I love who I love. Even if they drive me Miss Sugar Nut. I live in a crazyhouse. Bursting at the seams. I take too many photos of it. I have thousands.

No, the kids in the photos are not dead. Yet. They are alive. This is how they live.

I assume there are some people who call it living. Being alive. Being alive is not enough.

There’s this new thing I have. I call it: I am glad no one reads my shit anymore.

Enough is enough. Writing is a dangerous thing. Publishing is far more dangerous. Be careful what you wish for.

Esquire magazine can suck my cock.

“You need to print this,” I said. Some stupid piece I wrote.

They did.

I write about kids. Kids I know. Kids I run across. Kids I teach. My books were about alcohol fetal syndrome. AIDS. And sexual child abuse.

Any male who works with kids is suspect. I can only shrug. I deal with sexually abused boys who are doing sex work and have HIV. Sex with any of them would be ludicrous. Just ludicrous.

No one ever talked about what my books were actually saying. The reader was far, far more interested in who I was. And who I wasn’t. I would say: It’s not about me, but no one listens.

Who I am is irrelevant. AIDS is not irrelevant.

I am sorry I wrote those books. I sent the awards back. I put some into the trash.

I hate the reader now. I hate him. I want to spit in his moronic face. He makes me want to vomit. The reader is beneath contempt.

Don’t read me. Just walk away. No one reads me here. I am glad.

Today, whenever I have the opportunity, I roam the planet taking photographs. I love my Nikon. It is a weapon of choice between all my second selves, and you.

The kids I work with in SHOW ME YOUR LIFE inundate me with email. I love that, too. They are keeping me alive. I can run my entire art program from an iPhone. It doesn’t matter where I am. I work with a foundation. But it’s my dog and pony show.

I love that paradigm. The boys write their hearts out. You can tell me anything.

How is it that I am fucking them on an iPhone. Americans always assume the worst. I hate America. I despise it.

Show Me Your Life.

http://showmeyourlife.tumblr.com

I do not want to know anyone in the flesh. Being physically touched by people causes me to physically recoil. I will not shake your hand. It would take me days to recover from it. I don’t want to know you. I do not want to know your pain. I do not want to know your story. But I will take your photograph.

Sometimes, people get downright livid at my taking their photograph. I never ask. I don’t need your permission. Does taking someone’s photograph suck their soul from their body.

Yes. Just yes.

Look around. Who has a soul. No one I know, and no one I have ever met. We are simply carnivorous animals. There is nothing magical or awe-inspiring about the human being or the human species. Death will be a great adventure. I will pull its cocksucking soul out with my camera. Just watch me do it.

One bag. I live out of one bag. I live like this because you don’t have the balls to do it. Not with your lawns and your lawn mowers and your spoiled little brats and your trophy wives and your cars and your family entertainment centers and your stock options and your indifference and your tweaky little jobs and your property and your house a curse upon your houses. Everything I own — some very expensive shit — fits into the bag. A few of my cameras are the tiny kind that spies use. I wear Google Glass and when I take video of you, you will never know it. One change of clothes. The drugs that keep me alive. And all my various cameras. It’s a Domke bag, and I love that thing. I love holding it. I love running with it. It is why I can get out of Dodge on a moment’s notice. I can not only hop aboard a plane, I can fly one, too. I have a hundred names. Esquire, Houghton Mifflin, and Random House can kiss my tight white ass. They mean nothing to me. Always looking for the thoroughbred. Who will be the new boy on your block today.

It is America that sucks out souls. I will only take your photograph.

There is a lot of fight still left in me. I do not do yoga.

The planet is an ugly place. It is filled with more pain than Americans can stand looking at.

They want to run the place, but they can’t. It’s just too big. Watching them twist in the wind provides me with enormous entertainment.

They have wrecked the world and now they want to save it. They cannot save themselves.

I want to return to a country I will not name because it will get me into trouble with the computer spies. Trouble is a bother and a bore. The place is so destitute, it is extremely photogenic, and very cold in those long grey winters when the light slants down. Americans fear this place and they should. Because the people who live there are fucking crazy. It is an entire society of the mad. They have bad wallpaper. I have some students there. Most of them are sixteen, and all of them are falling down into the street alcoholics who consume vodka day and night. A sea of pouring vodka or more likely straight from the bottle. I see their videos. I teach them how to make videos. I even send them cameras. Their souls have left their bodies years ago. They are ruined, their country is ruined, and ruins are what I often photograph.

And they all have HIV. I probably wouldn’t work with them if they didn’t.

Why HIV. Because it compells you to want to do your living now. I don’t have to have sex with them.

Making suicide pacts with your students is the real rush.

We have all vowed we will kill ourselves together. We have the heroin now to do it.

I will set up the cameras so that they will take our pictures as we die.

We want to do it naked in the snow.

We do not need your motherfucking permission. The photographs will pop your eyeballs out. We will be like those boys on the bed. Curled up together in the cold.

The photographs will take themselves.