Tonight I’m placing ten years worth of clips, press hits, photos, diaries, manuscripts, cribs from my lectures, notes from other people’s lectures, letters, and really sketchy wireframe illustrations in archival boxes. (I mean, really sketchy, and really too many of them. If I actually created all of the websites I’ve mocked up…)

I am also watching the original Grey Gardens, or, as Julie Klausner put it, “Hoarders 1.0,” so.

I collect. I keep. I regularly go back and take stock. In a moment of kindness, a friend compared this behavior of mine to the assumptions one could make about the German people’s fondness for nostalgia as evidenced in the design of their toilets. A less forgiving take on my need to hold onto the past is that I am collecting intelligence on everyone who matters to me, including myself.

My answer is that I’m not good at living and writing at the same time, but I do take very fast and accurate shorthand.

This is why I still have to keep a diary. The press clips and lecture notes and even the wireframes — that all I keep out of vanity. The diary is practical, and has nothing to do with exposure. I’ll read it to anyone who asks. There are no secrets.

I don’t hold onto it all in order to reveal anything. I do it to remember that the truth changes and to become a more accurate observer of when I got it wrong in the stories I’ve told myself over time.

Now I go back and read: where I thought I had it all down right, where I didn’t, where I have to accept that I can never capture it any better and so hope those were days that don’t mean anything because now, aside from what’s missing, they can’t.

(I wrote another post this week called “New Zeroes,” but that’s on tumblr. Which, ever the mind towards the archival, I’m wondering if I should just fold in here. Or this there. Do you have an opinion, or is this just what passes for ‘content strategy’ or ’spiritual crisis’ these days?)

But if you saw me pawing through my bag at half past two on the F train headed back to Brooklyn, this is what I would have told you makes it all okay:

Amazing headphones. And learning how to get in and out of them and swipe your Metrocard and balance your laptop bag and get on the train going the right way. Purchasing them is also an excuse to go into B&H for the first time, where the first salesguy will not know which headphones are iPhone compatible, but the second will, and will request to be your friend on Facebook after. I showed his profile to a friend, who instructed me to not reply, but if I did, to say no more than “Dude, I am definitely not kosher.”

Boots. All of my clothes were wrong right away, and especially the shoes. The black dresses I wore when I was sixteen and still wear were okay, but still. You cannot be a kindergoth every day. This did not stop me from buying my first Fluevogs in ten years.

Ladies. Fancy-heeled teevee women of Manhattan be damned, you really do need people to call at three in the morning. (Even if San Francisco is still awake.) I am too lucky and I will not embarrass myself or anyone else further with stories of what women-friends do. But — almost nearly unrelated — I think New York has made me a little more gay? Or at least more head-turning-ly drawn towards any outwardly queer-looking woman I see around town? (Butch/femme visibility, it’s just not what it used to be.) It’s complicated. In one weekend I got to tell a genderqueer pal, Yes I Do Too Like Girls, and a metrosexually ambiguous dude, No I Am Not A Lesbian. I miss you too San Francisco!

Good sex. Also almost nearly unrelated. Attentive readers will note that the word “sex” there does not contain a hyperlink. So but and.

Amazing photographer. Better if she can also teach you how to play poker on short notice. Sarah Sharp (aka Trixie Bedlam) and I palled around Times Square with her camera and my mic and produced the photos that will haunt me should I ever get more involved with public radio someday. A few have already made it to Time Out New York. The best one is saved just for a charity calendar to benefit Sex Work Awareness, a community-based organization in New York that produces media trainings for sex workers. I will still work it for a cause.

But more and more, I want to appear on camera completely undone. I did a series of portraits when I first got to town that are the first I’ve ever posed for, that raw and also, the first under my full name. More on those when they are ready for that kind of thing,

Proseco. Because gin is a three-letter-word for bad behavior.

The iPhone Holy Trinity: Google Maps, iTrans NYC, and Foursquare (also for where you don’t want to be).

Mascarpone. On gelato, with whatever fresh fruit you can get that doesn’t completely make you miss the Mission.

Virgin America. Hello California? What’s the weather like out there now?

Unlimited texting, unlimited weekly MTA pass. For getting lost, getting back in the right direction.

Notebook. I am starting to write better in transit: subway platforms, in line for coffee, from beds.

Local guides. My grade school “boyfriend” now lives with his partner on the Upper West Side, and recommends we go fantasy Craigslist apartment hunting as a form of tourism. And with my best city friend, we executed a comparative evaluation of Prospect Park and Dolores Park (ratio of children to dogs three feet tall or greater, bare chests to bear chests, etc.), a few Saturdays at a time. Throw in learning how to get from Rivington to Houston while not quite in one’s right mind, and I’ve got a healthy start.

Out of town guests. At least once a month, to reinforce that illusion that you live here.

Some books to swap. I managed to ship myself just over a dozen boxes of books, but not enough to keep me from borrowing off of everyone’s shelves almost immediately. Ensuring that I cannot move again, I also made sure to accrue some library fines.

Hide all my old music from myself. If I were Karl Lagerfeld, I’d have bought seven new iPods, too.

Loading up again on the black eyeliner. Because evincing all my favorite shards of 90’s subculture makes me feel as if I never left and Kim Gordon would not be a bad idea to grow up looking like.

But also because no matter how perfect I will work to make it, smearing the mess that’s left on my cheeks was always the point.

Laugh, cry, rend your fishnets and ask for extra credit: Eliot Spitzer is now an adjunct political science professor at City College of New York, teaching a three hour section once a week on law and public policy. In another reality commanded by the New York Post, he’s also plotting a return to office.

