Big Ed's Place

I’d thought about doing a “what’s the story?” for the picture below, but realized it was really too obvious. Either the picture’s staged, or the couple just really really really had to get busy right then and right there, which may have been the result of alcohol or other inhibition lowering drugs.

I’m guessing it’s staged because it’s too much in the open, in too bright of a day, with way too much skin showing. I’ve had a lot of sex in public places and those are pretty much no-no’s.

Because, at least for me, the thrill is the risk of being in a public setting and the adrenaline rush that accompanies the possibility of getting caught–but I don’t want to actually get caught. It creates too much opportunity for huge complications, from arrest to getting photographed and the photos boosted to the web (a serious problem when every cell phone has a camera) to simply have the person catching you be an asshole and ruin the mood. Only in fantasies do observers watch quietly or join in.

So the number one trick to sex in public places is to arrange it so that you’re likely to see anyone coming before they see you. Since it’s difficult to look around 360 degrees constantly (not to mention up, if you’re in a city), this usually means picking a place with some sort of “back wall” that prevents people from approaching in one or more directions. It also usually means fooling around at night, when shadows work to your advantage and people can’t see as far.

That’s not to say that sex outdoors in the warm sun can’t be fun, but I will always remember the time we were fooling around in a mountain meadow and had just finished up when a hiker appeared. If he saw us, he never let on, but my heart didn’t stop pounding until we were well on our way home.

The number two trick is, like many things, plausible deniability. E.g., “I swear, your honor, she was just sitting on my lap. The accuser couldn’t have seen anything because of the way her long loose skirt covered us both.” The key is usually noise and rhythmic motion. If both of those are limited and subtle, it truly can be hard to tell what people are doing.

Now I say this as someone who’s had a lot of sex in public places and to the best of my knowledge never gotten caught. Just about every public flashing or public fooling around scene in my stories is based on a true past experience (and if you want to know if a specific scene is, ask in the comments). The hiker in the field is as close as it’s been and I plead youth and excess hormones.

Now that isn’t to say that some of my “never did it’s” won’t show up in future stories. I’ve had a number of ideas that never came to fruition due to a lack of adventurous partner at the time it seemed possible. For example, I wondered if one could get away with sex on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I heard a claim that it had been done in the 70′s but Google is failing me on finding more details. In the post 9/11 world, I wouldn’t try, but I could easily see writing a story set in an earlier time period where the protagonists pulled it off. I also had a photography session in the University library scheduled with a woman who chickened out before we did it. If you ever read a story involving a trench coat, stockings, and nothing else between the stacks, you’ll know where it came from. I also have plenty of ‘true’ experiences that haven’t made it into stories yet, but may sometime when the right characters call.

Which means that, in the end, I can “get away with it” the best in fiction. I enjoy it, and I intend to continue to enjoy whatever flights of fancy cross my mind in future stories. Just no amused cops in the middle of the day.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about some old, lost, intimate friendships.

Now I should be clear that I use the term “intimate” to be emotional rather than physical. I can have sex with someone without an emotional connection. That’s not to say there isn’t an intimacy there, but it’s rather different. The parts of my soul that I bare, if I do bare them, are rather different than what I share with emotionally intimate friends and partners. For me, the most intimate activities involve conversation. I bare my soul through words–not what I do in the bedroom (though I must admit, cuddling can be awfully intimate).

This should be no surprise to readers here. I often write about my life, and I try to bare my soul, sometimes hiding it behind a veneer of fiction, sometimes not. I believe that’s how we connect, and why not be the one to start? I think it strengthens my fiction and makes it more authentic and it certainly gives my other work here more style.

Given what I share here, it should be no surprise that I share pretty openly in my daily life. The people who reciprocate often become friends, if there’s enough of a connection or other relevant circumstances. It provides a deeper support community for me, and it allows me to be truly supportive of others.

The hard part, though, is that often life circumstances change and so must the nature of the friendship. I noticed this first when friends started getting married. Certain conversational topics, like sex, dried up. While they might have been willing to talk about what they did with their boyfriends/girlfriends, they wouldn’t bring up anything about life with their spouse. I “got it” when I got married myself (there’s a reason there are no stories about sex with my wife on this site).

