Ow Fucking Ow

So turns out I broke my ankle yesterday. Just got back from getting it set at the doctor. Still hurts :( The appliance on my leg makes me look like a really uncool version of something from Beyond Thunderdome.

I was really looking forward to going to The Brotherhood's party in San Diego tomorrow http:/www.freaksnightout.com/ but I just have standard crutches now and I'm not sure I'll be able to get around enough. Need to decide asap so I can coordinate with my posse.

Should I still go to San Diego? I know the event will be cool and it will be fun to see Scar. And I can eat drunken shrimp.

A Special Week

I have internet again. Apparently my old modem just gave out.

I fell on my ankle again today though. Sitting here with ice on it. It was almost better I thought, but today it did the same thing while I was just walking down the street. It just gave out, stopped responding to the messages my brain was sending it, and I fell. At least this time my ankle twisted more forward so my achilles tendon is fine. The torn tendon thing was really terrifying as that can cost upwards of $20k to attempt to repair and you can still end up a cripple.

Feeling queasy from the painkiller. Ordered food which will hopefully be here soon.

Waiting on a couple thousand scans which were supposed to be done more than a week ago. I called Tuesday to ask for status and was kind of told they hadn't started yet, but they would give me whatever they had done next Tuesday. It is a friend and they give me a good price break, so I'm not going to be too impatient, but I kind of paid for stuff early so it sucks. And, if they were done, it would allow me to take it easy on some of my current work.

Did a bunch of fall cleaning this morning and bought organizational stuff yesterday and got rid of tons of junk and was feeling mighty pleased. Hey, and I don't have to endure platitudes about at least you have your health. Bonus for me!

Jon Stewart's appearance on Crossfire

If you are one of the six or seven people who have not seen any of Jon Stewart's appearance on Crossfire, you should click here now.

I think it is most entertaining that Jon Stewart is actually becoming an important voice in American politics. His lead-in show right now might be puppets making crank phone calls, but I think he will eventually run for office. And win.

I must however admit that I find Tucker Carlson disturbingly hot. Like he just really needs someone to have an elegant refined quiet dinner with him and then tie him to the bedposts and make him howl. But maybe that is just me.

Ow

The weird back pain I was getting in the mornings seems to have decided to hurt a lot more and become an all day affair. I feel like hell. Swollen and achey in way too many places. My skin is really aggravated. My brain is foggy. Not just my ankle but a bunch of my joints are popping and painful. I probably should have gotten the MRI, but they are so expensive. The weird waves in some of my fingernails are becoming more pronounced. My breasts are tender like it is my time of the month, but it isn't. I just want to crawl out of my skin.

I wish someone could just give me a regimen of eat this, drink this, take this, and excersize this in the following quantities and it will all be fine. I can handle self-discipline. Okay, if my body is producing antibodies to wheat, I can handle avoiding that, but I can't handle the seemingly endless parade of conflicting don'ts with no actual getting to feel good and healthy at the end of the tunnel.

I can't stand never knowing when I will have a good day and I don't think I can take having a whole lot more unadressable symptoms.

This Is How We Roll

A friend of mine shoots for Bookworm Bitches and about a zillion other sites. She is a busy girl, but today she just sent me pix of me and Forrest she took in the SUV Limo we took in Arizona in April on our way to the dinner thrown by the nice people who do Tranny Trouble and other sites. And we look like we are on our way some place nice too. Oh wait, we were.

Yo Bitch, Can You Spare a Dime for a Jerk?

Still feeling pretty under the weather. My foot is still too jacked up for proper exercise and some people are getting on my nerves. The number of people who pre-judge me and then come to me passing judgement with their hand out really pisses me off. Like does that ever work? The technique of telling someone that you know they suck and then asking for them to do a favor to disprove the suckitude already assumed.

I know. I know. I have received only a couple of irritating requests this week and dozens of people have been super duper cool during the same time period. Been getting a lot of emails and messages from people telling me how much Blue Blood in print meant to them and how much it changed their lives. I think relaunching BlueBlood.net has been really cool because it gives the people Blue Blood was originally intended for a place to congregate.

Just wish I were feeling healthier. The positives so totally outweight the negatives and I know I'd be better about focussing on them if I didn't feel so feverish and achey and generally brain-fogged and behind the eightball.

Blue Blood Updates, EroticBPM joins SpookyCash, Altporn Interview, Marquis, Amelia G's Fiction, Szandora POTD

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Yay!

Been working on EroticBPM and BlueBlood.net updates all night. I am pretty sleepy now, but I am also almost done. I love the feeling of actually getting to check off a bunch of things on my massive to-do list.

Among other things, I did a write-up about Taime's new club Pretty Pussy, complete with photo gallery of course, at http://www.blueblood.net/bb_133.html. My favorite new pic we just posted is this one of Forrest and Taime. Hee hee.

