The kind of morning I have to write about: or, surreal as all hell...

I won't pretend to pass this off as a post that has anything to do with any kind of blog theme. Truth is, I haven't had much time for those lately, and even when I do I've been so brain dead from all my other projects that I can't come up with anything, and I've been so wrapped up in my work and thoughts that I haven't been paying much attention to what's going on around me. So the blog has been dry.

But then, this morning, some cosmic ray or something showed up in my life. When I woke up I was in the midst of a dream involving me, my older sister, my father, and some other random people being stranded on a tropical island of some sort and seeking shelter as a storm approached. We had to wade through a swamp, past a calmly dozing row of gigantic crocodiles, and when we hit land I turned around to realize that my father had been eaten by one of them while pushing my sister out of the way. The rest of us sat to discuss what to do from there, the storm suddenly hit and we all had to run for cover to avoid being hit by lightning. There was some sort of massive half-built structure that we aimed for until we realized that it had no roof, so we had to alter our course for the trees ahead as the wind whipped up around us and the rain started pelting down. Just then I woke up, but wanted desperately to go back to sleep so I could see what would happen next. It was like a movie.

I got up and ran around crazily to get ready for work, somehow not having time for breakfast, but packing a huge lunch/dinner since I have my first session of a proofreading and copy editing class tonight at City College - my first in a series leading up to a Certificate in Publishing - and I won't have any time for dinner. So anyway, I started walking to the train very fast and heard a honk from a nearby car as it goes through an intersection. I assumed the driver was warning whoever might be at the stop sign going the other way that he was coming, but as he got up closer to me he slowed down and honked again. Ugh. Annoying. Eventually he took off again and I kept walking, only to catch up to him again as he was stopped further up the street at a red light. At which point he started shouting at me out of the window. What a nice guy. My name, however, is not "Mami."

So I got to the station right on time, only to find that my train had already passed. Way to go, MTA. Early trains are just as bad for most of us as late trains, you know. Running ahead of schedule will NOT make us like you more.

Anyway, I finally boarded a 2 train and found a spot next to an old, very angry looking Spanish woman who smelled like she was wearing an adult diaper, and that diaper was probably about due for a change. At Grand Concourse/149th I switched to the 4 train, which took its sweet time coming. In the meantime, I found a spot to stand right under the broken pipe that leaks water down into the train station all day every day, and wondered how long it would be before the ceiling caved in. I glanced down the platform to see a man with a big belly standing on the wrong side of the platform, shirtless, and talking to himself.

When the train finally came, I found a spot to stand right where a guy got on at the next stop, mumbling to himself. Great. Just what I needed. Turned out, this guy was a poet who had self-published 3 books and was selling them for $5 a piece on the subway. He spouted off some of his poetry, and it was GOOD. Not Pullitzer prize winning material, but good. I'd have bought a book if I'd had a $5 bill on me, but alas. One poem I remember is:

"The Quickest Way to Get to Riker's Island:
Take the D express train
Down to 34th Street,
And throw a brick,
Through the Macy's plate glass window."

Cute, right? So anyway, I was watching him walk down the car, selling his books and spitting poetry, and noticed as he passed a gentleman sitting, fast asleep, on one of the bench seats. He had that skin condition, the name of which always eludes me, in which his pigmentation varies in big blotches all over from black to pink. His mouth and chin and the tip of his nose were pinkish white, as was the skin around one eye, while the rest of his head was deep chocolate brown. The patterns gave him the appearance of having a muzzle, or a snout. But he looked peaceful. I noticed other people on the train looking at him, and I couldn't blame them--he was asleep after all, so he had no idea we were staring, and he was a singularly interesting looking person. I wondered if he was only pretending to be asleep to avoid the stares. Or if he was so used to them that he could relax enough on the train enough to pass out.

I got to work early, somehow, after being convinced I was late the whole way from the train. When I got in, the phone immediately started ringing and it's hardly stopped since, but I was told first thing by the guy who brings the newspapers to us on the second floor that our front desk man for the building, Steve, who has been a fixture of my mornings for 2 years now, died of a heart attack when coming up out of the subway on his way home last night. He was 54.

It struck me. Wow. No retirement party. No easy golden years. This guy who kept the building running, honestly, just stopped.

For some reason, every one of the weird events of this morning has just struck me as something significant. It's made me think about all the remarkable and weird things I've seen and done in my life. How everyone has these stories. How any moment, those stories could be silenced. It makes me want to call my parents and every person I love.

And of course it makes me want to blog.

The weirdness of my life escalates: or, it's been a while...

