Me, nerd girl wishing she was a Suicide Girl. You, Hank Moody type, sans dependence on controlled substances.

Last weekend, I couldn't look at any porn. Or rather, I couldn't read any of the blogs that the fancy new firewall my building's internet dude installed on our system thought were porn. I mean, I couldn't see all the largely innocuous internet offerings of an esoteric but sexual nature-- like Sex and The Ivy, Beautiful and Depraved, debauchette-- all my favorites. I was pissed. Imagine my chagrin at having to bitch to my building manager and my building's association president about how much I resented my internet freedoms being limited. OK, I wasn't so much chagrined as amused, but were I the sort of person to feel less prideful, and more sheepish, about my pornish habits... well...

What would my poor, shy neighbors do without me, their friendly neighborhood Porn-for-all Crusader? Because, I mean, if you can't read sex blogs at home, where can you read them? And same goes for real porn too, right?

Needless to say, when I informed the internet dude about the blocks he'd forgotten to turn off, he, of course, sent me a porn link. "To test it." Dude! What do you not understand about my complaint that I can't look at porn?

Huh. It's not weird that my building's internet dude sends me porn links, is it?


Anyway, then, this weekend, the whole internet system went down again (I pay for this crap?). I couldn't load anything-- NC-17-rated or otherwise. I had big plans to hole myself up all weekend to write. I've got a pretty serious backlog of stuff about which I'm thinking. I have been remiss in simply setting aside the time it takes to commit it all to print. But then my internet goes down and gives me all the more excuse to melt into the sofa, rather than the desk chair.

So, for most of the day today, I alternated between watching episodes from Season 2 of Californication and fuming on the phone with the porn aficionado/internet dude. Certainly, the former was more pleasurable.

I love Californication. Love. It. And not just because I think fresh-from-sex-addict-rehab David Duchovny has just got to be ripe for the picking right about now. About a year ago, Michelle, my lovely lesbian ex clued me into this show, swearing that I'd love it... and that she loved it too. It's not surprising that I love it-- it's full of cocks and tits and big words and contemporary literature jokes and an exuberant, happy casualness with regard to monogamy. But it is a little surprising that my ex, consummate clitlicker that she is, loves it so-- because, in a million ways, the show doesn't amount to much more than a testosterone-fueled joyride-- something I would have thought she would disdain as puerile and ookily boy-like. But then, I guess that serves me right for underestimating her, eh?

True enough, the show gets its fair share of internet thrashings from "feminists" still stuck in their Second Wave mindsets. Often, the Hank Moody character (a man who so oozes the Duchovny persona, the person of David and the character of Hank may as well merge to form one big drunk phallus) draws all the best name-calling arrows. He's self-indulgent. He's lecherous. He's a pig. He fucks improbably beautiful woman after improbably beautiful woman and really doesn't much have to suffer for his bullheaded refusal to participate in the social mindset that would have him nursing his heartbreak alone and celibate. But to me? I think the bloggers who hate Hank Moody just don't understand him. Not like I do. Not like I do.

Hank Moody probably comes closest to fulfilling all my fantasies of what a perfect man might be like of any fictional character I have encountered to date. Now, that feels like a big statement and some readers might be prompted to wonder that I could say such a thing only because Hank Moody is wrapped in the delectably dilapidated body of one Mr. David Duchovny.

And it's true. I love to look at David Duchovny. His hair often looks a little greasy (though it falls into his eyes with perfect puppy grace). His schnoz is definitely too prominent for his face and his eyes are too small. He's a little barrel-chested and his legs are surely too skinny. He hasn't much of an ass. His pants ride too low. He's aging-- he's had crows walking all over his temples and his voice cracks from all the cigarettes. He always looks a little dirty, a little paunchy, a little comically hobo-clown-ish. All of which inspires a desire deep within me to put my mouth on him. And to smell all that rank, smoky man smell that simply must emanate from him. So sure, the package certainly helps. Hank wouldn't be Hank if he didn't look like David.

