The Happy Ending

Happy Friday! If Friday were a day, I'd marry it. Sadly, it is not.

This week on Double X, I covered women as meat, the pornography of war, and Bill Clinton douchebaggery.

On The Frisky, I wrote about the sequel to "The Girlfriend Experience": "The Boyfriend Experience."

And I tweeted.

Are you happy? Are you really? Are you looking for your happy ending? Find it. This weekend.

Depending on the Kindness of Strangers After a Long Night Spent Dreaming of Flying Fire Ants

Hi Susannah,

Just wanted to extend a quick thanks for linking up to the Colliding Particles videos. I just watched them all. These are the kind of people that help me keep some hope in humans. I took my son to the open house at JPL in Pasadena this year and got myself involved in conversations with a couple different engineers there. I'm not sure how to explain the energy I feel when I'm around people creating or defining their worlds as they go. I've felt something similar from some of the musicians and artists I've met. It's something I feel reading your posts.

I'm gonna use the particle link as an excuse to take a moment and thank you for living your life so openly and honestly in such a very public way. I can't imagine it is easy. Only knowing you from the reflections cast by your writing I can't really attest to the why, but to me what you are doing is a very brave and helpful thing. It's strange and humbling to find bits of clarity in my life from the suffering and joy of a woman living a life that is very different from my own. I'd say keep up the good work or something corny, but really, my hope for you is clarity of purpose in whatever direction you take. I'll be following the part that remains public. :)

Thanks,

[Redacted]

(Image via Agraphie)

When There's Nothing Else Left

I found these videos a few weeks ago: "Colliding Particles." They are must-watchable. I've watched them repeatedly since. They're about the, well, men who are working on the Large Hadron Collider.

I love the series for a lot of reasons. Because they're beautiful. Because they're brilliant. Because they're funny. Because they make something terrifically abstract terribly real, something intensely complicated wooingly mundane, something incomprehensibly inaccessible deeply common.

They also remind me a bit of what it was like to "grow up" on the UC Berkeley campus, where my father was a professor. When you run the halls of academia as a child, it resonates in a way that's romantic. All those crazy faculty parties. The random international prize winners. It's not peeking behind the curtain; it's living there. I miss being steeped in genius.

This one is my favorite because he talks about what it's like when you go beyond the beyond. What do you do when you're the expert? Where do you go when the guideposts stop? How far can you take it when you're in uncharted terrain? It's all up to you now: the failure, the success, the everything in between.

One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a place, a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said, "I’ve known you for years. Everyone has said that you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you that I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged." -- Duras

Don't Hate Me Because My Camera Is Fly

Before I went to Los Angeles, I bought a new camera. It's a Canon Rebel XSi, and, yeah, it's a sexy motherfucker. Don't hate me because my camera's fly. I did a fair amount of research before I got it, and I chose this one because it's wasn't your average point-and-shoot, but it wasn't some unwieldy monster either. I got the average lens with it, and the camera bag that doesn't beg for the entire affair to be stolen by proclaiming what's in it, and some other stuff, like an extra battery. I am happy with it. I bought it at Best Buy, where the customer service was astonishingly horrid the first time I went, although the second time I went it was OK. They should work on that. Yes, Best Buy, I'm talking to you.

Because I don't really know what I'm doing with photography, and to get myself friendly with the device, I've been taking a photograph a day with it. You can find some of my handiwork here. Some of it is astonishingly boring, and some of it is not, but the point is not the photograph, at least at this time, it's what happens in between, me getting used to the camera, so we become one, like a cyborg.

Mostly, I just set the thing on automatic, because I don't know how to use the rest, or I turn it to the setting where the flash won't go on, because flashes are like the plague, IMO. (Please do not send me "advice" on how to use my camera. I won't use it. Thanks.) And low-light is not its best-friend. But, mostly, I love it. If another natural disaster were closing in on my life--and once you've had one, you know it's always possible!--I would grab the camera and the computer, but the rest can go. Dear Mother Nature: This time, please take everything but the computer and the camera. Thanks! Love, Sus.

I got my first camera in 2001, maybe. It was a Nikon. I thought it was rather clever at the time, but ultimately the colors were sort of flat. Sort of yellow? Sort of gray? Sort of tan? So I switched to a Canon this time. I think the colors are better. Maybe the greens could be better sometimes.

