Note For Rent

August

A word to the wise:

don't take your laptop to the pool. People splash people at the pool. Water, flying everywhere could--in theory--get on, say, your keyboard... which is right above your motherboard... and then there might be a... fizzeling.

Fizzeling.

Fuck me.

I'll do my best until I can source a new computer, but it's gonna be tough. You are the most patient readers a blogger could hope for.

As for actual content, I have high hopes for seeing aformentioned swarthy geek soon, as I'll be heading back to home base and he'll be around. All advice has been heeded, and straightforward passion is going to be the order of the day, not fancy swings and clamps and things. Look at me growing as a person.

Break Silence, part 2

I am certainly humbled by the sheer amount of mail I have received (and not answered) this past month. I’m a fairly terrible absentee landlord, to be sure. Perfectly despicable; but still here.

I mentioned transition before; and transition has ended up involving more of my resources (emotional, physical, psychic) than I had initially expected.

(Isn’t it always the way.)

And I’ve been repelled by the blog, by the sheer task of assailing the material. I haven’t even logged into my Typepad account since last I wrote; and it’s not that I haven’t done much: I’ve packed; I’ve fretted; I’ve mooned… but it’s all internal, which turns out to be the space most frightening to articulate: because as soon as you say it it’s true, and as soon as it’s down in print, it’s real. I’ve covered a lot of ground. I’ve had a lot to say to myself, before I could possibly say it to anyone else.

End result: as a compromise, I’m broadcasting an abridged version:

What was that Pink said? I’m not something, something…? I don’t remember exactly, but I have at least twice as many separate words in my blog than she has chords in her songs, so I mean what she said.

I am still here. I’ve been busy.

I’m by the ocean, right now. It’s very hot.

Okay, maybe not that abridged, however true.

I’d reached my terminus with prostitution in my host location. I’d done my best, had predominantly good experiences, made some money; and it was time to leave. So, decision made, I started to prep -- and then everything became more complicated. Relationships that had been started as good-faith interims became surprisingly serious; living arrangements that had been stress-free became fraught with difficulty; and then there was the question of what to do next....

I had a plan. The plan was good.

The plan was too naive.

So, I’ve been fixing. And dealing. And doing my best (my best, my best…).

And I haven’t been here.

And now I'm in Asia; in transition.

Let me say that I am quite overwhelmed by my readers. As happy as I have been to have a forum for my experiences over this past year or so, I never expected to see it thrive so. You guys and gals are tops. Kudos.

We’ll see this to the end, you and me.

Break Silence, part 1

I’m getting spanked later today. I’m charging for it, of course, but for all those faithful readers who have expressed their concern and impatience over the past month or so, please consider my backside’s appointment with a hand suitable chastisement for being such a poor blogger of late; and I have been very, very poor.

I promise that it’s not that I haven’t been trying to write (I have), but I’ve been suffering a paucity of words when I do – and the longer I’ve sat, the harder it’s gotten. Open spaces look emptier and emptier the longer they stay a faithful, void-blue promise. It’s not exactly that I’ve run out of things to say, but the rhythms of the past few months have been interrupted with, well, you know, life, and sometimes you find that the effort of staying upright is almost as important as where you’re trying to do it; and does this ship ever toss and turn.

I’ve been transitioning. As you do.

And I started to suffer hooker-burnout, which I have known to be an inevitable caution looming on the horizon, but it still sneaks up on you: one day it’s arrived, and you still don’t have enough money in the bank - not that there’s ever enough money in the bank – and when you’re unmoved to answer the money phone, or return query emails, because the thought of simulating passion you no longer feel for something that isn’t even novel anymore seems insolubly heavy, and you would rather lie in bed until 2 in the afternoon, not getting things done almost becomes an activity in itself: not rising, not eating, not going out; but drinking again, yes; watching apocalyptic volumes of TV, yes; ruminating on birthdays yet to devastate your time sensitive goals, oh yes. April’s been a peach, right up until the end.

Although, I have had fun. Sometimes, avoidance is its own reward. I’ve done my best to intoxicate (re: annihilate) those parts of my brain giving me trouble, and demanded nothing less that utter submission. I’ve demanded submission on dance floors, in bars, on stages; at home, at friend’s; once, I even demanded it in the back seat of a taxi. That ended better than it could have.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m prone to taking things a little too far when I get on a roll. I like to think that it’s just because I’m an enthusiastic person; but more probably, it’s because old habits die hard, and patterns, no matter how badly proven, are necessarily easy to repeat.

