Covering a fourteen-county area, I asked every senior truck-stop employee I could find about a hitchhiker found in a dumpster, but no one had ever heard of her. I broadened the scope of my questions: Had they heard of any homicides in any area truck stops over the past thirty years? They didn’t remember a thing. But what I was learning from the FBI painted a landscape of extreme violence, one that matched the world of my memory. By 2004, so many women had been found dead along the interstates that the FBI started the Highway Serial Killers Initiative to keep track of them. There were girls found in dumpsters, behind truck stop diners, off the side of the road on truck turnarounds—the national database listed over five-hundred Jane Does in or near rest areas and truck stops alone. Some of these were the very truck stops I was now passing through, and yet I couldn’t uncover even rumors of past murders. The strangeness of this crystallized when I visited a Pennsylvania truck stop where I knew for a fact that two women had been killed, one found only yards from where the woman I was speaking to worked. Still, she “had never heard of anything like that.”

Meanwhile in the city of Oakland where I live, news of a serial killer targeting street based workers was leaked to the Sex Worker’s Outreach Project. City Officials did not provide necessary life saving information to the group leaving them instead to analyze raw data and read between the lines to figure out what was going on with out any outside support.

Veselka follows up with two very insightful paragraphs that gravely resound with me.

Now, it would be tempting to say that her reticence was rooted in a sense of company loyalty, or in a straight-out fear of getting fired. Another argument might be that people see what they want to see and look the other way when it serves them. Or, we could say that women in these truck stops—waitresses, sales clerks, bookkeepers—are functioning within a system of subliminal oppression, and didn’t “see” these murdered girls because they routinely shunned women on the margins in order to protect their own tenuous status in a violent, male-dominated world. It is not a particularly groundbreaking statement to say that brutal self-policing can be a resistance strategy.

…

Who forgets the body of a murdered teenaged girl found at their place of employment while they worked there? There is no doubt that the social invisibility of these women contributed to their predation. But what exactly was that invisibility made from? These women weren’t remembered, it seemed, because they hadn’t been seen in the first place. And they hadn’t been seen partly because there was no cultural narrative for them beyond rape and death. As such, women on the road were already raped, already dead.  Whereas a man on the road might be seen as potentially dangerous, potentially adventurous, or potentially hapless, in all cases the discourse is one of potential. When a man steps onto the road, his journey begins. When a woman steps onto that same road, hers ends.

The same stigma on sex workers extends to any woman acting taking on adventure or agency. In the same bloodline is the ability to walk down a street unescorted without getting harassing or negative commentary. To be a man alone is to be a hero, to be a woman alone is to be a target. You aren’t easy prey because you’re smaller but because it’s always hunting season on femininity. Rarer still than a narrative of the woman on the road is the story of the trans*woman on the road, let alone hitchhiking.

During my travels I had literally thousands of interactions with people’s ideas about what I was doing with my life, but almost none of them allowed for the possibility of exploration, enlightenment, or destiny. Fate, yes. Destiny, no. I was either “lucky to be alive” or so abysmally stupid for hitchhiking in the first place that I deserved to be dead. And, while I may have been abysmally stupid, my choice to leave home and hitchhike was certainly no stupider or more dangerous than signing onto a whaling ship in the 1850s, “stealing” a slave and taking him across state lines, burning through relationships following some sketchy dude around the U.S., or accepting rides from drunk people while on hallucinogens. These tales are fictions, yes, but they deeply affect how we see people on the road. And the shadow cast by these narratives—one that valorizes existential curiosity, adventure, individuality, and surliness—does not fall over women.

There’s the rub, right? Whether you’re the woman who dared to stick out a thumb for a ride, tits for the rent, or a tongue for a tab of acid you get that message loud and clear: you’ll get what’s coming to you one way or another. There’s an incredible safety net for men, especially white men, to not only go on adventures but also to make mistakes. Beyond being safer from harassment, assault, and murder attempts it’s also in the ability to make a wrong move, to not see something coming, to not think of every single thing.

Engaging in sex work as a method of survival is seen as tragic, not victorious. You’re relegated to life in the objective case, not the subjective. When people are committed to the narrative of your context as defeat they will only see you as defeated. Sex work was a massive window into oppression for me and it mirrored back the types of privileges and entitlements I carry with me. Walking by the wayside is an incredible petri dish for the intersections of oppression. Who sees you? What do they do with you there? Who will stand by your side when you need help? Who will fight for your justice? Who will acknowledge your narrative?

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.
You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited…
(David Whyte, “What to Remember When Waking”)

The Hitachi Magic Wand

The Hitachi Magic Wand is an institution unto itself. It was introduced to the massage market in the 1970s and it looks it. Hitachi never updated the style of the “Cadillac of Vibrators” because it never really needed to despite its giant microphone look. It did have its downsides. It’s common knowledge that much like vampires, no two Magic Wands die the same way. I’ve had friends whose vibrators put on sparking displays of fireworks at their death while others exploded in flames. They sounded like the neighbors could hear them. Yanking them out of the wall right before coming was a common annoyance. Those in the Magic Wand cult now that the pleasure that comes with this piece of machinery far outweighs the few frustrations. Vroom, vroom! It’s the go to in my sex box to drive me over the edge during sex and I’m in good company.

It’s been a well known  secret that Hitachi was secretly ashamed of their miracle body massager. It wasn’t really designed for sex, per se. Human bodies happen to have a lot in common in their fundamental structures. Those 5-6K RPM vibrations that could ease away muscle knots in the shoulders were also great for the tension down on the pelvic floor and the clitoris and the penis. High end mall and airport vibratory massager purveyor Brookstone gave up the ghost and started carrying the Lelo line along side their vibrators that are actually the size of Cadillacs but the manufacturing firm Hitachi finally caved into their squirming modesty and has stripped the Hitachi label off their famous “neck massager.”

Look, it’s me from a few years ago! Photo By Danarama.

The interesting thing about the news is the way it reveals a piece of the process of how consumer goods get to our genitals. So far as publicity, the cat is out of the bag on Hitachi putting their electronics prowess into their production of one of the finest vibrators around. It’s been cited in popular media many times over and there is a growing contingent of individuals complaining about a perceived overuse of them in their pornography. “

Originally Hitachi was going to cease manufacturing their dirty, dirty massager altogether but their distributor Vibratex arranged a deal to obfuscate the association by taking “Hitachi” off of the label and focusing on the name of the product, “The Magic Wand.” That’s some good negotiation work by Vibratex. Regardless of how many Magic Wands are sold, they represent a small blip on the overall profit margin for Hitachi that manufacture a myriad of products. No matter how ridiculous you or I or anyone else might think it is to drop the product now after 30+ years on the market, it is their prerogative  They can make or not make anything in their lineup as it suits them.

Now to a smaller company like Vibratex, dropping this item would suck slug slimy sack. “The Rabbit” may have done wonders for the vibrator market but it wasn’t the same kind of quality tool that “The Magic Wand” was. Lots of vibrators come in go in popularity, marketing, and updated laws across the country legally permitting their sale and publicity. One of the reasons we have so many goddamn shitty vibrators is became of the shame and stigma around their production. When something is forced to the margins of society, it’s hard to access more than marginal tools and assets for production and distribution.

