“This should be a better world,” a science fiction convention attendee said. “A more honest one, where sex isn’t shameful or degrading. I wish this were the kind of world where you could say, ‘Wow, I’d like to sodomize you with my nightstick,’ and people would understand that it’s not a way of reducing you to an asshole and ignoring the rest of you, even though the request inherently objectifies the person you ask, but rather a way of saying that I may not know your mind, but your body is beautiful.”

We were standing in the hallway of ConStipation, about nine of us, three hadn’t had sex since the Twin Towers fell, and we all nodded. Then another friend spoke up.

“You can penetrate me,” he said to all of us in the hallway. “It’s no big deal.”

Now, you have to understand the way he said that, because it’s the key to the whole project. It was an Ayn Rand novel come to life. When dealing with a request along these lines, you have to completely ignore the meaning of the sentence in order to rationalize the manner in which you objectify someone. Consent is the important part of avoiding a sexual harassment lawsuit. You can tell your lawyer that you didn’t objectify the other person because they said yes. The spirit of everything was formed within those eight words. The Open Source Sodomy Project would have died had we not insisted that there was always a way to rationalize a request, to take the fun of seduction away, to simply pump my friend’s asshole right there in the hallway and ejaculate inside him.

Yet it wasn’t a come-on, either. There wasn’t that undertow of desperation because someone had said the sentence. When you skip out on hindsight, it’s always a marvelous thing. There was no promise of anything but a simple fuck.

We all dropped our pants in the hallway, our cocks erect and our friend quite willing to be part of our impromptu experiment. And lo, we all fucked our friend in the ass — taking turns to thrust, all of us coming. These were awesome asscheeks, plump but serviceable. And the sounds of all of us coming were beautiful. I understand that someone recorded all this and a podcast will be released soon.

And life seemed so much simpler.

It could have been base lechery. But in order for the Open Source Sodomy Project to work, we needed to flaunt our intellectual superiority, this quintessentially American way of justifying everything from looking at a complex moral dilemma with solipsistic naivete to stacking naked prisoners into a human pyramid and snapping pictures. There was always a reason. Always some excuse you could make to evade culpability. Now this wasn’t a case of only following orders, but of only following our desires. Innocence. We knew we couldn’t go further, but being allowed inside this area of somewhat restricted access with nothing more than a question was simply amazing.

We stood there afterwards, a little shocked, wondering if we should take some showers to get the smell of sex off of our bodies. Then someone else spoke in the same tone of voice.

“You can penetrate me, too!”

And my God! Many of us became hard and some of us exploded again! We weren’t degenerating into an orgy, but rather exploring the amazement of how beautiful the body was and how wonderful it was to have access to it. I should point out that those who requested sodomy only dropped their pants. They kept their tops on the whole time. Therefore, there was no objectification.

And every person in that hallway was then asked the question: “Can I penetrate you?” A few took offense and some of us were kicked in the nads. But some said yes. And the unfettered sex continued.

And my Lord, I’ve experienced sodomy in my time, but having so many sodomy opportunities in front of me was beautiful. We hadn’t even rented out a hotel suite! Who needed that when we could fuck anybody we wanted? And who needed to bother with getting to know a person? These were ripe assholes. Wondrous and mindless orifices to ejaculate into! We’d never consider sex with emotions again. We’d look at every person walking down the street and say to ourselves, “I wonder what it’s like to explode into his asshole! If he refuses, is he an asshole?”

We did not wish to offend. But one person we asked took offense when we asked to penetrate him. He was a large, muscular man who proceeded to beat the shit out of one of my friends after my friend posed the question. Something about assuming he was queer. We didn’t understand. Our friend’s in the hospital now. But, of course, he won’t be pressing charges. You simply don’t do that in an idealistic world. It’s like Esperanto. You believe in it no matter how problematic it is. Even though my friend was served with court papers and his attorney said that he’d require a five thousand dollar retainer. A small price to pay for the beauties of utopia!

By the end of the evening, others were coming up to us! Pretty soon, we were dropping our pants and there was more fucking.

I’ve left off the names, because frankly, people should reveal for themselves whether they’re Open Sourcers or not. People should speak out so that the natural spirit of evading the complexity of another person’s feelings can be sidestepped through this carnal simplicity. Who cares what the larger ramifications are? And who cares if an asshole is full of shit?

(Hat tip: Bookslut)

Ladies and gentlemen, you may have observed the relative silence around these parts of late. This is because I am very angry — furious about Hillary Clinton’s willingness to say anything to get elected, indignant about the White House’s denial about torture, prepared to apply a baseball bat to newspaper racks because the international food crisis and war casualties aren’t appearing in 42 point type on the front page, etcetera. I have been trying to figure out the precise way in which I can articulate my outrage, in which I can respond with something constructive. Why Americans aren’t storming the streets right now and why they continue to accept our slow slide into a Mad Max dystopic sideshow are mysteries I’m still trying to unravel.

But then my spirits were lifted by this YouTube video.

These kids may not know how to aim their pies properly. But it seems to me that throwing more pies at more figures is part of the solution.

And speaking of double standards, I wonder why we begrudge these merry pranksters, while we have no problem propping up a 75-year-old woman who took a hammer to Comcast. Casual dissent, it seems, is the new dissent.

