, your sister, shallow and untroubled, sweet the way the mouth falls open and stays wet. You hear the teeth coming through the gums and you remember how you were there for the birth, the screaming and the wet, the first broken bone, screaming and wet, twisted ankles, your kisses on the stitches and scraped skin, screaming and wet, perfect life trying to stay in place with heels dug into the dirt as it’s pulled along, screaming and wet, screaming and wet. You want to reach down and wrap the wounds with yourself and the way a child breathes with your same blood rushing over his lungs you know you would. You would and you would never look back.

You hear the murmur of the voices again over the pans and flannel shirts, quieted for you and the children and other children in other tents with their own sweetness and their sleep. They quiet the dogs too and move the kettle just before it squeals, they heat the gristle of the meat and hot slick balls slide and pop from the pan. They think of you when they unpack small plastic plates, the odd ends of old cutlery, heat chocolate over a gas flame with their foreheads tilted into each other when they speak, their voices passed on the same breath, eye contact dropped while they watch the camp and breastbones turned to the world because they would fight it for you. They would fight it and they would never look back.

You shock yourself now with the way that you are. You’ve watched clothes float above the ankle in a season and you’ve watched boxes overflow with the things that you used to be, sloughed off, hauled away with thick-tipped markers taken to the flaps and sealed shut with tape in the garage. You didn’t eat green this time last year and now you take your sugar a little less sweet. You sweat. You made a true friend and it took time. You’ve grappled with honor and fell short and you’re aware now that you can do wrong, real wrong, things beyond a child’s wrong and things you can’t change. Some days you feel like every next step forces you to cause pain or ease it and the best you can throw at it is a blind guess. You miss. You’ve killed things because you thought it would help and others for sport. You’ve been drug in yourself, screaming and wet, thrown down in the dirt with the words that you couldn’t keep. You grow. Then some days you know what’s right on your own and you wonder how.

Yesterday you made a marker in your memory when you thought you’d be safe if you stopped at the shore. You stood with your toes to the water and watched it lap and pool where they spread and watched the sand inch up and back again, never making progress but somehow already closer to landing somewhere else, becoming bone dry but never settled. You lurched. You watched a stick float in the distance and needed an anchor, something to stay in place to show you that it could. For one long low breath you were able to hold on but then when you blinked it was somewhere else too. You exhaled. The wind moved and the water washed over you again and already the trees were a little higher. You threw your head back and faced the sky and watched the way the green never caught up to the blue, watched the way they spun when you tried to stay too still. You realized that it would all be gone in a moment and you pressed your lids hard over your eyes and flattened it down and made it clear. You knew it was worth holding on to because something new was happening and this was the last of another thing but you didn’t know what. It was new like the first time you noticed, really noticed, the things that were hung on the walls of your home. The first time you saw that other people had lives outside of yours, everyone had a man named father and every mother was a daughter too.

You suck in your air suddenly, drowning, bobbing your head between the lake and tent. Then you are present. You count the hours backwards to the stick moving away from you, impossible to pin down, cold washing over again. You face the way you can’t look head on at the sky for too long, the way each time you examine it there is a larger gap. You count how much closer you have come to the next ten years in the span of a breath. To twenty years. To thirty and thirty more and then you see each night’s sleep as the plank that you will walk into the morning’s change. You always knew but had never believed that you will grow eyelevel to your father. The children will grow out of themselves and more will come and then some will belong to you. They will pour from you and you will hollow yourself out trying to tuck them back in. You are aware, irrevocably, of things bigger than yourself. Bigger than your parents and your summer, cold things, opportunistic and unjust things. Things that don’t stop at the crosswalk on your street.

There is an impatience now with what you don’t know and what you will learn. You fear you will learn why poor men go to the frontlines of the rich man’s war, why fur doesn’t come cheap, why strangers shouldn’t need your name and skin color changes at the train tracks. You will learn that not all dogs die quickly and that whole countries can be drug in by the cat, left on the back porch, all of the pieces fluttering and broke, your fault because you lived there. You will learn that right and wrong floats like a stick in the water and the waves you make moving toward it are the same that push it away.

When the tent wall falls down beneath the zipper and the morning spills in with the smell of bacon and soot you turn your face to your mother and for the first time see that she is flawed.

the porn picketers.

2011-07-31T00:12:00.001-07:00

Well I walked around Adultcon today. I wasn’t signing, although I did end up signing things that fans just happened to be carrying in their back pockets, like slicks of my vagina. Small world. I was media. It said so on my little red media wristband that one of the employees strapped to my right wrist with the greatest of care, being sure the make it tight enough that I could never ever slip it off and share it with a fellow wearer. Never ever. I walked around in high heels and eyeliner, of course, because I do porn and these habits will attach themselves to our DNA, but the mic pack sticking out where I maybe should have been wearing a bra really made me feel legitimate. Media. I was an information highway.

And once we got all set up with our wires and our sound checks and the bouncers treating us like we were special, we realized there wasn’t a whole lot to report on. It was 4pm on a Saturday. There was nothing outrageous. Nothing really worth making fun of. There were some hot chicks. Sophia Santi, Dana DeArmond. A few others. Some naked superheros. Naked is a debatable term of course, because they were dressed in paint. We got pictures with them and they signed their first names over our faces. We were unhappy with the outcome. We went to the dungeon room and the violet wand had a comb attachment. We are a creative species.

But overall, there was nothing shocking. Nothing worthy of my debut media attention. We got restless and decided to bug the picketers.

The picketers were stationed in front of the entrances with signs that accused pornography of either hurting children or exploiting women. I would argue that it exploits men more than women, but what can you do. They’re a hardheaded lot. My cohost, the lovely and talented Dane Hanson, pointed out to them that their signs were rather unimaginative. It was plain black text on a plain white background. The church brought them. The sheep had one of two choices. It was funny though, because when asked what they would write if they had their own signs, and could dress them up with glitter and slogans and maybe bullet points, they all stuck with what was already on their respective signs. They had two opinions to choose from and seemed content with it. Maybe I’m greedy. I want my own opinion.

So we asked them to talk more about their signs. We didn’t ask the blind person about his sign because we were suspicious that he didn’t actually know what was on the sign he was holding, or that he was holding one. We were also suspicious that he might be deaf. Talk about exploitation. But the man whose sign said pornography exploited women said he was upset because one time a relative left a stack of porn in his home and then he ended up spending too much time watching it and his wife didn’t like it. Then he speculated that women hated doing it. I asked if he had ever been a woman who did porn. He had not. I asked if he had ever spoken to a woman who did porn. He had not. I asked if anyone had every seen his sign on the way into the convention and then chosen to turn around because of it. Also no. This was his third year protesting.

And then we spoke to the woman holding the sign stating that pornography hurts children. I asked her how. Others of her kind gathered round and spoke openly because of my media badge. And probably because I wasn’t a pornstar, which they assumed was the case, because I told them I wasn’t a pornstar. I was in no mood to be saved. She immediately jumped on the child porn thing. I told her that child porn was not shot in the US, and that it was highly illegal, and that no one walking up the stairs to that convention was going in for the child porn. Then she said that it didn’t matter, that grown men sometimes went down to the south and befriended young girls in poor families, and bought them food, and that those men watched porn and took advantage of the girls in the south in the grocery store. Or maybe she said they took them to the grocery store, then took advantage of them. But she definitely said people like that watch porn. I told her I’d never heard of this scam.

I asked her how else porn hurt children, considering her first two examples were based on myth, or as they like to call it, belief. She said it’s a slippery slope. She said that men start out watching soft porn then work their way into harder and harder stuff and next thing you know they’re desensitized and can only get off on child porn. I pointed out that pedophilia is actually a disorder, and that men who are attracted to children are not attracted to adults, and therefore never had any interest in the very porn they were protesting. She was not sold on the idea. She wanted something besides my word. I recommended the DSM-V. She had driven three and a half hours to make it to this protest. She was not going to let it go easily.

And then we argued our way back to square one. I asked her, again, how porn hurts children. This time she said abortions. She said porn causes abortions, and that porn is a multi-billion dollar industry. How truly uninformed this poor woman was. She said that doctors make millions off abortions, and porn works with them, because people who watch porn are sexually irresponsible and more likely to conceive unwanted children. The logic started to make my head hurt a little. I asked her more about the doctor-porn-abortion conspiracy. She didn’t know much beyond it. The workings of that world are top secret.

But we finally found common ground. Because I asked her, again, how porn hurts children. And this time, she said it’s the Internet. We agreed that children and sex should be kept completely separate (this surprised her, because she thought people who side with porn like to force sexuality on children from an early age). We agreed that children should not watch porn, or be involved in porn, or even know what the shit is. And we agreed that it shouldn’t be so accessible online. I tried to explain to her that porn is a business and we actually don’t want people to be able to grab our product for free, not even kids. I told her we were capitalists, and we want money in exchange for our goods. This concept shocked her. I felt like maybe I was making some headway, but the retarded claims had worn me down, and I was too tired to go on.

Kayden's Review - "Interns"

2011-07-27T00:02:00.000-07:00

The Rise and Fall of PWL

2011-07-26T23:14:00.000-07:00

The Internet has brought a change in society unmatched my most modern innovations of our time. It has vastly increased distances and proximities in ways like never before. Social rules and ways of engaging have changed. People have shed their reservations and now feel free to behave with relatively little consequence, for better or worse. This new freedom has created some unlikely adversaries, and even more unlikely heroes.

Donny Long, legal name Donald Carlos Seoane, became active in the adult industry in 2005 as a male performer and it wasn’t long before he’d started conflicts with not one but two of the industry’s most powerful agents, among others. The conflicts escalated to the point that Long developed a website with the specific intent of harassing one of his adversaries online. The original URL was DerekAndrewHay.com, but eventually grew into a forum dedicated to harassing more than just it’s namesake. Long’s hit list grew to include girls who worked with the agents he despised, girls who worked with the performers he despised, or girls who wouldn’t work with him, and a scattering of others he chose to target for any number of reasons. In addition, he regularly posted hateful comments and enflamed lies on other prominent industry gossip sites until his user accounts were suspended, and invariably they were. Even to sites dedicated to inflammatory commentary his actions were recognized as crossing a line.

As the conflict continued to grow, Long widened his attack to include more than just insulting commentary. He began posting lists with their real names next to their stage names and was met with an almost unanimous response from the industry: he’d gone too far. Performers use stage names for their privacy and safety and he had jeopardized both. Having been kicked off most of the other boards he’d actively participated on, and feeling the pressure to either step up his fight or back down, Long created his final and most vicious site in December 2010—PornWikiLeaks.com.

Pornwikileaks.com, or PWL as it soon became known, was dedicated to creating and maintaining defamous wiki pages on all performers and industry insiders with whom Long felt he’d had a run-in, and some he hadn’t. Among the victims were Monica Foster, Mercedes Ashley, Nina Mercedes, Derek Hay, Mark Speigler, and a host of other people whose numbers totaled entries in the thousands. The chat boards attracted the most vicious commenters who felt free to behave under the cloak of anonymity that the Internet provides. Performers were refereed to as whores and hookers, men were accused of being closet homosexuals as if it were an offense on the level of child molestation—which was another accusation thrown around. Others were attacked based on their heritage or race. Of course the industry reacted again. This time Long responded with a rant threatening to expose the most personal information of all performers if he was not apologized to. He was ignored.

Long’s response was to illegally gain access to the AIM’s database, a non-profit organization responsible for the collection of samples and record maintenance of all STD testing in the adult industry. Those records are made available with the performers’ permission to producers and directors who hire them for work. Performers are required to test once every 30 days. The AIM clinic also caters to walk-in clientele who are only interested in low cost testing for their own purposes. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 15,000 names were included in the data dump that Long posted to PWL along with their performer names, if listed, driver’s license and social security numbers, or any other personal information that had been stored. The exact way that Long acquired this information is not yet known and remains under federal investigation.

When the data dump was posted on PWL, other industry gossip sites lit up with the news. Many who were aware of Long and his retaliatory nature chose to ignore it or sought legal representation. Some tried to reason with Long and sent private emails asking that he remove their names. Those people became targets. Mercedes Ashley was one of many performers who was unaware that any of this had been going on until someone sent a tweet alerting her to the fact that her medical information—specifically concerning STD records—was available online to anyone who cared to look. Ashley went in swinging. She has two children and had already retired from the industry and put it behind her after a very short career that only involved a few movies. Rather than respect her wishes, and her rights under HIPPA, the moderators at PWL took her fight to the chat boards and made it public. Other commenters jumped in with vicious attacks on her. Again, she fought back, now on this public forum. They doubled their attacks.

Says Ashley—“everyone kept saying, back off or you’re gonna get a wiki. And I didn’t know what the hell a wiki was. I was mad. I said screw them and their wikis and I kept fighting. Then I found out what a wiki was.”

A wiki page on pornwikileaks.com is an especially libelous dossier. Females who were given wikis were invariable listed as hookers and whores who had shamed their families. Private information that could easily jeopardize their safety was listed along with names and addresses of their children or other family members. Most men who were given wiki pages were labeled as “fags” except for a few who were aligned with Long and given rather glossy descriptions. Long listed himself as a “hero” and a “porn god” fighting the “gay mafia”, a termed he’d coined for industry insiders who opposed him.

News of the data leak broke into the mainstream media and drew more attention to the site. For many performers, their wikis on pornwikileaks became a top Google entry under their legal names, along with others who had tested at AIM but never actually been involved in the adult industry. There are numerous accounts of people having to explain to their friends and families what was going on, children being harassed at school because of what was said of their parents on the Internet, and jobs being jeopardized. There are at least two confirmed cases of retired performers losing their jobs over the postings on PWL. There is one confirmed case of a teenager who has been placed in therapy as a direct result of the postings made about his mother and the subsequent harassment he received at school. One retired performer committed suicide the day after she requested that PWL remove her information, although it has not been confirmed or denied whether PWL was the catalyst. As the number of affected increased, the traffic soared. New commenters who stumbled across the site joined in on the attacks. PWL’s strength grew.

Monica Foster was one of the most affected by PWL and the people who participated on it. She’d been an early contributor when the site first launched and she’d assumed it was just another chat forum. Ironically and regrettably, she became partly responsible for the site’s early success when she posted about a bad check written to her by a well-known professional athlete. That was the first time PWL received mainstream attention, as well as the beginning of a very hard road that the members and administrators drug her down. By the time her medical information was posted, she’d become the favorite victim of the site. The harassment grew outside the bounds of PWL though. Long took his online army to other social networking sites that she and other targets were active on, such as Twitter. They would batter the accounts of the people who openly fought PWL, as well as the accounts off those who interacted with them. It was not uncommon for one member of PWL to make ten or twenty fake twitter accounts and badger one person for a days on end to make it look like a coordinated attack.

It wasn’t hard to make the victim list on PWL. All you needed was record of an AIM test drawn sometime between late ’04 and February 2010 coupled with one of the qualities that PWL users hated. Foster believes that she was targeted for reasons beyond just the fact that she fought back. Long’s sites have a history of targeting male performers who have done crossover work, that is, work on both the straight and gay side of porn. They also have a history of targeting female performers who have worked with crossovers. When it came out that Foster’s father is openly gay, he became a target that the users at PWL gleefully took aim at. Additionally, Ashley and Foster and others were attacked based on race and because they were women in a forum where misogyny was not only tolerated but encouraged. Those victims identified as Jewish were subjected to heavy anti-Sematic rants. The assaults were non-stop. Donny’s army were in time zones all over the world and willing to go to great lengths to shake them. They posted pictures of their homes and made active attempts to stress family and work relationships.

Says Foster; “I felt completely helpless. They were indexing every adult star who had been active since 2004-05. They were trying to draw as much traffic as possible to route to their advertisers… There were advertisers making money per click off of my embarrassment and I couldn’t do anything about it. I was scared to death.”

And that was exactly the problem. Nothing could be done about it. While everyone suspected that Long was behind PWL, no one had any proof. The medical information leak is a HIPPA violation punishable under federal law but the law takes time and Long had run off to Thailand where he was safely out of reach of a growing group of people who had lost patience with the process. Everything else Long posted was protected under free speech, or the content that could be considered libelous could only be removed with a lawsuit that would never provide the payout to cover even it’s own costs. Long has very little to his name aside from the URL in question and some boxes in a storage unit.

Luckily, even anarchy has its order. As PWL’s assault spiraled out of control, a loose network of vigilantes around the world began to step up. Mike South, AVN award winning director and adult industry blogger on MikeSouth.com, turned his website into a platform dedicated almost exclusively to the transfer of information between parties who had the common goal of defeating PWL. Those who joined the fight knew that they would be drug into the wiki entries and cyber attacks along with the performers, but, as Mike said, “I didn’t have any secrets, my family knows what I do. I’m not ashamed. No one else was stepping up for these girls. If it were your everyday chick working in an office somewhere, something may have been done. But these were porn girls. No one felt like they deserved any protection. That’s simply untrue and ignorant. No one deserves to be treated like that.”

Michael Whiteacre also got involved. Self-described as a ‘recovering lawyer’, he lent his legal expertise pro bono to help the growing effort navigate what they could and could not do to fight back. When asked why he chose to get involved, his response was simple: “At the time I got involved there was no private info of mine on PWL. I’m just sick of seeing people being disgraced by hypocrites who make money off the same industry and people they excoriate.” Along with performing the role of the advocate, Whiteacre later became the bomb thrower of sensitive information that other unnamed individuals retrieved through whatever means they found necessary.

The final piece of the puzzle was brought in by Long himself. Sean Tompkins is incredibly adept online and had been a regular poster on some other sites that Long also posted on. Tompkins is not tied to the adult industry, nor did he know anything about PWL, but when Long suggested he check out the site in hopes that Tompkins might help draw traffic, he did. What he found made him sick. He asked Long if he owned the site and Long vehemently denied it, as he still does to this day, but after a few simple tests and some deductive elimination with the administrators, Tompkins knew that Long did in fact own the site. Tomkins joined the site as a commenter.

At first, Tompkins thought he could be the voice of reason that helped other posters realize they needed to back off, but when he suggested it, he too was attacked. After four days of fruitless attempts, he took a more aggressive approach. By then it was May. PWL had been actively harassing people for six months and had attracted a wide audience of gawkers and anonymous posters who felt safe to cross any and all lines they saw fit under the cloak of invisibility. Mercedes Ashley remembers cycles of breaking down in tears and then coming back out again swinging, always with a doubled effort. Monica Foster felt her life had become consumed by it. Mike South summed it up perfectly: “for these people commenting, it’s just something they do online, then they walk away from their computer screens and live their lives and forget about it. For the victims, there was no walking away.”

Tompkins, along with the assistance of a couple of unnamed Internet-savvy friends, began to gather the information they would need to take down not just Long, but all of the moderators and posters actively participating on PWL. They did the same thing to Long that he’d done to his victims—found addresses and pictures of his family, his dog, his personal information. They toyed with Long and he responded by posting pictures of Tompkins two children, complete with the customary racist rants. Then Tompkins and his team made a major breakthrough and gained access to the personal information of the posters and administrators. They would no longer be anonymous. Long was given the option to take down the defamatory links and comments by 5pm in exchange for Tompkin’s backing off. Instead, Long chose to stop responding to DMCA notices ordering him to take down content he’d pirated for the purpose of harassing featured performers and increased his own efforts.
Once Long ignored the DMCA notices it gave South the legal opening he needed to ask a judge to compel GoDaddy.com to release the information of the person who registered pornwikileaks.com. Sure enough, the name on the record was Donald Carlos Seoane. Meanwhile, administrators and commenters fled the site when they realized their own personal information was about to be exposed. South gave them the option of publicly apologizing on his site and a number of emotionally charged apologies came through by email. Those who chose to apologize over the phone often called in tears. PWL’s traffic dropped dramatically.

But Long wasn’t ready to back down. He kept up the harassment on his own while Whiteacre and South used the newly acquired domain information to find the person responsible for funding the site and Tompkins used his talents against Long and the administrators. Ten days before PWL went down for good, Tompkins sent Long an email. It told him that he had ten days left. The next day Long received another email, this time stating that he had nine days. This went on until the last day of the countdown, when Tompkins dropped his final bomb: he named the man responsible for providing the funding to keep PWL going—Michael Tierny, commonly known in the adult industry as performer Joe Blow. He also named every single person who had participated in victimizing other performers. He had access to every single piece of private information surrounding PWL that Long and Tierney had ever had. 41 minutes later the site was taken down.

PWL has been offline for close to two weeks now. More apologies are coming through as well as thank you letters from people across the adult industry. The legal investigation into Long’s crimes continues but the harassment of his victims has stopped.

Says Mercedes Ashley, “I feel awesome, amazing. I can enjoy my retirement. I can go home and chill out and be on my computer. This was one of the worst sites I’ve ever seen in my entire 12 years on the internet. I’ve never seen a site this evil. Bringing it down is something to rejoice about. I wanna forgive. I don’t wanna hold grudges. I wanted the site down. I just wanna thank everybody. Right on. Innocent people ended up on that site. I appreciate everybody who helped.”

Foster is more reserved. She worries about the cached pages on Google that still reflect the terror that PWL inflicted on her. She is in the process of moving and picking up the pieces. The last thing she had to say was, “It’s not over yet. A lot of people think that it will fade away and we’re not all that upset anymore. I will seek legal recourse because it really affected my life.”

Either way, the fight against Pornwikileaks.com has shown that the Internet has not destroyed accountability and has not created anonymity. While PWL was not original in it’s construction of a forum designed to criticize performers, it was by far the worst of it’s kind. Many are still assessing the damages and doling out the lawsuits. The authorities remain involved in investigations on both state and federal levels. Others feel like there’s no promise that another site like it won’t spring up in its place. Hopefully their story serves as an example though, and a reason why it won’t.

Kayden's Review - "Craft Service"

2011-07-12T01:41:00.000-07:00

Kayden's Review - "Cooking With Kayden"

2011-07-04T16:22:00.000-07:00

A call to arms

2011-07-03T17:47:00.001-07:00

There are too many ongoing tragedies. Natural disasters are still knocking things over and invisible gods are still fueling war and Ed Hardy still has retail outlets and Sarah Palin still gets airtime and the earth is still heating up and in a few year’s time your compass is gonna point south and the birds are gonna be really fucking confused.

And I still haven’t done a girl/girl scene with Jesse Jane.

Yes, I’ve done a girl/girl/girl/girl/girl scene with Jesse Jane, and two girl/girl/girl/girl/boy scenes with Jesse Jane, but I’ve never had her to myself. It is unfair, not just to me, but to all of us.

And how has this been allowed to go on, you ask? I just don’t know. Because the fine people over at Digital Playground are on their game. God knows they’re competent. You saw Top Guns. And Body Heat. And Babysitters 2. I know you saw them. Because that is some damn good porn and you will accept nothing less. I get you.

And of course you saw Pirates 2. I did. I wasn’t in it and this fact still doesn’t sit quite right with me. There was the spectacular use of technology and lighting and storyline and acting to really drive the characters into each other’s genitals, and then there was the spectacular use of Jesse Jane on Belladonna. And I remember sitting in that theater (yes, I watched it in a theater) thinking to myself A) I’m gonna need to fuck Jesse Jane, and B) ditto for Belladonna.

And now here we all are, a couple of years later, leading our lives day in and day out acting like nothing is amiss and turning a blind eye to the world. It’s all very passive. We need to be proactive. YOU can create your reality. You can enact the change we need.

So this is my call to arms. Convince Digital Playground that I should fuck Jesse Jane sooner rather than later, preferably immediately. Just the two of us and a camera, just this once, until I want to do it a second time, which is inevitable. Convince them that life won’t be quite as bright until this happens. Email PR@DigitalPlayground.com, or bug them on twitter (@DPxxx or @RobbyDXXX), or reblog this incessantly, or copy and paste it everywhere. Maybe print it off as a flyer you can post around your neighborhood. We can also maybe sell chocolate bars door to door to raise funds for awareness campaigns. Maybe peaceful protests in the park.

Here are some helpful talking points you can use when trying to convince your friends and family to get on board with this campaign:

It’s like make-a-wish, except I am not a dying child.
The fallout of a scene between the two of us will most likely lay the foundation for all good things yet to come.
There are no losers in this proposal. Only winners.
If you don’t fervently support this, you are prejudice against gays, or gay yourself.
Jesse Jane’s girl bits really do feel like flower petals.

You can make a difference. You can be the change we need in the world. And then I can have sex with Jesse Jane. Now go make your self heard.

Before They Edit my Interviews, They Actually Look Like This.

2011-06-28T11:33:00.000-07:00

1/ I guess you’ve had that question about a 1000 times but what did you do before porn and how did you get involved in that industry?

I’ve always done porn. Sex trafficking likes to pick ‘em young. Like Chinese gymnasts.

2/ You’ve had quite a few awards already. Do these awards still mean something to you (i.e : is it always nice to have the industry’s recognition?) or are they just another nice bonus that will go on your mantlepiece?

I consider them to be proof that I’m on the right track. They legitimize my blow jobs.

3/ By the way, where do you really store them?

I use them to club baby seals.

4/ Like a lot of adult entertainers, you’re pretty active on Twitter and you have your own blog since early 2008 (where you write A LOT) Is it important for you to share your (almost) daily life with so many people (you currently have 65000+ followers) ?

I’m actually illiterate and frankly I’m really fed up with these impostors.

5/ What is it like being married to Manuel Ferrara? On a more serious note, I’ve seen two of your movies in which you’re married to him (The Smiths and Body Heat) and like in every Manuel scene I’ve seen, there seems to be a real chemistry between the two of you. I asked that question to most of the performers who shot a scene with him and I got just about the same answer from everyone : Manuel has that ability to make you feel special during a scene. How was it for you?

He dips his dick in coke before a scene its really nice.

6/ Can you tell me a fun fact about yourself that you never told anyone… Pleeeeease ? ;)

I was born with a tail.

7/ If you were not doing porn, where would you be right now?

Probably free, and brunette.

8/ Digital Playground’s Top Gun is a BIG (huge?) budget movie. What was it like shooting it? (did I say that I really loved it?)

Flying the jets got tricky. But the Go pills helped.

9/ Should I steal you MP3 player right now, what would I find in it?

Drugs.

10/ Should I accept your invitation to dinner… hmm, sorry, should you accept my invitation to dinner. What kind of restaurant would I have to take you to?

We’re not allowed to eat. I get my calories from alcohol. Plus I heard that bread and stuff has cellulite in it.

11/ Can you say that you have real friends in the industry or are there just “business partners”?

We’re all very close, considering how we were raised together on the sex trafficking farm.

12/ Is there any chance to see you direct some day?

We’re not really allowed out.

13/ Have you ever been approached to do mainstream? If not, is it something you’d like to try?