If someone slipped me a million dollars tomorrow (please do!), I would give up writing for about a year, because I have been doing this professionally for about a dozen years, and let me tell you, I am pretty tired of it, and I would just take photographs. Where? In Porn Valley, of course. Because nothing else holds my attention like the Valley does. Everything else is shades of gray.

More, Please

Can't get enough of me? I know I can. Here's some other claptrap I vomited elsewhere this week.

On Double X, I got excited about a soldier in pink underpants, sang the praises of Bunny May, and invented the penis diaries.

On The Frisky, I reverted back to my usual coprophagy-oriented ways, made more underwear jokes, and whined about Jezebel.

I took a photo a day.

And you can find me, as ever, on Twitter.

Have a great long weekend because you are a beautiful, beautiful butterfly, and not a horrible, horrible monster, despite what everyone says.

Je Regrette Tout

Now I'll die and I'll tell you: what? The biggest regret of my life: I let my love go ...

There was this time when I was in Los Angeles, and it was very early, and I was up, because it was still early in the trip, and the time in my mind hadn't changed yet, not that it did, not that it has from when it did, and I was driving on the east side, down Los Feliz Boulevard, a street named for the Happy People, I believe, and the mist was real low, and I was crying, because I thought, Fuck, why did I ever leave?, and that right there was when I regretted everything, everything that came after, the leaving, the flooding, and the fucked up years, and all the time I wasted, and the chronic inabilities, and the fleeting moments in between when things are good, and then the shade closes, and everything is back to black, or so it seems.

Here, I climb the walls, I want to get out, but indecision and something else stop me. Somebody says, You'll figure it out, you always do, but it seems like it's taking forever to happen, so I keep looking at the photographs that I took there, and I keep rewatching the things that I saw there, and I try and tell myself that I'm not stuck, even though when I look down, all I see is my feet in quicksand, and there are my hands climbing across the ceiling.

I had an idea a few weeks ago, and it's maybe the best idea I've had in a while, only, it's not even new, it's old. It's an idea that I had years ago, that I forgot about, that resurrected itself in my head when I was lying on a table. It would take a year, which I can do; I did the Letters Project for that long. It would take place during 2010. It would be something different, and the exact same thing, and whatever it is that lies in between.

Do you ever have that feeling like you can't stand it one more day? When you've envisioned yourself climbing the walls so many times that you think today may be the day that you actually try it?

A long time ago, I remember, I was on a plane, and it was landing in this place that was like the jungle to me, and there was a time before that, where the plane was like a firefly, circling down in the night sky after all the others, and maybe there was a time before that, in some random dream I no longer remember, or maybe it's a memory piped backwards from the future, and I'm going there, and the only thing I can hear in my head is: This will make everything better, this will make everything else fade.

Mayday

For today's Double X post, I wrote about blogger Sarah Scott. From her "Story of the Scar":

I struggle up to the summit and begin the mile-long downhill that ends with a 90-degree turn that takes you back to town. Only I don't make the turn, and the world goes black for how long I have no idea. I don't remember if the EMT woke me up, or I just came too on my own, but I remember looking down at my thighs and thinking about dead meat. Big hunks of dead meat.

It made sense for a long time actually, because my legs still felt like I was on my bike. My legs in my mind, were straight out in front of me riding an invisible bike, like I was piloting Wonder Woman's jet. Then the pain started rippling out from between my shoulder blades and I snap back and forth between the phantom limbs and the horrible pain that keeps getting worse and worse minute by minute.

The helicopter arrives and they whisk me away to the nearest trauma center. I don't remember crying but I remember my eyes being very wet, I was willing myself to keep it together for what reason I have no idea. In Triage they give me morphine and don't talk to me much, and I know by their faces that it's really, really bad.

That's her self-portrait you're looking at.

Smokin'

Hello,

Lots of things have happened in my life since the last time I wrote/read you, some related to sex but I think that's not important for the moment. I haven't even had time to read blogs but I went back to my favorites and found some websites, yours obviously was there. So I visited your blog, searching for what I have found before in it, and I couldn't. I tried reading again what I read the first time I got there but then again, nothing. Something strange was happening, the whole thing looked different, but it was the same blog, it was you writing about your writing and other's writing, it was sex and you and ourselves and the old links I recognized, but what I was looking wasn't there anymore. So I got to read a few recent posts and suddenly -I didn't realize exactly when- I found you, again. I mean I found your reading or what I know from you (in this case I believe it is the same thing). So everything started to be clear to me, the conclusion I got for myself I mean.

