Category: My Other Sites

Death, Rain, Love, Hate, Etc.

Death:

My uncle died a week ago, followed by a third cousin I hadn’t seen (or really thought about, I confess) for 15 years or so. Once I’d finished thinking about the family, Charles Schulz passes on just as his final strip runs. And then tonight came “death night” in prime time, with a guest bimbo on “King of the Hill”, Maude Flanders on “The Simsons”, and Giardello on “Homicide: the Movie”.

Rain:

I love rain, and I try to enjoy it in the winter since it doesn’t rain here in the summer. Rain is probably my favorite weather, with dense fog a close second. But enough is enough, already. It essentially hasn’t stopped raining for four days. Forecast for next week: rain on Mondy, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

Things I love today:

  • Valentine’s Day candy is already being marked down.
  • Green Apple Books

Things I hate today:

  • Puddles. Everywhere.
  • The idiot in the Mercedes who came within six inches of hitting my car today while turning in front of me (I was going straight) from the INSIDE lane.
  • Nicotine addiction.
  • The bitch in the BMW who rode my ass all the way down Bayshore Boulevard when (a) she could easily have passed and (b) I was already doing 50 in a 35 zone.

Final question:

Why does it seem the more expensive the car, the greater the likelihood the driver will be an asshole?

The Family

They buried my uncle today in Greensboro. Of course, I wasn’t there. I feel sort of bad, but there was no way I could go east right now. This is the third time I’ve had an aunt or uncle die since I’ve lived in California. I haven’t been able to go home for a single funeral. The time and cost factors are just too prohibitive when you live 3000 miles from home.

I fear it will be a more frequent occurrence in the next few years. Each time there’s a death among my parents’ siblings or their spouses, I think about the fact that my parents are getting on in years too. They won’t be around forever, and I don’t want my last memories of them to revolve around phone calls and one single visit home every year.

I’d like to get to know my parents again before it’s too late.

It’s not as if we’re estranged or anything, and it’s not as if I’m expecting them to die anytime soon. We get along well and we talk often. But we can only maintain a superficial relationship via long distance and email. I want to watch TV with my dad and go shopping with my mom. I want to listen to stories and to go out to dinner with them and even to indulge in the occasional hug.

I’ve spent most of my life running. Running from my hometown and running from all the attention I got as an only child. I often felt that I needed to get as far away from home as possible in order to live my own life on my own terms. And all my life, I’ve kept things from them fearing more that they’d worry than that they’d dispprove or lecture.

Except, of course, in high school, when I was doing lots of rally stupid things so they WOULD notice and stop thinking of me as their “perfect little boy”. But that’s another story entirely…

I don’t feel that urge to run anymore (at least not from my parents). I have my own life, and I think it’s less dependent on geography. I’m not really planning on moving back to my hometown. I just don’ t particularly like it there, for a number of reasons. But I am planning to move a whole lot closer and to do it fairly soon.

I think I can go home now.

Maybe that’s why I had such a great time in Fresno this weekend. Or maybe not. Anyway, the promised “more details” will be coming soon, as will some pictures from the “Mary and Rhoda” hot dog feast Sarah and I had last night…

1 January 2000

It’s 2AM in San Francisco. The world did not end. The lights are on and the cable works. The web did not fail. I’ve sent and receieved email. There were no major riots. For a Friday night, it’s strangely calm and quiet South of Market, even though the bars have just dismissed their New Year’s Eve crowds into the streets.

Apparently, this “millenium bash” was one of the calmest New Year’s Eve celebrations in San Francisco history.

For my part, Dan picked me up at 7:30. We then grabbed Steve and Jamie and took the back rodas to a house near Geary and Masonic for dinner with some friends. We watched the celebration at Times Square. As we talked, we realized we’d all been watching the live coverage of the events worldwide all day. At this point, we gave up on all traces of urban sophistication and pretension (pretense?).

