The Mixed Media Meet

Of all the Erotic Meet events that @Annieplayer pulls together, the mixed media meets are my favourite. I love them because, well, how often do you get to sit round a table and talk shop about topics you love with people who love them as much as you do?

I always take a lot away from these events, but yesterday’s was my favourite so far. Particularly because I finally got to just sit and talk with one @Remittancegirl, something I’d been hankering for since the first time we met several months ago. (Everyone in attendance was equally interesting, I should say. ILB was as funny and insightful as always, Jilly was honest and adorable, Harper was glamorous and well-read, and Ash, who makes bespoke BDSM furniture from time to time, is always a treat to chat with. We’ll come back to him in a mo.)

Remittance girl, though, was effortlessly knowledgeable, incredibly insightful and refreshingly modest. The question that gave direction to the conversation was “are all the best artists crazy”? A fascinating topic, especially when, after we’d reeled off a list of the artists we considered we considered crazy and why, Harper asked us to turn the spotlight on ourselves and identify our own crazy traits. This threw up an interesting realisation for me: that despite a mild self-destructive streak and a preference for sexual overindulgence, I’m a relatively stable, balanced and healthy human – so is my creativity less valid? Less desirable? Can a sane person create work that appears ostensibly insane? I could have spent the whole afternoon talking about Heller’s treatment of sanity in Catch-22, but since I have Catch-22 tattooed on my wrist and everyone’s probably fed up of hearing me talk about, I left the subject largely alone.

When asked if she was crazy, Remittance Girl replied dryly, “I’m not crazy anymore”. We all laughed, and then she relayed some parts of her past and everything made sense. She said an interesting thing; in essence, that she’d rather live an unhappy life and use that unhappiness to drive her creativity and therefore leave a legacy than live a happy life and be forgotten. It put me in mind of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a story I love, because in that epic a horrible and melancholy king (Gilgamesh) is made happy when he recognises the city he built will enable him to live forever, the irony being that the city he built (Uruk, which became Iraq) was built on unhappiness, rapaciousness and vindictiveness. Me? I’d rather be alive and enjoy my happiness. What’s the point of a legacy if you’re not around to enjoy it? I’d rather live forever… but only for a while.

And then I got to go home with @Annieplayer and play ‘Drink Along With Withnail’. I genuinely only remember about 15 minutes of the film before I was incapacitated.

Oh yeah, Ash. He’s known as EroticArtisan, and the work he produces is spectacular – it’s done for the love of doing it, and he’s a modest yet self-assured character. A very desirable blend. I hope you’ll see some of his work soon over at my company’s site, www.spanking.co.uk.