Getting Help

Actually getting help on stuff from the people I partner with on various projects totally rules. Except for the part where I have to be awake to communicate with people working on programming and ad sales and all that good stuff. Fuck I am tired. That girlie thang Szandora and I always get at the same time is not a plus.

Trouble is on the way!

Yay! Szandora is coming to town. Trouble is on the way! This shot is from our most recent visit with her in Vegas. This set appears on both BarelyEvil.com and Szandora.com and the cute undies are courtesy of the cool folks at Beauty Fiend.

G.R. Ezekiel Nightshades Midnight Carnival!

I know there is at least one Southern California Halloween event not to be missed! The same folks who did the X-Sanguin III event during Comic Con are kicking out the jams this October 23 with a night under the big top at their own twisted carnival. Their last two events sold out completely. You can check it out at http://www.freaksnightout.com/ and we're looking at giving away a couple of pairs of tickets to a few lucky Blue Bloods!

So stop by the boards at http://www.blueblood.net/ for your chance to win tickets! We will be giving away tickets for the longest thread on the board, for the best thread, and for the most new members referred, not to mention a couple of wild card lotteries. So start a thread which turns out to be a hot one and send your friends over to sign up for the boards and you could win tickets to this hot event! Fire up your engines!

Lost in Phoenix

I am soooooooooo going to do a series of shoots featuring naked girls on the merry-go-round at Griffith Park.

Whoo!

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Yesterday was not so good

I woke up because two cars made a huge noise crashing right outside my window.

It was earthquake weather which makes me as freaked out as any wild animal.

Day before yesterday I tried putting wheat back into my elimination diet and confirmed what the bloodwork already said which is that I'm allergic to fucking wheat at this point. So my skin got all red and irritated and I felt really headachey and feverish the day before yesterday. Which means I got to start yesterday having missed sending some paperwork to my lawyer and having missed an ad deadline and having missed scheduling a shoot, those being the main things on my to-do list for the day.

So I was jittery from car wreck and earthquake and having eaten food I'm allergic to and was kicking myself for not being able to work when totally ill.

So I go down my friends list and I swear almost every post was a "in summary my life is a failure" or "hopefully the new meds will make this bearable" or "hellish detail of divorce" type of thing.

I went to post something supportive in a journal belonging to someone I've known for many years and came across a flurry of posts from someone who totally betrayed my friendship. And who, last time I saw them, told me that they totally didn't give a damn about the person whose journal they were posting in yesterday, that the guy was a loser who would never have what it took to live in Los Angeles and couldn't even get hard for some anal sex. Managed to restrain myself from clicking over to their journal. More because I knew how boring it would be than that I lacked morbid curiousity. But it still irritated me because I had managed to not think of them at all in quite a while and seeing their ugly icon made me think all over again about whether I should have told them what they did wrong instead of just hoping they would change in a positive way and the bad things they did could be water under the bridge. Plus I hate the thing where people talk really brutal smack behind someone's back and then act like they are a supportive friend to their face.

Sorry I was a little cranky, Xtian. I strongly prefer that people not ask me about picture stuff that way in this venue, but I was feeling sucky and behind the eightball already and I absolutely feel the way I said, but I don't feel that way at quite the Spinal Tap eleven I expressed it at yesterday.

Then some stranger in LJ was making comments about Szandora being too popular. Yeah, whatever that means.

Then I had to spend a few hours dealing with a business banking problem too complex and boring to detail, but suffice it to say that is was stressful and irritating.

Then I had a beverage fortified with a lot of vitamin C and had intense kidney and general abdominal pain. I knew I couldn't take the pills any more and I've had this reaction before, but never so severe and only to the pills, not to just a drink.

Eating is my favorite thing and I am so tired of having to be so careful about it. Just the stress of not knowing what fucked new chemical sensitivity my body will come up with makes mealtime less fun.

This morning I started the day waking up dehydrated from being so sick last night. Then I got an email that there might be a problem with my New Year's reservations in Vegas for the Blue Blood crew. Hopefully I ironed that out already. I'm going to drink water, attempt to eat something, and hopefully go back to sleep soon.

Stuff

So yesterday I went over to a photographer's house. Someone I first met in 1995 when Blue Blood exhibited at the big comics show there. Realized he lives four blocks from me now. We talked about art and the exhorbitant price of California real estate vs. how awesome it is to live here. Really nice to hang out with someone talented who is not weirdly competitive. Very refreshing and enjoyable.



Just posted a new feature on Andy Laplegua of Combichrist and frontman of Icon of Coil at http://www.blueblood.net/bb_132.html with an interview by Kellie, in case you thought she was solely a hottie, she does a fine interview as well. Photography by myself and ForrestBlack. He was a fabulous photographic subject. Very creative and moved well in front of the camera. All rock guys should be so excellent.

