Amusing and Unamusing

Random things I’m finding amusing this week:

  • There are a frightening number of otherwise intelligent men (both gay and straight) who would rather walk around the city like drowned rats than risk looking “effeminate” by carrying an umbrella.
  • I can’t even make out with someone in a bar without realizing that (a) he has a boyfriend, (b) said boyfriend is watching us in a very unamused fashion, and (c) it turns out that I sort of know this boyfriend via email.
  • There is, on Market Street in San Francisco, a building called the Bong Building.
  • An email spammer advertising collection services was stupid enough to include his phone number in the ad. When I called to request (politely) that he not use this particular marketing technique again, he told me he had to run because my daughter was sucking his cock and he was about to shoot. He’s a true professional. Of course I would never advocate repeated phone calls which might run up his phone bill or anything like that, but his number is available upon request if you’re interested in his services.
  • Heard from the mouth of one “oh so butch” leatherman the back room of a Folsom Street Bar Sunday night: “I was right here when I heard about Princess Diana’s tragedy… (sigh)… I almost had to leave”.
  • At the Polk Street Rendezvous, the cops were called in to arrest an old man sitting at the bar. His crime, horror of horrors, was smoking a cigarette. The patron who called the cops was subsequently barred for life by the bartender, and may find he has trouble getting served anywhere on Polk Street for quite a while. (Thanks to Cavan for this one.)
  • Cocoa Pebbles on sale for $1.99 at the Grocery Outlet. Yay!!!
  • Redneck Earl’s Takeout Barbecue on El Camino Real in San Mateo definitely deserves a visit. They have sweetened iced tea. Those of you who are from the south understand why this is so (a) special and (b) unusual outside Dixie.

Things I’m NOT finding amusing this week:

  • Dilbert.
  • My checking account.
  • Idiots who just moved to the city and really can’t drive, but do anyway.
  • Those same idiots when they park.
  • My savings account.
  • Email addressed “Dear Adult Webmaster”.
  • Valentine’s Day.
  • Puddles. Everywhere…

St. Valentine’s Lament

Well…

It was Valentine’s Day yesterday and it’s over and I’m glad ‘cuz Valentine’s Day sucks and it signifies no more or less romance in my life than before and the only present I got was from my mom and dad and the biggest theme of my night was perpetually running into an ex that I don’t really want to speak to much anymore and…

Take a breath…

All in all, I guess it wasn’t a bad day. I had a good lunch at a neo-dive called “Redneck Earl’s” in San Mateo. I caught a few minutes of a really good A&E documentary on the Titanic. The rain made for a very nice long sleep last night. I got lots of free beers and shots tonight.

Holeinthewallapalooza at the Eagle tonight was great. Imagine: actual queer rock and roll bands playing in an actual queer bar. I imagine several slumming Castroids probably left without entering, fearing that the Eagle had finally “gone straight”. Rock bands in a queer bar? Couldn’t be…

And there was the cute geeky boy on speed, who wanted to suck my dick “just for a minute”. There’s an ego-booster. I wasn’t his “type”, he said, but he really liked the head of my dick. Swoon… Who could ask for more?

OK, so maybe I’m asking for more.

Maybe it would have been nice to have someone bring me a rose, although I doubt it since the very concept makes me want to puke. Maybe it would have been nice for there to have been something more entertaining on my agenda than watching “Dragnet” reruns. On the other hand, maybe I would have been happier if I HAD stayed home watching “Dragnet” reruns.

Despite all the rhetoric for which I am known, maybe it would be nice to be curled up next to someone I actually like right now. I guess that would be a pretty tall order since I like very few people that I meet, and since the ones I really like are often not at all interested in curling up for a long period of time (if at all).

This begs the question of whether my standards are too high and whether disliking a large part of the population is necessarily a good thing. It’s difficult, you know, realizing that most people really annoy me. It’s uncomfortable to admit that I’m not a “people person” when I’ve really tried to think of myself as one. It’s hard to acknowledge that I’m very often not a huge fan of humanity in general.

Retarded social skills? Perhaps. Low self-image? Maybe. Going to the wrong places? Good thought. Who wants to hang out with someone so damned ornery and negative and cantankerous and anti-social anyway? Or maybe everyone IS really annoying and I’m just better than all of them. This, of course, is the most comfortable way of thinking, but it’s pretty danged hard to defend.

Anyhow, a happy President’s Day to you all.

Storms and the Sunset

I’m really amused at how excited I am about the current round of storms here. By the east coast standards of someone who has seen hurricanes, this El Nino crap is pretty tame. But in my five and a half years in San Francisco, this is the first storm I’ve seen which has been even moderately worth paying attention to.

To start with, there was thunder and real lightning, sporadic though it may have been. There was even actual real (almost) hard rain, but of course, this didn’t really compare to the east coast soakers which force even the most arrogant drivers to the side of the road.