I think my acting abilities are just a little ahead of the times for mainstream. They’re not ready for me.

14/ For you, what’s the best thing about working in porn?

The adrenaline rush I get from daily exposure to deadly STDs and moral decay.

15/ On the other hand, is there a negative side to it? (some of the performers I interviewed said it was difficult to have a serious relationship)

The gun they’re always holding to my head is getting to be a boring landscape, ya know?

16/ what’s the worst question you ever had to answer in an interview? (you can of course quote one of the above)

Someone threw a math question in there once. Actually they just asked how many abortions I’d had and it really stumped me. Never again.

17/ Is there a question that you’ve never been asked but would like to answer? If yes, what would the Q & A be?

No one ever wants to know how I feel about the political landscape. I feel like we’re really on a roll.

18/ Throughout your career, you’ve done gonzo titles and features with real comedy lines. In which do you feel more at ease?

Well the feature sets have a bigger budget for drugs and alcohol so I tend to prefer those. Plus the longer set days mean I don’t have to go home to my shackles quite as early.

19/ Free speech : if you want to say Hi to someone, promote your website, your Twitter, or just shout at someone, that’s the place to do it.

I don’t get it.

20/ Out of 10, How would you (honestly) rate this interview?

I thought I did a great job!

Kayden's Review - "Audition"

2011-06-28T01:42:00.000-07:00

Love This Boy!

2011-06-21T10:43:00.000-07:00

Kayden's Review - "Always Naked"

2011-06-20T18:23:00.000-07:00

That's actually just my microphone, but I really am happy to see you...

2011-06-11T13:37:00.000-07:00

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD NOT SELL ME A SWORD:

2011-05-27T19:56:00.000-07:00

I forgive you, at some level, for denying me this small thing. You couldn’t have known that I have a bookshelf that is very large and stately, filled with books that I have worn thin, and some that I have spit in liberally before closing, finding them unworthy of my time. There are also shelves and shelves of others that I have not read, but choose to let people believe otherwise, because for reasons I will not burden you with at this time, I do not support the notion that inaction can be a consummate lie. You couldn’t have known that this bookshelf is my pride and joy, or that the dimensions span 16 feet in length. Of course you wouldn’t have known that there are also relics on my bookshelf, and many gold colored awards, or that I have placed them so that the sun’s rays highlight them between approximately 4 and 6 PM this time of year, when I am most likely to have daytime visitors. They are like beacons. I will not tell you how I earned them.

So you could never have known that between the most impressive of the awards there is a framed photo—an original piece—signed by the photographer. And yes, the photo is of my genitalia, but it’s the juxtaposition that makes it art, so clean shaven and softly lit, so magnified against the backdrop of an abandoned public restroom that was only really 3 lidless toilet seats over deep holes with plywood for a structure. I know you would appreciate the contrast of the dirt floor to the latex boots that went over the knee. You would see how opposite everything really was. And the leather dog collar I wore, with the studs and the silver hardware. It was a study of the human condition. A bookshelf is a very cerebral thing.

And there’s really no way you could have known that I was a serious buyer and not mindlessly browsing. Yes, I stumbled on the store, and mentioned feeling misled when I realized it was not a pet store as I walked by your register, and yes, I was the only blond haired person for miles. And we did have that language barrier, what with me speaking English, and you not acknowledging it. And there was the way I squealed a little with my companion, who also stood out, the way her boobs were still bandaged, and overly generous for her frame—she will be blond next month by the way—I’m sorry about the way we squealed when we saw the swords.

So I can see it from your point of view, after showing us multiple swords, and helping me get the ones out of the sheaths that I could not undo myself, and my comments on how swords should not have safeties, I can see how you may have not taken us seriously. And when I tested that last one out, the way that child cowered when he found himself within a very narrow margin of the blade, and the cultural notes I relayed to my friend—who was preoccupied with your glitter selection and didn’t even hear me—about how they’re too well behaved and therefore hard to notice in that area. I can see how you would have been unsure of my candidacy for sword ownership.

Of course I sensed your waning level of interest in my business after that point and ducked out of range to give you some space, which means you didn’t hear the very responsible discussion I was having about the logistics of possible sword ownership, and about whether they can be carried in public, and you would have missed the points we hit on about my height and how a smaller sword would fit me better, but then we realized longer swords would keep the enemies further away, and that the enemies in question also probably had long swords, especially if they’d thought it through like we were doing right then, but what use is a long sword if you can’t wield it properly (?)… and we covered how practical a sword would be in the event of an apocalypse, because they do not require ammo, or licenses. And then we wondered if I needed a license. You would have missed all of that conversation. But you should know that conversation was what led us to the medium sized and much more realistic swords, in the back.

And before I go on, I feel the need to defend the squealing that I took the first step in apologizing for a moment ago, although I remain remorseful. I would maybe have behaved differently in retrospect. Swords are surprising artifacts for anyone, especially myself, because I’ve envisioned a sword very much like the one you would not sell me for some time. I am so deeply involved in this vision that I already have a plastic one sitting where the real one will someday be. It is a placeholder and I intend to return it to the child I stole it from just as soon as the real one comes along, although I’m sure he’s outgrown it by now and no longer cares. Not as much I care. Because the right sword’s place is on this bookshelf, between the two awards (which you might as well know I earned filming my genitalia (we’re all adults here)), at the base of the original framed art, which I’d like to reiterate is art, and the phallic object I am holding in it is a metaphor for the world.

So while I do not agree with your decision to passive aggressively ignore our repeated requests to hold the medium sized swords—notice we lessened our use of the word wield after the dirty looks you gave—I do understand it. I didn’t necessarily understand why you continued to ignore us even after I offered to buy it without a test drive, or why you seemed angered by the phrase test drive, or why your manager got involved, or why he’d want serious customers to leave without first completing their purchases, but it was a cultural misunderstanding and I can see that now. I hope in the time we’ve been gone that you too have arrived with a cool head at the very same conclusion, but even if you have not, I’m sure you will understand and appreciate my dedication to this pursuit when I come back, with a doubled effort and more appropriately dressed for sword ownership.

Until Then,

Kayden Kross

Hooked (one from the reading)

2011-05-16T20:26:00.002-07:00

I like you best mixed with the salt of my own body,
running down,
colorlessly
into pools that gather in the crevices of yours.
I like the taste between us,
muddled, pressed,
damp to the touch.
Rolling.
It’s the break I want,
the wave and the swell and the crash that lathers where it hits,
rushes my face.
I want to be washed over
with the depth of you when you rise
and the scratched surfaces you’ll expose in the trough,
the rough edges that carve me out and the softened pieces that stick,
in.
I want to be what’s under you and what’s left
when you pull back.
Caused.
I want to be affected by you.

I like the way you absolve,
standing over me,
examine your wake,
the spoonfuls that you scoop back in,
fingers first, smearing,
exacting,
dripping it thickly down my throat.
I like the weather in your eyes,
dark and downcast,
cold and gusting,
tidal,
as you run out of your own lines and into mine.
You remain unmistakable.

You say,
look at me when you fuck me.

And I wipe it clean I like the backwash
and the slack
that looms between us as I move through a list of possible,
fragmented selves
and you wet me back down,
bind it together,
cast it off.
I like what I can’t have
and you sweep it just ahead and leave me treading.
You say,
don’t lie to me and I surge forward, within reach, relieved again.
I want to tell you that I won’t,
couldn’t if I tried,
that you don’t know yet what you’ve got on your hands
as I drift my lips from your belt to your ribs,
take another breath to close the distance,
cast imperceptible nets into the trappings of something more.

The ITD Morning After Featuring Kayden Kross

2011-04-15T19:05:00.000-07:00

First Stab at a Short Fiction. Untitled.

2011-04-12T17:48:00.000-07:00

Hi and how are you and all of the niceties. How are the children? Are they beating down the gates of your loins? How is their mother? Have you met her yet? I never said this to your face but I hope that time is standing still.

The weather. Let’s address it. I know yours already. I know it the way you know it with so many summers ground into the dust. I know the kind of heel you have on your boot and the way it slopes forward on the pair you like for this time of year. I know by now there’s a straight line across the broadest part of your forehead that can mostly be rinsed off in the sink before dinner but will still be the telltale color of dry earth where it changed in the sun. I know how the hat fits your fingers and rests in the palm and the way you press it down into your hair with that same long step every morning from the porch to the ground as the dew begins to steam and you can already feel the heat rising up through the sole. I know how the animals sound before they eat.
And here? There is no weather. It is a city designed for movement. It is a great hallway made to be passed through on the way from one distraction to the next. There is so much petty business, every person with a card and a headshot and a broad resume. Broad smiles. Everything is room temperature.

How is my mother? Does she ever stop? And yours? Leave a kiss on her cheek for me. If we are nothing else we are at least sons and daughters.

What is the town like these days? Do the streetlights still hang from cables and rock in the wind? I miss the way the road signs were more of a suggestion. Do you remember when we practiced my driving on the main street? How I stalled the clutch and the truck lurched forward and died and afterwards the door stuck on the passenger side? Remember climbing over my lap and taking the wheel? There were too many parked cars with doors swinging into the street, dogs and children running between them, so many obstacles. I miss the careless nature of pedestrians.

I merged onto a freeway today with no shoulder. The sun has bleached out the color of the roads and they feel calcified. Nothing hits harder than a pothole in Los Angeles. I tried to make sense of where the paint had been but instead followed the cracks as they spidered across six lanes and an off ramp. Then I sat staring at all of the things trying to break through, the world wanting to take back the land, seeds sprouting in the husk, digging roots down into the fractures padded by cast off cigarette butts and the debris of runoff, protesting their right to life beneath the sheet metal sludge of a million cars both ways stopped on a freeway waiting for their own break, their own dark chance to push limbs through a shell and grab hold and never let go.

Do you know what you’d miss if you left right now? I didn’t. I see you leaning back at your grandmother’s kitchen table with that same coffee cup. And that saucer. The cut out shadow you made sitting by the window and the way the light shone through the paper. I think you’ll have that always. No matter what you can open one of those hard little unused suitcases and wrap the saucer in the paper, fold the shadow up, tuck it in the cup. Anywhere there is a worn table and a window there you’ll be. That’s what I miss though. What would you miss? I’m sure it is something so large that it will always be your reason not to leave. The other thing I can’t seem to replace out here is the levee that connects the two ends of the lake. You never let me take you there because you couldn’t dive off of it and you said the fish were spooked. It rises up on a sharp gradient ten feet over the water.

It’s more than the levee. In the summers when you weren’t around I would put on a bathing suit—just two little patchwork ragged pieces that you’d only ever wear alone—and I’d swing a leg up over the sweaty back of my horse and wrap the reins through his mane and I’d grip. For dear life I’d grip. I was so bony back then, and bright white in the sun. I miss the course of the days. Do you remember in the mornings how we’d fold sandwich meat over cream cheese on buttered bread? For energy, you’d say, and I’d take two bites and couldn’t finish it. Then we’d go to a swimming hole, or we’d grab walking sticks and canteens and head towards the mountains, or we’d bait rabbits, and all day you’d keep dangling the reminder of food in front of me and I wouldn’t budge. Once you thought you finally figured it out. You said girls are charged with holding back and men with pushing forward. You said we are equal and opposite.

If you still believe that energy is always in motion then this city is what happens when it’s caged. We are like sharks here swimming up against the glass. How easily I settled into it. Right now I’m sitting at a café with a red checked table cloth and it’s the kind of place where they ask if you want your eggs over easy because that’s how they think its done in the real places. Everything is a study of another way of life. The waitresses use pet names and they practice the act in the mirror while they wait at the end of the food line, smoothing their hair into something a little more messy. A little more lifelike. The whites are crisp and nothing has crumbs, the children don’t spill and the butter won’t melt. When I press my palms down flat on the surfaces I can feel them vibrate.

I want to know where we’re going sometimes. I keep thinking I might be able to plan accordingly, that if we both arc out from our common origin we will come back around to a common landing place. When I sit down in this crowded space I know that you are sitting somewhere opposite, somewhere open, the other side of the table, the other side of the day, somewhere you’re contemplating quiet while I struggle with noise. I want to ask what you look at now when the sun comes up and you’re there to meet it. I miss the calmness in your steps when you walked heel to toe so that the sound traveled through the wood of the porch and the dogs came running. Hearing you taught me that you can’t love anyone with whom you can’t love mornings.
I think I’ve changed. I can be vain. More so now that it matters. I used to let my bones stick out because there were so many better things to do in the world than sit inside with food. I didn’t have the appetite. When we were halfway up a hill or suspended in air above the water, swinging from ropes and falling belly up, there was no time. And when we spread out in the grass and stayed perfectly still in the sun I couldn’t be interrupted. Then at night when you spoke and colored in the ways you saw the world I couldn’t look away. Now when I sit here calculating how best to keep my bones showing I realize the fight is in the preoccupation. There are so many constructed things that need to be plugged with fiber and are left empty. I fill up on little personal histories and chew on what I’m working for and fall asleep hungry. I convince myself that there are things that miss me too. I think you do. I think you miss my collarbone and the way my body sloped down off of it. I assume you miss how our youth would lock together and ignite. I assumed there was nobody like me.

Yesterday was another audition. I did what I do best; showcased those big barrel rolled wheat curls, the soft strong of a farm girl, the accent, the body we made together, swimming, baling, running, working, jumping, tumbling, writhing over each other. I spoke with the soft vowels the way you remember me, even though by now I can feel in my speech the hard letters of a place at odds with itself. I sat in a holding room filled with girls doing the same, saying the same things, following the script. The girl to my right reapplied her lipstick in a compact and when she turned it over I noticed it was my brand, my color. The sticker on the bottom said Cherry Red. When they called for me we all looked up. They led me through double doors, through carpeted halls, day lit, with mass-produced prints hung at an equally measured distance. The weather was the same outside. And then there was a meeting room and we sat. Three of them and me. Two women and a man, perfectly in balance with each other, opposing me. An executing team. The conference table was meant for sixteen or twenty and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was responsible for filling up all of that emptiness. I thought this was the final test. How much space can I fill? What fiber can I bring or at least what kind of illusion can I create? But then they started talking about schedules, about filming. They talked about scripts. There was an uncertain flicker of happiness. I’d stood out. I was something in a sea of likeness. And then they talked about my name. About what name I should use. Even the individual parts of me are replaceable.

Tell me about what your body does in the heat at night. When the windows are open and the curtains are still and the air is still and it’s so much that you can’t breathe. When the bed sticks to you and your mind floats between conscious and not. Where do you go? I go home to a valley that I stole by trespassing. I had to get there by following a cow path along a barbed wire fence, climbing over the fence at the t-post, cutting my skin on the rust. Or I’d squeeze through in that same bathing suit, clawing red down the length of the belly or over the back. I’d bring a book and a blanket and lay out on wild grass spread across a hill that sloped like a body. Like it’s coming off of a collarbone. A tree says a lot about a place. A tree will outlast a clock. Los Angeles is at war with this. What trees are here are planted. Infant or diseased. They grow elsewhere and are brought in for show. They wither in the sun or without water and for lack of weather. The trees in this valley though were robust. They were thick with age and the characteristic strength of home. Native. I would wrap my arms around them and my legs as I scaled the height. I would climb until my muscles gave out and there would still be more ahead of me. I’d swing from them, build on them, throw the force of humanity against them and they stood fast, outlasting me. There was health back then. When I come back from it and find myself plastered between the sheets I am drenched in sweat and smell like the earth. My body feels like it’s hazy and running out of the lines. There is no weight to hold it down.

I can see the malady now. You don’t know what balance is until you’ve had imbalance. Every time I look up I’m staring at a ceiling. At night it’s the popcorned reflective texture from another decade, and then the days blend one paneled low-slung hard-lit top into another, always of a color not even worth noting, always a little paint where the water stains bled at the corner. Pieces go missing or fall through the structure. It becomes so common that it won’t stand out and then suddenly you realize that it’s the sky that’s scarce. Everything is an instruction to lather. Rinse and repeat. Is it ironic that I was looking to shed routine? You were always the steady one. Staying the course. You’re happy to let it come to you, watch the seasonal reruns, grow old with the things in your house. Your father’s house and his father’s. You take the torch and you push forward.

And I was determined to not hold back. I needed different things—like that levee. You had it all wrong. You couldn’t see the value of the levee because it didn’t interact with the lake the way you knew how. It wasn’t a dock or a bridge or a shore. And you thought it was so plain. Ugly. Just a flat topped gravel stretch of nothing. It made the sky look bleak and the clouds low. But in the summer when I was alone in that nothingness of a suit and the dirt was rubbing lines into my thighs with the sweat and the hair and the horse was pulsing and winding through the trails and over roots and loose rocks and I was holding him back with both hands so he didn’t slip and his veins and his nostrils and his eyes were all bulging, pushing out at the seams, and we’d clear that last tree, wrap our bodies around the corner and there it would be. That vast expanse of flat land. That elevated runway with water on both sides and no front to stop us. And we’d blow. I’d ease my weight up over the withers and ball the reins high on his neck in two small leather-reddened fists and tuck my chin down into his hair and he would trap the energy and for a second his stride would be short and high like a carousel and he’d raise his head and swivel his ears behind him to listen for the cue and flip his tail over his back and he’d tuck his chin too. And then he’d hear me. We’d snap and release. And he’d push his head forward and extend his legs and lengthen his whole body along the ground like his was gathering it up to take it with him. I’d squint to keep the wind out of my eyes and they’d water and streak tears over my temples. We’d be so free we couldn’t stand it. We were running in the sky.

The Vagina Journeys

2011-02-27T15:57:00.000-08:00

Robby D pointed out something that should have been obvious to me a long time ago, but I’m blond and live in my own world, so it wasn’t. When he gathered all the Digital Girls around him in a big pre-game rally, each one dressed to our characters, eyelashes glued in place or not, lip colors progressively more natural with seniority, heels swinging from the toes as we smacked our gum and spilled our tits out over the counter top, he said: you don’t shoot everyday like a lot of these other girls, so you don’t have as much experience.

Or he said something like that. I was only half listening because Jesse was flashing her eyes and they’d changed to this cool green like a cat that you just fucked with a little. And Stoya’s eyes were that witchy green on the other side. And I just really like green eyes. The point hit home though. Kinda. Because then there were Bibi and Riley with the baby blue eyes and the blond pigtails, one in a schoolgirl skirt and the other in white ruffled socks, and I think Robby followed his statement about our relative inexperience with instructions for the scene, but by then I was looking at Manuel, who was also in the scene to be. Big anchoring brown eyes. He’d be the center that all of our blue green pent up fuck would swirl around. Then Robby said, go do your girl stuff, which is like putting all of our hands in the center and yelling break!

Now I may have a long learning curve but I never stop learning. Among other things that I’m trying to master—bikram yoga, washing colors separate from whites, responding to emails, life—vagina is high on my list. I refuse to be in this industry for any length of time and then leave without a supreme understanding of vagina. I’ve got the reproductive parts down pat. First I aced every middle school science class they threw at me, then I got really curious and dug up the rest on my own after school in libraries or by stealing my Grandma’s medical texts. She was a nurse. Which is strange because I don’t think she’s acknowledged that boys don’t look like Ken dolls naked to this day. Then I took sociology of sex, psychology of sex, women’s psychology (boring), and some nursing class relating to how the brain responds to things like orgasms and drugs. There was also a class called Sex and Sexuality. So that about does it. I know about sex on paper.

And for all of that, the clit is still one little pink hooded question mark. Men, you can breathe a collective sigh of relief. It’s not just you. I’ve met a few master pussy eaters by now, and they all do one thing right, so I’ve adopted this motion for personal use in scenes. But then there are days when even though they’re doing the thing right, it’s not perfectly right without a finger or two. And then there are days when fingers just ruin it. And then there are days when its just not gonna happen no matter what. There are days when I need to get fucked before I can cum from someone’s mouth and there are days where once I get fucked I can’t cum from anyone’s mouth. Clits are moody little fucks.

So the scene starts. I’m making out with Jesse and we fall over the arm of a couch and land perfectly, with style, as if we’ve practiced this a few times. We have. Everything is entwined. I can’t get my fingers out of her hair to reach my clothes to tear them off, and she can’t tear them off because my arm is stuck in her hair, and we’re both still end-up over the couch arm attached at the mouth. Manuel had some part of himself buried in some part of Stoya, but something about sex gives me tunnel vision and I couldn’t catch the details. In the background I saw pretty little white ruffled socks high in the air but it took a moment to register because of course there’s Jesse right on top of me, pure energy, all blond and tan with a face that could launch a thousand ships.

Jesse got the clothes off. Something tore and something broke in the wardrobe department. Then she’s got her mouth everywhere and the only intelligent thing I can think is, hot damn. Then it’s a whirlwind of vagina. Piles and piles of vagina. The hottest vagina I’ve ever seen in real life, all at once. Smorgasbord. I’m determined to do this right.

You can feel it. The clit gets hard. You work your tongue underneath it and hold it steady with the ridge of your teeth or upper lip and then once you’re on right you hold it and you don’t let go. You flick the tongue with rhythm and once you have the rhythm right you don’t stop that either. And if you’re out of breath just turn blue. Or do what I did way too many times and come up gasping for air at the last moment after running the words repeatedly through my head Do. Not. Stop.

Even for a pornstar, these opportunities are few and far between. You give it your all and take as much as you can from it because you don’t know when it might happen again (it will probably happen next month when we shoot another big budget feature, but still). So here’s what I took from it:

2 orgasms from the first round with Jesse.

1 during Manuel/Jesse

1 during Stoya/Jesse

Then another, but I couldn’t see who it came from. I think I was facefirst in Stoya at the time?

Moved over the the Bibi/Riley armchair. Lost count.

Manuel joined us. Lost even more count.

Stoya threw in a few more.

Then we did it all over again with softcore angles. No arms were twisted in the making of this film.

And here’s what I gave:

?

That’s the thing about the female orgasm. You just don’t fucking know. But I did take one gem home with me. Diving between four vaginas in succession I finally figured out that the clit has a taste. A seemingly universal taste. It’s light and airy and lovely, and when you get the tip of your tongue just where it should go you’ll notice a distinctly different flavor from the rest. It’s a little watery, with a hint of metal. Like what clean silver tastes like. I’m clearly doing a horrible job explaining it but it’s there, and I feel this knowledge should be shared. Thank you for joining me on my vagina journey.

I Like Cum

2011-01-27T17:47:00.001-08:00

I like cum. I like everything about it. I like the mechanics behind it and the way it gets air when it shoots. I like the way the head shines and swells with it. I like the word Vas Deferens. I like the mixing process that starts in the balls and the way they feel when it gears up for take off. I like the knee jerk reaction. I like the egg white feel of it when it runs through the fingers, and the way it slurps when you cum swap. I like the warmth.

I like the slight salt of it, like clean sweat and tears and the taste of the body. I love the color, the organic off white of bone and teeth and nails. I love the human of it and the risk.

I love the tingle and the way my skin goes red where it hits and millions of sperm start to dig. I love the science of it, of kamikaze sperm, of x sperm and y sperm and DNA and lotteries. I love that y sperm swim faster and x sperm live longer and I love the way it’s made to weather the outside world. I love when the outside world is my throat.

I love the reward. After the swell and the build and the tangle of sex I love the clean break. I love knowing I caused it or earned it or created it or deserved it. I love the closure.

I love what it does to my head, the way I get drunk on it and roll under it and melt with it. I love that the tingle turns to a burn and I can feel every drop and its path. I like the arcs it will draw on the curve of an ass or the round of a breast before it pools on the belly or highlights a shadow. I like the moisture. I like the lines it leaves in its wake and the way it makes his eyes go soft when he shoots. I love the lack of control in us both.

I love the taste and the heady concentration of his whole scent balled up in it. I love that it’s slightly sweet when he eats fruit and bitter when he drinks. It feels good going down, weighty. It adds body to the swallow.

I love the final thrust and the way it rocks the hips upward to meet the rush and the breath in the ear and the last push and the shudder and the burst and the exhale. I like the way it parts when he collapses down on top, reaching upwards and back for water and air. I like the filth and the life in the mixture with me.

I like it pure, uninterrupted, in concentrate. I like it everywhere and I like what it takes to get it. I like it twisted and I like it neat. I like it straight from the tap when I deep throat and swallow to the rhythm of the convulsion and I like it licked off the skin of someone else. I like it all the ways it will come with my name on it.

Bad Day Blues

2010-12-29T18:04:00.000-08:00

People sometimes complain that I never have a bad day. I think that it sucks that this is wished on me. There are others who think I’m having bad days when they read what I post on twitter, but really, that’s just what happens when the sarcasm is lost in translation.

So let me share with you, finally, a bad day.

It started with a mechanic who has been trying to date me. Our schedules collide us regularly, this morning included. I wasn’t disinterested, but I wasn’t interested, so we were walking that line where we had exchanged numbers but I wasn’t acting on it. I don’t date. That’s at least half the problem right there. I also ignore my phone, which only serves to ignite the condition. But the remaining half of the problem became clear today when I walked back to my car and noticed a blue rose on the windshield.

Innocent enough.

Then I walked around to the trunk to grab my laptop and noticed another token of his affection. The thin brake light strip that runs above the handle had been removed. For a moment I freaked out, thinking someone had broken into my trunk (the lock was exposed and my laptop is my most precious possession these days), but on closer inspection, nothing had been messed with. There wasn’t a scratch on the car. The light had been removed with the utmost care. With pure love, really. Then I remembered the last time this happened, with a mechanic, and an easily-fixed missing part of my 17-year-old ride.

The ride was 17. Not me.

But I was probably 19. And I loved that truck. And that part went missing at the perfect time, and next thing you know that mechanic had me in his shop making a hero of him. He just happened to have the thing in stock, for the beat up old truck of a make and model his shop didn’t specialize in. It looked used, like the one I was missing, actually. I may have been so overcome with his masculinity that I blew him.

The current mechanic has been telling me how great he is at working on Mercedes for weeks. If you ever need help with your car, he’d said as he handed me his number, I’m just a phone call away.

He’s been texting to make sure I got that rose all day.
I finally responded that if the rose had been the only surprise on my car this may have gone differently.
After that he stopped texting, not even to pretend to not know what I was talking about.

The breaking-my-car-because-you-can’t-fix-my-real-problems gig just doesn’t work on me (anymore).

So I charged into Starbucks, pissed and violated, imagining my trunk as only a husk of its former self, worried about rainwater running into the defacement. I was too upset to masturbate so I ordered coffee, and a cookie, and plugged the computer in. The nice Starbucks lady offered to heat the cookie and it warmed my heart.

Then she put it up on the bar for me and a hoodlum tried to steal my cookie.

