If history is any indication, this period of unexamined brainlessness will end in relatively short order. Soon enough I’ll have things to share, but for now I’ll simply point to my Twitter where I continue to chatter in 140-character bites. If you don’t use Twitter you can find my tweets and more on Facebook. I wish you the happiest of holiday seasons and again, thank you for checking up on me.

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This post, Really, Truly, originally appeared on aag on Monday, December 19, 2011. Tweet This Post!

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This post, Scarleteen’s End-of-the-Year Fundraiser, originally appeared on aag on Friday, November 25, 2011. Tweet This Post!

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Right now my brain feels all private and self-contained, and while I’m absolutely certain that soon enough I’ll be back in 100% overshare mode, for now I’m just going to continue being quiet except to wish my USian readers a lovely Thanksgiving.

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This post, Having Not, originally appeared on aag on Wednesday, November 23, 2011. Tweet This Post!

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With his permission I am republishing a part of his advice, which you might also find to be helpful:

That’s a fake lawyer threat if I ever saw one.  Anybody who thinks “Legal Counsel” needs capital letters, doesn’t have a lawyer, much less a lawyer on retainer.  Second of all, the truth is an absolute defense in all charges of defamation.  That wouldn’t stop a nutcase from suing you (nothing can stop that) but it should stop any lawyer from doing more than blustering, as long as you don’t say anything about [person] that’s untrue — which you haven’t and won’t.

[Person] writes like a desperate failing sex toy white label owner who has no *clue* why ze’s not making money the way the fast-talking franchise salesman said ze would, so the universe is punishing hir stupidity far worse than you ever could.  Third, since you didn’t identify the store in the tweet, there’s utterly no grounds for concern based on what you’ve said so far.

If you haven’t already responded to hir about the ad space refund, I’d refuse that too. All of my ad sales are for blocks of time that are prepaid; the advertiser is free to put up whatever image I’ll approve. But I don’t refund because they are unhappy with the traffic or the conversions or my body odor or that I didn’t fellate them as vigorously as expected.  Or, to date, for any other reason whatsoever.  At my house and I expect at yours, that money was long ago spent on tomatoes or tangerines or toilet paper; and you’ve done nothing wrong that ze should demand it back.  I’d refuse the refund, as politely as I could manage, which would be not very:

Dear [Person]–

I’m sorry you no longer wish to do business with me.  Given your unreasonable expectations with regard to web traffic and review-writing, I’m content with your decision to terminate our business relationship.

However, all advertising sales are prepaid in advance for a set period of time, final, and non-refundable.  If you choose not to run advertising for the complete term you paid for, that’s your prerogative.  In that case, please confirm that you would like the ad removed.  Alternatively, I’m just as happy to continue running your existing ad until the paid-for period is done.  Just let me know.

Thanks for the advice, lawyer-blogger friend. I owe you at least a full crate of clementines for the help and commiseration. And for making me laugh, which I desperately needed after this ridonkulous little episode.

To my blogger friends who are accepting toys for review and/or allowing ads on your websites: If you haven’t already taken the time to write up some terms and conditions for these services, what’s stopping you? Please allow my experience be an example of what can happen when you’re not beyond abundantly clear about your expectations.

I’d love to know what you come up with. Post a link below or email me, okay?

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This post, Some Advice, originally appeared on aag on Monday, November 14, 2011. Tweet This Post!

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A person with less of a philosophical bent (or one less effectively medicated) might tend to see the events of the past week as cause for tears to be shed into the evening’s glass of wine, or tooth-gnashing, or hand-wringing, or fist-shaking toward the silent, pitiless heavens. But in this eleventh month of two-thousand-eleven, a time that finds me in terms of work, family, finance and fuckery almost shockingly content, I perceive this misfortune as nothing more than the barely audible whinge of the universe’s tiniest midge, ineffectually circling my head before scurrying off to try, with what I hope is the same degree of success, to make someone else’s life miserable.

My goal, once past the first stunned shock of moral outrage, is to transmogrify suffering into art; to make my own small tragedies and minor tempests into something useful — even beautiful — for myself and others. This little episode therefore becomes the impetus to perform some tasks that I should have completed months and months if not years and years ago. I will start small, with this brief group of statements to be produced when advertising dollars, website creation fees, or items for review change hands, and which by all rights I should have codified when the very first offer to be gifted with some delightful piece of sexual equipage wafted into my email box:

Want to send me something? Awesome. Here’s some information you might find useful:

Items sent to me become my property forever. I will neither return the item¹, pay for it, nor provide reimbursement in any other way.

My acceptance of a product in no way guarantees that I will write a positive review or in fact any review at all. I may write a post with many words about the product or only a few. I may include an image or not. Please understand that if I choose not to write about a product, it is probably because what I would write would be so unflattering that it is to everyone’s best interests that I say nothing at all.

