(Oooh, an office-in-a-box? Sounds snazzy! What is it? Ummm… office and merch supplies thrown in a box. Same thing for pantry-in-a-box: rice, granola, sofrito, tuna fish, peanuts, and a good chef’s knife. In a box. As simple as dick in a box, but easier to explain to customs.)

ANYWAY.

A lot of my life is wrapped up in getting this show on the road, getting it booked into places, getting homestay, making a fantastic poster, and, well, packing my life in a box for five months and putting it on wheels. That in itself is fairly traumatic. But add on top of it, I’m basically committing to saying the same vulnerable, sexy, scary things (one audience member at the Boston opening weekend called it “intense”) for 50 or 60 shows over the next five months.

How can I tell that I’m scared? I find myself second-guessing my decisions, even with the positive feedback, even with the plans in place, even with the Montreal postcards done and sent to print, the first of thousands of cards I’ll be handing out to people this year with my face on them (layered over a fierce pegging narrative, a very readable wall of smut in 20% grayscale).

I keep bugging my director. It’s not too much? I ask. NO, she says, shut up.

I look at posts like this, about how coming out and sharing one’s story as a sex worker is a privilege, and I think, god, what I’m doing is so fucking self-centered and privileged.

And then I feel the weight of the responsibility, because I know that people are going to take me and my play as some kind of representation of the whole, and it’s not, it really isn’t, but that doesn’t matter, because in the larger scheme of things, that’s just the way it’s going to be interpreted. And then I try to sort out unnecessary guilt from necessary good intent, and that’s a bitch, let me tell you.

And then I think, what if people really like it and come out to it? I’m going to have to file taxes in Canada next year, jeezus, I still owe $7000 in back taxes here in my own goddamn country! Or what if people start stalking me because of it? And then I start to get an anxiety attack.

And then inevitably the phone rings. (Warm pork chops or an anxiety attack, the calls always interrupt something good.) (And actually another call came in just now, a 15-minute hand-job. Five bucks for me, yay!) But you know what? As busy as I am, making lists or trying to reach kinksters in Calgary or nailing down a venue in DC–even while on tour, because I’m sticking as close to my required shifts as possible–I need the calls to keep coming in.

For starters I need to keep making money. I don’t know how the tour is going to do. But beyond that, doing the calls calms me right the fuck down. It reminds me where the hell this all comes from, this play, my comedy stuff, the tour. A fifteen-minute titty fuck grounds me in the straightforward (which is not always to say simple) act of getting a stranger off. Audiences and reviewers and the public and, hell, community standards can be prickly little bastards, fickle and treacherous. But my callers only want one thing, and by god, I know beyond doubt that I am good at giving it.

Thanks, guys!

I am doing the opposite of phone sex.

It feels like a slight ache in the back left quadrant of my brain, as if I have undergone a delicate lobotomy and temporarily extracted the actual physical portion of my brain that normally handles the phone sex, and now the rest of my brain–including the tender bit that negotiates slightly fraught domestic life with sub-optimal skills in the local language and also the part that maintains the psychological defenses while I’m out in a car drawing stares from the rickshaw drivers and their passengers–is pressing down on that empty space and closing in.

I’m pushing back, of course; wouldn’t be a PSO if I didn’t have creative ways to keep the sleaze simmering. For example, I still have that sex-psychic vision overlay that puts little boxes of sex info over the heads of everyone I look at. It seems to function pretty well cross-culturally. I may not know the language well, and fetishes vary, but the basic impulses are still there, so that’s a kick in the salwar kameez to play with. (Does anyone else play this game in their head, or is it just me?)

My Internet connection is working pretty well, so I still get to read status updates from my facebook friends, talking about pasties and piercings and burlesque shows in Germany and cabaret evenings in NYC and kink workshops in Arizona, and that helps me keep the flame alive. Sometimes I’ll even lie around in our bedroom after bathing without any clothes on, and let the cool air from the ceiling fan brush past my (currently) unmentionable bits.

I’m not getting paid for it right now, but it’s nice to know that I can keep that dirty space open and charged in my brain.