Working Sex (19 page)

 

 

. . . or the guy whose forty-six-year-old wife was cheating on him with a twentysomething and who really just wanted to talk (I asked why he wasn’t seeing a shrink; he told me he didn’t care for the stigma); or Mark, who cried silently as
I listened (his wife had died in a car accident); or Trey, who wanted to save me because I seemed sad; or Larry, who drove a taxi and smoked way too much pot and told all the girls he loved them; or the girls, the ones I cared about, the ones I fought with; or what it feels like to have the curtains drawn all day, as you sit in your lingerie with your feet perched on the heater, listening to Adrienne’s troubles, wondering if the phones will ever ring . . .

 

 

. . . or the blue candleholders; or the faulty washing machines which left the towels smelling vaguely of cum; or the “self-cleaning” house where I worked and the crazed madam who had a penchant for saving strays, but who refused to buy us a mop; or the actual mop I bought with my own money; or how I diligently mopped the whole place topless as Claire watched from behind her newspaper; or Claire, who cooked the best vegetarian meals while I narrated daytime television shows from the other room; or the way it tore my girlfriend up that I gave all I had to strangers and left none for her . . .

I was thinking of writing a medical book called
Hand Jobs: How I Got Carpal Tunnel,
and filling it with a bunch of short stories completely unrelated to the title.

 

. . .
or Christine’s boyfriend, who thought she was leaving home each morning to work at a jewelry store; or Brielle, who looked like a midwestern cheerleader and scolded me one day for wearing my Skivvies into a session, and who bought into some kind of conspiracy theory which compelled her to shoot guns in the woods every weekend, in case “they” were coming to get “us” (I was never sure who “they” were, but I was pretty certain that I was not included in her version of “us”); or Brian, the wealthy Republican, who volunteered at the local animal shelter and cried when they euthanized his favorite pit bull; or John, the very tall, very quiet poker player who would come to see me after every big win . . .

 

Stanley broke his leg in the backyard when I was chasing him! Why is the answering machine on? Is anyone there? . . . I just talked to Emma two minutes ago. What is going on over there? Well, you two better be in session. Do you hear me? . . . Bob! Don’t carry him like that, don’t you know what kind of pain he’s in? . . . Is anyone there? Brielle, are you there? Well if you need me, I’ll be at the . . . Bob! Show some humanity for Christ’s sake . . . his leg is dangling! Okay, well, just so you know, Mary’s client broke a table
last week. And if anyone else breaks a table over there . . .
Stanley
, oh my god . . . well, I am not paying for it, is all!

 

. . . or Mary, whose client broke the table; or how no one ever answered the phone when Margaret called to “check in” and how her phone calls always reminded me of an NPR version of Animal Cops; or how we were responsible for putting a spell on her boyfriend by having a certain set of candles lit at all times or else; or how her husband Bob brought me some unbelievably bad lesbian porn so that I could examine the authenticity of the sex; or how I neither wanted to burst his bubble nor clue him into my world and told him “this is exactly how lesbians have sex” . . .

 

 

. . . or how Samantha got the shits when she was on a threeweek raw food diet and could not work, but came in anyway and slept all day on the huge, leopard-print couch; or how we consulted the tarot one day to investigate whether we were being watched by the cops and though neither one of us really knew how to interpret the tarot, we managed to determine
that we were on the precipice of a preemptive catastrophe (which never happened); or how Mary just didn’t come into work one day because she decided to move to Ohio to become a teacher and how I was going to follow her example, but just kept on folding pink towels . . .

 

 

. . . or Diane, who dreamt of having an office job equipped with a desk, which would serve as the resting place for a framed picture of her daughter; or Lynn, who had been on the “Geek to Sleek”
Ricki Lake Show
and thought everything the clients had to offer was “chump change;” or the hippie house I worked for where the girls set up a gigantic altar in the middle of everything and were constantly creating “sacred space;” or how once the curtains caught on fire, because Lily and I were trying to sage the “negative energy” off of each other; or how the very next week Stuart, the owner, closed it all down because he could no longer afford the liability we had become.

A
na Voog was the second ever 24/7 home webcam on the Internet, starting in the fall of 1997. Today she is the net’s longest running cam. Her site has included a daily journal, a 30-second-refresh cam picture, chat rooms, bulletin boards, email lists, endless photo archives, and at times a mobile cam that she takes out into the world. It quickly snowballed from a small experiment to a site with thousands of members worldwide and a busy online community centered around her cam. Following are screenshots and excerpts from the journal (called ANAlog) she kept during the first year and a half she had the
cam, at a time when the whole world was trying to figure out what the technology meant.

i’ve decided to write journal entries about my webcamness wrrrld. this is my 1st ANAlog. i’ve been on the net now for a week. it’s a freaky and cool thing! i don’t know if i should pay attention to the cam or not. today i’m not because i just need a break and to finally get caught up on some email. and my house is going to the pits! i have so much laundry and dishes to do! eek! i can’t even get connected to my temperamental server now anyway. i keep crashing every now and then.

 

after the 1st 4 days of being on cam, i went on vacation for a week, and it was so weird ‘cause for the first few days of trying to unwind i kept seeing the monitor of myself in my head as i’d try to go to sleep. it was so crazy. y’know how things get all surreal and thoughts make no sense right when you’re on the verge of sleep? well, i was pulling down menus for my thoughts! and i was moving pictures over in my mind with a cursor and resizing them! i’d go out to dinner and all i could think of is “wow, that ketchup bottle would make a good cam shot!” or “too bad i don’t have the cam to show how the light is hitting those rotating pies in that display case!”

i hope after awhile these thoughts will just settle down. the technology of all of this is so astounding, mindblowing, yet so incredibly archaic at the same time. people staring at computers all over the world waiting for minutes for a picture to refresh. it’s endearing and insane. i like it. i’m glad to be a part of this whatever-it-is.