Advertising on my website is pre-paid, final, and non-refundable for any reason, including but not limited to an advertiser’s perception of the amount of clicks and/or sales the ad in question generated. In no case shall my positive, negative, neutral, delayed or incomplete review affect in any way a previously negotiated advertising arrangement.

I reserve the right to publish via website, Twitter and/or Facebook part or all of emails sent to me that verge upon an abusive, ridiculous, nonsensical or illogical nature. If a missive contains multitudinous spelling and grammatical errors, crude references to sexual behavior, uninvited images of genitalia, threats to consult a Legal Counsel on retainer or to sue for Defamation of Character, please expect to see that correspondence mocked and derided electronically and (possibly) physically set aflame in my own personal backyard.

Perhaps you can extrapolate some of the events which have lead to the creation of this document?

Do you have terms and conditions for receiving toys for review purposes? What am I missing from mine? Suggestions and expressions of commiseration are welcome in the comments below.

1. Yes this has been asked of me. Yes it was gross.

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This post, Impetus, originally appeared on aag on Friday, November 11, 2011. Tweet This Post!

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In those days their favorite thing was discovered quite by accident: I seated straw into cup in preparation for the day’s first healing gulp and it made an amusing noise. They were enchanted. “Again,” demanded the older baby, while the younger baby chortled. Of course I did it again (and again and again and again). Anything that kept them amused and marginally out of trouble for five minutes was worth the trouble, and so it became our routine to drive home to the sounds of rhythmic soda straw squeaks and little people’s laughter.

Do you remember when you used to love this sound, I asked today, demonstrating on my cup as we waited for the light to change. Neither the just-turned-seven-year-old nor her almost-six brother claimed to, although they both politely chuckled when I pointed out that it used to send them into gales of hysterics.

“I don’t remember being a baby,” said the girl.

“I don’t either,” said the boy.

I do, I said. You both pooped a lot. Poop is pretty much the ne plus ultra of humor topics these days.

“I did not!” said the boy, aghast.

“You still do,” said the girl.

“I wish I could be a baby again,” said the boy, and I’d have to agree with him. Even for a day — even for an hour! — I’d like to be mother to their baby-selves, in no small part because I’d like to believe I’d do it better a second time. I’d be more patient with carrot-colored walls and elbows that smell like bacon. I’d appreciate more that I could fight by proxy, that the sun brought on laughter, that the beloved wank-couch still lived. If I could do it again I would endeavor to yearn less.

And I’m certain I could succeed.

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This post, For One Day, originally appeared on aag on Thursday, November 3, 2011. Tweet This Post!

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At some point in my pre-double-digit years, no doubt as I raced through backyard sprinklers while singing this with exquisite abandon, I came down wrong on my foot and with a soft ping, hardly detectable over the happy shrieks of my compatriots, my ankle was ruined. For life.

I remember no one specific instance, only that it happened again and again. During kickball in PE: ping it would go, but off I’d limp to first base. Landing after a hurdle as I ran track: ping! but I’d do my best to sprint mostly on my other leg. Coming down after a block in volleyball¹ and PING it would hollar, but I’d tough it out ’til the game was over and I could request a quick tape job, because what kid wants to stop running? What kid wants to admit to being weak, to being less than perfect, less than whole, in front of her peers?

At random intervals I dealt with the ping ’til my twenty-first year, at which point I was in college and inexplicably enrolled in a ballroom dance class². It was a very great joke to my partner and me that we were asked to do this particular dance, so much so that we gasped with laughter as we polka-ed around the room — until without warning my ankle screamed PING!!!!! and my polka days were through.

If I’d been smarter I would have allowed myself to be transported directly home to spend the day with RICE, but who is smart at twenty-one? Instead I limped back to the dorm for lunch, then treked a half-mile to class, then another half-mile back, then the same distance again for a meeting. And then I went to the bar. And then back home again, where I was bound and determined to experience intercourse for (perhaps) the third time despite the fact that my ankle was bigger than my calf and that it throbbed with his each stroke.

Reader, it never healed. I racked up one belt after the next, never minding the dreadful pings as I smashed into heavy bags (and my opponents). Sometimes I’d dutifully take myself to a doctor, but neither x-rays nor poking turned up anything. No amount of writing letters in the air with my toe, strength training or plain old rest fixed it, and finally, at some point in my thirties, I gave it up as a lost cause. You’re going to have to deal with this for the rest of this life, I told myself. Better make the best of it.

For the most part I have. I’ve learned to work around the movements that set off pings, and some super-charged pain-killers wait in the cabinet for when I can’t, at which point I give myself a small lecture on being more careful and then carry on.

But this isn’t a post about ankles.

