On porn
I wonder if porn is the greatest weapon yet devised by the male backlash?
Consider porn's conventions:
- Head jobs: The woman cannot speak through her mouthful of cock
- Male orgasm: Denoted by the degradation of jism spattering the woman's face
- Female orgasm: Unknown bar whimpers designed to secure the male ego
- The female body: Sculpted (apparently, adjustable implants have now been perfected)

Some of the conventions could arguably be adapting the sex act to the requirements of visual entertainment, but from what David Foster Wallace unearths in his brilliant essay, "Big Red Son", porn genres have been heading in search of the peverse and degrading, with the burgeoning genre of gonzo porn giving average schmoes hope by chronicling the finding (on beaches, generally) of infantilised women and persuading them to have (in Wallace's words) "wild and anatomically diverse sex". Degradation porn has advanced too, according to Wallace, with recent films capturing twenty men spitting on a woman who then proceeds to blows them violently.

Add the ubiquity and billions of dollars generated by stirring men's urges in combination with degradation, and the rare alliance between feminists and Christianity begins to make sense. I'm not moralising, I promise: most porn turns me off these days.

On another note, what of the distinction between erotica and porn? Isn't erotica differentiated simply by the literary method of show-don't-tell: lingering shots of faces and sinuous bodies entwining, without the jackboot closeups, the microscopic engagement with genitalia in motion?

Tagging
Riding home a couple of weeks ago, I came to a 20 kmh speed sign. Someone had thrown a hasty '1' in front with a jagged dash of black paint, with a smiley face beneath. Looking at the sign, I couldn't help but think of it as a metaphor. What if the supposed disengagement of youth - the disillusioned slacker culture apparently typifying Generation X and beyond is just a wider version of the rich kid phenomenon, where parental wealth bestows a complacent laziness on their offspring? Are we tagging signs largely because the signs have already been built?

I was wondering about this also in relation to the phenomenal rise of video games. The unkind call it escapism, but escapism assumes the real world is somehow inherently better, which in many cases generating escapism, it's not. I reckon the appeal of games is in the sense of adventure and newness, immersion in a fresher, rawer world the likes of which our ancestors enjoyed (or battled).

Odd
I like it when life turns turtle - when things turn upside down and there's that oddly off-centre feeling in the tummy, the feeling that always puzzled me as to how to name it until I rode my first rollercoaster. I spose it's weightlessness - that sense of floating while the world shifts and rearranges itself around you, like the point during an action flick where the cops leave the ground at the top of a hill and the camera captures a frozen glance betwen them.

So, B is leaving on Saturday for maybe a year overseas in China. It's good for her and sad for me. And here's me at 12.47 editing a friend's love letter, wondering at the bizarrities of life. Editing his letter (he's nervous) feels odd, ghostwriting a courtship, and each phrase I delete and replace with something less stilted makes me feel less an actor and more part of the action. And last week, a man in his sixties extended his friendship to me on the train and we talked about his superannuation and his management consultancy and his growing up in then-Rhodesia and then he subtly offered me sex, a grandfatherly-looking man with wandering eyes, peaked skin and a face like a recovering cancer victim. He gave me his card, offered me a massage and told me he could "come to mine" if I liked, devouring my crotch with his eyes. And B told me the next day she was leaving very soon, after months of uncertainty had inured me to the possibility of life without her.

Uppers and downers

The link between depression and creativity is well documented - but what do anti-depressants do to creativity? Does the numbness my friends report comes with them take away the impulse to create?

High notes

To pinch a joke from my friend Pat:

Q: What did the Jamaican dudes say when they ran out of weed?
A: What's this shit music?

Why are drugs and genres of music so inextricably linked? Is it because the drugs and music work in tandem to produce certain headstates? The soaring emotions of ecstasy and intricate uplifting beats of techno / Weed with introspective genres - chillout and reggae / Rock with the yellow, swaying haze of drunkenness. But what about cocaine or heroin, the bigger drugs? Do they transcend genre?