After dinner, we all drove back to Steve’s house on Potrero Hill to bring in the new year and watch the fireworks over the bay. It was all very low-key, we were seven nicely agreeable individuals, and Steve and I (the only two drinkers of the bunch) couldn’t even manage to kill off one bottle of champagne. We did have streamers and balloons (five of which are now in my living room) and cookies and bread and cheese.

We laughed at the sparse turnout for all of San Francisco’s “official” celebrations. I occasionally looked out the window to make sure than South of Market wasn’t on fire. It wasn’t.

In fact as we drove through the remarkably sedate Mission district and onto Folsom Street on the way home, I noticed that the crowds on the street were pretty small even for a normal Friday night. I think people were terrified. Or just tired of all the hype.

All in all, it was a damn fine New Year’s Eve. When I got home, I turned off all the lights I’d left on, emailed my mom to let her know I was still alive and now I’m going to bed.

The traditional collards and black-eyed peas will be served tomorrow afternoon, although Safeway was sold out of fresh greens. All in all, I’d say that this shortage may suggest that there’s hope for the Bay Area after all. Or at least a hell of a lot of Southern transplants.

That said, happy New Year to you all!

Trip Post-mortem

Home again. Bags unpacked. Clothes put away. Car stowed in a relatively legal parking space. Ears still popping from the flight.

Coming shortly, essays and photos related to:

  • Squirrel shit.
  • Raccoons.
  • Okra, collard greens, and sweet tea.
  • A party in Dennis Hopper’s place which Linda Lavin and I were at.
  • Sleeping in the same motel room with my parents.
  • Condos, apartments, and even houses I could afford.
  • Thoroughly adorable Bosnian young’uns.
  • The Raleigh-Durham airport and the evils of air travel.
  • A 50-year-old supermarket on Walker Avenue.
  • Mom and Dad’s anniversary party.
  • The iMac.
  • Tearooms (or lack thereof).
  • Cheap cigarettes.
  • How much I don’t want to live in San Francisco anymore.

But I’m tired, so all of this will have to wait. I wouldn’t count on a lot of email responses for a couple more days either, but I’ll be working on it. Soon…

Bcak to SF

Lunch at the cafeteria in Burlington, and off to Raleigh and the airport. We said hurried goodbyes and I checked in at the front desk. At the metal detector, a guard (LIzzie Wright is her name, by the way) wouldn’t let me go through with my fake bullet necklace.

I wasn’t really so upset that she stopped me (even though she admitted she new it was nothing dangerous). I was upset that she was so rude and hateful about it, refusing to even let me sit it down while I went to get an envelope to mail it to myself. She obviously wasn’t concerned that it would explode or anything, otherwise she would have been worried when I threw it in the trash. Which I did, since I I didn’t have time to argue anymore.

This wasn’t a security risk and she knew it (she even said so). She just didn’t want to have her fat ass bothered by actually helping someone resolve a situation. Lizzie was nothing but a bitch and a control freak. Period. So I threw it away, thanked Lizzie for her southern hospitality, and got on the plane.

After paying $120 for long-term parking (cheaper than the tickets I would have gotten otherwise), I got on the freeway toward San Francisco. I flipped off two people on the way home, got tailgated three times, and got cut off twice. I suddenly had a strange longing to be back on Merritt Drive in Greensboro with its quaint little “aggressive driving enforcement area” signs.

Welcome home.

Back to Greensboro

 

I slept as badly as I knew I would. On the way out of town, we visited Carolina Beach and stopped at a barbecue joint in Garner. I grabbed refrigerator magnets and cheap cigarettes at a huge outlet in Burlington. And we came home.

Dinner at the J&S Cafeteria (see a trend here?) and my Dad and I went back to Harris-Teeter so I could get more provisions. I washed clothes.

Wilmington

I really didn’t want to go. I felt like crap, and I wanted to relax a bit and spend more time in Greensboro. But I didn’t say so, and we left early for Wilmington. My cousin and her husband had purchased a building downtown (the Masonic Temple no less) from Dennis Hopper. They were having a party celebrating the opening of the theatre and roof deck on the fifth floor.