Dude, like, there’s this whole web conservation moment going down. The same bullshit about how there’s all this bullshit on the Web and how it’s up to us to be responsible and all for our content. I hereby abdicate editing on this post. Because I want to tell you about why I’m up right now and, hell, maybe I’ll go into the the mistake I made of imbibing two cups of coffee and a rather large bottle of Coca-Cola to meet two deadlines and to get through a rather long day. The thought of pressing the backspace key and giving into this prim and proper nonsense might appall me if I didn’t view it as so laughable. Ha ha! How trivial it is to type those five characters and a space! I just watched the first episode of the fourth season of Doctor Who and HOLY SHIT! Rose Tyler has returned! She looks utterly gloomy and it’s very clear that Russell T. Davies is trying to go for a big finish here before he hands over his car keys from the producer who’s going to take over. Within long paragraphs, there may be meaning or there may not be. In gushing about Doctor Who, which I railed against not long ago because of its campy qualities, am I confessing to readers that I am going back on my original promise, which involved something about boycotting the show and suggesting in some language or some such that Russell T. Davies should be stopped? I’m too indolent and otherwise worn out to drag up the post. I don’t think it’s particularly important. In dwelling upon that important moment, am I perhaps finding another important moment? Or am I discounting the importance of that moment by describing that moment as important? Well, all I have to say is that I found a YouTube clip and I watched the surprise disappearance of Rose Tyler FOUR times! In a row. Just to be sure. Now that particular process of watching Rose Tyler reappear with a melodramatic sad glimmer on her face was, for some strange reason, important. But it is not important by the new rules of the game. Queen Victoria has suggested that because that moment is not thought out, because I am simply gushing on about a YouTube clip replaying a moment that I watched on an illicitly downloaded torrent, it is therefore invalidated by the new criteria of selecting precisely what it is I need to write about. But since I have spent a good portion of the day — deadlines, yo — selecting text and moving it around, why then should I bother to do it again? Am I not allowed one moment of expressing this moment? Or is meaning exonerated here? If I am not permitted to write about a moment about a moment about a moment, then I am somehow a lesser life form by these new rules. If I am fumbling around in the dark for the keys to that moment, producing much noise and less signal, but otherwise removing myself viscerally into this great realm of Deep Thought and Substance, then I am doing the Lord’s Work. How one chooses to express themselves is their own concern, really. How one chooses to publicly embarrass themselves about, say, Rose Tyler returning in Doctor Who is really that one person’s moment. Who is anyone to take that moment away from this person? If I hear an annoying conversation, I ignore it. Or better yet, I participate it and see if I can raise some hell. I am my own filter. You are your own filters too. Together the common filters come together and we all boogie and bust out the bourbon and otherwise figure out what that moment might have meant. Perhaps we all shared some shred of that moment and wanted to come to terms with it. Perhaps all of us are fumbling in the dark and perhaps all of us can find moments atop those moments. And then just as we experience another seemingly inconsequential moment in the real world — by feeling a gust of air, by hearing the clink of a quarter atop the counter at a bodega, by examining the slide of a window going up so that it’s not so hot in the apartment — we can then find additional stimuli to respond to. And you know what? Even though the little scroll bar on the right side of this window within a browser window is advancing, I’m not going to go back and check what I just wrote. Perhaps there’s some purpose in simply rattling on like this. Perhaps not. But once it is out there, it’s up to others to make sense of it or ignore it. I think it’s a colossally arrogant thing for this Publishing 2.0 guy to say. And I say this as someone who does value the editing and massaging of content. You wouldn’t tell some person spinning a hula hoop to stop spinning the hula hoop because it’s purposeless. Because it doesn’t add anything to the universe. Because it’s utterly trivial and without intelligence. The point is that the person spinning the hula hoop is having a good deal of fun and perhaps others who are watching this person with the hula hoop are also having fun, and maybe they are thinking that they should go out and get a hula hoop and have a bit of fun themselves. And they in turn might inspire other people to spin hula hoops around their hips. And then perhaps the sensation of the hula hoop might inspire another thought, another feeling, that could lead to something important. The Archimedes principle in action. People often blog or produce content because it leads to other things, other thoughts, other feelings. And to wave a schoolmarmish finger at those who produce blather is to be a humorless asshole. When you can just ignore it and move on to others who are spinning the hula hoops that keep things grooving.

ComicCon podcast forthcoming!

Reports on the Mailer tribute at Carnegie Hall, the Baker/Julavits/Siegel talk* at the New York Public Library, and a review of the documentary Young@Heart are forthcoming. In the meantime, there are interviews to conduct, panels to attend, deadlines to meet, and taxes to finalize. But there will also be more Segundo podcasts as well. So bear with me while I catch up on the backlog.

In the meantime, as others have noted, please support Tayari Jones’s efforts to provide funds for the Dunbar Village rape victims.

I’ll have more later. A lot more later.

* — To give you a small taste, in one of many of his straw man arguments, Lee Siegel informed the crowd that I wasn’t a writer because I had written the line “Edmund Wilson is a douchebag.” To be clear on this, I wrote “the man was a bit of a douchebag” and offered an argument supporting why I felt this to be the case. Nevertheless, I will inform the editors who hire me on a professional basis that Lee Siegel has insisted that I am not a writer and that they should begin calling me something else. Perhaps something along the lines of “intellectual nigger” because I also happen to write for the blogging medium.