I decided I needed to get out of that part of town. My horse is a couple of hours from here (Sacramento (still)), and I had an appointment to meet with a trainer that had been recommended near the ranch he’s at. I picked up my sister and a friend and we drove, with me bitching for a good fifteen minutes about my car, and the close call with my cookie.

It started raining, which was not unusual, but made the other drivers slow down. I got stuck between a pack of semis and then sped up when I caught a window. 80… 90… 100 miles per hour.

There is nothing out that way. Interstate 5 North of Sacramento is two lanes each direction on perfectly landscapeless land running in a perfectly rigid line. The roads are named things like A, B, C, D… then it starts with DD. I feel this is highly suggestive. The roads perpendicular to them are 1, 2, 3, 4… and so on. They lifted my mood by retelling stories of past road trips. My sister and I talked about how she’s bad luck, and how I only get tickets when she’s in the backseat, and how it’s been five years since I let her in the back seat because the last time I got two tickets two days in a row, and it’s been smooth sailing ever since I rid myself of her passengery.

This conversation happened, of course, as I sped past a sitting cop at 100 mph.

And it had, of course, never occurred to us to maybe not jinx ourselves by talking about it, or at least to switch her to the front seat.

So the moral of that story is I got a speeding ticket. He didn’t even ask first if I knew why I got pulled over. We all knew why I got pulled over. And I didn’t try to talk him out of it or show cleavage because he dropped the clocked speed to 80 to ease up on me and I didn’t want to push my luck right into a reckless driving charge.

Then we continued on, speeding to make up for lost time, agreeing that my sister would never again occupy the backseat, while she continued to occupy the backseat, and I continued to speed.

We met with the new trainer, drove over and saw my horse, fed him apples. Then it was dark. If you’re unfamiliar with roads named after letters and numbers on a perfectly flat grid in the middle of nowhere, they are lacking common decencies, like street lights, and people ride strange things, like tractors, and cows.

I almost hit a cat.

Two houses later I almost hit a kitten, and a possum, at the same time.

Without the time pressure it was enough to slow me to a speed more in range of the posted limit. There is a diner on the way back that I hit every time, because any restaurant with homemade peach cobbler and huckleberry shakes is worth visiting to excess.

Chelsea had a difficult order, which made me feel bad when I placed a slightly less difficult order, but difficult nonetheless. In the spirit of reconciliation I smiled up at the waitress, whose face was twisted, one corner of her mouth grimaced in pain and the other pointing down in anger. She did not smile back.

I said, it’s ok if you want to spit in our food. I would too.

She sorta smiled, but probably more because she’d already planned on it, or was even thinking it at that exact moment, and everyone gets a kick out of irony.

The food came.

Mine had a pubic hair on it. It’s possible that it wasn’t actually a pubic hair, but more likely, the tightly coiled brunette lock of a short-haired cook, but either way these things are suspicious when found in food. It wasn’t even convincingly mixed in. It was centralized, glorifyingly abreast the highest point of elevation on the chicken. It was backlit. Art department couldn’t have placed it better.

I consulted my sister on the matter, who is also a waitress, and we discussed the best course of action. I didn’t want to be the douche who sent it back, or the one who had it taken off the bill, but I didn’t want to be the douche who ate a plucked pube with a hair-light either. I looked for accompanying spit. It was hard to tell.

I was reminded that I couldn’t actually complain about any spit found on the plate, having done everything short of ordering the spit in the first place.

I agreed.

In the end I decided to let the waitress decide the best course of action, and I just tipped excessively. We made a pact not to ask for anything else for the rest of the meal, and my sister ate with her hands when she realized she had no fork.

So now I’m sitting at a different diner, worrying about water collecting in my trunk, rusting the lock, and sorta having the second half of a dinner to make up for what I was scared to eat earlier. I’m also mulling over the texts about the rose, and mulling over how it has made me a bitch, for not acknowledging said rose.

The thing is, if I acknowledge the rose, it’s gonna be in a police report, where I’m maybe gonna at the same time see what can be done about that ticket and the cookie thieves. I’m still willing to shoulder the blame for the tainted food.

The Masturbation Diet

2010-12-20T21:57:00.000-08:00

Stupid holidays really bring out the Betty Crocker in people. Not that I dislike holidays—let’s not take it that far—I just really can’t fight the chocolate chip cookies anymore. I was at a friend’s house last week and his roommate went and put Reese’s Peanut Butter cups on top of her chocolate chip cookies, only she dropped the dough into cupcake wrappers so they didn’t have to bake all the way, meaning they came out gooey, with the melted peanut butter cups.

What exactly are you supposed to do to fight that?

So I didn’t fight it.

The next day we hit a restaurant that baked marshmallows into the top of it’s chocolate chip cookies and graham crackers into the bottom.

Didn’t fight that either.

And the next day it was Coldstone Creamery, where I just went straight for the cookie dough, mixed in with the cookie dough ice cream, topped off with Oreo cookies.

Let’s just say this pattern continued.

And it’s not that I’ve necessarily gained weight. The Bikram yoga phase that my vagina has thrown me at full force is keeping everything in check. But AVN is coming up, and I just got my dress, and it’s a size 2 with no room for error.

So I tried to cut cookies out of my diet, and I found that they didn’t want to leave. They are shockingly powerful things, these cookies. I started researching it. Science says that once hooked, the desire for shitty food is as strong as the desire for cocaine in lab rat comparisons, and that the same parts of the brain are activated by cookies as by cocaine. Then it went into sugar peaks and valleys, and systems of reward, and the psychology of habit, and dopamine, and serotonin, and apparently the only effective diet drug was taken off the market in the 70’s when it started killing people or something, but the reason it worked was it interfered with the dopamine and serotonin levels that were manipulated by sugary food, or something.

Then I decided I didn’t like the research I was doing because at the end of the day I just had to decide not to eat chocolate chip cookies. It suggested a substitute food.

Nothing substitutes for chocolate chip cookies.

Except orgasms.

And that’s when genius happened. Orgasms are great for dopamine and serotonin too, and they have a lot to do with the reward systems of the brain too, and they’re like a zero on the weight watchers scale. So the next time I wanted a cookie, I distracted myself by rubbing one out, and again the next time, and again, and again, and I can proudly say I haven’t had a cookie since I invented this diet plan yesterday. I don’t even want a cookie. I just want to get off constantly. Not that much has changed; I’ve just put a positive spin on it.

You can’t say it doesn’t make sense though. It breaks the sugar peaks and valleys, eventually lessening the physical cravings, it still provides the brain rush, and there are no side effects, or worse, exercise requirements. It also circumvents the mental part of cookie addiction by interrupting the habit. Those are all the things that the deadly drug in the 70’s did, before people died and ruined all the fun.

So when this whole thing goes global and I can say I’ve single handedly solved the obesity epidemic, feel free to thank me.

Sweatshop

2010-12-09T23:08:00.001-08:00

I’m in Sacramento, for any number of reasons, chief among them being family members with real and imagined health concerns, birthdays, and the combined responsibilities that have been laid on me because of it. There are also holidays. You may have noticed this.

I have. Starbucks pulled out the holiday cups and parking became an issue. That’s always the first sign. Strangers start smiling for no reason. Then people start looking to spend ‘quality time’ and check in. People start mentioning things they’ve been meaning to get, but couldn’t possibly, not for themselves. That’d be so frivolous, they laugh. They tell me three or four times, then follow up with emails, sizes, and store locations so I can’t fuck it up. I get it.

So the point is I’m in Sacramento, presumably through Christmas if I can make it that far. It’s one of the perks of my job, being able to up and leave for long periods of time. Tuesday was my Mom’s birthday. I taught her the names of drinks that she described to me that she had started to like. Her favorite is that one they make with Gin and Tonic—what do you call that, anyway, she asked. After a couple more she asked the same question. I changed my answers up on her to keep it fun.

Today I sat in Starbucks, contemplating blogs, and what I would blog about if I were to blog, and coming up dry. I also have a restaurant review to do. I consider this homework, so it will rightly be put off to the last minute. The last minute may have already passed. Either way, the blog was not happening either. I ordered a mocha and the nice man behind the counter decided he would spread Christmas cheer and double the espresso on me. This happens all too frequently. Next thing I knew I was shaking, and still not blogging.

I tried to think of things I could do, inside, out of the cold. Things I could put plenty of false energy into. Things I could justify wasting time on. I understand that you might want to interrupt with the obvious here, but it was still early, and the go-to people were working, but I definitely thought of that first. I thought of and dismissed a few other things too. Then I remembered Bikram yoga. I’d been meaning to try it. Kirsten Price recommends it, and she’s hot, so that’s good enough for me. If you’re unfamiliar with Bikram Yoga, it’s what happens when you do seemingly easy meditative poses in ridiculously high heat. You do them in spandex. Men too.

So I found a Bikram Yoga studio, I signed up online. There was a waiver that I agreed to with a half smile at the thought of causing oneself medical harm from the lotus position. I checked out the etiquette and felt I could handle not making offensive noises. Then I was enrolled. The next class started in 45 minutes. I put on spandex and grabbed some water and the yoga mat that’s been sitting in my trunk ever since that one time I tried to do something whole and Eastern, in the sunshine, on the pretty grass, with the pretty trees, by the pretty footpaths of Santa Monica. The practice did not take.

A few words on my initial assessment of Bikram Yoga: A) There are hot chicks. There are many, many hot chicks. They are produced here. It’s a factory. It’s a little hot chick sweatshop. B) The hot chicks are in spandex, and as they get hotter, they wear less and less of the spandex. C) There are also men, who have figured out about the hot chicks. They too sweat and get more naked. D) The man sweat happens in high volumes. And the room is carpeted, and kept at sauna temperature levels, and this happens every day, four times a day, with the man sweat. E) It smells exactly as bad as you think.

By sheer coincidence, I was placed directly behind the hottest of the hot chicks. Probably not by coincidence, she also was the best at everything. I discovered this on the first difficult pose, when we were instructed to stand on one leg, knee locked, left hand extended forward and right hand pulling the other leg straight over the tops of our heads. She did it with perfect execution, like a ballerina, except one whose ass has Brazilian ancestry. The instructor told us to look at the mirror to find our balance. Find a focal point and hold it, he said. I couldn’t do that though, because of the Brazilian ballerina blocking the mirror. The only focal point that was directly in front of me, centered down the barrel of my outstretched arm and perfectly in line with my eyes was her vagina, staring back at me through the vertical split she was performing. I’m a good student. I stared.

So we continued this way, with her performing one highly suggestive pose after the next, and me admiring, and mimicking, and falling over. After fifteen minutes I felt good. I decided I’d had a really good workout. I was ready to leave. I was pouring sweat and out of breath and the smell of the room wasn’t the kind that you get used to. I was also getting the vibe that the chick wasn’t going to be inviting me into her vagina in the near future. I was down to my last bit of spandex before things got pornographic.

But the fucking class is 90 minutes long and the fat kid next to me was still going strong so I had to stick it out. I tried going places in my head to pass the time. I finished the water bottle off. We turned into another pose that lined me up again with her vagina, arms first, palms together. Like divers. I imagined diving. Jumping head first and right into her vagina. I would do it with grace, and strength. She moved.

We went to our backs. I stared at the ceiling with sweat in my eyes. I decided definitely now would be the time to leave. I tried. I couldn’t stand up. I decided to stay. The sweat blinded me and I tried sitting up with the rest of the class. It did not happen. I let the sweat pool. I considered wiping it away but my arms were dead. I wondered what the ballerina was doing up there, above my head. I wondered if she was opening up to the designs I’d placed on her crotch. In the periphery I could see the fat kid moving. It reinspired me.

So I was at it again, with the sweat and the leering and second thoughts on the medical release. I felt like we were getting close, because people started to drop out. They’d crumple to the floor and just stare at the ceiling, bewildered. They started making offensive noises, like pelicans in distress. The hot chick didn’t miss a beat. I only made it through the last third on the distraction of her flexibility. I was so consumed with figuring out how legs could spread like that that time started to fly. Or maybe I just lost all sense of it. Either way, just as I was on the verge of collapsing, for real this time, the instructor turned out the lights and told us to breathe. I did. I breathed harder than I’d ever breathed before. I breathed like I'd just been water boarded. I fucking breathed.

When the lights came back on my ballerina was gone. I was sad, but too weak to chase after her anyway. I couldn’t tie my shoes in the locker room. I was rubber. The fat kid beat me out too. The only thing I could focus on was the overwhelming urge to eat anything and everything in sight. But then I realized there was the problem of the sopping wet clothes. It was still December outside. I got an idea. I took them off. All of them. I wrapped myself in a towel and tip-toed out into the night to piece together things that would cover the most vital parts, things I’d tossed in my trunk along the way, like the random yoga mat, except, maybe, clothing.

There were socks. I thought that was a good start. There were rollerblades. Sorta useless for my purposes. I should mention the socks were knee high rainbow socks, for the rollerblades. There was a jar of horse treats, looking surprisingly edible (they're made out of the same things we eat, after all). Then there was my Indian sweatshirt. I threw that on. I call it the Indian sweatshirt because it has feathers on it. I should probably not do that because it is fleece, and tacky, and not Indian at all. There were no pants. My sadness doubled and I was forced to put the soaking wet spandex back on. I did it though, with the gym shoes and the rainbow socks and the wet spandex pants and the Indian sweatshirt. I marched into the first Thai restaurant I could find (why Thai?), as is. I needed Thai.

The ballerina needed Thai too, apparently. That tripled my sadness, getting that second chance like that and showing up like that. My hair was also not great looking, again with the sweat. And make up, I haven’t bothered with that shit in a week. I offered up a pitiful half smile at the thought of how clean-shaven and wonderfully waxed I was under it all. It was useless. I settled back into the leering routine and she politely chose not to notice and we continued on this way until she'd had her stick of broccoli with curry and I'd finished blogging about her. She didn't smile at me when she left, but she didn't scowl, either, so there is hope.

The point is I’ll be going back tomorrow, prepared, now that I’ve found my fishing hole.

Kayden Kross: Pornstar Fan mail

2010-11-15T12:40:00.000-08:00

Don't tell me this isn't awesome, because it is, and I won't believe you anyway.

Mick Hell and Hawk

2010-11-14T20:24:00.000-08:00

My knees hurt from masturbating. It’s not such a big deal in my day to day life but coupled with the excessive face time I’ve put in on planes recently and the switch from the gym to running on pavement my whole skeletal structure is out of whack, along with my sleep schedule, which causes me to masturbate more than usual, which winds back around to my knees. They are injured.

I need to masturbate to sleep when I travel, and I need to flex to masturbate. My leg muscles go taut and ligaments pull over my kneecaps and my toes curl and I scream. You may have witnessed this in my work.

The masseur was not privy. He warmed the oil between his hands and ran them down the length of me—neck to shoulder to ribcage to hip to thigh—and he stopped there.
Do you run a lot? He asked.

When he flexed his fingers it lit his muscles up all the way to the shoulder. They were good. He had a foreign name that I took to be Mick Hell for the first 45 minutes. Shave his pubic hair too close and he could have been male talent.

Sometimes, I said. But not in the past week. Why?
There is so much lactic acid in your muscles. What are you doing to yourself?
I laughed.
If only he knew.

He kept going. He slid them past my knees and my calves and down to my feet. They are freshly pedicured, because I thought ahead, but I haven’t made it as far as shaving. I felt bad but not very. After all, it’s pheromone week. My hair was in a day-old ponytail and I was wearing a robe and slippers, which is what you wear in these places. What he didn’t know is that I showed up that way.

He worked his way back up my legs, moved the sheets enough to flash X-rated nudity and pulled my arms behind me until my tits were showing. He moved back down again, neck, spine, lower back, ass…

And he stayed there, kneading my ass for the rest of the session.

You’re really tight right here, he said.
I bet.
Is there anything else you’d like me to work on?
I’m sorry, I said as I silently cursed my situation. My knees just aren’t up for it today.

Back in the room I settled back into slippers and a robe with the same messy ponytail, now greasy with massage oil. I ordered room service and poured a glass of wine and sat down to work on the computer. My inbox was flooded. One astute gentlemen recognized it for what it is: LDPW. Long distance pheromone week. I was reaching him all the way across the country.

The room service delivery guy knocked. He looked me up and down.

May I enter? He asked in one of those heavy slick accents that you only see in Al Pacino movies.
Of course.
He set the tray down.
Anything else I can do for you?
I thought about it, looked down at my knees.
Well, he said after a while, my name is Hawk if you need anything.

His fucking name was Hawk and he had a sexy badboy accent and he was delivering stuff to my room and I was all alone in clothes that could easily be flung off.
Fucking fitting. More male talent in the rough.
He handed me a card.
It said, Haque, with a phone number.

I cursed my knees and waited for him to leave and then broke down and rubbed one out anyway.

The Taxi Murders

2010-11-13T00:18:00.001-08:00

It’s pheromone week, which is on no particular schedule or cycle, but I recognize it by a two-part process that begins with a complete lack of interest in doing anything to keep myself up beyond the basest of human dignities. I’ll shower. I’ll brush my teeth. Sometimes my hair. Things beyond that are beyond me.

So phase one is complete. I need a nail salon. An eyebrow waxing. My razor is missing and I don’t care. I’m wearing pjs and a sweatshirt in the LA heat, and not even with a cute touch like flip-flops. I’m doing it with running shoes. I could lie, but you need the appropriate mental image to understand phase two.

Phase two began this morning. I noticed it in line at the café. I was hiding behind big sunglasses and the same hair I rolled out of bed with, and of course those pajamas and gym shoes. I might as well have been on all fours with my ass in the air and froth. Men wouldn’t stop sidling up next to me. Boys too. Little ones. I’d be standing behind someone and I could watch his phone conversation shudder and die as something tuned him in and he followed it back to me. I know it wasn’t because I didn’t shower. Because I did. I at least did that.

So I ate my food, with my book, but I wasn’t reading because I was being hit on. I really liked the team of firemen and I directed them towards Body Heat, because all firemen should watch my porn about firemen. When I went to refill my coffee I was asking mothers to please keep their toddlers from tugging on my pants. When I walked back to my car the row of leashed dogs on the café sidewalk stood and wagged their tails suggestively.

I packed and went to the airport. Security liked me. The waiter at the restaurant by the gate brought me free wine. The man sitting in the seat next to me was apparently immune to pheromone week because all he did was throw a temper tantrum when I wouldn’t give up my window seat, but that’s another story. And then I slept the whole flight to NYC and landed with an even worse case of bed hair and in need of another shower. Planes just do that to people.

That’s when pheromone week pulled out the big guns. I was waiting for my bags and had an entire 80’s hair band giving me the look when a small man with a thick accent tapped my shoulder.

Do you need a taxi, he asked.

I did need a taxi. I thought it was strange that he was soliciting me in baggage claim but hey, times are tough. So he grabbed my bags and I followed him down a hall and to an elevator, and then another hall, and then we were on the ticketing level and he set my bags down and told me to wait there. He said it was cold outside and I was getting curbside service. I said whatever.

I knew he was weird, but I wasn’t sure if it was just my western bias clouding my judgment, or my pheromonal mood, which is generally upbeat and strongly opinionated. I should mention this is part of the package.

5, 10 minutes go by. I’m checking emails on my phone and thinking I should just find my way down to the taxi line but laziness is a part of the package too. Just then he pulls up his van. It is not yellow. It does not have a cute little taxi light on the top. It is dark and unlit. Predators love that shit. He rushes in and grabs my bags and throws them on the bench seat and opens the door to the front seat for me. Trash is everywhere. I raise an unwaxed eyebrow.

Are you a licensed taxi, I ask?

Yes yes! He says.

Where is your license?

Get in the car I’ll show you.

Um. No.

What do you mean no?

Taxis have medallions and displayed things and credit card machines, and companies. And yellow paint. Where are these things?

Get in the car I’ll show you.

Um. Is the yellow paint in a can?

What?

Never mind.

At this point I’m pulling my bags off the bench seat. He’s hovering and whining. He’s trying to block the effort. He’s not much bigger than me though so it’s more of a token blocking. I stacked one bag on the other on the sidewalk and found the handle while he pled his case, which wasn’t coherent with the accent, but I did make out that he was still offering to give me his license once I got in the van. I told him that his license was not the point anymore, and that this far in the game if I got in that van and was found ceremoniously raped and murdered and lovingly left on display along the shores of the Hudson river with chicken blood sprinkled around me, I would actually be partly to blame, and I don’t want to have a hand in my own murder. He didn’t understand me either. I talk too fast when I get bitchy and it stops making sense.

So I found a yellow cab, in a cab line, with cab placards and an LCD screen that I can charge payment to, which feels safe. And now I’m thinking I’m gonna take a really great shower at the hotel, and I’m gonna shave, and tomorrow I might catch up on my nails, because the fact is, as lazy as I am right now, I could be murdered at any time and this is no way to go out.

1/2 of a $4 strawberry

2010-09-29T13:20:00.000-07:00

If I have a vice it's food, and of course the obvious
overindulgences in penis and so forth, but this specific blog with start out
with food. Good food. Some days I'm a vegetarian, here and there I can pull off
vegan. I like to think I try. These loose requirements coupled with location
and internet access have landed me on an over-regular basis at Urth Caffe. So
I'm here now.

Urth Caffe is ridiculously over priced. If you'd like a side
of jam with your toast they will charge you. I think they try to cater to
people who only feel good when they're spending money. Why else would they
provide the option to valet your damn car for your morning coffee run? I
disapprove, but not enough to switch. They claim they're superior because
produce is bought locally, everything is organic, homemade, the coffee beans
were kissed by the firstborn sons of kings etc etc. All I know is it really is
good. My breakfast was served with exactly one half of a sliced strawberry and
a cute little orange curl. I did the math and I think these things account for
at least $4 of the total cost. I can't be sure. Needless to say I had to eat
the strawberry to feel justified.

This was no earthly strawberry. It was perfect. It should be
the founding father of all future strawberries. It was perfectly red and ripe
and so packed with flavor that it made my eyes water. The fruit fell off the
stem. It was everything a strawberry should be. It reminded me of children's
books, specifically of the one my mom used to read to me every night before bed
about the big-eyed girl with the pink bonnet who worked hard when all of her
friends were playing and gardened tirelessly and held out even when everybody
else was eating their barely ripe spoils. Then one day she woke up and saw that
she had grown the perfect strawberry, and everyone was jealous. I had just
eaten her strawberry. I felt bad for her.

It got me thinking about the other children's books that
were read to me and the superficial ambiguous morals I'm just now realizing
they were trying to implant, gently. I suppose the strawberry story was meant
to teach me that good things come to those who wait, or, work hard, future
slave child, so that some café can sell your precious strawberry with an
insanely high mark up. Or something. I believe in a strong work ethic but the
second it seems like you're just being steered into the hands of some
organization who will take the surplus stemming from your efforts I'm convinced
we're all just being conditioned for the peasantry. If I remember correctly, the
girl in the bonnet never ate her strawberry. She just looked at it proudly. If
I have my cake, you're goddamned right I'm gonna eat it too. Then I'm gonna
spend two hours in the gym.

I don't know what I'm getting at. I'm irritated that a
strawberry can be that good, that its that overpriced, that its probably not
overpriced at all because as economics would justify, I'm really just paying
the real cost of the widget now that the good people of Urth have paid full
price to local markets that don't rely on pushing negative externalities on the
general population to turn a profit. Or something. I'm irritated that I don't
remember the fine details of that children's book well enough to know whether
my mom was secretly grooming me for the peasantry. I'm irritated that America
pretends not to have class systems as it measures its shrinking middle class
and growing wealth gaps and I'm mostly irritated that people keep telling me
with big reassuring smiles that I can do better than porn right before they
rattle off a long list of occupations that would keep my pants on but take away
all the things I enjoy like one half of a $4 strawberry and the time to
complain about it and an audience to unload it on and its sickening how many
people would define 'better off' as me wearing a pink bonnet and toiling in
fields for a strawberry some random bitch with a blog will get to eat instead.

relentless

2010-08-23T14:42:00.001-07:00

Don't ask me what I want, I want dominant. I don't want to
be asked I want to be made. I want to be told and pulled throat first down on
your cock, hair in your fists, eyes watering and sated. I want to be brought
back up for air, briefly, back against the wall, back in your line of sight,
bowing, sweating, begging. I want to be held up by the neck, fingers pressed
against my lips sweetly and falsly. Shhhhh. I want eye contact that shuts me
down.

Don't call me a good girl, I don't want approval. Call me a whore.
Call me all of the things you can't love on principal or in real life. Call me
over and over again to get me alone, vulnerable, knees down and dirty on the
floor of a darkroom, bloodshot. Call me because you know when you say jump I'll
offer you my spit and my face and a body to clean up on. Call me lowly because
you know I'm already waiting and I'll hear. Call me easy and whenever you like.
I'll listen.

Don't give, I want to be taken. Mark me, up. Draw me in and
watch me strive. Put me down and in my place. Strike and render the blow earned.
Plunge and I'll relax back into it, arched, curved, twisted into what makes you
push yourself harder into me. Canvas and clay. Mold me into what suits you.
Give me a brush and I'll stroke.

Don't forget where I stand, below you. Make me something
from which you want results. Make me reigned in, collected, pooled effectively
at your feet, gaze wide and pleasing, cock in hand and wanting and speaking in
tongues that plead. Please and thank you make me polite before you, before the
thrust of a million submissions, a million perfect highs and lows.

Don't break. Don't break the dominance and don't give in.
Don't need rest. Don't untie unfasten unravel. Don't stop. Don't forget that if
you've got me here you've got me more than most. Let's pretend for arguments sake
that this is all for you.

reader's high

2010-08-22T19:13:00.000-07:00

Act 1: The Intelligentsia

I've been reading (not that I ever stopped, but the problem has progressed to the advanced stages. As in, doctors have given me 6 months to live. As in, intervention is in order, and rehab. As in--get a life).

I once met a man who irritated me to a point that I almost couldn't contain myself. He was one of the intelligentsia. Just ask him. He was one of those tortured people who over-thought and over-analyzed and made it true that ignorance is, in fact, bliss. He loved being a tortured person. He ate caviar and pronounced the 'h' in who, with a British accent, in spite of his being born and bred in the midfuckingwest. Just like Stewie Griffin. I speak of him as if he's dead to me. He is. And by dead to me I mean I deleted him from my phone.

I have a point though. I'm not on a tangent. My point is that he read too, in a get-a-life kind of way. We talked books, as all people who need lives in one particular way will do. Given time I can list hundreds of titles that I've sped through. Book slut. I have my standards, but I pass through them like a stoner through cheetos.

