Category: Personal

Ella, Sex, and Weight Loss

Two Ella Fitzgerald specials in one week. Yer humble host is in heaven. She’s one of the few singers I remember seeing on the Ed Sullivan show as a young’un. Loved her then and until the night she died. That night in 1996, I just happened to connect with a very adorable boy in Sacramento. We listened to Ella and fucked all night. On the way home the next day, I heard about her death and knew I’d always remember both her and the boy.

It’s one of the few celebrity deaths I remember quite so clearly. I also remember hearing about John Lennon, at the end of a really rough night working at McDonald’s when I was 16. That was rough. and I was at my grandmother’s house when Elvis died. That one didn’t affect me much at all. Probably because he’s really still alive, huh?

But lest this get morbid, I’ll move on to something more positive. I think.

It seems my sex drive has returned. Tentatively. As I mentioned in email to a friend in the UK this week, it nearly scurried right back in last weekend when confronted with the distinct lack of selection in my neighborhood watering holes. Maybe it was the rain. Or maybe I should have gotten drunk. But this crowd would have required getting REALLY drunk…

All the same, yer humble host senses that he might allow himself to be persuaded to do the nasty at some point in the next few weeks. Perhaps I’m just tired of watching the same old porn over and over again. Maybe I’m just excited that I can once again wear clothes I haven’t been able to put on in years.

This half-baked scheme features no guaranteed results. Ultimately, I’ll probably get bored with the idea and remember that I LIKE not having to chase someone out of the house early in the morning. I guess I could just do it in public like I used to, huh?

I’ll keep you posted, though…

Randomly Friday

Lifestyle links du jour:

And now, our regularly scheduled journal entry…

I was home sick most of the day yesterday. I’m over it now, but I was feeling moderately crappy, an definitely felt no urge to drg my ass to the evil part-time job. So I watched movies and TV all day. I sat through an entire half hour of Misterogers Neighborhood. It’s been a long time, but I still instinctively recognized that musics and I knew that we were about to go to the Land of Make Believe when he started rolling that toy trolley across the table. I still got a little excited too. Should that worry me?

I also started the tedious process of teaching myself both Dreamweaver and Adobe Golive. And the other tedious process of doing my annual pruning and re-modeling of Planet SOMA.

The re-modeling won’t be major; I’ve fiddled with the design enough over the past year and I like it the way it is. But I’ll be eliminating lots of older, weaker, and out of date pages. Some of them are already gone, the seriously outdated sex club guide being one of the first to go. Some older rants are being edited and dropped into the journals. The road trips are being edited as well, in hopes that I might actually go on a new one sometime soon.

Of course, deleting pages is not difficult. Deleting all the links to them is, especially when there are several hundred pages on the site.

I’m also working on the long-overdue new issue of Did You Bring Bottles. Stories and pictures are, once again, actively solicited. In addition to a few more pages on the Safeway saga, I’ll be starting an A&P section. Soon.

It’s time for lunch now, methinks…

Favorite Forks and Regular Guys

I have a favorite fork. You underprivileged souls with nicely matching silverware sets might find that concept a little foreign. I understand. It would be quite difficult to have a favorite fork when all your forks look alike.

My silverware, though, is — well, let’s call it “eclectic”. It’s been acquired through trips to various thrift stores. None of it is particularly noteworthy, with the exception of one set, of which I have about three settings. All the pieces have little sputniks on them. I love little sputniks; I even have saucers with little sputniks.

I have a favorite spoon, too. It’s an ice cream parlor spoon, so it’s bigger than usual. It’s great for cereal. Do you have a favorite fork or a favorite spoon?

Do you think these regular guys do?

Interesting site that last one, huh? Don’t get me wrong; I think it’s great that they have a group dedicated to sports and “guy stuff”. But my god, could they use the word “masculine” a few more times? Sounds a little like a penis size contest to me, although they make it clear the group is not at all about sex.

I’m not into sports, and therefore I guess I’m not masculine. But that’s OK. It’s not something I really aspire to anyway. I think, though, that if I were forming a group of my fellow sodomites who were into sports, I’d refer to it as “a group of sodomites who are into sports”, rather than a group of “masculine men”. I guess all the sissy sports fans I’ve known wouldn’t be welcome.

Nor would I. And that’s OK too. Trust me on this one.