However, it’s not just the development of new intimate relationships which can crowd out the intimate friendship. I’ve had several die because the awkwardness of sustaining it was too much to bear. We discovered some serious barrier, like politics, that made it difficult to maintain respect for each other and thus be able to share openly. Others saw the onslaught of life changes, such as kids or relocation take their toll.

But sometimes, a relationship will hit a level where there’s nowhere else for it to go. This has been most often occurred to me in friendships with women. We reach a point where greater intimacy would require sex, and that’s not going to happen, so we back off. Then we discover that it’s damn difficult to sustain a friendship at a lower level.

In some ways, that’s what happened with the friendship that was the inspiration behind Friends and Benefits. The actual relationship went differently than that in the story, but still ended with a dispute about the nature of the friendship itself. She didn’t want to date me, and called me “ugly” on more than one occasion. I was tired of the sex play that wasn’t escalating or being either physically or emotionally fulfilling.

Yet recently I realized that, at its peak, that friendship was more intimate than relationships I had with some former lovers who remain in my life. With the former lovers, there was a clear post-intimacy path. We kept some parts of our connection and let others go because they were clearly no longer appropriate. Some of those relationships have then faded, like all friendships do, until we just exchange Christmas cards. Others maintain smiles and wistful unspoken memories. At least one had a “whoa! Is she attractive! Wait a minute, I used to date her.” moment.

So, with my old friend, I can’t help wondering if we’d have stayed in better touch if we’d actually become lovers, and then ex-lovers. It’s an experiment that can’t be tested, of course. Nor would I want to if it meant missing out on meeting my wife.

There are other memories of past relationships that have flitted through, recently. There’s also some realization that some of those types of emotionally intimate relationships aren’t appropriate anymore. I kind of miss them, even though I wouldn’t trade what I have now for them at all.

So I guess it’s just nostalgia of the rose-colored glasses kind. Maybe that’s just a sign that I’m getting old.

In today’s modern world, it’s too often to take the dominance of Western culture and economies as normal. Yet for much of history, it was actually the East that was the pinnacle. While Europe wrestled with Dark Ages and Middle Ages and more, both the Near East and the Far East flourished. So why, with a head start, did China not end up dominating the world instead of the Europeans?

They had a chance, even as late as the 1400′s. Sixty years before Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean, the Chinese Explorer Zheng He arrived at the Cape of Good Hope from the other direction. His fleet was significantly larger and the Chinese Empire much more powerful. Yet Portugal, later supplanted by other European powers, ended up owning the trade routes. Europe surged economically and culturally and surpassed China so that a few hundred years later, they were carving it up as part of their own empires.

So what happened?

In a word: bureaucracy.

The Chinese bureaucrats, who ran the country regarded the explorations as a waste of money and resources. China already was the Center of the Universe. Why spend any effort on barbarians? To add to the problems, they passed laws that restricted foreign travel and made it a capital crime to build big ocean going ships. The laws therefore made it impossible for any enterprising individuals to engage in exploration or trade outside of the bureaucrats’ control. There was no way an explorer could fund himself (or get another nation to fund him, as the Italian Columbus managed with Spain). The bureaucrats ruled.

Laws and bureaucracy killed the creative, explorative efforts of the Chinese people and eventually led to their destruction as a nation.

Now as much as we all tend to snarl about bureaucracy, it exists for some understandable reasons. Bureaucracies are put in place to manage and govern things on large scales. However, it doesn’t take long for them to do what they are really good at, which is maintain the status quo.

Deficit hawks in the US Government have known this for some time. It’s damn near impossible to kill a program once it’s established. No matter how outdated the agency or department, it can survive because the defenders of the status quo will fight harder and dirtier than those trying to end the program. After all, it’s the defender’s jobs and livelihood at stake. Most of us would fight hard ourselves.

And if we’re honest, most of us like the status quo. Not only is change scary, but chaos is usually downright frightening, if not hazardous. There have been studies that show that corrupt economies can succeed–if the corruption is stable. As long as someone knows what bribes they have to pay who, they can survive and even thrive. People can be creative because they know the rules. It’s when there are no rules that growth and creativity become impossible.

