Open To Suggestions

I was talking to Monk last night about the whole 12 second video thing. He and I have both been saying for a while that we'd like to incorporate more video clips into our content. But somehow, we're just not feeling clear about what that would look like.

I'm never going to go all-video, all-the-time. I'm a writer. But the 12 second format attracted me because I thought, "Okay, 12 seconds - I could just do that from the phone cam and accept that it would be low-rez and unpolished."

Thus, I walk around in the world thinking "Well, I could video this. But no, this is boring. I have to wait for something interesting to happen." And then something interesting happens, and I'm busy doing it, and I don't video it. Sigh.

And it can't be anything pornographic, anyway. I would definitely not video any of my sessions - even the parts without anyone naked - unless someone begged and pleaded for me to do so, and even then I'd be hesitant. You put something on the internet, and you lose control of it. I'd have to be really sure someone was one-thousand-percent all right with that before I did any such thing.

I thought: Maybe I need a theme, to kinda get me started with this. For example, I could go through my toy cabinet, and show you, one by one, my different toys. It would take a while, believe me.

And then it occurred to me - I could just ask you. Since you're the people who are going to be watching it, after all. So tell me, what would you like to watch 12 seconds of?

Remember, this is via phone cam, so think low resolution and bad light. And since I'll be holding the camera, it's going to hard to get to see me doing much of anything. It's more like: what do I see that you'd like to see?

(Note to the clueless: no, you don't get to watch me do anything sexual. That is so not going to happen.)

I look forward to some inspirational emails.

Here's the new Stranger column.

Now I'm off into a busy day of errands and shopping, and then some spa time at Banya 5. Bye!

The newest installment of the web series about a polyamorous triad, Family.

I was pleased to see that they got some good press in the Seattle Times. Nice when art overlaps with activism. Enjoy...

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Over the years, I’ve gotten used to some wild swings in my activities and surroundings. This weekend was one for the books, though. On Friday night, Armani and I had a very luxurious and decadent day and night at a local resort, with 90-minute massages, Chateaubriand, a hot tub, lots of wine - and lots of other things.

Saturday morning we woke up to snow – quite a lot of that, too. Now, I don’t know what it is, but it seems like whenever Armani and I leave town for a getaway, some dramatic weather-related thing happens. Like the ferry ride that we took in the windstorm of ‘07 – yeah, that ferry! Just our luck, we seem to stir up Mother Nature.

But Armani is a talented man, and he got us down off the mountain and delivered me home at noon. Whereupon I discovered that the cleaning people I had engaged – the highly trained team of professionals who were going to remove the heavy layer of nasty post-construction dust that was coating every single surface and every single object in my whole house – were not coming. At all.

So I was looking at a busy week starting Monday, with lots of people coming to see me, and a very filthy house. So guess what I was doing for nine hours alone on Saturday and for another four, with Monk, Sunday? Yeah. I looked like a chimney sweep on Saturday, only grayish-white instead of black.

People did offer to help me Saturday, but I’m hard to help sometimes. Certain types of things I can easily give clear directions about, but some things – well, I know how I want it done, but the effort of conceptualizing and then clearly communicating exactly what to do and why to do it that way? Oh, I’d honestly just rather do it myself. Unwillingness to delegate - it's a failing of mine. Control issues, me? Why would you ever think such a thing?

If the team had come, I would given them the keys and walked away - and then come back later and re-done whatever they didn’t do right. But directing another person, moment-by-moment for hours, in a huge and vaguely defined task, that’s actually composed of ten thousand tiny little tasks? Oh, no. As exhausting as it was to do alone, I would have been twice as stressed trying to do it and simultaneously manage someone else.

So Monk came on Sunday, when I had a clear and specific list of things I needed him to do, and that’s just exactly perfect. This is why I don’t have “apprentices” - and what a silly term that is - or personal slaves. I do not enjoy labor management - even the labor of people I’m very fond of.