Well, my lovelies, it's been a while. And I don't think I've sat down for more than a few minutes of it. Well, aside from seeing "Inglourious Basterds" the other night, which I feel compelled to see again on the basis that it f-ing ROCKED. Although I have no time in which to do so. We'll see how it goes.

But, the weirdness of my life is escalating like a kid with no respect or fear for the escalator. I'm reaching dizzying heights of insanity here. I just got a TWITTER account for my new persona as a correspondent for Whack! Magazine, have been in touch with numerous folks in the adult industry about interviews over the past few weeks, have done more 'research' for my book in a very unexpected place, may have begun to be stalked by someone I met on a research outing (that has yet to be proved, though), and haven't really relaxed at all. I'm trying to figure out ways in which to get myself fired on good enough terms that I could collect unemployment, but haven't come up with anything yet. All my friends who are on unemployment seem to be living the good life, and having just spent the past two days being wildly productive at writing while at home, I think I may want to try their lifestyle. Only problem is, the gallery won't fire me unless I crap in the middle of their floor. They may be jerks about it, but they love me. It's an abusive relationship, but they do give me a kickin' health insurance plan, and if that ain't worth a little backhanded slapping from time to time, I don't know what is.

But anyway, I've been thinking a lot about porn lately, since I've been writing about it and planning to go to a convention next month (that's a whole other story). Last night I watched a documentary about John Holmes that featured a lot of footage from his films in the 70's and early 80's, and it really drove home to me the differences in the aesthetics of porn performers then and now. Back in the day you had lots of body hair, somewhat saggy boobs from time to time, flabby butts, and more or less real sex going on in skin flicks. These days it's often fake tans, fake dyed hair, fake nails, fake eyelashes, fake boobs, hairless genitals, and sex that, while real, isn't very often the kind of sex normal people are having. It's like a mechanical depiction of an act that carries in it nothing sensual, only sexual. It's like watching robots go at it.

No, seriously. I've been thinking a lot about the fake aesthetic of porn, and I've been wondering if the increasingly Barbie Doll appearance of mainstream porn stars is a result of the adult industry's typical tendency to take a good thing and go way overboard with it. Men like big boobs, in general, so porn takes the big boob ideal and turns it into a charicaturized monster-mammary fetish. Everybody likes looking tan and healthy, so porn gives us oompa-loompa orange stars. And so on. And the public watches it, maybe because we have to watch what we're presented with, or maybe--and here's where the robots come in--because we don't really like to think that these piston-like penises and hairless vaginas are really human. We don't like to think that the hardcore sex acts we're watching and getting off to are taking place between real people, because that implicates us in some kind of gross moral degeneracy, throws our own less-stunning sexual prowess into a very dim light indeed, and most of all, puts us and the people boning on camera on the same basic level as human beings.

So we buy up porn featuring people who don't look like real people. We go to strip clubs expecting the performers to be surgically enhanced Femmbots from Austin Powers. We hold them at a distance from ourselves, as something vaguely like ourselves and yet safely different, like robots who can have sex but with whom we have no fundamental similarities. It feels safer that way.

But it's not, obviously. I watch some of the porn being made today, both in big studios and for low-budget online enterprises, and it's all featuring intensely fictionalized faces, oversized cocks, spitting, gagging, violent humping, weird fringe acts that have become mainstream. And I think, these people are doing this because they know people want to watch it. We want to watch it because it seems fake. But the overlap is inevitable and it's got to be going on in bedrooms everywhere, and in the computer-lit basements of teenage boys everywhere, who are growing up thinking that this kind of behavior is normal. That these bodies are standard. That this is what a man is supposed to do to a woman, and vice versa. And that scares me in the same way that the idea of intelligent or morally informed robots scares me. It says something really terrifying about our view of ourselves and the things we create. We want them to be bigger, better, smarter, faster, stronger than we are, more than we want to be ok with what we've got and use it. Of course robots started as time and labor saving devices equipped to help us, but many robotics experiments out there are taking some of our basic human roles away from us because they are NOT us, like mechanized soldiers and battle bots, even companion robots designed to give the appearance of feeling love, or just to have sex with (see that picture above? that's what that is. a sexbot). We watch robot movies because they feature super-intelligent and super-sophisticated bots that are so human we must anthropomorphize them in order to villainize them in order to watch them, and again, there's that creepy overlap. And sure, porn started as a sexy alternative to our imaginations when we masturbate, but it's turned into this multi-billion dollar monster industry that caters to our cruelest instincts by turning its stars into nonhuman objects who just fuck and fuck and fuck away.

I'm not sure how to end this, but there it is. Food for thought.