Inga is back in the area, staying in her ex-boyfriend's empty house while he's out of town. They bought the house together, but when Inga took a job in Philadelphia, the temporary separation eventually became a permanent breakup. Still, she often stays with him when she's in town, and now she's hanging around in her former home while he's away, occupying the same spaces she once did when things were very different. It's a domestic arrangement that I would find painfully nostalgic, but she says it doesn't bother her. They've managed to make good on the "stay friends" platitude with more endurance than I've ever managed.

We sat around in her former back yard last night, swathed in a pungent and obscuring haze of citronella smoke, swigging beer and talking business. Inga's not just a friend, she's a client, proving once again that she has little difficulty with complex relationships. Although we'd set up a time to talk specifically about business, I had no intention of billing this time in my next invoice. You just can't ask a friend to pay for hours when you sat around drinking and smoking. Sometimes I think I have an extremely difficult time with complex relationships. But then I remember that I have trouble with all relationships.

Richard and John showed up, and Inga and I abandoned our business for the evening. Dr. John and I compared some notes on recent exciting medical cases. It shows unusual forbearance on his part that he deigns to discuss medical matters with me as if I were a colleague. I'm sure from his perspective my EMT status places me somewhere just above Completely Helpless, perhaps between Pesky Do-gooder and Competent Professional.

Susan showed up on her bike, and the house's downstairs tenant joined us unexpectedly, asking if we minded some company. None of us knew her at all; only Inga had met her and exchanged pleasantries before. I found it amusingly ballsy that she just trooped upstairs and came out to hang with us... the kind of social feat I wish I could pull off effortlessly, but seldom will. As it turns out, she was a former Peace Corps Volunteer in Mauritania, a mere rifle shot across the river from Senegal, where I lived.

After Richard and John left, Inga and I launched into a lengthy discussument about pornography on the web. I reiterated my frequent statement that I would enjoy the challenge of starting a sex site. The skinsite of my dreams is a subversive thing, dangling the desperate titillation of sex to entice people into something that isn't really about sex at all. This topic often comes up in front of strangers, perhaps because I'm curious about what their response will be, but really because I'm always vaguely trolling for potential models in case I acquire the funding to start up my ideal nudie site. Some folks have suggested uninhibited friends who they believed would readily join the venture, but other technical questions have kept the whole project so farfetched that I've never bothered to risk embarrassing myself by following up on the leads.

As we are wont to do, Inga and I polarized into stubbornly extremist positions, with me taking the virulent anticensorship line and she espousing the belief that she was willing to give up some personal freedoms in order to make society better. It was very Crossfire. Eventually we shifted off the topic, sensing that the gloves might truly come off before too long if things kept up as they'd been going. I told a story about a meeting once held at my former nonprofit employer, an organization devoted to reproductive health and HIV prevention programs for young people.

This meeting was an inaugural event for the nonprofit's new Executive Director, to discuss ideas for new programs and new directions for the organization. At the time, they ran a project that worked with Hollywood script writers and producers, helping them incorporate safer sex messages into TV shows and movies. For example, if teens were talking about having sex, then we encouraged the writers to have the characters discuss contraception.

So I spoke up and proposed a new project to do the same thing on the Web. Face it, I said, kids are getting their images and information about sexuality from the Web now. If you want to influence what they see there, then work with the owners and producers of porno sites.

The silence in the meeting room was a pretty awesome thing. Everyone was appalled that I would suggest that a reputable organization consort with the scum responsible for putting sex on the web. I don't think my bright idea ever even made it up on to the flip chart that chronicled the output of our brainstorming. It was quickly forgotten by everyone present except me. I still think it would be a great idea. Where are the venture capitalists when I need them?