In the world of sex, the Magic Wand is the standard but the world of sex isn’t as big as the world of TV’s. The zoning to open a TV store is much more lax. Even in the Bay Area, Feelmore 510 in Oakland had to clear planning commission hurdles to open and faced striking opposition. Hitachi also helps make nuclear power plants. Vibratex is not their biggest customer. If you think their vibrators are good, wait until you get a load of their hydraulic excavators and train cars. Hitachi doesn’t need the Magic Wand. It’s an asymmetrical relationship. While it can be argued that Good Vibrations has crossed into your standard corporate mindset, it still only has a handful of stores. So to Hitachi, dropping The Magic Wand would be no big deal but it would be a pretty fucking big inconvenience to Vibratex and down the line to individual retailers.

There’s no one else making something on par with the Hitachi Magic with the same distribution network.

In the world of vibrators there are Magic Wands and toys for people that prefer less intensity. There is not a spread of toys operating in the league of the Magic Wand. It goes to family reunions with gas powered lawn mowers, paint mixers, and motorcycles.

For a brief moment I imagined a world where the production of Magic Wands stops altogether leaving sex crazed maniacs fighting over the last few on the shelves. In San Francisco there could very well be death matches in the streets over the remaining few. It’s an economic model for the physical distribution of shame waves. I would also call it a huge indicator of the need for more innovation in the actual engineering of motors in vibrators. The void that the Magic Wand would leave in the sex toy industry would win the AVN ward for the biggest gape of the year. This is less a testament to Hitachi than it is an indicator of stalled innovation in the world of dildonics.

Capitalism is some hella complicated shit and scale is also key. Science and engineering are hindered in cultures of shame. It means fewer people are willing to give you a loan or even a bank account for your sex related business even if it’s legal. It means it’s harder to rent. You have to swim upstream just to hang a shingle and in some places your stock might be considered illegal. It’s amazing that it’s easier to buy a gun than porno in some places. The fact that I have been told I am officially unable to process payments for “sacrilegious” photographs is a reminder that sex is still something of an outlaw profession no matter how unified HQ has decided your store layouts should be. It’s out of a horror film that it’s easier to run a toxic waste business than a dildo store. 

Making a better vibrator isn’t catering to the dredges of society.  Then again, so what if it does? That aside, it’s an engagement with dense concepts of mechanical oscillations and their relationship to the human body in particular. Making a vibrator is no less scientific or intellectually rigorous than building a better telescope lens and it grants us an opportunity to ask more questions and better explore the mysteries of our own bodies. When it comes to asking what a better vibrator would be, we’ve been ignoring some crucial questions about the fundamental engineering concepts and how they’re interacting with the swampy biomass between our legs in erotic hyperspace.

Doctor Extreme is a friend of the Mayhems and someone who is the BIGGEST vibrator nerd you will ever meet. I highly recommend that anyone who calls themselves a sex geek or vibrator junkie check out his videos, slides, and essays about vibrator physics. (Check us out having a hot threesome with his wife and a very nerdy introduction.)

I guess my hope is that beyond packaging and a lot of external innovations for the casing and outside layers of vibrators that we’ll see intensive focus on the issues that Doctor Extreme talks about in his video. It’s a solid primer on applied physics with a the motivator of pleasure behind it. It is math and science heavy but it’s about dildos. He has slides available and other videos on his own You Tube Channel.

I am without a doubt a lover of the Hitachi Original Magic Wand. For the most part, I’m only going to have an orgasm with it sitting on my pussy. For me to have an orgasm, I need a lot of pressure and stimulation. It takes a ton of work and a lot of time to do manually or I can have a few orgasms in a fraction of the time. It’s been the only vibrator that has actually gotten my off aside from a Sybian and the Orgasmatron. While I can claim no Doctor Who fandom, I can say that his explanation of the clitoris as a Tardis is apt and accessible. We need more hardcore nerds looking at the biology and physics of orgasms and orgasm tools.

But hey, I’m a little biased. There are some other serious sex toy geeks in that lineup. I’d also like to give a shout out to Dildology while I’m on the topic of sex toys and science. They aren’t doing sex toy tech but they are hacking toys to pieces to get to the bottom of what they’re made out of and that is brilliant. Yay for slutty science.

Bradley Manning pride contingent from a past parade.

I don’t get out to the BIG San Francisco events these days. Where once my eyes looked up and watered over from hope and stray glitter, now they tend to look elsewhere for SF Pride and Folsom Street. There’s all the waste, the trash, the dominating force of Big Booze ™ shilling Absolut Vodka and Budweiser, and the huge crushing crowds, terrible food, and the heart palpitations all of this gives me. No, I don’t care to see a parade of massive corporations demonstrating how tolerant they are despite whatever implications their brand and profits might mean for people, animals, water, and the globe at large. No, I don’t care for the tons of plastic crap manufactured with pride.

Daniel Ellsberg

Pride and Folsom have had brave sexual components because of the illegality of what they were displaying in public. It was a protest. I’m all for Bacchanalia, believe me. It’s also important to remember that it was about taking something that people were being arrested and brutalized over and putting out in public view. It was about challenging how and why people were being marginalized for what they were already doing in private. Blowing someone in public was the reminder that the sun didn’t turn to blood, the streets weren’t suddenly cracking open, and there was no legitimate reason why people were being pulled from their bars and bedrooms and subject to a criminal record and all the damages therein.

I heard about “Gay Shame” when I was in college and I didn’t disagree with them totally but I wanted to have my day in the sun, a party celebrating something that had isolated me as a kid and a teenager, and most of all a good goddamn time. I wanted to put down my politics, pick up a beer, and just let it all go. Those Gay Shamers seemed a little uptight and political to me. Sure, corporations had some pretty bad policies but having Bank of America come out to the parade meant that others would to, right? Mainstream acceptance meant safety. If those stodgy old banker dudes could see why an event like pride where they knew there’d be drag queens and naked guys in cock rings and little baby dykes stomping around in their first pair of big black boots and a miniskirt trying on subversive in public for the first time ever then surely “we” were winning, right? Right? There were too many politicians in convertible cars waving to the masses for us to be losers.

Assimilation is something I’ve been thinking about for a few years and I had a lot of unquestioned white, cis, and class privilege I never considered in my early analysis of pride. ”Gay Rights” seemed to be about collecting as many beads thrown by the banks and “queer revolution” saw them less as gifts and more as the ways and means people are strangled. What does it mean that I used to experience gratitude for massive, massive corporations to toss trinkets down onto the crowds rather than to demand that the cease their countless human rights violations, theft, and destruction. For whom is it better, exactly, that the mega corporations and banks enter a float in the parade and some extra cash to close the streets and enhance the exposure of their live action advertisements? “Gay Shame” as an organization might not be active but its ideas are still alive and they started to connect with me.

After you’ve lived in a dense city for a while, the joy of a giant drunken street fair wears off and you’re pretty much left with street closures and puke on the sidewalk. People complain about the ‘bridge and tunnel crowd’ which is an insult “real San Franciscans” love to use whenever a large event in the city sucks, i.e. “Pride was great when it was really about queers in San Francisco but the bridge and tunnel crowd ruined it.” I don’y know there, sparky. One might say that it’s a blind class-based statement since it costs an arm, a leg, a first born, and a job at a high end start up to live in the city of San Francisco proper but that’s a blog entry for another day. Suffice to say, whenever a queer/perv of class agrees that “Pride is soooo over,” and blames it on people commuting to the city, I tend to think they should self-fornicate with a cheese grater. But that’s just me and my usual rage bubbling up again.

