Monday April 28, 2003

MONDAY, MONDAY

Yeah, sorry about the boring caption. That’s about as exciting as it gets around here.

The big excitement for today was registering for my first Unemployment check online. Coming in marginally less thrilling was calling HARTline (Hillsborough Area Regional Transit, the local bus company) to find out how I’d get to a job on North Nebraska, which my agency has sent my resume over to be considered for. North Nebraska is just about as far from where I live as it’s possible to be and still be technically in Tampa (and, actually, I think this place may be in Temple Terrace) and if I get the job, I’ll be taking a 6:15 bus downtown to switch to a 6:47 bus out to North Nebraska… which means I’ll be getting up at 5 a.m. and getting home, if I’m lucky, around 6:30, 7 p.m.

But I may not get the job; they may not even interview me. It’s just one of those ‘wait and see’ things.

Oh, obviously, I did not win the Lotto on Saturday night. I had two of the numbers, which is worth nothing. Given how hard it is to match even one of the damn things, I think getting two of them should be worth a few hundred bucks at least, but some of you may have noticed they aren’t letting me run the planet yet. (Some of you will definitely notice a change when they do.)

I don’t suppose most people think about potential pivot points in their personal timelines, but being a geek, I do. Since I’m now up for a new job, and my lease is also up at the end of June, and if I get this new job it will be inconveniently far away, I wonder if there is a timeline out there where I’m living in an apartment somewhere near North Nebraska in July. And, if there is, is my particular personal timeline about to connect up with that one.

I also wonder if there will be any cute women living in the same building with me near North Nebraska.

Speaking of that, I lied before about the big excitement of the day. Actually, the big excitement for today was seeing a very cute girl in the pool. She was, alas, Attached To A Male Who Is Much Better Looking Than Me. But they were both pleasant and I found out their names – Mike and Jen – and can now say hi to them, or more importantly, her, if I see them or, more importantly, her, around the complex again. This isn’t going anywhere, but hey, when you’re me, just having a chance to surreptitiously ogle a total babe in a skimpy bikini is a life highlight. (It was a very skimpy bikini, and Jen is very much a babe. Seems nice, too.)

The rest of what’s below was written during my No Internet Weekend. Actually, I signed on briefly yesterday and posted some responses to some comments on this site, and uploaded some stuff, and did a few other things. Staying offline most of the weekend didn’t help in terms of email; which is to say, all I had waiting for me was spam. But the new comments were nice. Thanks to one and all.

Oh, this first thing down below is all about quantum physics. Give it a miss if that sounds as boring to you as it would to most people.

Like it? Hate it? Stop draggin’ my heart around.

WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND

I just finished watching Frequency for, I think, the third time. Took my mom to see it for Mother’s Day once in the theaters, bought it on video about a year ago and watched it again then, and then I bought it on DVD about a month ago and finally got around to watching the DVD in bits and pieces over the course of Friday/Saturday this weekend.

It’s a great movie, but I think I’ve mentioned that before. What this entry is about is not how great the movie is, but to recant something I’ve always said about it prior to this… namely, that the weird time travel thingie, with the cop in 1999 giving information to his firefighter father in 1969 that lets the dad alter the history that the kid remembers, simply couldn’t work that way… and if it did, there’s still stuff in the movie, the way it’s shown, that couldn’t work that way, either.

Well, I’m slow. I finally got it.

I’m not a math guy. I’m sure there are equations for this, and that those equations are the only way to put this precisely, and trying to explain it in words is going to be something of a struggle. But I finally realized, in a sudden burst like, you know, that cartoon light bulb going on over my head, that this actually could work. (I seriously hope time doesn’t actually work this way; people could be changing my personal timeline all over the place and I wouldn’t remember it, and I find that thought rather annoying.)