Non-masculine things I’ve done today:

  • Yelled “where’s my damned trivet” while cooking dinner.
  • Crossed my legs in the unmanly knee over knee fashion.
  • Admitted publicly (in front of, gasp, women and heterosexuals) that, until last night’s news, I didn’t even know that Tennessee HAD a pro football team.
  • Addressed two of my houseplants by name.
  • Discussed my silverware online.

No, I don’t fear “masculinity” because it’s “threatening”. I fear it because I have no earthly idea what it’s supposed to be (and I don’t particularly care).

Love/Hate

Don’t really give a shit about football? Yeah, neither do I. But I DO love Super Bowl Sunday. It’s such a calm, quiet day. No one’s out roaming about. In a severely overcrowded place (by American standards) like San Francisco, a day like today is a special treat.

The best part: when I woke up early this morning, it was pouring down rain. A dark, rainy Sunday with no pressing commitments is a truly wonderful thing. At least until the sun comes out.

Or until you go the grocery store.

I hate Albertson’s. Again. Still. In my last four visits, I’ve been overcharged three times on sale items. Specifically, they charge me for both of their much-promoted “buy one get one free” specials. The first two times, I didn’t catch it until I got home. The third time, I didn’t buy anything on sale anyway. But by today, I checked my receipt at the register and realized I’d been screwed again.

I could see this happening once, but on three out of four visits, scattered over a month? It never happens to me at Safeway or at Raley’s (or Harris-Teeter or Kroger). Frankly, it ain’t a very good way for a company to make a good name for itself in a new market. I want Lucky back.

More things I hate today:

  • Yet another increase in the price of cigarettes.
  • The laundromat.
  • The sun finally came out.
  • Bad news via e-mail about my uncle who’s in the hospital.

On the plus side, things that I love:

  • My growing family of houseplants (now at 9).
  • The “Pop-up Video” version of “Leif Garrett: Behind the Music”
  • A good night’s sleep.

All in all, though, life is good. I actually rested this weekend. I needed it. And I feel better than I have in a month. I’ve made a few decisions about the evil part-time job as well, but you’ll just have to wait.

Now, if I could just quit smoking…

Good Frame of Mind

It’s been an insanely busy week (this is a recording…), but I find myself in a really positive frame of mind right now. It’s an unusual condition, and I’m sure it won’t last very long, so I’m figuring on enjoying it while I can.

Things just seem to be going well lately. I’m working a lot, but I’m not doing anything I hate (see exception below), and I even like all the people I’m working for. I have a zippy new computer, I’ve been maintaining generally good moods, and the house is even relatively clean.

There’s one weak link, my crutch, if you will. It’s the evil, hateful, soul-sucking on-site part-time job I still force myself to face 20-25 hours a week. I almost walked out last week. I foresee getting even closer this week. I just don’t care anymore.

It’s not so much that I hate any one single aspect of the job, although I do hate the fact that it’s much less flexible than it was when I was recruited into it a couple of years back. It’s more that I resent being there (and HAVING to be there at specific day and time), particularly now that I’m doing a lot more freelance work. I feel like I’m wasting my time when I could be spending it much more productively (at 2-3 times the hourly rate, thanks).

I particularly hate that I’ve become somewhat “indispensable”, more through lack of staff and training than through any particular greatness on my part. This, of course, makes my “flexible” part time job even less so.

So why don’t I just quit and spare myself the agony of this one glaring negative in an otherwise positive period? Largely because I’m scared to, I guess. It’s a sea of steady income in the feast or famine freelance world. And I’ve been working for this company off and on for over ten years, although I’ve spent the past two and a half in a wholly administrative capacity. And, if nothing else, it gets me out of the house once in a while.

I know. I need to give it up. I will very soon. Encouragement and long-term freelance projects actively solicited.

Things I love this week:

  • They Might Be Giants
  • Stouffers on sale, selected varieties, 4 for $5 at FoodsCo.
  • Mark, for doing me TWO big favors recently.
  • The book I’m reading on the history of Winn-Dixie.
  • Ma Pinkie’s Barbecue and Soul Food in San Mateo

Planet SOMA 1999 Stats

Just in time for my fourth anniversary (with eight days to spare, yet), I’ve compiled the official 1999 Planet SOMA statistics, giving an exciting (OK, maybe not exciting) look at which pages are most popular, where links are coming from, etc. This front page, for example, was accessed over 128,000 times.

