I’ve always felt it was too easy for a person to be labeled a “porn star.”

The criteria seem to be that you have had sex, on camera, for the purpose of distribution, and that many people have seen it. But such criteria say nothing about one’s history, accomplishment or following. The real problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a linguistic distinction between the entry-level and the career-minded varieties of porn star.

Consider that, to be a movie star, you probably have to have at least one major motion picture out, maybe two, and you have to have been invited to appear, for that movie, on at least one talk show. To get that far, chances are good that you paid your dues: maybe a Lifetime special, definitely a rapist or victim on Law & Order: SVU. And that’s just by modern standards, where buzz is generated much more quickly, and the masses catch all their star news virally. When it comes to the classic star hierarchy, we’re talking about the A and B listers, and even then we’re dealing with maybe eighty people in the whole industry (two of which are Tom Cruise).

Becoming a rock star is a bit easier. One song on the radio will do, and really, if you get up on any stage, belt out a few notes, swagger around a bit and generally act sweaty, most people will give it to you as a kind of honorarium, as something you’ve earned by way of presence. “He’s such a rock star,” in the common vernacular, has come to indicate an attitude more than it does any kind of real success in the music business.

The label “porn star,” however, has the unique properties of being both literal and inclusive. That is, you must have been in a porn to be a porn star.  Cut and dry.  But once you’ve hopped that first gentle bar, you’re in for life, right at the top.  Even if the act was years ago, the distinction then becomes “ex-porn-star.”

The labeling issue is further confused when you consider the relative ease of getting a great many people to watch you in a porn.  Get a small part in an edgy indie movie, and a few thousand might see it. Write a song and some of your friends will be kind enough to listen. Take your pants off on camera and the world will click twice to see what’s going on down there.

Clearly, the title/suffix “star” has been too widely granted. We don’t yet have a good word for an “amateur porn star.” In fact, we stare the absurdity right in the face, because the proper terminology would be just that: “amateur porn star.”

Film critics offer a grim solution to this problem. Whenever the moniker “movie star” isn’t enough, they call an actor a “superstar,” or, ever more often, a “mega-star.”

“Porn-Mega-Star” has all the charm of an end villain in a Transformers spinoff, but at least it differentiates.

My solution?  Simplify things. We need to establish a base term for, um, entry level porn actors. Instead of “porn star,” we could call someone a “porner” (I also considered “smactor”). A “porner” is anyone who has been in a porn.

With a little effort and some skill in marketing, a porner could eventually work his way up to official porn stardom.  And so on. Such labels might even have the effect of legitimizing a career ladder which has long been dubious at best.

Now, if only we could figure out summer internships.

There are two kinds of people: Keepers and Throwers. I’m a Keeper. I can’t throw anything away.

This epiphany came while editing a recent story that my editor had called, “unwieldy,” a polite way of saying, “Get to the bloody point.” His version of the piece was five-hundred words. My original was nearly two-thousand. His was better, I knew, but at what cost? I was heartbroken. Where were all the little side-musings, the digressions? What happened to the eager Chinese man who loved football? “You can’t just cut the Chinese guy,” I wrote in an email.

My editor liked my wit, but felt I was hindering my story with irrelevancies. I went to task, cutting into the piece, wincing with each sentence’s deletion. Why was this so hard for me? They’re just sentences. It reminded me of spring cleaning and I suddenly thought about how maybe it wasn’t only my stories that I was hindering.

***

I keep things. This sentimental hoarding has a rough formula: Recall memory of object, expound something’s usefulness, and warn against hasty tossing. A monologue I might give before a garage sale would sound like this:

“I wore this green disco-shirt to a seventh grade dance. It still fits. It’s a perfectly good shirt. That ceramic turtle was a gift from family friends who imported fine Peruvian art. It’s a perfectly good ceramic turtle. I still have Mr. Greenwood’s phone-number in that old phone. He was my boss from three years ago and, though we didn’t part on the best of terms, one day, I may take up real estate and want some advice. Best to keep it.”

Sometimes the sentiment goes much deeper. Since my dad died some years back, anything he’s touched, a tie, a tool, most anything, becomes an untossible relic. He was a lot like me, with drawers of old movies and a garage filled with a lifetime of history. Even things of his I don’t like or can’t use are kept. In cleaning my closet I can’t help but think, “Someday, I may need this wrench to know the exact level of torque on a bolt which I do not currently own. My father would be proud that I had that wrench on hand. It must be kept.” It’s as though I’m saving his history for him. It would be like throwing part of his memory away.

***

I was like this when I was young too. I always look back to one afternoon when I was very little sitting in a room filled with stuffed animals. I had dozens. Vividly, I remember doing a headcount. “Bam-Bam, Sheepy, Bernstein, Ducky…woah. Where’s Ducky?” I looked everywhere I could and finally cried for my mother to help me.

