Big Ed's Place

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.

Merry Christmas!

I’d love to have something special to say today, or maybe a picture of a beautiful woman in a stocking cap here, but it’s crazy, as it always is at Christmas. My wife and I actually had a conversation yesterday about how much I hate this holiday. It saddens her to here that, but it feels better knowing I can actually express that.

Why do I hate it? All the additional work and stress for little emotional payoff. Yeah, my kid will be happy when he awakes and have a good day. But he’d be happy with a couple of presents and a trip to the bouncy castle place. Meanwhile it’s been non-stop, dawn to late at night, for several weeks. Four weeks of stress for a few hours of pleasure. Right now, that’s not a good trade to me.

Anyway, the first draft of Honeymoon is done, at 9,291 words. That’s 1,367 words in the past week. Now it’s editing and formatting for release, which will be difficult to do this coming week with the holiday craziness.

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?

We’re hitting the silly season of December where “running around like chickens with their heads cut off” really seems to fit (aside: how many people have actually seen this with real chickens? I have. It was a bit disturbing). Christmas is in a week, we’re nowhere close to done decorating and buying presents, work deadlines loom, and, oh yeah, I have a writing deadline.

I managed to get some words snuck in on Honeymoon. It’s at 7,924, which means I wrote 1,547 words this past week. I’m within 1-2kwords from being done, so there’s a good chance I’ll pull it off. But with the crunch, it’s still going to be tight. Even after I finish it, there’s a lot of production steps before it’s ready to release.

Anyway–back to dancing around crazily in the barnyard.

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?’

I’ve previously ranted about December here. It’s probably my least favorite month of the year because of all the additional stress brought on by the holidays. This year, my son is old enough to ‘get it’ and is already doing things like asking when we’re going to decorate (answer: after we get the house picked up, so put away your toys, please). This year, there’s less margin and available time to do with having the baby to take care of as well. We’re jettisoning several Christmas traditions as a result–no Holiday open house this year, no Christmas letter (just a photo card of the kids). Unfortunately, because of a commitment I made, I can’t push all the writing aside. I have to finish Honeymoon by the end of the month.

This is not easy. It’s going slower than I like do to the lack of time. My day job still hasn’t gotten the concept that shoving a full month’s worth of work into the first 20 days (so people can take off the holidays) is not a good idea. So they’re shoving. As regular readers know, my prime writing time is my lunch hour and this past week I had three working lunches and one compressed lunch (had to dash out, get food, get back). It was quite frustrating.

Nonetheless, I managed to do a fair amount of writing, given the time. I wrote 1,298 on Honeymoon, bringing it to 6,387, mostly in the late evenings and in ‘a sentence here, a sentence there’ fashion. I estimate I have between 2-4kwords left to go and I need to allow two weeks at the end for my team to read it and for me to format it. That gives me about a week to finish the writing. Uh… did I mention December is stressful?

Anyway–back to it. We’ll see how the week goes.

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.

So it’s been two weeks since I did a status update, due to limited internet access. That’s not to say limited computer access, for I did find time to write.

It was a productive two weeks. I finished the first draft of my science fiction story. It clocked in at 8,652 words, which means I managed 3,449 words on it in the two weeks. I also worked on Honeymoon. It’s at 5,089 words now, which means I added 1,459 words to it in the same time frame. This was mostly a function of the holiday weekend. The kids were taken care of and I had some uninterrupted blocks of time. Still, ~4,900 words for two weeks is pretty good.

So given this, where am I at for the year, now that I’m going into the home stretch?

Well, I had ~57kwords written for the year as of the end of September. Add the 8,652 for the science fiction story, 4,383 on Honeymoon, and 4,273 on FYI, and I’ve written quite a bit. I also added 1,653 words to Christening and 118 to the Florida Story. That makes 14,716 words in two months, bringing me to ~72kwords for the year. Not bad, especially considering I released six short stories and a novel as ebooks as well, plus maintained this site and regular postings therein.

So… one more month, one story to complete, and then it’ll be time to re-examine my queue.

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.

I’m offline this holiday weekend, and so unable to do my usual status post. As a result, I thought I’d do a “What’s the Story?” post for your amusement.

The question is simple. What’s up with the lollipop?

Now I’ve seen a stripper use a lollipop in her act–putting it in her pussy and then offering it to me to eat (I declined). But this isn’t a show like that. So what’s the story?