It’s no big surprise that the San Francisco front page is number one, with 22,333 accesses. It is a bit odd that my sex club page, which hasn’t been updated since I stopped going to sex clubs about three years ago, came in fifth. Anyway, the top ten is follows:

The strong showing in the 1970s section is largely due to a link on Suck.com a few weeks back (which actually shut down the site for a few hours), although the front page probably would have been in the top ten anyway. The loft boom is a result of this section’s being featured in a couple of Yahoo Full Coverage sections.

Yahoo was by far my largest traffic generator as a whole, along with several other search engines and “that interview” in Nightcharm.

Of course, all this can distract you from the fact that I still don’t have anything particularly exciting to write about. This weekend I brought in the New Year, solidified my good luck with black-eyed peas and collard greens, and drove upto Sacramento on Sunday (through the delta on Highway 160) just to get out of the house. And I worked.

It rained today. That was nice. And I had some really good pork chops for dinner. I almost threw a computer through a plate glass window at my evil and hateful part-time job today, which would have made an interesting story had I actually done it. And I won free stuff at the vending machine twice. But that’s about it.

Big damn deal, huh?

On Email

Hmmm. How will I remember the final week of 1999? Probably as one where I was working an awful lot. This, of course, bodes well for things like eating and paying the rent, but not for answering email nor for site updates. Methinks the newest installment of Do You Bring Bottles will be delayed by a few weeks. Sorry.

It might do the whole site a world of good if I took a little break anyway. It seems I’m not writing about anything particularly interesting lately. I’ve been in a relatively good mood the past few weeks, which is cutting into my traditional crankiness. My life has taken a rather subdued turn of late. And I’m finding it increasingly difficult to spend leisure hours sitting in front of a computer, particularly with all the freelance I’m doing right now.

This is not to suggest that I’m giving up the site or even taking an extended break. I’m just threatening to pay a litle less attention for a few weeks, or at least until I feel inspired to write about something interesting or do something exciting. And I reserve the right to change my mind at any time. So there.

What I am admitting is that I’m taking a bit of an email break. It’s just gotten to be too much, I’m way behind (again), and I get this creeping sense of doom each time I look at my In Box. So I’m not going to worry about it anymore.

I used to answer all site-related email almost immediately, often at length. Two things have changed in the past few months: first, I get much more mail now and second, I’m less inclined to spend a couple of hours a day answering it. My lack of response has nothing to do with how I perceive the sender; in fact I often brush off interesting people more readily than quick questions, simply because the intersting mail requires a more thoughtful response (and therefore means more work).

I’m so very flattered that people take the time to email me about the site, and I feel bad about it, but I can no longer beat myself up about every single message I don’t answer (or take three weeks to answer). I just can’t spend so much time attached to a keyboard anymore.

This is, of course, not to say that I’m no longer answering email or that I don’t like getting it. I’m just answering non-essential, non-urgent mail at my leisure. And that means some of it isn’t going to get answered.

Ooh. That felt good.

A Big, Butch Housewife

There are those Planet SOMA readers who have somehow gotten the impression that yer humble host is some big, butch leatherman or, God forbid, a “bear”. I cannot begin to say on how many levels that assumption would be incorrect.

For now, I’ll skip the obvious facts that the only leather clothing I own consists of two belts and a few pairs of shoes. I shan’t mention that I find pain (given or received) to be anything but erotic. I’ll refrain, once again, from discussing how I’ll answer to “big, hairy guy with a gut” all day, but never to “bear”. No, today let’s concentrate once again on the “butch” part. I’ve written about it before, but not on quite such a personal level.

How did I spend my Saturday afternoon? Why, I popped in the Nat King Cole Christmas album and baked a big batch of cookies, thank you. They were passable cookies: those peanut butter sugar cookies with a Hershey’s kiss on top. A recipe my mom gave me several years ago which I’d never yet tried.

I mixed everything precisely. I rean a few “test runs” down the stairs to my neighbor who was refinishing a door in the basement (he being much butcher than I). He loves it when I test my baked goods on him. When thy didn’t turn out absolutely perfect, I even instinctively knew that I’d put in about one tablespoon too little milk.

So, yes, yer humble host bakes cookies. I even bake a quite tasty scratch pound cake, thank you. I’m a pretty good cook. I make dinner every night and carefully save the leftovers. I own two large and one small casserole dishes. I have frozen pie crusts in the freezer and brown sugar in the cabinet.