The major advantage of democracy, as practiced in the West with various checks against mob rule, is that it allows small slow change. The status quo is largely preserved without being stifling. Similarly, regulated capitalism allows ‘creative destruction’ where inefficient firms fail and new companies rise up, but chaos is still averted. The marketplace has rules and does not descend into “he with the biggest weapons makes all the rules.”

Which brings us to SOPA. By now, if you’re reading this, you’ve certainly heard about the Stop Online Piracy Act that magically appeared in the US Congress a few months ago and, if passed, would allow the Government to shut down IP addresses if any users of those IP addresses posted pirated content. This would allow them to de facto censor any cite that the bureaucrats chose, anywhere in the world (since the US controls IP assignments). It’s bad law and I strongly suspect it will be defeated in it’s current form (too much publicity), probably to rise up again more quietly in a different form later.

Why will it rise up again? Because SOPA is a perfect example of law and bureaucracy preserving the status quo. In this case, preserving the status quo of the media conglomerates, from music to movies to books.

A prime example of the media conglomerates getting the law changed is the Copyright Term Extension Act. In this law, pushed through with substantial lobbying by the Disney Corporation, the duration of copyright protection was extended by twenty years. The proponents at the time were attempting to get copyrights extended in perpetuity, so that creative works would never enter the public domain.

Spider Robinson addressed this in his Hugo winning story, Melancholy Elephants. His point is simple; a perpetual copyright will stifle creativity.

This isn’t hard to understand. While there are allowances for ‘fair use’ and ‘inspired by’ uses of copyrighted material, those allowances are only as good as one’s lawyers. If Disney decides to go after a writer or film maker that borrowed from them, however distantly and indirectly, do you think that person has a chance against their army of lawyers? Even if they’re right? The legal fees would crush them. The current legal system is designed not to reward those who are right, but those who can outlast the others. Big corporations with deep pockets have a serious edge. The filthy rich executives at Disney cannot afford to let The Mouse enter the public domain in any way, shape, or form, if they want to stay rich doing what they do now.

SOPA is the same gut reaction. Digital piracy undercuts the status quo. The media conglomerates can no longer get away with charging high rates for content, like they could when you had to buy a CD or a book or go to a theater to get their content. They can no longer control when and how consumers get the content–by restricting their film from appearing in foreign countries for example (aside: one acquaintance of mine points out that she’d pay for legal copies of ebooks if she could get them, but she can’t in her country. Amazon et al won’t sell them there. So what choice does she have?)

So SOPA is an attempt to use the law and bureaucracy to preserve the status quo. The eventual SOPA successor will attempt to do the same thing. If they succeed, we’re likely to end up like the 16th century Chinese, with a lack of creative improvement or true innovation (why produce something new if The Mouse lawyers can say a ‘oops, you borrowed from us, give us all the money you made or we’ll sue’?).

Except the true kicker is, the only way to preserve the status quo is to destroy the internet, much like the Chinese destroyed their ocean going fleets, because piracy isn’t the real problem, it’s the shift to a digital economy.

The status quo cannot survive when it costs nothing to make copies of content. The entire structure of the media conglomerates is based on the fact that it does cost something; that’s how they contribute value, or used to contribute value. People paid them for the distribution of the content via records, books, CD’s, and newspapers. That distribution required physical objects (an “atom” economy) that meant there was a cost to making copies and the conglomerates could do it better than individuals could. After all, if you want a book, you can always copy it by hand, but wouldn’t it just be cheaper to buy one at the store?

Apple and Amazon have figured this out. Apple isn’t charging 99 cents for a song. They’re charging 99 cents for the ease of finding the song you want, the knowledge that it’ll be of good quality and virus free, the security that it’s ‘legal’, and the awareness that you’re actually helping the creator of the content. Apple doesn’t spend its own money on the content. It spends it on making it easier to deliver the consumers the content they want. Amazon is as much of a master of this, if not more.

Now I’m not a fan of pirates. As a content creator, it chafes me when someone else makes money off of a story I wrote and I get nothing (and yes, it’s happened). I do consider that stealing. But going after the pirates is like trying to go after slave traders. They’re clever, ruthless, and there’s always more ready to replace the ones you destroy, as long as there’s profit in it.

Which is the key. As long as there’s profit in it.