Oh, but there's more. Hank is a writer. The man knows his way around a thesaurus. Never before have I heard more synonyms for "erection," "semen," and "vagina" from any one potty mouth. Never before have I heard a broader ranging personal lexicon--with regard to every other (non-dirty) concept articulable in the English language-- from any man since Shakespeare. He is so goddamn fluent that any girl who fancies language in the slightest has really no defense against him.

He is also fearlessly foul-mouthed. Regardless of social situation, Hank quips profane. And it isn't so much that he lacks a filter as it is that he gets off on the tiny instant of rebellion that billows like a little fart behind every obscene image he conjures. The people around him, the ones who love him, are duly inured but he can't stop himself from testing their limits. And despite the famous deadpan Duchovny delivery, he twinkles ebulliently from within with every dirty word. I love how funny Hank Moody thinks he is. He is always just on the verge of laughing at his own jokes. Which, in turn, makes me laugh all the more at all his little nasty nuggets.

But the best part of Hank Moody is that he isn't a depraved womanizer at all. He doesn't fuck every pussy that crosses his path because he's a cruel manipulator on a power trip or because he's an insecure child with an penchant for instant gratification. Critics who assume he is one or the other or both have completely missed the soul of Hank Moody. Because Hank Moody loves not just the vaginae, but the women to whom the vaginae belong-- every last one of them, even if it's only for ten minutes at a time.

More than once, Hank laments the ubiquitous hairless pussy, favored by so many young Los Angeleno women. He revels, not only in lush thickets of pubic hair, but also in the blood of "crime-scene" sex and the gush that accompanies the mythic g-spot orgasm. Truly, this is remarkable. Here is a man who loves not only all that is pretty and presentable about his many, many women, but also that which is messy, smelly, bloody, gooey and wet about them. I mean that both literally and metaphorically, as he is, to my thinking, one of the few fictional men who I could consider an authentic, unabashed, unconflicted woman-lover. Oh, to be fucked by that sort of devotee. Only in my wildest fantasies-- I'm telling you.

Now, sure. He's got an alcohol problem. He's hung up on a woman with whom he's acquired entirely too much shared baggage. He's a little overly invested in protecting his teen-age daughter's virginity for my taste. And he has a little bit of a problem anticipating the consequences of his assorted debaucheries. But even with all the big, broad bravado and stupid, thoughtless stumbling, he's such a freaking sap. He is, at once, disgusting and sweet. Very manly, very id-driven, yet an embodiment of emotional availability. And he's not polite about any of it.

If the universe can devise a fictional character like Hank Moody, surely it can cough up a reasonable real-life facsimile for me. Can't it? Which is to say: all you Hank Moodys out there-- come find me! You're it for me. I'm telling you.

***

Now that my internet is working again, I'm hoping to be getting back on track in short order. In the meantime, thank you, readers, for indulging my paean to Hank Moody. I just couldn't help myself.

what it means to love a pervert

Weekend before this last one, I got invited to a little dinner party in the condo of some guys who live in my new building. So neighborly! We toasted to being privileged white yuppies gentrifying a historically black neighborhood. OK, we didn't really, but I did make the joke that we should.

Regardless, imagine how my eyes flapped open, wide like pansies, upon one of my hosts telling me that he once worked as a quality control officer for a phone sex line. Yeah, he actually got to listen in on all that sloppy fuck-talk. What a fucking job! Why would anyone ever quit? In any case, he rattled off a list of off-limits topics for which, if he heard the conversation veering toward any one of them, he was obligated to interject and cut the caller off.

I don't remember what most of those topics were, but I do remember that necrophilia was on the list. In my opinion, a fantasy is a fantasy and is therefore generally harmless. But who the fuck does necrophilia hurt? The object of one's attentions is, after all, already quite deceased. I mean, sure, it's a little distasteful. And I certainly won't be first in line to be snuggling up to any cadavers. But I fail to see the logic in censoring the fantasy. As usual, I fail to see the logic in censoring, well, anydamnthing.

