For the past few months, I’ve noticed the ol’ Mac slowing down. This was not entirely surprising; I’ve been known to beat the shit of my electronics (and no, I’m not going to add “and my women”) and I’ve had this computer since March of 2007. With it, I’ve written a book, flown about 80,000 miles, listened to/downloaded thousands of hours of music, and manipulated my genitals to orgasm while watching movies of strangers having sex approximately four billion times. So there’s a lotta history here.

About two months ago, however, it seemed to get worse. The first signs of impending death were marked by increased lethargy: things took longer to open/load, response time slowed just a little bit, etc. I could live with this, though. As a real-live writer, I can write off a computer every three years. I wrote this one off in 2007, which meant that I couldn’t write another one off until 2010. When the computer started to fade in mid-October, I figured I could tough it out for a few months before buying a shiny new Mac.

But then things got worse. Specifically, my iTunes started “stuttering.” This means what it sounds like – I’d be cruising along, banging on the keyboard or playing solitaire while listening to my iTunes, and whatever song I happened to be listening to would randomly stop, only for a second or two, then start up again.

Like the lethargy, I thought I could live with it. But it spread, quickly and with great malice. At first it was only a song here or there, a stop here or there, maybe twice in a two-hour session of iTunes listening. A week or two later, it was a few more songs, and few more random stops. A week or two after that, nearly every song had at least one stutter. A few weeks ago, just after I moved back to NYC, it was every song, multiple stops and stutters. Not good.

I tried a number of things to fix this problem. Well, not really – every time the stuttering grew unbearable, I’d restart my iTunes and, if needed, restart my computer. Sometimes I thought this helped, other times not so much. I had recently installed Snow Leopard and thought that might be the culprit, but I had the problems both before and after the installation. Finally, since it got much worse when I moved to NYC, I thought maybe the computer couldn’t handle the cold or simply preferred California. Stupid tacky computer.

And it wasn’t just the iTunes. Performance and response time were at all time low, and I also had great difficulty watching my favorite porno clips from Pornhub and RedTube, which also “stuttered.” This was an especially difficult development; I have been in a near-constant state of arousal since moving back to NYC, because I’ve forgotten how incredibly hot the women here are – wrapped up in their little winter coats with all their promises of mystery and sexiness underneath, in their little winter boots that I want to peel off their sexy little legs in my stairwell, unable to make it all the way up (the five flights) to my apartment, with their little hats that I just want to stuff in their mouths and get a roll of electrical tape and a box of band-aids and – ok, I’ll stop now. The point is that I couldn’t watch my porn clips, so I started downloading a lot more porn. However, these videos stuttered, too. So I had to use my imagination. Bleech. I mean, what is this, 1994?

And finally, for our purposes, dear readers, this system-wide slow death – and the iTunes stuttering in particular – made me no longer desire to or be able to write. Don’t get me wrong, other things have kept me from posting this month, namely working ten hours days, going out five-six nights a week, and all the aforementioned masturbating. But imagine being on the treadmill at the gym and listening to your iPod and having it pause at completely random intervals. Imagine being at a dance club in which the songs stop, completely randomly, for intervals of up to one-half to four seconds, sometimes once a song, sometimes ten times a song. You couldn’t really find your groove if this happened, could you? So when I sat down to write a post, I’d only get as far as my cantankerous iTunes would take me, which resulted in me pumping out a half-dozen half-complete posts. Sweet.

(I tried listening to my iPod or iPhone while writing, but this wasn’t smooth. For example, when a song I didn’t like came on, my muscle memory would cause me to pop up the iTunes, which, of course, I wasn’t listening to, in order to change the song. Then I’d just get pissed off about the whole thing and watch a DVRed episode of “Family Guy” or go read in the shower.)

