Monday, May 31, 2004

Hedonism by Degrees

Gustatory: it’s a great word. My earliest recalled true pleasures were concerned with eating and food: candy, challah, bbq renfaire ribs as long as my youthful arm… I’ve always naturally keyed in on the joys of eating, if not always the joys of cooking, which I usually find pretty joyful too anyway.  But my point is that I like food.

Familial Bonding

Thank you all, again, for boosting my spirits when I was dragging my ass back there last friday.  I’m dragging everything I’ve got now, but I have a much better excuse and I won’t need to ask for your assistance or your pity.  This filthy planet has plenty of better places for those things, if you have any of them left.  I think it’s fair to say, I was crabby before, but now I’m coming out of my shell again. 

Friday wound up being the day the visiting inlaws - mom, dad and two sisters - did all the typical tourist things in town: sealions, fisherman’s wharf, coit tower, ghiradelli square, funky bar, the castro, the mission (that is, the actual mission itself), twin peaks, ocean beach, and a few other items I probably am overlooking… I spent the day in a five-hour committee meeting that was productive and satisfying, even if only on a professional level.  I got home in time for some serious partying, though, and the party pretty much lasted through the weekend.  The main activities on Friday night were watching Big Frank

fight his way through a jug of Carlos Rossi Red, and all of us struggling to breathe as:

I filled the entire house with thick burning peppery white smoke while preparing carnitas.  The recipe calls for searing the meat, and lord help us, it seared us back. 

We rented a big ol’ landboat on Saturday and piled in for a drive down the coast to see some lovely tidepools,

chuckle it up at a favorite winery,

and eat ourselves stupid at a restaurant that left us all gasping for room in our bellies in which to fit one more fried clam or

whole smelt.  Once we got back it was time to play some games, including my favorite, Fluxx,

which I decisively lost, except that it was a lot of fun, which ultimately was winning, except, of course, that I actually lost. 

Sunday was a quiet day of reading the newspaper, arguing over crosswords, strolling in the arboretum and around the neighborhood, and getting our asses kicked with an hour or so of power yoga at the Y - I am sitting here feeling parts of my hips rattling around that till recently were locked in place with a mortal rigor.  Sure it’s good, but damn, from my forearms to the soles of my feet and everything in between that I can exercise in public, I’ve been expanded from the joints on out and it’s a very strange sensation indeed. 

That night we ate the smoky carnitas (which, once again, had turned out perfectly), drank some excellent wine (Ravenswood Sonoma old vines zin, Lyeth tricentennary vines aussie grenache, and of course the Bonnie Doon barbera that’s so freaking excellent) and then finished off the jug of Rossi, all while playing poker for pennies till after midnight.  That’s when Heather and Tara started voguing

and doing cheerleading poses

and things got a little weird.  We got a few hours of sleep before the alarms went off at 5 for the first airport run this morning; the second run was at noon.  I’ve spent the rest of the day trying to refocus my shattered energy, reconstruct my traumatized alimentary canal, and revel in the quietude of a house that’s been emptied of inlaws.  My sister and her husband show up in a week for about five days, and my mother is in town the weekend after that.  I expect a lot less wine to flow, but maybe that will work out for the best this time.  There’s only so much a fellow can stand, even when it’s the very best.

Friday, May 28, 2004

The Power of Blog Compels You

(Caveat: You know, I hope, that this isn’t about you. I mean, except for the part where I say how cool you are.)

I find new sites all the time that are witter and more current, wiser and more touching and goddamned funnier than I could ever hope to be, other sites that kick my ass and hand it back to me in a hefty bag, with comments up in the 70s or 90s or higher on every post and a link list of geniuses and international bon vivants, a rarified world in which I could never really even imagine myself participating.... and I think, there are so many of them out there, so clever and savvy, tweaking things on their sites that I don’t even know exist and still putting more meaning and entertainment in a 50 word post than I can eke out of 500.... and I come back here to the ‘hut with its pages on pages of tired white text, its worn old voice and the smattering of comments I glean from those few among my occasional visitors who are charitable enough to cast a word or two in my direction.... sometimes I truly feel, when I see the first comment on a post I really liked coming on line hours - many hours - after it’s been published, that I’m just getting a “pity comment” from some gracious visitor empathetic enough to be chagrined at the total lack of feedback.  I know, it’s neurotic, but that’s where I go sometimes these days.

