So yeah, being fully informed as to its location, we went and drove by Jimmy Stewart’s apartment from Vertigo last night after dinner…

Before dinner, of course, we’d relived our respective childhoods, me in the living room with a Banana Splits marathon on Boomerang, and Mark in the office with his new Robotech DVDs. I must admit I’d forgotten how good Jan-Michael Vincent’s ass looked when he was parading around Danger Island in those 1969 pants which gave him the perpetual wedgie. And how stupid those Arabian Nights cartoons were…

Dinner seemed a bit of an afterthought in the midst of all that, but it was pretty good too…

I was having a conversation with a friend and co-worker the other day and mentioned in context that I would never marry a pot-smoker. My friend was horrified and demanded an explanation. This has happened to me before, on several occasions. The funny thing is that if I’d announced that I’d never marry a cigarette-smoker (you know, a LEGAL vice), no one would have batted an eye and the chorus of “I understand completely” would have been near-unanimous…

Note that I didn’t say that I thought marijuana should be illegal (I don’t), but that I didn’t particularly care for the idea of a user sharing MY OWN HOME with me. But I guess that, as a San Franciscan, I should be more tolerant when choosing which vices I want to be surrounded by, rating them by way of some pre-approved social acceptability scale rather than by how personally offensive or annoying I find them…

Sorry. That conversation has been bugging me since Thursday and I had to get it off my chest…

Unofficial deadline for getting out of this steaming shithole of a city: the end of the year. Maybe I’ll expand later. So how was your weekend?

As I spent the $138 to replace my car window this morning, I thought about how lucky I was to be getting this education about those less fortunate than myself. Some might say that I was the victim. Far from it. The individual who smashed my window is clearly the victim here: the victim of a society which refuses to accept and embrace his alternative lifestyle.

I think it’s very important that — rather than placing blame on people who make a valid lifestyle choice and become thieves and substance abusers — we try to understand the reasons that they’ve chosen to live this way.

After all, it’s our fault that they made these choices, and our fault that we can’t accept them. By flaunting our jobs and the meager paychecks they bring, by our stubborn desire to live within the law and the rules of society, we make those who do not accept these rules uncomfortable, sometimes to the point where they just naturally lash out. Their self-esteem is at stake, dammit, and we need to understand what they’re feeling when they raid the broken-down cars and homes we’ve had the audacity to pay for through our labors.

Homelessness, poverty, and addiction are not crimes, after all. Therefore, can it really be considered a crime when some homeless, poor, or addicted individuals behave in a fashion which endangers the health, safety, and property of other people? Of course not. To suggest that such behavior is criminal would be to suggest that these individuals must take responsibility for their own actions. That wouldn’t be very tolerant, would it?

The fact that most poverty victims do not choose crime or violence as a lifestyle is immaterial. It is our responsibility as sensitive and caring San Franciscans (and as citizens of Mother Earth) to support all diverse lifestyle choices, even those which our misguided belief systems may suggest are incompatible with the rights of others. Who are we to make value judgments about those who feel the need to take what is ours?

Remember that tolerance is not just about accepting the rights of others to live as they see fit. It’s about supporting them in every aspect of their choice and making sure that there are no repercussions whatsoever for the individual making the choice. Any repercussions for adjacent individuals, of course, are irrelevant, as attention to these might stifle the freedom and creativity of those choosing alternative paths.

Think about it:

• The next time you’re mugged, consider giving just a little more than the mugger asks for. Offer him dinner, perhaps, or try to find him a place to stay for the night. Like most privileged individuals, you have a spare bedroom, don’t you?
• If you step in excrement on the sidewalk, take a minute to think about the differently-housed individual whose principles wouldn’t allow him to check into a shelter which wouldn’t accept his dog as a resident. Alternative co-housing communities are not the answer for everyone, and again, you have a spare bedroom, don’t you?
• When a car pulls up next to you (or parks in front of your house) with music playing at ear-splitting volume, understand that the youngster inside is merely expressing himself a manner he feels comfortable with. Respect it. Similarly, when children are running around the supermarket screaming and banging into you, it’s because their parents also want them to know the beauty of self-expression.
• Lastly, when confronted with the possibility of physical harm, always assure the attacker that you understand and accept his lifestyle choice. He’ll eventually respect and admire you for it, although he may not demonstrate this immediately.

People make choices. The fact that you may have chosen to work for a living and make something of your life doesn’t make you superior to someone who’s chosen an alternative path. Just different. Understand this difference and help it thrive. There’s no right or wrong here. This is San Francisco.

I know I feel a lot better having spent my money learning another valuable lesson about the community of man. To think, I might have frittered away that $138 on food or clothing for myself.

