The Seven-Year Hitch

(Parenthetical remark alert!)

Now I've done it. Friday was my last day at a job I've enjoyed (mostly) for seven years. Although I'll be paid for the almost six weeks of vacation time I accrued during the adventure (which may explain something about why I left the job), I've already begun obsessing about where to find my next meal.

No matter how much one enjoys his or her work, an odd mixture of complacency and restlessness tends appear (somewhat like a vulture) at about the seven-year point. If one can ignore the piercing stare, foul odor and occasional jockeying for a better shot at the carcass (oddly evocative of a Chinese fire drill with wings), one may be able retire after an extended career with one employer. My sister did that, retiring some time ago after 25 years in public service (albeit in several different positions). I, on the other hand, seem not to have her stamina. Although I try not to make a habit of taking a job and then un-taking it soon thereafter (I was with one company for more than 10 years and another for five before I began the most-recent seven-year crusade), I never seem to have found one place, position or group of people capable of convincing me I belonged there forever. Maybe that's because I was a military brat, and my family moved 21 times before I graduated high school. Maybe it's because I'm an adrenaline junky (not a bad thing for a journalist), and something always seems to beckon me from just beyond the horizon. Maybe I have a self-destructive streak that one of these days will do me in (to no one's real surprise).

It's not terribly bright in most world views to leave a comfortable salary for the vast unknown (and possible starvation). Still, I approach this change with (possibly misguided) excitement and anticipation (in addition to disquietude that verges on abject terror). My dog doesn't seem to be worried, and I've decided to accept that as a sign everything will work out. Of course, if I had his ability to convince people to wait on me hand and paw because I'm excruciatingly cute, I'd feel at least a bit more secure.

I'm counting on his loyalty remaining steadfast right up until the moment we share the last mouthful of his food.

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Mmm-mmm!

It’s still true: If it can’t be fried and served on a stick, it ain’t worth eatin’ at the State Fair of Texas (Sept. 28 through Oct. 21 in Dallas). According to a fair (meaning "from the fair," not "so-so") press release, [n]ew culinary delights this year include:

· Deep Fried Latte – "Fried pastry, cappuccino ice cream, caramel sauce, whipped cream, and instant coffee powder." (The three essential food groups – caffeine, sugar and grease – in one delicious … uh, fried thing!)

· Fried Cookie Dough – "Chilled cookie dough, battered and fried." (This treat won this year’s contest – for real.)

· Fried Guacamole Bites – "Scoop of guacamole, breaded and fried, served with ranch dressing or salsa." (Evidently part of the rumored “cholesterol coup” being planned south of the border.)

· Country Pride Peach Cobbler on a Stick – "Peach cobbler with dumplings rolled in pastry dough and fried, covered in brown sugar and cinnamon, and skewered." (What? No cream gravy?)

· B.W.'s Original Fried Banana Pudding – "Banana pudding inside fried tortilla, topped with whipped cream and powdered sugar or cinnamon." (Stick provided to help beat off simian thieves.)

· Mama's Fried Sweet Potato Pie – "Pie filling inside flour tortilla, fried and topped with powdered sugar and cinnamon." (Whose mama came up with this?)

· Cajun Shrimp On A Stick – "Spicy shrimp in a custom Cajun batter, fried and served with a choice of dipping sauce." (Custom batters are infinitely preferable to those dreary “standard” ones.)

· Deep Fried Cosmopolitan - "A delicious fried pastry is filled with rich cheesecake and topped with a sweet & tangy cranberry glaze and a lime wedgie. Served on a stick." (Lime wedgie?)

· Donkey Tails - "Large all-beef franks, slit on one side and generously stuffed with sharp cheddar cheese, are wrapped tightly in a large flour tortilla and fried until golden brown. Served with mustard, chili, or Ruth's salsa." (At least it’s not a more personal part of the donkey, which – along with the corresponding parts of bulls and rams – some companies actually turn into dog chews.)

· Fernie's Fried Mac 'n Cheese – "Texas-sized bites of macaroni & cheese, covered with a layer of garlic & herb-flavored bread crumbs, are deep fried until crispy outside and hot & cheesy inside. Served on a stick with a side of dipping sauces." (Take that, Kraft!)