Free Breanna Manning.

I wasn’t going to go to SF Pride this year because it’s not my thing. I did feel a moment of pleasant surprise when I heard that Pfc. Manning was named Grand Marshall. I felt, dare I say it, pride for Pride. It was a welcome return to the fact that many heroes are imprisoned for their courage. It’s something that the event participants and their leaders needed to remember. We are marginalized, our sexualities and genders are totally ignored (often even by our loved ones and supporters) or are used to attack us. That we are not safe. War crimes kill people, gay and straight alike. There cannot be liberation of any kind until the war crimes of our country are exposed. I hoped that at least SF Pride might engage with transcripts and information that Pfc. Manning does not identify as male and I was uplifted that we could remember our roots, remember the point of resistance and protest, that we could fight back against oppression.

But of course all the little things of SF Pride’s pattern of assimilation and being a corporate lackey indicated a philosophy that came to a head when Lisa Williams, the president of the SF Pride board, released a statement declaring that Manning was not to become the 2013 San Francisco Pride Grand Marshall and then went on to utilize some ugly semantics that went beyond being a usual toady to the interests of corporations, politicians, and the state and went right into some straight up fascism:

Bradley Manning is facing the military justice system of this country. We all await the decision of that system. However, until that time, even the hint of support for actions which placed in harms way the lives of our men and women in uniform — and countless others, military and civilian alike — will not be tolerated by the leadership of San Francisco Pride. It is, and would be, an insult to every one, gay and straight, who has ever served in the military of this country. There are many, gay and straight, military and non-military, who believe Bradley Manning to be innocent. There are many who feel differently. Under the US Constitution, they have a first amendment right to show up, participate and voice their opinions at Pride this year.

It is vital to note that the documents that Manning released did NOT place anyone in immediate danger and served only to reveal war crimes committed by the US government, that there are plenty of individuals in the military who were NOT insulted by the release of these documents and in fact commended the bravery this entailed, and that Daniel Ellsberg had agreed to represent Manning as marshal of the parade. Ellsberg was the one who leaked the “Pentagon Papers” and revealed war crimes and willful deception perpetrated by the United States during the Vietnam War.

It’s strange that an event which was anti-government and anti-authoritarian in its conception would reveal a blossom of corruption but it is not a surprise. For decades now there have been activists asking who the event serves and what causes it is advancing. Yes, the context of queerness in America has changed. The question of same-sex marriage is being talked about at Midwest dinner tables. Perhaps also it is the fact that it is only in recent history that one may openly serve in the US military as a homosexual that makes the issue tricky. It is not a paradox to say that within the context of our contemporary society, one may simultaneously be disgusted and opposed to withholding the right to marry and the right to express one’s identity as a soldier and also decry marriage and the military. No one should be persecuted for their gender or their sexual orientation, full stop.

That doesn’t mean that marriage and the military are the end all, be all of queer rights. We have the largest prison population in the world, this includes queers. We have 5 empty homes (largely due to foreclosure) for every homeless person in America, this includes queers. We have a country without healthcare, this includes queers. We are murdering people in other countries with drones and bombs and illegal prisons, this includes queers. Gay rights are human rights, human rights are gay rights.

There has been outrage at the SF Pride Board and specifically Lisa Williams. Previous Grand Marshals like Susie Bright have openly expressed disgust along with many others, there have been protests, and Glenn Greenwald at the UK Guardian knocks it out of the park by pointing out how Pride has gotten into bed with patently immoral and unethical companies all for the sake of hosting a huge and prestigious party in article, “Bradley Manning is off limits at SF Gay Pride parade, but corporate sleaze is embraced.” He points out that AT&T, Verizon, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Clear Channel, Kaiser Permanente are all welcome as sponsors of the event and lists the many hugely illegal activities that these companies have engaged in with utter impunity.

What amazes me is the bold stance that Lisa Williams takes in that statement. It is clear that SF Pride is no longer an event for the people, it is an event for the upper crusty corporate class. It is not about change, it is about the status quo. That statement could have been as watered down as the drinks served at pride. It so clearly forgot that it was illegal to be queer but that never meant it was wrong. It’s a reminder about the company we keep and the interests we serve with our actions.

I won’t be at SF Pride this year. It’s one part the huge crowds, another part declining interest, a firm distaste for an onslaught of advertisements, and absolute anger that someone who acted with immense love and courage for all people could be disparaged by such a disgusting statement by the president of the pride board. It went over and beyond its call of predictable cowardly duty. Despite the outcry and the growing number of angry facebook comments, nothing is really going to change for SF Pride until people take action at the event itself. Passive activism cannot match the sheer sums of veritable blood money offered by the sponsors. That fact is one of the strongest supporting statements about who the event serves. It doesn’t matter what people think or say, it matters that the paid positions behind the

Bawdy Storytelling Photos by Neuoptik Photography

Masters of psychedelic art: My household growing up had a lot of Peter Max and I always enjoyed the bright tertiary colors and flowing lines. Not surprisingly, art that appeals to someone tripping also appeals to kids. Although a lot of folks might want to decry this genre because of its illicit associations there is a tremendous amount of skill and theory applied here. It’s worthy of study and appreciation in all states of consciousness. It’s also had a massive impact on popular art since its inception.

“No fap isn’t a challenge, it’s a way of life.” As a logical counterpoint to Reddit’s constant stream of ‘fap material’ is a forum of young men dedicating their time and energy to not fapping as a new take on the old idea of preserving masculinity by abstaining from masturbation.

100% Men is a Tumblr dedicated to depicting companies and corporatations whose leadership is 100% male.

The Mysterious Island Of The Dolls in Mexico is creepy and compelling to look at.

Men should read Hegel before dating is a short video from the coming documentary “Monogamy and its Discontents.”

High school student calls out Pam Stenzel for slut shaming. Her school principal is a total tool with bad ideas on educating teens who engages shaming behavior of his own. Wellesley welcomes their incoming student after the debacle over Twitter. I wrote about Pam Stenzel in 2009 after bearing a grudge from having to watch her horrible “Sex Has a Pricetag” videos in junior high and high school. Pam Stenzel is a lying liar who lies to teens about sex. She makes students feel bad about themselves and their sexuality. May she be known for what she is. I wrote about Stenzel in 2009.

Salvador Dali’s wife Gala was known as the “demon pride” and is said to have outdone him with her own set of sexual perversities, megalomania, and lust for cash.

The Revolution Will Not Be Funded is an anthology that questions the impact of the non-profit industrial complex on enacting social change. I think it’s crucial to consider this and I’ve certainly had my own clashes of this nature.

The Mating Octopus in photos. For all you cephalopod lovers out there.

Triptychs by Mattie Brice explores labels and labeling through the lens of gaming and other personal identifiers. As always, she’s brilliant voice in the gaming community and radical bloggers at large.