What’s more, I discussed the relative merits of certain cleaning products with Dan and Jamie over lasagna at Joe’s last night. I vacuum when I know I’ll be having guests. I comparison shop at the supermarket. I even scrub the bathtub from time to time. I’m getting to the point where I’ll make someone “a good little wife”.

However, for those of you who would still like to believe that I’m a big nasty masculine aggressive butch sort of fellow, I DO have a big pile of dirty laundry on the floor in my bedroom, because I haven’t been to the laundromat in two months. And I DO know how to change a tire. Will that be sufficient? Have I managed to salvage at least a piece of your fantasy?

Anybody want a cookie?

Since 1984

As I was having dinner tonight, I heard a sad song from fifteen years ago. About this time in 1984, it (along with several other sad songs in an era full of them) would have had the power to make tears flow, so melancholy was my state at the time. It was messy.

But that wasn’t what I was thinking about as I ate my meal. I was wondering how I came to be sitting alone in this improbable little hoffbrau in Daly City, California, eating turkey with mashed potatoes and green beans. A strange little place, it was. A relic from the time when Daly City was populated mostly by meat-loving WASPs. I was a little baffled by my surroundings, and I realized this was the last place I would’ve expected to be fifteen years ago. I wasn’t really sad or depressed. Like I said, I was just a little baffled.

I kept listening to the song (and munching on the wilted green beans) and remembered spending a weekend crying my eyes out to the same song in an apartment in Raleigh, North Carolina, and getting completely plastered with a friend whose whereabouts I no longer know. I thought the world was ending.

Of course, it didn’t. I’d get the idea that the world was ending many more times in the coming years. Somehow, it never did. Even though things never quite worked out as I’d planned, the world never once ended, and that’s probably good thing.

I’ve bounced around from place to place to place (and lots of places in between)without any particular plan or direction. I’ve done fun stuff, stupid stuff, and just plain pointless stuff in this impromptu approximation of a life. Sometimes I wonder what a nice, orderly existence would have been like. I think about how it might have been to go directly from college into a normal job, house, and relationship. It sure would have been less stressful. But I have a sneaking suspicion it wouldn’t have been quite as much fun either.

When I used to start bawling to that song, this “normal” path was the one I was planning on, but I guess I knew it was no more likely in 1984 than it is now. But of all the places I expected to wind up, last on the list would probably have been that little dive in Daly City on a Wednesday night pondering that stupid saccharine song. A chance combination of the music and bizarre surroundings put me in a very odd mood for five minutes or so.

Such, I suppose, is the power of a song. And no, I have no intention of naming it, thank you. I’m also not admitting that the photo above is of a truck stop near Bakersfield instead of a hoffbrau in Daly City…

Coming tomorrow: the election commentary I was too pissed off to post tonight. Until then read this.

Phone Phobia


1983. Before the phone phobia hit.

I will never own a cell phone. Before I start, Let me make it clear that this is not one of those increasingly popular rants against cell phones or their users. No, this is all about me, thank you, and about the fact that I absolutely HATE talking on the phone. Why on earth would I want any gadget which might make it necessary to do so more often?

My dad hates talking on the phone too. He always has. I guess that’s where I learned it. Dad is the kind of person who, when confronted with, say, an insurance billing question, would just as soon drive to the agent’s office (even if it’s in the next town) rather than make a phone call. I don’t go quite that far, although I will go online first wherever possible.

He also has a habit of going to the next room to make calls. I used to think it was because he was self-conscious about being on the phone in front of other people (as I often am). Now I realize it probably had more to do with the hearing problems he was developing after years of managing a pre-OSHA manufacturing plant.

My distaste for the telephone no doubt increased during all those years I worked in retail and customer service jobs. Invariably, a ringing phone meant I was about to get verbally abused by some yuppie slime who seemed to be on the verge of a stroke.

Phone etiquette pet peeves:

  • People who call ME and then immediately put me on hold. I generally hang up.
  • Call waiting. Possibly the rudest technology of the past twenty years. If you want people to contact you while you’re on the phone, then get voice mail so they can leave a message, dammit.
  • Answering machines with interminably long messages.
  • Idiots who, upon hearing your voice, realize they have a wrong number and then hang up without saying anything.

I’d be quite happy to avoid phone calls from here to eternity. But I probably won’t be able to. Thanks to email, I’m at least spared a significant number, though. Email is good. Email makes me happy. Phones just make me queasy.