Go to the same grocery store for the entire fifteen years you’ve lived in a town and eventually the cashiers recognize you enough to make small talk. This would be annoying if it detracted from the speedy processing of a cart overflowing with goldfish and clementines but one lady, a youngish grandmotherly type, manages to chat while checking with a rapidity that would make a robot hang its head in shame. It was clear from that day’s groceries that I’d shopped specifically for an event; her questions drew out of me that it was for a child’s birthday party which would be attended by relatives both by blood and adoption. She made little supportive comments about my choice of main course³, decor⁴ and gifts⁵, dropping in small endearments at intervals regular enough to be charming without being the least bit creepy. “I bet your party will be lovely, honey,” she said as she handed over the receipt, and as I shoved off toward the parking lot a thought popped ping in my mind that man, I bet she’s a great grandmother. And mother.

A thought like this — so simple! — shouldn’t make the drive home one of sobs so aggressive it’s surprising I didn’t throw up. But it did. The good news is that it passed quickly. The injury is old, and I’ve accepted that it’s never going to heal. There’s medicine in the cabinet. I am always careful. And then we just keep on carrying on.

1. Aside: Is there any better feeling that putting a nastily spiked ball right back in your opponent’s court? No. No there is not.
2. Even English majors cannot read every second, nor can science minors spend all their time hunched over a Bunsen burner.
3. Lasagna
4. Pumpkins, duh
5. My darling is partial to lipgloss, nail polish and art supplies

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This post, Ankle, originally appeared on aag on Monday, October 31, 2011. Tweet This Post!

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• PuckerUp.com
• CrystalDelights.com
• LiquidWhispers.com
• MOMENTUMcon.com
• Seska.com
• LipstickAndLuxury.com

And reading this, which so many of you told me on Twitter that I’d love, and you were right.

And this:

• The state of the economy.
• The fact that my middle child is turning seven.
• The erosion of reproductive justice in this country and the possible effects it will have on my children.
• The thought of how the everloving fuck I’m going to pay for college for three kids.
• The worry that a single trip to the ER — much less a serious, long-term illness! — would pretty much wipe me out financially, as my insurance is for shit.
• The certain knowledge of how very much worse things will be if Herman Cain, Rick Perry or Mitt Romney succeed twelve months from now.

Worry does no good, I know, but it’s getting to the point that I long for the days when the worst thing I could imagine was the coming zombie apocalypse.

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This post, Updates, originally appeared on aag on Friday, October 28, 2011. Tweet This Post!

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I know this makes me A Very Bad Person! I know it! And yet after all this time I am tired, tired and disgusted and just done of fending off repeated attempts to get in my pants when I’ve very specifically said that I’m not interested. You might think the threat of a fang-bearing cunt would be enough to warn off the fools. Alas it is not. Here is but a sampling of the even more torrential flood of email — it’s been at least a ten-fold increase — my new profile has invited:

I would love to come. Over and feed your needs for a night of pleasures. Tonight.

I am in town Sunday night and would love to fill your hungry pussy!

Can it really be true, teeth inside your vagina? I would love to do some exploring and see, see for myself!

I’d love to meet ya sometime and feed that appetite. I have no idea what dentata is, but I bet google does lol. I attached a few pics. Hope to hear back from ya soon.

And this gem:

its xciting and refreshing to see a woman that knows what she wants and states. so I just wished now we could get together and you would allow me to take care of that ravenous appetite with this cock that needs a vagina wrapped around it…thanks for stirring my loins with your words wink.

Do you know what is a vagina dentata? I asked, to which he responded “ya I know but I was hopin it wouldnt really bite me just was hopin she would pull back the fangs and invite me in wink”.

And then he blocked me. I don’t blame him. I would have blocked me too.

And finally:

Do you really have choppers in your coochie? Has this had a negative effect in your search for copious non-committal connubial relations?

My answer: Metaphorically, to both your questions, yes.

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This post, The Threat of a Fang-Bearing Cunt, originally appeared on aag on Monday, October 24, 2011. Tweet This Post!

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Join me in being vocal about fisting! I include my love of fisting on all my bios and do it on camera whenever I can. Let’s celebrate and normalize the act! On Friday, October 21st, post a blog about fisting — what it means to you, what you like about it, tweet about #fisting, Facebook about the act. Share my post, share others’ posts. Tumblr the fuck out of it. Read a fisting how-to book. Watch queer porn online. (Check out my scenes on CrashPadSeries.com and QueerPorn.tv!) And if you want to be one of the first wave of supporters to order a DVD that actually has fisting IN it, October 21st is also the release date of Courtney Trouble’s LIVE SEX SHOW. So get excited. Learn something. Teach someone. Talk about it. Watch it. Love it. Join our FIST FIGHT!

On Friday I’ll talk more about my experiences with fisting but for now you can learn more about the practice from Jiz Lee, Courtney Trouble, and Rachel Venning at Babeland.

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This post, October 21st is Fisting Day, originally appeared on aag on Wednesday, October 19, 2011. Tweet This Post!

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