I am a coffee fiend. I grew up with parents who had long since ditched their automatic coffee maker for the very sexy Chemex hourglass and the sounds of beans grinding in the morning cued the start of the day. Fresh coffee and fresh orange juice helped me get my day started and old habits die hard. Forgive me, I am a coffee snob.

Coffee is a sacred substance in many cultures and it’s amazing how industrialized it is in the US. Most of us need the caffeine more than the fruit of a coffee tree. Preground tins are a staple of American living and we all know the Folgers jingle by heart. Diner coffee is pretty much an institution onto itself. We’ve also seen gourmet chains dotting the streets offering sugary drinks and endless disposable cups. Meanwhile, coffee snobbery and fine cafes are popular in urban centers and hipsters have declared the barista a spiritual leader. Coffee, however you take yours, is a cornerstone of life here in the US. Here is one of my favorite methods of making fancy coffee for myself or friends at home.

Please note: I rarely use measuring cups when I’m cooking. Your mileage may vary for taste, preference, and ingredient availability.

Ingredients:
Cardamom
Cinnamon
Nutmeg
Mace
(Spices can be finely pre-ground from the store or fresh and coarsely ground with a mortar and pestle or spice grinder)
Vanilla pods
Cocoa nibs
Coffee beans

Tools:
Coffee grinder
Spice grinder/mortar and pestle
Coffee maker of choice

Process:
I cut my vanilla pod into small-ish pieces and tossed them into the grinder with my cocoa nibs and coffee beans. I used 1 whole pod and about a 30/70 mix of cocoa nibs and coffee beans. Since I don’t mind my coffee taking on a vanilla or cocoa taste I had no problem mixing all three. You or your roommates might. Some coffee makers need a fine consistency, others want something coarse. French presses, drip machines, stove top, Chemex, percolators, and other methods all have their own preferences.

Get the coffee-cocoa-vanilla mix and put it into your machine and filter. Then add the spice mix, roughly 1/2-1 tablespoon depending on your spice preferences. Let the machine get hot water over, under, around, or through your mix. Enjoy the brew black or with a sweetener and cream. I like using raw honey and almond milk.

If you have the ingredients on hand it shouldn’t take more than a few extra minutes in the morning and it will work in Mr. Coffee on automatic if that’s how you roll. There’s no shame in setting up coffee the night before to get going at the alarm while you’re in bed. I like having something special they don’t make at Starbucks and the spice mix perks me up.

The fresher your ingredients, the better the taste. Still, it can be hard to get everything. Natural foods or world grocers can be super helpful at getting spices. I feel spoiled to live in the Bay Area where I can stop by groceries that carry goods from around the world. I avoid buying spices at chain grocers where they are marked up a lot in price. I made a jar of my ground coffee spice mix to keep by the coffee supplies and even without the vanilla or cocoa nibs it adds a lot to the taste.

The nice thing is that the pour over method gets the flavor and you can still control the sweetness. Chocolate or vanilla syrups often come packed with sugar and additives. A hint of cocoa and vanilla makes the coffee a treat.

Some might say that all of this masks the richness of the coffee beans but variety is the spice of life. It can be the extra pick-me-up to start the week or a way to close it. Mostly it makes me stop and appreciate coffee beyond compulsive caffeine consumption because I’m prone to the “grab and get out the door” school of mornings.

Happy brewing!

Trying to develop a career as a “professional” in either field is a tenuous path. Semantics mark the difference between the suit and coat crowd and the plebeians or worse yet the crackpots. Those who aspire to join the suit and coat crowd can be spotted at their industry’s events with marked civility to the crackpots by their subtle but very nearly ritualistic social performances best described by Roland Barthes and an avian behavior graduate student sharing drinks at happy hour.

In the drug world, the people talking about sex are regarded as the way to ruin the legitimacy of things. The ones who don’t get “the bigger picture.” In the sex world, those who talk about drugs can also ruin the legitimacy of things. Legality is a major issue. Drugs could blow the whole house down.

When you already have to speak in sotte voce about a very fundamental reality, the introduction of another pretty much leaves you to the fragments and the faintest lines of symbols creating galaxies of the inferred. This is the blend of religion, and of disease. The orbit is farther out with a much more tenuous grasp on gravity. The stakes are closer to death and not because of something inherent to them so much as their relationship to codified law that has a very class distinct application on the masses. Having “made it” is so often defined by the cocaine of an appealing ass. It’s not the Benz, it’s the room for a buzz that never ends and never has consequences.

Class is marked by the consequences you face for your own humanity.

Sexuality has been my trade but I keep my personal cards kept more keenly to myself. I do think ones pleasure practices are as sacred (for whatever that word means) as ones spiritual practices. I don’t think I really get a say over how any given individual choose to guide their perception of the world by chemical, religious, technological, biological, material, or what-have-you-tools so long as there aren’t material world consequences on other non-consenting people. You can’t just steal some shit. You can’t just instantly use someone as a tool of your experience. The fact that we imprison people for getting high is, in effect, a thought crime.

The images of our prison system in the US horrifies me. I’m horrified by its size, color, and feeding system. I’m horrified by the for-profit industry that surrounds and supports these rates of incarceration. I cannot uphold a law on semantics and legal arithmetic when the practice of it is absolutely based around race and class. Prop 35 passed in California and Nevada is looking at similar legislation. I see in that what I see in drug trafficking legislation. It makes labor trafficking at large seem more conspicuously absent. People think rescue laws turn into movie police with blankets, teddy bears, and hot cocoa when an illegal and underage brothel is raided. It’s just a vice wagon, it’s just holding, it’s always in practice an immigration detention center regardless of the wording. You are never handing people over for incarceration for their own good.

Really the moral rights and wrongs of sex and drugs are a distraction although they are the language of our social language on these issues. Much like a spiritual practice, it’s really no one’s business and some people do benefit by congregating and attempting a group consciousness activity like a sport, chant, rave, dance, meal, orgy, movie, or church and that works if they aren’t out hurting people, even if it’s something weird.

I think it’s interesting how coded the language of sex and drugs are as mutually exclusive topics and how that seems to totally implode when you combine them unless you are stringently harm reduction, non-pleasure oriented, backed with a huge insurance plan, lawyer on call, lots of letters after your names from academic institutions with pristine reputations, and other really subjective forms of assessment like your hair and relative number of tattoos and piercings.

It’s really difficult for me to separate conversations about sex and drugs and for me the cornerstone for both is that people are being incarcerated for both right now and that creating a societal perception of worthless facilitates this process. And, since all people deserve access to known information about the human experience I think it should be provided freely in the spirit of informed consent and safer practices. The cognitive experience of pleasure cannot be absent from the information. Whether someone wants to know how an anti-depressant will impact their sex drive or find out some of the biological reasons why methamphetamines can create the experience of amplified pleasure during a sexual encounter, information cannot be made illegal or off limits to select portions of society.

No information about the human experience can be censored because censorship is always a futile endeavor and has demonstratively negative impacts on every society it is imparted upon because benevolent censorship does not exist.