 

it’s eerie to sleep with the cam on you. i’ll wake up and see it shining and blinking at me and it’s like a dream.

3:40am, wow, it’s cool to take a shower and not worry about what picture the cam is going to snap of you! it’s a completely different vibe having the cam off. aaaah, my “old” life! someday i might get used to the camera and just forget it’s there, but not yet! i still feel pretty self-conscious. i wake up and put on lipstick right away or else i look so washed out.

 

it sure is quieter in here with one computer shut off, too. i find it interesting that so many of you want to watch me sleep. i sort of feel like you’re all watching over me, protecting me.

 

i really want to get a cam in every room. and be able to take the cam outside with me. i think it would be just hilarious if people saw me do absolutely everything. it would be so
over-the-top and ridiculous. it’s kind of like i live in a “camcage.” my house is getting messier and messier.

i haven’t gone outside in days because of my weird schedule and this cam. i hope i make it outside tomorrow for awhile. i really want to lie on the grass. oh, man, just thinking about it, i could cry!

 

and before i go to sleep, i have one last request, will SOMEONE PLEASE TELL ADAM ANT TO CALL ME? IT’S IMPORTANT!

i’m glad i started some controversy over the “pussy causes war” pix. i’m finding this cam a very powerful medium to reach a lot of people in trying to demystify the body of at least ONE woman! i want to try on every female stereotype and archetype and shatter them all.

 

and i want to do this in a humorous, fun and real way. i am still just at the beginning stages of exploring this medium and searching for what i’m “trying to say.” perhaps what i’ll say will be an accident. done in some small menial thing i do. i don’t know. i just want to break down barriers of all kinds, race, sex, time zones, countries, morals, rules, language, etc. etc. etc.

i’m feeling a bit overwhelmed with everything at the moment. it will pass, but in this moment. . .augh.

 

trying to find where i fit into to the webcam. all of a sudden i am so close to me that i cannot see myself anymore. my life blurs into entertainment, and i wonder if my microwaved dinner is entertaining enough. i don’t know when i can just be selfish and not think about the cam. i think about the lighting, when is the best time to take a shower. i feel guilty if i sleep all day because people will think badly of me. and it’s hard when you look or feel like shit to be on cam. if i don’t do something interesting i feel i’m letting you all down. if i get too down, i feel like i’m letting you down.

a lot of people worry about me that i am so antisocial. but i am just that way. and i like it that way. i think i’m getting more and more antisocial all the time, which is pretty ironic since i’m communicating with more people now than i ever have communicated with before.

 

it’s been very very windy the last few days and it gets me a bit excited ‘cause i know then that change is coming. weather
to me is always very symbolic, but in a very literal way. as is everything to me.

i’m noticing that a big issue that is crawling under the surface of this live cam thing is CONTROL. some people like the fact that they have no control over my life, they seem to like the aspect that they don’t know what will happen next. but some people go BERSERK over the smallest thing like my lighting. they say “move this way, move that way, your lighting is too bright i can’t see you, your lighting is too dark i can’t see you, your hair is messy, is that all i’m going to see? you are always asleep! you never sleep! why don’t you smile? wave at me, change your caption!”

my cam has turned black and white due to the fact that i’m frying it by leaving it on 24/7. i think if i turned it off then turned it back on again it would go back to color. but i’m enjoying the black and white. i did some groovy “film noir pin-up” stuff the other night

some changes have happened in the chatroom because of trolls coming in there and wrecking it for everyone. and i’m
just drained from it and it’s distracting me from my life and my happiness. 1st of all the chatroom called #anacam is now a place where only i can speak and everyone else cannot speak. think of it as a radio of sorts where i can broadcast in my thoughts as i’m thinking them. and you can listen but i can’t hear you. it’s much more peaceful for me this way. for those that wish to speak there is #analove (where you go to talk about happy things) and there is #anaslam (where you go to bitch about stuff).

 

i’m #1 on Kat’s Kam Konnections again. woo woo! i think ‘cause maybe i was cleaning the cat poop off the floor in the nude.

 

AnaFone cards will be available starting Friday October 10. you can call and talk to me directly. The following denominations are available:

 

$6 for 3 minutes
$10 for 5 minutes
$20 for 10 minutes
$50 for 25 minutes

i’ve been writing in my new bulletin board (bbs) so much that i’ve neglected writing a new ANAlog. the bbs has been
AMAZING and chaotic. it received over 500 posts from around the world in the 1st few hours it had opened! WOW! and it’s been fun in there, and intense, and angry, and gleeful, and just about every emotion with a myriad of subjects from the war against women to pimento loaf. from alien abductions to depression to sex with midgets. it’s been insane. even god has posted many times!

EXPLOITATION? ya, that’s just it, i’m just “exploiting” myself SO much that there is just no way anyone could exploit it further. i just want to take it BEYOND the point of exploitation so that it all becomes a great big joke on “the exploiter” and therefore it cannot even exist anymore. i mean, there IS something really funny here, like it’s all getting turned inside out. and i can post here about “them,” the exploiters. whatever “they” do to me, is done to them. because i’m live 24/7, any way they affect me, anything they do, is reflected right back at them via my cam, via the net, via posts. there’s nowhere u can hide anymore. the net is just a symbol that we are a telepathic race. that we are all pulled into this together.