Had a lovely post-birthday date with Roman last night. I think we raised the general perversion level in Seattle a few notches all by ourselves. Knee sex! And needles. Woot. We were quite wiped out afterwards...

Read about other interesting social events in my life lately…

I saw a young woman walking down Broadway a few days ago, and it made me sad. I don’t know her, but I know who she is. I recognize her from her website photos, although she’s changed a lot since they were taken. And not for the better.

The photos I saw, beginning about a year ago, showed a thin, disturbingly young-looking woman posing on a bed. She called herself “a Lolita” and offered her services as an escort. Now, ya’ll know I support sex work and sex workers. But several things about this woman bothered me. Aside from the fact that I wasn’t convinced she was eighteen, underneath the artlessly brazen sexuality of the photos and the text, she just seemed…dangerously fragile somehow. Not someone I’d pick out as being well-suited to the job.

But I learned a long time ago that I can’t fix people who I think are broken. They have to choose to fix themselves. Or not. I could only hope that she’d take advantage of the resources sex work offers – more free time and more money – to take care of herself and work out the issues I suspected she had.

She hasn’t. She looked like shit, frankly. I’ve seen her a lot on Broadway in the last year, and she always looked a little…odd. But this last time, I would have thought she was a homeless person if I hadn’t just seen a post from her on one of the local escort boards a few days before. She was very dirty - the kind of dirty that takes days of not bathing to really accumulate. Her hair was straggly and matted, and it looked like she’d been hacking at it with scissors. Her clothes were stained and mismatched. And just the way she was stumbling along the sidewalk, slump-shouldered and vacant-eyed... If you looked up “junkie homeless person” in the dictionary, this would be the illustration.

Of course, I thought, I don’t really know that she’s a junkie. But it’s extremely likely. The other possibility is that she has some kind of undiagnosed/untreated mental illness. And it could be a double-header: drugs and mental illness.

I'd seen posts from this little waif - long, rambling, badly-spelled missives inviting guys to just come meet her at a certain rendezvous. Don’t try to call, she said, because by some mistake on the part of the phone company, her cell had been shut off. Yeah, a mistake. It’s just sad, because once upon a time she was a sweet, pretty little girl, and she lost her way somewhere.

Sex work isn’t the cause of her downhill slide, though. I’m quite sure that she was broken inside when she came into the industry. And it’s funny how doing sex work affects broken people in either one of two ways.

For some people, it sort of buoys them up for a while. They feel relieved from the pressure to try to be well, and they just relax into a state of somewhat-functional craziness. If they live modestly, they don’t have to work very much to keep the rent (more or less) paid and have food to eat. The rest of the time they can just feel however they’re feeling, and if that means talking to people no one else can see, or staying in bed with the covers over their head for two or three days, well, they can do that. No need to worry much about appearing normal and showing up for that eight-to-five thing. And even when they are actually working, a certain level of quirky weirdness is okay with clients, as long as one fulfills the job description.

I’m not saying this is a good thing in the long-term, you understand. But I’ve known a lot of women who were able to sort of limp through life in this way, never getting to a place of wholeness and wellness, but managing to avoid out-right implosion.

But for other people – like this little waif - it just speeds up the race to self-destruction. They have lots of time and money to spend trying to numb themselves to the pain they’re in, and there’s a lot of ways that can go badly. They remove themselves from places where people might say, “Uh, hey, honey – you don’t look so good. Maybe you should see a doctor or something.” Their isolation works against them, not for them.

It’s not that clients won’t say something. There are plenty of soft-hearted guys around who’ll try to help out a damsel who’s clearly in distress. But even if she’s willing to accept help from them – which is unlikely - there are limits to what they can do. Their first responsibility is to their own lives, and unless they have some training in dealing with her issues, their efforts are likely to be kindly-meant but ineffectual.

