About last night.

Last night's LitCrawl event at Good Vibrations, featuring readings by me, Badger, Carol Queen, Pam Rosenthal, Greta Christina and the estimable Violet Blue, was packed with people, truly fun, and a big success. Read Badger's account of the event.

What I didn't tell people is that I had written my piece that day. Though I stood at the side editing the piece while others read, I thought it came off pretty well. I appreciated the kind words of people who commented on the piece as I posted it. I didn't mean for the primary impression of the piece to be that I'm no longer getting any, but more of a reflection on what it means to be a "mere" customer versus someone in the in-crowd, and how truly fortunate I was to have a paradisical sexual period, the kind that most people merely fantasize about.

But there's also a side of me that's half mischievous, half passive-aggressive, to the point of being a killjoy, that makes me want to go to an erotica reading and read a piece that is both erotic -- featuring as it did fucking, fisting, blow jobs and sex work -- and also a downer. People laughed throughout my piece but as it neared the end the laughs stopped coming and I think people were sort of "What the fuck just happened with that?" by the end.

That trickster part of me likes confounding expectations. Remember that moment in "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" when the organizers of an anti-war demonstration invite Ken Kesey to address a huge crowd, and he not only twits all their expectations by delivering an utterly confusing off-topic rant but manages to deflate all the rah-rah antiwar energy that had been built up during the rally. Something evil in me admires that.

Then I walked down Valencia St. past other venues during the second round of readings, and every place was PACKED -- there were hundreds of people packed into every venue, shoulder to shoulder in many cases, listening to writers read. The third-round reading I went to at the Lone Palm featured my friend Katia Noyes and five other writers including the really famous Bharati Mukherjee. And that was super packed too, though I got there early enough to get a seat at the bar. I found myself next to this drunk woman who had no idea an event was about to be held and finally starting asking people what was going on. She thought she was just going to have a couple drinks after work, and here came a hundred people and a literary event. She was one of those soulful emotional drunks; she was so moved by the readings that she held my hand through half of it. But ask her a question and she would say something completely tangental. I hope she got home all right.

LitQuake, LitCrawl, Carol Queen, Violet Blue, Greta Christina, badgerbag, Good Vibrations, Katia Noyes