Life is good over this way.

The first day’s campaign is off and running - my friends have been thoroughly spammed, all the Facebook and Twitter bullshit is revving, and we’ve made some sales. Pretty fantastic to have the site be live, and more, to have a product that I actually feel good about hawking. Mostly it’s the design of the book . . . I finally got smart, at the age of 32, and decided to work with a team instead of trying to do every goddamn thing in the world by myself. When I was first getting started on my porn-producing mission, I was so independent-minded and so stubborn that I almost had no choice but to do everything myself - it was like me against the world, and I loved it that way. But some of that ethos leaked out into my subsequent artistic practice in ways that were less than helpful. Basically, the things that I’m good at are, like most people, fairly limited. And what this project’s taught me is that in the end, you can really leap higher if you get your fucking ego out of the way, stand aside, and let someone incredibly talented take what YOU do well and make it that much better. Here’s a screenshot of the Anna Tes-designed PDF.

Fucking brilliant. And it’s even better big. Anyway, I do run off at the mouth. But why not? There’s reason to celebrate: I haven’t had a forum from which to run since I last owned a “blog,” and that was way back in 2001-2003 - fuck, that was so long ago that the word “blog” hadn’t been invented yet (at least not back in 2001). I used to call my bastard-ramblings an “online-journal,” and I would hector my friends relentlessly into reading my posts on a daily basis. In fact, I’d express thorough surprise and minor malcontent if they skipped so much as a day. You could basically say I had issues. You could basically say I loved to speak aloud.

And now I’m back. And what’s even better this time is that there’s a reason for me to blog, instead of just total self-aggandizement; we’re also trying to sell a product here. (I guess last time I was supposedly trying to sell my videos, but, well, I think the truth is i was mostly I was just trying to get attention. Same as now. By the way, my old site, after I let the domain expire, got bought by a dildo clearinghouse or something. Madness; and puzzling. But I kind of love it, all the same.)

So what’s to come in this blog of mine? I kind of don’t know. My “default mode” is to start talking about girls. And by god, let me tell you that’s tempting. One would imagine that there’s a certain amount of self-restraint I would have picked up by now - i.e. , ole boy, you MIGHT not want to broadcast the pathetic details of your pubescent-style sex life - but, in truth, I haven’t actually learned much self-restraint. Not much at all. At heart, I am and will always be a weird little exhibitionist, and the sooner I realize that, the sooner I can get on with my life and start writing. And sadly, I always get my best feedback when I shoot lowest.

So, on that topic, let’s begin. I seem to be staying at a hostel with some of the hottest women travelers in South America. Why did God do this - to test me? I seriously don’t know how this happened, in a cosmic sense. But I am accepting His plan, and I am hunkering down to enjoy the scenery. In other words, I am not going anywhere.

This trio of Israelis blew my mind. First of all, one was Panamanian, which changed everything. Think of all the combinations of people in the world, and you will rarely come up with a Ashkenazic-Judaic-Roots-in-Russia Israeli Panamanian who speaks a crude brand of English but is traveling through the hinterlands of Peru. It’s just weird - and that’s Israel for you. They have six thousand varieties of tempting Jew, none of whom look Jewish at all, nearly all of whom you have to do this complicated ethnic tracing ritual to figure out where in the hell they did come from. (Best Jews ever are the Black Jews of Dimona, who come from Chicago, but have moved to Tel Aviv, to doven and wrap tefillin and things like that). Black Jews, Blond Jews: both fantastic, both perhaps a bit less rare than you might have thought.

Traveling is an eye-opener, to be sure; mostly about nationality-oriented things, and, when you stick to the hostel circuit, which is what I’ve been doing for the past couple of months (out of sheer laziness, necessity of a good Wi-Fil connection, and sick panting desire for young and supple flesh) the revelations and suppostions you make are most often about nationality-oriented things regarding persons that are not even from the nation which you are visiting. For example, I am in Peru right now (I know that I said in my last post that I was in Taganga, but, in truth, I am in Mancora, Peru now); yet aside from the abbreviated conversation I had this morning with “Magdalena”, a diminutive bodega owner bottle-blond who was selling my rather hung-over ass a giant and expensive bottled water, I carry on the majority of my speaking with persons like me - travelers. It’s a different kind of invesigative journalism; and last night I was examining the mind of a wild dark-haired 24-year old Irish girl with a taste for Dublin rum and a sadistic sense of humor that involved running up to every single person in the bar, complimenting them in the most sincere fashion possible while looking deeply in their eyes and touching their forearm, and then elbowing me in the ribs and forcing me to do the same. We drunkenly complimented every single person in the bar; even Mike, the tiny, near-toothless German chef who is 37 years old, five-foot-nothing, stubble all over his face neck and mind, his spine twisted and crooked by years of alcoholic delight. I said, Mike - solemnly, touching his grizzled and wizened little hands -  I think you’re a great cook.

Then I lured my new friend into an orange hammock, where we explored each other’s minds and laughed about things that were only sometimes funny. In the midst of this some drunk stole my left flip-flop, though, and when I had to trudge home along the beach, it was on one foot. The traveling life is a good one, if slightly slutty.

Let’s all buy more books so I can buy a flip-flop.