My mom is lying in my bed, asleep, as I work on writing about my life on a pornographic website. As the days have passed I’ve found that the sense of vibrant irreality around the whole thing has taken me in a kind of chokehold; I’ve never cared about something so much, it seems, and I refer not to the story itself but to the whole business of camming, and of what it will eventually mean or elicit in me. The rain falls outside, lightly, and I find it unusually beautiful and comforting to hear the sound of a bus vaguely in the distance. I’m using a little Zafferano Poldina lamp to illuminate my workspace, which is the floor beside the bed. It’s a strange and serious business, for me, camming. In a conventional sense, is merely a job that sustains me, a place in which I experience the alienation of capitalism. But I am strongly identified, perhaps overidentified, with the vicissitudes of the work, and feel strongly about my success, and about the memories I can capture and embellish upon as I continue this work. Arguably, this profession is more ripe for storytelling than psychoanalysis is.

The next afternoon, thirty minutes away from her planned departure, my mom asks me, with a little smile, about how I’m managing to live these days without a job. I tell her that I found a job, that I’m a streamer, that I play the cello for people on the internet, or otherwise talk to them and read to them. She doesn’t seem to suspect that it’s sexual, or should we say pornographic, and is happy to hear that I seem to enjoy my work. Then, barely five minutes after she’s out of the apartment, I set up my ring light for the stream. I have brought the equipment to this colleague’s apartment, where I’m catsitting for the next ten days or so. I feel unusually happy as I broadcast, and this sense of happiness seems pinned to the freight elevator visible through the corner of the window, which is going up and down the exterior of a building under construction. It’s covered with plastic orange netting, which I can sometimes see construction workers through, and I can never quite tell if any of them peer through the holes in the netting and notice me nude on the couch. If so, I don’t believe I’d get in trouble.

Today I feel so evenly balanced between the camera, the couch, the laptop and its constituent windows, and the window behind me, which is massive, wall-length, and without drapes or blinds. As I noted to my mom, it’s probably not possible to buy a tension rod at Home Depot to install drapes with, as the wall is simply too long. I don’t think I’m rigorously speaking a true exhibitionist. I seem to enjoy watching myself more than I enjoy the feeling of exposing myself to others. I don’t want the construction workers to feel uncomfortable or distracted, and I don’t get off on exhibiting my image to anyone who didn’t ask for it or anticipate it. I’m more of a voyeur, looking at myself and the configuration of things around me in the very private room of my mind.

There’s something very fulfilling about streaming these days. I came twice this week, early in my streams. Perhaps it’s bad to cum so early from a business perspective, but I didn’t care. How pleasurable it is to give the image of myself when I’m really happy or really cumming. I like to think of CB as a place where tokens are given out for the sake of celebrating gratuitous acts of exhibitionism. It has us participate in a primitive, pre-economic celebration, in which currency is only given to someone who is already invested in being good to the giver.

I love watching men on my stream when they choose to share their images with me. No matter how unattractive the man might be by society’s general standards, I’m interested in seeing the panoply of bodies and sexual demeanors that exist.

Sometimes I am a bit exhibitionistic, but it’s hard to be on a pornographic website, when exhibition of the body is so obviously supposed to happen. When I walk around on the street and wear a sheer shirt, nipples somewhat visible beneath, then I feel exhibitionistic. When I wear a beaded crocodile charm on my bag, or walk particularly fast down many blocks, I feel exhibitionistic. I don’t know who’s looking at me, I don’t know whether they are, and that uncertainty keeps me interested in potentially being seen out there.

Last week, I was extremely horny, particularly one afternoon as I sat at my desk and attempted to read a long chapter by Kohut on the “psychology of the self.” I consider entering the bed, and covering myself with the duvet, with down feathers inside, and the white cover with red scalloped embroidered edge. It’s a puffy object, the duvet, I thought, puffy as my engorged cunt. Beneath the puff are the blue linen sheets with a motif in white, of foxes and deers and forest. It has a kind of dry, flat, rugged summery texture, it’s literally made of a kind of grass. The goat skin sits on top of the duvet; I take it off when I go to sleep.

It used to scent my room with goat, now the odor is attenuated. I want to lie in there and not touch myself and feel the most intense orgasm ripple out from me as if I were being cracked open with the sound of thunder. If a branch could grow into me I’d let it impale me until I turned green and woody, and thorny even, or tomentose. Loquats have tomentose leaves; I have loved their fuzzy texture since I first encountered them in college. Fuzzy woolly large leaves.