But I shake-out easier these days. Not exactly wrinkle free, but you can still wear me.

I hit the wall somewhere around the first week of April. I sat down, and wrote:

If bad, harmful, and frustrating things all come in threes, I count these past couple of weeks as 6-6-6. I've got doubles of trebles in everything -- and none of them involve me being occupied at both ends in a way I find pleasurable.

First, I'm broke, which is the germ from which all the problems emanate. No matter how well turned out, turned on, or well advertised, it seems the Trade has (city wide) hit a slump. Socks yanked up around my calves, and marching out into the world with grand designs, I'm still laid low by industry lag. Most frustrating about this is the fact that what you can do to increase business, as a purveyor of sexual favours, is only as much as you are doing in the first place: promote, promote, promote; and make sure that you're available.  I do, and I make sure that I am, but in the end if no one calls the sleek, black money phone, I can't very well answer it.

And as I turn inward, curl around the question of how I can have made so many psychologically exhausting choices, lied to my friends and family, and proudly maintained my successes and failures in silence, even though I've been dying to tell people, I feel helpless. How? is what I have to ask. I mean, really; how?

Second, I'm leaving. It's time again to cast one nation off for another. This I've known for a while, but the time line that I gave myself hadn't been to strict -- I had a last date of possible departure kind of thing worked out. Shit if it hasn't crept up on me, and fuck me now if it's not inconveniently close, with my bank balance lower than it has been since November of last year.

But don't be too worried. I hit bottom. I bounced.

29th Nail In The Coffin

Three things.

First, it's this odd little blog's Birthday today. I've been at this whole "For Rent" thing an entire year; funny, I don't feel any different, and certainly not a day over nine months old.

Second, Best Gay Blogs posted the interview I did with them, along with quite a flattering review. I love it when voyeurs make you blush.

Third, Jane over at Falling Girl Falling is calling it quits, for the same reasons and concerns that sometimes make it hard for me to maintain this blog, so I grudgingly understand, but I'm going to miss her prose and its implacably mischievous gleam. Bonne chance and adieu, my dear; I'm sure that you'll continue to startle the world, even without baring yourself on the Interweb.

Happy Birthday to me.

Catch Up Reading

Sometimes you should leave well enough alone.

For some reason, best known to those little unknowns that drive human impulse like a spastic robot while you’re laid low by bacteria, I’ve been reading up on the state of the Middle East and American foreign policy -- to occupy my downtime. Perhaps it was a subconscious attempt to commensurate my intellectual landscape with the others, emotional and physical, but wherever and whyever it started, I can now say that I’m more thoroughly depressed than simply stressed or grumpy (although, the body’s now feeling tip-top, thank you).

Sunni, Shiite and Shit-kicking American Machine, all factions are embroiled in one big, huge, sun-burnt mess over there; and as someone who takes comfort in history on a day-to-day basis, our repetitive nature as human beings, and our inclination to respond to the same stimulus in much the same way no matter what the technology at hand (oh, those clever little opposable thumbs), I have to say the shape of the situation does not look encouraging. You thought things were already bad? Well, there’s another tipping point tipped, I think. Tippled maybe, for all the sense it makes. And everyone’s looking; but looking does little to help when no one has any idea about what they’re actually seeing, constituent parts being a little illusive when the policy makers are barely even educated with a basic definition of their own faith, to say nothing of Islam, but if you stare at it long enough there resolves at least something you can see: a daunting, insurmountable escalation. Oh, wait. “Plan”, is it? “Manageable”, you say?

Well, that and “violence”. That’s a word you hear over and over. Title and tag-word, almost a mantra as well as the thing itself, it is violence in this case that occurs on a macro-scale, the kind that your imagination has a hard time containing -- much like global philosophies or the dimensions of the universe; it extends beyond a cognitive circumscription. All holocausts are like this. They occur and they fry the circuits right out of your head.

(I wasn’t going to post this. It’s a little outside the scope and the purview of the blog, and unless I wanted to bridge the gap, talk about sexual oppressions and liberties as they develop in a state at war, the provisions made for prostitutes to keep an army happy, or the tendency for sadomasochistic sexual practices to crop up in societies and minorities militarily oppressed, I doubt I could find a common thread to make it an actual essay, referenced and sited; but the world is interdependent, so maybe it’s good to be reminded that even hookers are horrified as world events lose all perspective, and it’s hard to know what’s coming next.

