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.)