Nothing crazy, really. Was watching some porn and the music playing sounded vaguely like “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” but there was and is nothing crazy to report, I don’t think. I slept poorly. I’ve been away from the job for 5 days, but this return feels like any other day. Didn’t miss the job, didn’t hate it in its absence.
It has become very dark in the mornings, all of a sudden. Dark in a way that reminds me of one the last big performance gigs I had several Christmases ago. It was just Christmas standards and would have been a routine gig if I was in practice and performing regularly. But this was no regular gig anyway. It was arranged by an ex-girlfriend, and rehearsals required me to report to a private school on the upper east side. I think it was a grade school but it might have been K-12.
Whatever it was, the school’s security guards routinely interrogated me about my presence there. I would, as normal for me, arrive a half hour early, in this case forgetting that I really had no access to enter the building tat early. So I just stood around outside, drawing the attentions of security who clearly thought I must be a pedophile staking out youngsters. The mere implication (it was never stated outright, but the veiled suspicions were unmistakable) was enough to make me feel ill.
That was how the rehearsals started, though, with me being screened for pedophiliac tendencies. It was always a different crew of security guards but the ritual was always the same. I would see the ex-gf inside the school but she would always be busy with stuff. I went ahead to the singer’s studio and we rehearsed there. That much of things was fine.
Long story short, the whole concert and preparations and anxieties of dealing with the ex-gf, the then-current girlfriend who injected herself into the proceedings a little too deeply, and all the bullshit of being treated like nothing by the event’s main organizers… It was mentally and emotionally exhausting. That night, I went to bed at a normal time, about 9pm, and slept straight through, non-stop, until 5pm the next day. 9PM to 5PM. That was epic. I remember waking up to the darkness outside, thinking it must be 5AM. But there were already text messages from the GF, talking about going places and doing things. I was like, what is she doing up at 5AM? She’s never up that early. It seems she had sent those messages mid-day but I had the phone turned off. So the timestamps looked like they arrived when I turned the phone on at 5pm. Only then did I realize I’d slept 20 hours straight, all because that’s what my body needed after that exhausting Christmas concert.
And the point of this reminiscence is that it happened today that I woke up confused what end of the day I was on. When I left the building ay 7AM it felt like 7PM had already arrived. And now we have DST coming around for, of course, no good reason. I think that makes it dark as night 24/7. Just kidding, but it brings on a lot more dark, if I recall correctly.
I am at work stupid early today, thinking I should write stories and not self-serving prattle. There is a story to be told from every subway ride, I believe. The woman whose website I watch made an early appearance today. She is back to wearing masks. I wondered why she dropped the mask just as Covid cases were said to be rising. Trains were slightly messed today, with no 7 trains from Queens to Manhattan. The 6:45 arriving train at Queensboro Plaza was unusually crowded because all the 7-train passengers had to switch to the N to get to Manhattan. I got a seat, though.
I had five days off. What did I do? Where did I go? Clifton, NJ, was a primary goal, and I did make it there. But instead of following my instincts I followed a GPS directions thing and wound up in a part of Passaic I did not really want to be in. I found a conspicuous quantity of Newtel payphones all around the downtown area, raising questions about why, why are they still here? None had dial tone, but I’ve heard talk of Newtel phones in other cities coming to life after dark and robocalling toll-free numbers. It’s an enduring payphone scam, if that’s really what’s happening.
Passaic was interesting, I guess. I was more interested in getting back to the Clifton Station on time to pay much attention to anything.
The next day was spent getting to know DaVinci Resolve. I am looking forward to the day I cancel my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, which has been a financial headache for me this entire year. I did not request a renewal of the contract, and there is no way out of without paying the full amount. So I stuck with it, using Premiere Pro but hating it more and more for its shortcomings and irritations. I think a 10-minute video could take 7 hours to encode, while an hour-long video might take about an hour. But even there, after the encoding is complete, Premiere Pro just sits there for as much as another hour, doing what I cannot fathom. Numerous searches through support forums returned no solid clue as to how to prevent this.
I am also being age-shamed out of Adobe. My processor does not support AVX2, so I’m not able to upgrade to the latest Premiere Pro anyway. I have no desire to spend more money on a processor or even a whole new PC just to be able to keep spending money on Adobe products. DaVinci Resolve is free, though there is a $295 tier that looks like it includes interesting features but probably nothing I would legitimately use. The free version so far is passable but not up to Premiere Pro on certain feature sets. But it’s what I have to go with since upgrading to the newest Premiere Pro will not be possible.
I have so many video projects I want to explore. I watched part of one last night, something I did a couple of years ago. ALONE: DIARY OF A MASTURBATOR. It’s a lot of footage of me masturbating in various places, mostly in the apartment but a few other spots around town. I don’t JUST jerk off, I talk about women I’ve been with and there is a recording of phone sex between me and a woman I really, really loved. I need something more of that, something to show that I don’t just masturbate alone, that I’ve had encounters… But those would violate any level of trust I had with those women. It would have to be agreed to with someone new before anything began.
In the end, what is it all good for? I’m probably never putting this before the public in any meaningful form. Maybe that is the statement. My masturbation video, for my eyes only. I had not watched any of it for a couple of years. My body has changed some since then. One foot looks older. My cock is the same but I’ve been watching enough #bigdicktranny porn lately to feel wholly inadequate.
I had been catfished into making explicit videos for someone I thought was a woman. She might have been, but more likely she was a syndicate, or network of people who target people like me. Nothing came of it. There was no extortion or threats, because I never showed my face, and I cut them off before they could do the same. It is no lie that I have no money, so they were wasting their time on that front and I think they knew it. Have not heard from them in about a year but was reminded of that incident in conversation with a pre-op transfemme last week.
I have to go. Work beckons, and I welcome the call.