The way we look at things, connected with the way we are, connected with what we are, connected to what we are attracted to, all these things can evolve and become a bigger and complex thing that keeps growing and growing even if we don't get to understand a part of it, of even if we don't get to understand it at all; I'm refering to life, our life within. In essence we remain almost the same, even if all the universe outside changes.

Hug, read you around,

[redacted]

A Photo a Day

It seems I've launched a new project. I'm going to be doing "A Photo a Day." Which is pretty self-explanatory.

I started talking photographs in around 2001, as I've written here before, when Nerve was a print magazine, and I was covering some bukkake shoot in the Valley, and they asked me would I bring a camera along. I borrowed a point-and-shoot that belonged to my boyfriend-at-the-time, and that was that.

Generally speaking, I have no idea what I'm doing. I don't know what an f-stop is, and I don't know that I want to know. I suppose you could call that "self-taught." Or you could call it "retarded."

With an extremely few exceptions in the past, I don't crop my photos or manipulate the image in any way. That's part of the "game" for me. Get it right in the field, or don't get it at all. Please do not send me long emails expressing your complicated views regarding cropping, or how all photos are "edited," or some such thing. It really doesn't matter either way.

I stopped taking photographs for several years, for several reasons, until recently, so this is my attempt to make it more ... thoughtless. More automatic. More intuitive. I don't think I'm particular good. Nor do I think I'm particularly bad. With photography, for me, it is what it is.

I like talking photographs because it's one of about two or three things in my life that I don't experience in a state of high conflict. You raise the camera to your eye. You push the button. You take the picture. It isn't any more complicated than that.

And that, I like.

The F Word

Well, when I wrote my first post on Double X, I really didn't expect a mini-shitstorm to come of it. Frankly, I didn't think I was saying much I, or others, hadn't said before. I really thought most people were kind of, you know, over it.

Apparently, the "feminist" blogs didn't like what I wrote, among them Bitch, Feministe, and Feministing. The comments are hilarious, if you have the time. In more than one thread, they get all worked into an inner-thigh lather over the fact that I used the term "culturally retarded," which they said was "ableist." I had to look that one up.

They're always so angry! And shouty! And sure you are doing something wrong! Especially if you are a man! Or disagree! Or diverge from the philosophy which is not written down but they can find if you just give them a minute to paw through the kicked up bird feed and look behind the macrame plant hanger and check under the futon!

For another take on this tiny tempest in a tampon holder, please see the always brilliant Meghan O'Rourke's "Feminism Is Not a Monolith and Neither is Double X." You don't even need to read it. The title is enough. It is correct.

Ironically, feminism's lack of diversity of thought was its disease. Thankfully, Double X is uncensored. Unabashed about that. And totally unretarded.

The Fucking Machines

Scenes from my life on the set of the latest installment of "Fuck Machines." Or was it "Fucking Machines"? I think it was "Fuck Machines 6." Porn Valley is nothing if not complicated. More here.

Recent Emails I Have Received and My Answers to the Questions Within Them

Question #1:

Hey Susannah Breslin-

I've read your website since way back when it had, I think, a different name. I'm a filmmaker and am always thinking about making a movie about porn. There's gotta be another one besides BOOGIE NIGHTS (that's good). Probably other folks have contacted you about your book and "movies", but if you're out in Los Angeles again maybe we can grab a cup of coffee. I get these kind of requests and am sometimes put off, so if this is out of line we can go through our agents.

I don't really know anything about your book, of course, but I know you've been obsessed with the making of pornographic material and I enjoy your sensibility. I sent you some bukkake rules I found and you posted them. I sorta have a bukkake in a goofy film I made called [redacted].

a fan,
[Redacted]

Answer: No.

Question #2:

Dear Ms. Breslin,

My name is [redacted] and I am an Instructor-type at [redacted] in majestic [redacted]. I am writing to ask your permission to use select text(s) from Reverse Cowgirl as source material for a performance project I am planning for fall of 2009. A bit of context… I am developing a performance centered around music, math, and the body. Vague yes, but I’m only in the collecting phase of my process. I came across your blog within the last year or so and am really struck by your writing. In particular, I am extremely interested in the manner in which you resist cursory readings of the things you write about--whether it be feminism, porn, or the difficulties of being a writer to name but a few. As an academic I identify closely with certain philosophers and practitioners that ask me to look beyond what’s easy and ask different sorts of questions that move beyond the surface, and oftentimes get a similar vibe when reading your writing (FYI- I hate the fact that in some way I identify as an academic type--sigh).