So my book conversation with the intelligentsia began like
this:

Him: "I'll read for hours each day if I'm not working"
Me: "No shit? Me too"
Him: "Yes I really like to savor them." (He may have flicked
dryly at his lips with his tongue in an attempt at bridging the gap between
literature and sexuality here... I wouldn't put it past him)
Me: "I can't put them down. I'll finish the whole thing in
one sitting if no one interrupts." (This was pre-twitter of course)
Him: "Oh my lord (in horror at my indiscretion). I'll do 5
pages at a time"
Me: "like, between breaks for coffee?"
Him: "no. I'll read 5 pages in 3 hours. No breaks"
Me: "... oh...?" (I felt it rude to ask questions after that)

Act 2: 3 Books in 3 Days, and back again

The thing about Bucharest is it's a really beautiful city. The Paris of the Eastern Block someone said... the Orange County of Communism. I don't know what the fuck that is supposed to mean. The stray dogs and orphans begging on the streets are clean and well fed if that makes any difference. I was asked if it feels very Communist. I responded that it feels Communist in the sense that it doesn't feel Capitalist, as if Communism were somehow the ordinary state of things and Capitalism were some type of inflammation. Maybe I'm not wrong. But then again the Pizza Hut chain here said on the corner of its prime real estate that it was the nicest restaurant in town. I guess they don't have laws against fluffing here either.

Bucharest is a really beautiful city and I'm stuck here staring at it through the windows and the heat wave. I don't hate it, but my days are spent reading. I read at the cafes, at the hookah bars, in the hotel lobby... and for hours on end on set between my two-word lines. It's like an exercise routine and I've finally pushed past my plateau. It dawned on me, slowly at first, when I finished "Stories in the Worst Way" by Gary Lutz, then set it down and picked up "The Dying Animal" by Philip Roth, and the next day set it down for "Black Spring" by Henry Miller. Then I finally looked up, and there were no more books. So I picked up "Stories in the Worst Way", by Gary Lutz. Then "The Dying Animal". Then "Stories in the Worst Way" a third time.
Then "Black Spring." It dawned on me that the pompous ass actually had something to say.

If you've ever read, and reread, and reread again the very same paragraph, its like art, and if its well done, it will be hard to look away from (and if its poorly done it makes you want to throw up in your mouth a little). I started feeling horrible. I thought of all of my favorite authors, the ones I feel I would friend on Facebook if they would have me. The Margaret Atwoods and William Faulkners and Toni Morrisons and Barry Hannahs of the world. The Bukowskis. I could do better with them. I should be savoring them like the pompous ass who was cold-heartedly deleted from my phone (I never looked back). Sharon Olds wrote a poem entitled "Sex Without Love". I had to do a paper on it for a creative writing class. I got the same thing out of it after reading it 47 times, dissecting it syllable by syllable. It's like that elusive runners high, only it exists and it's not painful to reach.

Act 3: here's why

Sleeveless
-Gary Lutz (this is the story in its entirety)

"I've had things in my eye, sometimes too many at once.
Except this once.
It was during a standstill in some otherwise eventful unemployment on both sides.
My wife was asking for permission. She was sleeveless. The car was already in
her name.
'Let me have at least a look at him,' is all I said.
He was waiting in a booth at a coffee shop. My wife slid in beside him. I don't
ordinarily drink coffee, but he ordered it for all three of us. I was going to
count the number of sips I took.
'This isn't my day,' he said. He told us what had happened on his way over--near
misses, thumbnail bios of the principal, etc.
We sat in the misorderly, picayune midst of my wife.
I let him butter me up. I tapped my foot on his. Just a tap.
Because I know myself from somewhere, surely.
I've been within an inch of my life.
There are no big doings in my life that I know of."

Black Spring
-Henry Miller (p. 26)

"The
dreamers dream from the neck up, their bodies securely strapped to the electric
chair. To imagine a new world is to live it daily, each thought, each glance,
each step, each gesture killing and recreating, death always a step in advance.
To spit on the past is not enough. To proclaim the future is not enough. One
must act as if the past were dead and the future unrealizable. One must act as
if the next step were the last, which it is. Each step forward is the last, and
with it the world dies, one's self included. We are here of the earth never to
end, the past never ceasing, the future never beginning, the present never
ending. The never-never world which we hold in our hands and see and yet is not
ourselves. We are that which is never concluded, never shaped to be recognized,
all there is and yet not the whole, the parts so much greater than the whole
that only god the mathematician can figure it out."

The Dying Animal
-Philip Roth (p. 27)

"So we went to bed. It happened fast, less because of my intoxication than because
of her lack of complexity. Or call it clarity. Call it newly minted maturity,
though maturity.,I would say, of a simple kind: she was in communion with that
body in the very way she wished to be in communion with art. She undressed, and
not only was her blouse silk but her underwear was made of silk. She had nearly
pornographic underwear. A surprise. You know she has chosen this to please. You
know she has chosen this with a man's eye in mind, even if the man would never
see it. You know that you have no idea what she is, how clever she is or how
stupid she is, how shallow she is or how deep she is, how wily, how wise, even
how wicked. With a self-contained woman of such sexual power, you have no idea
and you never will. The tangle that is her character is obscured by her beauty.
Nonetheless, I was gently moved seeing that underwear. I was moved by seeing
that body. 'Look at you,' I said."

I'm going to sign off here. The girls in the lobby think I'm a crack-head because it's 5am (but 7pm in LA!). I apologize for the length of this one, but anything broken into 3 acts is bound to take some attention. To make you feel better, I posted a picture of my asshole.

-last week

2010-08-11T07:33:00.001-07:00

I read in the sauna, all of them. I find them in gyms and
hotels and sports clubs and occasional random places you'd never expect to find
them when I travel. Thanks to a friend I can now find one on my patio, and I
found one here in Romania. I'll travel with 4 or 5 books because I know my mood
will change between the time I pack and slow down enough to crack one open. It
can take months to finish individual books with this cycle, but books are like
bikes and it all comes right back.

I like to read in the sauna for the same reason I catch up
on news on the elliptical and answer emails in lines and address twitter in the
car. I have to double up on productivity when productivity is low. I'm
convinced that if I stop, ever, I will fail terribly. Whole cities may crumble,
slide right down inclines and into the water sources they were built on.
Traffic lights will stop working. Horns will blare. I cannot rest.

This is partly why I have a hard time with TV, unless I'm on
the treadmill.

One book I've been toting around for months but hadn't
started is a book on improv called "truth in comedy." I'm curious about the
science of funny, as well as the pay scale that I always hear comedians working
into their routines. I read it until the binding started to melt on me and the
individual pages began to separate and the cover was too hot to hold. There are
interesting rules that mostly involve camaraderie and not shutting down one's
team members. Maybe that's why I need a book on it. I don't play well with
others.

I just don't crave the social exposure the way I see other
people crave it. I'm content to interact online, from a distance, to ignore my
phone. I won't go into a club unless I'm paid to. I like people in short,
concentrated doses. I like them one on one when they sit across from me over
coffee or make meals last for hours. I don't want to hear about their taste in
music or what they watch on TV or where they're going to drink tonight or where
they went to drink last night. I don't want to know their celebrity crushes.
Occasionally I meet people who feel the same way.

The person who passed along this book is like that. I met
him on Julie Meadow's documentary. He'd read my blog, done his homework. He
liked the one I'd just posted called "1941-last week", about a woman I knew who
died young. He'd spent his whole life studying improv and offered to coach me
if I were interested. Of course I was.

So the next week he showed up with a stack of books on
comedy. I liked him completely. Hours flew by with silly exercises and skits
and breaks where he'd smoke from a vintage cigarette holder and pull out the
vegan snacks he brought everywhere. He took up very little space without losing
authority. When he left it was only because the day was done. There was nothing
else to do, no more meals to be eaten or errands to be run. One or both of us
had a flight to catch or a bedtime. He brought up weird and interesting things
about himself and his life. He sketched and divorced a stripper. He saw ghosts
and auras and energy and the good in people. He didn't drive but lives on both
coasts. He's not from either of them.

He's a modernized trust-fund Ghandi. He feels he has too
much money and so gives it out in chunks with no research or expected rate of
return. He financed Julie's project, his friend's small business, a number of
up and coming gurus he thought had something to say. He says it's just too much
for one person. He doesn't like designer labels. He makes precise movements and
won't waste his own energy until he's improvising, and then he vibrates with it.
We spent a while afternoon sitting at Urth Caffe while he made me assume
various dominant and submissive roles with only body language. He played the
counterpart and didn't leave a single part of his being dormant once he was
acting.

I bring it up because the receipt from that day fell out of
the book in the sauna with the pages that were melting off the binding. There
is an intensity in meeting someone you feel you can love completely, as is,
without sex or kinship or history or return. The intensity is in the immediacy
of it. It was the same immediacy I felt last week when he took his own life.

Working hard...

2010-08-11T03:31:00.000-07:00

Just wrapped my first day of shooting for "Life on Top". I play Delilah in the second season of the series and so far this acting thing is a dream job. There was of course the accidental Roman vacation, now coupled with the pseudo-vacation in Bucharest between work. "Work" is a liberal term though. I had to say exactly two words on screen today before going back to the AC and gym/sauna/room service grind at the hotel. My sister is of course here with me too (her b-day was August 1st, and I give good b-day gifts to siblings) I can only afford the one)). The production team set me up with a per diem and a phone. I have almost as many days off as I have on during this two week run. I could really, really get into acting.

We're hoping to hit the Black sea, a few castles, supposedly there are some amazing sunflower fields somewhere out there. Just being able to exist in a foreign country without the usual hustle to pack experiences into short 24 hour periods is nice. It's even nicer that when I want a break the movies are played in English. I must see Inception.

I came back to a pleasant surprise--My first real shot at acting is finally up in trailer form. "Body Heat" will be releasing next month and it's about that pre-order time again. There is an entire website devoted to this masterpiece (www.bodyheatxxx.com) so if you're trolling the internet like myself and need some trinkets you can pick up iphone apps and wallpapers and other fun things resulting from the beautiful marriage of porn and technology. I'd tell you more about it but A) that will ruin it for you and B) I'm off to the gym to make up for the Italian food. Ciao.

When in Rome

2010-08-10T11:46:00.001-07:00

I am at gate H2, at the Fiumcino airport, about to board my
flight to Bucharest for the second time in 24 hours. The first attempt was a
failure for reasons beyond explanation. We just missed the connection. We suspect
foul play on behalf of the language barrier.

I slept for an hour, barely, and only because we ran out of
things to do after kicking a few Italian boys out of the room. We do not know
where they came from really, or their names, or how they ended up there after
we tried to push them out of the elevator. We've found reason to eat full meals
every single hour since we landed. When in Rome.... Eat Italian food.

The experience with Alitalia has been less than pleasant. I have
reason to believe the entire staff hates Americans, or at least us. We cannot
help ourselves. We were born this way. We did make it to the gate though with
plenty of time. We grabbed some cappuccinos and one of a rainbow of cheese and
bread combinations and came back again. There were two flights on the screen,
one to Bucharest and another to Leeds. We asked which was boarding as we stared
at the line of passengers with tickets in hand. They said Bucharest was next.
We went to the restroom, brushed our teeth, cleaned up... came back. The flight
to Bucharest was gone. 10 minutes had passed.

But if you're gonna miss your flight, it might as well be
done in Rome. We made it work for us. We grabbed a hotel room and dropped our
bags and hit the streets armed with useless American dollars and an equally
useless map that were soon ditched in lieu of Euro and walking towards large
ancient looking structures until we hit them. We toured the Colosseum, the
Pantheon in all of it's scaffolded glory, the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish
Steps, the Forum, a number of piazzas and sculptures and pillars and official
looking buildings and fountains that I couldn't pronounce much less remember,
and all of the winding side streets and alleys in between. We had red wine,
pizza, calzones, gelato (twice), cappuccinos, pasta, and even more bread and
cheese. I took 364 pictures. I'm in 3 of them.

By 2:30am we had closed down our last wine bar. The waiter
handed us plastic cups and emptied the rest of our bottle into them. We went
back out into the night. We were lost but not entirely concerned with
correcting it. An impromptu choir apparently forms around the Spanish steps
every night. We passed them and can only assume that this was where our
stragglers latched on. The Italian boys. So the four of us became lost together
in Rome with Chianti and no reason or desire to go to sleep. The alarm would go
off at 6:30 and the car would arrive at 7:30 and we'd come off of Pacific time
and an eleven hour nap on the plane. By accident we found our hotel again and
tried to leave them at the street but they snuck in. We tried to push them out
of the elevator, playfully but with a force that should have been interpreted
differently. They would not be deterred. Upstairs they continued their
conversation in broken English while my sister showered and I pushed the
advances of one off. I laughed at my private joke when I told him that I was
conservative, stop, don't you know about American girls? He did not know. No
one does. That way of being was 60 years ago.

When my sister was out of the shower the second Italian boy
moved in. He'd barely survived my wrath when he lit a cigarette for her. I
don't care if she's 20. I'll cut him. As he moved in closer to her I grabbed
him with both arms around the waist and pulled him out of the room and into the
elevator as he kicked, personally escorted both downstairs and then I
enlightened them to the fact that Chelsea was my little sister and therefore
forever off limits to everyone as I dumped them into the street. I said
goodnight. It was 5 am in Rome and I was wide awake.

small successes

2010-08-06T18:31:00.001-07:00

I hopped in a cab at 4 am with the kind of begrudging
fortitude that is sometimes the only strength I can summon to make it through
the DUI hours on the morning side of it. By morning, I mean I'm on the waking
side of 4 am. I did get an hour of sleep after all. In retrospect I would have been better off just continuing
through my night until the plane took off. I would have been even better off if
I'd actually looked at my itinerary and ignored the advice of the hotel
employees that I knew in my gut was wrong all along. I knew I didn't need an
hour to get to the airport at that time in the morning and I should have known
my flight left 40 minutes later than I thought.

Now I'm stuck at JFK watching people consume McDonald's for
breakfast and contemplating the placebo effect as they continue on about their
business powered by what was just passed as food. I'll be doing this for
another 2 hours with bitterness over the lost sleep opportunity.

I landed in NYC early Tuesday morning. 8 radio shows, 5 sets
for my site, 2 youtube videos and the combined number of Starbucks runs later
I'm realizing I'm just getting started. I'll sleep on the plane of course, on a
direct flight to LAX where I'll shower and turn around for a mainstream
opportunity that came up.... where I'll balance spreading my name liberally with
flying under the radar. At 4pm I have my first rehearsal for a part in a play I
picked up, just in time to actually perform in it tonight and Saturday.
Tomorrow has it's own set of small necessary things. I leave for Romania Sunday
for 2 weeks. Packing is in order.

I'd like to turn off my schedule and turn around and head
back to the hotel. It's my favorite hotel in one of my favorite cities. I'm out
here promoting my Penthouse cover. I'd like to promote it for another 6 months
or so. I could go through the same radio questions where they ask about my
family and my future, my goals. I'll keep joking with them in that
I'm-actually-completely-serious-but-its-too-ridiculous-to-be-credible way. I
really do want to be a card-carrying member of the AARP in 50 years. And I
really do want to settle into the stride of New York, find someone to play the
odd couple with, and live out my own private sitcom for a while.

I was amazed at how many radio shows wanted me to lay out 5,
10, and 20 year life plans live for the consideration of millions. One show
wanted my 50 year. I've never met anyone with a 50 year plan that wasn't some
variation of sitting on the porch or walking in the park hand-in-hand with the
one true love. Goals feel private and vulnerable. I don't need people telling
me to aim higher or lower or even straight. I know what I want and I adjust
according to what I think I need to do to get it. Then sometimes new
opportunities come up and I want more or different, and I adjust again and keep
going, and this may happen a million times before I stick to something but the
fact is I never drop the ball on my future and that's all the world needs to
know. In the meantime, I feel comfortable saying that if I can just get through the weekend without collapsing from exhaustion I'll have succeeded in the short term.

delirium and toothpaste and sin and such

2010-07-03T21:19:00.000-07:00

I've slept too much over the past four days to sleep anymore
but I still don't have the energy to make it much past the front door so I'm
laying on my bed watching the sun set, grateful that I'll eventually be able
to use codeine to knock myself out if it comes to that. I'm pretty sure my
thermostat hates me. One minute I'm setting it in the sixties and the next I'm
jacking it up to eighty with an occasional lull where we all hang precariously
in the mid seventies while I lie curled up beneath multiple heavy blankets and
sweatshirts and foster dogs. My hair hurts. My eyes hurt. Everything feels
obnoxious. My thermometer hasn't reported me below 101 degrees since Wednesday
afternoon with a running average of 102.

I'm not quite sure what happened. One minute I was in a
meeting with Digital for a project they're putting together and the next I'm
standing to leave and my brain has become the unfortunate victim of one of
Newton's laws against my skull. Things in motion will tend to stay in motion
unless it crashes into something else... (or something like that). Like all
shocked victims later say: It came out of nowhere.

So now I'm down. The mint sensation from toothpaste is
practically unbearable, which is an especially raw deal considering the one
thing I've become obsessed with doing since Wednesday is brushing my teeth.
It's such a sick and filling sting. I imagine it was this kind of feeling that
got people inventing things like sin and its resulting baggage back in the day.
Sin is a relatively new concept after all--it didn't exist before the
monotheistic religions. Maybe it came around the time they put out toothpaste.
I'll have to look up the history of toothpaste.

Other recent obsessions include soup and frozen yogurt. With
both have come a strong appreciation for handicap parking spots--not that I have
the placard, but I've made my own handicap parking spots by parking in things
that aren't parking spots at all and it's made all the difference in the world.
The fact is I can't walk very far without getting lightheaded and collapsing. I
think the personal dark comedy that I've been living really peaked yesterday
when I had to race myself back to bed from the shower because if I didn't move
fast enough I wasn't gonna make it. The foster dogs thought I was playing and
bit at my ankles the whole way. I left my cell phone on the counter. I was
stranded for a few hours.

At first I was grateful for an excuse to stay in bed and do
nothing all day but like anything over indulgent it's become a little sickening
in its own right. I'd liken waiting for the fever to break to watching paint
dry but the damn paint would have been dry by now. I can't focus on anything
for any respectable period of time either so my normal time wasters are lost on
me. I don't even have the energy for twitter. Or dark chocolate. This is a
serious thing indeed.

my days off are less fun than my days on

2010-06-16T11:16:00.001-07:00

I'm having one of those days that just won't get going, or, more specifically, one of those blogs that just won't get going. I've had nothing to write about for weeks. My theory is that its because I ventured out into the world and started talking face to face with other human beings, so all of the things I would have otherwise felt the pressing need to write about have been passed along in the oral tradition instead. The other theory is that I've been lazy.

I did get a blog done though this morning, finally. Then I tried to upload a picture and 'Safari quit responding' and I lost everything. I can't recreate it so I'll give it to you in a nutshell: My days off are less fun than my days on. Porn forces me to have a life.

Yesterday I spent my day off getting my blood drawn, my tattoo lasered, and pins haphazardly stuck to me from all angles at the tailor. I was up at 6 am and sat in front of the computer until noon answering emails and fielding phone calls and tracking down returns and credits. I made a thousand dollars back just by calling out companies on their shit. I opened up and re-signed and re-addressed all of the physical fan mail I'd taken care of the day before because my rabbit ate it when I left it next to the front door to drop in the mail box. I sprayed my entire house down with bunny anti-chew spray. Again.

There are nibble marks on my fucking window shades.

And now I'm re-writing a blog before I re-clean my rabbit cage and go to the gym and then shower and go out into the world with the people and the sunshine, where I will run more errands. At some point I'll settle back down in front of the computer for more emails and phone calls, I'll post ads for the kittens I took in because it looks like home #1 fell through, I'll mediate between the kittens and the rabbit when they fight over the litter box, I'll clean up the neat pile my rabbit leaves next to the litter box in protest, and I'll try to think of something to really blog about while I marvel at the fact that, yet again, I've managed to blog about having nothing to blog about.

I have the solution

2010-06-02T13:38:00.000-07:00

OK so the fact is I think I have a diagnosable run of the mill textbook case of ADD. I think I need drugs and therapy. I think it shouldn't take 10 days to do 10 pages of work.

And it's not that I'm slow because I did 5 of the 10 pages just yesterday before I turned it in. Most of my 10 days were spent doing everything but the paper. My business cards and receipts are now organized. My beta fish tank has been cleaned (twice). My lightswitch plates are spotless (2am urge) and my laundry is done and sorted by color and sleeve length. All of it. I even booked an appt. to check my eyesight after I stared at the screen trying to get the thesis sentence wrapped up for six hours so now I feel like I'm on top of my health as well. That's a lie though. I spent those six hours toggling between formspring and twitter and updating my amazon wishlist. Then I took a break to bond with my rabbit.

If I were to be completely honest I'd tell you that I've actually had the entire semester to do this paper. I had the choice of any current foreign policy issue. I blasted it on twitter: pick your poison.

And they came back with Israel/Palestine. Cut and dry. Right. I can't even turn in a current paper on this mess because the second I wrap it up they've made the headlines again. And of course twitter doesn't just want to give you a topic and tell you to run with it. Suggestions come with opinions. Then they're asking me to post the paper. Fuck that I'll get shot.

The problem was specifically writing the paper. The research came easy. You can follow a million different leads down the rabbit hole and come out the other side knowing less than you went in with. I followed the history all the way back to biblical times and they told me that David and Solomon were as real as King Arthur. I was disappointed.

I had to address 3 things on this paper: the players, the cause, and the solution. Ok I got liberal with the players and I got detailed with the cause... but the solution? Seriously? How am I supposed to propose a viable solution to a situation essentially designed for war with 2000 years of history sitting on top of the worlds energy source in ten pages?

So I got vague with the solution. There isn't a fair solution at this point. The UN can keep slapping resolutions against Israel and the US can keep funding it and the Palestinians can keep moving back off their land and civilians can keep getting bombed walking to school and peace talks can keep crumbling and the oil companies can keep drilling and the people of god can keep praying and we can all keep staring at our screens wondering why Justin Beiber is always a trending topic on twitter and in 20 or 50 years we can all look back and shake our heads and mutter to ourselves that we can't believe we allowed it to go on.

They did it again

2010-05-16T01:45:00.000-07:00

Every time they roll out with stuff they've done on me I get a little more giddy. I hope you feel the same. I got the cover images last week and now the trailer is up. I can barely contain myself. You know the drill. Preorder.

http://www.digitalplayground.com/store/video-details.php?id=670&ptype=dvd

The very first one

2010-05-11T15:07:00.000-07:00

My first kiss set me back 2 years. It wasn't just a kiss. It was 13 years leading up to it and unrealistic expectations and butterflies and the giant looming question mark in my head when I wondered where I was supposed to put my nose. I googled it. How to kiss. There was no real advice beyond preemptive tooth brushing and not bumping heads.

My partner did not read that article though.

On the day of the kiss I saw him in first period and at lunch. My girlfriends elbowed me and giggled and I avoided getting too close for fear that I might chicken out if given the opportunity. Then school dismissed for the day and we poured out towards the buses. I rounded the corner and there he was perched on a railing in all his cool skater style glory. His friends stood around him in a semicircle, waiting. My friends stood on either side of me, pushing me forward. He cooly threw another oreo cookie in his mouth and tossed his hair back out of his eyes. He was freckly and beautiful. He looked me straight in the eyes and smiled then jumped down off the rail and led me away amidst squeals and whispers.

And then he turned to me and went for it.

I used to always get in trouble at church because I couldn't keep my eyes closed during prayer. It seems like the most obvious time for the enemy to strike if you ask me--right when the whole congregation shuts their eyes for a guaranteed amount of time. Ninjas could move in, or worse. So when he came in for the kiss my eyes fluttered shut before my system overrode the whole thing and they opened just in time to see him coming at me with his soft blond lashes in the sunlight and his pretty tan and his puka shells and his tongue jutting out of his mouth like a stiff board and covered in black oreo cookie crumbs. I saw his whole mouth. The braces. The crumbs. The black spit. I saw it all right as it collided with my own mouth, my iridescent wet n' wild lip gloss and my lips quivering in fear. And I recoiled. My head flew back. Someone squealed again. It may have been me.

So that was my first and last kiss for two years. I feared it more than book reports, more than gym class on days we had to run the timed mile... Just the memory of it could bring back that very strange, very uncookie taste he left on me. It was a huge roadblock for my boy infatuation. I loved them. I couldn't get enough of them. I just didn't want to see their tongues in that much detail ever again.

When I did finally cross that bridge though, I did it with force. I was 15 and freshmen year had just let out for the summer. I made up for the two years that I should have been experimenting and went straight for the kill. We kissed. He felt me up. We fucked. It was untraumatizing. He tasted good. Red slurpee and cigarettes and Kid Rock played in the background. Then I wanted to kiss everybody. It was a good summer.

For the love of chocolate

2010-05-11T12:19:00.000-07:00

She says I get it from her...

2010-05-10T13:49:00.000-07:00

My mother is in town for a short weekend and while she's already leaving tomorrow, her
presence will remain in the form of slightly unbelievable stories and a large gaping hole in my pocket.

I felt the need to use the word 'gaping' to give you a feel
for the gray zone of inappropriate that we've been operating in since Friday.
I'm of course referring to the fact that she's requested residuals on my ass
because I got it from her. She doesn't use the word residuals though. Residuals
would be measurable. Instead she just says that I owe her, big time, and will
forever and ever and ever. That cannot be capped.

She also requested a tattoo last night. A green and gold
angel with nice boobs and pretty hair that blows behind it and looks powerful.
She said she'd draw it for me. I drank more wine. She said angels are powerful.
I said so were fairies in Disney movies, what's the difference. She said the
difference is that angels are real and Gabriel was gonna kick my ass.

right.

While I had a really really fun time and created perhaps the
most memorable home video of all time last time I got her drunk and filled her
request for a belly button ring, I don't think she would forgive me for doing
the same with a tattoo. Those things are pretty permanent in my experience.
Plus I don't like the idea of a sexy religious fairy as my mom's guardian
angel. If the tattoo actually found it's way onto her body it would be proof in
itself that guardian angels do not exist.

Breakfast went relatively smooth. I thought we'd cleared up
'vegan' last night when she told me how great her scallops were and that she
especially liked when she ate vegan like this because it was healthier. I
pointed out that her scallops weren't vegan, and neither were anyone else's
because there is no such thing as a vegan scallop. But today as she took the
first bite of her omelet she told me again how great it is to eat vegan like
that. I made the obvious point about how eggs come from chickens and vegan
means no animal products before throwing that set of premises into the if-then
machine and forcing her to admit that those eggs also could not possibly be
vegan. I'm beginning to think she's really just trying to tell me how great it
is to eat only organic....

I let her drive my car home from there. She always loves my
cars. As she pulled onto the first street my heart jumped into my throat so I
was momentarily mute when she asked why the road was so weird.

The road was weird because she was driving on the fucking
sidewalk.

