Today I put into play something I’d put in my own diary about a month ago: slowblogging, a microperformance, a call to action best answered by just a small handful of people. For three hours, I invited anybody who wanted to come get a private reading from my diary, if they managed to catch the announcement I made about it as I was doing it (on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook).

Why not just put it in your blaaaaaag Melissa? I wanted to tell stories without them being part of the awkward, extended performance that is my ten years of blogging. I wanted a private place in public. I wanted to share it.

Blogging had done something corrupt to my diary writing. So I took the last few months to turn almost completely away from (sorry) personal-storytelling-on-the-internet and headed back to the diary, which can keep a secret for at least a few minutes. There’s nothing pure or sacred about it. It’s really just about being fair to time and to memory. (Even if I go back and read it almost immediately.)

My diary is my favorite book to pull out on the train or waiting for the train or waiting for someone or after someone. It’s my constant. I’ve been keeping track of everything that way — dates, lovers, transformations, scraps of stories — for as long as I’ve been writing, which is almost thirty years. The first one I still have is from when I was six and even then, there is a sense in it that it will be read. There is kissing in it.

There’s an element of performance to it, keeping a diary. The diary itself is compromised: let’s blame the rise of the memoir, and the death of books, and Facebook, and Anaïs Nin, who never got enough credit for her work as the first blogger. Nin lied in hers. She never let anyone read it. She’s got over a dozen volumes in print.

We don’t believe in diaries. They are instruments for writers to build bigger stories about themselves, or, they are boring. There’s not room much in the middle, and they don’t even sell for that much money these days.

My diary is the first thing I wanted to put on the internet. I’ve scanned so many pages I’ll never let anyone upload. This was before all of this: before it was easy, before it was an act.

But this, even this is a performance. Telling you this. Telling you I have a secret. Even in bed when a lover runs down a list of our night previous, I have to make fun of myself — “Oh, are you just doing the sketch for the diary yourself now?” — before he takes his own turn at me. It’s not narcissism. I’m not in love with myself. I’m in love with the story.

I’m eating chicken breasts and thighs with my fingers tonight, in honor of the first night I got to seriously spend time with Annie Sprinkle. To all the whore sisters who’ve been questioning my sanity of late, this story is for you:

(“Annie’s Breasts,” Northampton, MA 2003, and read with the love you’d give a poor little rich girl)

This would have to be the first story. Annie’s breasts. My own mother’s brand of maternal love, that being suffocation, denial, and repression, kept me from going after that golden oldie of psychotherapy, the comfort of the tit. Throwing my head on momma’s boobies, and just letting out a cathartic, helpless wail was not in my cards, not until I was twenty three years old, alone in San Francisco, letting loose a little torrent of tears into the cleavage of Annie Sprinkle.

A few years after, when my actual cards were being read by my teacher, Mary, she asked me, “Does Inanna have any mothering qualities to you? Because that’s what you need right now. You need to know that your mother loves you. Not your birth mother. She’s not happening. You need to know, and not just know, but feel, in your whole being, that the Goddess is your mother and she loves you.”

It doesn’t sound like, “Jesus loves me, this I know, cause the child molesting priest, he told me so.” Not really. I’m sure a part of me felt so still, held mom at arm’s length still. My mom, my real mom, I knew it, was a whore — not the one whose cunt I first knew, but the one whose cunt first taught me. My cunt. My own.

I was my own whore-momma, until Annie. It wasn’t a new age rebirthing with crystal dildos or forced labor breaths that owed more to porno than Lamaze. It was just me, standing on uneasy legs in a tiny black box theatre in the Mission, holding onto candy I bought in the lobby to benefit some leftie-sex political cause. Annie was in front of me, taking questions from the stragglers. My legs were still gooey from the massage she gave me mid-show, cooing, “Are you old enough to be here? Does your momma know you’re here?” in that voice you use with clients, but that didn’t split us up — even though it should have, it didn’t. I had paid to be here, and if my self-consciousness had gotten out of the way, I would have told you, if you were the ticket taker, Yes, I’m here for a religious experience.

So Annie had run her Magic Wand (made by Hitachi, in this instance), over my shoulders and neck and back, as a twenty year old image of her flickered on the screen behind her, of starlet Annie with a similar vibrator on her pussy. I don’t remember much except I couldn’t overcome my total body silence, which, if you have ever shared a sexual experience with me, especially one running heavy with whoring, you’d know was dangerous. Am I dissociating, or helplessly blissed? The line is awfully thin.

