Friday, April 25, 2008

Swing


I spent the whole last week or so working on something, and now I'm about done with it, and now I'm beat. I am not sleeping well, working myself up into some kind of state, ready to c-r-a-s-h. This morning, I had a dream that included a motorized fuck-dog and a field of trees that ate people. I woke up in a kind of fever state. Over the last six weeks, this blog and the letters blogs have gotten more attention than anything else I've done in the last three years combined, with the mentions in Time, Newsweek, the LA Times, interest from the New York Post, and mentions on various high-profile blogs. Yesterday, someone sent me some interview questions about prostitution, which I suppose I will answer. Sometimes, I wonder about the difference between porn stars and prostitutes. Because of some random law, porn is legal, but prostitution is not. They share common themes: fucking, performing, sex for money, fame, stilettos, hot chicks, dudes with issues, people trying to get it on while everybody watches. The context is what's different. That prostitution breaks the law while porn does not means the former gets beat up while the latter gets glorified--or is it the other way around? The end result is porn is America's punchline, and prostitutes are the new black. It's hard to know what to make of it. Either way, people who fuck for a living bear the consequences of a cosmic misunderstanding. I need to get back to working on my novel, which I relegated to the sidelines while I focused on this other project. Remember, we're trading in peonies here, not daisies. Sometimes I think I'm crazy. Sometimes I don't. These days, I've begun to suspect it really doesn't matter either way.
I wasn't sure whether this, too, was for effect, another mock punch, another flourish for the ever-present camera in T. T. Boy's head, or whether his father's violence was the inheritance that he did receive. Then again, maybe it was just the loud clamorings of a young man alone, trying to beat back the tundra silence of an apartment where the table was always set for a family of four, and no one was coming home. -- "Waiting for Wood," Stiffed, Susan Faludi