It isn’t just sloppy movie writing, taking something abstract and confusing and making it simple for a dramatic visual. And see, that was my primary hang up before. I mean, sure, okay… a guy gets hold of a magic radio that lets him talk to his dad, 30 years in the past. He tells his dad some information that lets the father avoid dying in a fire, thus changing the past that the guy in the present day remembers. Weird, but so far, standard time travel stuff… the person in the present day altering his own history, and then remembering two separate timelines of events even while living in the new, changed present, is pretty old hat in SF.

But what was annoying me was what I perceived as ‘mistakes’ put in for the sake of drama. Frank, in the past, using a soldering iron to burn a message in the desk that John, his son, would be sitting at thirty years in the future… and John, in that future, watching as the letters slowly burned into the desk, seemingly from nowhere. Later on, Frank uses a shotgun to blow the villain’s hand off in 1969; meanwhile, in 1999, John is fighting the same guy (30 years older) and abruptly, that guy’s right hand withers and vanishes, as an effect of what Frank had done three decades before.

See, stuff like that just struck me as stupid and sloppy Hollywood hokum. It wouldn’t work like that. The continuum is consistent, any changes that Frank made in the past would already be reflected in John’s present. If the bad guy was missing a hand, he would have been missing it when he showed up. If Frank burned letters into a desk, then those letters should have been there all John’s life.

But I’ve realized that it’s actually not so stupid. Those details… and another one, where Frank’s wife/John’s mom scratches the bad guy badly in the face in 1969, and suddenly scars appear on his face in 1999… show that whoever plotted the film actually studied some quantum physics.

See, what I was forgetting is, Einstein’s theory of simultaneity – a theory which is looking to be more and more credible as… um… well, you’re not going to get this yet, but it’s ironic I’m about to type this phrase… as time goes by.

See, Einsten theorized… and seemed to believe… that in point of fact, time does not go by. The past, present and future are illusions. We perceive time in a linear fashion, in much the same way we perceive space… but that’s only because that’s the way our brains process the data we receive from the reality around us. In actuality, there is no linear time. Everything happens all at once… simultaneously.

Of course, if there is no time, there is also no space… everything is everything else, all at once; there are no separations. But that doesn’t really come into this much, so don’t trouble yourself with it.

Everything happening at once, however, is key. We have to keep this in mind as I try to explain how the weird time travel physics in Frequency works.

Simultaneity… the idea that there really isn’t a past, present, or future, but only a constant ‘now’ in which everything happens simultaneously… actually explains many things. Precognition becomes simplicity itself, if there really is no future… if everything that has ever happened and will ever happen is actually happening ‘now’, then ‘seeing the future’ is essentially tuning into some aspect of the continuum that you don’t normally perceive… a part that normally we would process as ‘hasn’t happened yet’.

This also nicely takes care of the whole predestination conundrum, although getting into that makes my head hurt even worse than thinking about ‘simultaneity’ does, so I won’t mention it again here.

I realize this is confusing. Let me toss a metaphor at you. Think of that old laser printer in the office you work at, or you used to work at. The one that you’d send a massive, 40 page document to, with a lot of different fonts and maybe a few embedded graphics in it, and the printer would blink for a while with a PROCESSING or LOADING BUFFER message… after which, it would print one page at a time… very very slowly. The reason for this is that the printer only has so much ‘memory’ built into it. It can’t accept the entire document you transmitted at once, so it accepts data until its buffer is full, and then prints a page, and then accepts more data, and prints another page… and so on, until the job is done.

But remember, you sent the job all at once. Your 40 page document is done… it’s a discrete entity, and it’s sitting there on your computer’s hard drive, and you sent it to the printer in one single instant. And your computer transmitted it in one single action, too… however, the printer’s buffer can’t accept all that data at once. It has to take a little bit at a time. It has to process it. And then it prints it. And then it goes and gets a little more.

Now, reality is your 40 page document. It exists, all at once, sitting on the hard drive of the universe. And it is being transmitted, all at once, to your brain through your sensory receptors. But your brain has limited processing capacity… a small buffer. Your brain… the human brain… can only accept so much data at any one time.. When it accepts enough, it processes it, and then it ‘prints a page’… and then it goes back for more.

