Just some photos from my pre-New Year’s escape to the land of the Sunsphere:

For a variety of reasons, I’ve been listening to the radio more often lately. And I’ve been noticing lots of commercials for fake testosterone supplements that will make old geezers more manly in very important ways. I can only assume these “spark and passion” inducers are directed toward guys who are in preexisting relationships. Being the fat, middle-aged, single guy I am, the boys aren’t exactly standing in line waiting for their chance at me anyway. The last thing I really need in my life is something to make me more horny.

It seems almost cruel…

I’m trying hard to keep my sense of humor about the irony of scrambling to qualify for a new mortgage on a house I don’t particularly want to own (or, more accurately, to continue owning) in the first place. It’s necessary so that I can afford the payments by myself until I can sell the damned thing, and so that everything will be exclusively in my name. Suffice to say this ain’t “Property Virgins” and I’m not exactly giddy with excitement. It’s just a necessary evil, I guess.

The shitty thing about same-sex marriages unsanctioned relationships in the US is that even though there were none of the financial benefits beforehand, they’re still just as much of a pain in the ass to unravel when they end. I’m just glad this one is an amicable one.

If ever there were a justification for why urban freeway construction continues not to be a good idea in most cases, the Independence Freeway project in Charlotte is it. Construction of this monstrosity over the past twenty-five years has destroyed homes and businesses and neighborhoods and created a creeping blight that has devastated much of East Charlotte. And apparently the first phase wasn’t bad enough; the wasteland is now rapidly progressing farther eastward toward Idlewild.

I feel a little possessive about the east side of Charlotte, having lived and/or worked there most of the time I spent in the Queen City. It’s really sad to watch this happen. I wrote an article on the death of Independence Boulevard for another (short-lived) site five or six years back and I should drag that out and republish it here along with some photos I took for a photo essay on the same topic.

Talk Talk
It’s My Life (1984)

Because (a) they just played it on the radio and (b) this song is always appropriate–unless it’s being sung by Gwen Stefani.

Charles Addams, happiest amid horror, gets a Google Doodle

I finally disabled the Twin City Sentinel site yesterday. TCS–the name came from a defunct Winston-Salem newspaper–was originally designed to be a collaboration between Mark and me, first on local topics and then on things urban in general, but it never quite caught on with either of us (much less with anyone else) and it hadn’t been updated in a couple of years. The last PHP upgrade at Pair broke it, so I finally pulled down the remains yesterday.

I’ve added a couple of my articles to this site in case you care:

• Roanoke (23 July 2007)
• Making preserves out of history (16 February 2008)

…to do a good Steely Dan cover. Here’s proof.

…is more nights hanging out in the basement listening to Québécois radio and playing with my databases.

Malajube
Pate Filo (2006)

I really kind of like this band.

Kids who were born on the day I uploaded the first version of my first website will be getting their driver’s licenses tomorrow.

Damn.

My mortgage guy apparently works very late on Saturdays, which is good since we take care of what we needed to do earlier thanks to yet another “Mom crisis.” I sometimes fantasize about what having just one stress-free weekend a month might be like. I vaguely remember when weekends used to help relieve stress rather than add to it.

Some random links for tonight:

• Detroit: A City on the move
• The expressways of Toronto: Built and unbuilt
• What grocery stores used to look like in Toronto (in honor of the project I was working on this afternoon before the day went horribly wrong)
• 10:15 Saturday night

The LA Times just keeps being my “go to” source for serious journalism with no sensational headlines:

I don’t read the SF Chronicle anymore. Has it gone down this same path? Other papers? My local?

Now would probably be the wrong time to look back with amusement at the wood chipper jokes my former roommate and I used to make to my ex from Minnesota around the time Fargo was released, huh? That said, I think tonight may be a Fargo night. It’s been several years…

Tuesday morning at the doctor’s office (my own for a change) and the wifi is not working. The Muzak, inexplicably, is the theme from “The Price Is Right.” I’m not sure how I feel about that.

Fleetwood Mac
Tusk (1979)

Via Romleys, the Mega Longs is closing.

