Year: 1999

Chritsmas Eve

Yeah, it’s last year’s Christmas picture. No, I don’t look much different…

Christmas Eve greetings. Should you prefer another holiday, or none at all, please feel free to indulge yourself at your own pace.

Christmas plans are progressing successfully. I have a pork roast. I have both macaroni and cheese. I’m picking up the collards tonight, and I baked the cookies last week. Should be a regular Southern-fried feast.

I love my building. Unsolicited, I already have an offer of an extra table from my landlord (who rules the landlord universe) and extra oven space from my downstairs neighbor. It feels like kind of a cross between 28 Barbary Lane (minus the sex change) and a Lower East Side tenement about 1910 (minus the Yiddish).

Contrary to popular belief, we city folks actually do know our neighbors. We often even like them. This statement should not be construed as a dinner invitation to the new residents of the yuppie barn across the street. I sense they wouldn’t appreciate good collards anyhow.

I’ll move past Christmas now, in case I don’t have time to update in the next few days:

I’ve decided that I don’t really care that the new millenium doesn’t really start until 2001. It’s all semantics andway. The dates change in ten days and my checks with the “19__” on them become quaint souvenirs. On the other hand, I’m still annoyed by the semantics of those who continue to say “the year 2000” instead of just “2000”, unless they’re also in the habit of regularly calling this year “the year 1999”.

That said, I’ll note that I still have no plans for the big event. As previously stated, I hate crowds. I’m also not wild about New Year’s Eve in general. But I do have two bottles of sparkling cider and one bottle of cheap champagne. They were on sale at Safeway, so how could I resist? I’m still thinking of renting a room at the Motel 6 in Fresno and polishing them off by myself. The only down side would be that none of the thrift stores will be open on New Year’s Day.

Last but not least, look for an article (link forthcoming) featuring an interview with quotes from yer humble host coming soon to a Latino-Hispanic news site. Subject: gentrification. It’s always a strange thing being interviewed, and I’ve actually had the pleasure several times since Planet SOMA went live. I guess the strangest part is that I’m not sure I’ve ever done much of anything to make me particularly worthy of being interviewed. What a strange thing this Internet is.

Off to cook them collards now…

Christmas Day

You would have all been quite amused, if also a little frightened. Yer humble host spent an entire 24-hour period in a stunningly good mood. It was so uncharacteristic for me. Thanks are due to several good friends (and to a lesser extent to a pretty danged decent meal, along with Rudolph and the Grinch). I don’t think I grumbled once the entire day, although I did cuss when I burned myself on the macaroni and cheese casserole.

 

Note to self: throw more parties where you’re the only one in the room who knows everyone else. It’s fun.

 

The final menu was pork roast, collard greens, macaroni and cheese, pinto beans with onion and tomatoes (and a generous dollop of cayenne pepper), salad, bread, pound cake with strawberries, and assorted cookies and candy. And sweet tea, of course. There was wine and bread and pepermint hot chocolate, and more thanks to Dan and Sarah and Brad and Paula. Steve brought sugar. Mike brought wine glases and Chuck sent a card table in absentia.

 

I’m not sure what caused this Christmas stiffie I seemed to develop this year. maybe it’s my newfound domesticity. More likely it has to do with this being the first Christmas I’ve spent in San Francisco since 1995. It’s also possible that I was thinking this might well be my last Christmas here.

 

Whatever the reason, I was happy as a clam all day. I was boucing around the house singing along with Nat King Cole in the morning while I cooked. Dinner was great and the cramped quarters weren’t too horrible. We watched the Grinch and Rudolph and Charlie Brown and Dragnet.

 

Afterward, I even popped down to the Eagle and manage to have good time even in a public place. Miracles never cease. Of course, Eugene forced me to drink and listen to Blue Oyster Cult and Patti Smith and Al Green until last call, so I felt like death at 8:30 the next morning when my coma came to an abrupt halt, but that’s not a happy story, so I’ll skip it, being that this is an uncharacteristically positive journal entry. I’ll just admit to the world that my recent tea-totalling has caused me to lose my tolerance for booze (and hangovers).

Anyhow, my downstairs neighbor intimated that it was the best Christmas he’d had since moving to the city. That rather made it with the effort, I think.

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.

New G4?

I’m thinking of buying a new computer. Of course, I’ve been thinking of buying a new computer for a year, but this time I’m thinking of buying one this very week, since I’ve found a nice new G4 on sale for about $1300. Strangely enough, this will be considerably less than I spent for much less machine four years ago.

Of course, my move into the USB universe will require new peripherals, etc., so it’s not like I’ll get off quite as cheaply as the above might suggest. But it sure would be nice to be able to open big files and not to worry (for a while at least) about cataclysmic disasters involving my hard drive. It would be great to get DSL without having to buy a new card and without worrying whether it would do any good with my wheezing old 1995 machine.

And why not spend all this money right now? My finances are always precarious, but this way I’d be broke with a much faster computer. That’s an improvement, right?

Maybe it’s time for the first annual Planet SOMA Pledge Drive. I could insert pledge breaks right in the middle of all my most popular pages, making appeals to guilt and offering overpriced premiums. For a $10 pledge, I could offer an autographed JPEG. For $25, a color copy of my Best of the Bay award from 1998. And $100 could get you a cum-stained jockstrap or a pair of official Planet SOMA used Nikes. But I hate to think what I might have to do (or to whom) for $500.

It could work, couldn’t it? Or did I piss everyone off yesterday with my email sabbatical?

Things I love today:

Things I hate today:

  • “In the Heat of the Night” at 6:00 instead of 5:00 on TNT
  • Michelina’s Signature frozen entreees
  • The new condo-loft project which is about to obscure the Herb Caen mural on Mission Street
  • This damned “freezing cold inthe morning but warm in the afternoon” weather which renders a coat first a necessity and then a burden

The End of the World

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I don’t care.

OK, so the world isn’t really going to end, but it sure seemed like it was at my friendly neighborhood Safeway tonight. The lines were ten deep and there wasn’t a jug of water nor a decent can of soup in the place. It was crazy. Looked a little like a supermarket in North Carolina when half an inch of snow is predicted.

Me, I was just excited to see that Safeway has started carrying Sylvia Queen of Soul Food canned beans and still had Frosted Mini-Wheats on sale. I have milk jugs and can store my own water just fine, thank you.

The SFPD (all of whom are working tomorrow) have commandeered a majority of the parking spaces within three blocks of my house. Shops in Union Square are boarding up their windows for the weekend. It’s getting a little creepy ’round these parts.

Yer humble host has arranged to be safely stowed on the eastern side of Potrero Hill watching the fireworks in a purely residential area which drunk idiots and terrorists will probably avoid. I’m leaving my car there for the weekend.

So I guess this will be the last journal entry of the 1990’s (or the 1900’s, or even the 1000’s, for that matter). Should I say something profound? Should I wax nostalgic about the last 100 years? Probably not. The older I get, the more sketchy I am about what really happened the Middle Ages. Must’ve been all those mushrooms.

I’ll just close by wishing everyone a happy new year and inviting you to visit a dramatically unchanged Planet SOMA tomorrow.