Except when your brain ‘prints a page’, what it does is, it makes a memory. It takes the data your senses have soaked up, it processes it, and it turns it into coded proteins that we can somehow access through an effort of will to ‘remember’ past events… by which we mean, past sensory loads, or past data transmissions. But what we remember is not reality, any more than a photograph of a particular attractive person is actually your spouse… and that page being printed at the printer is not your document, either… merely a copy of it… a flat copy, and, if the printer is an old one, probably an imperfect one… maybe it dropped some of your fonts, or left out a graphic, or can’t print in color. (The ‘printer/brain’ metaphor is pretty good, actually. It works on a lot of different levels.)

Anyway, that may very well be how time actually works. Reality is out there… it’s one discrete entity… and it is transmitting in its entirety to your brain all the time. But your brain has limited processing capacity, and it is the slowness of our processing that makes us perceive time in chunks… chunks which we call ‘the past’ and ‘the present’. ‘The past’ is just the stuff we have processed and turned into ‘memory’, or, printed out, as it were. ‘The present’ is probably the text that is coming out of the printer right now… and the future is the rest of the data in the queue. It’s all there… but we haven’t processed it yet.

Okay, I probably didn’t explain that very well, and you’re probably still confused… I can’t fully grasp it either, although that analogy helps make it clearer for me. And, by the way, I don’t like the idea of simultaneity; if true, it means that the way we perceive reality is essentially and basically false to fact, and we can’t help it, because our non-corporeal minds/identities are imprisoned within a slow protein data processor that forces us to live in a completely non-true and subjective world of past, present, and future. And for all that simultaneity is born out mathematically (I’m told) and makes sense of a lot of strange phenomena, it’s hard to reconcile it with entropy… if there is no past, present or future, why do people get old? Why does metal rust? If everything happens all at once, shouldn’t things remain in the same state without changing?

I can’t answer that, I’m not all that smart. But, again… simultaneity is the key to understanding the weird time travel quantum physics in Frequency.

See, the whole movie works along the lines I’ve just described. There isn’t really any linear time. However, John, in 1999, remembers clearly a chain of events that occurred over the last 30 years. However, Frank, in 1969, doesn’t remember those events, because he hasn’t processed them yet… they have all already taken place (simultaneity again) but the collective sentiences inhabiting the particular space/time locus called ‘1969’ have, for the most part, not processed the events that John, in 1999, ‘remembers’, yet. To them, those events are the unknown future. To John, though, they’re the past. He’s processed them. He remembers them. That makes them, from his POV, ‘history’.

But, in point of fact, both Frank and John (and all the rest of us) exist simultaneously… and for some reason, for a ‘period of time’ (it’s hard to use time language in this context because it’s wonky), the two of them form a connection. Frank, in 1969, and John, in 1999, connect across the decades.

And while that connection exists, their actions become subjectively simultaneous to each other, as well as to everyone else who in any way perceives their actions.

What did I just say? Basically, anything Frank does in 1969 effectively occurs at that same perceptual moment to John in 1999, if the two of them are sharing the same equivalent space. If it happens in the present to Frank, it happens in the present to John… both of them are processing the new data simultaneously. Or to put it another way, the ‘new’ things Frank does in 1969 aren’t part of John’s past, so they aren’t part of his memories yet. So he perceives those things at the same ‘moment’ as Frank does. The two temporally separated individuals are processing the new data at the same simultaneous moment, regardless of the separation of ‘objective’ calendar dates that they each occupy. So if Frank carves a message into a table, John actually sees that message appearing letter by letter. If Frank maims somebody in 1969, the effects of that wound occur suddenly and John sees those effects in 1999… not as if they had always been part of his ‘history’, but happening right at that moment… simultaneously with Frank taking the action that caused the effect thirty years before. Again, this is because these are ‘new’ events, and these two, as the actors causing them to come into being… perceive them ‘at the same time’, and turn them into memories… i.e., valid history… simultaneously.