On the other hand, I think of lilacs. I saw the most resplendent lilacs in bundles of white and bundles of purple, earlier today, at the Union Square Greenmarket. I stopped to put my nose to them, in search of that wheaty, sweet, aquatic scent. I only caught a little of that, then marvelled at their delicate aggregate blooms which nevertheless seemed so robust in group formation. I considered buying a bundle, $20 for white and $15 for purple, but didn’t, partly because I believed they weren’t going to be so beautiful outside of this particular configuration, buckets of lilacs, so many lilacs. Before I moved on I noticed on the sign designating prices an advisory note: “smash stems with hammer.” What remained with me as the day passed was that advisory note: smash stems with hammer. My mind seeks this out as the most erotogenic residue of the day.

It turns me on so much to think about the woodiness of lilac branches, of the wood which needs to be smashed with a hammer in order to ensure that water is absorbed. Do lilac branches exude some kind of sticky sap, or the kind that’s caustic, or the kind that stains your fingers? Some people on the internet say that it’s actually not a good idea to smash lilac stems with hammers. The say that a precise, angled cut with sharp shears is better. Also, I’ve just learned that the flower grow in “panicles,” branching clusters. I eye the vial of En Passant on my desk; it’s a fairly photorealistic lilac fragrance, which I rarely use these days.

I’ve sprayed this fairly photorealistic lilac fragrance on my chest.

The image of the lilac in the form of this artificial composition makes me think of the windows on the computer screen, the windows I spend so many hours focusing on as I stream. “Stream,” too, a word which refers to the rill, the rivulet, the river, the creek, and I’m thinking of the wonder of wading on pebbles. Windows are metaphorical when they’re part of a graphical user interface. They refer in a way to the architectural element of the window of a building. But they are so far apart in form and function. A window on a computer can be told what to display, unlike the window which is an opening on to a view of the outdoors.

Windows on computers often overlap, and are often moveable.

I believe I’m aroused like this because I have a regular with beautiful windows, which look borderless and clean. They are wider than they are tall, and thus resemble the average aspect ratio of windows on my computer screen, which otherwise have so little in common with the architectural element they are named after. I always love watching his cam; his house is so beautiful.

On Saturday he showed me a wall studded with small plants, with a large window wider than it was tall standing behind them. Some larger plants on the floor also stood before a large window on the other side of the wall, and the beautiful medium blue hue of the sky outside signified to me that the sun hadn’t set long ago. I commented on it, which led him to bring his computer screen close to one of the large, square, clean windows. I saw my own image reflected in the glass, which caused my face to crackle with joy, like a heat-shocked glazed ceramic. On Sunday, he sat on a couch and showed me a light that could be switched on to a pale teal color or to a pink hue. He was tightly framed against the lamp. I don’t recall much about it otherwise; it was a bit otherworldly and cozy; the hues he had set the lightbulbs to were unusual and elegant to my eyes. Another night he lay on a couch with his camera facing the balcony, which had a long red light on its ledge. There was something exciting about seeing a long, horizontal light, illuminating the scene in part through a window.

Thinking about all this, I feel a surging warmth in the seat of my body. Lights and windows, rectilinear elements, an interplay between the virtual, and the words for physical things which we use to represent them. I think of how I saw my window juxtaposed against his, each superposed on the backdrop of the text box in which his messages appear. The strange virtuality, the screen upon a screen, the window within a window, the unusual sensuality of these rectangles.

Perhaps I’m merely attracted to him because he lives in an area I’m familiar with. I saw a beautiful deer carcass in California once, on Skyline Boulevard, after I had biked up the steep climb of Old La Honda Road. It was half fur, half bone. Maybe because of the power of the sun and wind in that place, the carcass had lain intact for longer than usual, and vultures had picked clean the part of the body they found most appetizing. I told him this, just as he started to jack off, in a slow erotic daze, then, in a powerful, furious rhythm, with his eyes shut. I thought about how it was enough that I was with him, that he no longer had to watch me to get off. I don’t know if he was getting off in the banal, habitual sense. It was more like levitation, like he was getting off the earth.

The little pools of semen on his lower belly were so sublime to see, even through the pixels. I thought it was wonderful to see him evolve from the somewhat sly-looking man with an elegant body to a thing so plainly exhausted and reduced, like this decomposing deer, to a carpet of sunken fur over its depleted flesh.

I went to sleep, I woke up later, I went to sleep, I woke up later.

Then the afternoon of my own horniness came. I tried to touch myself, but realized that my cunt was repelling me. I think of it as having a magnetic field. It refuses physical contact and attracts thoughts and ideas in the form of symbolic language. Its muscular contractions are secret and crucial, but they draw in the metaphysical energies of the mind. I breathed out and whimpered instead and felt myself on the verge of tears. I thought to myself, I am breathing, I am whimpering, I am on the verge of tears. Being horny like that must involve extruding keratin. Becoming “goated.” Being like a snail who extrudes keratin, very slowly, first in liquefied form. The cunt wants to be preserved in its own hard enclosure, in the horniness which feels like the carapace of a scarab beetle.

All it cares about is its innerness, its untouchable inner life.

Now that’s something you won’t see, and can’t see, ever.