This was one of my favorite spots in Oakland (which observant readers know yer humble host strongly prefers to San Francisco). By the time my friends and I discovered it as part of our Friday night dinner in the East Bay diversions, it had ceased to be a Payless and was a Longs Drugs. The store was massive–more a discount department store than a drug store–and it provided lots of Friday night entertainment with its odd assortment of merchandise and inexplicably large garden center, toy department, and cheap food zone. Sometimes we’d drive over and eat at the Emil Villa’s barbecue joint in the parking lot and once in a while we’d take BART to Rockridge and walk over.

Despite an early 1990s remodel, it still felt like the late 1960s inside. I liked that. I always managed to get by for a visit on subsequent trips to the Bay Area but I knew its days were numbered when CVS took over. Even the building will be gone in a few months. Pity.

I was all excited because I was getting ahead on the $200,000 grant application I’m writing, and I had a good meeting with the dean yesterday, and my mom and dad were relatively stable, and I had two consecutive good nights of sleep, and…and…

And then I answered the phone.

It was my dad, very upset that my mom continues to be very upset about being “in jail” (a/k/a “in memory care”). I met him for dinner, but didn’t even order any because he’d killed my appetite when he started talking about how we had to “get her out of there this weekend even if we have to bring her home.” I bit my tongue and only hinted at the fact that there would be no “we” involved because I might just stop even answering the phone if he decided to bring her home.

For the 57th time, I gently reminded him how much she’d hated being home (what with all the intruders only she can see, especially that one who pretends to be my dad) and that she was pretty likely to be unhappy anywhere she went at this point, which is heartbreaking but true. And then I gently reminded him that we have probably hit the point where we have to worry less about her being happy than about her being safe. And she’s not safe at home in an insecure environment where he’s not capable of taking care of her and where his own health would suffer quickly if he even tried. I also (still gently) reminded him that we were not the only people impacted here, and that my aunts, not at the peak of health themselves, were only capable of taking so much more–particularly the one who lives next door and bore the brunt of Mom’s problems when she was home.

And speaking (gently) of impacting other people: I can’t live my life in perpetual panic mode anymore, afraid to answer the phone and having to drive thirty miles to their house at all hours every time my mom gets upset about something. I’m barely capable of even managing my own life right now, much less mine and my parents’. While I’ve tried to minimize it as much as I could, the last eighteen months or so have been completely devastating for me (things were bad enough before the problems with Mom started) and the worst thing is that I haven’t even had time to work through most of it yet. There’s only so much drama an emotional weakling like me can process in a short time. Thus my ability to simultaneously manage their lives and my own (not strong to begin with) gets a little weaker every time my dad panics and threatens to undo all the work I’ve done.

And you know what? I think, for once, that maybe he got it this time. Or at least I’m going to convince myself of that before I go to bed.

Pardon my vent. My dad is a really good person and he’s in a really bad place right now, too. I understand that and I’d never abandon him or my mom. And I think he’s genuinely concerned about how this is affecting me, or at least my work. He’s trying. He’s lost the love of his life. He’s sad and lonely.

But I’ve essentially lost two of the most important people in my life this year–the love of my life and the woman who gave me life–and I’m pretty goddamned sad and lonely too. And it’s the hurt that keeps on giving because, despite the loss, Mom and Mark are both still part of my life and there’s always one more fucking thing to deal with (a run-in at the nursing home, a new mortgage to sign, an incoherent verbal attack, a new cell phone plan) to remind me of what the relationships aren’t anymore. I’m just getting weary of minimizing my own feelings in favor of everyone else’s. It’s starting to seem like a running theme and making me feel a little like a doormat. But I’m whining now.

Again, pardon my vent. Back to francophone pop or something tomorrow. Francophone pop makes me happy.