Like I said, I am simply collecting materials that connect in my mind around the themes of the performance. If you want I can give you more info, like how I envision a mesmerizing sound and media-based performance project that explores the ability of the body to produce multiple meanings over time especially with regard to repeated sequences of math and music, if you want. But generally speaking I can tell you that I am interested in using the moments of your writing where I get a real sense of how complicated you understand a lot of writings/attitudes toward the body to be.

Logistically speaking, the performance would be a non-profit, undergraduate event, with a run of two weeks at the most. Regardless of the size of venue I wanted to write you and make sure it was cool with the understanding that you would be cited (sometimes in the actual performance I would think). I could be more specific about which texts I was interested in using the closer we got to the rehearsal phase in August. If you have major reservations or any additional questions please drop me a line and let me know.

Hope you are well,
[Redacted]

Answer: No.

Question #3:

"Above all else, they are deeply, profoundly, unbearably sad."
 
I was very sorry to hear that.  And the horrible truth is that no matter how bad it is- yes, there is something worse.
 
When I was young and returned from sea. I would sometimes end up at the fringes of conversations where people were topping each other on some fucked up subject.  I could always wait until the end and crush the competition.  It was funny for a while- in a brittle, been-there-done-that way.  Then it became harsh, when I could just keep topping my last story.  Then, it just became hard and ugly. 
 
I know what you mean.  At first, you drink from the fire hose because it is there.  Then, I began to notice there was a taste and I did not like it.  Finally, I was not thirsty and longed for a desert.
 
Today, I am so sensitive it startles me.  When did I become such a pussy?  The people I have know, the stories I have heard, the things I have seen- when did I get so soft?
 
There is the flip side, for me.  I have stories that are sadly human but also profoundly funny.  Before there were blogs, I wanted to start a blog of sea stories. 
 
And there is the great purgatory in between.  Stories that I tell that sometimes bring down the house and other times are answered with shocked silence.  I still can't quite tell the difference.
 
The best part about going to sea was being at sea.  The ocean is an alien universe that filled me with daily wonder.  The rest was people.  You have the people and the situations.  I hope you have a flip side.
 
I have a personal question for you.  Do you have trouble meeting people's eyes, now?  When I was a child and when I went I first went to sea, I could stare a person in the eye without problem.  Now, I have trouble maintaining eye contact.  This kind of troubled me for a while.  I started holding people's eyes again and paying attention to my reactions. 
 
When I figured it out it was both illuminating and sad.  When I look into most people's eyes, I feel that I know exactly what they are thinking.  I see the fear, anger, bitterness and pleading.  It makes them feel smaller and desperate to me.  It is more than I want to see in people.  It doesn't bother me with friends and family.  It is too much in everyone else.

Answer: Yes.

Double X Comes All Over Your Face

So, a long time ago now, like, last fall, a lovely person who is named Xeni Jardin sent a lovely person who is Hanna Rosin in my direction. Miss Hanna was in the process of co-creating a site that wouldn't launch until the following spring -- egads! who could wait? -- that would be a spinoff of Slate, and for the ladies.

Because life is sometimes awesome, Hanna liked me, and they decided to take me into their den of intellectual iniquity. Since I'd been trying to get on Slate since, like, 1996, or whenever it launched, this was spiffy. I've been blogging on Slate since late last year, on the XX Factor, but today saw the launch of Double X.

The site is very nice, and it's for the chicks but also the dudes, and I'll be posting there, like, every day, and I'm really happy. It feels ... fancy.

For my first post, I wrote about how we are awesome and everyone else is lame, except I dressed that sentiment up in a political hat and told it it had to talk polysyllabically, or else.

"Apparently, if you launch a website for women in 2009, the most important question is whether or not it's feminist. At least, that's what you'd think, judging by today's launch of the women-oriented website you're reading. Only, the funny thing is, I thought feminism was dead. I mean, didn't we kill it already?"

Read the rest here.

Special thank you's to Hanna and Xeni, without whom I would not exist, but would appear as a hologram of my former self.

Eventually, my Big Fat Story About Porn Valley will run on Double X. So, wait for it. A little XXX for XX.

You Are a Miracle

You know your writing career is really in the toilet when you're debating whether or not to put the anecdote about the sperm omelette at the beginning or at the end. Sometimes, it's difficult to write when you want to throw up at your own product. Some days, it's a miracle you don't chop off your own head.

"You are a miracle!"