The way to stop digital piracy is economically. The slave trade didn’t end because slave traders were destroyed. It ended because people stopped buying slaves (via cultural and legal shifts in much of the world and war in the US). Similarly, the mobsters of the twenties weren’t put out of business by law enforcement nearly as much as they were by the end of Prohibition.

iTunes and Amazon are the way to defeat piracy. People will pay for reputable distribution and ease of access. That’s just not the business model the media conglomerates have been following for the past century.

The new business models require creativity in business. They can support creativity in content creation. Laws and bureaucracy can’t. It’s as simple as that. SOPA’s a mistake, as its successor will be, but we can’t expect much else from those who need the stability over the creativity to remain rich.

For this one, the story’s pretty obvious, but I can’t help wondering about what happened before and what might happen after.

We’re at a party. There’s been drinking. These three decided to get it on while everyone else was elsewhere in the house. When the others came back, they stumbled on the scene. Note the surprise on the onlookers’ faces.

So… what led these three to decide, “out here in the living room is good enough, we don’t need to find a bedroom?” And what happens next? Are they going to stop and perhaps relocate? Let the others watch? Or perhaps this will turn into a general orgy?

All interesting speculations…

I’m sick. Being sick, I realized that there are really levels of sickness. From least sick to most sick:

1. Too sick to kiss.
“Sorry, dear, I don’t want to give you my germs.”

2. Too sick to fuck.
“I just don’t think I could maintain any vigorous activity for any length of time.”

3. Too sick to get a blowjob.
“I appreciate the offer, honey, but I don’t think it’d do me any good. I really don’t feel well.”

4. Too sick to jack off.
“Yeah, I’ve been lying around all day in bed with nothing to do, but I really don’t feel well.”

5. Too sick to look at internet porn.
“Please. Take the laptop away. Just let me rest.”

6. Too sick to have a threesome with two hot bi babes wearing stockings and sexy lingerie.
I’ve never been this sick.

Hopefully I’ll be well soon.

Another Christmas is over and once again, too many material goods were exchanged. Economists sometimes write about how inefficient this exchange is economically. We give people things they don’t really want or won’t really use, when cash would serve them better. However, cash is considered poor taste.

This is in many ways because giving gifts is, for many people, a way they demonstrate their love. The problem is that it’s usually the circumstances around the gift that form that demonstration rather than the demonstration itself. For example, I’ve noticed that women appreciate flowers when they’re given on random days rather than specific holidays. Roses on Valentine’s Day convey the message, “I didn’t forget the holiday but didn’t think of something you’d like more than a traditional offering.” Roses on a Thursday in March convey the message, “I was thinking of you and I wanted to make an effort to make you happy, just ’cause.” Which represents love better?

At Christmas, the ‘love’ is often conveyed in the number of presents or the price of the presents if we listen to the Madison Avenue marketers. Love is also conveyed when the giver correctly picks something that the receiver will really like. The message is, “I know you well enough to know what you would like.” Unfortunately, this can be very very hard.

For one, the receiver themselves may not know what they would like. I want an ereader, but there’s no way my wife could guess which one since I don’t know. Needless to say, she decided not to guess, for which I am grateful.

For two, how many people do we give gifts to that we don’t really know? We buy presents for my wife’s aunt, who we see maybe twice a year. We have a general list of her interests, but that’s really not good enough to know that, “yes, she’d really like this and it won’t end up in her junk drawer.”

Finally, there are usually other constraints in play as well. Equivalent cost reciprocity drives me nuts. If I find a work of blown glass that I do happen to know my father would love, but it exceeds a given dollar amount, I have to pass it up. Yes, he’d enjoy the present, but the mismatch in value between the gift I give him and the gift I give my sister would cause problems. Similarly, no one wants to “make them feel bad” if they get you a cheap gift when you get them an expensive gift. It’s a gift, folks, not a barter exchange. Why does the relative cost matter? But it does.

In the process, I’ve become difficult to buy for. I’m at a point economically in my life where anything I want materially, I can just buy. When people ask me for my wish list, it therefore becomes, “stuff that’s either too unimportant for me to purchase, or too much of a pain to shop for.” Yeah, give me a gift that I couldn’t be bothered to buy myself. That’s what I want and a good demonstration of love, right?