All the same, it was pretty, unless you had to experience it as your house was sliding down a hill or rushing down a river. The roomie and I were inspired to make a quick beach trip during a lull on Saturday afternoon, in search of carnage, choppy seas, or at least the woman we’d been watching all weekend on the Weather Channel. We found the choppy seas, but settled on lunch at the Doggie Diner in lieu of the rest.

Aaah, the Doggie Diner on Sloat Blvd…it’s the last relatively-intact remnant of a mid-century Bay Area chain. One still stands in Alameda, but minus the defining doggie. The SF location, across from the zoo and now known as the Carousel, serves up great burgers and chili dogs, and makes you forget completely that you’re in the most pretentious city on the west coast.

People know each other here. People are friendly here. The guys are very cute in that semi-suburban way which says they haven’t yet bought into the wholesale fashion culture mandated east of Twin Peaks. Everybody in the place knew the guy shown above; they talked about how he was going to Chico State now. I had really intense cravings to follow him there, not just becuase he was fuck-gorgeous (which he was) but also because he looked like he was capable of having a really good time on the spur of the moment without getting too complicated or worrying about what he was wearing or how developed his pecs were.

It’s like this all over the Sunset, actually. I worked in the area for a couple of years and was amazed at how different the west side of town is. And while I’m not itching to pull up stakes and move here, I’m also not convinced that this difference is necessarily as bad as we on the “cool side of town” seem to believe.

But I digress. Back to the storm. After the Doggie Diner, we took the unbelievable maze of subdivision roads into Pacifica, where some real weather was starting to kick in. The pier was closed, the roads were getting wetter, and just for a minute it almost looked like an eastern coastal town (except, of course, for the mountain backdrop).

Pacifica is such a creepy place, but I’m fascinated by it. The overall tone is suburban, but I’m not sure if it’s a suburb of San Francisco, Daly City, or just the ocean. It doesn’t really act like a beach town either. Maybe the perpetual fog just attracts those who would rather not be bothered by anyone else and who want an eerily quite space in which to commune with the sea, each other, or whatever.

Darkness set in, and we headed back to the City, still being amused at how exciting this relatively low-level storm seemed given the general blandness of Northern California weather. I watched the Weather Channel some more. This may be the closest experience to a “blizzard watch” I get for a while. That’s probably not a bad thing.

No Friend of “Friends”

Sat through my first episode of “Friends” last night. I know I’m running a little late on this particular trend. I actually only watched it because I was hoping to catch the new Apple commericial, which was scheduled to run between 8 and 9. Is it just my imagination or is this a really lame and stupid show? What is so appealing about these people? And which of the guys is the one who’s supposed to be so damned cute? I just don’t get it…

I learned many things in the past week while working on the current feelance web project. First and foremost is that most movie studio web sites seem designed primarily for people who have T1 lines in their homes. It should not take five minutes for a web page to load at 28.8K. Ever. Period.

Another bit of realization: people were really amused at the thought of me in a tapas joint. Maybe I’ve carried this whole “lowbrow” thing too far. On the other hand, it IS pretty unusual to find me in a tapas place or anyplace where I’ll have to shell out more than ten bucks (tip included) for dinner…

Why is it that every major bill of my year falls due in February?

Hmmm…sixteen years ago Friday was the first time I ever had sex in an actual bed. I think some sort of celebration is in order…

Anyone who knows me well is aware that I love rain and storms. In fact, overabundant sunshine actually depresses me. I’ve been like this since I was a kid. But jeez…enough is enough! It might be nice to spend at least one day this month not being waterlogged. I’ve killed off two umbrellas in the past week. Dashing up to the corner store has become a monumental feat of planning and timing.

Color me very pissed that Channel 44 has replaced my two back-to-back reruns of “Grace Under Fire” at 6PM with “Star Trek: The Next Generation”. Nothing against “TNG”, but I’ve seen ’em all, and it’s not exactly what I’m looking for at 6:00.

Three of the last four guys I’ve had sex with have begged me to cum in their mouths. Should this worry me? Should it worry THEM?

Word on the street is that The Power Exchange Main Station, an SF sex club, will be going co-sexual soon. There’s to be a male-only side and a male-female side. Seems like someone’s being left out doesn’t it? I’m sure female-female scenes will be tolerated on the co-ed side, as long as they’re doing it for the enjoyment of the menfolk. A question: do any heterosexual females have the same odd fascination with watching two guys go at it that so many straight men have with girlsex?

Yo quiero Waffle House.

Instant Retro

I imagine that any day now I should start seeing flyers for retro-mid-90’s-rave nights at the local clubs. Maybe nostalgia nights featuring early episodes of “Friends” or special showings of “The Crow”? Or maybe the ultimate in retro: a web site which is completely compliant with Netscape 1.2?

