sex beds with chains. a wall of dildos, anal beads ...and anal plugs. women walking around covered only with pasties and tattoos. and lots of lonely, lonely, awkward men shuffling around with cameras waiting to get a photo with their favorite. welcome to adultcon! a friend of mine was shooting something for a tv show he's on and asked if i'd like to come along. in my mind, the world of pornography ...or adult entertainment (that's more like it) is  a mystery as far as the performers involved. maybe they are sexually and emotionally liberated individuals who recognize the silliness involved in hiding our bodies from one another. maybe they understand something more subversive. the world is a ridiculous place to take seriously, so why not get paid to do the one thing that everyone enjoys doing? getting semen launched into your eyes (or whatever your deal is). maybe they understand the world on a much more profound level. nope. just sad childhoods all grown up. it's hard to place your finger on just what it is, and they will let you put your finger lots of places. it's not the sad little booths where aspiring stars sit swap-meet style behind a table littered with an assortment of their films. it's not the over-sized cutout of them directly behind them. it's not the throngs of middle aged men who meander around telling the girls they love their work. it's not seeing a woman stand with her legs apart while anyone with a camera snaps a shot of her vulva. it's not the televisions with highlights of her career playing behind her. it's just this weird feeling that permeates through the atmosphere. if you attend adultcon with someone - even if they are an avid porn watcher - they will stop and at some point say, "do you feel creeped out right now?" and you will. at one point, a brunette girl with a scar on her face motioned me over to her and then aggressively bounced her boobs into me a few times ...which sounds nice, except you didn't see the angry look on her face. fury. then when i didn't exhibit the appropriate response to that (which for me was to just smile and pretend to do a stupid dance) she said to me in a thick russian accent, "you need to relax." i don't know what that says about me when someone in that situation feels compelled to give me advice, but it didn't feel great.

i never got to go to a major league baseball game as a kid, and i don't know if it would have been that great if i had. now however, going to a game is like going to disneyland for a kid. i went to a game recently, and they have a huge section of the concession area dedicated just to kids. like a giant playground where they can play in ball pits, sit in fake dugouts, race against cutouts of their favorite players, wrestle with the mascot, and other such activities that pretty much eliminate any chance of them seeing the game. it must suck for the parent who has to monitor them. there's a lot to take advantage of as a kid at a baseball game, but the real beauty for these little jerks is when they are actually sitting in the stands. any foul ball hit anywhere near a child (regardless of how pathetic his attempt to catch it is) will be given to the kid. at the game i watched, a dude stood up with his bloody mary in an attempt to catch a scorcher fouled in our direction. he stood up, not to catch the ball, but to protect the little kid sitting next to him. and he succeeded. the ball hit his arm like a missile and exploded his drink all over him and his baseball jersey* he'd elected to suit up in for the game. his arm looked so gnarly that people were crawling down from several rows up to take a picture of this giant lump that had formed where a wrist used to be. and then, about 2 seconds later, "give it to the kid! give the ball to the kid!" the kid, who had done nothing, neglected to mention he already had a ball from earlier in the game - and he took the missile ball. little rich jerk. not many kids ever even get to go to a game, let alone sit close enough to the field to actually see a ball. and then he gets to take two balls home. neither of which he caught. you grow up hoping to maybe one day go to a live game, and you work and save, and eventually you go. and when you catch a ball that you've been working for your whole life "give it to the kid!" yeah, that little privileged, uncoordinated fellow next to you. no way. go play in the ball pit.

*i think it's a little silly for grown men to wear a jersey and want a souvenir ball from the game, but even still - that kid sucks.

"well, he's a jerk. I'm not going to watch his movies anymore." what does his personality have to do with what he creates? or she? requiring people to be pleasant and then also be great entertainers seems like a lot to ask. people romanticize van gogh cutting off his ear out of love, but that is not the action of a normal person - or a reasonable person. if they would have had phones back then, i'd imagine the woman who was the catalyst for that maiming would have gotten some unsavory voicemails from him prior - "i'll do it!! you hear me?! I'll cut off my god damn ear!! that's how crazy you make me!! hello?!!" but we don't know any of that. we only know his art. isn't that all we should know of an artist? reality shows have given us some idea that behind the scenes they should be a delight, but that has nothing to do with art. you're going to boycott what they created if they're not a person you enjoy? what if edison had been an asshole? "well, i'm not using lights anymore! i can tell you that much!" think of all your favorite art, not the artists, just the actual song, movie or book or whatever it is that you like from them. and then imagine the children they touched, the racial slurs they shouted, the things they drunkenly crashed their cars into. in the future, only the art will be remembered, so you may as well get an early start.

i've never really understood how the bones of dinosaurs compressed into oil. it seems unlikely. we've been pumping oil for a long time, and we don't seem to be at a real shortage. how many dinosaurs is that? and how much bone does it take to make one barrel of oil? did they all die right on top of each other? the bones turned slowly into oil then leached underground to find other oil and form big pools? i'd like to think the earth is really just a big complex machine with gears made of rock and metal that work constantly to pedal us around the sun and spin around its axis. and the oil is the lubricant for those gears. and eventually it will dry up, screech to a halt, and we'll all fly off into space. i like that we have a constant leak happening under the ocean. complete with a webcam so you won't miss a minute of the action. news channels with icons in the bottom that say "oil spill day 75" and the like. that seems fitting for humans and our existence on this planet. while we're here, things like that are bound to happen. and we go right on laughing and carousing. like when you're at a funeral and you know people are out at bars laughing and slapping each other on the back, and you think, "god damn it! don't they care?" no. no one cares. we just want to party. and that's why a constant, human caused, stream of oil in the ocean is essential. it seems like there are two basic types of depression. the narcissistic "why doesn't everyone love me?" kind, and the "why be happy? look at the world we live in" kind. but you're not seeing footage of darfur, or children starving everyday on a webcam. now, thanks to this oil spill, there's a constant reason to be depressed and hate the world. that's good news for a morose individual such as yourself.