“Come back to Northampton, Annie,” I said to her bosom, as we melted into an embrace. I thanked her for sending traffic to my website, sacredwhore, which was linked partially as a mistake from her site, as she knew the woman who used to own it. “Yes, I saw that — keep it up,” she said, in that heavy-light sigh. When I finally made it back to the car, I wept and wept. The trip home detoured to Ocean Beach so I could scream at the Pacific, “How am I supposed to do this? Why am I supposed to do this?”

I didn’t use the word problematic, but I would have if it weren’t so cold. Annie’s problematic, sacred whoring is problematic, being stuck for another two weeks in San Francisco with less than a hundred bucks is problematic. Between all the choices, I pitted working-class survival wits against adopted-elitist academese, and went with the most profitable (and therefore, least “problematic”) option. I did my first massage call and the fever broke.

Whore fever. What soothes it is salt water, and cash. Like the well-stocked womb I made for myself, where I’ve got a full bookshelf and my laptop and incense and my candles from the city I love like heaven, and not just heaven for whores. It’s never clear-cut, never one or the other, just spiritual, just for the money. It’s to stop the fever, and it’s to stay alive. It’s for God the Momma and for God Inside of Me. It’s for my cunt and for my wallet, and when those slits start melding more, the fever may break forever. Right now I just ask Momma for a healing salve when I start burning up, and when She comes, I do, too.

I have a new job. Which instead of whoring by night and making whoring more respectable by day, as I did at St. James Infirmary, now I write about sex & money all morning for Valleywag and go back to bed in the afternoon if I need to get the sweet stink of gossip off of me with a healthy wank. (Today it was “Perfect Teen Double Team.) This is why I’m writing from bed. The best things begin here.

II.
Tonight I take advantage of not having masturbated in over a week, maybe two, I can’t keep track, I’ve been traveling and coming home. Coming home took as long as the trip. Coming home was sleepy, delirious, filled. Having a sense of purpose again, this raw clarity bolstered by fuck and cold nights and love too why not, that’s the type A motivation I need to get myself off with porn. The hunt, and wouldn’t that make some historian proud. The terror of discovery: not that I’d be found out, but that I wouldn’t find what I needed before my body gave out.

III.
My wireless connection barely works through my walls. I consider unplugging everything and taking this endeavor to the couch but give up and romance the slow download speed as a sort of teenaged fumbling.

IV.
After I come all I want to do is write.

V.
We’re going back and forth on honesty, and being honest with oneself, and am I writing a manifesto or a chapter outline? Am I going to put on some butch thing and just get naked in the introduction? “You make it safe to say, I’m flailing,” I tell her. “So go where it’s hard,” she says in three new ways.

VI.
The teacher video makes me realise I no longer want to fuck my teachers. This is how I finally give way, flood my own hand, and can rest: I’m different than when I began this, time has worked itself on this body and this is my body and my body is my field research, and this time there’s no shame in wanting to have all of this. It’s going to be hard and that’s why I want.

VII.
The shock that nothing will make it stop, then that stops, too.

You went where the digital camera was. You drove to Boston, to Providence, to New York. You took planes to Chicago, San Francisco. You started a blog to just talk about porn not because there was no one offline to share porn with you, but to talk about porn on its own terms, in its own space. You had to speak its language, even if you didn’t know it. You got paid enough to buy books for one class, to buy a vibrator and a box set, to buy a plane ticket, to buy dinner for your boyfriend. You got paid enough to buy lingerie you ended up never wanting to wear anywhere else after you wore it on camera. You got connected enough so that for a few years, you never had to pay for your own webcam, or computer, or sex toys.

You forgot if you were getting paid to blog or to do porn. You “had” to have your blog linked to the site so you could have something else for the members to pay for. You “had” to hang out in chat after webcam shows to become more of a personality. You met every smart woman in sex online that there was to know because if they weren’t naked on your website, they linked to it, or you to them, and that was enough.

The fucking that porn was supposed to be about was almost incidental.

You quit when the photographer couldn’t get the word out of his mouth, pussy. As he asked you to spread it, and all he could say was, “Can you just…

…thanks.”

I get it: I can watch this girl, over and over. She writes to me, exploit this as you see fit, after I blog her and offers me a custom photo or video set. I go to her site. I’m restless after a day turned inside out by writing all night, and sleeping all day, and fucking again all night. I need this. Then I have this. As much, as long, as turned on as I want. I get it. I take it. Porn is the power to take, to possess. Is it my distance from having been the possessed that makes it obv.? My arrival at the desire to own this, even if she invited me? Because? Is this just me wanting evidence of my own fuck? Does porn care? Porn is no mirror. Porn is shifting light, sometimes in the shape of a girl, but mostly, in the shape of my need.[1]

I’ll wait to write to her until the morning.

[1] Rarely is it made in the image of my need alone.