Year: 1999

29 November 1999

This Waffle House in Burlington NC may be the only one in captivity which deviates from the standard brown walls and yellow roof prototype so common in the south. But even in its deviance, it’s still a chain prototype. It used to be a Sunoco station. That said, you’re now ready to read about my trip home to North Carolina a couple of weeks back. Finally. Enjoy.

If you’re inordinantly interested in my past life, you can also check out the lost journal entries from 1988 and 1989-1992 that I found at home, while dodging raccoons and squirrel shit. They come pretty close to filling a big gap in the series. Or you could just skip ’em.

Unrelated to the above:

I seem to have developed a strange sort of Christmas fetish this year. I’ve been listening to the music and watching the assorted cartoons. I have an urge to bake. I’ve even been contemplating buying a tree. I’ve never bought a Christmas tree on my own, although I used to decorate the elephant plant when I lived in Charlotte. I don’t think Irma would let me decorate her.

Maybe it’s because I probably won’t be going home for Christmas this year until sometime in January. Maybe it’s my newfound domesticity. Or maybe it’s because this will probably be my last one in San Francisco. I don’t know. All I’m sure of is that I really want an illuminated plastic snowman.

One Little Link

Apologies to anyone who tried to hit the site but couldn’t on Monday. A strategically placed link at Suck.com resulted in a slight bandwidth catastrophe, blocking access for a good chunk of the afternoon and evening. I don’t envision a repeat performance. I appreciate the link, but jeez, you’d think they’d warn a guy…

Minneapolis and the Season

The lady from the credits on the Mary Tyler Moore Show just died. Not Mary, mind you, but the lady behind her on Nicollet Avenue when she threw her hat in the air. Why do I care? Because I have this strange connection to Minneapolis and because I’ve been on that very corner, taking pictures while someone who wasn’t Mary threw his hat too.

Minneapolis was my very first online road trip, over three years ago. I went back last year. It has even been suggested (on more than one occasion) that I should consider migrating. At times over the past few years, it has seemed like everyone I knew either lived in the Twin Cities or was from there.

But damn, does it get cold in the winter…

Speaking of strange connections, Bill tells me that North Carolina-based Krispy Kreme Doughnuts broke ground on its first Bay Area location today. It’s a good 30 miles away (in Union City) but this is a sign that there may yet be hope for this pretentious yuppie paradise. If I remember correctly, Krispy Kreme just serves plain old coffee and refers to its sizes as “large” and “small”.

First Chia sighting of the season: a commercial for the Chia Herb Garden on UPN44 airing as I type. When my ex-roomie moved out, he left me in possession of a couple of unused 1993 models. Do they keep? Would it have helped if I’d frozen them? Is there a Chia Pet website? I don’t feel like looking, but there has to be (there is).

By the way, UPN44 gets the above link as revenge against the other (unnamed) Bay Area station which didn’t give me a job a few months back and also stopped running “The Streets of San Francisco”. Damn them.

Lastly, having now rambled back toward the subject of TV, may I state how disoriented I’m going to feel tomorrow morning when all the cable channels change in San Francisco?

I’ll stop now.

The Snoopy Store

 

Photos by Sarah…

I went to the Snoopy Store this weekend. Did you?

I also changed a tire on the shoulder of Highway 101 near Rohnert Park this weekend using only half a jack. Did you?

As far as I can tell, the other half of my jack is somewhere in the middle of the Mojave Desert, where I must have left it after the last time I changed a tire. I’m not sure why my tires (like many of my cars) have to die such violent deaths. I take care of them. I really do.

Anyway, the Snoopy Store was more fun. Sarah wanted to go there and I wanted to hit used bookstores in Santa Rosa and Petaluma. We both wanted junk food of a variety unavailable in San Francisco (A&W for Sarah, Foster Freeze for me). A road trip was born.

Things I hate today:

  • Donut spare tires.
  • Donut spare tires.
  • Donut spare tires.

Thing I love tonight:

  • Cinderelmo.

Pretty deep and introspective stuff for the first journal entry in a week, huh? I’ll try to do better tomorrow…

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.

