Something... amazing

Did you ever see the movie 'Adaptation'? The characters sprang from the mind of the screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman. A couple of them remind myself of me. So I tend to think I must have something in common with him. This is reassuring, since it reminds me that human behavior is largely predictable - that's why psychology, or forensic psychology, or profiling work - but it also is a bit depressing to know I'm just a puppet on invisible strings. I'm self-aware, so I can fight to redefine myself, as I have successfully done in the past, but most of the time I lose the fight. I'm weak. Lately. Really most of my life I have been. Occasionally I've had periods where I really had my shit together and I was strong, and was able to change myself. But self-discipline is part habit, and I feel very far from there right now. Those muscles aren't used to being worked out and I'm not used to feeling their pain.

One of the characters in Adaptation that reminds me of myself is LaRoche, the horticulturist. He's eccentric, but special. That sounds arrogant. Then again, he was arrogant: "I'm probably the smartest person I know." Anyway, I can relate to how he goes from extreme to extreme. There are people in the world, weird ones, many of them, who collect stuff. You see them at the swap meet or flea market, and sometimes in magazines or on TV. You know the ones- the girl who has over a thousand vintage lunchboxes or the man whose entire house is filled with rubber Mickey Mice of all eras. LaRoche continues, "Dropped turtles when I fell in love with ice age fossils. Collected the shit out of 'em. Fossils were the only thing that made sense to me in this fucked up world. Ditched fossils for resilvered old mirrors. My mom and I had the largest collection of 19th Century Dutch mirrors on the planet. Perhaps you read about us; Mirror World, October '88? I have a copy here somewhere..." It's funny to watch him but I'm also reminded of how I drag out magazines articles on myself to show people.

Anyway, most people don't understand the desire or really the... unrest one feels when one is driven to build something - a collection, a building, a piece of art - that is extreme. LaRoche's Florida nursery is destroyed by Hurricane Andrew. "I knew it'd break my heart to start another nursery, so... y'know, when the seminoles called, and they wanted a white guy or an expert to get their nursery goin' I took the job. I wasn't going to give 'em a conventional little potted plant place. I was gonna give 'em something... amazing. Ya know?"

I know.

Anyway, I know lack of moderation is immature in some ways. But in other ways it creates some really amazing things. My porn collection is one of those extremes in my life.

I have to think I have a better visual memory and mental database for porn than anybody on the planet. The other day I saw a joke webpage that had like 16 different little boxes you could click on. When you clicked each box, it revealed a different set of tits bouncing around. I recognized like a third of them: Scotti Andrews wearing the light blue shirt in Bring Um Young, and so on.

I can even identify a girl and recognize a particular scene in a particular movie, by seeing just a tiny part of the picture. You could cover up the whole screen except for a 1" x 1" square, and I could still identify the scene by seeing a part of her vagina, her cleavage, the skin on her inner thigh, her butthole, the fabric of a piece of clothing, the splatter pattern of cum on a tongue, some trees in a background...

It really sets me aback when I see a collage somewhere - like, say MSNBC does a feature on porn and has a typical header pic with a blurred mishmash of sex-related images, like a chick winking, juicy lips, a leg, and so on - and I recognize some of the different movies they took a frame from: "There's Belladonna wearing the pink fishnets in Ass Worship #1", etc. I mean, there are tens of thousands of porn movies out there. Jesus.