Now I figured this out long ago, but it never alleviated the question “what do you want?” For lovers, I’d say, “lingerie in your size.” I.e., the best gift you can give me is to fuck my brains out. That worked up until we had kids. As much as my wife might want to fuck my brains out as a Christmas gift, it’s kind of difficult when the baby is insisting on nursing and the 3-year-old wants to see if Santa came. It’s also not a present I can open when the extended family is gathered around the tree.

Which has led to me to realize that the gift I really want is time. Want to make me happy and show you love me? Volunteer to babysit. Offer to take over a home repair or a chore like getting my car washed. Bring food over for a meal. Help me free up the time so I can go fuck my wife’s brains out, or go sit in a coffee shop and write, or do all the things I enjoy doing but get shoved aside trying to raise children and get through the day.

I’ve started to say that, when people ask what I want. Some get it–this year I got babysitting gift certificates from one relative. Most–still don’t. Instead, the mound of stuff just grew, and I lost time figuring out where to put it and what to do with it, that I didn’t really want to give up.

Anyway, it’s over, and now we just have to clean up and start the new year. Hopefully there will be more time to do fun things in the coming months.

On my drive to and from work, I listen to the radio, often flipping stations to avoid the commercials or to look for a weather report. This past week, I caught a Katy Perry Song, Last Friday Night that’s inspired this post.

Now I’m a lyrics guy. Good lyrics grab me, be they country, pop, blues, rock, or Broadway musicals. I’m not a big Rob Thomas fan, but his line, “I’ve got a scar I can talk about” in the Matchbox 20 song Bright Lights nails the emotion and introspection at the same time. Similarly, the lines from the Citizen King song, I’ve Seen Better Days, which go “I’ve seen better days, I’ve been the star of many plays” is just fricking inane (and it’s in the chorus!). So when the Katy Perry song came on the pop song, I listened for the words.

The song’s celebrating a drunken debauchery night that the singer can’t really remember. It has lines about ‘a stranger in my bed’ and not being able to remember if she kissed someone, as well as “It’s a blacked out blur but I’m pretty sure it ruled.” Then it has a repeated refrain:

Last Friday night
We went streaking in the park
Skinny dipping in the dark
Then had a ménage à trois

Last Friday night
Yeah I think we broke the law
Always say we’re gonna stop
Oh-whoa-oh
This Friday night
Do it all again

And this is where I went, “whoa!”

I’m not used to mainstream pop songs played openly on the radio talking about ménage à trois. It definitely makes me wonder what the younger generation is up to. Has group sex become casual enough to toss off as a line about a wild evening? Is it what the ‘cool kids’ are doing? I suspect it’s a standard “Katy Perry being mildly provocative” since she is the one who burst into fame with “I Kissed a Girl.” However, I’m still struck by how casual of a reference it was. I certainly can’t recall any pop songs from the 70′s or 80′s that referred to group sex. Plenty that referred to sex, but not group sex.

But then I realized that the song also implied that they had to be drunk to have the ménage à trois. That implies there are still inhibitions around group sex. Which leaves me wondering… hmmm. Is this as big of a step in mainstreaming non-traditional sexual practices as I thought?

Okay, this one disturbs me a bit–just enough that I almost didn’t post it. It’s got a strong element of humiliation, which I’m not fond of, and hints of non-consent. I decided that despite the handcuffs, non-consent is unlikely (the handcuffs aren’t attached to anything, the way she’s holding her arms indicates she’s conscious while the photo is being taken). So I’m posting it because I find it disturbing.

Now obviously, we’re at the end of a gangbang. There are eleven condoms there, and if one guy can do all that, I want to meet the guy. I don’t have a problem with gangbangs, though they’re low on my list of things that interest me (now, a “reverse” gangbang where woman after woman screws a guy–that’s different, and interesting. Though the descriptions of how that happens in Hefner’s bedroom aren’t all that erotic).

What makes me uncomfortable is the driver’s license. If it wasn’t fuzzed out, this picture would be prime fodder for humiliating the woman. Imagine it posted openly so everyone who knew her could see what she’d participated in. Imagine sending a copy of the photo to her parents. I shudder a bit at the potential implications.