Interstate 40 between Raleigh and Wilmington is hideously boring. I nodded off a few times. When we arrived in Wilmington and checked into the Hampton Inn, I really wanted to sleep. I was also a bit leery of sleeping in the same room with my parents for the first time in a good twelve or thirteen years. But there’s no polite way to say “I don’t want to stay in the same room with you so I’m getting one of my own. I’ll pay”

  

Wilmington was nice, if a bit of a traffic nightmare. The historic district downtown has not yet succumbed to the twin pressures of Starbuck’s and terminal cuteness, although a bar called “Dot-com” was a bit off-putting. I found a great dusty old used bookstore and actually spent a few bucks.

 

We had dinner in at the Front Street Brewery. These places aren’t known for their food in general, but this place was just plain awful. I got jerk pork. Ever eaten jerk pork with no spices at all? I don’t think they even used salt.

The party was fun. There was a play. There was music. There was beer, but I didn’t have any because I already felt rotten enough. Linda Lavin was there, although no one could quite pick her out. The view of the Cape Fear River from the roof deck was amazing. I know this because the roof deck was also the smoking area.

After the party, my Dad and I walked to the Waffle house by the motel and had real food.

Downtown Greensboro

 

Today was my day to drive around the city taking pictures, many of which will soon be featured elsewhere on the site. Today was also my day to realize I was getting a bad cold.

 

The pictures were great; I concentrated on downtown, the ghost mall, and old supermarkets. The cold, on the other hand, sucked and made life miserable for the next few days.

For those of you keeping score. My mom used to live in the building above.

Raccoons

Quick update. There are no new pictures. They will happen soon.

I’m just plugging along on Mom’s new iMac, writing in SimpleText (Windoze types think “Notepad”) just to see if I remember how (and because I have no other options until I can buy Mom a Zip drive).

The fiftieth anniversary is complete. About a hundred friends and family members appeared for the celebration. I wore a tie. People were shocked. I, of course, was just uncomfortable. But I consumed sufficient numbers of sausage balls to ease my pain.

Later this week, there will be quality time in Charlotte with Duncan and in Wilmington with relatives. There will be barbecue and grits and Cheerwine, and pictures of supermarkets where absolutely everthing is cheaper.

But for now, I’m going to sleep in my childhood bed.

Mom reserved me for a day of cleaning out the storage building behind the house, as about half its contents belong to me. I dug through old newspapers, toys, and other things I never had the energy to drag to California. It was dusty and smelly. When I got to the top shelf, I realized a lot of the stench had come from the piles of squirrel shit there. Apparently they sneak in through the eves.

It got even better a few shelves down when I saw this immobile furry thing. I jumped a little when I saw it, a little nauseous at the prospect of pulling out a dead squirrel. I jumped considerably more when it moved, and I saw that it was way too big to be a squirrel.

Turns out a full-grown raccoon was living inside that box of old Sears catalogs. Conveniently. my mom wouldn’t let me touch it, fearing rabies. I was comfortable with that, as I didn’t want to get near the damned thing anyway. Mom called animal control. The raccoon, cute as it may have been, went away to be euthanized (a polite term for “killed”). Mom was relieved and a little sad.

That night, I went to the library at UNCG to do a little research and to see if my old tearooms were still jumping. They were not, alas…

The Party

 

The reception began at 3, and was held at my aunt’s house next door. All in all, over a hundred people showed up. This was particularly convenient for me, as it allowed me to see all the relatives at once, rather than spending hours and days driving around town.

 

My function was to take pictures and look dashing in a tie. I took lots of pictures. I wore a tie. “Dashing”, however, would be too much of a stretch.

 

Some cool touches: my mom’s wedding dress and veil were on display, as were lots of old photos. The guests signed the original guest book from the wedding (on a separate page, of course). Another aunt made those cool little miniature ham biscuits. And I knew at least half the people there.