Then I think of some blogging friends I thought I used to have, and whatever once stood for a relationship between us is just gone.  My comments on their sites resound like hollow echoes and their comments on mine have evaporated entirely, their hits soaring as mine slowly dwindle. I can’t help but feel a bit jealous, resentful, covetous, petty as the tide surges forward, carrying further they who were once my peers but now outpace me; meantime, I drift slowly backwards into a murky unknown, where my talents are ordinary at best and my words shatter brittle in the night air, leaving no more impression than the shadow of glass. It leaves me wondering why I do it. 

But then I remember: there was no choice, I never decided.  I always wrote.  I wrote all through school - bad poems and long unsent letters, illuminated doodles, fables, jokes; I developed a sense of rhythm that demanded satisfaction and a love of words that I needed to feed, and the pages filled notebooks and the notebooks filled boxes before I finally confronted the fact of my addiction to rearranging words and got myself this journal to stoke my jones.

This medium of blogging brings many diverting novelties to my writing experience, and it’s easy for me to confuse these with the real reason I write.  But this site is not about the comments, the hits, the geeky tweaks or the purported social status inherent in my links list.  If it turns out I’ve alienated every damn person I thought was my friend on line, I regretfully accept it but I will still go on.  I’m not doing this for them.  I’m not even doing it for me.  I’m doing it because I can’t not do it.  I just write.  I just do.  This site helps me hone that craft as best I can: compels me to produce my best work according to my own standards, to extirpate typos and to refine my prose.  It’s nice to hear from people who visit here but I must finally embrace the fact that we are all bystanders at this trainwreck. It was going to go down anyway; the ‘hut just happens to have been fortuitously located so as to provide a convenient vantage point from which to view the carnage.  That is, if you are of a mind to do so.  But either way, the writing will just go on.

Shameless Plagerism

The committee meeting is coming up quite soon and I don’t have time to share one of the essays bursting from my little book of arcane runes, so here are some arcane runes from one of my close personal friends:

The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark - now glittering - now reflecting gloom -
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters, - with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

First part of Mont Blanc, Percy Shelley (1816)

Thursday, May 27, 2004

Not Named After the Cereal (more’s the pity)

I’d missed every KaBoom for a decade but I wasn’t going to miss this one - Robert Randolph opening for the Waifs at a free waterfront concert.  (Train headlined, but I couldn’t stay for them and didn’t much mind.  I’m much more into the first two acts.) Although I’d had a trying day and there was much for me to deal with, I blew it off and grabbed a downtown bus in the midafternoon to catch the show.

Pubic Inquiry

It’s been a quiet few days at the ‘hut, so I was surprised to get an email from “Chris” who had some cogent and relevant things to say about one of my recent posts, and then asked me as follows:

“I am doing an honors project, so I am compiling a lexicon of sexual terms, http://www.encyclopedia-of-sex.com. For this project to work I need to get people to submit the oddest words they know. I also need some help promoting this project and I was wondering if you’d be interesting in doing a link exchange. Any help you could lend would be greatly appreciated. Here’s my link Encyclopedia of Sex. Thanks again.” Just to make sure this wasn’t automated spam I wrote him back, asking “what kind of honors project is this?” He responded promptly: “Im an extension student at UCLA, and my project is an english/sociology thing. I want to get words into this lexicon as well as some info on the people who enter the words, things like geographical location, age, and sex. That way I can do statistics (that part is how I got the project accepted).”

Well Okay Chris, here’s your shot: I’m opening the Chucklehut Floodgates (or trickleweirs) and inviting all my readers - both of you - to send Chris weird sex terms.  I didn’t have any myself, as most of my best stuff is made up.  He seems to have a decent start already, but I’m sure one of you will come up with something really groundbreaking. 

