I'm away, writing THE GIRL MUST DIE...

i'm gonna be away writing for quite awhile. here's the working cover (not actual cover) for my current book.
(click image to see a bigger version)

America: Clubbing its Hard Ons to Bloody Pulps Like Kathy Bates in "Misery"

paraphrasing a tom robbins' line that directed much of my early writing career:
"we must all write with hard ons; even women."

and when james said to me, "it's no surprise there's a lot of cheating in those buddhist temples, because when you're in touch with the life force, it's exciting, alive, and erotic. how contradictory it'd be to refuse such connection and excitement."

...ah, i'd never thought of arousal that way. arousal, particularly mens' arousal, had been distilled down to something rancid and smelling of bleach in peep show booths. something cavalier, casual, disposable. infinitely manipulatable.



but essential? exciting? powerful? creative? ...NECESSARY? transcendental? ....

whoa....


I never was a huge fan of David Letterman's humor. He was too confident, restrained, midwestern, impersonal, and glib. He looked like i felt when i was in any crappy gas station job far too long.

once when he was on oprah, he said it was nice to be on the other side for a change. to have something to say that someone wanted to actually know about. he's the man on the date who has to do all the applauding and complimenting, and feign fascination.

i was in san francisco during the inevitable bout of butch lesbians secretly fucking gay men so they could have balance in their lives. as a girl who's been with women, men are right: women can be fickle and confusing and fucking needy as hell. me? i'm naturally the needy, chatty one, wanting to talk about death and philosophy as soon as i wake at 5am, so i don't want to have to be the david letterman of the relationship. it is so much work to say "yes honey" at all the right times.

oy vey.

and just as michael jackson's dying was the most human thing he'd done in a long ass time, this is the most fascinatingly human david letterman has ever been in my lifetime and i love the brilliance of how he's courageously dealing with it head on.

it's a new era, y'all. CBS's removing the video from youtube is so bush era. so "last 30 years."

and as a professionally obnoxious person, for i could not survive as an artist if i weren't bigger than regular life in SOME way, i'm tired of people loving people with a lot of chutzpah and personality, but then they want to keep such people to themselves, hobbled in a bed like kathy bateman hammering james caan's feet to a useless bloody pulp in stephen king's "Misery."

that's what we all want to do to the people we count on to live, feel, breathe, and fuck for us because we're at our tediously boring jobs we insist we needed to fall back on because every american wasn't granted the right to all be rock stars in the constitution.

the truth is that the LIFE FORCE we all love and need isn't just like a spray of aqua net: it's a fucking hard on. it's wet panties. it's a look that "i just made it off stage with my tits intact and i wanna fuck you all right here and right now."

courage skips through the clover hand-in-hand with fear, and the relief of making it out alive another day to tale another tale, is manifest in bear hugs and sweat and all that comes with the joy of being alive.

it's harder than ever to merely make a decent living in america, so soon it won't just be our movie stars and politicians who get to fuck someone new every night in "we're alive!" celebration: it'll soon be accountants who cleared an audit and gas station attendants who get an unexpected wink.

i'm a leo and prone to more possessiveness than anyone i know. but i'm realistic about the kind of people i'm attracted to and admire. i don't want to tackle a hero i adore, and keep him in a cage to myself, with his feet beaten to a bloody pulp. the act of seeing one you truly love and adore being alive and themselves is more wonderful than all the seven wonders of the world. it's art in action. it's human strength and beauty and inspiration against all odds.

when you look at someone as they are, as you might while standing before the grand canyon or niagara falls, and not as a means to an end for your own self or insecurities, seeing them come alive in a beautiful alive way is almost a religious experience. it's what art and change is borne of.

it's the opposite of kathy bates in "misery," which is how we're taught to control ones we think we love.
it's really just us wanting them to live for us because we're chicken shit or lazy.

human courage and audacity in the name of goodness and all that is alive and precious is fucking amazing.
that's no key party. that's not the smell of bleach in a peep show booth.


that's what marquis de sade's work is really about to me now that i'm grown up and have endured enough pain to understand he wasn't writing about sex at all, nor cute little black and blue flags with a heart in the middle, flapping in the breeze.

real s/m is about no safe words and taking all the crap that life does to hobble you and make you submit, but you don't, even in the face of returning again and again to prison and eventually dying in an asylum just because you refused to keep your elbows off the proverbial table.

it's about the sadomasochism of a conscious life and be alive to feel it, and trying to make the best of someone chasing you with a mallot and turning it into something remotely erotic because when you outrun 'em and they're tired and you've won, you wanna turn around and sodomize them with joy.


yep. i get it. i get so much more now than i ever did.


and as a little girl who at the age of 10 wanted to lose my virginity by age 11, i get how we can eroticize-- no, how we MUST eroticize---all that we have done to ourselves to enable others to treat us like blow up dolls because we didn't know how fucking amazing we were and all that we had when we had it.

i am mildly fascinated by the contrast of responses to the roman polanski thing. i get why the now-grown woman says move on. she knows she's merely being jerked off to by all of america who believes it protects its girls. or WANTS to believe.

i was horrified by that dateline pedophile hunt because times are so different and hypocritical. all of my first lovers would've been in the stocks for years by their rules.

we want our baby girls to prance around like porn stars but we don't want them to know the LIFE FORCE and power of true pleasure and the eroticism of power. true power. not the power to get the mailman hard. the power to do what you want, be who you want, and fuck whenever you want.