We had a good day today though. We went to Santa Monica and
rode bikes down to Venice then I drove her up the PCH because she'd never seen
Malibu and I had to prove to her that it was just an exalted neighborhood that
gets pitch black at night and is eerily quiet. She was mad that Hollywood had
portrayed it otherwise. She asked where they filmed "3 ½ men."

And now I just got back from the gym. She got back an hour
ago after making token movements on the elliptical next to me and carrying on a
full blown one sided conversation before I finally stopped and told her with 3 gasps
of air between each word that if she can talk for that long then she's not
technically working out and therefore should not be complaining about it. She
agreed and decided that she would go take a shower to get all of the sweat off.
Problem is she hadn't broken that sweat yet.

So she took my keys and went back upstairs to 'clean up'. My
building is obsessed with security and she wouldn't have been able to make the
elevator move or even get into the lobby without the fob. Same goes for the
gym. I needed her to bring something back down though before she quit on me for
the night entirely. 10 minutes later she was pounding on the glass and tugging
at the door. I didn't want to stop where I was with cardio so I yelled back
that she needed to swipe the fob to make the door open. She tried again then
started pounding the glass again. After a few rounds of that I jumped down and
opened the door for her. I showed her again where she needed to scan the key
fob. She swiped it over the sensor to prove that it wasn't working. I looked
down at her hand. She was swiping my Mercedes key chain while the real fob hung
limply from the other end of the key ring. I sighed, deeply, and pointed it
out.

We're both worn out. I'll admit it was a long day and I
packed it full to make up for the short amount of time she'd be here. Maybe we
can blame the blond moments on that in time. As I'm writing this she's telling
me she needs protein in the morning if we're gonna go riding and wants to go
back to that same café so we can get one of those vegan omelets tomorrow.....

Skipping the silent auctions and champagne part

2010-04-27T12:39:00.000-07:00

Wow I just realized my last post was my 200th post on this blog. Kinda uneventful. About 10 blogs ago I decided I was gonna do a 200th post post about the 200th post. I forgot. Oh well. Now I'll have to write about 100 more things. 100 more new and interesting things will have to happen that I can document, although I'm not even sure 200 new and interesting things already happened. In fact I think at least 100 of the last 200 posts were me talking about how new and interesting things were in fact, not happening. I really missed my chance with that last one.

But if I do make it to 300 posts, you're gonna hear about it. And if I make to 1,000, we're partying in Vegas. All of us.

But that's not what I logged in to blog about. I logged in because I have a friend named Karris who sent me an email that made me realize we're all douchebags. Haiti is in ruins and it's been a prime opportunity for one celebrity after the next to attach his or her bankable name to whatever fundraiser and get a bunch of publicity. Charity laws here only require that 10% of raised funds go to the charity in question. Who ever follows up on where their money went once they donate? You get to give your feel-good money, the celebrity gets a press release, and everyone goes home warm and buzzed. And children in Haiti are still starving.

If you know anything about the history of Haiti, you know that it was the only successful slave rebellion-turned-free-state back when a bunch of thieves were stealing human labor and building empires. That was us by the way. Go Haiti.

Before Haiti was populated by freed slaves, it was populated by the Taino Indians.... whose race was literally wiped off the face of the earth when Columbus hit Hispaniola (the island that modern day Haiti and the Dominican Republic sit on). You see, the Taino Indians had gold, so after they welcomed Columbus onto the island, he turned them into slaves and tried to make them mine for it. They had traded for most of their gold though and couldn't supply what he wanted, so he wiped them out (the ones that didn't die from European diseases that is). Then Hispaniola became a major port, and eventually fell into the hands of the French, and before long it was the richest colony in the hemisphere. Today it is the poorest nation in the hemisphere. Strange.

Haiti has been unstable since it's independence. 42 out of 44 leaders have not made a peaceful transition. They're assassinated, overthrown... there was a suicide or two... I would argue that our interventionist policies haven't exactly helped. In the last decade they democratically elected Aristide. He had the people's support and was doing good things for the nation, making progress and so on, and we, uh, took him in 2004. Just like that. Over night. No more leader.

That's just an example. Haiti gets cut off at the knees a lot. Then there's the deforestation. Lack of industry. The country doesn't have much to trade on the world market except for cheap labor but the population is riddled with AIDs and as much as 2/3 of the workforce is out of work. There's also some extreme national debt that dates back to Haiti's independence. France wouldn't recognize them as a nation until they paid 121 million francs in retribution. So they did. And they've been broke ever since. I should probably mention that Aristide tried to get that money back.

So that's Haiti. Of course their buildings aren't reinforced. Their children are only averaging 1 meal a day. No money for infrastructure. Back to my friend Karris--she lives there. We grew up together and had lost touch but last year we met up again. She moved to Haiti 7 years ago to work at an orphanage. She's passionate about the kids and she misses American food, or at least food in America. She really misses sushi. She sends me handwritten cards and pictures and updates and right before the earthquake was planning to come back to CA for a visit, but the orphanage was flooded with new orphans and she stayed. She's proud that she can give them three meals a day. She finds them medical care by making an 11 hour trek across the border to the Dominican Republic. The only thing she has to herself right now is some coffee creamer that she hides in the back of a fridge, which runs on a generator.

The orphanage is called Danita's Children. Karris is religious, and while I've made it clear a thousand times that I am not, I do believe that she's doing more for Haiti than the people riding the publicity wave. I know that all of the money goes to the orphanage, not just 10%.

So if you feel like feeling good about something you did today, you can always donate to Danita's Children. And I'm gonna make it super easy for you like I always do and provide a link-

www.danitaschildren.com

If you do donate, there's a field for who the gift is being made in honor of. Please fill it in for "Karris"

Poll: Freak Of The Year

2010-04-27T00:28:00.000-07:00

Poll: Freak Of The Year

Ya'll should vote (for me). You came this far. You're probably bored and trolling the internet like I was when I found the link that brought me back to blogger to post it here. Might as well. Freak of the Year. That's right. I'm campaigning and that was my platform.

PS you're supposed to follow that top link where it says "Poll: Freak of the Year".

Delta (still) Sucks

2010-04-15T00:04:00.000-07:00

I'm on my way to feature at Blush Gentlemen's Club in

Pittsburgh, except for the part where I'm not actually on the plane. I blame
Delta, naturally. No Delta flight ever goes well for me. They are evil and if
it weren't for the armed security guards at the customer service counter I'm
convinced there would be riots.

I got to the airport an hour ahead of time, like I always
do, but I hadn't looked closely at my itinerary and didn't realize it was a
Delta flight. My bad. If I had realized it was Delta and not any other airline
I would have shown up two hours early. That's what I told the customer service
agent anyway. The truth is I generally block any attempts at booking Delta
flights long before it gets to this point.

That hour was not enough according to the skycap. He argued
with every single person ahead of me in line and the added conversation shaved
valuable minutes off of my hour of padding. When he finally called me to the
counter I'd been waiting 15 minutes. He told me I could no longer check my bags.
We argued, like everyone before me. I got in a new line.

And then I waited. And waited. And waited. My ride came back to the airport. Finally they called me forward, where they switched me to a

1:40 am flight, apologized, and charged me $60 in baggage fees. I hate them.

So now I'm sitting here waiting again. I have two hours to kill and even the bar is closed. It's a good thing they're suppressing dissent

with police power.

Fuuuuuuuck Yes

2010-04-13T23:26:00.000-07:00

I don't think I've ever done two updates in a day in my life but I shot my load early with the last one. I didn't realize my awesome wonderful amazing porn was now available for pre-order.... and if you haven't pre-ordered yet then clearly you didn't realize it either. But that's OK. Here's the link. No more excuses.

http://www.digitalplayground.com/store/video-details.php?id=600&playVidId=925&playVidType=bts&playVidService=ppv_hd

I guess you're gonna have to copy and paste that URL because blogger is being a bitch about making it a live link....

today's groundbreaking update

2010-04-13T21:52:00.001-07:00

I woke up at 7:30am because a rabbit landed on my head. You'd
think after a year of this crap I'd have gotten used to it, but between the
claws and the jerky movements it's still a shock every time. I've been locking
Sammy up at night lately, specifically because he disturbs my sleep, but I
couldn't catch him last night and I was too tired to pursue it beyond calling
his name out and making kissy noises. Yes, my rabbit does occasionally come
when called.

Things that make me wake up in a panic throw off my whole
day. He landed. Claws and hair went everywhere. I sat up screaming and trying
to untangle myself from the mess of sheets I was wrapped in. I tripped over
what was still around my ankles as my feet hit the floor. The rest of my body
followed. From my new vantage point flat on the ground I could see Sammy
running away so fast his tail end was spinning out behind him on the hardwood.
I haven't seen him since. At some level it's ironic that between the two of us
he was more traumatized by the incident.

I was up so I figured I might as well get a head start on
studying for the midterm, if you want to call it a head start. The midterm was
at 3:30 pm. I ordered the second textbook over the weekend. I hadn't even
opened the package yet. It's a dense class but I'm familiar enough with the
professor by now that I know what to expect. He's a hardcore dependency
theorist, meaning he is of the opinion that developed countries (DCs) gained
power and wealth at the expense of the lesser developed countries (LDCs), first
through colonialism (direct siphoning off of resources and labor power from
periphery to core countries) and now through neocolonialism (indirect siphoning
from LDCs to DCs by setting up puppet govts. getting in bed with compradores,
destabilizing regions, unfair trade policies etc.). We've put third world
countries into a cycle of dependency that they cannot break free of. Hence the
name "Dependency Theory".

Dependency Theory wasn't the only thing I needed to know
though. I had to know realists (capitalists), idealists (liberals and
communists), environmentalists, and for some reason, feminists. I skipped over
the feminist bit. It drives me crazy on multiple levels for multiple reasons.
I'm not going to get completely into it but this is an international political
economy class. I don't like wage gaps and religions that cut off clits as a
rite of passage but it feels more like a symptom of a larger problem than a
theory on how wealth and power are distributed between states (unequally).

I had to know the rise and decline of capitalism from Oct.
1492 through the present and significant events such as the treaty of
Westphalia and on and on--basically those things that made sovereign states what
they are today and the driving forces that puncture borders to create new
markets and are slowly eroding that sovereignty, i.e. McDonalds, Halliburton,
and the IMF. Then there are the multitudes of theories within the theories, and
to be honest, I just read the chapter summaries for 1-5 because it got tedious
and there was a reason it was scheduled to be read over the course of 8 weeks
and not 4 hours. Lesson learned.

The test: I've never answered "E: all of the above" so many
times in my life. But it wasn't just a guessing game or a strange distribution
of eeny meenie miny moe. I really had a grip on the material. I got to the T/F
section. I answered T for 28 out of 30 of the questions. I felt toyed with. I
turned in the test and went horseback riding instead of sticking around for the
lecture. That'll fix anything, at least until the final when I realize that the
notes I just missed out on were a large chunk of the test material.

And now I'm back home, catching up on an entire semester's
worth of homework for the other class, but not really, because I haven't started
yet. I spent some time on Facebook, where I ran into a long lost cousin. I
couldn't figure out why her entire page was in Spanish (she's a redhead from suburban
America for christsakes), then I remembered that the last time I saw her was at
her wedding, where she was marrying some doctor from South America, and it all
came rushing together. I looked up other family members. My mom is still mad
that I won't let her write on my wall. She's been grounded since she started
leaving "love, mommy" notes last year. I keep trying to start this homework but
once I really look at the assignments I question my enrollment in the class in
the first place. I think from now on I'll just audit everything.

Maybe I'll go try to find my rabbit instead.

Painfully Normal

2010-04-10T12:25:00.000-07:00

Well I'm in a little hotel room in Brockton, which is
outside of Boston.... And that's the only landmark I can give. I asked a roomful
of people at Subway yesterday where I was and they didn't know either... didn't
even know the cross streets. The people who worked there didn't know. I asked
how they found their way in every morning. They didn't know.

I've been changing things up at lighting speeds lately. I
got into fostering dogs through a rescue group and got too attached to the
first one just in time for him to go to his "forever home". I made sure his
forever home was someone who works in my building. I get text updates and
pictures. Now I'm looking at the next one. It sucks being out of town and
watching the desperate ads posted every day about this sweet puppy or that
great family dog red listed at the shelter with 24 hours to go. I can't do
anything from out here. Even when I'm back there I can only do one at a time.
There was a cocker spaniel I wanted to take but the rescue said they can't do
old dogs. He was 6. It makes me want to start my own rescue. The little
experience I've had with this so far tells me anyone could do it. Like
everything else it will be put on the back burner until I'm in town again
though.

What I can do from here is study. And I have been. I have a
midterm Tuesday and for all I know maybe one Monday as well but the Tuesday
class is the one I care about. Another Polisci course from my all time favorite
professor. Another international relations class, this time focusing on how everything
plays out on the world stage with no world govt. They call it anarchy. Last
semester focused on the third world and it feels like an extension of the same
class. I'm missing one of the textbooks so I ordered it on Amazon with one-day
shipping, meaning it arrives exactly 25 hours before the test. Maybe I should
have ordered a little crack as well to keep me up through the night.

I almost died my hair pink. Not pink pink. Just a few
rose-champagney highlights. Or something. I couldn't quite articulate it and
Digital didn't pick up when I called for permission so I'm still blond. Always
blond. Even the time I dyed my hair brunette with a box kit from Rite Aid I
still identified with blond. Every once in awhile when I stumble on one of
those old pictures my eyes nearly pop out of my head. We make such bad
decisions as teenagers.

There was the purging of the truck. I paid off 3 parking
tickets on it (I swear cops don't even leave paper tickets on windshields
anymore). I'd had it. I sold it. When the new owner ran the title he found two
more unpaid parking tickets. I must have gotten them that week. I sighed. I
bought a new car. I parked nose-first for the first time in 2 and half years.
It's the little things.

And now I'm going back to the text book that I do have
before I get ready for tonight's feature and then head home to abandoned dogs
and cars that fit in parking spaces and midterms. Just when I thought my life
wasn't normal it became painfully so.

the end of an era

2010-03-30T00:37:00.000-07:00

I think I'm finally taking the leap. I don't know if I'm
strong enough yet and god knows I've backed out of it a few times before but I
feel ready now. I'm switching to cars and selling the truck.

It's not the truck, it's me. It's LA. Its the parking garages
with their 6'6" clearances and the fucking 12-inch red zones between zoned curb
parking that leaves me hanging illegally over at both ends. It's the valets who
turn me away or charge me double and the rare uncovered parking lot that I
can't back out of once I manage to squeeze in. It's the fact that my parking
spot is compact.

I like driving this beast though. For the life of me I can't
figure out how I haven't been pulled over. I think cops give giant work trucks
a pass. They definitely see me. I've lost count of the number of times I've had
one approach me on foot while my heart raced and I wondered what exactly he saw
me do. All they ever want is to know whether it's diesel, how I like it, what I
tow. For all the red lights I've run, the illegal u-turns I've made, and the
bullying tactics I've employed to change lanes, it would only make sense that
somewhere along the line I would've caught the eye of a cop with a quota to
fill. It's California. We're broke.

But they don't care how I drive. They drain me in the form
of parking tickets when I'm not around to answer obvious questions about my
vehicle. It's cowardly really. You should know it costs $300 to park in a bus
zone, even a temporary one with no visible sign.

It's $80 to park between 3 and 5 am on many streets
downtown, except Sunday, and you'll be towed from 7-9 am, with an additional
$80 ticket. It's $60 if your meter expires. And loading zones vary.

It's the drive-thrus and all of the times I've panicked
because my wheels got stuck coming around the corner. It's the frequency with
which I automatically retract my tow mirrors to squeeze by. It's the number of
people who have to ask why I have a truck before they even ask my name. I have
a truck because go fuck yourself.

Actually I have a truck because I bought it as a second
vehicle to tow my horse when I lived in San Diego. The car was for everything
else. And two weeks after I bought the truck someone rear-ended the car and
they made it a total loss. I never got around to replacing it. Then I moved to
LA with its size 0 road systems and I bought a loft downtown with exactly 1
parking spot. And now I'm sitting here paying off another round of parking
tickets in defeat, doing the math and realizing it would be cheaper to have a
second car payment so I can just park in parking garages, and that's sad. The
truck will have to go. It hurts now, but it's for the best.

Bunny Death Stares and Other Unfortunate Living Situations

2010-03-18T00:19:00.000-07:00

My rabbit was running rampant again. He did this of course
because he gets off on small scale types of perfectly executed incremental
torture tactics--the kind that let you fly under the radar.

Our issue is the cage. He just got a new one. It's divine as
far as I'm concerned. It's called a bunny townhouse to be exact, because it's
two stories high with tasteful cedar accents and a little bunny ramp to go
between the levels, and finally a piece de resistance that I like to call the
master suite, better described as a little wooden bunny box with an arched
doorway. I thought it would be big enough that I could put him in it without
having to deal with the creepy bunny death stares that he likes to give when
he's locked up. I was wrong.

He did the same thing during his potty training stint when
he was a kid. Freud would call this the anal stage, the power struggle. I just
remember repeatedly referring to him as the asshole. I'd leave him locked in
his cage when I was gone so that he wouldn't stray too far from his litterbox and
"forget" where it was and leave a mess for me to come home to. Instead I came
home to bunny rage over the matter. When I'd finally let him out he'd typically follow a routine of briefly
attacking my foot before running under the nearest piece of low furniture and
staring at me for the remainder of the night.

He hated my slippers. They had little fuzzy monkey heads on
them. I suspected that he felt his dominance was being threatened. As I'd walk
around the house before bed he'd wage guerilla warfare against them from
militarily strategic sites such as my closet and treadmill. He'd rip into the
furriest part and dart off again, leaving me unsure of my place in my own home.

He got bolder and the hit and runs turned into full-blown
stalking. When I sat answering emails for hours on end I could see him creeping
in on the desk, ears flat and nose twitching. Then I'd feel the jolt of my
slippers being assaulted and I'd yell, all alone in my house, "No Sammy! Bad
rabbit!" but he'd already be gone.

He finally got the slippers. I woke up one morning and found
holes burrowed through not one, but both of the monkey heads. That was the end
of an era. We settled into a comfortable routine after that. He liked to eat
off my plate when I made salads and sit on my head when I slept at night. Then we
moved.

The new place had a patio that I though was perfect for him
to rule in my daily absence, free of electrical cords and book spines to gnaw
through and stocked with plenty of fresh air and greenery. He ate the greenery
though, then burrowed through the root system, and within a matter of days I
got a frantic call from the building manager who wanted an explanation as to
why my downstairs neighbor woke up with a rabbit sitting on her head. After
months of failed attempts at rabbit-proofing the patio I gave up, and that
leads us to this moment, where we have hit a stalemate over the cage.

I got him back today after a week of texts and phone calls
and emails from neighbors with bunny sightings. Once he's off my patio there's
nowhere for him to go, aside from everyone else's patio. It's the roof of a
tall building. He can't be cornered though, so all we do is wait, and watch.

The neighbor who finally caught him did so by turning his
entire unit into a large-scale bunny trap. I got the victorious call this
afternoon and rushed over. He was fat, but otherwise unharmed. And we're back
to square one, with me sitting nervously at my computer under the watchful
glare of a caged rabbit.

Kayden Unbound

2010-03-15T23:16:00.001-07:00

Check out this little number!!

The Procrastinators

2010-03-14T00:14:00.001-08:00

Check it out! I was bored.

flol

2010-03-06T01:42:00.002-08:00

I hate lol. Visually it's like nails on a chalkboard. When I
read it I want to reach through my screen and wipe it away. I want an edit
button for it, or one of those little blurry boxes. Digital white out.

Rofl isn't as prevalent so it doesn't activate my OCD in the
same way. Ttyl seems outdated and is therefore not a threat to me. I can't even
comprehend these new emotional outburst acronyms that are longer than four
characters in length, aside from, of course, lololololol--which naturally makes
me want to stab things. I can handle brb, but I think only because I know
exactly one person who uses it, and he uses it with extreme wit, sarcasm, and
caution. This formula makes anything OK.

I have small but acute internal meltdowns that I feel peer
pressure to mask when people actually verbalize lol in conversation. Lies. When
you say lol to me in my physical presence you are not, in fact, lol-ing. In
fact I suspect that when you type lol you are not laughing out loud at me even
then. I suspect you're looking at your screen with the same expressionless
straight face or slight smirk that I am, because facial expressions are only
used in the presence of others, because they are a form of visual communication
with other life forms that actually have to see you to get it.

But I'm starting to get it. It doesn't bother me any less,
I'm just rationalizing it better. Especially lately when I say things on
twitter that are not meant to be taken literally, but are, and before I know it
I have people who don't get the reference asking where they can send flowers
and get well soon cards and whether I've designated a next of kin. My rabbit is
my next of kin. There.

But I'm committing the same crime with smiley faces. People
say I do them backwards, like this:

(:

To be honest I don't think it's possible to smile backwards.

They are my go-to response as I answer emails. They are code
for many things, such as "I don't speak your language" or "I don't want to
answer your question" or "I do not want to commit myself to your opinion or get
into an argument with you over it" or "I can't tell whether that's rhetorical".
Mostly I find myself adding them to the end of almost everything I say as an
insurance policy against being taken literally.

That's just the problem with written language across the
distance of the web though. All of the subtleties of visual cues and intonation
are stripped away and next thing you know what you intended as the most awesome
joke of the century has been grossly misinterpreted as serial killer tendencies
and so on. Compound that with the language and cultural barriers you run into
as you respond to people all over the world in real time and the emotional
distress becomes immeasurable, as with the islander who took me seriously when
I suggested we elope in Canada and hunt moose for sustenance.

So that's where I am on Friday night--sitting at home
rationalizing pop culture acronyms (which to my horror I discovered all have
Wikipedia pages), and taking it a step further as I grapple with whether I can
actually use them. I know I should out of compassion for the poor souls I've
unwittingly fucked with, but I'm going with the slippery slope argument on this
one and I'm afraid of where opening this floodgate of intolerable methods of
communication might take me. I tried it on. I practiced saying lol in the
mirror. I don't wear it right. It's like the first time I cussed in 6thgrade and everyone laughed instead of taking my middle-school outburst
seriously. I really meant it when I finally said the F-word. So what if I
stuttered.

For Everything Else, There's Visa

2010-02-18T00:17:00.000-08:00

I was saved from one disastrous impulse buy after the next today. I felt like I had a little guardian angel following me around as I continued blindly and stupidly forward. I affectionately named him Visa, in honor of Neil Gaiman.

It started with a costume store that I'd been meaning to get to because with the release of 'Tyler's Wood' and two features coming up in April, it seemed only natural that I would have a golf outfit. I'm female though. The golf outfit multiplied like a virus into a mermaid outfit, a Raggedy Ann outfit, a belly dancer number, and something with a long-tailed formal jacket. As I started to piece together a Charlie Chaplin idea that sprang into my head at the height of my creative fury, the storeowner went into the back to grab everything in my size. He came back shaking his head with one pitiful thing in his hand--my golf outfit. Everything else was out of my size range. I bought it and left.

I was in Studio City and had two hours to kill before my next appt at the Apple store to fix a glitch I had on the laptop (turns out it was operator error). I didn't want to drive downtown only to turn around and leave again so I started trying to kill time with other errands that could be run. I needed gas. Diesel gas. I couldn't find it though because it's LA and I'm the only asshole left who doesn't drive a BMW or a Prius. I decided then and there that I was going to trade my truck in. I was done. I was sick of the parking issues, sick of the parking tickets, sick of the fucking pedestrians who step in front of me all the time not realizing that my hood is too high for me to see their happy-go-lucky little heads bobbing along right in front of it. That's what crosswalks and red lights are for. I was sick of the $700 registration for my vehicle size and finally I was sick of getting 11.8 miles to the gallon while I spent most of it driving around in situations like these trying to find another place to fill up on diesel. The truck had recently been fully serviced and detailed. It was in perfect condition and there was a CarMax 5 minutes away. It was time.

But first I needed Starbucks.

And when I came out of Starbucks my truck had for no reason whatsoever developed an antifreeze leak. Green mutant fluid was running everywhere. I couldn't trade it in while it was still in the process of hemorrhaging vital fluids. I sighed and drove to the mall instead to wait out the time for the computer appt. There would be no impulse car buying and selling today. I would have to join the legions of BMW and Prius drivers another time.

So the unfortunate thing about this particular mall is the layout. I hit the food court first and opened a book over lunch (by lunch I mean 6pm first real meal of the day). An hour later I was starting to feel strange still sitting around a mall reading the book. I decided to browse as I slowly made my way towards the Apple store. The only interesting thing between my current location and final destination was a puppy store. Fuck my life. That puppy store had Corgis. Very few things can compete with the face of a Corgi puppy.

And I held the Corgi. It was a boy. I love boys. It was brown and white. I love brown and white. It chewed my shoelaces. I love my shoelaces. When I looked up it was 7:30 and I realized I was gonna be late so I handed it back and ran across the aisle. 15 minutes later everything was cleared up and I was back at the puppy store being chewed to pieces and barked at. It was bliss. Blood ran from my fingers. Other customers kept looking over nervously because when he barked he really meant it, then he'd growl, then he'd go in for the kill. I imagined my rabbit living peacefully back at home, my leather couch, my other shoelaces. I watched him chew on a wall corner and I thought of my own wall corners, pristine and white. I watched him piss on the floor and I thought of my beautiful hardwood floors, laid in 1925. I asked how much he was. I winced. But still I wasn't deterred. It was the store that said no, because this one had a cold and he wouldn't be ready to go until next week. I left empty handed, with Visa the guardian angel hanging his head in exhaustion. I found my truck mysteriously repaired. On the drive home I decided to stop for a pint of ice cream on the way. They were out of my flavor.

so much time, so little to do

2010-02-16T15:29:00.001-08:00

Well we wrapped my first movie over at the streamlined porn machine that is Digital Playground. Wardrobe made me giddy. The script was engaging. The people were hot and the scenes matched. The lighting was beautiful and Robby D did what Robby D does. All in two days work and out in time to make it to the Xbiz awards. We don't need reviews I just did it for you.

I'm excited about what's next. I'm on an improvement kick. I'm taking a speech class focusing on where I put my tongue when I say "dental" and how there are over 48 corresponding sounds to the 26 letters of the English alphabet. It highlights intonation and what words I should be stressing to get my point across. When I say "Fuck Me", you're gonna believe me. Now I'm looking up improv classes, acting classes. I found one I liked until they wanted referrals. That's deterring to a pornstar. I like things best when I can take them up on a whim.

I'm watching and rewatching my recent releases. I'm happy with Rawhide 2 and I see where I can improve and where I've already improved. I've been spending an incessant amount of time on Facebook and revamped my MySpace page. Twitter is still my friend. I find myself responding to emails that were sent last year, with an apology for the delay. Some people take it better than others. I sometimes catch myself laughing at the ones who send back curt messages to the tune of "nevermind, I sent that in May". I think between May and AVN the only days off I gave myself were Thanksgiving and Christmas. I'm trying.

