Last night at midnight I went out and swam laps. Delicious sensation, but I really should know better. My sinuses reacted: water pressure plus coming back in to air that was cold at first, then stagnant as the a/c went off in the cooler early morning. There was no sleep at all--- up with sinus pain at 0330, up again at 0600. I know that Melissa at kraftig_bewegt called at 0400 from NYC to say that she was on her way to some kind of photo shoot in a subway tunnel. Her voice was drug-fueled--- coke or crystal. I have no idea what she was doing in subway tunnels at dawn, or what the photo shoot involved. I would like to see the photos, of course--- or at least know the full Story.

PondLife tells me that the season's first real storm moved north from Charleston towards Wilmington with only rain gusts over Charleston Harbour. I miss seeing rainstorms over open water. I can see rain over the river here on dark days, see wind through the treeline behind my apartment. But it's open water that I miss. I miss the smell of salt air late at night.

I do wonder what Melissa at kraftig_bewegt actually did in the subway tunnels (but which line? which stop?)... I wonder how close it was to the Baltimore subway tunnel fantasy Lissy at emigree--- the other Melissa ---developed... Lissy of course always saw herself in a thin cotton sundress worn next to the skin and heeled sandals while being taken by multiple strangers in a darkened tunnel. I suspect that kraftig_bewegt had something more NYC designer/slutty on there in the dawn...

Ms. cataplexis writes in a secret location of having a webcam Encounter with a boyfriend at home. There was some...display...on her end, some...self-satisfaction...on his. I can't take boyfriends all that seriously. I just can't. Boyfriends as a class strike me as...inconvenient and a waste of oxygen. So that Ms. cataplexis didn't reach self-satisfaction herself seems to me to be only correct. After all--- beautiful girls should reach on-line or phonesex orgasm only with Older Lovers and Alluring Strangers. Ms. cataplexis writes that failing to reach orgasm frightened her:

Will my notoriously over-the-top sex drive be conspicuously, horribly, dryly absent? I don't know what I'd do if I found out that even a two-month hiatus failed to make me want to come at the slightest touch. I...I'd curl up and die. Just there, on the spot. Without that kind of ecstasy, what's the point in breathing?

This is when I get all nostalgic for my late teens, when I could run circles 'round the boys and leave them gasping, unsure of which way to turn, exhausted and confused and elated. I'm not old. I am still, in fact, young, not even in my "prime" (whatever that is) - why do I feel sexually deflated all of a sudden? Robbed of want?

I have to find out. And then I have to fix it. Because if I don't, I'll feel hollowed out. A rind of me. Devoid of anything sweet.

This should be a warning, really--- a signal that beautiful wicked literary girls should seek orgasm only with Older Lovers and Alluring Strangers. Strangers Have The Best Candy, and Older Lovers Have The Best Fantasies. Beautiful co-eds should make note of these things in their Moleskines.

There are girls--- Sarah at Tooths, Umi at ivich ---who grew up with IM-sex, who spent their early and middle teens trying to find Older partners on line for cybersex. The problem, they've told me, was that finding a partner was much, much harder than all the moral-panic television pieces and news stories would have us believe. What the hell was the matter with this country, Umi asked, when a hot and willing high school girl couldn't even get an older partner to masturbate with her on AIM?

I was at the coffeeshop early this morning. The tall, gaunt, blonde girl with the Discman that I'd seen there a couple of weeks ago was back again. She was in a charcoal gray knee-length skirt and a very fitted black top and an ankle bracelet. She sat there with her Discman and worked with watercolours. There was a whole set of watercolours spread out on the table in front of her. She was using a fine brush; I didn't see what she was illustrating.

The blonde girl was as gaunt as she'd been back at the beginning of the month. Her face was all angles and edges, her collarbones as sharp as the fins on a missile. She was all nervous energy--- long, thin legs in constant motion under the table, hands fluttering back and forth over the watercolour sets. When she went to get more coffee she was still unsteady on her feet. She had that sense of remarkable fragility and uncertainty as she moved. She took phonecalls there at her table, and she was all intensity and edginess. I do want to know her backstory, to know about the children's stories she paints illustrations for, to know about her life and what she's thinking.

