Right now, holding sorrow, my first instinct is to be a caregiver. I’m heartbroken, and I’m — for the moment anyway — not able to do anything about it except to turn in and care for my own self. Which is the hardest thing to do. Which is why they hire, isn’t it? To be held.

I should be so comfortable. I have a lifestyle that prostitution has made possible — both the apartment in San Francisco and the connection to an on-call network of other sex workers who have responded to the outing of Spitzer and the escort he hired with speed and aplomb. I spent the last two days of SXSW checking in on the press statements written collaboratively (GoogleDocs pushed to its limits), getting ten emails every ten minutes with press queries, and not feeling as helpless and removed — geographically outside ground zero — as I could have. But the frenzy of the conference, the pace of which had me swapping phones with friends over breakfast and over drinks to keep up with the news, kept me safe from getting swallowed up with fear. I had about 5 minutes to decide last night how much I wanted to come out on national broadcast television. This is all too fast, and it’s how we have to move now if we want to stake some ownership in this story that’s rightly ours.

The Early Show segment ended up cut too short to bring me in. I’m still stripped raw from six days of Nerd Spring Break so it’s just as well — coming out on teevee was a decision I’m fortunate that I have more time to work it out. In the meantime everything you need in whore-media-watchdogging is going down at Bound, Not Gagged. I’ll be on my couch nursing a post-SXSW bug (in retrospect, now the morning after I started this post, the sushi was a bad idea) and hammering out more for Valleywag, which deserves a post of its own.

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.

In my old studio apartment in Lower Nob Hill, San Francisco, as shot by Heather Corinna, who has the full gallery all to herself, and her site’s patrons.

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.”

So I fell in love with my Ho Hill, with the rent boys who checked their messages on the pay phone I could see from the window, with the girls in knee-high faux leather boots breaking hundred dollar bills at the Walgreens by the cable car at three in the morning, with the proud women walking the Tenderloin ignoring my taxi cab’s windows as I rolled through home at night, and the mamasans in the massage parlors watering the plants in the windows as I walked to my morning coffee, and the quick hustle of men exiting the strip club cum brothel sharing a building with the Church of Scientology and a Subway. I fell gooey, messy, shamelessly, naively, without full knowledge and precisely without full knowledge, for my hill, and the people who made it and who made San Francisco “it” for sex & the future in the first place.

I watched a women in spiky-heeled boots stride out of her cab and towards the callbox of one of the grander dames of the hill tonight, a great old building with an imposing foyer. She carried a floral print duffel, like a carpetbagger, and had the kind of pink and white dyejob that would usually mark her as not a whore at all. But the wisps around her eyes, the fine blonde ones, were curled, and the rest matted as if it had been under a wig. She straddled that line between don’tfuckwithme punk and takemehomefuckme that could be a working girl getting off work for the day, or just some hipster chick out to… yeah. It’s impossible to tell anymore, the little flares of prostitution the city once threw up for me wherever I walked.

And of course I wonder what my neighbors think, too.

A few weeks after I moved in, around Christmastime, I’d taken a boy home from a bar, a real defiantly tragic single girl gesture, something in all my experience I had never been (a single girl) or done (a boy, from a bar). My apartment door was hardly revolving at the time, but I did get a note slid under shortly after that episode, the woman next to me or under me, I never found out, complaining of noise (”men’s voices at a late hour!,” “loud music after midnight!”). I tried to knock on her door and introduce myself but she never answered it, though of course I heard her inside, watching television. A girl who worked at a “massage parlor” (really, a cheap one bedroom apartment up the hill a few blocks, since broken up, a respite for tattooed girls looking to make holiday cash) came by one night and I showed it to her and she insisted it didn’t have to be about sex, it wasn’t about sex, it was just me being paranoid and creepy and now knocking on my neighbor’s doors and what was I going to say, “It’s true, I used to be a whore, but I’m retired, and all this sex is for free, really, and please, don’t judge me, I pay my rent on time just like everybody else!”