Instead, I bought glass. In that glass, I found a miraculous reflection.

OK, does anyone REALLY believe that Dubya and his cowboy posse start quaking in their boots whenever San Francisco or San Jose or Berkeley passes a resolution condemning military action? Oh mercy. The folks in Berkeley don’t want a war. We’d better pack it in right now, because as Berkeley goes, so goes the nation, right?

Note that the preceding statement has nothing to do with my attitude on any military action, pending or otherwise, but merely with my unending amusement that some city councils believe the federal government has any interest whatsoever in their positions on foreign policy…

So here’s to you, Mr. Robinson: you might have a little more credibility if you weren’t too chickenshit to include a valid email address in your repeated messages. But screamers like you only like it if no one can answer back or call you on your bullshit, right? I imagine you’re a rather timid, ineffectual sort who can only string two words into a sentence when doing so anonymously. But if that’s your trip, more power to you. I understand how much easier it is to win an argument when you don’t let anyone else play. At least I get a chuckle every couple of weeks…

How could I not love a boy who would willingly spend a Saturday afternoon driving me around so I could take pictures of old supermarkets in Sacramento? It was a good weekend; we ransacked a dying Kmart, hit thrift stores, and ate well on Saturday and then spent Sunday together in the front room playing with our databases (with the shades open so the neighbors could see)…

The only down side was when I tried to introduce Mark to the joys of jerk pork Saturday afternoon. We strolled into a place on Broadway in Sacramento which turned out to be from hell. Anyone know a really kick-ass Jamaican place in San Francisco so I can try again?

Wow. Who expected this? Really, I’m shocked…

Why do I love you?

• Because I’ve never once felt like I had to pretend to be anything other than what I am.
• Because you have interests which range a little farther than current fashion and “Friends”.
• Because, while I don’t agree with 100% of your political opinions, I have immense respect for the way you arrived at them.
• Because you drive me around looking for old supermarkets in strange cities and can at least pretend to be amused by it.
• Because you find sunshine and warm weather as depressing as I do.
• Because you never make me watch E! or stupid reality shows.
• Because you like Jane Jacobs just as much as I do.
• Because you like Cheerwine almost as I much as I do too.
• Because you’re a geography major.
• Because you’re the cutest geography major who ever walked the face of the earth.
• Because our first dinner date was at Denny’s.
• Because you’re obsessively geeky.
• Because you’ll never want to own a cat.
• Because when I was commuting to Fresno, you always took me to see bands and never dragged me to queer bars.
• Because you’re the most fun sex I’ve ever had.
• Because you bought me that “L.A. Freeways” book. Twice.
• Because you like Saturday morning cartoons and artificially-colored pancakes.
• Because you think Wal-Mart is a good place to buy toilet paper rather than a vile affront to the proletariat.
• Beacuse you keep a box of kleenex in your car.
• Beacuse you leave your Chucks on sometimes.
• Because you grew up in a mirror image of my hometown, with almost the same phone number as me, and with a mother who worked for the same, ummm, company as mine.
• Because you’re a Mac supremacist.
• Beacuse you write good dirty stories.
• Beacuse you’re a sucker for good carnitas and good grits.
• Beacuse you don’t get pissed off when my neck snaps every time I hear a skateboard roll by.
• Because we laugh at the same things on TV (and at the same idiots walking down the street).
• Because you understand the value of work.
• Because you liked “Vertigo” and “Harold and Maude”.
• Because when I wake up next to you in the middle of the night and look over at you, I feel so incredibly wonderful.
• Because you managed to convince me that I didn’t necessarily need to live the rest of my life alone and refusing to love anyone.

Gone for the weekend, fleeing the bears, fireworks, and assorted chants and clichés in favor of cafeterias, Googie, and the heretofore unvisited Hollywood branch of Amoeba Records.

I love Los Angeles. This is not a sentiment which I’ve ever been embarrassed to admit, despite the fact that residents of San Francisco are not supposed to speak such heresy. But for a series of coincidences in 1991, I might be living there rather than here now anyway, and sometimes I still feel the slightest twinge of regret at my decision.

Yes, I realize that the perpetual sunshine and the relative lack of fog or rain would most likely make me suicidal. I understand that the lack of a real pedestrian focus (although there’s more of one than some people realize) might be annoying.

But LA is a city of magic and of dreams, and it holds a fascination for me like nowhere else, except perhaps Chicago and Detroit. It’s a place where I don’t particularly want to live, but where I could spend untold months exploring without getting bored.

Oddly enough, I’d never before had ample opportunity to do this exploring. My first trip was a quick affair, a drive-by on the way to San Diego in 1991. Later trips were always connected with work, either mine or that of a significant other, and never seemed to allow me any time to do what I wanted to do, see what I wanted to see, etc.