“Oh, that? I didn’t think you ever played with that one anymore and it was all tattered,” she said, gesturing towards the trash cans outside. (I should mention that she’s a ‘Thrower.’) I didn’t play with it anymore but, my god, how violated I felt. I ran out the side of the house, straight to the garbage cans and rescued Ducky, all the while feeling a mix of guilt and relief. Even without knowing the word ‘anthropomorphize,’ even at six, I knew the guilt I felt was because that stuffed duck had feelings of its very own, and I had betrayed them.

This “sentiment” was sometimes just a genuine revulsion to change. We used to own this vacation place out on Lake Mead. When I was twenty and my father had just died, my Aunt and Uncle bought the place. Afterwards, month after month, my mother gave me updates on the “improvements” my Aunt had made. “She changed the carpet,” my mother says casually one day.

“What!” I yell into the phone. “But that carpet was classic. Straight out of the 70’s. That carpet made the place. You can’t even buy that stuff anymore.”

Another time, “She pulled up all of the cactus out front.”

“Are you kidding me? You and I spent a week finding just the right colors. We planted it ourselves on that hot day in August. You remember that?  We had to wear jeans in a hundred degree weather to avoid the needles.  Who the hell doesn’t like cactus in front of their desert house!”

More recently, “She threw out all of the rocks by the patio.”

“Oh no. Oh Jesus, Mom! My whole childhood, snorkeling with my dad, hiking through the hills, finding the best, most beautiful rocks. She threw them out!?”

My mother reminds me that the lake house was their house now, theirs to make their own. The memories were mine, not my aunt’s. She tells me I would have to hold on to them inside. I know this, but it still stings when my mother tells me changes my aunt has made.

“Oh, you mean the bitch,” I say, correcting her.

***

The strength in my life and in my writing comes from the connections I make to my own history. It gives me a robust sense of personal identity, and identity gives one purpose and momentum. But there is a point when connections are less like pillars of support and more like the sticky tendrils of a web. Instead of shedding my outgrown skin, I’m wincing at the rip of a band-aid.

My writing is an analogy for my life and the struggle of letting go.  Each piece is a journey.  An idea becomes a paragraph, paragraphs pages. Eventually a story; then another.  A life.  Each sentence is a connection, a relic I create and collect as I find my way. I love them all, but not all of them are meant to be kept.

Strength comes from identity, and identity from connections, but the greatest strength may be knowing that connections can impede as often as they encourage.

One of my cats has started following me into the bathroom.

Most of the day, he sleeps under the bed, while I am on the couch.  At night, we switch.  As I see it, I respect his territory and he respects mine, with only minimal crossover for such necessary exchanges as food-in-bowl and pet-on-head (he is, after all, a “good kitty”).  But now, oddly, he insists on watching me poop.

“I thought we had an understanding,” I say, knees pressed together in reflexive embarrassment.  “You know…you do your thing and I do mine.  What’s with this?” I make a little noise like a toy-gun to spook him off. It doesn’t.

“Mrrow,” he says, and saunters over, finding my huddled knees as good a place as ever before to sidle up against.

“Cat, this is very unlike you. You never like me. And it’s not like I…”  And it dawns on me.  I watch him poop.

One of them has been pooping on the carpet.  I haven’t been able to figure out which one.  All I know is at night the carpet is clean and sometime in the night, with all the mystery and silence of Santa Clause, a little present is left for me.  What’s amazing is, it’s always left in the same place: three infuriating feet to the left of the damn litter box. Never two feet, never four. That’s poop left, litter-box right: it’s like when your GPS is out of sync and a casual drive down the coast shows you a hundred feet west, driving in the water.

Now I stalk the poopers.  I stay up late at night, later and later. I’m on their time now, waiting for the sound of kitty paws on artificial gravel.  When one of the cats walks down the hall, I wait and listen.  I creep around the corner, shielding my eyes from the ambient light to keen my senses.

Tonight, it’s the fat one in the box.  Good ol’ fat one. (This is the same cat who, after first moving in, would find his way into my girlfriend’s underwear drawer. There he would lie for hours, a true predator. Eight a.m. would bring a scream, and I’d rise just in time to see gravity defied by fur, his paws outstretched, no doubt intending a kill. I was endeared to him then.)

I watch him poop, making sure it wasn’t a trick. I watch for twitches. I watch for silence. He sees me and is unmoved.  I nod, acknowledging him. He is not the carpet pooper. He sits there, proudly, little head upright, the dignity of a prince, and pierces me with his repose like a general standing tall in surrender.

And now he follows me into the bathroom to watch, and I can’t blame him. I would close the door, but it seems a little sad since nobody else is around but the cats. And even that is a little sad. I never wanted to be a cat person: they’re the ones you hear stories about. I’ve seen James Bond, and the most evil of villains, the most twisted, always has a cat curled up in his lap. They are as one.

