"Hi Matt, I represent a large adult video company and we would be
interested in featuring you and your wife having sex in various
locations around the world, similar to your current videos. Details are
sketchy at the moment but we would be willing to pay you each £100,000
and all travel fees, shooting would probably be completed over a 3
month period. Let me know if you are interested."
And Melissa asks, "You have a wife?"
I'm in Dubai at the moment, shooting an ad for Visa...as you do from time to time.
The ad is unrelated to the above inquiry and is of a non-pornographic sort...or so I'm told.
It's Ramadan right now, which means no eating or drinking during daylight hours. The crew has arranged a closed-off, private space near where we're shooting tomorrow so we can nourish ourselves in sin.
I'm told there is also no laughing during Ramadan, though I can find no confirmation of this. The internet says one must abstain only from things food and sex-related.
Our hotel is near the Burj Dubai, which is supposed to open before the end of this year. Construction is all but complete, making it the not-yet official tallest skyscraper in the world. You wouldn't know from looking at it, though. There are no tall buildings anywhere near it, so it's difficult to judge its scale.
It'd be much easier if the skyline looked like this.
Apparently reaching the height of the Empire State Building's observation deck wouldn't put you halfway to the top of this beast. The tip of the Burj's spire is over half a mile up in the sky.
Melissa and I bought a house over the summer. We were in a town home for a few years, but this is a real housey house. It looks out over the canal. All day we watch fishing boats come in and out from Puget Sound, drawbridges raising and lowering, locks opening and closing, trains passing down from Vancouver, and float planes using the canal for visual navigation. It feels a bit like Legoland.
From time to time a bald eagle perches outside our bedroom. I've stood in the shower watching seals feed on salmon. A couple weeks ago they picked up a 140 lb mountain lion that was spotted on our street.
I got a kayak. It makes me tremendously happy. I realized several of the best days of my life happened on a kayak. Shortly after moving in, Melissa and I paddled over to Ray's Boathouse for dinner. They let us park it on the dock, we watched the sun set over the Olympics, and that was one more for the list.
We went to Burning Man. Loved it. Most people who've told me about Burning Man eventually end up sounding like cult members. I don't want to do that, so I'm not going to go on about it. It's possible your life may still be complete if you never bother to attend, but it's certainly unlike anything else I've seen in this world.
Drugs weren't nearly as central to the experience as I thought they'd be. They're present, certainly, but used discreetly and if you don't want to be in the thick of all that you don't have to be.
Nudity, on the other hand, is omnipresent, but the bodies on display are generally of a fit and well-utilized sort, so you're usually staring because you want to, not because you can't make yourself turn away.
The art was much more of a thing than I expected. We mainly just wandered around looking at stuff.
I would go back.
I also went to Comic-Con in San Diego. It was great for a whole different list of reasons. I spent most of my time in the ever-dwindling comic book portion of the convention hall, sifting through old EC horror books and tracking down cherished Fantastic Four issues that still elude me.
My anxiety over my own book has settled. I don't know whatever happened with bookstores returning copies, but I'm not worrying about it at this point. The responses I hear are still all good, and it's selling well in the store on my site. I should have warned on the sales page that it sometimes takes me a month to get copies signed and out the door since I'm away from home so much, but I haven't had any irate customers yet. I'm starting to enjoy the whole process of packing envelopes and putting my pants on to go walk to the mailbox.
The book has basically become this thing I did that turned out okay and didn't fail miserably and I'm sort of a little bit proud of having done it. And since it's a book, it hopefully has a long life ahead of it, and once I get the next video done I expect it'll suddenly start doing very well for a while.
Did I mention I'm making another video? I think I've sort of mumbled about it in the past. I tell anyone who comes up and asks, and I did a thing at the TED conference about it, but I guess I haven't formally announced anything. I'm planning to start in the early part of next year. I'm going to putter around the planet in a low-key way for a while, and then do the bigger crowd stuff as I get closer to completion. It was a drag rounding up a huge group of people to dance and then having to tell them all that the video would be up in a little over a year. Schoolkids in Burkina Faso don't mind as much when you tell them that.
This new video won't be a rehash. I've got something planned that I'm quite excited about. In fact, to be honest, the world travel part doesn't thrill me nearly as much as this amazing thing I get to put together. I'm around the corner on travel. It'll always be a big part of my life, but I'm old now and I found what I was looking for and I wrote a book about it and I've got a nice house and a lovely partner and I mostly just want to be there doing all of that.
But I've also got this wonderful opportunity, and a thing to say that's worth saying, and an audience that seems to want to hear it. And, of course, I'm not much use at this point when I'm not dancing badly. There are lots more bills to pay now.
I'll put a sign-up page back up at some point like I did with the last video, so you can get an email when I'm dancing in your area. In the meantime, if you want to make sure you're on the list, just send me an email and tell me where you are. The nearest city will do. If you tend to be in more than one place, you can list them, but please limit it to just a few. And if you've emailed me in the past and mentioned where you live, don't worry about it. You're already on my enormo-giganta-list.