· Fernie's Fried Choco-rito – "A flour tortilla – stuffed with marshmallows, coconut, candy bar pieces, caramel morsels and cinnamon – is dipped in pancake batter and deep fried to a crispy, crunchy outside and sweet, gooey inside. Drizzled with honey and topped with whipped cream." (It’s the pancake batter surrounding the tortilla that makes this one truly special.)

· Fernie's Fried Chili Frito Burrito – "Chili and Fritos inside flour tortilla, fried and topped with choice of cheese sauce, shredded cheddar, jalapeños, sour cream, hot sauce, and onions." (Fernie must be stopped.)

· Fried Avocadoes – "Hand-battered chunks of scrumptious avocado are breaded and fried to perfection. Choice of dipping sauces. A culinary hit in California" (which, if you ask me, is enough reason to ban it from Texas).

· Fried Coke - "Smooth spheres of Coca Cola-flavored batter are deep fried, drizzled with pure Coke fountain syrup, topped with whipped cream, cinnamon sugar and a cherry. Served in souvenir contoured glasses" (on a stick).

· Fried Pancake Sundae – "Tasty country sausage bites wrapped in a light pancake batter, deep fried to perfection , topped with whipped cream, lightly glazed with hot fudge sauce and finished with a cherry on top. Pineapple and strawberry glaze options available." (This one left me speechless.)

· Fried Praline Perfection - "Guaranteed to melt in your mouth. Plump coconut and pecan pralines, battered and fried to a rich golden crust. Served warm with powdered sugar." (There’s no such thing as “too rich.”)

· Melon Monroe – "Honeydew melon sauce ladled over chocolate-chip ice cream, topped with whipped cream then garnished with two fried-dough, shaped 'legs' filled with a special caramel sauce. Served fresh out of the fryer." (Norma Jean must be so proud.)

· Deep-Fried Death Row Inmates (not in the fair's press release, but nevertheless a novel solution to Texas prison overcrowding.)

—Kathee "Gourmand" Brewer

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Chicken Soup for the Pornographer’s Soul

If chickens made porn, what kind of content would they produce? Would it come to be known by the more delicate euphemism “fowl entertainment?” I only ask because, for some reason probably best left in the ether, chickens play a significant role in American folk sayings and fables: They cross roads, warn everyone the sky is falling, lay eggs, count, write illegibly, display immeasurable cowardice, and probably engage in all manner of other un-chicken-like behaviors. It seems chickens can’t be too anthropomorphic. (In some parallel universe, there’s a cult-classic movie Planet of the Chickens. I know there is.)

Possibly never before in the history of chickenkind has the question “Which came first: the chicken or the egg?” popped up as frequently as it did when we began surveying website owners with the question, “Which is more important: content or traffic?” Of course, that was not unexpected. Neither was the neat little dividing line between the opinions of content producers and traffic pushers. As with most things, where an Internet pro’s opinion falls along the spectrum of all possible answers evidently depends in large measure upon whence his or her income derives. It’s all a matter of perspective.

What did surprise us is that more respondents didn’t take the chicken’s way out and say “They’re equally important.” Apparently having borne feathers in a previous life, that’s where I think I would have gone. After all, what good does having the most exquisite content in the world do a producer if no one sees it? Conversely, how beneficial is tons of traffic if your content sucks so badly people can’t beat a hasty enough retreat? Both scenarios are financial sinkholes waiting to happen.

As it turns out, debating the issue is also an excellent way to tie oneself in knots for hours at a time; take my word for it. It’s much like the un-winnable argument about whether editorial or advertising is more important to a publication’s financial health. You haven’t lived until you’ve gotten between a content producer and a traffic pusher and set them at each other’s throats, only to find that in the end, they shake hands and agree to do business together — over your poor, mangled body. This devil’s advocate thing just isn’t working for me….

That’s one of the absolutely fascinating things about the adult industry, though. Perhaps because the industry remains relatively small in population, competitors in adult don’t attempt to compete by wiping out, buying out, or humiliating their rivals, but by forming effective alliances. Although there are exceptions (more in the brick-and-mortar end of the biz than online), adult enterprises don’t engage in the sorts of corporate shenanigans for which the mainstream world is all too notorious. More often, they decline to put all their eggs in one basket and instead agree to work together for mutual benefit. “I’ve got this killer content. You say you have an enormous amount of convertible traffic? Well, heck, send it on over and I’ll pay you for it!” The phenomenon prompts the question, “If adult entrepreneurs are despicable hooligans with questionable morals, then why are they the ones who are able to make a kinder, gentler business environment work?”