Sex continued without interruption on my corner of the hill, and just the other day, my neighbor lamented my moving out, her loss of “such a nice girl,” even if I’m only “next door” by virtue of my address, not my behavior.

It’s that I’m moving off my hill that I can say any of this. My retirement complete that I can talk about it. My being in love that let’s me go back to when I lost it.

It’s because I fell in love with this hill, and then on this hill, that I said the words without reason just a few blocks up the street and again in my bed, when I wanted it and didn’t have it, when I had it in a moment and killed it with saying it, and finally, when I had it and didn’t know it and didn’t care and had to say it anyway. The fantasy of the hill gave way to the fantasy of a lover and then that, too gave way to something I could still hold onto in the morning, and not because he or she was there still, but because it wasn’t just about saying something hard in the moment: it was saying fuck the moment, this is what I live for.

The hazard of all this writing-in-the-moment, right? You live for a story, but if you write about your life, how do you not write about the story of your life? How are you not that observer, wondering how this will “play” later? You think I have a hard-on for the web because of some greater virtue? Fuck no, it’s the story: it’s that my story is there now, and I didn’t even have to do much but show up. Scores of photos, other people’s blogs, videos and videos I don’t even know about, and people, people who may wish they were never there with me, but there it is, there it’s been told, there we’re all told it, and even when all parties haven’t been recorded, the absence is just as telling.

I could say, I was a whore, I stopped, and now I’m in love. But that’s the reduction of my experience that made me so unbelievable to my lovers in the first place. It’s why being in love with a place made more sense. I can read her history, and then make it my own when my own actual history is so perpetually in progress that I have to get outside of it just to recognize time has passed at all.

I was a whore. I was chasing love. I lived here.

And, and I can never forget this, here, too.

Here’s June 2000, when I started live weekly webcam shows, on my site beautifultoxin. Aside from getting me to write/blog every day, to build up my first community of viewers/readers, and getting me wet with many of the concepts I still work with — surveillance, celebrity, identity, performance — the cam project let me amass, with very little effort, tens of thousands of images of myself from a four year period (curiously, I killed the thing around the time Flickr launched).

I can go back and see my “flaws.” See that I have always been soft around my belly, had rounder hips than I do breasts, that my ass and breasts sit high on my body. That my forehead is prone to wrinkle up and my chin will double if not held just right to the camera. That just putting on lipstick makes me look like a different person depending on the light. That holding my arms slightly away from my body makes my hourglass figure pop but bringing them in close adds weight I don’t really have. That I do care about looking good on camera. That good to me, for me, still means slender, if not thin.

I know how to fake it, but I know that everyone knows how to fake it.

And I only really get how deep this gets me when I see something like this burlesque number from Mad Men, see a girl’s curve and shape and belly and softness and roundness and remind myself, I want to be as good to touch as I am to look at, want to feel as at home with myself at 30 as I did at 20 as I wished I did, and maybe really did, at 10. When all I wanted, by the way, was “a real woman’s body,” and that was, at the time, just like this:

(I know, she’s also a glamorous femme, a stripper, a dancer. But wait for the lingering shot as she slides her gown down her hips. That should not be shocking.)

I’m being a lot more open on my tumble log, but because I am restricted. How information moves there — a video posted elicits comments, that elicit repost, not to mention back channel email and other conversations — fascinates me. Aggregate truth. Something intimate. “The last refuge on the Internet for girls,” Nick said. For the lack of comments. But it’s not that. The narrative flow of a blog is so expansive, it’s easy to get lost in your own myth, in the details, in being grandiose. When your contribution is so neatly framed, and your choices for how to express yourself purposefully limited (hello, twitter, which still only asks, “What are you doing?”), the tension that comes from being “constrained” produces a taut, dense result: both in content, and (it’s premature) community.

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.]