I was not serious, New York, when I lamented not being on the ground in March 2008 to cover his “downfall” from having “availed himself” of the “services” of a “prostitution ring” — and a porn-load of other gross, gross metaphors that do nothing resembling fair reporting on the fact that “Client 9″ is no different than scores of other elected officials who are happy to legislate and enforce prostitution as far as they can from the guilty, nasty, professional sex they enjoy in expense-accounted suites.

(And they are so guilty. You can see how guilty quite a bit on MSNBC. Or at Slate.)

It’s not happening. And if I’m wrong, you can tease me for ever having shamefully hoped I might get my chance at him.

(image: my inbox, just last week.)

It’s been almost four years since I’ve done a reading at Femina Potens, I know — and since then, Madison Young’s labor of porno-fueled love (sincerely, her feminist art space is built “one anal scene at a time,” she says) has jumped across town from the outskirts of the Mission into a space that was once home to another queer San Francisco institution, Image Leather.

So come out and celebrate geek love with us in time for (oh I know) Valentine’s Day. I’ll be reading something from the collection of stories that I’ve been working on for a few years about my sexual history with the internet — which are also a sexual history of the internet because I am precocious and lucky.

Details, details:

Femina Potens proudly presents SIZZLE, the monthly Bay Area award winning literary erotica series. SIZZLE heats up the Castro every month, merging internationally acclaimed queer and erotic authors with the Bay Area’s top emerging local writers, spoken word artists and performers. SIZZLES’s open mic performances regularly reveal the bravest, hottest, most eclectic performers that the Bay Area has to offer.

This February, Femina Potens is celebrating geeky, Sci Fi love and lickable literary adventures of the nerdsome variety. Come parade your highest Pong score with the queer literary legends, titillating transformers and sexy scientists of Femina Potens. SIZZLE is proud to present Chica Boom (voted Miss Gay Latina) with a seductive Sci Fi burlesque act. Francesca Ochoa, writer and activist for the ground breaking Art XX magazine, will entice us with her electrifying writing on eels. Jeff Stroker will intermix the periodic elements of S&M and Atari into a collision of come-hither coitus, performance and writing. Melissa Gira Grant, sex blogger and sex worker activist, will obsessively orate the hottest of Internet love legends.

Femina Potens will host a Q&A panel with authors and performers after the reading, and dares all to cultivate dialog and tap into the creative process of the wordsmiths and sexy geniuses in our communities.

Deeply touch your own inner geek this Friday Feb 13th, 2009 at 8pm at Femina Poten’s Sizzle.

Sizzle hosted by:

Femina Potens curator, international award winning Bondage Model and Feminist Porn Star – Madison Young.

Feb 13th 2009 @ 8:00 pm
Doors/Open Mic Sign-up @ 7:30 pm
$10–15 sliding scale admission ($5/open mic performers) for an evening of hot words, buttery pop corn and cheap beer.

Femina Potens has limited seating availability so advanced online ticket purchase is highly recommended through Brown Paper Ticketing, or visit Femina Potens for guaranteed seating information and advance ticket sales.

(photo via Femina Potens)

That blog about sex I started almost three years ago? The one that just won’t go off and die decently? I’m trying to commit my first waking hour of the day to writing there — like anyone needs me to email them right at eight o’clock. Which also means I’m likely to be punchy. I’m writing as if a major gossip publisher were breathing down my cold little neck, egging me on in a chatroom to make it short, sharp, and right. Besides, there’s room in writing about sex to do some reporting on the business of sex itself. I’ve already covered the sex industry proper. Now’s time to cover the publishing and marketing side of selling not just the good but the crap about sex. And why it’s broken. I promise it won’t be boring. If it is, well, there’s always sites you can wank to when considering the rest of your morning needs.

This is my obsession: that all writing about sex is taken as an authoritative voice because the vacuum that ought to contain hundreds of voices is still so deafening and boring; that what “sex writers” are asked to sell is their ability to be sexy by some standard of sexy that’s easy to sell; that combine that cult of personality with the promise of delivering the “truth” about sex and you get a whole lot of nothing.

It’s not that maintaining privacy affords more opportunities to tell a bigger story, which it does. It’s not that we can’t tell the truth so long as our face is on it. It’s that when your face is on it, your career in sex itself is riding on who and how you fuck. How few sex writers do keep their personal sex lives out of their writing, or don’t sexualize themselves even when getting the story (substitute here for: giving advice, doing education, making a movie, teaching a class) isn’t even about that?

Right now, then, for the record, I’m not fucking. I did yesterday, and it was his skinny hips like the boy in Debauchette’s story that made me start in on this piece in the first place. That I straddled them as soon as I filed my stories to my editor for the day doesn’t make me any more right about the porn case I was writing about, or about any of this, but I’m putting it here all the same.

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.

Roxanne M. Carter (kore) influences me to stick with the web, always. Her original site, at the sadly dead prettie.com, got me bugged about the web diary as legitimate storytelling.

This was in 1998.

We’ve never met. I’ve only ever heard her voice now that she has a videoblog. This is the most recent.

[edited to add: I'm gravely abusing the tumblelog. So much more is happening there. Best intentions, etc. etc. This tends to be how it shakes out for me. Solution? See above. Stick with it.]

RKB. Tireless. Smutpusher. Cupcake fetish queen. And she will always be my first. Editor. Out, originating from under her hand, in the next six months: Best Sex Writing 2008, with my essay on The Pink Ghetto (pre-deconstruction to come at Sexerati), and Dirty Girls, which has my erotic memoir, “Cocksure,” also known as “The Saddest Blow Job Story In the World.” I read it at Writers with Drinks last month, and a mayoral candidate even approved.