Effectively, the two separate individuals become one factor in the equation of space/time. What John does in the future causes an effect in the past; what Frank does in the past causes an effect in the future. But all those effects are ‘new’ to the past that John remembers, so her perceives them at that moment. Perception is, effectively, nothing more than the process of turning sensory data into memories.

Essentially, the two of them create a loop in time, and inside that loop, thirty years of ‘history’… or, actually, ‘events’ that John remembers… become mutable. Frank is at one end of the loop, John is at the other… and all of ‘reality’ lying ‘between’ them, as it has been perceived by John and is being perceived by Frank, is now thrown into flux. Those events are no longer ‘fixed’ by John’s memory… they can be changed. And when those events are changed, John perceives the changes as taking place abruptly, in his own ‘present’… but that’s only because he hadn’t processed the new events as yet. Once he does process the new events… the things changed by his father thirty years ago… he ‘prints a new page’, or makes a memory… and those things become history to him once more.

Things actually get weirder than this, too.

There’s a big climactic fight scene in Frequency. The bad guy attacks Frank in 1969, and ‘simultaneously’, thirty years later, he also attacks John in 1999. Now, the bad guy doesn’t really know what’s going on, and he is not communicating with his future self. He is attacking Frank in 1969 for one reason… Frank has interfered in his serial murder spree and revealed his crimes to the cops. In 1999, on the other hand, he’s attacking John because John, having figured out his identity, drops by to gloat, telling him that ‘you went down thirty years ago… you just don’t remember it yet’. The bad guy, who I presume is pushing 60 in 1999, doesn’t know what John means, but John does indicate that he’s aware the bad guy is a serial killer. So he tracks John down (how we never find out) and attacks him.

The thing of it is, the two timelines are not consistent. The guy who is attacking Frank in 1969 could not possibly, from that point on, become the guy John spoke to in 1999. In 1969, that guy’s identity is now known. He would not be sitting around in a bar, secure in having committed a bunch of serial killings that he never got caught for, waiting for John to come up and drop a net over him. I don’t know where he’d be, but by the time John sits down to talk with his dad on the radio, the night of the attack, John should, effectively, be in a new timeline… the changes his dad has made should have voided out his previous confrontation with the serial killer. Without that confrontation, the serial killer should not have attacked him.

There’s actually an explanation even for this, but it’s even weirder than the whole simultaneity thing.

In fact, here we have to get into Schroedinger’s Cat… and trust me, you don’t want me to explain what Schroedinger’s Cat is, but basically, it’s a theory (one that appears to be so self evident it will probably seem rather stupid to you) about alternate timelines, and potential changes in the timeline. The theory states that, until an event is perceived, it does not exist. (Okay, okay. Schroedinger’s Cat: Schroedinger hypothesized putting a cat into a secure, non-transparent container along with some device that will, at some indeterminate time in the future, go off and kill the cat. A little bomb, or some poisoned food… the point is, you can’t see the cat, and you don’t know exactly when the cat is going to die, but you know eventually it will. The question Schroedinger asked is, what state is the cat in while the container is closed? In other words, while the experimenter/observer is uncertain of the state of the cat, does it actually have a state? If we never open that container, will the cat be not alive, and not dead, forever?)

I told you you didn’t want me to explain it, stop calling PETA, I didn’t make it up. And I also told you it would sound stupid to you. Most people are going to say, ‘well, it doesn’t matter if we can see the cat or not, at any given time, it’s either still alive or dead, regardless of whether we know it or not’. And that’s what we call objectivist thinking… the world is what it is, and we perceive it pretty much as it is, and it’s going to go on happening whether we notice it or not. The tree makes a sound, whether there’s anyone around to hear it fall or not. But there’s a whole school of philosophy that questions whether anything can objectively exist without something to observe it. And oddly enough, this is a big part of the physics of Frequency.