13 December 1999

Highlights of the weekend:

  • Dinner Friday night at Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles in Oakland, featuring some of the most amazing greens I’ve had in a long time.
  • A female bar-back at My Place.
  • A (legal) smoking area at My Place.
  • Count Chocula on sale for $1.99 at S-Mart Foods in Stockton.

Realizations this weekend:

  • I like most of the rest of Northern California a lot better than I like San Francisco these days.
  • I haven’t had sex in my house in about six months, I haven’t picked anyone up in close to two years, and I don’t particularly care.
  • They still sell Tahitian Treat, and I still like it in small doses.
  • Saturday night TV isn’t worth a shit.

Coming up this week:

  • Christmas cards. Maybe.
  • A new job. Maybe.
  • Laundry. Probably.
  • Voting for Tom Ammiano on Tuesday. Definitely.

Sorry. My mind’s not on this writing thing right now…

Peanuts

No more banner ad at the top of the page. The election is over. Things don’t look good for Tom Ammiano. I’m not surprised. Money talks, here and elsewhere, and that’s what this election was really about anyway. Kudos to San Francisco for refusing, however, to paint it in terms of race or sexuality.

Enough said about the election. I’d rather talk about the demise of “Peanuts”. It’s almost a cliche to suggest that Charlie Brown, Snoopy, et. al. were among the greatest pop culture icons of the 20th century.

I was lucky enough to be a kid when Peanuts was at the peak of its popularity and impact, in the early 1970s. My life revolved around the whole scene during elementary school. I had the lunchbox and all the books. I had the pennants hanging in my room and the pajamas and the sheets. I ate cookies made using Charlie Brown cookie cutters and cereal served in a Snoopy bowl. I still have “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and “It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown” all but memorized.

Best of all, when I was 6 years old, my parents gave me a stuffed Snoopy, which was my closest friend for several years. I slept with it every night until significantly past the onset of puberty. I was an insecure kid.

I know. It all sounds like marketing, and is vaguely reminiscent of Pokemon or the Smurfs. But “Peanuts”, especially in earlier years, was a little more intelligent and uplifting than the standard kids’ crapola of the past two decades (“Animaniacs” and Elmo excepted).

It wasn’t my favorite comic strip of all time. That honor goes without hesitation to the still-brilliant “Bloom County”. To be honest, I rarely even pay attention to “Peanuts” anymore. But I’ll sort of miss having it around all the same.

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.

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?

20 December 1999

Question du jour: Do you pronounce “GIF” with a hard or a soft G? I prefer the hard G, simply because the G stands for “graphics”, as in “graphics interchange format”. To pronounce it with a soft G makes me sound as I’m describing a brand of peanut butter. On the other hand, if you think of “GIF” as a word rather than an acronym, the soft G would be correct.

Question du jour #2: Does anyone other than me find it completely creepy that it’s so warm in San Francisco this week, the first week of winter? It was 75 yesterday. It rarely gets that warm in the SUMMER here. People were barbecuing. I was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt all day and still broke a sweat. I had to take the extra blanket off my bed last night. It’s just not right.

Note to readers in New England and the Upper Midwest: Please don’t send me death threats for discussing the weather.

Nostalgic indulgence du jour: I miss Bloom County, dammit. I dragged out my books this weekend and re-read the whole saga, from the Meadow Party’s 1984 convention in San Francisco to the Mary Kay Commandos and the Peguin Lust trials. I re-lived Steve Dallas’s alien transformation and re-visited Binkey’s anxiety closet. I’m convinced, in retrospect, that Bloom County is the only thing which made the 1980s bearable.

Salute du jour: Viva Berkeley Breathed.

Ego boost du jour: I was finally told by someone I’ve slept with that I seem to have lost a lot of weight. It doesn’t really count until someone you’ve slept with says it.

Diet foods du jour: homemade cookies, Sausage McMuffin, Sylvia Queen of Soul Food pinto beans, plus whatever I have for supper.

Question du jour #3: Is your evening meal called “supper” or “dinner”? How about your parents’?

Realizations du jour: I can’t think of much to write about today and some day soon people will start catching on that most of the pictures I’ve used lately are re-runs or weren’t taken by me, because I haven’t gotten my camera fixed yet.