Tell someone that you love them today, would you?)

Romance and Modifiers

A few things (mostly) unrelated to work:

* I have continued to date Spark, which has probably been wise, as well delightful. We get on well, and if you're going to see someone romantically when you're a hooker, words can't really express the simplicity achieved by dating another one. He's actually had a greater amount of experience in the field than I have, and being able to trade war stories after a couple of days apart really helps to clear out any residual emotional backlog that can sometimes accumulate as you jump from bed to bed, in and out of position. As we're both traveling, the romance has taken on a dewy, rose-coloured summer-fling type quality -- which is about all the romance that I'm really built to handle at this point in my life. Vive l'amour temporaire!

* I am packing up and organizing myself to make it to this. I fear I may be traveling to gay Mecca.

* As I continue to not drink, I move closer and closer to becoming a morning person. This disturbs me.

* I have a new favourite band. Justin, they'd climb up onto your sexyback and ride you like bad, bad pony.

* Unbidden, life plans have begun to formulate out of the nether-regions of my psyche. Apparently certain ideas and prospects have been circulating amongst themselves back in the vaults, because I woke up a week or two ago and realized that I had a plan, and that the plan was good. Sex-work being what it is, that mysterious way station between so many things, it has never bidden a greater calling for me -- its fascination has primarily been to uncover the secret faces, and get a sense for the characters that people it -- but what my experience has revealed is a wonderful support mechanism that I can use to facilitate other ambitions. Money has never had enough of an allure to rule (re: motivate) me, and consequently my potential earning power has never looked terribly promising -- my family points out that I have made some astonishingly un-prudent choices -- but with my ability to work this angle now fully mapped out, apparently I've become empowered to make some decisions that I otherwise would have been unable to. Onwards and upwards, as they say.

I could explain what the plan is, but that would be telling.

* I keep coming back to the desire to get my nipples pierced, primarily because I think it'd be sexy as hell, and as my nipples have been more or less duking it out with my cock for primacy as an erogenous zone for as long as I can remember, getting them outfitted with little metal barbells might just settle the argument once and for all. I had almost given up on the idea until I had a client (a very dirty old man, bless him) really into tattoos and piercings, who kept mentioning how he wanted to do mine for free, and when he showed me his I was so turned on that I mounted him. The only catch is that I would need to give the poor things six weeks to heal, so if I'm going to do it, I'm also going to have to go on hiatus.

So they killed him, as of course we knew they would, but I can feel all the wiring in my head attempt to fuse when I'm exposed to the rants of that other mortal and incurable lunatic, as he goes on about the "important milestone" in "Iraq's course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain, and defend itself". You don't even really know where to begin, do you?

I do wonder, though, if the gallows were there already, or if they had them imported.

Make the Yultide Something

Okay, I've cracked. Here's a totally festive video.

Happy Holidays.

This post made me a little angry.

And you know how you can sometimes feel your intelligence crumple up, like the nose of an automobile that runs into a block of cement at 80km an hour, when it comes in contact with some profoundly stupid reasoning? Yeah, like that.

I shouldn't read opinion pieces.

A New Home

I decided to give the blog a new home here at TypePad because it gives me a little more control over the system without having to learn anything more about web design.

Ah, lazy me.

Well, not so lazy after all. Importing the content from blogger was supposed to be easy... but it wasn't. There was all this changing, and republishing, and fiddling and nonsense that just about drove me up the wall. Though with it all finally done, I'm feeling a little chuffed: the posts are all there, the formatting is intact, and I even managed to get the comments -- which was looking a little dodgy there for a minute.

What rankles is that had I known even a little more coding than I do, I probably would have managed to do the switch in under half an hour. Stupid computer languages and their insufferable gobbledygook.

Otherwise, I've been working steadily and skillfully. The ideal of course would be only four days out of seven -- that's a rhythm I can manage while still staying sane and happy -- but I've been pulling five so I can have the extra funds to get myself comfortably set up in my new (still undiscovered) home. At least, that's the official reason; but I accept that it may also be because my excitement at being somewhere new and stimulating lures me out into establishments of ill-repute, where I spend stacks of cash on beverages, thus making it that much harder to amass the capital one needs to buy, say, a bed.

Still, it's grand to have the opportunity to choose.