Basically, the question is, why aren’t the two timelines… Frank’s in 1969, and John’s in 1999, in alignment? Why are things that Frank’s actions should have undone (the serial killer remembering talking to John the previous day) still in place? And, for that matter, why is John’s mom still dead in this latest history, when Frank’s actions should have prevented the killer from murdering her?

Well, it’s Schroedinger’s Cat… the timelines are still inconsistent, because the question of John’s mother’s life or death hasn’t been settled yet. In other words, until certain events in ‘the past’ are played out, John’s timeline can’t change… and the events in ‘the past’ will happen simultaneously with similar events in John’s ‘present’.

Basically, Frank has to finally prevent the guy, in the past, from killing his wife (John’s mother). Once that happens, the timelines are no longer in flux… they become one ‘solid’ timeline, in which various changes have been enacted, and life is much better for a lot of people… John, Frank, their mother/wife, John’s good buddy Gordo (John got him on the radio when he was only 6 years old and told him to buy Yahoo! stock, so Gordo is now rich in the ‘new’ present), John’s girlfriend (now his wife in the new ‘present’) all the women who were originally killed by the bad guy that Frank and John stopped back in 1969… all told, it’s just a better timeline (except for the bad guy). One would almost think that God Himself put a kink in entropy just so two decent human beings could work together to make a small stretch of history slightly but discernibly better for a small handful of people… which is a nice fantasy. But if God does stuff like this, I hate to think what the original timelines that are constantly getting ‘fixed’ look like, if the ongoing present, with all its atrocities and horrors, is the ‘better’ one.

For that matter, I’d hate to think what happens when a couple of guys who aren’t as nice, as smart, or as lucky as the two heroes of Frequency get a similar opportunity and manage to fuck history over completely.

Although that would explain a lot of stuff, too…

What’s also interesting to speculate on is whether or not Frank and John remembered any of this after the temporal link between them faded… or if their memories of different timelines just vanished, as they settled into the new, happier one the two of them had created by communicating across the decades.

See, if they forgot about it (and they probably did) then, well… this sort of thing could be happening to all of us, all the time, and we just don’t remember it.

Yeah, I’m sure I didn’t explain any of that very well. But anyway. Frequency isn’t as scientifically ignorant as I’d always thought, and that’s good news. Even if the theories behind it make my brain hurt.

Like it? Hate it? You don’t have to live like a refugee.

THE WORLD MADE FLESH

You know, I used to have a lot of movies on videotape with Mary-Louise Parker in them. It’s not that I like her as an actress, in fact, she pretty much annoys me… she’s probably a good actress, and she’s pretty, in a sort of big-eyed, waifish, humorless, much too earnest sort of way. But to my experience, the characters she portrays are always strident, screechy bitches. But I used to have Grand Canyon on videotape, because despite the fact that it has Mary-Louise Parker in it being annoying, and Alfre Woodard who is also pretty much always just as annoying (to me), I still like the movie a lot, for various reasons I won’t go into here.

But what’s especially annoying now is that I’m not entirely certain the actress’ name is Mary-Louise Parker. I recall vaguely that this actress played Dorothy Parker in some movie I haven’t seen, and that’s making me think maybe I’m getting the names mixed up. And because past periods of financial insecurity combined with Tampa’s easy access to many different pawnshops have led to frequent historical purges of my videotape collection, I no longer seem to own anything with Mary-Louise Parker in it. So I can’t quickly check and make sure of her name before I write this thing.

I could sign on and go out on the Internet and check… ah, I love the Internet… but I’m trying to stay off the Internet until Monday. No email. No blogging. No quick Google searches to confirm the name of an actress I generally find extremely annoying. And that means I may remember to do it before I publish this thing, sometime tomorrow, on my blog. Or I may not, in which case, the name may be wrong. And I’ll hate that.