What’s with this idea that a certain period in time becomes “retro kitsch” before some people have even finished experiencing it? This seems to be a pretty recent thing. Somehow, I don’t think that my mom was fantasizing about the mid 1950’s when she was my age (in 1963).

No, the whole “retro” thing seems to be more or less a product of the 80’s and 90’s. Before the decade was even over there were “New Wave Nights” featuring oldies from about 1981 or so at clubs in bigger cities.

Of course, in many ways New Wave itself was a bit of a “retro” phenomenon — a backward glance at the girl groups, garage rock, and bubblegum of the 60’s. But at least a few decades passed before this particular appropriation of the past took place.

Why are we (post-boomers) such a nostalgic generation? And why are we so nostalgic for things which didn’t really happen very long ago? A Love and Rockets record from ten years ago is not exactly the stuff history is made of, after all. A Nirvana song from 1991 doesn’t even come close.

Are we crying out to the world “our generation DOES have an identity”? Or is our creativity just so thoroughly stifled that we can’t come up with anything new? Maybe our grasp of history is so limited that we just don’t realize that five or ten years is not a tremendously long time in the overall scheme of things. Is our collective attention span THAT short?

Perhaps it’s more of the Peter Pan syndrome; by repeatedly listening to music or watching TV shows from a few years back, we can continue to pretend we never grew up.

Maybe it’s just because so much of the media seems so incredibly bland in the corporate era in which we now live. But that’s a cop-out; there was a lot of crap in the eras we’re now romanticizing too. Break out those Survivor and MC Hammer records and you’ll remember.

Could be it’s just a vengeful reaction to the fact that all through the 80’s, we were forced to listen to crappy retread “classic rock” from the 70’s, because commercial radio by and large ignored anything new. Hmmm…maybe this “instant retro” thing DIDN’T start with us…

My parents listened to several decades worth of music before deciding what to get nostalgic about. They didn’t think of five-year-old songs as particularly nostalgic; they were just part of the repertoire. Kind of a nice perspective, don’t you think?

So how soon do the Spice Girls become “retro”? I’m just not hearing nearly enough of them lately…

The Year 2000 and Random Notes

As editor of the website Planet SOMA, I am tremendously worried about the phenomenon known as the “year 2000 problem”. I have been continually worried since at least the year 1990 or so. My worry is unrelated to the issues surrounding incorrect dates, etc. I’m more concerned about how we are to address the year 2000 once we hit the years 1999 or 2001.

Upto this point, we have treated the year 2000 with a certain reverence not extended to other years. After all, how often do you hear someone referring to “the year 1998” or “the year 1964” for example. I am concerned that once we hit the year 2000, we may become sloppy and start referring to it as simply “2000”. This, in my opinion, would be tragic.

Henceforth, I propose that (to be fair and consistent) all years be given their proper antecedents. No longer will the year 1998 be known as simply “1998”; we must be careful always to use the grammatically correct phrase “the year 1998”. Of course, we may still refer to past years as “the year formerly known as 1997” if we wish.

I ask for your help in this matter. The concept grammar is at stake.

Random notes du jour:

  • Chewing gum is exempt from sales tax in California as it is considered a “food”. Coca-Cola, on the other hand, is not. Clued into this tonight at Safeway.
  • It is now possible to get free beers from bartenders in California by offering them a drag off the cigarette you’re not supposed to be smoking at the bar to begin with.
  • Patty Duke playing Patty Duke in the last half hour of “The Patty Duke Story” on Lifetime is a pretty gosh-darn frightening thing. And I taped it just so I wouldn’t miss the ending. Which is even more frightening…
  • The body-piercing industry is not exempt from power-hungry shitbags. The decision this week by employees of Gauntlet to unionize is evidence of this fact. Five year “non-compete” clauses and “hole quotas” indeed…
  • Planet SOMA readers who go to the effort of meeting me face to face are damned fine people. Two instances this week have reminded me of this.
  • I really like the new comic strip “Zits”. Lately, I even like it more than “Dilbert”. This is sad.

Survey results:

The first 100 surveys are in, and these psychoSOMAtic rants are the number one “I’d like to see more of…” request. Color me honored. And color me impressed that the damn dirty pictures finished in a relatively lukewarm tie for third place, along side “Yer Humble Host and friends” and behind “SF information”. More results soon. Thanks to everyone who has already participated, especially the “you rule” voters.

Off to sleep now…

The Poll

I’ve been working on Planet SOMA for over two years now, believe it or not, even though the “official” grand opening date was 2 March 1996. One of these days, I guess it will be ready…

Actually, at the two year point, I’ve decided that things have gotten a bit cumbersome and that a bit of spring cleaning might be in order. The site now has well over 400 pages, some of which are glanced at no more than three or four times a week. I’m thinking it may be time to prune them back just a bit, since I’ve been a pretty major packrat over the past two years and have kept damn near everything available in some form.