I think it’s also key to investigate how the laws of sex and drugs are Trojan Horses of foreign hostility and have severe global consequences. There are civil wars in the wake of American drug policy. There are mass epidemics and denied resources behind conditional AIDS funding. Offering care, concern, and support to someone is not the same as criminalizing a way of being. It’s a logical fallacy to equate decriminalization of sex and drugs as an endorsement of a ‘hedonistic life.’ It’s not an endorsement one way or another as that would be a meaningless gesture from me. I don’t believe that people should be subject to criminal penalties  denied care, or deprived of informative resources.

There’s no one kind of sex I think is the best, there’s no one chosen world view I can espouse for the diversity of experiences there are on earth. I’m also kind of a shitty sex educator because it’s hard for me to advocate individual recipes. How do you give a blowjob. A blowjob? Have you ever had a time when it was a hot day and you were slurping mango slices off a cock?

That’s probably not what someone was looking for and there are great personal sex trainers out there who can give tailored advice from their body of knowledge and learning about your individual experiences. Sometimes it really is just a few 90 degree angles that can totally change your whole sex life. The answer might also be to quit your job, liquidate your assets, and travel the globe for a year or so. Maybe both at the same time.

Both lenses offer incredible insight to what consciousness is as do the whole host of weird tools that humans use. We are constantly making and animating tools and sometimes forging entire realities around them. For some its crystals, for others it might be cars or computers. Beanie Babies. I’ve met the car culture people who have live and breathe in cars and a chosen aesthetic to honor them. The same is easily said of computers. It’s easier to congregate and speak openly about things that aren’t illegal, though. It’s hard to really open up honest conversation if the cops can come through the door when you’re about to have some major breakthroughs. Man.

What we certainly can say about sex and drugs is that they are exceptionally efficient mood changers. They work fast. They create quantifiable physical effects we can observe and document but do not fully understand. There is still so much unknown about these two topics of timeless fascination and they do say that we’re most afraid of the unknown.

I’m interested in how sex and drugs always bubble to the surface of human articulation in our knee jerk pejoratives  crude graffiti, and finest art in the Vatican. Engaging in them is to alter one’s consciousness but so is intentional abstention from one or both.

It’s already tenuous to host a conference on sex or drugs. Both have some potential repercussions for mere attendance let alone being an organizer. To host a conference on sex and drugs is received with only a few aesthetic differences from your average gathering of witches. Self-described witch conventions actually have a lot of room. It’s when you put up a banner for a conference on getting high and getting off that you can pretty reasonably suspect that local law enforcement will be paying you a visit on more or less polite terms.

While I’ve written predominantly about sex, I want to express more of my ideas and opinions about drugs and drug legislation as well as its impact on social justice. Pleasure is a barometer of social justice and one that I am interested in studying. In many ways it’s because I’m not really concerned with being a crack pot. It’s a little late in that regard, for better or for worse as the case may be.

It’s gospel in the sex positive world: there’s no such thing as too much lube for anal sex.

Except for the fact that A) yes, actually, there is such a thing as too much lube and it results in very dangerous and slippery situations, especially if you’re wearing high heel shoes and trying to fuck someone bent over a sink in a bathroom somewhere in public and B) it’s easier to recite a slogan in place of evaluating what you want and this has its pros and cons and no single slogan can hold the entirety of experiences inside it.

From a public health standpoint it’s important to advocate for latex-safe lube and condoms as a means to reduce the risk of transmission of STI’s and it’s also important to remember that educators are on hand to provide the love buffet of options without creating a singular narrative for how sex should be enjoyed. There is no one-lube-fits-all and some people might actually be better learning how to evaluate what kinds of lubricants will fit their needs best rather than providing advertisement for Lube™.

Maybe it’s just a side effect of providing sex education since 2003 but foregoing lube for buttsex is one of my favorite modes of intercourse right now. The first time it was powerful and anxiety inducing. Had I finally broken some kind of slut wall? Was I now, after years of teaching and practicing this playful discipline experienced some new form of anal enlightenment? Was I at some new level of insatiability, forever destined to need more? What kind of a filthy, fucked up whore wants to get fucked in the ass without lube? How many cocks did it take to make me like that? How far had I chased the pleasure dragon to overcome what felt like canonical law?

Of course it’s a mix of things and I will not advocate that anyone fuck like me simply because it works for me. Whether it’s sex or fine art sculpture, I think we’re all trying to remove the imposed boundaries that inhibit us from achieving our full potential. It’s also key to remember that all of our tools can ultimately become our thought prisons. Our life’s work is escaping a cognitive borders that define what we believe we’re capable of in our lives. We all need to go for our personal gold: mine includes decreasing my dependence on consumerism and getting fucked in way that inspires and pleases me. Your goals might include model train building and interior design. I do not know what makes your heart swell and your mind buzz. I know that pleasure is paramount in human lives and that some take pleasure in baking the way I take pleasure in fucking. Slut though I am, it was the persistent voices of asexuals that made me realize I believe in the pursuit of pleasure for all humans rather than the pursuit of fucking, per se.

What I found interesting was how taboo it was among sex educator peers to talk about anal sex without lube in an open forum. There was fear that endorsing something outside of the lube model would lead to dangerous and reckless sex, blood and tearing, and a bad view of sex education. I don’t think that repeating any single line, no matter h0w well-intentioned it is, can be our salvation. We all have to be prepared for the nuances of human lives that will inevitably exceed our popular aphorisms and we have to check in on how and why our conventions came to be and what contexts they emerged from and serve best.

Of course my endless amusement with storytelling, myth, legend, and modern religion lends me to imagine the creation of a new slimy creature like part of a forgotten esoteric pagan pantheon brought back to life when an unwitting sex positive Pandora opened a box and released it from it’s confines. Behind the pearl clutching of my peers and the shock of espousing sex without formally packaged Sexual Lubricant™ lurks a spectre in the shadows. Formerly known in a dialect long since discarded in the sands of time, it’s modern incarnation put on a suit, pulled its tentacles into a shark skin suit, got a tooth whitening treatment, and used its own gel-like consistency to slick back a newly grown thick head of hair to head into retail offices everywhere as “The Lube Lobby.”

Yes, The Lube Lobby! It hands out its first few packets free to breakdown your memory to create a mass condition of dependence and slick floors and stained sheets. It tells lies, like, “Coconut Oil is never for sex, you filthy communist. You need my patented formula,” and also, “Anyone who thinks licking specialty truffle oil from an anus is delusional about the places of cooking and sex in the American household.” Even the more vicious, “Only a worn out hole could take a cock without any added lube. You don’t want to be some slut loose enough to double fist, do you? Anal sex without lube is equivalent to parking a Harley right in your rectum.”

The Lube Lobby AKA the ILubeNati has been slinking into stores and homes with a pernicious drive to consume aimlessly in pursuit of a fulfillment that will never come. The ILubenati is insatiable. It was never been fed enough flesh, it corrupts critical thinking, it turns people in lubity-lube-lube crawlers forever trapped in a slick and clear sludge made with chemicals that its consumers cannot pronounce. It will cause twisted ankles on porn sets. The public lust for silicone will be unquenchable. Marketing will encourage lube sets with differently colored lids to encourage hobby collection. The gamification of lubricated sexual pleasure has already begun with different formulas for different intensities of fucking with slickness levels to be unlocked only by successful perverts.