Vulgaires Machins
Parasites (2010)

Nous sommes la crosse du siècle
Nous sommes l’industrie du disque
Ce qu’on a payé 3,07$
On vous le vend 30,58$

Random thoughts for the last Friday in January:

• It’s kind if a drag that it’s never really seemed like winter here this year, but I must admit that that the $107 gas bill I just received (half of last January’s) went a long way toward easing my pain.
• I may make a quick trip to Atlanta the weekend of 10 February to see this movie, in case anyone there wants to tag along. I’ve been obsessed with the Pruitt-Igoe saga ever since I first read about it in an urban sociology textbook almost thirty years ago. It was one of those pivotal reads that started me down the path toward my fascination with urban history (and urban decay).
• Thing I love this month: free copies of the dead tree edition of the New York Times every day at work. It’s apparently part of some “newspapers in education” program or something. I hope it lasts.
• Thing I hate this weekend: the fact that I’ll be spending most of it working. But I’m on deadline for a grant application to fund the first phase of my dream project, so work I shall…
• I bought Bugles tonight and I’m not afraid to use them.

I can’t even recall if we were at a party or in a bar. That’s how fuzzy it is. But I remember talking to my boss about how he’d lost a fortune investing in Canadian zinc mines. That really surprised me, but he emptied his pockets and all he had was a five and a toonie so I guess he meant it.

I was way too drunk to drive home so I flew to Fresno instead and crashed at the home of my former sister-in-law and her husband. We all watched Cops for a while. Then, just as I crawled into bed, the alarm went off and I woke up in Winston-Salem and started getting ready for work. I was remarkably productive all day today considering how busy I’d been the night before.

I was thinking earlier this morning about how I used to always feel younger than my years and how that’s no longer as true as it used to be. As you might guess, I was viewing this development rather negatively at the time. But now that I think about it, maybe it’s a healthy thing–a much needed reality check.

I’m forty-seven years old. That’s not ancient by any definition. It’s not like I’m ready for Medicare or dinner at the cafeteria at 4:45 (unless I’m with my dad) or Wheel of Fortune. Granted, I’m also not an annoying twenty-five-year-old hipster fuck but I think that’s something of a positive. And I wasn’t really an annoying twenty-five-year-old hipster fuck even when I was twenty-five, although I may have been closer than I care to admit.

I’ve obviously been subject to Peter Pan Syndrome in the past; I spent thirteen years in San Francisco, after all. And I’ve fetishized being a curmudgeonly old coot on occasion as well, which is easy to do in Winston-Salem where everyone is an old coot so there are lots of role models. Neither approach seems particularly satisfactory.

I think maybe I’ll just try being forty-seven for a while. It’s a good age, if not one that gets a lot of good press. I’ve reached a certain level of comfort with my surroundings but I’m not willing to settle for the status quo either. I’m past the whole “fashion victim” stage but haven’t reached the point where I no longer care about my appearance. I don’t have to jump on every trend but I also don’t feel that all technology and new ideas are inherently evil. I can’t drink a lot but I don’t want to either. Cute boys don’t leer at me very often but I also don’t care all that much anyway. So how bad can forty-seven really be?

At any rate, it’ll be over in six months when I hit forty-eight. I’ll reassess then.

Correct me if I’m wrong but I vaguely remember the Taco Bell on Drumm Street in San Francisco having served breakfast a good ten years ago.

It wasn’t, as I recall, very good.

Alas…

…ask yourself at 10:00 on a Sunday night, “What the hell happened to my weekend?”

Me too. But at least I do feel a slight sense of accomplishment. It’s gonna be a long week, though.

Thanks to some help from a higher-up, I had rather a major coup today with respect to my grant project, albeit not something I can talk about here at the moment. It’s a good thing and will give my application (and the project, if funded) terrific credibility, but the timing was…ummm..a might inconvenient, coming a little more than a week before the application is due.

My next ten days or so just got a lot more complicated. It was already pretty nuts to begin with and I’m already pretty thoroughly worn out. It’s going to get worse.

Better try to sleep some now.

So I keep hearing these radio ads for some Walmart/T-Moblie phone plan. For $35 or something (I can’t be bothered to look it up) you get “unlimited talk, text, and web.” A few seconds later there is reference to “unlimited web for the first 250MB.”

Correct me if I’m wrong but doesn’t that constitute…well…a limit?