Friday, December 24, 2004

I hope everyone is having a nice Christmas Eve. I am, but even so, there are times when one is ready for a break from all things red and green, so, here you go...

The new column and the Kink Calendar are up, so check those out…

There is apparently an article in The New York Times Sunday magazine on blogs, sex, dating and privacy. I don't have a password set up, and I don't want to deal with it while I'm traveling (and using Max's laptop), so I haven't read it yet. Perhaps some kind person will come back and give us a review.

Who says it's just Americans who are uptight? A city in Mexico has passed a law banning indoor nudity. Hey, maybe they're going for zero population growth. Or maybe some politician has a body-odor fetish. ..

On a cheerful note: Annie Sprinkle is getting married! (To a woman.) I've hung out a tiny bit with Annie and she is one of the sweetest, nicest people you could ever meet. She has such a sense of loving kindness about her, you can't help but smile and feel good when you're around her.

I once got a very clear demonstration of just what a kind and sweet person Annie is. She was doing a show here in Seattle several years ago when she got word that her home, a houseboat, had caught fire and that almost everything she owned had been burned up.
Had this happened to me, I would have completely flipped out. But Annie, while clearly sad, stayed very calm, and she completed her performance schedule in Seattle. To watch her perform, you would never know she'd just suffered a major personal loss. The reason the fire started was because a housesitter left a candle burning unattended, but she had no harsh words about the person responsible, just saying that it was an accident and that she was sure they felt terrible about it.

Now, I think I'm usually a pretty kind person. But damn, if someone caught my house on fire, I'd be beyond furious with them. So I think Annie Sprinkle is an person with an usual gift for loving kindness and forgiveness, and I wish her joy and happiness in her marriage.

Thursday, December 23, 2004

Some Brief Observations En Route, In Chronological Order…

1. Whatever type of drugs the guys who work at the MasterPark lot in Seattle are taking, I want some. It was still dark outside when we were getting on the shuttle to the airport, and those guys were a) abnormally cheerful, and b) slinging my 70-pound suitcase around like they were having a pillow fight. Unbelievable…

2. Speaking of drugs…I’m not a big fan of cartoons, but even in a deep Xanax-induced haze, with no sound, the movie “A Sharks Tale” looks amusing. Perhaps I will actually see it sometime when I’m not on a plane, and am thus coherent.

3. The 3-hour stretch of Highway 16 in between Macon and Savannah is the most empty, boring, godforsaken stretch of nothing I’ve ever seen. I’ve been driving it at least once a year for fifteen years now, and it looks exactly the same – like the flat, brown, ass-end of nowhere. There are hardly any radio stations, and god knows there's no cell signal. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to stick your head out the window of the car to see if the wheels are really moving, because the landscape just doesn’t look any different.

4. Tybee Island, Georgia doesn’t look much different than it did fifteen years ago either. I can’t decide if this is charming or scary. This is a town my brother once described as being “kinda like Mayberry on acid.” And he’s right.

5. Atlanta, on the other hand, looks different every time I see it. It’s a bitch because I rely on landmarks (turn right at the Publix next to that big blue building with the awning) to remember how to get to my mother’s house, and if they keep building and changing stuff, that system is going to go to hell.

6. My mom generally asks me about twice per visit if Max and I have any plans to get married. She’s already done so once this trip. But she was very sweet about, really, so I don’t mind…

Tuesday, December 21, 2004

So, here I am at my father’s house in beautiful, sunny coastal Georgia, the food is great, the people are nice, and I’m going nuts because I have to use a DIAL-UP internet connection. I think I’ve lived in Seattle too long to ever leave.

I’ll be driving back up to Atlanta tomorrow, which, while it’s slap in the middle of The Redneck Heaven State, now seems like a futuristic paradise compared to the Beach Town That Time Forgot where my dad lives. Why couldn’t he have lived on Hiltonhead, for god’s sake? My mother, at least, has a wireless network.

Meanwhile, if you didn’t see it on Monk’s blog, here’s that local-access TV thingie he and I both appeared on a couple of weeks ago, Sex Life Live with Dane Ballard. I come on about halfway through the show for the part where I talk a bit, and then later I sort of help Monk tie up Dane. It's amusing.

Be aware, though, even with high-speed, it’ll take a while to download. I suggest you click on the link, and then pause the video and go do something else while it loads. I mean like - have dinner or something. The file is big, and the server is clearly not very fast.

And now I should post this before the connection craps out on me. More soon, I hope...

Sunday, December 19, 2004

So, as I mentioned, I'm going to be out of town - in Georgia, to be exact, visiting my family for a week. I'm leaving tomorrow, so I should be packing right now, except I think I'm still in some type of denial that I'm really getting on a plane and (more or less) voluntarily going to the place I regard as the Birthplace of All Things Redneck. Jesus.

Still, it's better than having them come here. When I go there, it's simpler to get myself into the appropriate mom-visiting headspace, which is: I do anything she wants. Yes, it's true: my mother is more dominant than I am.

I'm not giving her what she really wants, you understand, which is for me to move back to Georgia, preferably into a house not more than a mile away from her. I have gently informed my mother that if it somehow came down to: either I join the National Guard, or I move back to Georgia - well, then I'd be off buying body armor with my signing bonus.

So that's not going to happen. But otherwise, when I visit, whatever she wants to do, I do it. It's just my way of saying, "Hey, thanks for not drowning me at birth." Because now that I'm a grown-up myself, and I reflect back upon some of my childhood antics, I feel sure there must have been times when that seemed, just a moment, like a lost opportunity.

And God knows I learned some very effective getting-my-way techniques from her. It's just that she's the one person in the world I can't use them on.

I'll have the laptop with me, so there will be updates throughout the week, although probably not every day...So stay tuned for scenes from "A Seattle Dominatrix in Zell Millers's Court."