Perhaps it works because, like chickens (or any bird, for that matter), the adult industry is too busily engaged in finding its next meal to plot world domination. Although the outside world often seems to view adult as some sort of terrorist cell intent upon subverting humanity by way of its loins, mainstream frequently finds itself taking business and technology lessons from adult. Doesn’t it sometimes just make you want to shout, “Get over it, you self-important prudes!”?

But back to chickens…. Did you realize the chicken is said to be the closest living relative of the Tyrannosaurus Rex? I’m not sure whether that makes chickens more impressive or T. Rex less so, but it certainly lends a new complexion to the phrase “hen-pecked.” It’s also been demonstrated by research (your tax dollars at work) that chickens prefer to look at humans who possess the physical attributes that make humans sexually attractive to each other.

Maybe chicken porn isn’t such a far-fetched concept after all.

—Kathee "Henny Penny" Brewer

(This column originally appeared in the February 2007 issue of AVN Online.)

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Playing Games

I fantasize, therefore I am.

William Shakespeare was wrong: All the world’s a game, not a stage. He was right about “all the men and women [being] merely players,” though. What else could explain all the weirdness in the world? Karma’s not that facetious.

Take former (possibly, by now) Iowa Sen. Larry Craig, for example. Now there’s a man who knows games. No one’s really sure exactly what game he was playing in that Brokeback Bathroom (certainly the gay community is confused by it), but evidently it has some very peculiar rules at which only Craig and an oddly omniscient police officer are masters. I’ll never again be able to think benign thoughts about the Hokey Pokey.

Note to Sen. Craig: If you have to hold a series of press conferences in order to proclaim, “I’m not gay!” … well, draw your own conclusions.

Although participants in virtual worlds like Second Life vehemently resist the “game” label for their endeavors, it’s probably easiest for most of us to think of them that way. After all, in the broadest sense, games are those participatory sports that may resemble real life in some ways (they have rules; there are consequences for actions), but in actuality they are where people go to avoid real life. Virtual universes, especially, are the worlds we’d create if we were God. They encompass the charades in which we’d engage if we were as self-actualized and self-determined as we’d like to be. They allow us to unshackle our inner children, heroes, villains, genders and fantasies and behave in ways few of us would dream of behaving outside the fantasy realm.

Maybe Craig is an ardent participant in some Beltway version of Second Life and momentarily lost himself in character. (Of course, there are those who argue Washington comprises its own make-believe world.) In the 1980s and early ’90s, there were rumors about Dungeons & Dragons players becoming so involved in the game that they suffered psychotic breaks, became unable to separate themselves from their fantasy characters and eventually committed suicide or murder, so there is precedent for such behavior, at least in urban legend. Come to think of it, though, the same could be said of religion. There is far more of that sort of antisocial activity documented among religious zealots than among role-playing gamers. Jim Jones’ little fantasy world at Jonestown, Guyana, stands as just one glaring example.

Less easily consigned to the realm of fantasy is the U.S. Army’s regrettable behavior on the night of July 5, 2007, when during a so-called “health-and-welfare inspection,” military police confiscated several very personal items that were legal but improperly declared contraband. No one knows what the people in charge or the MPs were thinking as they snagged two vibrators and a laptop computer from a barracks in Iraq and subsequently “leaked” the names of the women involved, but they weren’t playing a game. We know this because (as mentioned earlier) games have rules, and the army certainly wasn’t playing by its own that night. “Oops! Sorry. My bad” doesn’t cut it as an explanation, either, gentlemen.

