I get on the plane tonight, at precisely 11:30 PM.

But right now my soul is sitting in an internet cafe in Miraflores, the posh part of Lima, listening to a Grateful Dead show from 1984 on a crystalline soundsystem, my ears hurting from the tight metal of the headphones, Incan businessmen all around me but the show is spectacular and I´m marveling at its spectacularness, drinking a take-out coffee, running my tongue over my teeth, staring at the glowing radiation of a ViewSonic screen, trying to figure out how to best waste the rest of this long, bleak day, trying to figure out how to best waste the rest of my long, strong life…

My life will soon be one of North Carolinian texture. I´m going to have a couple of weeks in New York in August, but that´s just a reprieve … no, Sam is going home and he will be commenting upon the progresses of his book and the progresses of his life from within the confines of a room he used to inhabit while twelve years old - surely a plan that cannot withstand more than a month or so before crackling and exploding like a damned heathen in the fiery bowels of everlasting hell — yet just as surely a plan that cannot be avoided, and so must be undertaken, because this is what happens when you work without a net.

I am actually thinking of going back to school. I´ve been a diehard short-term man more or less my entire adult life. I got extremely lucky right out of college and something that I thought a rather far-fetched dream - to create my own independent movies and produce, edit, and distribute them myself for profit and for adventure - actually materialized, seemingly without any effort on my part, and despite an admitted lack of understanding in regards to the business side of things. That kind of thing simply doesn´t happen often, yet the stars aligned and for better and for worse it did, for me, in the very first business venture of my life. And of course that convinced me that all of the other far-fetched dreams and experiments would too blossom and burst open, simply because I desired them to. This was not exactly the case.

And so now I am recognizing the need to get real. Will I continue to publicize my book and work like hell to get it out to an adoring public who wants nothing more than to read about modern-day pornography, the cultural artifact that resides alongside minor-league baseball as one of the more amusing tragicomic industries of our time? Clearly, I will. I love writing and I love blogging. I particularly like writing about sex, and I particularly love blogging about my lack of ever having sex. There´s just something satisfying about it. Is it because the act of writing about sex allows me to recall a time during which I partook of the pastime? Or is it because writing in general allows me to in some sense avoid or at least transmute many of the basic characteristics of life, which can often be painful, and, especially in North Carolina, excruciatingly boring? I´m not sure. But I do know that my writing path, pursuant to sex or no, can and in fact must be joined by a get-real path, which is to say, a man can go to school. And pursue a degree. Which will eventually lead to a job for which he is paid a grown-up salary.

I can´t go into my 40´s forever financially unstable, jaunting off to Lima at a moment´s notice because the road is paved with gold therein, and then panicking because my bank account has dropped into double-digits again. It´s not a good look, it´s not becoming. Not for me or for any man. I have much to offer the world. I need to figure out what that is.

In the meantime, I will continue to write about ten-inch penises, because That is What I Do.