But by now, in late December, I had resigned myself to my computer’s demise, and was looking forward to getting a new Mac on January 2 (January 1 being the Mummers’ Parade and all). However, just two nights ago, I was on gmail when I saw my friend Ben come on. Ben is my former roommate and a veritable Mac genius, so I figured I’d ask him what he thought might be wrong.

I explained the problem to Ben in great detail with not a small amount of expletives smattered in, and Ben calmly wrote, “Did you check how much space you have available on your hard drive?” I told him no, and that I didn’t know how to do this. Ben walked me through it, nice and slow-like, and we discovered that I had 6.1GB available on my 120GB computer.

To me, this means nothing, about as much as when people talk about Harry Potter or Lady GaGa. But Ben, on the other side of the gchat in Charlottesville, VA, damn near fainted when I told him this. He said that that was way, way too little to have available on the hard drive and I needed to get to at least 10GB and preferably 15GB free. This, he said, was undoubtedly causing my problems with poor performance and the music and porn video stuttering.

But where could I find this extra space? I had to delete some stuff, some big stuff. Yes, I have 9700+ songs on my iTunes, but, even though almost all of them are rated on a one- to five-star system, it would take me weeks to go through and determine which should be deleted. And I would have to delete a lot of songs, since they were so small in size. The same applied to my various documents – I have a ton of them, but they’re so small they’re practically harmless. No, I needed to make some big deletions, asap.

That meant only one thing: my porn collection – my extremely large porn collection – had to be drastically whittled down.

I’ve always been sort of a romantic when it comes to porn. Though I lose interest in a woman immediately after the tenth time we’ve had sex, I can go back and beat off to the same porn clips over and over and over again, year after year after year. To this day, one of the strongest feelings I’ve ever had for a woman has been for Celeste, a porn star who peaked in the mid- to late-90’s, when I happened to be at my sexual peak. As I still have clips of her on my computer now (and have had them for years), I would say that Celeste is responsible for more of my orgasms than any real woman. And, really, it’s not even close (whether this means I need to get laid more or I need to beat off less – or both – I’ll leave up to you).

And now Ben was telling me that I seriously needed to get rid of some porn if I wanted the computer to survive. I can’t recall how much porn I had in total, but it was about 200+ downloaded movie clips, ranging in size from 2.3MB (and incredibly lo-fi 44 second clip of Stacey Valentine) to 979,491MB (the entire movie of Busty Pom Pom Girls, which is quite forgettable aside from the opening blowjob by Azalea, another of my favorites).

(…)

(It just occurred to me – and I don’t think I’ve ever asked this of myself before – but is this too much? Am I pulling back the curtain just a litttttle too far here? For some reason, while I have no problem talking about a rash that enveloped my body and caused my penis to look like a red jolly rancher or how I enjoy(ed) masturbating into slightly microwaved raw chicken breasts, I’m thinking that expounding on my favorite porn stories and offering intimate insights into my naughty collection might be just a tad too far. But then again, meh. Maybe I’ve just become re-sensitized, since I haven’t posted in so long.)

Hearing this news was devastating. But at the same time, it made sense. The computer was just overloaded. And I knew that, since the advent of sites like Pornhub and Redtube, I didn’t need to carry that much porn on my hard drive (tee hee!). Ben pointed out that I could get an external hard drive and move some of the porn there, but if I ever did get up the ambition to do something like that, I’d guess it would be sometime in 2014. And like I said, I knew I had some extraneous and unnecessary porn on the computer, so this was a good excuse for a porn audit.

And yet still, choosing which porn clips would survive and which had to be deleted was a daunting task, one that I refused to take lightly. Many of these clips I’d had since early 2003, when I got my first laptop, and I was attached to them. But – and I’m not sure if this will make sense or not – I was attached to the collection as a whole. Over the years, again, we’re talking about countless orgasms, anytime I needed them, without back talk, cash outlay, or required emotional support. And now, I had to substantially cut into this collection, to decimate it to save the computer.