I can’t help but remember that my college sociology project was an analysis of the community of 20 art galleries in a four-block area of philadelphia.  The only dirty word I got to use was “commission.” And even then, it needs the proper context to be even moderately juicy.  Obviously, I wasted my education.  But at least it returned the favor.

Wednesday, May 26, 2004

Panache Sack

For the past three weeks I’ve had a little yellow race-car sticker stuck to the left sleeve of my favorite coat.  I’d notice it and think, “that’s just the sort of jaunty non-chalance I need to get through my day with style and panache.  I’ll be the only guy in the office wearing a sports car.  I have a special kind of cool that the others just can’t hope to match.”

Well, I just checked again and the sticker has finally fallen off.  I knew it would happen eventually but I was hoping it would last longer.  And now if I want panache I have to tote it with me to work like all the other puds around here.  And I don’t want it getting bruised.  A fellow’s panache can be a delicate thing, especially when he’s lost his race car.

Does anybody have a gently-used panache sack?

Dutiful

So I finally got a chance to post a few photos from my Riverside trip to my photoblog - hope you enjoy them.  Meantime I need to get a few more items resolved on behalf of my constituency before I delve back into the myriad tales of the macabre and quotidian that are even now seething at my fingertips, seeking new minds to infect.  Those stories will have to wait.  I have duties, people.  Duties.

Heh.  I said “duty.”

Monday, May 24, 2004

The Essential Mystery of Hey Look A Shiny Piece of Foil

What kind of day it has been: when I came in to turn on my computer, I was so out of it that I not only got “control-alt-delete” WRONG, but the computer put up a helpful screen to teach me how to do it right. I’m morbidly overeducated; I’m my department’s “go-to” guy on computer problems, and I can’t hit three keys at the same time using both hands and one extra appendage.  That’s just sad.

What I see when I’m confused and thinking too quickly with too little of my brain:

* The shy-looking girl on the bus seemed too demure to be wearing a shirt emblazoned with big letters that read “HUSTLER.” Plus, it was a thick dark sweatshirt, not really very revealing. Plus, turns out it said “WHISTLER;” I just couldn’t see the whole thing.  And in the end, was I disappointed?  Well maybe a little bit…

* The guy on BART wearing the sweatshirt that said “Naughty Jesus Commands You” was actually really wearing a sweatshirt that read “Nautica Jeans Company.” But I like it better my way.

* The truck on the intersecting highway that was owned by the SNO Transport Company needs to put a bigger space between the initial acronym and the word “transport.” The phrase “SNOTRANS” doesn’t fill me with confidence in their services.  You don’t even want to know what it fills me with, but it ain’t confidence.

On a final note, I’d like to mention that, if you want to live in a city with a really silly name, I don’t think you can do much better than Flin Flon.  And now it’s time for me to go home and see how my cold medicine works when I’m lying down.  I can tell you now that it makes me pretty easily distracted when I’m sitting up.

A Hummer on the Bus

I’ve ridden with the Hummer before.  I usually have trouble picking him out in the crowd when I first hear him - toneless closed-lipped grunts, like he’s honking through his nose… random honks that slowly resolve into groups of notes and eventually into a real song - something chinese, like him, traditional and formal, his voice raised up loudly now through his nostrils, the notes quavering in clear firm vibrato from the wattles of his skinny throat.  Once I pick him out of the crowd, often by following the bemused stares of those around him, he always strikes me as one of those who might or might not be living on the streets.  He wears old clothes, carries a small tightly tied plastic bag, and seems to exist in his own little universe. He’s somewhat irritating, and rather weird, but in general it’s kind of cool to hear him express himself that way with his ancient songs on my garrish modern omnibus. 

He had just started in on the “actual song” portion of his show that day on my ride home when a very angry-sounding homeless guy got on.  He was dressed in tatters; his shoes were more scrap than sole; his backpack was filthy, broken, and erupting with seemingly random pieces of discarded junk.  Most of his teeth were gone and his beard and afro were ratty and spotty.  He was shouting loudly, kicking his way in through a back exit door, howling curses and wordless roars.  His first words on his way down to the back of the bus as he stomped past the Hummer were, “Shut your chinese ass up, I’ll kill you muthafuckah.” For the next ten minutes he ranted and screamed in a raspy guttteral voice at - what?  Demons?  Pain?  Chinese people?  Probably all of the above.  His unbalanced exclamations had shut up the Hummer, who had swallowed his old martial melody into the deep hollow below his lumpy larynx.  The crazy screamer left the bus at Fillmore, bellowing with rage and confusion. The Hummer rode on with us for a few more minutes, but in silence, his little plastic bag dangling from his wrist.