:-)

Today is a good day. Feeling much better and cranking on getting things done this week. Think I might actually be sort of caught up soon. Whoo-hoo!

Going to go buy myself some organic goodness now. Think I will make a doctor's appointment on Monday and see if I can start being more active and maybe try some yoga classes with Alex.

Now if I could just get on a sleep schedule vaguely related to my time zone . . .

Reality Check

Soooooo . . . there is this promoter who has an event coming up. I first met this promoter years ago when I still lived on the east coast and was just visiting Cali when a zinester friend took me to said promoter's club night. The promoter was doing a really cool night then and he was still super effusive about how jazzed he was to have me and Forrest there etc. I liked the guy. We even supported some of his events after his stock took a downturn and they were not really the ideal ones to be supporting, but we felt that he was doing it from the right place.

He finally put a bigger event together but was always sort of weird about inviting me and Forrest to participate each year he did it. This year, he is doing the event within sight of my roof and one of my favorite Blue Blood girls wanted to perform at the event. She kind of did a freebie at it last year and was hoping to get booked properly this year. She says her performance drew more onlookers than most of the booked talent. So the promoter and I were talking about having her perform and doing some promo and all, but nothing was finalized. He wanted to not pay my girl. She was not into that. I asked him if he could offer something to help defray her expenses.

He didn't get back to me, but he did have people spam the hell out of the Blue Blood boards. One guy alone did four or five threads about the event and not in the announcements forum either. I kind of think this promoter is trying to use my talent and my web site to further his event, but does not want to even put up a link to BlueBlood.net on his.

Should I just tell my girl to go perform for free again? I feel like she should be valued and I know they do have talent they are paying and she says they are promoting with her image from last year.

Should I be annoyed by this? Not sure how to handle the situation. I don't want to end up with bad blood, but I don't want to be a chump either. The promoter might just be busy too and I don't want to overreact to nothing.

Dead Letter Office

When you mail somebody something twice, do you assume that they really got the thing both times and are looking for a third freebie or do you assume there is a problem at their post office or a problem at your post office?

Before I ran an internationally distributed magazine, I always thought there was no such thing as lost in the mail i.e. the check is in your mouth, I won't come in the mail. Doing mailings of thousands of magazines, I realized that there is an infinite number of things the USPS can do to screw up. When we were based in Atlanta, we paid for an address correction service which was supposed to give us change of address info, but the Atlanta postal people thought we were evil and decided not to give us the data we paid for. Now that is evil.

Atlanta had a 24 hour Post Office. Which sounds great, except for the part where the counter people would get pissy if you made them mail more than 12 items and they would often just throw out whatever you mailed more than 12. Fortunately we learned this before losing too much, but still.

When I first got my space in Hollywood, there was some disagreement on which area it was zoned for as the building rested on sort of the line. The two post offices disagreed on which one should pick up and deliver the mail. Later on someone here (not me) slapped a postal carrier. So, to make a long story short, I don't put things out for the postman here; I go to the Post Office.

So what are you likely to believe if someone says they did not receive something you sent them?

MoneyBookers

Okay, I'm leaning towards going with Money Bookers as my paypal alternative. I know some people who have used it and had positive experiences and I don't think I know anyone who has had a horrible one yet. Anyone have any experiences with it they'd like to share with me before I walk the plank? Thanks.

Old Skool

It took me a while to transition both me and Blue Blood to the web. Forrest pretty much had to drag me kicking and screaming and I still do more magazine work than most anyone else in my position would. The modes of communication are different and the place for fashion and music is different and the money is different. I'm an old school zinester and some of those values are tough to hold in a world where my most serious business competitor could be a fifty-year-old multinational corporation in sheep's clothing.

Lately I've been thinking about the fact that thing really have turned out about 80% how I planned and how I wanted and that is probably not a bad score given how high I was aiming.

One of the things I wish had gone better as I achieved so many of my dreams is I feel like there are a few relationships I wish I had been able to take better care of. Given how many people I have met with my varied interests and all the places I have lived, the percentage of people I wish I had not missed a certain connection with is verrrrrrrrrrrrry low. I've been trying to come up with sort of a list of people who really know me. And know me from before I had the ability to put people on magazine covers. Sure, I want my friends to be pleased for my accomplishments, but sometimes I forget what an amazing distance I've traversed because it was a tough journey to stay in touch during. Both literally and metaphorically. Lately I've been able to patch up a couple of relationships and just appreciate the ones I have so much better and I'm awfully pleased about it. Spent part of this evening deciding whether or not to send an email to someone on that list of people I wish I had been able to maintain a relationship with and then realized that I (a) had the wrong email address and (b) the person didn't have internet access. Doh!

I suppose no one here has a contact email for Elisabeth Bjerregaard-Pederson?