I sorted the clips by size, largest to smallest. The aforementioned Busty Pom Pom Girls did not make the cut, even with the Azalea blowjob (now I only have one other scene with her in it, a serial from “Stop – My Ass Is On Fire!”, which is only ok because I’m not really into A.S. all that much). “Trailer Trash Nurses,” a full 700,000MB, was also deleted (half decent Stormy performance, but otherwise not great), as was a 600,000MB serial of “Where the Boys Aren’t” (I was ok with this; not totally into girl-on-girl-on-girl-on-girl-on-girl). I kept working my way down the line, opening each movie, assessing it scene-by-scene, and making the determination if it was a keeper or destined for the trash. It was, as might be apparent, emotionally draining. It was also testicularly draining, as I beat off twice during this process, and probably would have gotten another in if I wasn’t worried about my heart exploding. So there was that.

Eventually, it just became the same thing: tits, blowjob, penetration, pop shot, over and over again. I thought I had made a pretty good dent in the collection and made some wise choices for deletion. When I started the process, I had only 6.1GB of hard drive available, which I needed to get into the 10GB – 15GB range. After the first round of cuts, I emptied the trash, and boom – I now had 17.8GB free. Mission accomplished.

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The computer is now running as smoothly as the day I bought it – I have been listening to my iTunes while writing this entire post, and there hasn’t been even one stutter. I feel good about this, and proud that I was able to put aside my sentimentalities and make tough decisions. Yet at the same time, I realize that this is not the end of the road. That one day, likely one day soon, I will come home to my apartment after a nice walk around the streets of the Lower East Side, my new home, and, feeling a little randy, will turn on the old Mac to settle in for a nice session of self-love. And when nothing tickles my fancy on Pornhub or Redtube, I’ll head back to the well and Uncle Jason’s private collection. And I’ll think to myself, “You know what? I want to check out that scene of Serenity giving the simultaneous handjobs.” And, frankly, I don’t know what I’ll do when I see that it’s not there, when I realize that it’s been discarded, like a piece of worthless garbage. Yes, I know this day will come. And I do not look forward to it.

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But getting back to us, friends, I do have a number of half-completed posts that I will put on here, back-dating them. Therefore, when you come back to the site, check below this post for potential “new” stuff. I’ll try to post them in order, starting with the oldest and working our way to the current day. And then going forward, just after the new year, we can keep a semi-regular schedule (wish me luck). I’m sorry that it’s taken so long to get this resolved, but what’s done is done.

Until then, have a lovely holiday season and a happy new year.

(What, you thought that I’d post about Santa or Jesus on Christmas Eve? C’mon.)

One of our favorite bar arguments between my friends and I goes something like this: if you could trade your life with any other man’s life in the modern era (roughly defined as post-WWII, which doesn’t mean that the man has to have been born after WWII, but just alive), who would it be?

As you can imagine, there are a number of possibilities. Below are some of the most common answers, with my comments (I had to limit to a handful because, honestly, this could go on forever):

- Tom Brady: He’s an exceptional athlete and leader at the most glamorous position in sports. He’s a champion, and by 28 years old had inserted himself into the discussion of the all time greats. He’s rich. He’s very good-looking. He’s married to one of the world’s most famous models. Most noteworthy: he’s almost replaced Elvis Presley in the “I’m not gay, but if I had to fuck a guy, I’d fuck ____” discussion (or in my case, “I really, really want to fuck Tom Brady. Like, I think about this at least five times a day.”)

- Michael Jordan: If Brady’s in the discussion for the all-time greats at QB in the NFL, Jordan owns the discussion of all-time greats in the NBA, regardless of position. Six-time champion. Fierce competitor. Loves to gamble. Also, has a bit of money stashed away.

- Hugh Hefner: Strong, strong choice. Entrepreneur who’s going on 60+ years of sleeping with the hottest women in the world (and that is no understatement). Still loves to party. Most noteworthy: Millons of men across the world owe at least two dozen of their orgasms to Hefner, which can be said about no one else on earth.