Non-Drowsy

I’ve got a bunch of weird stuff written up, plus a bunch of photos and the occasional odd lot to post, but I have no chance to get any of it on this site at present.  I’m just lodging this “OCD” post so that I don’t feel as if I’ve neglected my responsibilities, as if I had any.  I am due now (that is, five minutes ago) at a meeting which should last a cheerful three hours; I say “cheerful” because my cold medicine is just starting to kick in.  I had a bunch of entertaining one-liners running through my head as I walked in from the bus with which to regale you but now I’m just running on fumes.  You’re probably better off this way. This meeting should be either interminable or embarassing.  Oh good, I’m already giggling.

Friday, May 21, 2004

AutoResponse

I was chatting with P-tricia a few months ago and she mentioned something that stuck in my head - that there are things people start to say, that her brain finishes for her - regardless of what is really being said.  “Sew.. buttons.” “See ya later… alligator.” I knew exactly what she was talking about, too.  My brain is filled right up with these kind of call-and-response reflexes.  It occurred to me when I saw Judy‘s post about seeing the phrase “Native Dancer Lane” and she read it as “Tiny Dancer Lane.” Putting aside what I accidentally thought it said, I have struggled through the past several days choking the mawkish Sir Elton-in-my-mind as he incessantly sings that cloying little refrain. 

But that’s not really what Pea had been talking about.  She’d been talking about situations where someone gives you the first part of a phrase and I complete the phrase in my mind no matter what they meant to say.  I’ve taken a little time to inventory a few of these as they presented themselves to me during the course of various conversations, and I now humbly unveil the following list of THINGS MY BRAIN FINISHES SAYING EVEN WHEN I ASK IT POLITELY NOT TO:

Wednesday, May 19, 2004

Time to Redecorate

It’s an incremental process, but it looks like the “office” is completely painted now, and all that remains is the master bedroom, the long hallway, and the living room and dining rooms.  It’s always like pulling teeth with my landlady to get permission to do stuff around the flat; she’s equally cheap and paranoid, which is a most restrictive combination indeed.  We have to ask her permission each time we want to paint a new room, and now that we finally finished the last one, I’m gearing up for the next request.  I got tired of the same old reason, though - that we want to “freshen the place up.” It’s true, but it’s so weak.  I started making a list of the real reasons we want to paint, and then I started adding in the reasons I’d like to give her just to see whether she demands to install surveillance cameras:

* Not painted in at least fifteen years
* Last painted with world’s ugliest shade of beige
* Centrifuge mishap
* Food fight
* Unfortunate lesson in poultry farming
* Combination of wall-mounted cuspidors and bad aim
* Projectile emesis party
* Habitually drink only warm soda from well-shaken cans
* Conclusion of smelting operations
* A visit from the Vaseline King

I tell you, this guy’s too slick for his own good.

cute enough to eat

Memepool comes up with another winner: Bento Pictures are the most adorable food you’ll ever eat.  In fact, eating seems cruel to these smiling anime faces.  Can’t we all just get along?

Tuesday, May 18, 2004

Down by the Riverside

It was a brief trip - about 36 hours - which only makes the welter of emotions and experiences it aroused that much more potent:

Five Dollar Poem

It’s been like a rodeo soda around the Chucklehut - bucking fizzy - and I’ve had no chance to correspond, post, or even sleep. In fact, I was reformatting my hard drive till 3 am today and now it looks like I’ve lost all my email, recent and archival, plus the address book.  Isn’t that cool?  (Pause for icy silence.  Nice work.)

