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Back Issue: November 2013

Posted in Miscellaneous, tagged , on November 28, 2016| 1 Comment »

Parrots in journalists’ clothing…mindlessly report…[news stories] with the high level of critical analysis one might expect from a toddler or a spambot.  –  “Why I Wait”

Neil Gaiman's DeathNovember is the beginning of the holiday season, and that means a large number of seasonal columns: besides the obvious Thanksgiving and Yuletide kickoff columns, I also do regular ones for The Day of the Dead, Guy Fawkes Day and Armistice Day, and “Maggie’s Kitchen” shared a few recipes for the holiday season.  Despite its name,  “Flaky Pastries” is not a cooking column but a Q&A; the others for this month were “Suspicious Minds“, “Let Me Help” and “Three in One“.  The Cliterati reprints were “Innocence Never Had” and “Shame, Shame“, the harlotography was “Hwang Jini“, the fictional interlude “The Other Side“, gold star for effortand the guest columnist Brooke Magnanti; in addition there was a special guest column, “Picture Out of the Past“, in which Aspasia answered a reader’s question about a piece of art he bought.  After all that, there were only four other columns: “We’re Number One!” ridiculed the weird pissing contest between US cities and states to be the largest “sex trafficking hub”; “Traffic Circle” examined signs of the disintegration of the hysteria; “Crumbling House” looked at the collapsing reputation of Somaly Mam and “Why I Wait” explained the reasons I don’t report on some stories right away.Gamera

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Diary #334

Posted in Diary, tagged , , , , on November 22, 2016| 7 Comments »

selfiecamera_2016-11-16-00-12-16-589Although I really hate Christmas displays and marketing going up before Thanksgiving day (tune in this coming Friday if you want to know how much I hate it), my behind-the-scenes preparations have already started.  I’ve ordered some presents already, bought Grace’s ticket to visit me over the last two weeks of the year, and have already set up for my annual Yuletide special (details on Friday).  All this despite the fact that I’m really still in a more Halloweenish mood, as evidenced by this recent selfie taken while I was very high and looking quite witchy.  That may have something to do with a lot of difficult personal stuff I’ve been dealing with lately, or the rereading of a number of my stories while compiling The Forms of Things Unknown, or even binge-watching Doctor Who with Lorelei Rivers.  As many of you probably realize, binge-watching TV shows is not my usual style.  But I’d never seen any of the post-revival episodes until now (though the classic series is one of my favorites), and I’d like to catch up.  Plus Lorelei is a major fan, and she is extremely persuasive (not that it actually takes a lot of arm-twisting to get me to cuddle on a sofa for hours with a beautiful young woman).  Anyway, I’m also starting to put together the sketchy outlines of my January tour down the West Coast, and it looks like I may (not certain yet) head down to Florida in March.  So keep your eyes on these diary columns and be sure to let me know ASAP if you want a date while I’m passing through your city.

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Diary #333

Posted in Diary, tagged on November 15, 2016| 2 Comments »

selfiecamera_2016-11-05-12-48-38-054I think my car will soon be able to get to the airport by itself; it drove there and back three times in as many days last week (the first time Sol Finer drove it to pick me up, and the next two times I took friends there), then yesterday I had to go again!  Other than that, the week kept me so busy with little chores, tasks and annoyances that I wasn’t quite able to catch back up, and the election didn’t help at all.  But that finally broke near the end of the week, and a dear friend invited me over to her house Friday for an evening of inebriated cuddling on the sofa, which was blissfully relaxing and put me into a lovely frame of mind for the rest of the weekend.  I’m beginning to get my schedule together, and pretty soon I’ll know my tour dates for January; tentatively, I’ll be stopping in Portland, San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, Albuquerque and Denver, so if you live in any of those cities and would like to see me please keep your eye on this space over the next few weeks.  And with any luck I’ll be able to get my new book out by then, too!

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Diary #332

Posted in Diary, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , on November 8, 2016| 1 Comment »

selfiecamera_2016-11-05-12-53-43-464On Friday I flew out to Oklahoma to speak at the #OKAnarchy2016 conference at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, and if you’d like to see what was going on there you can look at that hashtag on Twitter.  My talk on “The War on Whores is the New War on Drugs” seemed well-received, and my friend Angela Keaton kicked ass with her concluding talk on the problems with many “-isms”, especially “feminism” that serves the carceral state.  I got to meet some new allies in a group fighting for the rights of sexual minorities, and though the drinks in Oklahoma are far too watered-down to be effective I certainly gave it the old college try.  On Sunday Grace picked me up, and I spent a night at my ranch before she took me to Dallas yesterday afternoon so I could fly home.  Unfortunately, my new drug regimen failed me for the first time; the ride proved too rough for the meds to control, and I got very ill.  But fortunately, the diazepam kept from from having a panic attack when the sickness set in, and the ondansetron at least helped me from the attack much more quickly than I usually would.  I was also invited to speak at an event n Phoenix in January, and I’ve decided to drive down so I can tour along the way; watch this space for details!