Anyway…

On one of my many Yahoo accounts… one under which I am a member of many adult Yahoo Clubs, the names of many of which are really amusing, but I’ll spare you all them here… I keep getting email from Bisexual Britni. Bisexual Britni, it seems, longs to give me a blowjob. All I have to do is go to some adult club in Denver, or New Orleans, or Los Angeles, or Portland, where she’s doing a shoot for her website in which, apparently, she provides oral services to every lucky male in the audience over the course of the evening, and, well, I too can experience the vacuum attachment on legs that is Bisexual Britni. And I’ve seen pictures of Bisexual Britni, she ain’t bad looking… and I’m not here to pass judgement on her lifestyle. Any girl who likes sex so much she’s willing to slurp a load out of every single guy in the average adult club audience certainly isn’t someone who merits my disapprobation, given that, were Divine Allah himself (or Anubis, I’m not fussy) to offer me a mystical unguent or potion that would allow me to get similar favors from any woman I desired them from, well, there would be a profound skyrocketing in kneepad sales in Tampa, to say the least.

And then there’s William Munney, hero.. of sorts… of Unforgiven, one of my favorite movies. Now, I don’t think William Munney wants to give me a blowjob, and I say praise Baal,

praise mighty Mammon, for that, too. But I recollect a particular exchange in that fine, fine saga of the Old West in which William Munney and his elderly colored friend Ned Logan are discussing prostitution, and William expresses disdain for 'buying flesh’.

‘Buying flesh’.

And then (this is where Mary-Louise Parker comes into it), there is The Most Godawful Annoying Fictional Feminist In The World, which is to say, Mary-Louise Parker portraying Josh’s girlfriend Amy on the past few seasons of West Wing. And there’s an implicit irony in a character that is so stridently feminist being best summed up, succinctly, by the character’s sexual/romantic liaisons with a TV show’s regular main character, and I’m certainly aware of that, but that isn’t what this is about. What this is about is that Amy (Lawrence? I could throw in one of my West Wing videotapes and see, but then I’d have to watch Mary-Louise Parker playing this character long enough to hear someone say her name, and she’s a very, very annoying character, so I don’t want to bother) is just about the only uber-feminist I have ever heard of or seen portrayed who is vehemently opposed to legalized prostitution. Her arguments against legalized prostitution are, basically, that it’s not good for the women involved, and while I think that’s a profoundly stupid statement when taken in actual context as to, you know, how good criminalizing prostitution is for the women involved, we’re not going to have that discussion now, either.

No, what this is about is me trying to sort out the various levels of emotional distaste, or lack thereof, I feel for various different permutations of ‘buying flesh’. And, if possible, why.

One thing I know: I don’t like prostitution. By which I mean, someone selling sexual services to someone else, specifically for cold hard cash (or, I suppose, VISA or Am/Ex or MasterCard). I’m libertarian enough to be offended that the government insists on criminalizing a transaction between consenting adults that really shouldn’t be any of its goddam business, and I’m in favor of legalizing prostitution, probably within certain specific zones in every sizable municipality, and within the constraints of licensing the service professionals, etc. I tend to think that’s much more moral and ethical and reflective of the kind of governmental system I want to live under, not only because it’s not as intrusive or morally judgmental on the part of the authorities, but also because it’s much more sensible; you’d raise one helluva lot of tax revenues from legalized prostitution. But even with all that thrown in, I still don’t like prostitution. I’m not morally or emotionally comfortable with it, I don’t think the specific act of sex between me and another human being is something that should be turned into chattel.

Well, of course I don’t, ideally, all desirable women should just sleep with me because they want to.

That may seem like self effacing irony, but that’s pretty much how I feel about it. I don’t want to pay someone to get into bed with me, or coerce them through some other means. If someone is in bed with me, well, I want them there because they want to be there, and it’s pretty much that simple.

Ah, but then there’s all the porn you look at, Darren. Isn’t that turning two (or often times, he admitted with no sheepishness at all, considerably more than two) human beings having sex into chattel, or merchandise, for your consumption?