Well since the last thing I put up was a poem, I figured I’d do another one while I had a short chance.  This one is a five-dollah poem, because I got a fivespot from the post office a few weeks ago and this poem was written on it, wrapped around the edges in cramped green printing:

Illusions of everlasting love
cloud my thoughts and evaporate above
so I sit here now,
crease upon my brow,
wondering if physical desire
is the one thing that,
for a relationship,
Marc (?) will require.

I wasn’t sure about that Marc bit; it was hard to read.  But I like finding poetry on money.  I mean, other than “E Pluribus Unum, didja see me screwnem?” It doesn’t have to be good poetry, because it gets circulated.  And if it’s good for the circulation, it’s good for the country!

Friday, May 14, 2004

Take Me Out

I had a few other items I thought I might blog up for y’all but this one seems too timely to defer.  I wrote it on my way to a playdate on Tuesday night.

Thursday, May 13, 2004

TIVOR IS MY BITCH

(written last week)
Tonight I come home to triumph, in the form of The Daily Show and South Park.  I really enjoy both shows but I never bothered to figure out when they were on so I could either see them or tape them… Instead, I’d just whine about going to bed too early and being a bad planner.

Well, in the words of FCC Chairman Mike “Daddy Used to Be A Man” Powell, God’s Machine is in the house.  Or hizzouse, was it?  Either way, TiVo showed up not long ago and I thought my days of Colbert Deficit Syndrome and A-Kartman-itis were over.  All I had to do was unpack, plug in, and start suckling at the video teat like the piglet that I am. 

Yeah, right.  Turns out, TiVo isn’t exactly plug-n-play.  Step 1, of course, was to move the big heavy media cabinet away from the wall.  Step 2 was to repack my hernias and screw back on a couple of fingers that snapped off during Step 1.  Then I got to pull the tape deck out of the stereo - it’s now barely solete* and anyway when TiVo goes under the TV, the VCR has to move to where the tape deck used to live… This also involved re-wiring the equalizer and changing the VCR-TV cabling.  But I actually pulled it all together on the first try, and better than ever. The hardware, as they say, was established.

Wednesday, May 12, 2004

To the Victors

If you get free tickets to great seats at a game where you eat well, drink well, laugh well, sit comfortably, get to blog and to marvel at this lovely city’s skyline, where you are warm and can bask in the company of a good friend and the enthusiasm of an energetic boy, where everything goes right except that the home team loses -

- this is what you get.  Now don’t get in my way.  I’m moping.

(I’m not really moping.  Jules told us to look sad because we were losing and the stadium was emptying out and the seagulls were blatantly scavenging among the sparsely-occupied seats.  But actually I had a great time.  When I mope, I tend to wear a lot of mardi gras beads and olive oil.  And not much else.  It’s the way of my people.  My shiny spangled mopey people.  Now you know why we don’t do family reunions.)

Tuesday, May 11, 2004

from box 43

Just thought I’d say hello from my box seat at SBC Park where the Giants are taking a shellacking from the Phillies - 7th inning stretch is now over and I just missed a home run by Pedro Feliz so I guess I’d better get back to my seat - but a special shout out to Jules for her awesome ticket-providing skills, you have made my day here!

Friendly Household Cyborg

It turned out to be a “three Lazy Lightnin’” weekend, with additional versions from 1972 and 1979 (Oregon and Oakland, respectively) to round things out after that cranking DSO show on saturday night -> sunday morning.  For me, that would have been enough to make it a good weekend, but no - there is more, there is always more.  Sunday I awoke after far too little sleep to assemble the cyborg.  We’d wanted a cyborg for years, and finally found one we liked at the proper price point at the european boxed-goods emporium.  Sure, we’d have to build it ourselves, but that’s what leads to pride of ownership, right?  The box was big and unwieldly, but Kel and I wrestled it into the dining room where we’d already moved out a bookcase to make room for our new helper.  The funny thing was, even though there were a lot of pieces and it looked complicated, the damn thing came together quite quickly and easily without incident or injury- except for one blister in the middle of the palm of my hand, which is actually occasionally inconvenient.  Mr. Borg is now standing sentry to the cyde of our dining table, just waiting for a chance to prove himself.  Some would say we’re fools for letting one of “them” into our home, but we are confident that we’ll be able to control any wild impulses he may have to destroy humanity or to rule us as our cruel emperor, as cyborgs so often do in those Hollywood documentaries.  Here, then, is a picture of our lovely cyborg, and remember, the “d"s in “sideboard” are silent, except that the second one sounds like a “g.”

