The Block Kids

I've launched a new project: The Block Kids.

We weren’t just preschoolers; we were test subjects. My fellow preschoolers and I became the subjects of one of the most ambitious studies of identity ever undertaken: the Block study.

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Squares

I'm looking for someone to build me a custom personal site using Squarespace. Know of someone? Email me.

An excerpt from my novel-in-progress

The wife looks out the window. In the distance, she can see the tumor.

It is half-hidden behind a shrub at the park that abuts the alley behind the house. It is fiddling with a leaf and oozing a small pool of blood. The tumor sees her seeing it and withdraws, pressing itself into the leaves, concealing and congealing.

The wife looks at the dough ball. She pushes an errant raisin back into it.

It’s possible the tumor wasn’t a tumor at all. It’s fall. The leaves are turning vermillion, goldenrod, pumpkin. Perhaps she mistook a seasonal change for sickness.

Story of my writing life

This is the outline of the presentation I'm doing at the Crossroads Writers Conference this weekend as part of the Freelancers Summit on Friday.

THE FREELANCE LIFE

-- Born and raised in Berkeley, CA
-- HS drop out, UCB grad, UIC writers program
-- Gypsy scholar, Father dies
-- Book publicist, The Internet, The Postfeminist Playground
-- Porn, politically incorrect, punditry
-- Move to LA, start freelancing, TV
-- Beat: culture, sex, adult movie industry
-- 2002: Leg injury, launch RCB, traffic junkie
-- 2003 – 2005: New Orleans, mental breakdown, suicidal
-- 2005: Hurricane Katrina, move to VA, waitress
-- 2008: Time Warner editor, the art of online outreach
-- 2009: They Shoot Porn Stars, Don’t They?
-- 2011: Downsized, Forbes blogger, digital copywriting
-- 2011.5: Marriage, cancer, work as identity
-- 2012: Stop everything but Forbes, reinvention, novel
-- Tips: Pick a beat that isn’t boring, get rejected a lot, learn to hustle

Don't be a boob

Read my latest post on Forbes: "What Doesn't Kill You Makes You More Creative."

The day after my last chemo treatment, I went to a porn convention and wrote about it. What was I thinking? I had to double-check the dates just now. I must have been out of my mind. I was very tired. And bald. But I had something to prove to myself. I was angry I had cancer. If I’d run into cancer at a bar, I would’ve beaten the crap out of it.

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Labor Day

Labor Day, Chicago, Illinois

Excerpt

Here's an excerpt from my cancer novel-in-progress. I've written 40,049 words or 186 pages. The research for it is ongoing.

The wife had gone in for surgery on a gurney, and she had come out of surgery on a gurney. The wife who had come out of surgery on a gurney was different than the one that had entered the operating theater.

It came out drugged and said things that didn’t make sense and had a bandage on it. It slept on the sofa for hours, curled on itself, and it could no longer follow the husband if he said too many words too fast or if the idea was at all complicated, which it usually was.

Its hair was growing back, and it was exercising. It was trying to look like the wife that he had married again. It was unclear if this would work.

It was doing radiation. It had a tiny bull’s eye stuck with tape between its boobs. It had one boob that was bright red. It got tired a lot of the time. It tried, but it also failed.

Are you better at working or living?

I, for one, know the answer to that question.

Being a workaholic is a problem.

I work too hard, I stress too much, I put jobs ahead of things I shouldn’t.

I had a horrifying realization today: I am better at working than I am at living.

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An excerpt

Here's an excerpt from my "cancer novel" in progress. I wrote most of the first 30,000 words while doing chemo. Why, yes, I do experience everything as a competition. Thanks for asking.

The best thing about getting married, she had found, was that after you got married, it was like everything else in your life had never happened, and that was what she had always wanted.

Sometimes she watched the husband sleep at night. His arms up over his head like a little boy. His dark lashes on his pale cheeks. His breathing like he was pretending he was a freight train in his dreams.

The husband was always there.

"You used to live in a tuna can," the husband liked to say. "I found you by the side of the road. I call it the grand experiment."

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Scanning

"How Porn Went from Boom to Bust" is like a preface for the story I'll be working on this weekend. Definitely stay tuned there for more to come.

Yesterday, I got scanned by this machine. You put your arms in the holders, and then they feed you in and out of the doughnut.

At the end, you lie there while a nurse dabs ink onto you and then pushes a needle in real quick.

"This is like a prison tattoo, right?" I asked.

The nurse laughed.

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The man with the legs

There was an old guy riding a bike pulling a cart at the Fourth of July parade. In the cart, there was a very old merry-go-round horse and a pair of upside down mannequin legs with a giant plastic fly on the crotch and a giant plastic cricket on the inner-thigh.

I asked the guy what he had going on there.

"This is my float," he said.

Thongs

Thongs, Chicago, Illinois

Shit

I keep wanting to write a post that's like, "Oh, I finished chemo," but I didn't know what to say. I felt like I got run over, and then re-run over, and then run over again just out of spite, and I was crabby. Stabby, really. Very, very irritable.