Well, yeah. And that’s what I’m doing by writing all this down… trying to figure out why I feel an emotional distaste for prostitution that does not, by and large, extend to erotic (pornographic) performances. Which is to say, I’d probably date a porn starlet… for a little while, anyway. I mean, I assume that even if we found a porn starlet that wanted to date me… which is pretty much living in fantasy land anyway… but even so, I can’t imagine the relationship lasting long, unless I stumble onto the only porn starlet in the world who reads Heinlein, is a huge fan of the first five seasons of Buffy, who can meaningfully discuss Alan Moore’s From Hell as well as Colin Wilson’s A Criminal History of Mankind, and who likes Monty Python, too. And I’m pretty sure if there is a porn starlet like that out there anywhere, she doesn’t want to date me… but assuming all of that, sure, I think I could date a porn starlet… for a while.

I simply couldn’t date a hooker. I know there are a lot of guys that do… hell, I know there are a lot of guys that take their sweet (if rather gullible and far too dependent) girlfriends and pimp them out… but these are men who should be sent off to a special island where they can exclusively enjoy the company of each other for the remainder of their lives, in my opinion. (The guys that pimp their girlfriends out, I mean. The guys who date hookers aren’t as egregious, just sad.) I couldn’t date a hooker, I just couldn’t get past the fact that my girlfriend, as a profession, sleeps with any guy who can pony up the fee. I could not keep my mind from dwelling on the hypothetical details underlying that simplest of social rituals, asking my babe ‘how was your day, sweetie’, when I see her again for the first time after work.

Yet wouldn’t this bother me with a porn starlet, too? Wouldn’t it be pretty much the same thing?

And there are other gradations beyond this. Since the debut of the Internet, there are all these ‘amateur’ porn stars… women who have very active sex lives, many of them with the knowledge and connivance of their husbands or boyfriends. Women who travel around to motorcycle conventions or car shows or various adult clubs, or who just have a lot of stripper friends with studly boyfriends and/or husbands, and who do a lot of these people in front of a webcam. They put movies of themselves having sex with these various partners, and photos of it, on their websites, and they make money (I presume, a lot of money) from doing so (and apparently, they really piss off Dr. Laura when they do it, too, but you know, occasionally you get these little bonuses in life, and it’s best to just appreciate them when they come). And would I sleep with one of these women? Oh, yeah, sure. Would I date one, if she became free and we seemed compatible? Um… well, she’d have to cut way down on the extraneous guys, because I’m deeply insecure about that shit, but… yeah… I would not regard someone who had had her own pornographic website with the slightest level of the essential emotional distaste I feel for a woman who is, pretty much, a straight up hooker.

Now, I feel a little distaste for the classic porn starlet. And I feel enormous distaste, as noted, for the hooker. So… why these gradations?

Somebody I know… it may have been the Late, Great Jeff Webb, but it seems more to me like something Karl Wasmuth would have said… once pointed out to me that the only difference between a woman acting in an X rated movie, and a hooker, is that the woman acting in the movie isn’t being paid by the people she’s sleeping with. She’s being paid by the producer of the film. Nonetheless, she’s still, basically, having sex with people she might not normally choose as her partners (although this line gets further blurred with performers like Bridgette Monet, who would only perform on camera with her husband, and, well, pretty much any woman the producer hired for the same film). Yet one of these things is not like the other… one is like ‘ew, gross, stay over there’ (by my perceptions and reactions) and the other is ‘well, okay, sure… we can talk about it over coffee’. And I’m not really sure why… except that the ‘well, okay, sure, we can talk about it’ becomes, ‘yeah, no problem’ when you take it one step further away, to the level of someone who is recording her (generally extremely promiscuous) sex life and selling admission on the Internet.

I suppose it basically comes down to choice, if not discretion (well, it certainly doesn’t come down to discretion).