Once Cy-locutus the Cydeborg had been re-configured and brought on-line, Kel and I wandered outside a little so she could get an ice cream and I could get a tapioca drink at T&A on Clement (kind of disappointing, the fruit juice was artificial and too sweet) and then we did touchup painting in the newly-blue-and-yellow room, which looks pretty damn good.  That brought us up to time to drive out to the east bay for several hours of TV with Dave and Kim and Jeff and Amber and Tony and Carmella, which is to say, we watched about 45 minutes worth of programming over the course of three hours of the Survivor finale, followed by about three hours worth of programming in the course of one hour of The Sopranos.  I’m still waiting for Vito’s Protein Fixation ("VPF") to raise its ugly head again, so to speak.  By 12:30 a.m. we were saying goodbye, by 1:15 I was walking the dog again, and by 1:30 I was unconscious.  I think I might have gotten into bed first, but there’s no guarantee on that one.

In addition, I thought of something clever and pithy and brief to post here, very late on saturday night I think, or maybe even friday night, and I can’t remember what it was, and that’s making me feel as if I can’t really close this out, because I wanted to say something and it hasn’t been said.  I skipped it yesterday, hoping that by doing so I’d trigger a memory and remember it today.  No such luck.  All I can remember is that it had both an “L” and an “A” in it, and one of the words sort of repeated inside another word, but it wasn’t a pun.  With that much information, I’m sure you can reconstruct my fiendishly clever idea and you’re all nodding in sage approval of it.  So, if you get around to it, would one of you just remind me what the hell it was I was thinking about?

Monday, May 10, 2004

The Load Warrior

We get an email newsletter here each day - “Today’s Legal News.” It’s usually pretty dry, with one or two small items of substantive or political interest.  However, I did particularly like this small item, lifted verbatim from the “Today’s Brief“ section: “A sperm donor has no child support obligations or parental rights unless he’s signed a contract saying so, a Washington court has found. In an apparent case of first impression, the state’s Court of Appeals took a load off a married man whose longtime girlfriend had two children by his donations. The woman, who had received financial support for the first child, had sued to collect for the second, but her former boyfriend argued that he never agreed to Baby Dos ... “

I really don’t have the energy to pursue the implications of this ruling to the reducto ad absurdum to which all legal decisions are susceptible, so I don’t have any opinion on whether this is good or bad law.  I just see that the court took a load off this dude.  He must be psyched - you know, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.  I guess he found himself a little amicus curiae in his briefs.  Just more proof that the gavel of justice makes for strange bangfellows.

Late Review: 5/5/77 as of 5/8/04

The first thing was that the show was at the Fillmore, which is just essentially historical, it reeks of rock history like no other building in this town and that covers a lot of territory. There were knots of giggling hippies twirling for a miracle ticket out on the corner and a bucket of crisp red apples at the top of the stairs, and we ran into our friends within a minute of setting foot inside the auditorium for the sold-out show.  The Fillmore magic continues to dazzle me and I know I’m not alone.  What a great venue, and it’s even cooler because it’s so close to my apartment.  So, we started out with certain advantages.

Thursday, May 06, 2004

Bloato Fog

This is a sample comprising 10% (net, not gross) of the new photos I have nailed up at Chuckle’s Photo Hut.  Eventually I’m gonna gussy it all up and make it cumbersome and confusing, but for now it’s still pretty clean.  See them before they see you!

The Hump Seat Rider

Every afternoon the crowd heading to the Richmond BART station meets at Beale and Howard, and cars troll up docilely to take them on, two or three or four at a time.  Each day the crowd gathers, all of them looking for their own ride home.  In the morning, these same people park out in the ‘burbs and then carpool in with other strangers, getting a ride from a new fellow citizen each day, helping with tolls and keeping quiet while a cypher drives them to a dropoff point downtown, or back to whereever they started, or to the Richmond BART station, anyway.  Stranger things happen every day.  It’s supposed to be one of those social success stories.

