CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!!!!!!
You have arrived at the new Vile Material. Which means one of two things. You either a) Belong to that -1 percent of people who were fans of the original Vile Material E-Zine (http://ickystevenson.tripod.com/), or b) You were looking for the nastiest, most obscene porn on the Internet and made the fatal mistake of typing the words Vile and Material into a search engrine, only to see this pop up.
You see the Asia Carrera banner so your hopes are still up. But then you start reading this and realize that your quest for snuff is a forlorn hope. Awwww! Poor you!
Well, since you're here anyway, I think I'll tell you the story of what happened. See, myself and Mr. Walsh (writer/co-founder of the original Vile Material) had the Vile Material site for about a year when everything that could go wrong went wrong in our lives.
What had initially been launched as a springboard to auspicious careers in e-publishing had become a nightmare. Not only were we pissing people off (with the "obscene" literary flotsam on the site), but we were having trouble with updates due to a lack of time or energy.
One of our main reasons for starting the site in the first place had been to get our minds off of a close mutual friend's acute addiction to heroin and prescription pills. But now his addiction and overall manipulative ways were impinging on the progress of even the site (not to mention our personal affairs).
It was around this time that things started going sour with the girl I had been seeing stedily for just shy of two and a half years. The non-stop lovemaking had ceased and I was so inextricably mired in our friend's stupidity and his constant schemes---and my own self-doubt---that I didn't even notice the absence of said fornication.
A month or so went by and just as I had managed to distance myself from our fairweather friend, she broke it off with me. Add to this my sudden writer's block and you've got the makings for a pretty engaging tragicomedy. What next? Throat cancer?
That was a month and a half ago. And I guess you could say that all the time between then and now has been spent in a state of constant suspension, oblivion.
My inability to write anything I considered worthy of publication, my failure to get a movie project off the ground and my failure as a boyfriend kept me from revisiting Vile Material.
Then the power outage hit and my hard drive went shithouse and I was thrown into a frenzy, trying to save stories to disc and back-up research on floppy. In the end, I discovered that I had lost three years worth of short stories, essays, endless research, quotes and poems. And to top it all off, when I finally got a new hard drive installed, my Tripod account was fucked.
I had no way of accessing the backend of the old site.Which means, in layman's terms, that my password was in absencia and I couldn't make any new changes or updates.
After several attempts to contact the Tripod Support people, I decided to give up on the old site and just start new. I finally saw the light and realized that maybe new beginnings aren't so bad. In a way, this is all pretty exciting.
As strong as my love once was for my (ex-)girlfriend and as much as I love the inimitable nastiness of the original Vile Material, there is nothing I can do to change what is, ultimately, irreparable. But the smell of promise tickles my olfactory nerves.
I mean, hell, I could be between the sheets with a big booty latino girl by tomorrow night. Or maybe I'll end up at a 'perfect circle' concert on "e" with a group of ravenous thrill killers from the planet Labia (in the Vulva Galaxy). Or maybe I'll overdose on cheese and find myself reincarnated as a marsupial. Who the fuck knows? The possibilities are endless.
And while change has always been synonymous with anxiety in my book, there is something comforting about the fact that I no longer need to fantasize. There is something very delectable about this newfound ability to shoot for the stars. And, most importantly, there is something very satisfying about that imaginary voice I keep hearing, that voice which screams in orgasmic exasperation: "Ooooo, Papi! PAPIIIIIIIIIIIII!!!!!!!"
Bob Freville
August, 2003