My next movie will be shot at the end of the month, and then we gear up for the big budget in March. By then the classes should be well underway, the emails should be answered, the blogs should still be regular and my treadmill should have no dust on it. After I got back from Vegas I knocked out a list of things that needed to be done, and now that I have free time it's harder than ever to stay on track. It's too easy to daydream or get caught up in a book or sleep until noon. I can sit at a cafe with a computer for hours and not actually accomplish anything. I'm finally using my TV under the guise that I'm catching up on culture when I pop in The Godfather or Citizen Kane, but really I'm just discovering that DVDs do have some entertainment value after all. I can't wait to start running myself ragged with work again.

1961- last week

2010-02-15T22:29:00.000-08:00

My friends mom died. She did it last Monday, 48 years old with two kids recently grown and out of the house and blood in her vomit. The only significant thing that happened leading up to it was a fall from a horse--a small horse. She landed on her hip and walked away. A week later her 23 year old daughter is flying up from San Diego to help with funeral arrangements. It's hard to think of life in terms of fragile when you're still stuck on human resilience and adaptability.

I don't know what to say to the friend. I've known her since 7th grade. We rode horses together, with her mom leading the way teaching us backyard vet care and how to cure a kicker. I've seen her arm wrestle and mud wrestle my own horse. She's the type that tells you what you're gonna do, loudly, and if you don't do it, assumes its because you didn't hear her, so she yells louder. Then you do it. She has wild red hair and walks like she was born on a horse. She's so knowledgeable that she carries horse business cards, horse certifications, volunteers at a horse riding therapy center, and now she's down for good from a spill off a pony in the pasture. The family doesn't know what to do with her horses.

It's not a large town. It's located in the foothills outside of Sacramento and the only people who know about it are the weekenders who have a cabin in Tahoe. They stop there for gas. It's the four way stoplight where the freeway ends and the highway begins. There's a Burger King and a McDonald's and a token Main Street where the shops sell mostly antiques and the coffee houses are good. I went to school there. We'd ride our horses straight down the streets. There's a bar called PJs where you can tie them up and every year The Wagon Train Parade will do it's two week ride from the Nevada border down through the 4-way stop light and end at Main Street. I did the ride once. My friend did it every year. Her mom was a staple there. She and her husband renewed their vows on that ride. He still gave her Hallmark cards every week.

Now my friend is sorting through what's left behind, because her mother saved everything down to bits of leather that could be used to reattach snaffle bits to headstalls and spurs to boots. She saved the dogs that were brought home and the rose bushes that her husband gave her on Valentine's day--one for each year they were married. She saved the cards from him and the letters from her son in prison. 500 people were at that funeral. The son wrote a letter for this too and my friend read it at the ceremony and was fine, until she wasn't, and she cried. Her grandfather stood behind her in a show of support, but it's hard to prop up that kind of emotion.

My friend is good all the way through. She's worked for the same company since she was 16 and graduated on time then moved to San Diego and signed up for classes, making things work to relocate within the company. She's never late and she always pays her bills. She's the first person you call in a crisis and so was her mom, if it involved a horse. The two of them were there for almost every rescue I picked up, helping me haul them, train them, medicate the mange and the worms. Our mothers went to school together and our grandparents serve on the local level for the same political party. I see generations as defense lines against death. My great grandma passed away when I was 19 and it never occurred to me until then that such a thing might happen. I still have 4 grandparents left, a mother and father. I hadn't planned on facing my own mortality until everyone before me faced theirs. It's selfish, but seems like the natural order of things. This has thrown a wrench in my view of the world, and I'm still sitting here unsure of what to say to my friend. I'm sorry, that's horrible. You're such a good kid, she'd be proud. Words are terribly limiting in these cases.

I want to console her and say she lived a good life, something that would flow with the American dream--two kids, strong and healthy, a dog, a picket fence and a loving husband. A packed funeral.

A fine way to go out if you're not 48.

The Book Thief, and other regrettable losses

2010-02-06T22:07:00.000-08:00

It started with a poster. "It's not a poster, it's a painting," the sales woman corrected in irritation. I looked at it more closely. It's a damn poster. It just looks cool because it's printed on canvas.

I don't really care either way. I just know it needed to be on my wall in all of it's unoriginal glory. I whipped out my card and told her to wrap up my painting. She gave me a look that suggested I wasn't the best home for it, I was undeserving of such a fine piece. But I was the only home offering. I was the only home in the entire store for that matter. She ran the card. It's not that I don't love it. I just know that no artist's brush has ever touched that canvas. A printer touched that canvas, and somewhere out in the world there are more like it, printer-touched in exactly the same way.

It made me itch for something original. I needed something with sweat on it, or at least fingerprints. I signed the merchant copy of the receipt and headed to the adjacent store. The place looked like some sort of spiritual industrial burial ground/reincarnation center, where small construction equipment and government discards circa 1950 go to die in peace, knowing they'll come back as a one-of-a-kind $500 lamp to be proudly displayed in the middle of some artist's raw loft downtown. The place is lawless. Finished pieces are stacked on top of pieces in the works on top of junk. Prices change day to day, spiking or plummeting by fifty and 100% depending on who's working and whether he remembers the original price he quoted you. Whether sales tax is tacked on to the final price is another matter of whim, and delivery is free, because the entire relevant customer base lives within walking distance of the store anyway.

As I walked through the randomly laid pieces in their various stages of completion I kept finding what I wanted, then finding something better and forgetting the thing before it. Finally I settled on the best thing, a refurbished locker-room bench. I had the perfect spot for it. The style would be seamless with the rest of my loft. As the employee and I discussed various price points that the bench might fall in I looked through the pile of junk to some of the finished junk in the back and saw an even more perfect bench, still from a locker room but refurbished with metal bars running underneath. I switched my negotiations to the new best-thing in the store and 5 minutes later was running out to grab cash for the purchase and meet him back at my loft to welcome home my new gym bench/unofficial bookshelf. As a rule of thumb in my loft, anything that can house books, will.

So that's why I was rearranging books tonight. I like to store them by genre and author. Toni Morrison has her own section, along with Rand, Orwell, Atwood, Bukowski, Faulkner, Augusten Burroughs, Chuck Palahniuk, Cormac McCarthy, Kim Edwards, and on and on. Then there is the section for short stories, poetry, periodicals, signed books, the political section, the economics section, biographies, the books that were so bad I couldn't finish them, the books I have yet to read, and of course I keep my textbooks. I did this as a kid with The Boxcar Children and Walter Farley just as my grandpa did with every book that passed through his hands in 35 years of teaching. Old habits die hard and genetics die harder. I'm fighting both.

In my intensive rearrangement session (the new gym bench went to Atwood, Bukowski, Neil Boortz, short stories, and Stieg Larson (new find)), I discovered a travesty. Every time I move this happens but I swear this last move took the greatest toll. I'm missing books. Lots of books. From Faulkner I'm missing "The Sound and the Fury" and "A Light in August", from Atwood I'm missing "The Handmaid's Tale" and "Oryx and Crake". From McCarthy I'm missing "The Road." I'm missing "The Book Thief" by Markus Zusak. I'm missing 3 out of 4 of my Dan Brown books but that's OK because A: everything went downhill after "The DaVinci Code" and B: I know I'm missing those ones because I lent them out. I'm missing "The Hours" and that's tragic, because the only thing I really appreciated about Virginia Woolf was the book that was about her, not the ones actually written by her. I feel like I'm eating lace when I read her work. "Orlando" is in the I-couldn't-bring-myself-to-finish-it section.

I'm missing everything by Anita Shreve but the only title I actually remember was "All He Ever Wanted", and I remember identifying too much with the female and feeling like the main character was a dumbass, and I don't think that's what poor Anita was going for. I guess it's best that I don't have that book. I had the "He's Just Not That Into You" books, and I thought they were fine pieces of comedic genius. I loved pulling them out on friends. That era is apparently behind us now.

I can't imagine how all of the books I don't care about managed to survive the move. I guess I wouldn't have noticed if they didn't though. I have a book called "Dark Horse" that's been haunting me for years. It needs to go. On an equally tragic note, I realized that I only had one book by Barry Hannah, and that one is in the top 5 on my list of all time favorites (It's called "Yonder Stands Your Orphan"). A good friend gave me a signed copy of one of the first edition hardcovers for Christmas one year. That one will never fall victim to a careless move. Maybe I just shouldn't risk moving anymore.

The PeeWee Herman show review from a non-critic's perspective

2010-02-04T00:57:00.000-08:00

OK, to be honest, it's wednesday night in downtown LA and I'm home because they called last call at 11:51 pm at the bar across the street and the PeeWee Herman show let out closer to 10 and somewhere in there we hit Katsuya as always but we just weren't that hungry and they did last call closer to 11, forcing us out and onto the bar we just left.

I can't say the PeeWee Herman show was bad. I can say I was pre-K about the time he had his unfortunate rain-coater run-in with the media and I grew up not understanding the cultural references related to him (or anything for that matter) and halfway convinced that he was the devil incarnate for (gasp!) jacking off. I should mention that I grew up under a distant and inpenetrable rock.

I get the idea of the word of the day but not the nostalgia of it. I understand that women who take principal roles and wear sequins should be considered the most beautiful of them all but I don't agree with it. I am turned off by PeeWee's nervous child-like leg shaking. I can't help it. I can't say I didn't enjoy it though. By the end of the show I was emotionally involved with the outcome of the relationship between the heart-chapped cowboy and the MILF. I felt peace when PeeWee flew. They pulled me in.

Resume (for your consideration)

2010-02-02T16:54:00.000-08:00

OK before we all jump to bad conclusions, let me start by saying that I am not leaving the industry, I am not looking to leave the industry, and nothing negative has happened that might have caused me to contemplate leaving the industry. I'm not looking to leave Digital Playground. Nothing about my current position in porn is changing anytime soon. With that out of the way, I was asked for my resume today. I was asked by someone who doesn't know what I do. I was just looking into what would have been a cool volunteer job before I realized I had to undergo a four hour interview, and turn in said resume. I'm not that dedicated to the volunteer thing. I'm sorry.

But I am curious about what my resume might look like, if say, Cal Osha tries to shut us down through the back door with condom regulation or Shelly Lubben lies to the legislature again to put our merchandise in a tax bracket that would run us out of business and I find myself treading the cold dark waters of today's job market.

Here goes:

Kayden Kross
PO Box 862062,
Los Angeles, CA 90086
kaydenblog@gmail.com

Objective:
To secure a position in a firm in which I can continue to get overpaid to do what I would otherwise be doing in my free time and utilize my skills in the art of fellatio and excuse making. I feel I'm strongly suited for work in public office.

Work Experience:

Contract Star, Digital Playground
Jan 1, 2010-Present

Maintain figure, skin, hair and nails with routine intensive spa days.
Interact as a public persona online through the extensive and excessive use of social networking sites, most notably Twitter.
Read and respond to physical and digital mail in a timely manner
Perform on-camera sex acts on an exclusive basis, tailored to the artistic direction of the production team, including but not limited to various combinations of oral, manual, and vaginal sex with various combinations of men, women, and toys.
Be available for photo shoots, television, print and radio interviews, signings, and other promotional opportunities as they arise.
Avoid acting like an asshole.

Cohost, AVN Awards Show
Jan 2010

Introduce show, performers, and presenters.
Promote show through radio, BTS filming, and photo shoots.
Prepare for show with rehearsals, media classes and a shot of vodka.
Spend and obscene amount of money on dresses that will never be worn again.
Fear that Kirsten Price is out of my hosting league.
Smile and blink.
Avoid acting like an asshole.
Avoid tripping, stuttering, and mispronouncing names.

Writer, Unkrossed.com
Sept 2008- Present

Compose posts on an unstructured schedule according to whims.
Moderate comments according to whether or not I'm being impersonated by the commenter.
Responsible for art direction on all images that accompany posts.

Cohost, XRCO Awards
Feb 2009

Introduce show, performers, and presenters.
Make friends with Jessica Drake and let her make all decisions.
Prepare for show with rehearsals and a shot of vodka.
Spend and obscene amount of money on dresses that will never be worn again.
Smile and blink.
Avoid acting like an asshole.
Avoid tripping, stuttering, and mispronouncing names.

Cohost, Xbiz Awards
Feb 2009

Introduce show, performers, and presenters.
Prepare for show with rehearsals and a shot of vodka.
Spend and obscene amount of money on dresses that will never be worn again.
Smile and blink.
Avoid acting like an asshole.
Avoid tripping, stuttering, and mispronouncing names.

Contributing Writer, InsideSTL.com
June 2009- November 2009

Composed weekly posts about a wide range of topics from clit-desensitizing bike seats to the virtues of oral sex.
(Turned into monthly posts.....
Turned into biannual posts.....
Got fired? possibly.)

Contributing Writer, Mikesouth.com
Mar 2008-Septemberish 2009

Composed weekly posts about a wide range of topics from political stereotypes to porn stereotypes.
(Turned into monthly posts.....
Turned into biannual posts.....
Got fired? possibly.)

Contract Star, Adam and Eve Pictures
Jan 1, 2008- Dec 31, 2009

Maintain figure, skin, hair and nails with routine intensive spa days.
Interact as a public persona online through the extensive and excessive use of social networking sites, most notably Facebook.
Read and respond to physical and digital mail in a timely manner.
Perform on-camera sex acts on an exclusive basis, tailored to the artistic direction of the production team, including but not limited to various combinations of oral, manual, and vaginal sex with various combinations of men, women, and toys.
Be available for photo shoots, television, print and radio interviews, signings, and other promotional opportunities as they arise.
Avoid acting like an asshole.

Contract Star, Vivid Entertainment
Oct 2006- August 2007

Maintain figure, skin, hair and nails with routine intensive spa days.
Interact as a public persona online through the extensive and excessive use of social networking sites, most notably MySpace.
Read and respond to physical and digital mail in a timely manner.
Perform on-camera sex acts on an exclusive basis, tailored to the artistic direction of the production team, including but not limited to various combinations of oral, manual, and vaginal sex with various combinations of men, women, and toys.
Be available for photo shoots, television, print and radio interviews, signings, and other promotional opportunities as they arise.
Avoid acting like an asshole.

Nude Model, Independent Contractor
Oct 2005- Present

Show up with clean hair.
Contort into and maintain natural looking positions.
Provide a selection of wardrobe ranging from two-piece intimates to exotic dance wear and themed costumes, as well as everyday wear.
Avoid carbs for the day.

Stripper, Risky Business
Oct 2004- Dec 2005

Provide engaging solo stage performances of the nude variety.
Provide engaging solo lap performances of the nude and gyrating variety.
Maintain an attractive exterior.
Upsell $9 sodas.

Trail Guide, Shadow Hills Riding Club
May 2004- August 2004

Halter, feed and groom horses.
Assess the need for veterinary care throughout the day.
Care for and put away tack.
Saddle and safety check horses in use.
Guide customers along the trails of Lake Natoma.
Work on behavior modification with difficult horses.
Shovel shit.

Waitress, Denny's
Sept 2003- Oct 2004

Took phone, takeout, and table orders.
Prepped food and delivered to table in a timely manner.
Vacuumed, swept, and cleaned tables and prep areas as needed.
Closed out checks and assisted in counting tills at the end of shifts.
Delivered karma in the form of contaminated food to a select cross-section of the deserving American public.

Dogwasher, PetSmart
Sept 2003- May 2004

Scheduled appointments, checked in dogs, and made phone calls to notify owners when their dogs were ready for pick up.
Cleaned and swept salon as needed.
Collected and maintained shot records and updated owner information on pet's files.
Washed and dried dogs and cats.
Trimmed nails, cleaned ears, and brushed teeth.
Upsold grooming packages and products.
Assessed the need for muzzles based on whether blood was drawn.

"Associate", Taco Bell
Oct 2002- May 2003

Heated frozen bags of meat, stirred hot water into powdered beans, cut open bags of lettuce and tortillas.
Kept track of food temperatures and ages.
Collected and cleaned dirty dishes, mopped floors, wiped down counters on an as-needed basis.
Took and tendered orders at the counter and drive through.
Prepared food to order on food line, wrapped and packed orders.
Filled drink orders.
Delivered karma in the form of contaminated food to a select cross-section of the deserving American public.

"Associate", McDonald's
May 2001- Oct 2002

Grilled frozen patties, deep fried various forms of chicken and potatoes, kept pastries heated and ice cream machine full of mix.
Kept track of food temperatures and ages.
Collected and cleaned dirty dishes, mopped floors, wiped down counters on an as-needed basis.
Took and tendered orders at the counter and drive through.
Prepared food to order on food line, wrapped and packed orders.
Filled drink and dessert orders.
Delivered karma in the form of contaminated food to a select cross-section of the deserving American public.

Education:

LACC, Los Angeles, CA
Aug 2008- Dec 2009

AA Modern Political Science

Miramar College, San Diego, CA
Jan 2007- May 2008

Coursework in Economics, Finance

"Kayden's First Time"
Oct. 2006

Passed?

Sacramento State, Sacramento, CA
Jan 2005- May 2006

Psychology Major

American River College, Sacramento, CA
Aug 2003- Dec 2004

AA Liberal Arts

Skills:

Performs well solo or in a group of up to 4 people.
Deep throats 7"
Qualified for the "expert traveler" line at the airport
CPR certified
Can drive a 6 speed, tow a 5th wheel, and back an F250 into a compact parking space
Extreme vocal range
Career driven
Unnaturally strong inner thighs
Fills out a bra
"can do attitude"

Commendations:

Awarded one of "Dr Jay's 13 to Watch" Jan 2010
Won "Best American Starlet" Sept 2009
Member's Choice Twisty's Treat of the Year May 2009
Penthouse Pet of the Month Sept 2008

References:

Available upon request

OK so basically the moral of the story is stick with porn. It's a cut throat world out there and I'm highly specialized.

The trouble with Depressurized Deadlines

2010-01-30T22:07:00.000-08:00

I had one of those days that accomplished nothing in a big way. It actually takes work to do as little as I did. It requires a sustained effort. It started with an alarm that did not go off because it had not been set. Waking up naturally is a strange process. I couldn't do it daily. It's just too much of an ordeal with the coming in and out of dreams and wondering what time it is and deciding it doesn't matter and falling back asleep and then finally just staring at the ceiling not wanting to know what time it is because there is no way in hell that the world has waited for you to start when the sun is that high in the sky.

There was the shower. I really put love into it. Scrubs. Razors. Oxygen masks. Hair masks. Steam. I finally got out when I'd run out of beauty procedures and then stared at a pile of fresh laundry that needed to be put away before deciding it made my loft look 'lived in' and that was OK. Then the OCD kicked in and I put it away and threw another load in, took out the trash and ran the dishwasher. Then I was out the door.

I put love into Urth Cafe too, just like they supposedly do to their food and their food does to us and we in turn do to the fair farming coops they buy their loving food from. It's a good campaign. 2 hours and 2 extra large coffees later I figured it was a good time to relocate my day-wasting efforts. I jumped on my bike and rode through downtown. The smell of Mexican food off of a catering cart wafted through the streets and the crowds and bad air and created a strange appeal that I had to get in on. I looked at stores that sold stuffed animals holding valentine's hearts and spelling out Amore. I fell in love with a frog that sang and was told that he was $3, but I had to buy 6. Wholesale only. I left. I don't have six people to give singing frogs to and I had no way of carrying them anyway.

My bike tire was low so I stopped by the bike shop for air and found a shiny basket. I imagined all of the downtown treasures I could cart around with a basket and jumped on that too. It was good timing because if I'd found it an hour earlier I'd probably have those frogs in tow. While I waited for them to attach it to my trusty steed I walked down the block to my webmaster's place.

Madison Scott was bringing back soda and my webmaster was serving pizza and Faye Reagan was sitting in the corner doing that sexy redhead thing that the rest of us can't quite seem to comprehend, much less imitate. Along with Kagney Lynn Carter and Lisa Ann these are the girls I consider my web sisters. We are a part of the Danger Enterprises harem, meaning if you've joined one site, you've joined them all. It's a good deal all around, unless you're just downloading our stuff for free on tube sites, in which case it's a good deal only for you. People never feel like they're stealing when there's a middleman.

We talked porn. I ridiculed my webmaster's new lamp with the ram's horns and his shaved cats and he retaliated by sweet talking more junk food onto my plate. Finally I had to leave before the bike shop closed or I'd be walking home, and the only thing lying between me and a brisk winter walk home is skid row.

Once home I cancelled my gym appt. and blamed it on dinner plans while justifying it in my head because of the hours I'd spent with my bike, conveniently forgetting that most of that time had been spent eating pizza and mexican cart food. I sat down at the computer and responded to Facebook emails, then regular emails, all while toggling back and forth between the window opened to Twitter. Somehow I ended up on Amazon. I shopped. Hours melted away. It occurred to me how little had been accomplished so I decided to bust open the To Do list--I needed to blog, post a craigslist ad, clean up after my rabbits and my fish (who is surprisingly messy), and follow up on a million other people who are apparently as useless as myself today. This was about 10pm. The energy rush had hit. I was officially off the wagon.

Next thing I knew I wasn't efficiently posting ads though. I was browsing the pet section. There was a cute potty trained rabbit that I briefly contemplated adding to my brood before realizing that I still needed to clean up after the two I have. There was a strange post on the trouble with giraffes (turns out they're evil and bent on world domination). Next thing I knew I'd been sucked into the activities section and was reading with ardent fascination about speed dating while I adjusted my world view to the addition of yet another thing that happens in real life and not just movies. I would love to audit this speed dating thing. I don't want to be graded on participation but I definitely want to know what it's all about. It's been awhile since I came home with something meaty to blog about.

Breakfast Club

2010-01-26T09:31:00.000-08:00

Damn I can't remember whether you're supposed to make your resolutions public because you're more likely to stick to them or keep them private because when you make them public you're less likely to stick to them because just by saying something about it you feel like you've already made progress.... fuck it I need something to blog about.

Here goes: I'm sick of sleeping in late. I've always been a late sleeper. I rock at 4am emails and I rock at finding restaurants that still serve breakfast at noon. I also rock at explaining that I'm not a crackhead I'm just naturally strange. For some reason I have incredibly reliable bursts of energy around 10pm like clockwork. That's when laundry gets done, bathrooms get cleaned, and mail gets opened. It's when bags are packed or unpacked and trash is taken out. Often it's the only time my treadmill gets any love. These energy spurts will last for hours. Around 1pm they wind down but by then I'm well into emails and I have a hard time leaving things unfinished if they can feasibly be finished in one sitting. Next thing you know I'm rolling out of bed at 11am and pissed off that the rest of the world has a 4-6 hour head start on me. I want to start waking up at a normal time, and seeing as I haven't mastered the art of meditation as a substitute for REM, I'm going to have to start going to bed at a normal time too.

I was up at 7:30am today, and that's an accomplishment in itself. I was only up that early though because I flew home from St. Louis yesterday and the only sleep I got was on the flight back, with a layover that threw a wrench in the whole process. That meant that my 10pm energy spurt never came last night. I fell asleep before it could catch up to me. It felt good to be drinking my first coffee of the day with everybody else, rather than with the crowd who is coming back for more on their lunch breaks. It's awesome that I'm getting all of my 10pm chores done now, before 1pm when the photographer shows up at my place to generate a little more clubkayden content. When my live show is over at 9pm I'll have nothing to do but read and worry about tomorrow's shoot--my first one as a Digital Playground contract girl. That alone is gonna take up hours though. Luckily I have an 8am call time to keep me on track.

Landing Strip Blues

2010-01-20T17:18:00.000-08:00

The longer I'm in porn the more attention I pay to the details-the matching lingerie no matter what, the good smelling lotions, the heels, and most importantly, the grooming. It's not as if I actually expect to be caught unprepared on the streets like a real celebrity who just wanted to grab some coffee and next thing you know her unpolished Saturday morning face is plastered across the news stand and some happy paparazzi is off in Europe blowing his 50K payout. I don't expect a porn crew to run up behind me in line at the grocery store with a camera and scream "surprise! I knew you didn't walk around looking like that all the time!". That scenario is the least of my fears. I pay attention now because on a personal level, it just bothers me if I don't.

Being female is a lot of work though, especially if it's something one makes the commitment to take on daily. Hair nails skin clothes shoes scents and gym maintenance must be streamlined into an efficient schedule if you expect to have a life beyond it. Luckily most things that are done regularly become automated. For me, this has happened with shaving.

A shower takes 15 minutes and I do everything every day. No one likes stubble, especially there. I finally invested in a heavy duty razor for the closest cleanest most awesome shave of my life. It has a titanium handle and the blades glint through the steam and soft lighting of my shower. It is a fine machine.

With this new razor I have cut my shave time in half. I'm quick and deft. A few days ago I cut it too close though. I got cocky. The blade slipped slightly to the left and before I knew it I was down a landing strip. I was completely bald save a few stray hairs that made everything look incredibly uneven, so I took those off too in sadness.

The adjustment period has been rough. I feel so much more naked. It looks foreign. And pink. I'm trying to grow it out as quickly as possible but by trying I mean I just think about it a lot and wonder what I could possibly do to speed it up. I feel like I'm in denial in the morning as I shave around where the landing strip should be. There is no comfort.

I have a landing strip deadline. We're shooting my first movie for Digital on the 28th of January and I do not want my first movie to be a lie. I do not want the people who watch those scenes to walk around believing that I've chosen to live my life completely bald. I have nothing against bald. It's great on others, wonderful in fact. I just don't like it on me. I wait with baited breath for the morning I wake up and finally have something to work around with my razor again.

The Search for the Perfect Cookie

2010-01-16T22:02:00.000-08:00

My favorite cookies are chocolate chip, without the chocolate chips. I like things that are the raw material for perfect, meaning they have the potential for perfection if I can just make them my own. I decided at one point that the reason we think there is no such thing as perfect is because perfect is individualized.

Chocolate chips cookies should be worked over and picked through. They are no good as baked dough without the chips and they are no good with the chips left in once baked. This paradox tormented me in Home Ec as I tried to perfect the chocolate chipless chocolate chip cookie in the oven. I finally decided that the chip flavor needed to rub off on the dough without being a part of the actual dining experience. The perfect chocolate chip cookie was one with a relatively low ratio of chip to dough for easy consumption, but not so low that surrounding dough was not properly affected. I created a math formula that was only as advanced as I was. If I remember correctly I involved the Pythagorean Theorem. I was devoted to the issue.