Late last December I wrote about Ms. cataplexis (she was __sudden then):

Ms. ___sudden writes that she thinks her parents disdain her because she ran off with a boy after university. Ran off meaning... across the country…or ran off just to live with him at grad school? Ms. ___sudden wrote once of being an “anorexic promiscuous bisexual amphetamine-junkie nomad”--- which does make her all the more sexually intriguing in my eyes, of course…but also makes me wonder whether this implies that she has lots o’ cool post-graduation Stories to tell.

Those are Stories I'll never hear, and questions I'll never know the answers for. And let's be clear: "anorexic promiscuous bisexual amphetamine-junkie nomad" is just a brilliant phrase. I really, really want to know everything behind that. And how can I not be attracted to girls who'd describe themselves that way?

I suppose I may buy a little external hard drive. If I'm going to load films onto the Tare Panda Laptop, I probably should have a way to do it without eating up space on my computer. I can't deal with running out of memory, whether that's because of iTunes or films. And I can't deal with low battery power on anything--- not a laptop, not my iPod, not my little Nokia keitai.

I can hear David Sylvian's voice in my head--- "...grieving for the loss of Heaven..." David Sylvian leaves me lost in dreams. I need to hear more of his early work with Japan, just as I need to hear more of his later work with Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Last night at 0330 I was staggering to my sink to get water for sinus pills. I could hear noise outside--- noises from the pool. My guess was that the bikini girl in Nr. 110 had come out to swim naked with the boy she'd brought home earlier. It says something about how bad the pain across my face and behind my right eye had become that I didn't look out through the kitchen window to see if the bikini girl was climbing naked from the pool. Later, of course, I thought it possible that it might not be her. One of the garden apartments had had a party earlier--- lots of art-school and design-school people dancing to electronica, lots of high-drama bitchiness and repartee flung across the downstairs. The noise in the pool might have been remnants of the party...and I suspected that the party had very, very few girls there.

Taci at Pallorina wrote from Portland that she'd spent much of last weekend panty-free in camouflage-pattern short shorts. I kept wondering--- woodland pattern or desert camo? Whenever I see girls in shorts like that, they're always just a bit loose over sharp, stark hipbones, with a roll or two turned up in the legs. Panty-free should be taken as a given. And, yes: it is a look I like.

I need to re-read White's "Nocturnes for the King of Naples". I need to re-read "Hard-Boiled Wonderland". And I just may re-read "It Was Gonna Be Like Paris". I had a number of Facebook friends messaged about the Listfield novel. I'd love to hear what, say, Deserie at eyelines or Lissy at emigree and even Debauchette herself might have to say about "It Was Gonna Be Like Paris".

Hard to decide what I need more--- sleep or new books.

Philip Glass is playing--- "Glassworks". I'll have to load it--- and his "The Photographer" ---onto the iPod. And I will follow PondLife's advice and ask for lovely clever wicked readers and correspondents to send me playlists, to tell me about music I should have on the iPod. Lissy at emigree has something like five thousand songs loaded. She must have a catalog listing somewhere on her iPod. I need to get her to send me a copy. I do trust her tastes in music. And the same is true of Liz V. at nightmareteeth...and true as well of PondLife.

I did discover a D-Land journal called Porzellan--- it's an archive site for a lovely scientist girl whose current diary I've been reading for a couple of years...back all the way to her time in Germany. The entries at Porzellan are lovely. Very much worth reading.

Too bright outside. Ninety-something degrees. I really just want to sleep. I have to finish watching "Persepolis", yes. But what I want is just...sleep. I need to get over the edginess from all the sinus pills and not eating and being far too doom-ridden about the future and my ghost-voice status.

There are lovely clever wicked girls dreaming of subway tunnels today--- posed for photographers in the shadows, caressing themselves while dreaming of being taken by faceless strangers. I suspect I'll never hear their Stories, never see any photos. There are dreams I can't be part of any longer.

At least rain squalls blew in over Charleston. I wish there could be darkness and rain and wind here.