I didn't think it would be like this. I envisioned myself (actually envisioned!) dramatically weeping as my Yoda-like oncologist said, "You are done." But I didn't. Instead, I wept in the car on the way home out of fury, and I have been in a sour mood since.

Of course, it's not supposed to be this way. I'm supposed to be a happy fairy living life to the fullest!

I prefer Barbara Ehrenreich and a book she wrote: Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America. It's about how she got diagnosed with breast cancer, and her response to it is nothing but nasty and ill-tempered.

My hero.

That said, I took one of the dogs for a walk today. It's very, very hot. This dog likes water. It is bred to like water. I make it go near the sprinklers and tell her to go ahead, and she sort of dances around in the water, the spray going all in her face and soaking her, coming back around to take gulps from it.

Side note: Do not fucking email me.

What?

Doctor: "Are you a murder?"

Me: "Am I a what?"

Doctor: "Are you a martyr?"

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Side effects

1. Nose bleeds
2. Rashes
3. Muscle and joint pain
4. Fatigue
5. Cognitive problems
6. Insomnia
7. Depression
8. Anxiety
9. Nausea
10. Martian visitors

Spread

 
If you read my work online, which you do, you're probably reading it for free. This is good. This is great.

But it's not enough to passively ingest the work of creatives whose work you admire. If you want to keep reading them, you have to do something.

In this tweet, I suggest that you link to, tweet, share on Facebook, or otherwise share your love of our work with the world.

This is how we make our living. This is how you pay us back. This is how you help us.

Thanks.

Doggy

This is Jake. Here he is, doing what he does best. I guess you could call it chillaxing. This is not long after getting up in the morning. Then he ate. Then he sprawled across the kitchen floor and went back to sleep.

This is how Jake rolls. When something good happens, or when something at all happens, really, he opens his mouth and smiles and pants and lets his tongue loll. It looks like he's really enjoying life, really having a good time, really grooving into the river of energy that is the universe.

There is a lot to be admired in Jake. He shits in public and doesn't give a shit. He enjoys lounging across chairs with his chin on his paws and his paws on the arm of the chair and looking something like a cat. He likes going to the dog beach but sometimes fetches so much that he is sore the next day.

Too bad Jake can't write. Or blog. Or have opposable thumbs.

If he did, anything would be possible.

Shrinkage

Every Wednesday morning, or whenever, I go to the person I call the "cancer shrink." Basically, he's a social worker connected to the hospital. We sit in this really spare room and talk. It's just off the hall where you get your chemo. So you complain while people zonked out on Benadryl get toxic waste pumped into their veins.

I like the social worker because he is very hard to read. In fact, he rarely expresses much. I like this because I don't complain a lot outside of the cancer shrink room, or at least I think I don't, and this means that when I complain in the cancer shrink room, the person I'm in there with isn't making some big deal out of it and weird faces and what have you.

I was wearing the T-shirt you see above today. I sat down and waited in the waiting room before the appointment. There was another woman in there, older than me and wearing a red hat. I'm bald and mostly don't cover it up. I think this is because I originally thought I was trying to prove something to everyone else -- Fuck that shit -- but I think really I'm trying to prove something to myself.

Fuck hiding. Or whatever.

The lady said she wanted to not wear a hat, and she sort of tilted up her hat so I could see the mostly gone hair there, nothing but a few strands left or so. We got diagnosed around the same time, and we have the same number of treatments left. And she said I looked beautiful. Twice, I think. And then when the cancer shrink showed up, she told him that I looked beautiful, too. So, thanks, lady in hat, for that.

She said something when we were talking about mostly it's hard because of vanity. Yeah, I said, because you can't hide it anymore, not even to yourself, when you look in the mirror. She nodded. She knew what I was saying.

Hustler

Last night, we went to the Hustler store because I had to get something for a story I'm doing. It was the only place I could find it. I called around to some other stores, but no one else had it. Finally, I found it here.

It made me remember when I used to live in LA. And I had a closet full of stripper shoes, and a cupboard full of porn, and a T-shirt that read: "FUCK ME I'M FAMOUS."

It seems like a long time ago and yesterday.

I can't say I miss it. But I do.

For a while, I was embarrassed by it, but now I'm not really.

Working on this story, I tweeted something like that it made me feel how the dog gets, because it was trained a long time ago to be a drug-sniffing dog, when it gets around hubcaps. It gets all intent. And intense.

Either way, it doesn't make a difference, really. If you believe in alternate universes, on some other planet in some other dimension some other me is running around with a pink rhinestone necklace that reads "BITCH," and it's nighttime or that weird time when the whole sky is sort of periwinkle blue, and I'm driving through the Cahuenga Pass into or out of the Valley.

TMI

Tell the next person who tells you what you should and shouldn't put online to put a sock in it.

"Why TMI Is Good for You":

According to a recent study, the female-dominated group of human resources managers screening your resume may have a problem with you if they find out you’re attractive. They don’t want the competition. How do you think they’d feel about inviting a porn expert into their midst?

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