The first 100 surveys are in. Why did it take two months for this to happen? Your guess is as good as mine, but here are the results:

Site Rating:

  • You rule: 64%
  • Pretty good: 35%
  • Average: 1%
  • You suck: 0%

Speed of Access:

  • Blistering: 39%
  • Pretty Fast: 46%
  • Adequate: 15%
  • Slow: 0%

I’d like to see more of:

  • 1. Rants (58%)
  • 2. San Francisco Information (44%)
  • 3. Yer Humble Host and Friends (43%)
  • 3. Dirty Pictures (43%)
  • 5. History-related (36%)
  • 6. Travel-related and Route SOMA (34%)

These results were pretty encouraging, although I realize that survey respondents tend to answer favorably in general, and on this site specifically they also tend to be those who spent a lot of time and looked around the site more than the average reader. The positive reaction to the rants and the relatively lukewarm reaction to the pictures were especially promising.

Thanks to all who have participated so far.

Nicotine Fits, Part 2

So I finally ventured into one of the nifty new California smoke-free bars Friday night. I’d been putting it off since returning from the holiday trip because I wasn’t sure I’d know how to behave and also because I was a little worried about just how a smoke-free bar might SMELL.

As it happened, I ended up coping in much the same way everyone else seemed to be doing so. I just went ahead and smoked. It was very simple. Of course there were no ashtrays or cigarette machines. One bar even featured a prominent “no smoking” sign. No one — patron or staffer — seemed to care.

At first I was a little timid, cupping the offending cigarette in my closed hand like a joint or something. I guess I was afraid the principal would walk by and catch me. It all felt so very junior high; I feared a month’s detention.

By the end of the night, with several beers in my belly and a cute little clubkid on his knees in front of me, however, I felt much more secure. I was pushing his head down on me with one hand while puffing away with the other. Somehow the opinion of the State of California mattered very little to me at this point.

So I guess I’m a desperate outlaw now, darn it…

I hear rumors that the Castro bars are actually observing the smoking ban and enforcing it. I’m not surprised; they’re just so much more sensitive over there. I’m surprised though that no one seems worried about whether or not the noisy smoking drunks on the sidewalk will affect property values.

Of course, there is the issue of workers being exposed to second-hand smoke. Once again, I would state that no one, to my knowledge, has ever been forced to work in a bar. When you take a job, you understand that there are some occupational risks. In bars, these risks include loud music, smoke, and having to cope with obnoxious drunks. Obviously, many people have decided that the rewards outweigh the risks.

Consider this: dealing with rude assholes is detrimental to my psychological health. That’s why I don’t work in retail customer service anymore. I never requested a law stating that it be illegal to act like an asshole in a retail establishment. I knew the risks when I took the job. I was prepared to take them. When I no longer wanted to take these risks, I quit.

But as long as we’re “protecting” people, may I suggest the following:

  • I guess we’ll have to get rid of conversation first. Too many hurt feelings and broken promises. Civil liberties can’t be considered an issue if someone might be offended.
  • Let’s ban on techno and house music in bars because they kills brain cells and make me homicidal, thus putting other patrons at considerable risk.
  • A ban on being horny in bars is probably in order because horniness might lead to unsafe sex.
  • We should eliminate attractive people in cruise bars. Seeing these people could make some less attractive people become victims of reduced self-esteem levels, causing them to drink too much or (gasp) crave cigarettes. Come to think of it, we’d better ban anyone who’s ever been attracted to an attractive person too…
  • No more TV. Radiation, y’know?

Who was it who said that people who are willing to give up civil liberties to obtain a sense of “security” are deserving of neither? I’m off to have a cigarette and see if I can remember…

Home

I’m home again. I’m tired. I hate flying. I hate airplane food. I hate that I didn’t bring home any Cheerwine or barbecue. I hate that I have to go back to work tomorrow. I love that I got so much great mail while I was gone. I hate that it most likely won’t be answered for several days.

And I really love this article in MacWorld, only partially because it mentions me. But I’ll cease with the self-promotion and go to sleep now.

All in all. seeing Mom and Dad and the few friends I managed to hook up with was great. But (surprise) I still can’t recommend Greensboro as the happening vacation destination of the year…

Still plugging along working part time as an Administrative Assistant. It pays the rent while the freelance stuff begins to trickle in and while I continue trying to decide what I want to be when I grow up.

At the Airport

Charlotte/Douglas International Airport. After several false starts, I’d estimate that I now have about a 75% chance of getting on the next plane headed for San Francisco. And I am definitely ready to get home. I hate that I had to leave my mom feeling so bad. She was in worse shape this morning than yesterday. I also hate that I never caught up with my friends Duncan or Daniel in the strange and surreal crush.