Yeah, so writing this story for the soon-to-be-launched Double X is going fucking awesome! And by "fucking awesome," I mean I can hardly stand it. Without barfing. If that, then by all means, it's going great. Thanks for asking.

The idea part is the easy part. The research part is the fun part. The writing part is the I-can't-die-soon-enough part. Or, you know, maybe that's me. Or maybe it's Porn Valley. Or maybe it's what happens when you try and put into words things that dwell in the Lacanian gap into which you have bungee jumped, headfirst, yet again.

Oh, the hole you're in!

The Worst Porn Movie I've Ever Seen

Previously, I've written here about the best porn movie I've ever seen, which is, of course, the only good porn movie ever made, which is, obviously, "The Operation," which is great for many reasons, most significantly because it allows you to see inside of other people.

Over the years, I have seen a great many porn movies. For a time, I had it stockpiled everywhere, because people kept giving it to me, and sending it to me, and it was in the closets, and the cabinets, and under the bed. Eventually, I moved, and after the moving guys had removed everything else, I pointed to several large black garbage bags, and explained what was inside of them, and the men sort of half-smiled and ducked their heads, and they picked up the bags, and then they were gone.

For several of those years, I was interested in seeing whatever I figured no one had seen, or what was hard to see. I don't know why. If the point was searing my brain, I succeeded. I saw bestiality porn, puke porn, pregnant porn, 86-year-old woman porn, midget porn, Ron Jeremy in a diaper porn, bukkake porn, gokkun porn, the world's biggest gangbang porn, sideshow porn, golden shower porn, coprophagy porn, people pretending to be dead porn, handicapped people porn, hot dog porn--you name it, I saw it. Some of it I saw getting made in person. Because of this, I sometimes consider that I have something in common with those who work in the FBI's AOS or DoJ's OPTF, those who are employed to see the worst of the worst, the basest of the basest, the craziest of the craziest. Because that's what you often see, if the people in them go far enough. You bear witness to those among us who are in the process of losing their minds. Only, this time, someone was there to record it. The sex? That's pretty irrelevant.

When I was in Los Angeles not long ago, I met someone who showed me some videos, and in sum total I would have to say that they were far and away the worst thing I've ever seen. By miles. That they were porn movies was incidental. They induced insomnia. After I saw them, if I closed my eyes, they would replay across the backs of my eyelids. They are focused on conjuring madness, and depict moments in which human beings behave in ways that are not simply primal, or animal--they are incomprehensible. They are so singularly fucked up that I haven't been able to even come close to describing them since viewing them. To anyone. Including you. And it's not what happens in them. It's what doesn't happen in them. There is no stoppage. No limit. No boundary not crossed. Here, transgression reaches the bottom of the pit, and what we discover of the pit is that it is deep, deeper than one would have thought humanly possible. In the end, no one is saved. Above all else, they are deeply, profoundly, unbearably sad.

So, if you came here, as some do, from googling "best porn movie ever made," there's the other side of the coin. Best not to forget about it. After all, whether you see it or not, it exists, some apocalyptically fucked up moment in time, repeating in an infinite loop, for whoever happens to watch it.

[Update: Please don't send me emails asking me how to get a copy of "The Operation." I don't know. If you want to find it, you will.]

How to Tell a Boring Porn Story

I picked up a copy of Rolling Stone because someone asked me if I'd read the Sasha Grey profile in it, and I hadn't, but now I have. I feel like America has reached some kind of deep, profound moral nadir when even porn stories are boring.

It's so ... timid. As if the only thing left to do once porn has gone mainstream (ha-ha, kidding!) is to just give into it and pop some Ambien and file a story written with all the laziness of a slow loris that only a frantically masturbating 13-year-old boy would bothering poring over before stickifying some soft-core photos taken by someone who had the great virtue of being the son of the publisher in a horrid, half-baked homage to Terry Richardson, which, if you think about it, is like taking a photograph of a simulacrum and then xeroxing it. I think someone said something like that to me once about something else. Whomever you are, I salute you.

Anyway, yawner. Don't waste your $5. Mostly, when it comes to the "DIRTIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD" who is "liberating women one gangbang at a time" (oh golly gasp!), author Vanessa Grigoriadis does her usual kid gloves-handling of the subject at hand, stands around debating if all this DIRTIEST GIRLNESSING is a bad thing or a good thing, for a while, like, isn't sure, and then shrugs her shoulders like, whatever, and decides Grey may not be prone to smiling but is "not a victim."