The thing is, if she’s into humiliation, those implications may turn her on. Not that she’d want them done of course, but the threat could be arousing. I’ve met two women who got off on being humiliated and I know there are many men who do (and usually become subs or cuckolds). It was strange to watch (they were scenes in the bdsm club), but I could tell they really were getting turned on.

So I realize that my discomfort is specifically because I don’t know the story. I can’t be assured that she enjoyed the hell out of the gangbang and this humiliating picture. I can’t assume that she wasn’t used and abused and this is the result. I suspect it’s not, but the doubt definitely has me wondering, ‘what’s the story?’

Okay, I’m stealing the line from Pretty Woman, but it’s been so true that I realize that it may be distorting my views on how much of the rest of the population looks at sex as well as affecting my writing.

I came of age during the AIDS hysteria in the mid-80′s. We knew sex could kill you, but no one had any meaningful statistics to assess the risks of various activities. Sitting around my dorm room, we actually had discussions about dental dams for oral sex on women. Of course, by the late 90′s, we knew that the risks of AIDS transmission via oral sex on women were damn low. I looked them up in 1999 or so and there were only three cases of women catching HIV from other women and other cofactors were suspected. Gay men may have been dying of AIDS, but gay women were never a risk population. That wasn’t obvious, though, just a few years into the epidemic.

As a result, I’ve been tested for HIV a half dozen times, mostly as a precaution or a chance to reset my baseline. I could confidently inform the girlfriend du jour that I was clean. However, that didn’t lead to us giving up condoms. In twenty years of being sexually active, I had intercourse sans condom less than ten times. I’d say less than five, but it might be six. It wasn’t until my wife and I were actively trying to get pregnant that condoms were set aside.

I never understood the excuses people make for not wanting to use condoms. I thought it was brain dead stupid. A slightly better pleasure is worth risking your life for? Puh-leeze.

Now that safety consciousness did not stop at condoms. I never had sex with anyone without a conversation about STD status beforehand. I turned down some sexual offers because I didn’t know the person’s background. I was once in a strip club where a dancer was sticking licorice in her pussy and offering it to customers to eat. No way, my friend. It’s probably not a risk, but I just couldn’t get past my first reaction of “what are the germs on that?” I also was once offered full service by a dancer and I turned it down, to later discover she had active herpes. I never understood sex with complete strangers because a condom isn’t guaranteed protection against herpes and I’d just as soon do without that virus, thank you. The conversation beforehand was a must.

It also didn’t stop at STD’s. I had condoms break on me four times before a courtesan acquaintance recommended Magnums. I figured anyone who had to protect herself professionally probably had worked out the best brand to use and I’ve been happy since. So I also discussed pregnancy with all my partners and made sure we had a second birth control method in place in addition to condoms.

The end result was that I caught nothing. The only two pregnancies I’ve been responsible for were planned.

Which probably explains part of why my twenties were probably a bit less wild than some of my contemporaries. And certainly less wild than the generation that came before, where HIV and Herpes were unknown, and the generation that came after, where the true statistical risks were known and not just conjectured.

So there are things I don’t ‘get’ at anything deeper than an intellectual level. Dogging. Glory holes. Random hook ups. These are things people do and enjoy, but I just twinge enough inside to realize that I wouldn’t.

Furthermore, I’ve realized it’s difficult for me to keep the disbelief out of my voice when others talk about things I consider unsafe. I get the furrowed brow and my body language conveys, “well that was stupid” even if I bite my tongue.

This spills over to my writing. I’m not sure I could write a dogging story and make it fun and erotic. I do know I include condoms in my stories, which is a tad unusual for porn and erotica. I know that safety issues have contributed to me intentionally writing some sex scenes as non-arousing (Allen’s bachelor party in Friends and Benefits comes to mind).

All in all, being a “safety guy” has a price that I hadn’t quite been aware of before. However, I’m certainly glad I am.

With the release of the illustrated ebook version of Friends and Benefits, I thought y’all might like a fun preview. In Chapter 18, Joe gives Sharon a Steve Hanks poster of a woman in a shower and then Sharon poses for Joe’s camera in an attempt to mimic the poster. Well, the original poster, and Tzratzk’s rendering of Sharon’s posing are below. Enjoy.