Against our better judgment, we left on the Friday afternoon which began President’s Day weekend. It was also Valentine’s Day. Our original goal was to stop by Fresno and see Mark’s sister, but we learned on the way down that she was out of town, so we headed straight for Bakersfield, with a stop in Coalinga and another for a romantic Valentine’s Day dinner at an Arby’s in a truck stop.

This trip would be different. There was no real agenda…

After a Saturday morning breakfast at my favorite Bakersfield diner (discovered six years ago on a trip to Las Vegas), we explored downtown for a little while, looking at interesting buildings and wandering through the remains of a classic Woolworth’s store which now houses an antique mall.

We stopped at Long’s for previsions and cash, and made our way toward the Grapevine, hoping that the mudslide from a couple of days before had been cleared. Fortunately, it had.

We had one of those mileage milestones near the summit, which was the most eventful part of the Grapevine leg. Finally, we arrived in Greater Los Angeles, which is to say that we were within 40 or 50 miles of the center of town. We passed Magic Mountain and all the assorted beige suburbs, and finally the freeways started getting bigger and more intense.

We arrived at the lovely Motel 6 - LAX in time to realize that we’d be sharing it with about a hundred youth soccer teams. This wouldn’t have been to much of a problem except that this particular Motel 6 was a former Howard Johnson’s hotel, about 10 stories tall with only elevator access to the rooms. Unsupervised kids and elevators are not a good combination. But there was a king-size bed and a balcony overlooking an off-ramp. It was good…

Saturday night dinner was at Clifton’s Cafeteria, which was a high spot on the agenda which we didn’t really have. I’d been here once before and it’s a most amazing place, the surviving link in a chain of cafterias from the 1930s. Clifton’s is a wonderful joint, with most of those cafeteria classics I miss from the south (except for the collard greens and fried okra), and I don’t come to LA without visiting if possible.

After dinner, we roamed around downtown LA for a while. Lots of people tend to forget that there actually IS a downtown LA, but it’s there in its faded glory. The department stores and most of the theatres are closed, but it’s still a lively place, with shops catering to a largely Latino clientele and at least one really cool rock-goth-skate shop where I was pretty excited to see that Vision Street Wear is back.

We headed back to the Motel 6 to, ummm, eliminate the heavy dinner, and then wandered back out toward Hollywood and the LA branch of Amoeba Music. The San Francisco and Berkeley branches will never be quite the same for me; this place is a huge mecca for music AND video, and we spent most of the vacation budget here. It was truly amazing…

Further driving ensued (Hollywood Boulevard on a Saturday night is a nightmare, by the way) and somehow we ended up going all the way to Burbank and Toluca Lake, where we had late-night food at the perfectly-preseved Bob’s Big Boy I’d visited once before with Duncan.

Then it was back to the Motel 6. The soccer kids were, alas, not asleep yet…

Sunday morning. Breakfast required. Not an easy task, it seems. We tried Pann’s in Inglewood, which had an hour-plus wait. We tried Johnie’s at Wilshire and Fairfax (across from the old May Co. where Jan Brady bought the silver platter), but it was closed for good. We finally landed at a thoroughly generic IHOP in Hollywood.

Now fed, we tooled through Hollywood again, stopping by Amoeba so Mark could return something and I could take more pictures.

Afterward, we took a quick drive through the Hollywood Hills, visited the last Mayfair Market in existance on the planet, and headed for the sight (site?) I’d been craving all weekend. It was an unassuming little house on an unassuming little street in North Hollywood. It told the story of a lovely lady…

Yeah, you know the house…

We covered a lot of ground on this particular Sunday, most of it by freeway. Mark was itching to see “the stack”, and once we arrived, I knew why. It was quite amazing. It’s kind of nice to spend time in a city which is proud of its freeways rather than ashamed of them…

We also popped by LAX to see the Exposition Building, and to a Fry’s because, well, that’s what we do on the weekends, even in LA.

Being a freak for old shopping centers, I wanted to see the remains of the Braodway-Crenshaw center, an early example of an extremely well-designed center dating from about 1950. The two anchors were still standing, with the Broadway store having been turned into a Wal-Mart and the May Co. now a Robinsons-May. I was amazed to see it was still rather thriving, albeit in the midst of a suburb which was not exactly as middle-class as it had been fifty years ago.

Actually, the whole of Crenshaw Boulevard is an interesting cruise for those of us interested in old commercial architecture.

For the evening, we headed to Orange County, planning to eat in a restuarant at Knott’s Berry Farm which Mark remembered from his youth. Alas, it was not quite the same restaurant anymore, so we looked in vain for any interesting Googie architecture left in Anaheim, bought matching Snoopy mugs with our names on them, and went on our way.