But that’s not me and the fat one. We respect each other’s territory. Maybe being a cat person just means respecting where the other one poops.

He really is a good kitty.*

*Someone, please help. Spot, “The Fat One,” has had me cornered for two days writing flattering cat stories. Even now, as I type this, he has a paw to my throat. His English is poor but his meowing is clear. I don’t have much time. Send dogs.

The other day I was amused to find my husband walking back and forth in front of our bedroom window without any clothes on.

As we live in a forest and are surrounded by trees, we are not overly concerned about the view into our windows. It’s not that we don’t have neighbors. We do. Our houses up here sit on 1-2 acre plots and back up against Roosevelt National Forest. But the trees between us do create a natural privacy border of sorts. And still, if somebody were looking, they could see us.

On one side of us is a beautiful modern cabin built only a few years ago. The man who built it went to high school with Scott’s mom and sometimes comes over for drinks. There are a lot of trees between us and him.

On the other side of us – the bedroom side – is a rather large home inhabited by a couple which has recently acquired a dog. I point out this seemingly banal detail only because we have received several phone calls from them to inform us that our dog was over there sitting at their back door. Once we got a call from them to let us know that our dog was “making footprints in [their] dirt” and that short of calling the sheriff, they didn’t know what to do.

I’m admittedly curious to see how this new dog of theirs fares.

For the past several years, the man in this couple – I’ll call him Dave – has been actively involved in thinning out the trees surrounding his house. As there are hundreds of trees on his property, this is no small task. In the nine years we’ve live here, we’ve grown accustomed to the loud buzz of his chainsaw as it chews its way through the lodge pole pines between his house and ours.

Scott and I like to joke that he pulls out the chainsaw whenever he and his wife are arguing. Or maybe he is sexually frustrated and can only find relief by hoisting heavy logs. But really, we have no idea why he is so hell-bent on razing his forest to the ground.

When he is finished disassembling the tree into branches and burnable split logs, he stacks them on one of several giant piles surrounding their home. I have heard him say that the reason he is thinning his trees is for fire mitigation purposes – as if a massive fire in the surrounding trees of our properties would stop short because of a few extra feet between house and trees. My father-in-law is a catastrophe adjuster and snickers at this idea. He once saw an adobe house in the middle of the California desert that had caught fire from embers that blew from several miles away. At any rate, the massive dried out woodpiles around his home would most certainly compensate for any gap left between his structure and the forest. Even burning through the wood during the winter, he has at least a 15-year supply of fuel out there. Possibly 20. We are talking about at least a dozen cords of wood, conservatively.

A few weeks ago I dreamt that I woke up to find that he had taken out all of the trees between us and that we could see into each other’s houses as clear as if we lived in a Denver McSuburb. A couple days later I awoke to find that the US Forestry Service was on the forest border thinning out trees at an alarming rate. The dream followed by the reality…it was sort of a Simon Smithson moment.

For several days they were out there raising up a mighty chorus of chainsaws. Every few minutes someone would shout and another tree would come crashing to the ground. I wanted to cry.

Occasionally, I would glance out the bedroom window to spot “Dave” next door staring wistfully toward the forest. I can’t be certain, but I think I spotted a glint of jealousy at the sheer chainsaw power so close, and yet so out of his reach.

Once I looked out to find that they had brought in a prison work crew to help them with the project. I am no genius, but it seemed odd to me that anyone would mix convicts and chainsaws. We made the kids go inside.

As this was happening, I was getting madder and madder at what they were doing to the forest. Our forest. We hike out there all of the time and know those woods well. They have become a part of our lives and daily experience. And now – because of a leftover George W. Bush policy – forests all over the nation that run along private property are being mowed down in the name of fire mitigation.

It sounds good: fire mitigation. But let’s be serious. If we have a forest fire behind our house, there will be no saving it. Our house is built from stone and cedar planks. We have a dried out shake roof from 1967. We have frequent lightning storms accompanied by upwards of 60 mph winds without a drop of moisture to be felt.

Smokey the Bear would definitely not approve of our domicile.

But even more to the point, the Forestry Service did not clean up after themselves. After glutting themselves on chainsaw grease and sawdust, they left the trees felled on the ground, stripped of their branches, which they then threw into giant 10 ft. piles.

Here is a picture of the piles they left:

Every 20 paces, you will run into another one. They are everywhere within the 200 yard cutting zone, which incidentally is not barren of trees – only thinned. They are giant bonfires waiting to happen. Branches waiting to kick up in one of our infamous windstorms and head straight toward our roof.

When my husband walks naked past the window for the 10^th time in a row, he smiles smugly at me and winks. He knows he can’t stop the legacy of Bush and yet another poor policy decision. That glory train has already been set into motion. What he can do is hope that through the trees the neighbors catch a glimpse of his march. And when they see his raw determination, they will agree to put down the chainsaw and give a man some peace.