So, I spent this past weekend recovering from a post-move immune system spaz-out (involving a near-eardrum-bursting ear infection that made me realize that I have never, in my nearly 32 years, felt ACTUAL physical pain before. I'm lucky to be so effin' healthy, I know, but it's now my new point of comparison. I'm supposing childbirth, gunshot wounds and lifelong degenerating disease would trump my icepick-in-the-ear afternoon any day, but I can't be sure, never having felt anything of the sort of any of those things.). While recuperating, I treated myself to a viewing of a little film called Kissed. And lest this post become any more disjointed, allow me to reveal that it was, indeed, about a girl who liked to ride the dead.

In many ways, the film is too sterile and bears the air of a fable or fairy tale, sparing us from all the gory details of what it really means to be penetrated with something stiff with rigor mortis, as opposed to tumescence. I mean, I kept wondering, what if it... broke off? Inside? That could only be unpleasant, right? But nothing of the sort happens. At least not in this movie.

Molly Parker, our star, who seems to have made a few interesting sexual detours in her career, -- she's currently staring in the pukily judgy and malaise-filled Swingtown and she previously spat bourbon up Peter Sarsgaard's asshole in a cute little scene in The Center of the World (in another scene, she plucks a lollipop from her cunt-- as as far as I could tell, it looked pretty real) -- is nothing if not ethereal, all naked, tits lit up by the exam room lamps, while she has her way with those who are beyond choosing. She is poetic and ecstatic in a religious sense throughout-- plus possessing of a singular personal quietude that serves to distance her from the (let's be frank) utter freakiness of her lust for corpse-love. Ultimately, it's not a dirty movie at all, but a shimmery, fabular one. Which is both pleasant and, if you're me, a little disappointing. Because, man, I SO wanted to see just exactly how she went about, um, hoisting some dead little, um, sails. No dice, though.

Fortunately, though, the film does do something else that's quite intriguing indeed. Long about the time our protagonist Sandra decides to follow her career aspirations (embalming, of course) on a collegiate level, she has become the sort of pretty girl who gets approached by saucer-eyed young men in coffee shops. One such young man quickly inquires after Sandra's ooky choice in study focus. And she responds that she's in the game because she "makes love to the corpses." Because the movie is fantastical, he doesn't respond with the expected revulsion, but with fascination. Of course he does. He is supposed to be her soulmate. Who else would the random dude in the coffee shop be?

But let's say that the movie's not a fantasy. Let's say something like this could really happen. Let's say, instead of a necrophiliac, you were a girl with a blog about sluttishness and film. And you sit down in a coffee shop. And a cute boy asks you what you do. And you say you write about sluttishness. You say that maybe, just a little bit, you feel sluttishness, as a concept, as a way of life, as a mindful practice, is your calling. And he doesn't widen his eyes, cough into his hand, and turn tail to run. Or let's say you are a necrophiliac. Or a submissive. Or a bootlicker. Or a pussylicker. Or a beltloop fetishist. Or you identify with whatever other quirky thing sends blood to your genitals. And some stranger not only unconditionally accepts this weird thing about you but decides to revel in the kinky thing you are. What of that world?

It's this sort of characteristic receptiveness that makes this film unique. Sure, I kinda wish it was unique because it's all graphic and gross. But I have to settle for its providing a safe place for discussion of something of which even phone sex operators dare not speak. Of course, our girl's boy must pay the price for opening his soul in the way that he does. He knows, after all, that his living cock can never substitute for all the cold ones she works over on the job. He is destroyed because he thinks-- and rightly so-- that she is not capable of loving him as he loves her. So he hangs himself. And she fucks him. And she claims to see his glowing love in every corpse fucked ever after.

I'd venture to say that this sort of overblown gesture of romantic love has as much in common with reality as does this boyfriend's essential openness. We don't kill ourselves to satisfy our lovers' bizarre sexual cravings. And if strangers overshare, it freaks us out. Oh, but this film's is a fun world in which to live for a couple hours. And you get to feel a little like you might be out-dirtying the industry's best potty mouths, just from hunkering down on your sofa. Not bad.

corpus congealed

Thanks to Mom for this totally great, totally creepy thing.

She says she saw the real thing on a recent trip to Chicago. The one she saw was a boy. Apparently, this was both apparent and transparent.

I can only hope that my own pancreas turns out to be so cauliflower-like. And makes such lovely splooshing noises when extracted. I can only hope.

P.S. Play the video. You just gotta.