We took a long surface route back home, stopping for dinner at a small Mexican place in La Habra, and looking for more neon. About half way home, I realized we were very close to the oldest operating McDonald’s in America, so we had to stop by there too. Afterward, it was back to the Motel 6 for our last night in the king-size bed.

President’s Day and home. We successfully had breakfast at Pann’s this time, covering my cravings for both Googie and grits. We also did a little cheap grocery shopping before returning to San Francisco, only partly so I could visit cool old Vons stores (most of which have been butchered inside since the Safeway takeover).

We made it through Ventura and beautiful downtown Oxnard, with its inexplicable “two-skyscrapers in the middle of a field” skyline. Soon, we were out of the city and its assorted field of influence and on the way to our planned dinner stop at McLintock’s in Pismo Beach. Interesting place, great food, and more Wranglers and cowboy boots than I’ve ever seen in one room in California. Note that I do NOT have a cowboy fetish, so this was merely a source of amusement.

The depressing sign suggested that our adventure in LA would soon be over…

All feelings about potential military action aside, you gotta love the simple truth of this letter in yesterday’s Chronicle:

I have to laugh every time I hear some peace demonstrator around here crow about how “courageous” it is to demonstrate against war. Courageous? It takes about as much courage to be anti-war in the Bay Area as it does to be anti-abortion in Vatican City.

And while I’m on the subject of newspapers, here’s one of the creepiest paragraphs I’ve read in quite a while, from Saturday’s LA Times. Note that the creepiness of what it says pales in comparison to the matter-of-fact manner in which it’s said:

The lack of a head and hands has stymied efforts to identify the woman, and police can only speculate as to why the knees were missing. Perhaps the knees carried identifying marks, Seyler said, or perhaps they simply didn’t fit inside whatever was use to transport the body parts.

Pictures from last weekend’s trip to LA (which will include no kneecap shots whatsoever, thanks) coming this weekend…

Random thoughts for a Monday afternoon:

• What is wrong with our country and its priorities? How could the greatest nation on earth have gone so far downhill in such a short time? There are currently only eleven Howard Johnsons restaurants in operation nationwide (link via Jonno), while a quick scan of the white pages revealed that San Francisco alone is home to more than SIXTY Starbucks. How did we become a society which places a higher value on pretentious, overpriced coffee than on fried clam strips and ice cream? It’s sad…
• This morning — as I do so many days — I watched a line of pedestrians crossing the Embarcadero midblock, against the light. Only this time, there was a car coming. Did the possibility of death by motor vehicle deter the hearty Bay Area pedestrians? Of course not. As a group, they somehow sensed that the protective safety cone provided by their own sense of self-satisfaction would no doubt protect them from any pain or inconvenience caused by an evil motorist. In fact, they looked down right surprised when the guy blew his horn to warn of his approach…

  It reminds me of the story of the guy who died after being hit by a car on a busy street. His tombstone read “He had the right of way.” These folks, alas, didn’t even have THAT going for them. Keep in mind that I’m a pedestrian much more frequently than I’m a motorist, and I too like to assert my rights. It is not, however, something I’m prepared to die over. I’m not sure what pisses me off more: the fact that these idiots were so quick to put their own lives (and that of the driver) in danger, or the fact that they managed to make me sympathize with some yuppie guy driving a Mercedes…

• Those wacky tax and spend Republicans are at it again. The California GOP is now backing the multi-million dollar recall effort against Governor Gray Davis. Funny, I thought this particular party was supposed to be more concerned with eliminating wasteful spending than engaging in it. The idea is ludicrous; the recall will not be successful and its sole purpose is to soothe the egos of the party which managed to field a candidate so unappealing (Bill Simon) that he was unable to defeat the most unpopular politician in recent California history. Slimewad or not, Gray Davis won the election fair and decisively, which some would argue is far more than our current Republican President can say. Get the hell over it, people…
• Quoth a Richmond “homeless advocate” in yesterday’s Chronicle, in response to that city’s ban of alcohol within 15 feet of parks: “Where are the homeless going to drink, if not in the parks?” Where indeed? The mind boggles…

You know what I like? I like not having a headache like the really nasty, vaguely debilitating one I had last night. Not having a headache makes me happy…

Only one person today noticed that I snuck in a new cover photo yesterday featuring yer humble host standing smack dab in front of the real live Brady Bunch house. Maybe I didn’t include enough of it. Or maybe no one cared. Anyway, more photos from LA coming soon, I promise…

Do you ever find yourself waking up in the middle of the night wondering what ever happened to Joe Piscopo? No? I didn’t think so. Neither do I…