At night, the Ilubenati glows bright green as it gains power and comes to dominate first the liberal metropolitan cities and trendsetting hipsters who bought into bacon lube “totally getting that it was a joke and not to really use it” but of course REALLY using it a few times before letting it collect a disgusting dust under the bed and then acquiring other flavors to be just as stagnant and forgotten. We will be buried under stacks of non-biodegradable bottles and drowned in more-or-less viscous lubes that will suspend us like sparkles in novelty glittery lube.

Bwa-ha-ha. Meet the Ilubenati, coming soon to a massive chain drug store near you.

I don’t want to be in the business of limiting the imagination and breaking down sovereign sexualities. Adding lubricant to sex is a handy tool and one that I’m far from being above. I’m glad there’s all kinds of ways to breakdown surface tension and we all have different kinds of bodies. When I worry about Lube™ I worry that we’ve substituted the institutional shame of the church and the state with corporate shame. It’s one thing to offer a product as a merchant, it’s another to forge a streamlined paradigm sexuality. Brand ambassadorship is a common pitfall of all the arts and sciences. There is not a single field that is free from being made to simplify the lives of the corporate heads at the expense of those lower on the pyramid. The consumers themselves are often near the bottom but there’s the other layer subjected to the waste, manufacturing byproducts, resource denial, and labor standards of production who don’t even get to enjoy the fruits of the object itself.

In my own experience, I prefer lubrication on my clit the most. When I use condoms, I definitely need some added lubrication because barriers do need some care and feeding to be effective. However, most lube advice is offered as though the person asking is/must be using a latex condom and is at a high risk for contracting HIV or other STI’s. We are not at equal risk for HIV and there is no such thing as blanket advice for sex. This is why phrases like, “Some, many, and most” are helpful and why double checking for particular corporate party lines is key. Are ideas of sexual liberation being offered or is it just a platform for advertisement? Is another product the answer or would introspection yield better results?

We follow scripts more often than we think. I was certainly following my own and it was helpful to break out of that in my personal life  to remind myself that there is no single tool that will work consistently well in all settings and having critical thinking and troubleshooting skills is key. I used to hear a question about anal sex and get ready to launch the standard track, “Lubrication, communication, and relaxation,” and while that tip has crucial components I was delivering it a way that was no more distinct that the strong and powerful life lessons condensed into Catholic verse.

Sometimes, when it comes to teh buttsecks, someone is talking about having sex with a very personal and intimate partner they are fluid bonded to and the answer to their question may not be in the one-size refrain. Going back to the fundamental concepts behind the refrain are crucial for all sex educators.

Lubrication is a means of reducing the surface tension that can be uncomfortable for people. Some forms of lubrication will degrade latex condoms, some might contain chemicals that are caustic or carcinogenic, some might be oil based and capable of trapping bacteria, some might contain sugars that encourage yeast growth, and some might need constant reapplication. Some companies make lubes tailor made for sexual penetration and other people might find that their virgin olive oil works out best on their non-virgin holes.

When I’m working on set or with an individual, I like to have an array of options from the hippiest-dippiest coconut oil to the most state of the art and scientific silicone blend. I know that they way someone connects in a professional setting with a limited time frame isn’t the same as the way I connect with someone I’ve known and have been fucking for years in our kitchen while making dinner. Sometimes I want to pressure and the friction on entry because I know how to relax the muscles so quickly I don’t experience actual pain, especially those with whom I share intimated bonds of trust.

Most importantly, I think back to the fact that all kinds of sex (including anal) happened long before sexual lube was sold in bottles at any store. Every generation thinks they invented sex and trademarked the best way to fuck and (hopefully) had fun in the process. We are all tasked with inventing sex for ourselves and its a shame to accept any boxed model of that it should look like for you. All sex models should be taken out for interrogation from time to time. We’re rarely thinking of all the circumstances and most often addressing the ones immediately in front of us.

You can’t take anything for granted, not even needing Lube™ for every instance of sex.

Daisies in coffee bottles

Plastic has been a complex innovation that we’ve overused. It’s kind of a bad habit of opulence to burn through a supply of something without thinking. This is the story of industry. Plastics are handy because they’re lightweight, have the ability to be really resilient, and they have made a lot of things in computing, technology, and medicine possible because of their existence.

However, plastics can be super toxic and fail to break down. We put them into mass production and introduced a lot of reasons one might think they need something but only serve to become landfill fodder. Plastics are hard to recycle and most of the process winds up being just as bad, if not worse, than landfills. We didn’t ever really need plastic bags but we have them. We never really needed plastic bottles but we have them. We also send them around the globe because they lower shipping costs despite the fact that not every country has “waste management infrastructure” like we do. The landfill, wretched as it is, is the best case scenario for a lot of our plastic demand. It’s sure as hell better than in the bellies or around the necks of wildlife with its poison permanence pockmarking our natural landscapes.

I think it’s cool that the notions of reusing things is starting to catch on and as much of a pain in the ass as some might think it is, I do like bans on plastic bags in cities. (Pro Tip: If you constantly leave your grocery bags in the car of your city with a plastic bag ban remember that you can RELOAD your grocery cart and rebag at the car. Remember also that Costco Warehouses never issued plastic bags for their shopping and instead encouraged shoppers to reuse the leftover boxes from shipping to organize their goods.)

I don’t know if we’ll make change in behavior fast enough to reverse the damages to the planet but I do know that thinking about ways I can reduce my own waste output does help my overall awareness of what I consume. I do get hopeful as more places encourage reduction, reuse, and recycling. I hope that health codes continue to recognize the damages they’ve created by legally mandating use of disposable plastics despite their cost to personal and environmental health. I think it’s cool when coffee places drop the cost of their morning brew for people bringing in their own mugs. I think that’s awesome! I hope more places follow suit.

HOWEVER, all behavior change comes in waves and it isn’t always easy. I too feel frustrated and even shamed by clerks when I forget to bring a bag or I’ve already overstuffed my backpack. It feels like losing. It’s key to remember that, A) store clerks are trapped behind a register for 8 hours day after day and that makes them cranky , B) no one wants you to self-flagellate when you forget, and C) clerks are often in a bind when they have to remind people about anti-plastic bag legislation because people take their anger out on them and every time you have to ask is a chance for someone to flip out.

Once you DO start to get the hang of bringing your reusable hippie shit there are still more chores to remember. The biggest one of them all: clean your hippie shit.

Reuse those bags!

• Throw your canvas grocery bags in the wash or clean the vinyl/heavy plastic ones with a sponge and some soap and water. Yes, it’s true, you DO have an increased risk of foodborne illness if you keep reusing and reusing those grocery bags. How to solve this problem? Clean them. The elevated risk of foodborne illness as a reason NOT to institute bans is as ridiculous as suggesting that cutting boards , sponges, pyrex, or tupperware should be banned because reusing them without washing elevates risk of illness. Make it a point to throw basking soda in the washing machine water every now and again and clean out the things you use in your life that repeatedly come into contact with food. Also take care of your sponges, cutting boards, AND your reusable grocery bags. No one wins if you lug a gross bag with old food bits to the farmer’s market or the corner store. While some advocate bleach, I think baking soda and vinegar are two of the best cleaning agents around for routine cleaning. It will do wonders to brighten a fabric without causing any fading and it’s non-toxic even though it can kill bad stuff.
  