The line was substantial but very well-behaved, so it moved pretty quickly.  He pulled up when I was third in line and announced “room for four” out the passenger window.  He wasn’t kidding, either - his gleaming old Lincoln could have been a limo.  I loaded into the back seat with an older woman in a plain business suit and a young exciteable-looking guy - like the summer clerk you never hear from again.  He enthusiastically volunteered to sit in the middle - “I’ll take the hump seat,” was how he put it, which seemed to embarass the older woman next to him, which in turn seemed to egg him on a little.  I could feel tension building as the driver’s eyes ran up and down over him.  The driver was built like his car with a big frame and big muscles, well upholstered but still looking sharp and stylish in a tailored suit - potentially, a very tough customer if you got him irritated enough.  Riding shotgun next to him was a heavyset tired-smelling woman with alopecia and Persistent Sighing Disorder.  It felt like it might be a long ride.

We got out past the island before things got weird, long enough for me to have lulled myself into a premature sense of safety.  It started benignly.  The woman in the suit got a call on her cellphone - she quickly turned off the ringer.  But the clerky guy saw her phone and got rather agitated: “Wow, that’s the smallest phone I’ve ever seen!”

Wednesday, May 05, 2004

dang

This is the only photo I’ve been successful this morning in uploading as evidence of my amazing trip to pt reyes on sunday.  Screw it, I’ll try again tonight.  Meantime, keep your hands and arms inside the blog at all times.  I’m likely to start driving a bit more aggressively any minute now.

Tuesday, May 04, 2004

Tiki Time

The thing is, I was going to try to do this post together with my photos from Chimney Rock from Sunday, but that’s more than I can handle so let me just make this easy for myself.  It’s not a long drive from SF to Santa Cruz and thence up to the sleepy mountain canyon town where Jules lives, but it’s a world apart.  The weather, the air, and the sense of limitless joy - these are unique to the world of Jules and it was up to me to drive down and partake of them. 

It took me nearly 2 hours to make that drive, at the end of which I was met with joyful (well I enjoyed them) hugs from Jules and Mona, and Jules’ friend Jenn who seems very nice indeed.  We returned to the house, got settled a bit, and then I drove (in Jules’ parents’ car, with her parents, sister and nephew) up to the cool creepy haunted lodge, the kind of place with a dozen rooflines in every room, where peaked ceilings collide at strange angles as rooms stack up with woodsy casualness. I ordered a few drinks and shmoozed with Dennis the mellow barkeep, who showed me around the creepy Mermaid Room (still haunted by the spirits of naked hotties who would swim in the world’s largest jello-shot, which formed a wall of the room), the sliding-combo-fireplace-and-escape-tunnel, and the selection of weird fruity drinks.  Jules drank something that tasted just like a snowcone.  Magnificent.

At the lodge we got the blogging crowd together with Jill, Mona, Mia and Ryan, Pete and Erin, and Jenn and Rina, for local color.  We were an eclectic and noisy band as we poured ourselves forth from the bar and onto the city streets for the short drive back to Chez Vilmur, where Remy was pounding stakes, beers and sand - he’s a man who clearly knows what, where and when to pound. 

Then the party really got rolling.  Matthew and Humberto, in from Mo-town, ran the table karaoke-wise, providing lengthy and hilarious renditions of what I believe to have been popular hits from the 60s, lo even unto the present day.  At 9 Sawni called in and I got to meet her as well.  At 10 the karaoke machine packed itself up and moved away, and the crowd contracted till it was mostly us goofball bloggers and Jenn and a few other entertaining folk from Jules’ “real” life.  We continued to drink and chat in ever-changing and endlessly fascinating configurations which left me tired and disappointed at 2:30 am - disappointed that I had to leave.  I had another gig the next morning.  I got home at 4 am and didn’t get a lot of sleep that night. 