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Diary #331

Posted in Diary, tagged , , , , on November 3, 2016| 4 Comments »

time-lady-maggie-10-27-16Last week was full of lovely distractions, mostly Halloween and birthday-related.  And I conveniently had a day of rest between each one to recover before the next!  On Thursday there was a fairly large costume party for the sex worker community; my costume consisted of a steampunk leather corset that Jae found for me at Goodwill (she has rather a knack for that) and a faux-suede skirt, with my snakeskin boots.  I declared that I was a time traveler; what I was thinking of is the way that Time Lords and Ladies in Doctor Who always seem to dress a bit out of synch, with clothes that don’t quite fit any particular time period.  On Saturday, the party came to me; I don’t think I ventured out of my door the whole day, but several friends dropped by to celebrate my birthday with me, bearing cake, candy and intoxicants.  It was just so lovely; the love and acceptance in the room was like a living force, and you may get some idea of what it was like by looking at this tweet thread.  And my hangover the next day wasn’t even that bad!  On my birthday, a portable DVD player arrived via post for me, courtesy of regular reader Ivan Dragomiloff; that’s going to come in handy considering I didn’t have any way to play the DVDs other readers and clients have given me lately!  I then spent the evening with the lovely Lorelei Rivers, who cooked dinner for me and indulged me by watching a couple of my favorite horror movies, The Black Cat and The Haunting.  Tomorrow I’ll be flying to Oklahoma City to speak at a one-day event on anarchism; if you would like to see me there, you need to let me know today (the only times I’ll have available are Friday and Sunday afternoons).  Since I’ll be so close to home, I’m having Grace pick me up for a one-day visit Sunday, then I’ll be flying back to Seattle on Monday.  Oh, and while we’re on the topic of my work:  remember, my readers-only special expires three weeks from today, so if you want to take advantage of that you need to act soon!

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Back Issue: October 2013

Posted in Miscellaneous, tagged on October 28, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Death will claim us all soon enough; it’s both foolish and counterproductive to waste one’s life trying to escape the inescapable, and to suck all the marrow out of its bones in a futile attempt to delay the inevitable.  –  “Halloween 2013”

Zombie Rising from the Grave by Diane DiederichMy natal month is, of course, dominated by my natal day, and besides the directly Halloween-themed “Trick or Treat“, the tangentially-related “Total Perspective Vortex” and “Book Review:  The Science of Fear“, and the strong influences on the harlotography (“Aileen Wuornos“) and fictional interlude (“Monopoly“), several of the titles of otherwise non-horror-oriented columns were horror-inspired (as were their illustrations).  It’s not hard to pick them out of the list of Q&A columns (“Your Move“, “It Takes All Kinds“, “All Clean“, “Buried But Not Dead” and “Horns“) and Cliterati reprints (“Dark Corners“, “Imaginary Evils“, “Sex Rays” feminist heretic burningand “Everything Old is New Again“), and then of course there’s “Torture Chamber“.  After the guest column (Sasha Castel on being a mistress), two stats columns (“Frequently Told Lies” and “Handy Figures Revisited“), and an extra news column (“Hysteria on Parade“), that leaves only two columns on prohibitionist tyranny: a look at Swanee Hunt’s “Vendetta” against whores, and a critique of the US government’s “Whimsical Notions” that men can be ordered to be asexual.Temptations of St. Anthony by Bernardo Parentino (c. 1494)