War in the real world certainly is not a game. However, even soldiers are only human, and it is entirely reasonable to assume they might find a release for pent-up frustration and tension in fantasy. That might explain why so many RPGs incorporate elements of war instead of existing solely as Utopian societies. Even if — or perhaps especially if — the fantasies are sexual in nature, they provide a valuable security valve. Given that our fighting men and women and the civilians who support them are not faceless, nameless, soulless automatons (which, frankly, might be easier for everyone, since it’s much less traumatic to mourn the death of a machine than a human), shouldn’t the military hierarchy forgive them their fantasies as long as those fantasies remain within their heads and not out in the public view? Isn’t a sexual release valve preferable to one that results in the trigger-happy slaughter of innocent people? Although there are legitimate cultural reasons for not flinging Americans’ headlong dash into damnation in the faces of Iraqi Muslims who believe pornography and sexual devices are sinful, as long as deployed soldiers and civilians don’t make a spectator sport of their fantasy lives, is a “the terrorists will win” scenario actually imminent?

It seems engagers in fantasy could be doing far more harmful things with much larger ramifications … but then, I tend to live in a fantasy world where the majority of people are reasonable.

—Kathee “Ender” Brewer

(This column originally appeared in the November 2007 issue of AVN Online.)

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"It Snuck Up On Us"

When you live on a sandbar in the Gulf of Mexico, there are five words you do not aspire to hear from professional weather watchers: "It snuck up on us."

Hurricane Humberto did exactly that early Thursday morning, surging into a Category 1 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 85 miles per hour just before striking the Southeast Texas coast slightly northeast of Galveston at about 1 a.m.

Humberto was an indolent storm, lollygagging across the Gulf at about six miles an hour for most of Wednesday before engaging in some serious Galveston sightseeing late in the afternoon. Sustained winds were only in the 50-60 MPH range at 9 p.m. If Humberto had come ashore then as forecasters predicted instead of insolently gamboling about over the water for a few more hours, it would have remained a tropical storm. It might have whacked a few more trees on the island, possibly sent a few more inches of water under shop doors on The Strand, maybe slightly damaged a building here and there ...

... but it would not have become the dreaded "H word," which tends to send people here into a panic. You would think because we're all very aware we live on a sandbar in the Gulf of Mexico (and we take perverse pride in thumbing our noses at Mother Nature), everyone might simply shrug and go on about their lives. Some people, however, allow hysteria to overcome them and they behave as if any hurricane's arrival represents a monumental surprise. Given Galveston's history, that's just bizarre. After all, despite Katrina visiting her wrath upon New Orleans in 2005, Galveston remains indelibly inked in the anals of history as the site of the worst natural disaster ever to strike the U.S.: the 1900 Storm. (Crews stopped counting bodies at 6,000, and what once was called "the Wall Street of the Southwest" literally was swept from the face of the planet in one night of unimaginable terror. Erik Larson's excellent books Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History and The Drowning of Galveston and the History Channel's chilling Isaac's Storm provide harrowing accounts of the disaster.)

Some of us, of course, consider hurricanes one of the unfortunate trades we must make in order to live in what passes for a tropical paradise roughly two miles off the coast of Texas. No matter how unpleasant it may be when she actually does slap us in the face, usually Mother Nature behaves herself quite politely around here. (After living in California's San Fernando Valley and Glasgow, Mont., I can attest to the occasional hurricane being infinitely preferable to unpredictable earth shaking and predictable snow drifts higher than houses. I'll take the hurricanes, thank you very much.)

What never ceases to amaze me is the broadcast media's morbid fascination with violent weather. For the past two years, at the vaguest threat of bad weather, Galveston has found itself under siege by news vultures who insist upon standing on the seawall and yelling into microphones as video cameras capture them being doused and buffeted. Venerable Dan Rather started the trend during Hurricane Carla in 1961, and since then every talking head with any ambition has imitated his death-defying feat in hopes it would propel him or her to similar national prominence. It hasn't, and those of us who live here think it's a particularly silly thing to do. ("What are you, nuts?! Get down from there and go inside before someone has you committed! Sheesh.... Talk about not having enough sense to come in out of the rain.")

Even more annoying is the implication people can't wait for another Katrina-like disaster to liven up the daily news — as long as they don't have to endure the unpleasantness personally. A man died in High Island (site of the storm's official landfall northeast of Galveston ) during Humberto, and there was "significant damage" to property in that area from wind and water. High Island residents remain without power, and the roads are impassable due to downed trees and power lines.

As one local weatherman (excuse me: "meteorologist") noted, "[Galveston] dodged a bullet this time," but our sighs of relief are accompanied by someone else's sobs of despair. Celebrating our good fortune would be terribly inappropriate.

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