(You might argue that you owe about 400 orgasms to Peter North, who you’ve watched eff dozens of porn starlets over the years. But my point here is that Hef started it all; without him, there would be no Peter North or Vivid Video or Hustler or Oui or anything like that. Sure, maybe someone else would have eventually done it, but Hef introduced nudity into mainstream America and, indirectly, is the reason that if I so desire, I can go online right now and find a video of three chicks fucking a horse in under 45 seconds.)

- Jay Z: “I’m way too important to be talkin’ about extortin’/Asking me for a Porsche is like askin’ for a coffin.” So there’s that.

- David Beckham: This one usually comes from my snobby soccer fan friends, but I do see their points, mostly related to how he’s the Euro equivalent of Tom Brady (though I have no idea about the championships or MVPs, so save your emails, soccer fans). I guess it would be nice to be recognized pretty much the entire world over AND be married to a Spice Girl, even if my favorite was always Baby Spice.

(Note: I know that there are probably a handful of other soccer players for which one could make an argument, but I’m disqualifying anyone who grew up in a third world country by default. Yeah, Pele and Maradona and Kaka probably had/have it great, but if you spent the first fifteen years of your life worrying about dying from dysentery, you can’t make this list. Sorry.)

– John Mayer: I have been looking for reasons to hate John Mayer and, dammit, I just can’t do it. Yeah, maybe he didn’t start off well with that whole “Fathers be good to your daughters” song (which should have been subtitled “I Understand if You Want to Punch Me in the Face, But You Have To Admit I’ve Got A Good Thing Going Here”), but there’s no denying that he’s an incredibly talented guitar player, he’s seemingly a really funny guy (or at least he knows how to make fun of himself), and I dare you to name any girl that you know that would not eff him. Try it. Every single girl in your life would eff the sensitive, non-threatening, handsome John Mayer. Can’t say that about a lot of guys, you know, in the entire universe.

- Leo DeCaprio: Still killing it. If anything, it’s his own consistency that hurts him and causes us to forget about him in this discussion. Yeah, maybe he lost Gisele to Brady, but I wouldn’t exactly call this a consolation prize.

- Derek Jeter: Jeter, along with the next guy, would be among my top four picks (my final two will be revealed at the end). He is as close to the King of New York that there is, a champion, a classy guy, and someone who consistently crushes extremely beautiful women. Also, I sort of know two girls who slept with him and they said he’s very nice and a good lay. So that’s bonus points for him.

- George Clooney: Another one that I’d personally pick. He’s a terrific actor, and, according to a buddy who works at a fancy-pants NYC hotel with an A+ celebrity guest list/clientele, one of the nicest famous people he’s ever met. I personally think that if I ever got famous that I’d be very grounded and cool (though not to my employees, family, friends or colleagues), so this makes George an even better pick for me.

Clooney and Jeter are high on my list because they’re smart enough to realize something vitally important in this discussion: if you are a famous man, YOU SHOULD NEVER, EVER GET MARRIED. I don’t want to go off into some tangent about how love doesn’t exist because I’m bitter and have been beating off into the same pair of old boxers for about eight years now, but I can’t imagine why any man who could sleep with any woman that he wanted to would ever, ever get married. It’s just the dumbest, most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard. Provided, maybe I’m being a little harsh by saying one should “never” get married, because I understand the importance of family and all that crap, but guys, c’mon. Even if you’re going to bed with Gisele every night, you’re going to get tired of it. So go the Clooney/Jeter route, make it your life’s mission to have sex with every 11 in the world, and then maybe you can settle down.

