God, I wish I had a fucking cigarette. Why did I quit? I miss you.
In 1998, I moved to Los Angeles, and over the following five years I wrote about a lot of things, and one of the things that I wrote about was the adult movie industry. It was a very interesting time in the Valley, because Clinton's "screw that" attitude towards obscenity prosecutions and the increased competition presented by e-smut dictated that the porn industry become increasingly more extreme. And so it did. To compete. And because it could. Isn't it funny to think a president helped porn become more hardcore? (That's rhetorical.)
When I was around the biz at that time, it was -- well, it was fucking nuts. There were apocalyptic gangbangs, and bukkake (American-style, that is) was born, and gonzo porno was looking to get harder and faster and push things further than ever before.
I saw a lot of things. Some of them were pretty fucked up. Some of them were grotesquely beautiful. Everything was fascinating. That's how it was. That's how it is. That's the kind of place the Valley can be.
Eventually, I left the Valley, and other things happened, but I never stopped thinking about the Valley, not even for a second. When I had something of a breakdown in early 2005, during which time I spent most of my time thinking about various ways I could kill myself, it was hard to tell if I was the problem, or if the Valley was the problem, or if something else was the problem, or if my insides were some kind of Gordian knot that I could not untie no matter how hard I tried, or if I would ever unravel the story of my life.
Then, things got worse, worse than I ever could have imagined, and it appeared, at least to me, that the sky inside my head would be black forever. But after that, after what seemed like forever, things got better. Maybe. Some days, I'm not sure.
Now, I'm going to back to the Valley. In a week. To do a story. But what's the story, really? Is it about the Valley -- or is it about me? Or is it about something around the bend that I cannot yet quite see, no matter how far I crane my neck, no matter how I toss and turn as I sleep?
It's hard for me to say, from this vantage point, what the Valley holds.