In middle school we'd sit at the long cafeteria tables at lunch and talk about boys and unfair parents but when I got to the cookie I'd drop out of the conversation and one by one my friends would go quiet too as they tuned into my strange cookie ritual, as I broke it into pieces and worked each bit down to the chocolate, turning it over and over with the edges of my front teeth and then putting it aside. When it was done I'd ball up the napkin with the melted waste and reapply my frosty 7th grade lip gloss, taking special care to make sure there were no crumbs left and then sucking the last bit of chocolate off of my fingertips and suddenly I'd remember that I was supposed to be a part of the conversation about the parents who just don't get it and the boys that we just didn't get. I'd pick at my fingernail polish and worry about homework with my meditative cookie experience already completely forgotten while my friends gave me strange looks and continued to dwell on it until their giggles turned to shrieks and they had to stop for air. It was known that I just really liked chocolate chip cookies, except without the chocolate chips.

Sometime between 7th grade and today I must have dropped the habit. I don't know when or how but on the way out of Trader Joe's tonight I picked up a bag of my favorite cookies on a whim and opened them on the drive home. They didn't taste right. I bit in again and still they weren't the small bits of baked heaven as I'd expected. I bit around a chocolate chip, then again and again until I had a pile of melting chocolate in my lap and I tossed it out the window. It was perfect. Now I'm wondering what other wisdom I've lost along the way.

Welcome to the Playground

2010-01-12T12:18:00.000-08:00

Back from Vegas. I feel like I hit a big fat cartoon wall when AVN stopped and my body kept flying from the momentum. I just don't know what to do with myself now that I can sleep 8 hours at night and don't have to worry about what time I have to be in the make up chair and why vicoden doesn't come in salve form so I can put it straight between the soles of my feet and my extra-high heels. I have two suitcases sitting my my front door that look like they exploded on impact. I'm not sure I'm quite up to the task of putting everything away yet. For now I"m drinking coffee and fucking around on the internet. I'd feel like a bum if it weren't a part of my job description.

Now that I'm with Digital Playground I'm going to have a little bit of time off until my movies start rolling out. We shoot the first one at the end of January and between now and then I don't have much going on. School starts at the end of January too but I only took on 6 units this semester because I've finally decided to fight my masochistic scheduling tendencies. I'm afraid to tell my trainer all of this because he's been preaching for months that if I could just find a little more time in my schedule he could finally get me there. He says get me there as if it's a common goal of ours. He thinks he can achieve perfection. I know better. I've seen myself around chocolate.

I'm excited about this year. Cohosting the AVN awards was one hell of a way to begin it and when Digital talks about the various projects they have in the works I get a little giddy and have to sit down. There's a word for that. It might be histrionic. I was nervous going into the show about the transition. The first night in Vegas we did a company dinner and I met everyone all at once. It was like the first day of school trying to remember names and expectations and where the pencil sharpener is. I got shy, which is my natural response to most things when I have clothes on, but it wasn't long before I was happily sipping cosmos and pitching my idea for foot-vicoden-salve to men who couldn't understand my pain. I was most nervous about meeting the girls. There are a total of six of us and I know females well enough to know that with each addition to the pack the chances of disaster increase exponentially. Strangely, every single one of them was awesome. There's Jesse, who is infamous for being awesome so I won't even go into it, and then Riley, who has perfect genes and no attitude about it, Katsumi, who invented exotic, Raven the porn girl you can bring home to mom, and Janie the girl next door who looks way better than real girls next door. Things are looking good. Hopefully by this time next year I'll be able to describe in detail what they all taste like.

Just Say No

2009-12-28T23:12:00.000-08:00

I have a Victoria's Secret problem. On a broader scale I have a lingerie problem. I started last year when I developed a sudden phobia of wearing mismatched bras and panties and has only been exacerbated by the fact that most of my job involves being seen in some combination of nipple and pussy coverings propped up by heels and often spruced up with stockings and necklaces. I can legitimately say I don't want lingerie, I need it.

I shot six photo sets today for Club Kayden with Tammy Sands, my most recent great photographer find. Six photo sets means six outfits that involve lingerie. That's weeks worth of shopping blown in a day. I'll be back again tomorrow and probably at the mall again Wednesday. It's unsustainable.

Granted-I do sell some of it. But not all of it. I get attached. I keep the comfy stuff, or the unique stuff, or the completely uncomfortable but really cute stuff. I wear it to the gym and to Starbucks. I wear it until the washing machine has beat the life out of it and straps are hanging by threads and once vibrant colors are placid pastels. It's about a three month lifespan. And then it can't be sold. Then I shop again, because after all, I need it.

The fucking catalog should not come to me though. You do not leave beer kegs on the doorsteps of alcoholics or heroin in IV bags at rehab clinics. It is an unfair test of willpower. The catalog came with a promo code. I can do all of my shopping, right here, right now, at a discount, on already discounted items. This nervous blog that you're reading? This is me trying to win. I'm not winning though because there's a babydoll pink and black polka dot and lace plunge push up bra and thong set on page 70 and it's 25% off and I'm doing the math because with the additional promo code they're practically giving it away and I'd be a fool to pass it up but it's like that one cigarette to the guy who quit two weeks ago and has now proven he can so he's gonna just have this one, because he's out with friends and how much harm can one more do....

Santa died today

2009-12-18T16:59:00.000-08:00

I'm in Rhode Island and the temperature has not ventured above the point of freezing since I landed. I actually have to work myself into the right frame of mind to go from the door to the car waiting at the curb. I'm wearing Uggs in my hotel room with the heater set full speed ahead. I'm drinking iced coffee because I don't like how it tastes hot anymore. It's sabotaging the effort.

School is out. I've been to the gym already. I don't have to leave here until 9:30 PM. This is heaven. I ordered room service and played online for hours. I can't remember the last time I was able to relax without worrying about what needed to be finished or started or what I'd forgotten to finish or start. Yesterday I made it to the mall and brought back 4 books. Books are like video games to me. I can't wait to get home to start them and I will only stop when I have beat them or been forced by basic needs such as food and sleep and sex to put them down, briefly.

Today was too cold to make it back to the mall, despite the fact that it's a 5 minute shuttle ride from the hotel, curb to curb. I substituted with Amazon shopping from the warmth and comfort of my own computer. You could say I went overboard. I transferred it all to the wishlist instead. It was like binge shopping and purging. I might have a disorder now.

I caught up on news. There is an asshole group trying to harass women seeking abortions by forcing them to fill out surveys that would be available online. They want to know age, race, marital status, and reason for aborting. Supposedly it will deter abortions and unwanted pregnancies. Kinda like abstinence only programs.

There is still a war in Afghanistan and still people who think we're doing this because we represent good against evil and it's our job to 'police the world'. They all happen to be American.

And the most dividing incident of the day was a christmas display in some random guys yard. He put Jesus in a pretty malicious looking white robe with a shotgun and a dead Santa at his feet. As far as I'm concerned this sounds like a pretty normal continuation of the bible stories. You're either a martyr, the victim of a murder, or taken at the hand of god... and Santa got all three. They weren't kidding about that jealous god bit.

That's not the point though. The point is that this is on CNN right next to a war and the weather reports. There are the people who think he's right to do this because Santa has stolen Christmas from Jesus. One more time: fully functioning adults are claiming that one cultural myth has stolen the attention of the masses from the other. Then there are the normal people in the neighborhood with kids who are upset that their kids have to witness this bizarre profession of faith, or find out the hard way that there's no Santa, at least not anymore, because he's dead on their neighbor's front lawn. But hey, I believe in free speech. Without that handy clause in the constitution I would be out of a job.

RIP Gus and Term Papers

2009-12-11T00:53:00.000-08:00

I haven’t been doing time changes well lately, and that explains why it’s almost 4am in NYC and I’m up, alone in my hotel room with a computer and an empty pizza delivery box. I’m doing research for a paper that was due two days ago, a paper I should have started weeks ago considering how massive it is as a percentage of my final grade. Normally I at least get these things in on time, even if I’m printing them off 5 minutes before the class is starting. This semester I have met my match. Live and learn.

My abused little circadian rhythm took a double hit when I slept all afternoon, after waking up at 5 am for the Howard Stern show, after going to bed at 2 am, after sleeping 4 hours on the flight here, after not sleeping at all before the flight. Shit happens. Things fall behind and I make up for it by cutting out sleep and playing catch up on Thanksgiving and Christmas when I have days off. Bags have to constantly be packed, houses cleaned, laundry done. I feel like I’m buying rabbit food at an unsustainable rate and only grocery shopping so that I have something to throw away when I get home after a long weekend on the east coast. I double book and somehow fit it in, I switch flights to red-eyes regularly to accommodate, I take naps in the make up room.

Homework sifts itself into the cracks. I got lucky with the Polisci class. I took this professor last semester and he tends to overlap material. Three times now I’ve been able to print out an old assignment with a new date in the heading. He hands them back with the same comments, same grades. Without small breaks here and there I’d have dropped out entirely.

I had to drop a class early on this semester because of the '3 absences or less' policy. I tried to outsmart the future and only signed up for 6 units next semester. December 15th marks the last day of Fall 2009 and I'll be walking away with another AA, this time in Modern Political Science--that is if I actually finish the paper that I'm casually not working on at the moment.

It's hard to know what to take seriously. I've got it all backwards. I like school. School is my hobby. It keeps me grounded. I look forward to it. School is getting in the way of a porn career that is looking up though. Every time an amazing opportunity comes my way I have to weigh it: ditch class again or blow off a once in a lifetime opportunity. It's a muddy decision.

Take today-I went on Howard Stern. I've wanted to go on Howard Stern since I was introduced to "Private Parts" because my first roommate was an aspiring DJ, and like all aspiring DJs, idolized the man. Multiple times I've been slated to be on the show, and multiple times it's been pushed back for any number of reasons. I was a raw bundle of nerves in the green room and then 5 minutes into the show felt completely at home. I'm still elated 20 hours later. I'll never forget it, I got amazing PR, and more opportunities opened up because of it. I spent the last two days catching up on other homework and preparing for this trip instead of writing the paper that I'm still not writing. There is no way in hell I would have put off Stern's show for the paper. It was destined to take the back seat.

Paris: Same deal. All expenses paid trip to the Hot D'or Awards, a black tie event with a pre party ride on the river and two full days to be a tourist when I wasn't filming more promotional bits for Hot Video. And to put a cherry on the whipped cream I took home the award for Best New Starlet. There is no way in hell I would have turned that down to make Monday's class. Especially considering Monday's class regularly cancels last minute. In fact there is a high correlation between me changing flights to make that class and that professor not showing up. But when I booked Paris I missed the Tuesday class's midterm. I wouldn't have changed it.

My goldfish died today. Gus. He's been around for awhile but he certainly didn't die of old age. I killed him. I changed his water too quickly on the way out the door to the next flight. Either the water was too hot or too cold or I didn't put enough water conditioner in it or I put in too much. I don't know. He was alive when I left and he's dead today. The pet sitter let me know as compassionately as he could. He offered to flush him. I told him to lie and tell me he buried him. I was so tired when he told me that I thought he was talking about my rabbit and freaked out. It's sad when a fish dies. It's tragic when things with hair and ears and controlled toilet habits die.

So now the question is why am I blogging instead of writing the paper that I'm writing about not writing. I'm tired. I'm staring at the screen and nothing is happening. I've been doing research for so long that I'm reading through and not absorbing a word. I should be packing for tomorrow morning's flight but I realized that like everything else, I'm behind on the blog.

the question...the answer...and one brave man

2009-11-30T12:16:00.000-08:00

are women as horny as men? one fellow imagines just what that might be like. what a world...a cringe inducing world...just scroll down and play the video on the page...but of course IMMEDIATELY return to this blog. IMMEDIATELY.

http://tinyurl.com/ygkbf6n

The kind they make with wood.

2009-11-30T01:44:00.001-08:00

I understand this whole "progress" thing we're all on with phones that run our errands and substitute for relationships and "green" everything from cosmetics to phones that run our errands and relationships, but some things are fine as they are.

For example: Christmas trees.

LA seems to disagree. You should have seen the shock and awe I was met with when I tried to buy one today. I called ahead to make sure they had Christmas trees before I showed up, because no one else did and I was sick of driving around and finding out the hard way. They said they had Christmas trees. "Real Christmas trees?", I asked suspiciously. "Real Christmas trees," they said. I drove straight there. I walked in and looked around. More fake plastic trees were stacked by the door. I asked where the real ones were. The security guard pointed behind him to the boxed trees. I told him that trees that came in boxes were plastic and therefore not real. He looked at me quizzically and pointed me in the manager’s direction.

The manager also tried to point me to the boxed trees. I told him I wasn't looking for plastic trees, that I’d called ahead to avoid the exact situation I had once again found myself in, and that they shouldn’t tell people they have real trees when they don't. He asked what I meant by 'real trees.' I sighed. Heavily. I explained that real trees were the kind that grew out of the ground and back in the olden days people used to cut them down, back before all things American were replaced with plastic. His response? "Oh! You mean the kind they make with wood? We don’t carry those."

I guess tomorrow I’ll be more specific. I’ll ask for the Christmas trees they make with wood.

watching my every step...

2009-11-29T01:33:00.001-08:00

There is something to be said for goals. We all make them, consciously or not. We need things to aim for and things to look forward to and sometimes we just need a hobby. Sometimes other people need a hobby. Sometimes we fall victim to other peoples' hobbies. I've become caught in that trap.

Rewind 8 months. I started working with a new trainer on referral, and unbeknownst to me, expectations had already been set. I just wanted to feel like I was working out, but a little bird had whispered in his ear that I really like to be pushed. Lies.

When I got there, the sign in the bathroom asked that patrons kindly clean up their own blood and vomit… granted, that was in the men's restroom, but there was no women's restroom. I was in over my head before the first dumbbell was dropped in my limp hands. Next thing I knew I was doing the GI Joe crawl between 60-second sprints on the treadmill and creating various ailments that would medically prevent me from what might come next. Between what I've led him to believe and what he’s put me through, we both find it rather odd that I've survived this long. Thank god for a job that makes me travel far far away from LA and his regime on a weekly basis. If it weren’t for that I’d either be eligible for fitness competitions or dead.

So that's my trainer, the loveable dictator. He checks up on me with midnight texts inquiring on my sugar intake and cardio output. I lie to him so he can sleep at night. I can attribute the abs to him. I'm definitely stronger. I can even do real push-ups but get too winded because I whine the whole way through. But I haven’t lost what he calls "the gingerbread layer" and he's acutely aware of this. He is on a mission.

So my phone rang at 11:15 this morning. It woke me up. I answered and he asked where I was. I was in bed. I asked where he was. He was at the gym. Why? Because we had an 11am appointment. He told me in a voice that should not be argued with to get my ass out of bed and get to the gym. I obliged. When I walked in I knew I was in trouble. He had his laptop out and a row of pill bottles and a cute little thing still in it’s packaging that looked like a nano pet. He told me to sit down. On the laptop was a detailed diet plan that mostly said things like “chicken” and “fish” and “vegetables”. I frowned. He pointed to the first bottle. Chewable vitamin C. I was instructed to take two of them a day until I felt 100%, and again every time I felt like anything was coming on. He pointed to the next bottle. Food-derived all-in-one vitamin capsules. One a day forever. I pouted. I don’t do pills. He pointed to the third bottle. Dried mushrooms in capsule form. Supposedly potent as immune boosters. I would never be sick again. I saw my excuses fading before my very eyes. I mourned their loss to myself. Then he opened the little gadget.

And that’s how I ended up with a pedometer nestled warmly in my Ugg boot. I was instructed to take 10,000 steps a day no matter what. I was told that the average American takes 2,500 steps a day and the average European does nearly 20,000 and that’s why we have an obesity epidemic and I’m sitting around daydreaming about French people who have dessert after every meal and then prance around in their size nothing sexiness. So he’s making me walk like French people but taking away the dessert that French people get as a walking reward. Simply unfair.

I’ve caught the bug though. I have a new toy. I parked further away so I could rack up steps. I did serpentines around tables at the restaurant to add more distance to my route out the door. I took the stairs. Every hour I dug the toy out of my boot to check my progress. It was slow coming to say the least. When I finally made it home at 11pm I still had 2,400 steps to go so I turned on an episode of Family Guy and walked the remainder until I hit exactly 10,000. I texted my victory to a friend who had bet $10 against me and then I texted my trainer. He will sleep well tonight, but the friend says that because it was technically after midnight when I hit 10,000 I’ve lost the bet. The jury is hung on that one. I just want to know where the fuck all the Europeans are walking to if I can’t even cover half of their distance with the aid of a treadmill.

I’m not taking the pills though. I don’t do pills.

DP PSA

2009-11-17T23:02:00.000-08:00

Well it's true. I've jumped to a new lily pad. Officially I can confirm that yes, beginning January 2010, I'm the newest Digital Playground contract girl. I'll be joining the likes of Jesse Jane, Riley Steele, Katsuni, Mckenzie Lee and Raven Alexis. There will be whole new level of pussy chasing. I will allow you all to live vicariously through me.

The press release went out today, and when I saw the picture that went with it next to the DP logo I got a special little tingle. Overnight they made me edgier. They made my hair softer. For the first time ever, the real color of my eyes showed up in a picture. If I could bottle this effect I would be knighted.

So what does this mean to you? The blog won't be changing (except for an occasional picture that is better than the ones I take myself). The website won't be changing at all (because I'll still be creating my own content). Everything else will only be improved upon.

Now about AVN- if you weren't already aware, I'll be cohosting that with Kirsten Price (who I'll sadly never diddle on film). That's your first reason to show up. We're gonna need an audience. The second reason is that I'll be signing at the DP booth next to the aforementioned primo pussy. We're gonna need a line. It's ultimately your decision to attend, but you should know that my mother just spent 4 days with me and if I've learned one thing it's that guilt tripping is a sport and I am the child of an athlete. A prodigy if you will. Do not disappoint me. Last but not least, I'll have one temporary lift on my alcohol ban. This will take place on Friday at Tao, where I'll be hosting the "8th Day" party. I'm going to need people to rub it in when I have a hangover the next morning.

In other news, I'm leaving for Philadelphia in the morning. I'll be featuring at Oasis Gentlemen's Club Thursday through Saturday. Showtimes start at 10pm. That's my self-serving PSA of the day.

I did Sadie West (or she did me?)

2009-11-12T19:42:00.000-08:00

We just wrapped "Kiss Me Deadly", a film noir slash modern day mystery slash fetishy wonderland. I play a damsel in distress slash badass slash submissive fuck toy and I say things like "gee" and "That's right pretty boy" or "buzz off, creep" to the man who greets me in a disturbed voice, "hello kitty cat".

I got to wear vintage white gloves and carry vintage suitcases and hold up my stockings with garter belts and bat my eyelashes from beneath the brim of my pretty white hat. I had large barrel curls and red lipstick. We ran dialogue through the haze of a smoke machine to men in trench coats and ties. We held cigarettes and made a big deal of lighting them.

The garter belts were my personal touch though. They were functional props. Smoke and mirrors because I had something to hide--band aids. I got impatient last week with the tattoo removal and decided to go balls out on the last treatment to remove my playboy bunny. There is no longer a dark black logo there. Now it's red.

But when it heals it will be a ghost of the past. I'll speak of it like an ex boyfriend at cocktail parties- "I don't know what I saw in him."

What I'm really interested in talking about though is Sadie West. She's my Xena Warrior Princess. She was directed to come at me in hooker gear in a back alley after eyeing me from a pay phone. She yells at me, flusters me as I straighten my hat and gather myself. After each take she apologizes under her breath so as not to ruin the audio that's still rolling. It was misleading.

Come sex time she pulls my hair, she scratches and bites. She tells me to spit in her mouth, she spits back. She makes faces that make you wonder if any mortal could restrain her and just when you think you've finally got her pegged you get thrown off course again when you realize that she manages to remain flawless through it all. Her pussy, sloppy as I've made it, still looks perfect. Her make-up hasn't moved. Her fucking hair isn't even frizzy. It could drive a man to drink. Luckily I gave that up a little under a week ago.

giving up the drink

2009-11-10T18:09:00.000-08:00

I'm giving up alcohol. Not because someone staged an intervention. Not because I woke up with (another) lame tattoo. Not because I hit rock bottom. I'm giving it up because I'm a wimp.

It's the hangovers. I get them when I take Advil PM and I get them when I smoke a hookah and I get them every single time I drink without fail. I drink often enough. Social situations breed cosmopolitans and my job consists mostly of social situations lately. And I do like cosmos. I was in Vegas last week for Adultcon. The first night I had a few drinks. A few means 3. I didn't finish two of them. I woke up with my head pounding and didn't touch alcohol for the rest of that trip.

From there I went to New Orleans. Of all the cities in the world to give up alcohol I think New Orleans was the most taunting one I could have chosen to test my will against. A coy tease if you will. But I did it. Kinda. I did it until the last night when I was forced to order a Hurricane from a famous bar. I had to try it he said. I'd get to keep the glass. I ordered the Hurricane while dueling pianos playing ominously in the background.

30 minutes later I had sipped a half inch off the top of a 9 inch glass. I was done. We dumped out the rest and boxed up my souvenir "I drink in New Orleans and here's my proof" glass. 4 hours later my alarm went off and as I packed for the airport I cursed hurricanes and cosmos and all things alcoholic and once again worked through the undeserved pounding in the back of my head.

Friends

2009-11-02T11:28:00.000-08:00

I’ve always had friends that I could disagree with. They have their funky religious views and political views and social views or I don’t like the people they date or the fact that they eat veal in restaurants or I think their taste in movies sucks but they’re still my friends nevertheless. Sometimes we fight about whether I’m an ass because I’m bad at keeping in touch or whether they’re an ass because they’re needy and maybe we’re both asses and we just don’t want to admit it but after we’ve bickered about it over dinner and run around the issue in circles we can leave knowing we’ll still be friends in the morning.

I haven’t spoken to one of my best friends in the world in almost a year because we had the same fight we always have and I’ll never get her and she’ll never get me but we’ve been doing this for 12 years and I miss the hell out of her and that’s why it keeps going. I have others that I haven’t spoken to in almost a year but when we meet up again it will be like there was no lapse at all. We don’t need to keep in touch to like being around each other when our paths cross.

There are people I can confide in, people who I don’t agree with or who don’t agree with me but it makes for good conversation. I love Ayn Rand but sometimes I really get Lenin and one of the most introspective people I’ve ever met in this industry talked to me about Buddhism and his religious tattoos while I read Nietzsche and I was fascinated by him. I keep changing. Just when I think I’ve finally taken a solid position on something I’ll learn something new and it will throw a wrench in the whole thing and I’ll have to start over. Friends are good for that. They keep you updated on their view of the world and give you a chance to jump in.

Sometimes I don’t jump though. Sometimes I think people are batty but I love them and on at least an equal number of occasions I’ve been certifiably insane but they’ve loved me too. People get emotional and operate within their own constructs from their own perspectives and if you haven’t been there you can’t definitively say whether they’re right or wrong. You shouldn’t have to though. I’m a big advocate of personal responsibility and whatever decisions my friends make are entirely their decisions but it doesn’t mean I’m not there to talk about it.

That gets me to the point of this blog. I’ve taken a lot of crap for my association with Mike South. We were originally put in touch because of his ties to Adam and Eve at the time and my interest in a contract with them. During the interview process we talked a lot and it turned into a weird friendship. I knew nothing about his blog or who he was in the industry. The only thing I knew was that he was immediately helpful when I was a complete stranger and has been available to talk 24 hours a day ever since, and especially when I’ve needed someone to talk to most. He has never been on my payroll or held any official title with me, there has never been anything sexual between us, but he has always been there to talk me through everything from the most serious and personal to the most useless and random. Months after my contract with Adam and Eve was in place he invited me to write for his site and I was happy to. That’s when I learned that it’s best not to hold public opinions.

The thing I didn’t expect is that I would start being tied to everything that ended up on his site whether I was aware that it was even posted or not, much less whether I agreed or not. I have tried to make a passive effort at distancing myself from his blog because of this. I do not write for it. I do not have an affiliate link from it and generally I try not to read it or any industry sites for that matter. Mike and I have had screaming matches over this issue but there is no simple resolution. Either I have a public association with MikeSouth.com and deal with the consequences of that or I don’t. I do not want to deal with the consequences of other people’s opinions. It has nothing to do with my feelings about that person or anyone else. I just don’t want to answer for things I have no control over. It’s hard not to laugh when people think I’m somehow Mike’s puppet master. He was posting controversial blogs long before I came along and he will be doing so long after I’m gone. He’s had good relationships with people and he’s had bad relationships with people and regardless of their standing with him he’s never been someone you can control and I am one on a long list of people who can attest to that.

Damn holidays make me nostalgic

2009-10-30T16:00:00.000-07:00

I’m on a signing at the A&E store in Tempe, Arizona right now. I had them drop me off at Starbucks so I could study, knock out a few papers, catch up on emails and generally kill time on the computer. I have yet to actually begin one of those papers and most of my emails were spam but I’m really OK with how it’s all working out. I’m working through a short-term burn out after all the traveling, not that I would undo any of it. Not many jobs will pay you to drink in Paris.

I had a free afternoon after I got home last week. I spent most of it studying for midterms knowing I would be going straight from set to the tests and would have no time to catch up on reading otherwise, but eventually I burnt myself out on that too and decided to just jump on my bike and ride around downtown. At this moment in my world there is nothing better than a free afternoon to ride my bike through the third world of LA with the street vendors rolled out on the sidewalks and whole families set up beside a grill selling hot dogs wrapped in bacon on the corners. It feels like I’m crossing the border into another country when I cross the street from Main to Los Angeles and into Santee Alley.

I never leave without a reality check. Part of me envies the kids working side by side with their parents or watching their younger siblings while they play with brooms or toys and their mothers work next to their fathers and their father’s fathers or uncles or brothers or sisters and they all sit around and talk and play cards between customers or walk up and down between shops to visit friends and neighbors. They bring their pets in and put their youngest down to nap in the back room and at the end of the day I assume they go home and cook big dinners with their big families and they may not be rich and they may be uprooted from their own countries but they’re together through it all. I’m their opposite. I’m not clipping coupons and I was born in California, I look so California by foreign standards that I’m greeted with disbelief when I show up without a surfboard strapped to my ankle but at the end of the day my family is 8 hours away by car and my sister is backpacking Europe without a cell phone or reliable internet access and my mother just learned how to text and it’s not unreasonable to think that I may not hear her voice until the next major holiday.

I grew up with a big extended family. My grandparents live in a 5 bedroom house and they had 5 kids who turned around and bought their own big houses for their kids but on Christmas and Thanksgiving and Easter and birthdays we would all end up back at the 5 bedroom house with the lab named Caesar and the old wood stove that never went without a fire and every bed and every couch in every room would be filled with people in sleeping bags and old blankets on those nights. Then my aunt and uncle moved with their kids to Australia, others went on mission trips, others started rotating visits with their in-laws and before you knew it I was living in Southern CA and my grandparents stopped hosting holidays and I really miss waking up to my cousins squealing and running around in footed pajamas on Christmas morning.