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But there’s another guy who’s always been widely picked, and the argument for him goes something like this:

If I had to choose my one hobby, I’d say it’s sitting in my apartment, drinking Bud bombers and watching VH1 Classic. I’ve been doing it for years and it never, ever gets old. I love it. I always have, and I likely always will. Now, this argument goes, what if I could do this for a living, and also:

- make about $40 million a year doing it;

- do it in some of the nicest houses in the world, watching some of the fanciest TVs ever made;

- be recognized as the greatest ever at doing it; and

- subsequently marry a woman whose hotness can not be described in the English (or any other) language because of it?

Well, I’d be Tiger Woods.

Tiger Woods has always been one of the top picks in the “Guys I’d Most Like to Trade My Life With” game. There is a lot to be said for choosing Tiger. Though I’m not a golfer, I have a lot of friends who love golf and love going golfing, even if it’s at their shitty local golf courses. And I can see the appeal of Tiger: take your hobby, the one thing you love doing in your free time more than anything else, and make it your profession, be the best ever at it, make the most money ever at it, do it at the best places all over the world, and find yourself a hot wife because of it. Um, yeah, I’ll sign up for that.

(You might ask what’s the difference between Jordan and Tiger? Isn’t basketball a hobby, just like golf? Sure, basketball is a hobby. But 30% of guys between the ages of 22 and 80 don’t take vacations that revolve around playing basketball.)

But here’s my counter argument, and my whole theory on this game in general: I really don’t want to be anyone from this generation. Don’t get me wrong – I’d trade my life for John Mayer’s in a heartbeat – but if I had to pick of the past 60-70 years, I’m not going with anyone who’s at their peak right now. The reason is that there are just too many gossip magazines, TV shows, websites and blogs nowadays (please reread that sentence in your best “old fogey” voice). If you’re this type of famous, everything you do is watched, detailed, studied, spied on. That is a pitfall of fame that, if given the choice in this hypothetical game, I’d rather not deal with.

But those who pick Tiger will say, well, look at him. He’s intentionally the most boring celebrity there is. He’s married to a beautiful woman. He’s a golfer, for Christ’s sake, a sport enjoyed by rich people, a sports whose announcers whisper, a sport that requires hardly any real fitness. Tiger just goes out, wins, and goes home. He’s not exactly tabloid fodder.

Um, whoops. (As of this writing, “Tiger Woods affair” brings up 37 million hits on Google.)

I’m not going to delve into the whole Tiger Woods thing, because I don’t care. For the purposes of our discussion, I care only because what happened to Tiger is my ultimate vindication that my two top picks for “Guys I’d Like To Be” are right and have been right all along. Without further adeiu, my top two choices are (in order):

2) JFK. Let’s start from the end. Yes, he died violently and young. Not good. Let’s put this in the “Cons” bucket.

Pros (really, the only pro that you need): He was at once the most powerful man and the coolest man in the world. Think about that. Obama kinda spoils us, since he’s somewhat cool. But while Obama was rocking the mom jeans, JFK was carousing with various mistresses, including Marilyn Monroe; it’s tough to make a comparison, but imagine if sometime down the line we learned that Obama drank like a fish, swore like a sailor, and occasionally banged Megan Fox in the Oval Office. There will never be another like JFK; I’ll take his 46 years any day.

(And to be fair, Megan Fox could not hold a candle to Marilyn Monroe, but she just so happens to the hold the number one spot on my personal “If I Can

1) Frank Sinatra. And it’s not even close. Drank (a lot). Caroused (a lot). Was admired by and friends with both mobsters and politicians (including JFK). Won both an Oscar and a Grammy (a few of those, actually). Never wrote a line of music, yet his songs will live on forever. The Rat Pack. Vegas. Once inspired me to start a bar crawl in which my friends and I get dressed in tuxes and bombed on Scotch. Like JFK, there is no comparison, because though there have been forty-four presidents, there are only a handful of artists that can approach Frank Sinatra’s profound effect on his craft; and none of these – not Elvis, not Dylan, not MJ – lived a life as desirable as Sinatra’s. So no, it’s not even close.

(And let the counter-arguments begin.)