I’m not about to try to express the true depth of my feelings for my new friends in this pale, clumsy medium, but let me say this, at least: Jules and Remy are not just thoughtful and entertaining hosts, they have a lovely home and are flat out lovely people.  I could hang with them every weekend.  Plus they have a house full of really good books, and Jules sings divinely. Mona Bliss was an absolute delight to meet - after a year or so of on-line friendship, she was even cooler and nicer and sweeter and funnier than I’d expected, which was plenty on all scores.  Mia and Ryan just blew me away - I don’t know why I wasn’t ready for them but they’re both so genuinely funny, thoughtful, clever, and easy to hang out with.  I hope I didn’t wear out my welcome with them because I had so much fun with them both.  Jill and I got a few good chances for a meeting of the minds; she’s a wise and wonderful woman with a great perspective and enviable talents - I’m sorry she had to leave semi-early.  Pete and Erin, on the other hand, I couldn’t stop chatting with.  Each of them is a jewel of a personality, witty and intelligent and with their heads screwed on right.  Sawni, with whom I barely got to speak before it was time to pass the phone to Jules, was the sort of person I can imagine having known for a very long time already and liking more each time I spoke to her.  Jenn and Rina were also exceptional and cool and fun and amusing but I didn’t spend enough time with them either to be more specific - I’ll address that next time. 

I have left out many amusing and embarrassing details. That’s right. Next time, wrangle yerself an invite and you’ll see the depths to which I sink.  It’s worth the effort, I assure you.  And in the meantime, and in conclusion, Thank you so much, Jules and Jeremy, for a party I wish I could remember more clearly but that I’ll never forget.  You folk are tiki torches in a world of fluorescent overhead lighting.  And I for one think that’s a good thing.

Oops

This story just makes me laugh (courtesy of the Obscure Store, originally, for me) - the princess of pop is so enamored of hebraic occultism (or occult hebraicisms) that she got gen-u-wine aramaic gibberish tattooed on the back of her neck.  According to monty python, that’s where you find out where a bishop’s priory is, or whatever it is that bishops have.  But according to Brittny, it’s where you advertise your ignorance.  It’s been said that the Zohar should not be studied by anyone who has not completed 50 years of biblical and talmudic studies.  Brit didn’t even learn hebrew.  Now, I don’t speak hebrew, so that’s not something I can hold against her.  Then again, my tattoo is a simple geometrical symbol.  If I were going to do something permanent, I would try to get it right.  Who knows what you’ve put on your neck?  Maybe that’s God’s shameful nickname that the Rabbis learned years ago NEVER to mention out loud.  There are a lot of pitfalls when you start to dabble in holy tongues, apart from those with the standard piercings and studs.  What’s more, it seems that this isn’t Brittney’s first incorrectly-inscribed foriegn language tattoo.  Oops, my dear, you’ve done it again, haven’t you?  But this time YOU’VE ANGERED GOD.  Good luck on your next tour.  I recommend lots of insurance.

Monday, May 03, 2004

OCULAR ISSUES

* There’s some damn muscle above my eyeball that’s twitching like that time we hooked little Timmy Thomson up to that wall socket. It was sort of moderately entertaining at first, something new to think about during a meeting, but now it’s just irritating.  So hear me now and hear me well: the twitch has got to go. At once.  I have spoken.  Dammit.  (Update: still twitching.  I don’t think Timmy lasted this long.)

* I’m not a big student of the delicate art of facial hygiene, but I think I need to shave my eyebrows, or trim them, or something.  If I glance up without moving my head, the ceiling looks hairy.  I admit, there are times when the ceiling has been hairy, and other times when I thought it looked hairy but for a different reason - but this time I’m pretty sure it’s an eyebrow issue.  The next stage is likely to be spontaneous brow macrame, and nobody wants to see that.

* Dr. Andy gave me his prescription swim and snorkle goggles!  He and I look so much alike that folk often assume we’re related, but it’s not just a superficial thing - we’re alike down to our optical prescription, except for different astigmatisms, but those mostly clear up under water anyway.  Andy got keratotomy and doesn’t need prescription lenses anymore, and we’re going to hawaii together in a few months so I could really use the equipment.  Ergo, I’m completely psyched.  Now I have about three months to get my 12-year-old sunglasses replaced.  Finally it’s time for my polarizing influence on world events to start working in my favor.