THAT is equally erotic, as erotic as performing on stage and making it off without the audience picking its teeth with your bone shards.

in an era where feminism is about the freedom to be a pole dancer if you want, and pro choice is about whether to swallow or not, it's interesting how simplistic and unrealistic we are about the situations our girls find themselves in. we've gone awry with this one-sided VICTIM shtick.

i see the confusion of men and their own truth and creativity is suffering for it and we're neutering and emasculating men and then disgusted at how weak we suddenly find them. cripes. i don't know why most men aren't all gay just so they can get shit done without trying to figure all this shit out, because i can't even figure it out.

when i saw whitney houston on oprah complaining about bobby brown spitting on her for the benefit of oprah's collective loins stirring, most of us KNEW she had the ability to do some shit in private considering what she'd done in public. as bianca laureano says, that woman in "cray cray." the highest order of crazy.

but she plays to us because we need her to be the victim.

how boring.

being the victim is so NOT HOT. even in boring suburban s/m, the bottom rules.

and to have lived life as a lolita in your youth, it's not ideal, but you hang out with famously crazy artists who're in touch with their ID, and you figure on being alone late at night, you've gotta figure the night WILL color wildly outside the lines before the sun comes up.

i'm not blaming anyone. i'm just saying it's reality. we want our artists to be able to have the courage to navigate the dark and light sides of our nature, and while many commit suicide or go mad, there's a reason for that. there's a consequence to having your nerve endings so close to the surface. when i'm doing good, i'll fuck anything or anyone around. i feel alive.

dangling a fresh 13 yo girl in front of a wildly alive man is like dangling a piece of chicken in front of a tiger.

just because we SEEM so civilized, we're not. why do you think society tries to tamp down on new ideas? because one snap of the button popping and we all go haywire.

i argue it's actually NATURAL for a man to want to fuck a 13 yo. they're tight, clean, in awe of all you do, and they shut up.
it's creepy, but a lot of things in life are creepy, just as many things in life can be sublime.

so it's not fair to entrap the ones we applaud for living life with rabid hard ons and send kathy bates around to chase them with a sledgehammer.

i'm not saying it's RIGHT.

i'm just saying it's time to stop pounding the piano with victim tears, and look at ourselves and how we teach our daughters. what we expect of them. what we expect of ourselves as growing women with power and influence. and how we transform what we have been through.
do we stuff tube socks into our lips and staple our foreheads to the middle of our skulls?

the sado masochism of merely being alive.

i don't have an answer. i just think things are so much more complicated. the irony is that when we let each others' freak flags fly, and we let the wild ones we love be as big as we originally loved them for---and BIGGER---they always come back.
where else would or could they go to truly be themselves?

that is gold. i know that those who let me be my unedited, open self, i do the same because i'm secure. and while it seems like i have some swingin' key party life, far from it. i'm actually the most conservative NORMAL one i've ever seen.

and there is no "ideal" sex life, or even life. and while the eastern religions are more popular now, and the west has reinterpreted them into passive-aggressiveness, maybe it's time to look at others who screamed from the asylums. like marquis de sade. his jailers were more perverted than anything he could write down. and THAT's the frustration of the truth that he had to live with.

he probably wasn't insane when he went in, but the truth of that would surely make me insane eventually. i just came out of my own vacation into madness and solitude, deep-fried in a thick batter of frustration.

it's really time for the fearful and insecure people who've been making the status quo, to be challenged.

david letterman apologizes, but it's the almost anachronistic mixture of masculinity, humility, but with integrity.

we can marry superfreaks and expect them to wear calico and stay home and knit. don't send a 13 yo girl to a wild artist's house with a shaved crotch and expect him to turn away, unless you wanna spend 30 years of your own boring life trying to restore all of white women's virtue. we've lost too many men in the name of protecting White Women's Virtue.

life's too short. but that's a whole other story.

but it's time for all of us to know our audience, for chrissakes.
and it's time for america and the whole western world to stop parading teeny bopper girls with shaved and delicately-parted crotches on their shoulders, and sprouting pedophiles in this culture like alfalfa sprouts.

it's time for us to grow up and applaud our own hard-won hard ons and all that we accomplish in the spirit of them and the life force they're actually about. the fact that we all thought we could endlessly refinance everything like magazine subscriptions and never have to pay it back shows us we didn't learn anything except how to bullshit ourselves and others endlessly.

time for us to stop roasting the ones who feel, on spits over fires.

time for us to color wildly outside the lines. it's time for james caan to turn on kathy bates, toss the mallot aside and sodomize her so she, and we all, have something to fantasize about in the ol' rocking chair.

--erika



p.s. all this said, i actually love boundaries. they're necessary. but i only trust boundaries made by those who've gone to the edge and back. they're more real, honorable, and natural. anything else is all white knuckling and hoping you don't snap.