There’s a passage in a Modesty Blaise novel, and no, I can’t find it right now… I thought it was in Dragon’s Claw, but it’s not, and I’m damned if I know where it is at the moment. But in it, one of Modesty’s frequent male bed partners (I hope it’s not the detestable Giles Pennyfeather, but I rather suspect it is) comments on Modesty’s, well, tendency to go to bed with a lot of different male partners. (Alas, no one ever comments on Modesty’s unfortunate bias against female partners, especially with Steve Collier’s delectably babe-like wife Dinah traipsing around in many of the books calling Modesty ‘darling’ and giving her little kisses and such… but these books were all products of a different era, and I just have to be a grown up and accept that and move on, while, occasionally, muttering ‘rashen frashen fricken fracken’ under my breath.) And Modest asks this fellow, with that dangerous amiability she sometimes has, if he sees any problem with that, and he hastily says something like ‘well, no, as long as you’re selective’. And she affirms that she is very, very selective (and she is; you certainly can’t imagine poor old Darren ever ending up in bed with Modesty, although, since her boytoys tend to get snuffed or at least kidnapped and severely threatened around the fifth chapter in order to get the adventure off and running, that may not be a bad thing at all).

And I suppose, in the end, that’s what it comes down to… a hooker sleeps with anyone, not because she finds a particular man at all desirable or gets any real pleasure out of the act with him, but because, well, it pays the rent and buys the groceries. Now, mind you, we all do stuff we don’t much like (well, most of us do, anyway) to keep the bills paid. But it just seems to me that sex is something that should mean more than that… it should mean more than trudging into the office every day, or working the deep fryer at the fast food, or cleaning out the glazer in a supermarket bakery. It should, at the very least, be a pleasure, even if it’s just a shallow, casual, and entirely sensual one without the slightest trace of intimacy.

And, again, I don’t know, but it seems to me like performing in erotic cinema has more of that in it than scheduling eight or ten half hour appointments per day at $200 (or whatever) per pop, with anyone who calls your number in the Weekly Planet and gives you his VISA. And going out and balling anyone who strikes you as desirable, while someone else takes pictures, seems to have a great deal of that element of personal choice to it. Hey, if people want to pay you to look at the pictures later, well, that’s fine, but you were still gonna have sex with those people anyway, the side income is just gravy.

Of course, the thing of it is, is, once you start making money from having sex, I’m sure there are times when the money becomes more important than the sex. I don’t doubt anyone who has one of these websites has, occasionally, just said ‘well, I need a new pictorial for the site, I’m really not in the mood for a three way right now, but that’s what sells’ and then slogged off and done it anyway. But then, I’m sure there isn’t a man or woman anywhere in the world in a relationship who hasn’t, on occasion, said to him or herself ‘well, I’m really not in the mood, but my significant other wants me, so what the hell, let’s think about England and get through it rather than piss them off’.

So, in the end, I guess it comes down to choice, and I guess choice all comes down to a sense of connection. If you’re sleeping with someone because, on some level, you like them and want to sleep with them, that’s a profoundly different sexual act than if you’re screwing an utter stranger, whom you may not even like very much (or may profoundly dislike) because you’re getting paid. I suppose that’s where my distaste comes in.

And wasn’t that a remarkable waste of time, me writing it, and you reading it?

Of course, that’s as good a definition of ‘blogging’ as any, I suppose.

Like it? Hate it? Take it easy, baby… make it last all night.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I’m not a likable guy. I’m not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It’s simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don’t like my opinions or my blog, don’t read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I’m not going to say that this time around, because I’ve realized that what this is basically saying is, ‘if you don’t like what I have to say, tough, I don’t want to hear it, don’t even bother to tell me, just go away’.

And that’s actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country… for a little while longer, anyway… and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I’m not sure that’s a right when you’re doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don’t feel like reading… and I’m really quick with the delete key… as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don’t like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance… these things are only worth my time and attention if they’re entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough with, style, and/or panache to amuse me… try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.

Like it? Hate it? Hit me with your best shot.