The public knows me as a prize-winning artist, invited to interviews for magazines and talk shows, but that’s far from how I started out.
But first, understand this: women enchant me when they light their cigarettes, when they expel their chalky, membrane-thin sheets from moist, barely spaced lips, and when they concave their cheeks and make taut their mouth around a slightly staining filter tip during a hungry pull. On those increasingly rare occasions where I happen across feminine smoking, I pause and watch them, transfixed. The memories of her smoky immersion, her cloudy delights of nasal and oral joy compel me afterwards to capture it on canvas and paper. But for years I felt that images of this kind were not to be shared. They aren’t Art and they certainly aren’t marketable.
“Oh yes, considerably,” she replied, her anger growing, so that when she took a violent pull on her cigarette, her eyes blazed nearly as fiercely as the blazing tip. “There are lands and financial benefits, to say nothing of the political alliances and connections to the Tories that would fall into his grasp. This would greatly ease the way for his gaining a seat in the House of Lords.”
“But Denise, there IS a way to signal hotties if you can’t text’em,” Lauren said, laughing underneath the sun umbrella at the patio table. “You don’t hafta dial their cell if you know Crypton.” She flounced her platinum pixie cut in the breeze and plucked Denise’s smoldering cigarette right out from her slender fingers.
This is a brief excerpt from the September–October 2010 issue of Smoke Signals magazine, and one of my first columns for the free/public version, "My First Decade at The Orgy":
Boardhost shut down my forum and multimedia archive near the end of March because they recently implemented a ban on smoking and fetish content. Way back in 2000 when I opened the first incarnation of "Sublime," I asked the then owner of Boardhost (who was pretty much a one man band at the time) if he had any problems with SF content. He told me flatly that he absolutely did not.
La petite mort is French for "the little death." The expression is most often used to describe the experience of having an orgasm, but is also used to describe the release of emotional energy (catharsis) that accompanies experiencing the climax of a creative expression, as well as the experience of going through a shocking life-changing event.
