If by “date� you mean a social appointment with an individual with whom there is a shared interest in potentially pursuing an amorous relationship, I’ve not had one in over a year. In the interest of full disclosure, I have seen my X, Donny, a fistful of times, and while those times could fall...

My pretty dumb things have had exactly three days of traffic that topped 10,000. The first were Wednesday and Thursday, June 28 and 29, 2006 and the other was yesterday (it looks like today is pretty on-spot to break the 10K threshold too. Fingers crossed!). The first 10K spike occurred when as an e...

It’s no secret that I worship at the altar of Joss Whedon, and the irony of that statement, given Whedon’s avowed atheism, is not lost on me. I am one of the legions of people who are autodidacts of the Whedonverse, those who will from time to time exclaim, “Shiny!� when pleased, who can sin...

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single tattoo in possession of open space is in want of some company. Which is to say that my intermittent compulsion to get inked seems to come not from my conscious but rather arises from my flesh itself. This feeling is, of course, imaginary. I realiz...

I read an awful lot, though I tend to hoard more books than I actually read. When I die, I’ll most likely be sent to a revision of Dante’s fourth level of hell. I imagine myself in the crowd of other bibliomaniacs like Oprah and Edward VI, all of us pushing giant library carts stuffed with tripl...

I am a menstruating woman. Which is both to say that I am a woman who menstruates—and therefore neither one who has not yet started nor one who has ceased to menstruate—and to say that right now, this moment, as I write this piece, I have my period. Now 46, I’ve been getting my period approxim...

The other night while at the ITF reading and after consuming two giant glasses of soda water with cranberry and one tiny dram of bourbon (because I had to get my Dorothy Parker on), I was struck by the completely understandable human need to pee. This is not usually a problem. I have been housebroke...

If you're in Gotham, delight in the carnal, love Susie Bright like I love Susie Bright, and want to see me read, you need to go to tonight's Very Special Episode of Rachel Kramer Bussel's erotic reading series In the Flesh. Every writer who is reading appears in Susie's bordello-scar...

“Men are dogs,� people say in order to disparage the males of our species. Men are like dogs, presumably, because they tend toward the promiscuous, the easily distracted, and the eternally hunting. Like dogs, men will sniff all tails, hump anything animate and inanimate, eat trash with gusto, an...

Longtime readers of these pretty dumb things may have noticed a change in my writing—and not merely the fact that after a long and robust glacial age, the block has thawed and I am now writing again. No, rather I speak of the complete dearth of sex writing. I’ve always said this was a blog with ...