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Diary #330

Posted in Diary, tagged , , on October 25, 2016| 6 Comments »

selfie 10-21-16When I bought my first smartphone a year and a half ago, the folks at Verizon didn’t bother to tell me that the model I liked was already over four years old.  So even though I liked it a lot and didn’t really want to get a new phone, I was eventually pushed into it by necessity.  It only had 8 gigabytes of memory, which apparently isn’t much once all the apps one doesn’t want (but can’t remove) keep repeatedly updating themselves without permission; I was constantly getting errors and my text program was so slow that it was really difficult to keep up my end of a text conversation because my phone kept bogging down & acting screwy.  Plus even though I have international service on my plan, I was told the old phone wouldn’t work internationally.  So a few weeks ago I decided to get a new used phone, and after TWO false starts (basically, the phones that looked like they would work wouldn’t accept a data transfer from my old phone) we finally got one that would work and I spent most of last Monday afternoon & evening moving into it.  As those who’ve been reading for a while know, I’m really very OCD about how I like my environment (including my online environment) to be set up, and I don’t like change.  So the trick of getting a new device for me is making it as much like the old one as possible so I don’t fail to appreciate the new one’s advantages by obsessing over the features I’ve lost.  Anyhow, it’s finally mostly straight except for a few kinks I need to work out, and I’m told that next time I upgrade these newer phones (my new one’s less than 2 years old) allow everything to be copied to the new phone, including the settings (which I had to laboriously reconfigure this time).  All in all, I’m very pleased with the upgrade, which for me is saying a lot; the new phone is a helluva lot faster and my texting is so smooth now, and I was actually able to upload this selfie (the first one with the new phone) directly to the blog instead of having to email it to myself & upload from my computer, which is how I’ve had to do them since the spring.  It’s too bad the new version of my weather app is so much uglier than the old one and lacks the lovely background pictures, but I guess I’ll survive.

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This Trick’s a Treat

Posted in Links, Miscellaneous, tagged , , on October 24, 2016| 7 Comments »

this-tricks-a-treat It has been my custom for the last few years to present a collection of spooky stuff in order to get y’all in the mood for Halloween.  Last year’s column contains links to those of previous years, so if what I share with you today isn’t enough (and really, is it ever possible to get enough spooky fun?) you can go back to those previous columns for more!  Since last year’s column, there have been a few dark or horror-themed columns and stories, including “Windows of the Soul“, “Knock, Knock, Knock“, “May Eve 2016“, “Out of the Dark“, “Clowning Around” and last year’s thanatopsis, “A Necessary End“.  I also featured creepy or spooky-fun videos in Links #277, #278, #279, #287, #293, #295, #309, #315, #316, #318, #327  and #328, and here’s a collection of appropriate links:

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Diary #329

Posted in Diary, tagged , , on October 18, 2016| 5 Comments »

selfie-10-13-16Though last week was full of the little chores which are necessary to real life, it was also full of the kind of weather which tends to raise my spirits.  Plus I had a multi-hour outcall with a very nice gentleman whom I hope will become a regular, and I restarted one of my old ads and started up a new one.  But I suppose the most interesting event of the week from your point of view (besides the taking of this selfie) was that on Saturday night, Christina Slater and I went to dinner with Desmond Ravenstone, a lifelong advocate for the rights of sexual minorities who has joined the fight for decriminalization and recently helped found Clients of Sex Workers Allied for Change (COSWAC).  I’m impressed by both his energy and the knowledge and experience he brings to the table; if we can keep attracting individual allies of his caliber and pulling groups like Lambda Legal and the ACLU into our coalition, I think decriminalization in the US can be achieved a lot sooner than many people imagine.  And it’s about goddamned time, considering that there’s never been a valid legal rationale for criminalizing it in the first place.

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Diary #328

Posted in Diary, Music, tagged , on October 11, 2016| 1 Comment »

selfie-10-4-16On Monday of last week I had another beauty treatment, then went out of town on a 2-day gig from Tuesday to Thursday.  This in itself wouldn’t be especially noteworthy except for the fact that it seems like every time I’m out of communications range for more than a few hours, some kind of big disaster happens (in this case, the raid on Backpage) that I then have to stay up late struggling to catch up with.  It’s almost as if the universe were trying to tell me something (in which case I apologize in advance for the category 5 shitstorm which will no doubt ensue the day after I croak).  Fortunately, I had something on Friday evening to take my mind off of things: a lovely and generous gentleman took Jae, Vignette, Lorelei and me to see a local production of Man of La Mancha, which happens to be among my favorite musicals (the irony was not lost on him, and I daresay he enjoyed our company more than the show).  And while we were in the lobby, Lorelei spotted a poster for an upcoming show that she says we simply must see together; I’m really enjoying having a musical-theater-viewing pal, and we’re working on a list to share (“You haven’t seen such-and-such?” she says.  “Oh, I’m sure you’d like thingamajiggy” I reply.)  We’ll try to take as many selfies as possible in the process, though we somehow forgot to get one on Friday (a damned shame given that we all looked spectacular, if I must say so myself).  So here’s one I took on the immensely boring three-hour wifi-less ferry ride Tuesday evening instead.

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