Behind the Scenes

I have not written in this blog for over a year. Part of the reason is that it is called Behind the Scenes, and after the LAPD vice squad raid on the building we held our classes in, the owners sold the business. Besides our classes, the huge 30,000 square foot building had an erotic art gallery, adult video and photo shoots, and special events with erotic themes. LAPD decided that a sex positive facility such as this was not going to be on their turf, so the usual problems with inspectors and raids began. Once that happens, it is pretty tough to stay in business, unless you can afford the huge legal bills to fight them. So, without a facility, we did not have any behind the scenes to write about. Instead we focused on the 2.0 release of the Erotic University campus software.

That would have been our next big push, were it not for my being diagnosed with one of the strangest diseases I have ever heard of. It caused random, inexplicable, and sometimes debilitating pain. It would soon manifest a new symptom, one I did not expect, one that would result not just in losing months of work, but in actually destroying months of work.

The condition is Fibromyalgia, or FM, which affects the brain. It is poorly understood and 90% of the people who get it are women. It has an almost endless list of symptoms, including chronic fatigue, and pain of just about every kind. It is not real pain, and by that, I mean not caused by any specific problem in the part of the body where you feel the pain, but it feels real. Over time, I have come up with names for the different types. The stabbies, which can feel like anything from a bee sting to being stabbed. The worst is the sensation of a needle stabbing you in the eye. There is the ball crusher, which is fortunately rare and unfortunately feels just like what it sounds like. There are times when a section of the skin feels like it has been burned. There is muscular soreness in large areas of muscle, which is much of the time. The various pains can feel like anything from a sprained toe to a heart attack. It can come without warning, last seconds to hours, and then disappear. The pain does not get less, it just disappears in an instant.

FM can be a condition of heightened sensitivity, and there are times when being touched is unbearable. This totally sucks at swing parties. It can be hell on your sex life. Fortunately, this does not happen often.

You can learn to deal with chronic pain. The fatigue was tough, though. But I was not evenly remotely prepared for what has been dubbed Fibro Fog. It is far more insidious than it sounds.

Yes, you can be in a fog, confused, not really present, and not functional at all. I’ve lost time, hours just disappeared. I went to one swing party in a bit of a fog and had trouble recognizing people that I knew. We left early.

The really insidious part is that you can be in a minor fog where it makes you stupid, but at the time, you think that what you are doing makes perfect sense. Some of my friends have pointed out that this is a little like working under the influence of drugs. You think what you are doing is great but later you see it is total crap. Never having used recreational drugs, I don’t know, but with Fibro fog you do unbelievably stupid things. Like put dishes away under the bathroom sink. It makes sense at the time.

It is even worse when you are doing software development. How about spending two weeks updating hundreds of files, but never bothering to save them?  Or saving files in what now seems like random places? Or writing code that has nonsense in it, and even though you thought it worked at the time, it obviously does not. And this went on for months, with me not realizing just how badly I was messing everything up. Sometimes things would be done perfectly, other times it was just random nonsense. And I had no idea.

I was focusing primarily on updating the campus software, but I also picked up some Web design work. It came to a head when I did a site for a client that had a critical date to coincide with a television show. The client called the day after the show, upset that things on the site were not working. I am methodical, and have systems where I check each thing as I go. Key elements did not work, and when I looked at the underlying code, it had weird garbage characters in it. How could that happen, and even worse, how could I think that I tested it and not caught it? It was then that I realized just how bad things had become. I had to stop all work for both myself and clients.

It is now many months later. After trying many drug combinations, I have what seems to keep the pain levels down enough to function, and keep me sharp. I have developed systems to cope, I am better able to tell when a fog hits, and it lasts a very short time when it does thanks to the meds.

I have spent the last two months meticulously going over every piece of the campus to correct the errors I introduced. It is a tedious process, but I am almost done and we will have version 2.0 officially out the door in a few weeks.

As I am more active again, I’ll actually have stuff to write about, focused on behind the scenes of creating adult sex education programs and all of our interactions with the adult industry, swing clubs, the BDSM community, sex educators, and many other topics.

I am very grateful that I have come as far as I have in gaining more control over my life. I have seen many people who are quite debilitated by this condition. I am grateful for all of the friends who have been helpful and supportive. When I took the big step of going to the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas this last January on my own, I had friends on speed dial living in Vegas and working the show floor who were there to help me at a moment’s notice.

So things are looking up after a long hard slog, and I look forward to writing about the interesting things going on.