I myself have gotten burned trying to rescue people way to often too get involved with this young person. That’s been a hard lesson for me to learn in this life. But I have learned it, so she’ll have to work out her destiny however she chooses.

But it is sad.

What Am I Looking At?

Oh, I can see that these people meant well – but this just seems in poor taste somehow. (And no, I don’t mean the minty stuff.)

"What happens when a middle-aged man with a beer belly decides to mimic the poses of his models?" This so cracked me up. I’ve modeled for several male photographers who showed me the poses they wanted by doing it themselves, and most of the time, they looked about this silly. But I think it's impressively bold of him to do it and post the photos, and I do totally get the self-portrait thing. It’s handy when you have no models around.

I’ve had several people send me this link. It’s a little video of people’s faces while they masturbate to orgasm. It’s a cute concept, and it’s nicely executed, but I fail to see what makes people think it’s so fantastically hip and cool, exactly? I mean, I have no problem, but - is this really so revolutionary?

God, that was a nice massage last night. It's funny, I've gotten a number of professional massages from different LMTs over the years, and most of them have been pretty ehh. I mean, the part when they were doing my neck and shoulders and back was nice enough, but I was unimpressed with the rest of it. It just didn't feel that great, and I didn't feel particularly different/better afterwards. I thought maybe I just hadn't found the right person, so I kept trying different practioners. But it always seemed the same, and after awhile the idea of paying money for an experience I really wasn't enjoying that much seemed dumb. So I just stopped doing it.

But I have friends and lovers, who aren't trained professionals, give me massages that I loooooove. Go figure. Jae gives great massages, as does Malixe. And Max and Roman both rub me the right way, too. I have no idea why I so enjoy getting massages in that kind of context, but not a professional one. It's not like I'm hung up about having a stranger touch me. And I sure don't mind paying to get what I want. (Remind me to give the "money keeps it clean" speech here sometime.) But that's how it's been: I love getting massaged - but only by generous amateurs.

So last night was a first, although it was sort of a cross-over situation. Mark is a trained bodyworker - although he claims to be retired from massage - but he did this hour-plus massage just as a favor to me, which was very sweet. A little bonding experience with a new friend.

My apprehension was misplaced. Mark Yu sweetly massaged me into a nearly boneless state of relaxation. More later...

A busy weekend around here. We had bondage instructor and body worker Mark Yu up from San Diego, and he taught two cool workshops. I had to miss the Saturday class, but the Sunday one, Bondage Bio-mechanics, was very cool. It was basically about how to assess and cope with individual people’s physical abilities and limitations, in terms of range of motion and flexibility, and how to design rope bondage that works with their bodies instead of against it. I like learning about how to work with people's bodies.

And Mark is definitely a great body worker – he did some acupuncture on Max Friday night, and also some back and body adjustments on him both Friday and Saturday nights. I don’t know exactly what kind of therapy he calls the hands-on stuff – it’s Chinese, I think. I should ask him. But it seemed effective. Max wasn’t in any kind of acute pain, but his body gets tense and stiff, and what Mark did seemed to help. I think he’s going to work on me tonight. I'm looking forward to it, but I’m also slightly nervous, because this is not gentle Swedish massage, it’s pretty intense, almost like rolfing. Pray for me.

We all attended the Bondage Is The Point party at the Wet Spot Sunday night, which was fun. I taught Roman how to do play piercing. I've stuck needles in him, but he’s never been the piercer before. And his wife T. had never been pierced, so it was a first time for them both. I put just one in T, the first one, mostly to make sure if that she had a hard time with it, it would be with me, not him. It’s always harder to deal with your primary partner having difficulty than anyone else. But she was fine, and he did just great, as I knew he would. We went off into a side room with the curtains closed to do this, because we thought if things got intense, we might want privacy. However, we wound up having a really good time and getting very endorphin-high, and all of our friends said the sound of our laughter coming out of the room was very enticing.

Plus, I got a delicious foot massage. Who could ask for a better night?