Mmmm. OK! Thanks! That was awesome. Thank you for that tour of the sausage factory that did not include a visit to the abattoir. Better luck next time. On the other hand, forget it. You couldn't handle the sausage.

Here's Susie

I've blogged Thomas Allen's book art before, but this was worth a revisit. [via Boing Boing].

What I'm blogging elsewhere ... On Slate, "John Edwards, Sex Victim?" and on The Frisky, "That’s Vaginal!"

Stay classy, Susannah.

What I'm working on here ... A profile of the adult movie industry for Double X and revising my novel set in the adult movie industry, Nothing Is Real but the Girl.

Quote of the day ... "POOR IS THE MAN WHOSE PLEASURES DEPEND ON THE PERMISSION OF ANOTHER."

Song of the day ... Del tha Funkee Homosapien spitting lyrics to a motherfucking car alarm: "This is for the real people that take the truth and ingest it/Let it radiate in their soul and manifest it."

Outside, the rain is pouring, and the cement truck is roaring, and a dog is hanging out a car window like this type of shit happens every day.

Pretty Girl Shots

More shots I took in Porn Valley. Three ways of looking at a porn star. Location: Woodland Hills. Million-dollar mansion on the top of a hill with a 360-degree view of the Valley at your feet. They call these photographs pretty girl shots. The set photographer took the girl into the backyard. Near a fountain painted so the water looked bright blue. The green grass was lined with brilliant, blooming flowers. The only thing blocking your view was palm trees. A century ago, California state senator Charles Maclay overlooked this landscape and proclaimed: "This is the Garden of Eden!" And, by God, he was right.

Truth Be Told

Every once in a while, I get an email from a former merchant seaman. For me, it's the Valley. For him, it's the sea. You can read his first email here. You can read his second email here. And you can read his third email here.

So, like, I send you these notes and tell you to leave the Valley behind you.  But it would be a lie to say I am not jealous of you for returning to the Valley for a visit.
 
A while back, I stood looking out over the ocean.  My wife laughed at me and said I always do that.
 
"Do what?"
 
"Walk all the way out to the end of the dock and just stare."
 
It's true.  I walk out to the end until all I can see is water. 
 
She asks me if I miss it.  I want to say "more than breathing," but that would not be a good idea.  I just say yes and let the sight and feel of the ocean absorb me.  Then I go back home.  That little bit of the sea is enough to relax and fill me.  It isn't a real hit, but it does me for a bit.  I imagine it would be a little like you watching some "racy" HBO special and your friends thinking it was like being in the Valley.  It isn't, but it balms a void.  [Yeah, I know, my example could easily be way off the mark- but you know what I mean.]
 
And people think they can also go to sea and see what I do.  Maybe, but likely not.  So much depends on who you are and what you are looking for.  I think of your example of the male journalists who also witness porn.  It isn't the same once you stick your dick in it.
 
God damn me, I do miss the sea and everything about it.

Be peace.

Un Día Voy a Cantar las Canciones Sin Letra y Cada Uno Podrá Imaginar Si Hablo de Amor, de Desilusión, Banalidades o Sobre Platón

Last weekend, I got back to revising my novel, for the first time since I got back from Los Angeles, prior to which I had finished writing it, although now it needs revisions. During that time, I had been to DC and LA, so I wrote a new chapter for the book, a preface, which is set in DC. I had my character walk the same way I'd walked, exiting the FBI's Brutalist headquarters, passing the National Archives in front of which sits a stone woman with an open book on her lap whose pedestal reads WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE, and down to the National Mall, except when I was there it was cold, and in the book it's spring, and he walks through a shower of cherry blossom petals.

After I got back from Hollywood, I had to take some time to let all the things in my head, what I'd seen and heard and witnessed, retreat, so it wasn't quite so BIG, because it can get that way when there are humans mating with machines, and porn is strewn across the floors of strip mall offices, and you end up in the back of a warehouse marveling at an empty raised Pepto Bismol pink stage with chipped paint and a stripper pole festooned with silver star streamers. I have to wait for it to abate, let the reptilian brain chew on it, so I can put it to words.

This has been a strange week, hasn't it? Once upon a time, there was a virtual me, and then there was a real me, but for a second there I wasn't sure which one was real, only that the internet flattens time, and you have to find a way to stretch yourself across it.

Have a great weekend, because there's nothing else worth having, is there?

[Music: Juana Molina's "Un Dia"; title translation here.]