  I love my Kanteen.

• Cleaning your water bottle means more than a quick wash because it’s “only” water. Remember that your water bottle is coming in contact with your filthy, filthy mouth and that water incubates a lot of germs. A quick rinse isn’t going to cut it. Make sure to wash the CAP of the bottle and the THREADS where it screws shut. Lots of stuff likes to hide here. As a note, this was something that got drilled into me while doing disaster recovery. We all had our water bottles and those who didn’t make it a practice to seriously clean their bottles on a regular basis often came down with Giardia. This included my husband who can attest to the unpleasantness of water borne parasites.ALSO: you can help get rid of the metallic taste in your bottle if you take it home and let it soak in water and vinegar overnight. If you’re noticing some stains in your bottle from a smoothie or coffee, try throwing in some rice and vinegar to help shake it clean if you don’t have a bottle brush handy.

It’s so much easier to help those good habits stick if they aren’t making you sick. Make sure clean up to prevent yourself from getting sick when you’re checking out more sustainable ways to go about your business.

There are things you know you forget. There are things you know are the most vulnerable to being forgotten during stressful times. Then there are things you just don’t forget.

My PIN number is one of things I just don’t forget and when I stood at the register of the grocery store trying to pick up just a few items for my anti-mold diet staring at my dumb fingers at the keypad with neither the muscle memory to type it out nor the ability to recall the sequence I knew that it was going to be a long recovery process.

As a 5 year resident of Oakland, CA and a sex worker whose housing situation is different from your average renter because either your income is inconsistent or lacks a W2 or someone just doesn’t like your looks or your google trail I’ve had some bad luck with landlords. In one apartment, the landlord knew that the handyman of the building with the master key set had been breaking into units one by one and had a bit of a vigilance issue with female tenants and especially me but hadn’t sent out any warning other than that he had been terminated from his position. He never handed over his keys, the landlord did not declare a massive emergency key change day, the landlord didn’t even warn his most vulnerable tenants privately. All of these things would be a liability or an inconvenience and as the saying goes, shit rolls down hill.

One of the great mistakes people make when it comes to unethical and dangerous behavior is the assumption that it comes from someone being deliberately and willfully malicious. It’s the Snidely Whiplash model of doing the wrong thing. It doesn’t happen like that most of the time in real life. Evil is more about the context of any given situation than a manifest desire to actively cause harm. It’s the endless disavowal of responsibility and the inability to put your foot down when shit rolls down hill because you’re unwilling to get any on your shoes.

When Oakland was part of Rancho San Antonio, the Mexican government struggled with keeping out illegal U.S. residents who would cut the protected redwoods and sell the lumber to passing ships. After the area became part of the United States and the Gold Rush began, the hills swarmed with loggers who sold the timber to builders in San Francisco. -SF Gate, 2006

Oakland’s got a long history of being exploited by profiteers but that’s a ragefuelingly common story for this country. I hate when people talk shit about Oakland because it comes down to hating the dog for being kicked by some douchenozzle with botulism walking by. Victim blaming is bigger than rape, it’s our default setting when we bear witness to exploitation. It makes us feel bad to apprehend that kind of knowledge and we shove off that discomfort in the directions we feel safe to express it. Without dedicated work on awareness, it’s generally directed down the hill. 

When I look at an issue like the black mold that came through the floorboards and the drywall of my ex-apartment and made the walls moist to touch I feel angry at what happened to us over 18 months, my gaze turns up to the context that facilitated it and the pervasiveness of the poison. My story is a small piece of a bigger picture and whether or not I resolve some of the short straws I’ve pulled by virtue of being a broke ass Ho has nothing to do with the fact I despise all the ways that people profit off of the pain and suffering of others and a giant social machine permits it.  My personal experiences are an insight into a broader political context.

In this case, that context added blood to my husband’s cough, broke the skin of his legs into large sores that refused to heal, introduced him to migraines, stiffened my joints making all movement painful, created persistent distortions in my vision, gave me sudden coughing fits that often left me hurling, caused my dog to itch, and then gave my cats soft sneezes. My beloved Floozy seemed mostly fine except for her endless sniffles and she died out of the blue leaving our other cat without his companion and the dog confused at her absence.

It happened over 18 months and it wasn’t a thing we pinpointed to the mold until it blossomed everywhere after a rainy winter. Mold wants you to be mold food. We knew that winters were dreary times in our home and for some reason we could write it off that no one felt well, ever. That our meals were spent quickly and hunched over on the kitchen counter. That the fainting spells I had, especially after sex, were somehow normal. “Well you get what you pay for,” was the phrase that echoed in our heads as we compensated and adapted to a hostile home environment from mold spores choking everything out in a basement unit with no light and inadequate heating. It was the perfect place for mold to grow but in the midst of it all that could be seen was how impossible it had been to find a place, especially with a dog and how we weren’t like to find anything else for $1000 a month that would take us as we were.

Internalized shame: I deserve to live in a mold cave, it’s just a little mold–penicillin is mold, you’re lucky you even found a place to take you, if you just did more cardio your chest would feel better, you know you’ve seen worse than this, this is the downside of having pets, every house in the neighborhood probably has the same mold anyway, what are you complaining about as a healthy 20 something anyway?

Mold wants you to be mold food. It prefers when you stop going out and just sit inside of it and don’t really know where a few hours went when you were just staring. It likes when sometimes you going from verbose and articulate to being literally unable to form coherent sentences. But if it can take to sturdy and health 20 somethings who hike mountains without thinking, then what is it doing to the kids in these houses? What is it doing to the elderly? And as I think about planning my own family, I wonder what it means for a pregnancy.

I quit smoking and drinking. I jumped on an extra health kick with vitamins and lots of time moving my body. People in the porn industry commented on my svelte and toned (albeit hairy) body and asked about my routine. I thought of it as getting into shape, I didn’t realize how much of it was my body’s attempt to protect itself from the damage being done with everything breath. One of our greatest gifts as humans are zipfiles that allow us to survive and adapt to all sorts of conditions. Our ability to adapt and go on is a gift. It’s why humans are found all over the globe. It’s also why a contributing factor to why a dangerous context creeps up on you. Without the perspective that there is more out there, somewhere, and that what you’re experiencing in front of you is not ‘reality’ but a slice of it can cause both pain and hope depending on whether you are literally allowed to leave.

“Why didn’t you just move?”

Not everyone has the liquid cash to pick up and go at a moment’s notice. We sure as fuck didn’t. When we finally had to because even a few hours in the mold cave caused immediate problems we literally had nowhere to go. Our surviving cat went one place, our dog to another, and Ned and I found refuge with our respective lovers in different cities. There are a lot of reasons why we might have been even more fucked than that and it wasn’t easy. It strained our relationship, it was stressful for the animals, ad we hemorrhaged cash. Suddenly the clothes on our back were toxic and had to be destroyed because of the time and expenses to get (confirmed) black mold out.

I wonder what we would be doing without the background and education to know how to access legal resources that are (technically) on our side. We learned that there is no official standard for mold save for ‘water damage’ and lawyers don’t really take on cases unless it’s for larger suits of whole buildings. Everyone should be protected by the court system but it only serves the needs of certain segments of society. There are a lot of reasons why it’s scary to put the many, many, many hours of research and documentation into building a lawsuit and even with the best of resources it’s not always feasible. The court system is designed to be out of reach and inaccessible. What we seek is restorative justice to repair the damages to our bodies and our property.