What happens in Paris....

2009-10-19T17:15:00.001-07:00

I’m in Paris for the Hot D’or awards and so far the time change has not been kind to me. I slept 7 hours the night before my flight, 4 hours on the plane to Cincinnati, then 7 hours to Paris…. 3 hours later I went back to bed for 4 hours, woke up for dinner, laid awake all night recovering from the wine, and then fell asleep when the sun came up and was forced out of bed at noon. Now it’s 2 am and I want nothing more than to go to the gym. My eyes are sore. I’m slightly curious if it’s from oversleeping but I’m not motivated enough to find out. Granted, I was able to sleep off most of a 24 hour flu in that time, but either way it’s left me feeling like a bum up until now. Now I feel like a crackhead.

Good things about Paris: Food, wine, endless supply of fuckable people.
Bad things about Paris: Euro exchange rate, I have to leave on Wednesday.

I can’t get enough of these Frenchmen. We have a natural attraction. I have chemistry with the whole goddam country. I can’t go 5 feet without a cheesy line in a smooth accent or one or both of us blushing when we hold eye contact for too long. Poor Katy is pulling me off. I advised her to take an insurance policy out on me in case I don’t make it back.

On the other hand it’s probably best that I’m leaving Wednesday. If I have too many days here I will eat myself out of the dating pool…. I don’t know how they do it but it seems like this nation of skinny people with perfect complexions eat dessert after every single meal, along with wine, bread, and cheese dipped in carbs and covered in cream based sauce. I am not one of these super humans. I cannot sustain this decadence.

I’ve decided what happens in Paris stays in Paris…. Right down to the calories.

150 men and a cow

2009-10-14T22:53:00.000-07:00

A while ago I said I wanted to be a Native America Indian when I grew up, except with horses and without European colonization. I meant it. They really had it down.

I’ve refined this dream though. What I want is the stateless society back. The feather headpieces and the teepees were cool but it’s the environment that was ideal, without full time politicians and people displaced from the land and fears of old age and lost jobs. They had more stability than anyone today can ever hope to have because they had the ability to go straight to the source for their needs—the land. Even if you bought six thousand acres, cash, and moved your mother and your father and your 5 kids and your family cow out there and tilled the land and camped out in your teepee you’d still be strapped to western society because there is still property tax—and that has to be paid in currency that you can’t grow on corn. You’d still have to report back to someone and stay savvy enough about changing legal codes and zoning and tax laws and everything else not to lose what you’ve already paid for. And if you want to homeschool your 5 kids because you think it’s fucked up that American schools don’t ever teach about their own internment camps during WW2 or explain why the rest of the world is irritated with us or that they require children to learn how to use pastels in art class but not how to protect themselves financially in a world that they will be eventually forced to deal with then you’re gonna have to file paperwork for that too… and you’re gonna have to check in periodically with the government to let them know how things are coming along with your kids. You can never buy yourself out of your government.

Stateless societies didn’t have prisons or militaries or large-scale social unrest—but they didn’t have a frictional gap between rich and poor either. They were real democracies with real freedoms. They had strong social connections and youth was good but wisdom was better and life wasn’t seen as something that was slipping away but something that was only richer in time. Granted, women died in childbirth and men could die from an infection and kids could die just because they were kids and that’s unfortunate but it was quick and it was unexpected. Now we die chronically and slowly from radiation and pollution and artificial ingredients and stress that was never meant to be put on the body for long periods of time. We die from the inside out of cancer over years while suffering from the side effects of medication that won’t make it better but slow it down. We die en masse because of genocide and epidemics and famine all stemming from over population and an uneven distribution of resources. And kids still die just because they’re kids… we just can’t see past the borders of developed nations and neither can anyone else.

If anyone wants to buy me a sovereign island somewhere in the pacific I’ve already started designing the flag and shopping for cows. We’ll need to import a tribal population of about 150 to make it fun.

my scientific method

2009-10-12T14:13:00.001-07:00

I’m going to start petitioning for 3am shoots for the rest of my career. I did an informal in-my-head survey and it turns out that my best scenes have all been shot after dark, with the exception of the other best scenes that were at least shot in the afternoon but with my favorite performers. I’m no good in the morning. The threesome with Evan Stone and Violet Marcell in 8th Day wrapped at 4am. The one with Randy Spears in the second installment of ‘Flight Attendants’ wrapped after midnight. My favorite POV BJ on my site was shot no earlier than 3am. This is rigid scientific research I’m doing here and I think I’m on to something.

It’s not just porn. I don’t do morning sex nearly as often as I do oh-my-god-I-can’t-believe-it’s-already-3-in-the-morning sex. That may be partly due to the fact that I tend to spend my mornings either sleeping or sitting in airports but I did some research and it’s largely due to the fact that I’m female and therefore crazy and subject to hormonal swings that leave me horniest when the stunt cock is most likely to be well into his REM phase. This sucks because that same research revealed that boys’ hormonal swings are exactly the opposite and leave them doing that subtle poke-you-in-the-back-with-a-gentle-rocking-motion when your alarm isn’t set to go off for another hour. Further proof that god did not make us and we are biological accidents and if orgasms weren’t so awesome the race would wither and die.

Fantasies or lack thereof

2009-10-02T14:14:00.000-07:00

Porn interviews don’t have much variation. Sometimes they throw a curve ball in the form of a political question and even more rarely history or math but even then it’s not for the answer it’s for the reaction—can the porn chick add two and two and does she know what the Warsaw Pact is. They prefer if you don’t. Get creative. Giggle and say balls. Or Megan Fox. Then they get back to the cookie cutter questions about how many orgasms we can have and which position we like and how old we were when we started having sex and if you really want to have fun with it you can give a different answer every time so people will start comparing notes and scratching their heads. Here’s the one that always stumps me though: “what is your fantasy.”

I dunno.

I really do say that. I don’t know what my fantasy is. It used to be a B/B/G hookup. Two guys one girl all mine. Then one day, many many weeks into the epically long filming of “The 8th Day”, I started part one of a two-part scene. In the storyline I’m coming out of a euphoria and I round the corner into a room of gorgeous men and I have one and then he’s not enough so I have another and he’s still not enough and as I’m about to move on to the third the euphoria wears off and I realize that my gorgeous men aren’t really gorgeous men and I run out screaming. So the director calls action and I dive in throat first and it’s wonderful like always and it keeps going and going and I become more and more aware of the one watching with his dick in his hand (because the other two are there as props for part 1) and suddenly I reach over and pull him in and he’s not quite sure how to react but he most definitely doesn’t say no and I hear the director under his breath telling everyone “don’t stop rolling.”

And so there went my fantasy. I lived it. It was good. I did it again in a second movie not long after and I’d do it a third time. I expected to get the most selfish sex of my life but it’s the complete opposite and somehow it still works for me. It’s very hard to keep two men satisfied at once. They’re selfish creatures by nature.

But now I don’t have a new fantasy to fill the void. I hear other girls in the industry talking about theirs and phrases like “100 guy gang bangs” get tossed around and one likes chloroform but I just haven’t found mine yet and I feel displaced. I’m open to suggestions though. I think “2 girls 1 cup” was the pinnacle of organic sexual creativity and not in a good way. Now we have CGI in porn and fantasies are involving technology. This is a new day dreaming era. People will see Belladonna slay a giant worm in Pirates 2 and next thing you know there will be a demand for interactive DVDs with talking putty-like insects. Times are changing. I need to catch up.

No me gusta

2009-09-19T12:38:00.001-07:00

Spanish always gets the best of me. I dropped the damn class again. I know at the end of the day I’m just being a wimp but I really don’t like foreign language classes when there are so many other classes out there that I actually look forward to. The polisci class makes me giddy. The business law class is sadly accompanied by one very uninterested and monotone professor so that makes it less stellar but the book is pleather bound and that somehow makes up for it. The health class is a random stupid requirement but I don’t hate it because I’d have to work out anyway. These classes are all once a week. But Spanish…. There are problems with Spanish.

The first issue is the fact that this is the third time I’ve signed up and dropped it. The first time I just plain didn’t want to do it and the last two times I’ve still just plain not wanted to do it coupled with scheduling issues around it. Oh and I’ve never gotten along with a Spanish professor. They sense my distaste.

The scheduling issues are legitimate though. Foreign language classes require an ungodly amount of face time in class and when I signed up the second time it was a 4 day a week class and I was living in San Diego and working in LA and something had to give. Spanish gave. This time around I thought I’d be smart and get a Monday/Wednesday class at three hours running time apiece. Then I missed both Monday and Wednesday because I went out of town last minute and got scheduled for a bit part on a mainstream show the following Monday, as well as a trip to Paris for the Hot Video awards in October, which meant I would miss another Monday and Wednesday. I’m not a math major but I added it up and that seemed like more than the three allowable absences that were very clearly vocalized on day one. He said he would drop anyone who missed more. I just beat him to the punch.

The funny thing is between all of my false starts I have the alphabet and numbers down seamlessly. Me llama Kayden. Soy ventiquattro anos. Mucho Gusto.

Maybe eventually they’ll just add it all up and let me move on.

Birthdays

2009-09-19T01:35:00.000-07:00

It’s my birthday. Or it was my birthday anyway. I got distracted and ended up blogging in pieces. I am disappointed either way. I feel like the intensity that I crossed my fingers with and made a wish on a candle about this time last year should have guaranteed a successful outcome, but clearly this has not happened because I’m sitting here in wonderment at the fact that yet again, I am another year older.

I don’t like this whole birthday thing. It’s a harsh method. Yes, I got to spend it in Hawaii doing Hawaiian things and doing them buzzed on Hawaiian drinks, but the concept of aging an entire year in a day still just doesn’t sit right with me.

I remember being 5 years old on the morning of my birthday and rushing down the hall because there were gifts and most likely an extremely unhealthy sugary breakfast waiting to reward me for merely staying alive long enough to mark off another year. I looked forward to ticking them off. Soon I would be six, and that meant bigger things and more freedoms. I had a bike now and the ways that could be topped the next year made my head spin. My mom laughed and turned to her friend and promised that soon enough I’d be wishing they’d stop coming and her friend laughed knowingly back at her and I thought there must be something deeply wrong with both of them because by the time you were turning numbers like 30 you were probably receiving gifts on a scale that I was not even aware of yet.

OK. I get it and it scares me that I can take some things from my mother’s perspective now. I started fearing birthdays around 18. I figured it would be best to stop there. But then I turned 21 and that was my new ending point. And then 22… 23. Now 24. Ewww. But this is it. I will not age another year from here on out.

The problem with this goal is two-fold. The first issue is that I have neither the supernatural ability to interfere with time nor the mental instability to believe otherwise (but I do keep trying to believe otherwise). The second is that I don’t think I have the attention span to stay my age for more than a year at a time anyway. I definitely would not want to be 18 again. Or even 21. They were both fun years but I don’t think they’d be fun as a repeat. It would just be fun to keep looking 21. I’m working on it.

By the way cardio sucks.

Another book made me happy and tingly all over

2009-09-04T17:46:00.000-07:00

This is why I read.

“I can believe in things that are true and I can believe in things that are not true and I can believe in things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen—I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and the bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, and that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to go hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to life, and that while all human life is sacred there is nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game and that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and you might as well sit back and enjoy it.”

--Neil Gaiman, American Gods

The answer is Megan Fox.

2009-09-02T22:46:00.000-07:00

Today was day two of the Fall 09 semester. In logical order yesterday was day one and I realized it about an hour before my first class was scheduled to start. I have 12 units on the roster again and I hate six of them. I love the other six though, despite the $250 books and the fact that they each run for three hours straight. I love them so much that I looked forward to losing a beauty pageant of sorts just to be on time today.

The “pageant”: It started off as a cattle call. Thousands of applicants were narrowed down to 50 and 50 down to 8. I made it that far. The problem with making it that far though is that my alarm went off at 5am this morning. Very few things are worth 5am traumatic wake up sirens and this barely teetered on the edge.

I got up though and found my way to a rented out bar with a room full of half naked Playboy quality chicks. If I’ve just given life to your personal fantasy I don’t blame you. Feel free to covet at this point. Hours later we hobbled down a series of winding staircases in red-soled pumps and silver bangles and presented ourselves to a round of judges and a surprise audience. This was the trivia portion. If we made it to the next round we’d be demonstrating a “uniq ue talent”. Thank god I didn’t make it that far because I do not have one.

The “questions”: I got lucky. Things could have been much worse. The professional cheerleader next to me matched players with teams and trophies with years effortlessly as she tossed her perfectly smooth hair over her perfectly tanned shoulder. The two to the right smacked down questions about the Simpsons and drinking games and things they couldn’t say they “never have I ever” done. Cheers to the chick with the personal sex tape floating around. And me? I knew what a “shart” was. Woo Hoo. They had the cool trivia and I had more things related to buttholes primed and ready on the tip of my tongue.

There were things I didn’t know. I didn’t know who owned the Lakers and I still don’t. Megan Fox. When in doubt the answer is always Megan Fox. That’s what I learned from the guys I asked about guy knowledge. They immediately hit me with a follow up question. “Who coaches the Lakers?” Megan Fox. Duh.

And then there were the open-ended questions. What super power would we have and why…. And of course, have we ever been with a girl. The girls around me had kissed a few, drunk or at least surrounded by other drunk people. The cute little cheerleader confided that she had never actually sealed the deal…. And then there was me. I’ve sealed many a deal. I said so. I got that racy cheer from the crowd. That would be my claim to fame for the day.

So I didn’t make it to the final round. The girls who knew every character and every level of every bestselling video game for the past five years and the girls who knew that Homer Simpson drinks Duff Beer at Moe’s made it to the final round. I smiled broadly and clapped and slipped out the back door, happy for the publicity and the chance to duck out on demonstrating my non existent talent, and mostly because I was going to be on time for the six units I don’t hate.

Gone Fishing

2009-08-28T07:37:00.001-07:00

I’ve been traveling a bit lately. I’ve actually been through six states this week. The weekend was spent in Sacramento and Monday in LA preparing for another week away from home. Yesterday was one of those all day travel days. I was awake at 4am to get to the airport to fly to Atlanta and then from there we were on the road for 3 ½ hours with an interview in between in Alabama. I got into bed around 2am in Florida and was up again at 4am for my first deep-sea fishing trip. From here I’ll fly to Albany, NY out of Tallahassee for a feature over the weekend. Somewhere in there I lost a day and as far as I’m concerned it was Tuesday until about 5pm when I realized it was Wednesday and I was at the edge of the continental shelf with no cell reception and no laptop and everybody on board including myself was much more concerned with the 7 ft shark flopping around on the end of a hook.

Exhale. We turned the shark loose. I found that I’m not a great fisherman. While they were casting nets for live bait I was rescuing the little crabs that got drug in too. Then I immediately got cited for pretending that a fish flipped out of my hand and back into the water. They’d catch them, I’d throw them back in when they weren’t looking. They broke that habit fast. They couldn’t get me to bait the hooks with live fish through the eyes and they couldn’t get me to pose next to the big fish that I caught because I thought they looked like they were in pain swinging around like that in the air. Then they told me they didn’t feel it and I told them that just because the fish didn’t complain it doesn’t mean he didn’t feel the steel tearing through his flesh. I know. Hypocritical. I reeled them in in the first place.

We hit one reef that was filled with red snapper. I’d get a bite as fast as I could drop the line. It was hard to save those ones though, or at least at first. The change in pressure from being drug in would literally make them pop. So then I slowed it down. I got teased. I bonded with the fish and tossed them back unpopped. They were my favorite to catch because it was illegal to keep them.

The man who owned the boat found my cause entertaining. I thought one fish’s eye fell out and freaked out when they had the video camera rolling. And of course there were the popped fish. He told me the fish just had hemorrhoids. There were jellyfish floating around us everywhere we went. He leaned over the edge of the boat and sliced a piece off the top of one and ate it raw. He told me it tasted like jalapenos and that now it wasn’t aerodynamic and would just swim in circles for the rest of it’s life. I reeled in a remora and they tried to stick it to me. FYI a remora has a vacuum for a chin and likes to attach itself to the sides of sharks like a suction cup. Strange feeling.

I lost one of my pet snappers to a barracuda, or at least that’s what I was told. I caught him. I felt him put up a token fight on the line and then suddenly I felt like I had hooked a monster. The pole bowed down and almost took me overboard and the next instant he was just a normal fish again until I wound him up out of the water and there he was, still blinking at me, because the head was all that was left of him. I was traumatized.

So now I’m back on land. I have more fish than I know what to do with, partly because I don’t cook and partly because I’d feel bad eating them anyway. We went from there to the showers to a seafood dinner (because out of 10 restaurants at this beach, 10 of them serve seafood). As I scanned the menu I imagined the blank little faces of the grouper and the flounder and the snapper and I settled on scallops and now I fear I may be forced into a temporary vegan diet if we happen to dive for scallops tomorrow.

Modern Day Kinsey

2009-08-26T21:24:00.000-07:00

I sometimes wonder what happened to the sex people used to have, or even if people used to have the sex I think people used to have. I know at one time pajamas were made with buttons over the naughty bits so sex could be had without being naked. Then again they also practiced blood-letting and burned witches at the stake around that time. That is one century that could very well be written off as being wrong about everything. It’s not what I compare today’s stunts to though. I think of 50’s sex as a comparison. Missionary style. Quiet. Slow motion. Lights off. Quick. Married. Or that’s how I imagine it anyway. I wasn’t there.

It seems like it’s all about extremes now. More people and toys and positions and holes and noise and it’s all bigger stronger faster. It’s fun on set when the whole industry is trying to outdo itself. Then I get one of those porn guys home and the lights may be on and it may last all night and there may not be a ring on my finger but they want missionary. They want it slow. And yes, quiet.

I met one of the sweetest girls I know on the set of Playboy Night Calls. She was there to promote her new movie, specifically a bukkake scene she did in which 84 guys came on her face and as her mouth filled up she spit it into a blender—“just cum, spit and lube” as she described it—and yes, they blended that mixture right up and gave her a straw. Does that even happen in real life? Wouldn’t you have to rent out a banquet hall just to accommodate all involved? Do you send out e-vites? How do you deal with the fashionably late? The sheer logistics of it make my head spin.

Fetishes and niches. That’s what’s popular now. We’re over the centerfold, the quest for the perfect girl who won’t spread her legs for the camera but will grace us with a tasteful shot of her tits. Now we want the perfect rush. We swing. We suck on toes. We sexualize shoes and costumes. We love MILFs and anything else we’re not getting in real life. I just wonder what we’re all doing in real life. Forget what we search for or create in porn. Is everyone out there arranging gang bangs and pony parties or do people still settle down after a long day’s work and have a quickie with the same person they’ve been having quickies with since before threesomes became popular and we all forgot what girls looked like with a full bush.

Then there is BDSM. I get it. It’s hot. It’s fun to watch. Holy damn it’s a lot of work. The ties and the gags and the masks and the whips and cages and electronic things and leather furniture and harnesses and wands that shock you instead of releasing little magic sparkles like we all grew up believing when we saw the good witch of the west. The transportation and expense alone is a little masochistic. I’ve only met one couple in my life that had all the bells and whistles. But they live together and they’ve been in the industry for 50 years combined. They’ve had time to stock up and it’s all a write off. How do everyday people with desk jobs do it?

I’m thinking I’m gonna hit the streets with an informal survey and a mouth guard. I’ll ask people how many exposed hard ons they’ve been in a room with at once and whether they own any leather props specifically made for sex or any machines that have been featured on Howard Stern. I will be the Kinsey of modern day.

The hangover

2009-08-23T20:03:00.000-07:00

I woke up to a hotel phone ringing and a maid trying to walk in. I was fully clothed except for my shoes, which were set tidily at the side of my bed. My feet were covered in lotion and there was a person asleep in the bed next to me. I kicked the maid out and looked around me. The phone gave up. My laptop case was on the desk, unopened. My bag was by the door, also unopened. My iPhone was charging in the far corner next to a table full of empty martini glasses. That made sense considering I didn’t remember getting a hotel room last night.

I flipped the covers off of the other person. My friend was dead asleep. I checked for signs of life and then the clock. 10:30am. She was supposed to be at work at 8. I made it into the bathroom and washed my face, brushed my teeth, chugged a bottle of water and stripped out of last night’s clothes then called my aunt. She was the last person we’d been out with. She answered the phone laughing and asked how I felt. I asked why. She asked if I remembered anything. I remembered ordering a cosmo. OK a few cosmos. She laughed again as I got another call and clicked over. My buddy was on his way to the airport and wanted to say hi before he left because he’d missed me last night. I apologized and told him my phone had died. I told him I was about to order coffee and he was welcome to stop by. He asked where I was. I clicked back over to my aunt and asked where I was. Sheraton, Downtown Sacramento. I clicked back over and he said he’d be there in 5 minutes. Back on the other line my aunt started quizzing me about the night before but I couldn’t remember a thing so she filled me in. There was dancing. Lots of dancing. Mostly on my part but I pulled her boss’s friend into it to and apparently we were an object of interest. Guys hi-fived him. Girls gave me dirty looks. I spilled a drink down my shirt. I hit on a MILF for him. I hit on a gym instructor for her. They all thought it was for me. We drank more.

At one point I guess I decided that I couldn’t drive back to my friend’s place and needed a hotel room. Good call. The boss’s friend drove my rental two blocks down to the Sheraton with all of us piled in the back. I made it just far enough to put my card on the room before getting distracted by the hotel bar. More cosmos. My aunt recounted what she could. We mediated a fighting couple. I ran guys off who tried to talk to my sister. I spilled another drink down my shirt. I tried to fight the guy who used it as a reason to grab my boob (“look your boob is wet,” grope). There was some philosophical conversation. A French guy named Yawn tried to take my aunt home because he likes red hair and white dresses. The bar closed.

I’ve already forgotten most of what she said we did but as she went on the phone beeped again. My buddy was downstairs and wanted to know what room number I was in. I opened my door to look at the number as the room service guy was about to knock. I told him room 1328 and clicked back over to tell my aunt goodbye then turned my attention to room service. “We didn’t order room service,” I said. Wrong room. He checked his paperwork and it confirmed that he was at the right room. He said it was a breakfast pre-order from the night before. Oh. I asked what it was. A bagel and lox and poached eggs. I explained that there is no way I ordered it. He showed me the order that had been filled out and signed. It was my signature. As we went back and forth about room service I had no interest in, the friend made it upstairs and looked at me quizzically then stepped around the man and through the door. It occurred to me at that point that all I wasn’t wearing any clothes. He took it from there and sent the room service guy away.

All of the noise woke up the other girl. She rolled over groggily and asked what time it was but before I could answer she followed it with “oh my god what’s wrong with the bed!” Nothing. It was fine for me. “I’m all wet!” she jumped up and started pulling her clothes off. Then she realized she’d been lying in a pool of her own urine.

We burst out laughing as she ran shrieking into the bathroom. I debated on ordering room service after the little episode we’d just had and finally decided to just call and act like nothing had happened. The lady who answered made me swear that I really meant it this time and I assured her that I really really intended to take the food if she sent it up. She begrudgingly obliged.

Friend number 2 asked what happened last night. I don’t know. I tried to explain it and failed as I checked my texts. They were not good. It was basically just a random spattering of letters that I had sent out to a random spattering of people. The one that was legible said something to the effect of “I look like a pirate because I’m texting with one eye closed”. There was something about foot massages too. I was relieved to find that I had not drunk tweeted anything but I did send an email. I sent a follow up ‘just kidding’ email and got my aunt back on the phone.

I figured there had to be a grand finale to this story. The night had to have ended with a two-headed turtle race or a gypsy or sex with a midget. She confirmed that one guy took a strong interest in my feet and gave me a full service foot bath and massage with really awesome lotion. She said I went off about healthcare. I waited for the good part of the story but it didn’t come. Finally I interrupted her. What else? She laughed again. There is nothing else. “You fell asleep you pansy.”

I did my porn research

2009-08-18T11:19:00.001-07:00

Adam and Eve is finally rolling out with “The 8th Day”. Now it has a Twitter page. Yes. My porn tweets (twitter.com/The8thDayXXX). The signings are starting. The back seat of my truck is littered with posters. And then as I was leaving set the other day my truck was also filled with 6 very big boxes of porn. Bruce gave me a box of markers and a smile. Sign them.

OK. I have a system down now. I open the box. I unwrap each individual porn gem until they’re all unpacked and then go back and sign them as I lay each one back down to dry. Then I pack them up and start again. After box #2 I incorporated ‘half time’ into the mix. So now after each box I fuck around on the Internet to let the muscle spasms in my hands relax. And that’s how I ended up on Craigslist.

I’ve been frequenting Craigslist lately because I want an Eames lounge chair and ottoman with rosewood and black leather. I want one from Herman Miller. Bad. It’s a sickness. But once again the Craigslist furniture ads failed me and I wasn’t ready to open up another box, and that’s when I saw the personal ads. Women seeking men. I clicked.

I posted. “What would make you pay for porn.” That was the headline. The body of the message was simple: If porn is free, what would get you to pay for it? I linked it to an anonymous email address and went back to signing my very unfree porn. I had 52 responses this morning. Here’s what they said:

Alexa Blowhard Sexy Teen Model wrote:

“Really simple

if you want to see my n@ked or f%ck me. go to my twitter account

I have pictures of me. If you like me great I have a few young friends that are trying to meet guys

We are Escorts that are very Horny. No membership site and We do not tell your wifes anything. Just good times and great head.

otherwise play with your own d!ck

Call me if your cute.
I have a young friend if you want to hookup”

And then someone representing himself as an agent told me he’d have to start me out at $500 a scene but once I got a good reputation I could get up to $5,000 a scene.

And about ten people told me how big their dicks were and sent me their phone numbers.

Then there were the spattering of emails to the effect of “Nothing. It’s free. Duh.”

2 guys said they’d pay if they could fuck the girls themselves. One requested Abbey Brooks.

And finally there were the valuable responses:

3 people said they’d pay to see live shows. 2 of them mentioned solo girl live shows. I responded to those with www.clubkayden.com. I couldn’t help myself.

3 people said they’d pay if it was actually good quality. But they didn’t define good quality by full-length movies complete with acting and special effects. They defined it by the word “believable”. Believable orgasms and believable scenarios.

Then 2 more said they would pay for the full-length movies complete with acting and special effects.

1 guy said he’d pay if it wasn’t so crappy and they charged a realistic price for it.

And then there was the guy who said he always paid for porn because he didn’t trust the free stuff not to infect his computer with viruses.

The end. They flagged and deleted my post.