I have health insurance but I shudder at the costs of the battery of tests on my body without it. I had cardiac and pulmonary testing as well as lots of lung x-rays and blood work. There were scripts to fill. Specialists to consult. We had to hire a private mold inspector to look over the property and run tests on the air and surfaces of the space. We had to have enough liquid cash to pay for meals when we had no kitchen to cook in and on top of that we learned that our diet would have to radically shift to recover. Apparently most cheap and processed foods use the dregs of crops and stocks and it often contains mold. There is a totally acceptable standard of mold in food products and on top of that sugar is a prime feast for mold spores. Look at the labels of your food today and see if you can keep yourself below 35 grams of sugar a day.

So much as I preferred to shop local, away from chains, and in staunch opposition to companies like Monsanto I always kind of thought it was a special luxury thing to get “hippie food.” Now I question why fresh air, fresh water, fresh food, and safe housing is literally branded as a luxury or privilege in our society. We have it backwards. Food justice isn’t about getting fancy top shelf products, it’s about pointing out we are in possession of sovereign bodies. Our society has put forth an architecture of exclusion that dictates who among us gets to have access to the food that isn’t dangerous.

I’m no longer surprised that the French revolution was tipped over by the moldy bread allocated to the poor while the wealthy maintained a “let them eat cake” attitude. Is it any different today?

When confronted with unethical and exploitative practices as the hands of industry, people like to say, “You have to understand they’re trying to run a business.” What I understand is that there is a process of logic at bay, that only one set of interests are under consideration, and most people want to get everything they can squeeze out of you and not have you make them feel bad about it. I understand they’re not stroking Snidely Whiplash facial hair giggling about the horrible things they enjoy doing to people in pursuit of a buck. Most people want to expend as little as effort as possible for the maximum personal gain.

Landlords and bosses and government and friendly neighborhood monolithic corporations are totally running businesses. I’m running my life. The quest to make a profit does not extend onto the personal turf of other people’s lives.

No one is doing people a favor renting them patently unsafe homes. You’re no saint for charging a low price and “allowing people to have a place to live.” That’s some job creator bullshit right there. It’s apologism for exploitation. No one goes skipping into a situation like this with glee. It means they were at the end of their options and down the back alleys of marginalization there is someone willing to make a buck.

You see, my landlord knew that there was mold and she knew it was a toxic mold. This was information she was in possession of and yet she continued to funnel in tenants without making changes in between. She knowingly put me and my husband and out pets in a dangerous situation and she did so for $1000 a month. It’s so little for so much damage. Her actions are mostly born out of the fact that selling the property would likely be unfruitful and the cost of actually tearing it down or renovating it to safety would be costly. She rents her dangerous properties because it’s just easier to do that than actually make change.

Living in Oakland helped me integrate a lot of ideas I’d had. It turned a lot of class theory into practice. It taught me a lot of shit I needed to know and it was a radicalizing experience. Class stratification isn’t a theory, it’s an experience of the majority. It’s kids developing lungs in toxic mildew while being actively denied a diet that can help them thrive let alone combat the stress and damages of a life at the mercy of the state and the rich. It comes in so many forms and it all feels so big and hopeless to take in at once. I’m reminded that this is the case so long as we are divided. We cannot afford not to get to know our neighbors and mind our own business if we are to overcome the architecture of exclusion.

I always thought polyamory was a radical idea because I saw in it our obligation to look every person we meet as someone as we could love. In practice, this might be the case but we cannot allow ourselves to look at someone and declare them unlovable. When we confront injustice it must come from a place of love and with the broad perspective of the system creating a context we’re all fighting a long war against. To think of revenge is to become myopic.

The story of the mold isn’t the story of something terrible that happened to Ned and Maggie Mayhem. It’s happening to entire portions of my city and many people know. They just don’t want to take on the project and there are profiteers at the borders of every ghetto who make no more than a gatekeepers salary. We cannot allow it to continue. We have to consider what it means that the gap between a CEO and a front line employee’s salary is the biggest it’s ever been. Even lovers of “traditional America” need to look at the facts of the economic climate and how unsustainable it is to stretch the classes as much as they have been. When you keep pushing people up against a wall with nowhere to go they are going to be forced to strike back and no one wants it to come to that. It’s dangerous and terrifying. We cannot be “aggressively negligent” in the ways in which we, including myself, are complicit in this war on the poor comforted with the scraps and spoils.

It’s exhausting to love as much as it’s going to take to start and win and revolution. It means reaching out to people from all kinds of backgrounds and abilities. It means recognizing that poor people aren’t fucked up and crazy by nature but that living in poverty means being denied access to any of the things you need to build a foundation of all health from the head to the toes. It means realizing that there are all kinds of legal statuses in the states beyond immigration. It means recognizing that the drug and sex wars are a part of class stratification because if we keep locking people up for drug or prostitution violations we are stripping them of their ability to gain other employment.

I remain pleasure positive not just because pleasure is not a privilege and is a vital human right but also because of everything we would need to do together on this world to be able to actually experience it and share it on an even standing with our fellow humans. I know that this is something I will never see in my lifetime. It is the goal out of my reach that feel like breathing and won’t let me stop. To have a world where we share joy and company with one another freely we’re going to have to ensure that every individual on earth is fed, clothed, sheltered, and able to live each day without fighting for survival in a world where the biggest danger is the side effects of greed. We would have to tear down borders. We would have to dismantle the weaponry. We would have to expend the effort to do the right thing even when there is a personal cost.

My experience with mold got meta real fast. Although I still can’t remember my PIN number, I think I can remember why I’m here on earth better. If there’s anything to take away from that it’s a purpose to my existence. I want to shorten the gap between where I am and where I want to be. I want to learn to love all the people the way that I know I must. I know that I have to confront the painful truths in the ways in which I have blood on my hands and I have to unlearn habits of convenience and work on my own sense of power because that’s when I will see that I have more tools than I thought I did and I will take time to use them rather than hoard them.

I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything; but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do. -Edward Everett Hale

 

 

The Mayhems:

Our apartment had a mold situation “blossom” out of control. It pretty much ate up our lives and health. Let me tell you: Black Mold is awful! It made us sick, probably killed our cat Floozy, was a disaster for everything we owned, and we were kinda homeless for awhile looking for a friendly place for us and our (surviving) cat and dog. We did valiant battle against mold and junked most of our belongings and found new lodging.

We also presented the PSIgasm at South by Southwest . I was profiled at Nerve. Appeared at Naughty Natural.  Went to Merida, Mexico in the Yucatan. I also stopped by the Products are Hard conference in San Francisco.  I’m also still trying to plan a wedding party. Talk about stress city! It’s been a hectic month and it took a lot out of us. It was great to see Texas and Merida even if it meant having last minute cancelled flights, blizzards, lost baggage (TWICE!!!!), hotel fires, travel snafus, and other insanity.

Enjoy the photos and I’ll be working on writing some insane bullshit for you all to enjoy.Click to view slideshow.