Four Years of Planet SOMA

I was chain-smoking and developing a mild headache four years ago today, as I finished and uploaded the very first version of Planet SOMA. It was a simple little site and I had no idea that it would grow into such a life-altering monster.

Sentimental fool or just full of myself? You be the judge…

Unrelated to the anniversary:

I had the disturbing realization that I’ve now lived in California long enough that I’ve started silently correcting news reporters when they mispronounce place names. Not just San Francisco names, but statewide. Of course, I was named an “honorary native” by an actual one over six years ago. I’m not sure if any special privileges are associated with said honor.

Speaking of states I’ve lived in, I’m embarrassed to admit that South Carolina is one, although I only spent four months there. Come on people, give up the friggin’ rebel flag. If it’s such a goddamn symbol of “historical pride” or whatever, why did take the Civil Rights demonstrations of the 1960s to get it flown atop the state capitol?

It’s a symbol, all right, but it doesn’t have a damned thing to do with history. If it doesn’t come down soon, I want a refund of my state income tax from 1986, please. With interest.

That said, I’ll be spending the rest of the evening laboriously planning the next four years of Planet SOMA. Unless there’s something good on TV…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pop Rocks

Time for me to do one of those heinous millenial lists now. Sometimes I feel that my life has been a quest for the perfect pop song (among other things). So here’s a list. If it seems a bit heavy on the 1970s and 1980s, that’s because that’s when I did the most looking.

Keep in mind that these are not necessarily my all-time favorite songs and arists of all time. They’re just a bunch of really bitchin’ up-tempo, often over-produced pop songs. Whiny love ballads and metal masterpieces don’t count. The songs are also in no particular order other than alphabetical, except as categorized.

Let’s just say they’d make an amazing tape or CD compilation. Call ’em lightweight, if you will. I don’t care…

The Winner:

  • “Starry Eyes” – The Records

The Runners-Up:

  • “Glass Onion” – Beatles
  • “You Say You Don’t Love Me” – Buzzcocks
  • “Downtown” – Petulia Clark
  • “Boys Don’t Cry’ – The Cure
  • “Every Word Means No” – Lets Active
  • “Georgy Girl” – The New Seekers
  • “Cruel to Be Kind” – Nick Lowe
  • “Driver’s Seat” – Sniff & the Tears
  • “New Romance” – Spider
  • “I Only Want to Be with You” – Dusty Springfield
  • “Pulling Mussels from a Shell” – Squeeze
  • “Incense and Peppermints” – Strawberry Alarm Clock

The Rest:

  • “I Beg Your Pardon” – Lynn Anderson
  • “Hello Dolly” – Louis Armstrong
  • “Every Time I Think of You” – The Babys
  • “Saturday Night” – Bay City Rollers
  • “Norwegian Wood” – Beatles
  • “One Way or Another” – Blondie
  • “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” – Blue Oyster Cult
  • “There’s No Other Way” -Blur
  • “Take Five” – Dave Brubeck
  • “What Do I Get” – Buzzcocks
  • “Fame” – Irene Cara
  • “Just What I Needed” – Cars
  • “Ring of Fire” – Johnny Cash
  • “Seven Year Ache” – Rosanne Cash
  • “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” – Cher
  • “Street Life” – Crusaders
  • The Love Cats” – The Cure
  • “Happenstance” The dB’s
  • “Mack the Knife” – Bobby Darin
  • “Punk Rock Girl” – Dead Milkmen
  • “Sausalito Summer Night” – Diesel
  • “Europa and the Pirate Twins” – Thomas Dolby
  • “Hello, I Love You” – Doors
  • “Girls on Film” – Duran Duran
  • “Morning Train (Nine to Five)” – Sheena Easton
  • “Stand or Fall” – The Fixx
  • “Hey Saint Peter” – Flash and the Pan
  • “New York Groove” – Ace Frehley
  • “One Last Kiss” – J. Geils
  • “Somebody’s Knockin'” – Terry Gibbs
  • “Our Lips Are Sealed” – Go-go’s
  • “Hold On” – Ian Gomm
  • “Live for Today” – Grass Roots
  • “Midnight Confessions” – Grass Roots
  • “Let Me Go” – Heaven 17
  • “Don’t You Want Me” – Human League
  • “Things that Dreams Are Made of” – Human League
  • “Whisper to a Scream” – Icicle Works
  • “You’re One” – Imperial Teen
  • “I Want you Back” – Jackson 5
  • “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” – Elton John/Kiki Dee
  • “Wives and Lovers” – Jack Jones
  • “The Break-up Song” – Greg Kihn
  • “Detachable Penis” – King Missile
  • “Good Girls Don’t” – The Knack
  • “Lotta Love” – Nicolette Larson
  • “Room with a View” – Lets Active
  • “Funkytown” – Lipps Inc.
  • “Ways to Be Wicked” – Lone Justice
  • “Summer in the City” – Lovin’ Spoonful
  • “One’s on the Way” – Loretta Lynn
  • “Into the Groove” – Madonna
  • “Cliche” – Male Model
  • “Gemini Dream” – Moody Blues
  • “Right Back Where We Started From” – Maxine Nightingale
  • “Everybody’s Talkin'” – Harry Nilsson
  • “Flash Light” – Parliament
  • “I Wanna Be Your Lover” – Prince
  • “Wolves Lower” – REM
  • “Send Me an Angel” – Real Life
  • “Talking in Your Sleep” – Romantics
  • “Neck on Up” – Todd Rundgren/Utopia
  • “Set Me Free” – Todd Rundgren/Utopia
  • “My Ex” – Sex Execs
  • “Homosapien” – Pete Shelley
  • “Strangers in the Night” – Frank Sinatra
  • “Might as Well Be Walking on the Sun” – Smashmouth
  • “Tainted Love” – Soft Cell
  • “I Got You” – Split Enz
  • “The Fez” – Steely Dan
  • “Breakfast in America” – Supertramp
  • “The Happening” – Supremes
  • “Ballroom Blitz” – Sweet
  • “Let’s Stay Together” – Tina Turner
  • “They Don’t Know” – Tracey Ullman
  • “Cantaloop” – Us 3
  • “Gone Daddy Gone” – Violent Femmes
  • “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” – Dionne Warwick
  • “Lovely Day” – Bill Withers
  • “Change Gotta Come” – X-Teens
  • “Senses Working Overtime” – XTC
  • “Generals and Majors” – XTC
  • “For Your Love” – Yardbirds

The Ghost Mall

In 1976, Carolina Circle Mall opened in the northeast corner of Greensboro, North Carolina. At over 750,000 square feet, it qualified as a regional mall, with three major anchors — Belk, Montgomery Ward, and Ivey’s (now Dillard’s) — as well as theaters and an ice skating rink. It was designed to create a real estate boom in the northeast corner of the city.

Twenty-three years later, Belk is gone. Dillard’s is gone. The theaters are closed. Montgomery Ward has the same lime green and burnt orange carpet it had in 1976, which seem to give it a remarkable staying power. Most stores are vacant; many of them were never occupied at any time in the past two decades. The county is seriously considering converting the mall into offices and a community college campus.

This is the definition of a ghost mall. Maybe this is why I’m so fascinated with ghost malls. I grew up going to Carolina Circle Mall pretty regularly. And during my early 20’s, I spent a year working in this mall.

 

Some would say Carolina Circle was doomed from the start. Its design was so outlandishly “70s modern” that the whole place looked out of date within two years of its construction. The neighborhood was not great and got worse over time; Greensboro’s wealth and population have always clustered to the west. On top of that, the site was plagued by an intense stench for its first few years due to a nearby waste treatment plant.

When I worked in the mall in 1985, rumors of its demise were already at hand. Over a third of the space was vacant even then and the remaining stores were vacating at an alarming pace. No one was updating; most chain stores were museum pieces already. The store I managed made its retreat shortly after I left in early 1986.

 

It was already very troubled. The few customers who braved the mall were redneck mall rats who came mainly to play pinball and buy drugs, and project kids who hung out by the skating rink. Unlike the malls of today which are designed to discourage teenagers, Carolina Circle was designed to attract them. Maybe this was one of the biggest mistakes its developers made.

 

A complete internal renovation late in the 1980s slowed the pace, and some chain stores actually came back…briefly. Ward’s attempted to mask their screaming orange exterior tiles, but didn’t bother to replace some of the original 1970s lime green shag carpet inside. In keeping with the fashion of the time, the interior of the mall was very blue, and (once again) looked rather dated only a year or two later.

After a few years, the renovated mall was even more like a ghost town than before. There was just no one there and no stores for them to go to. It was just plain creepy…

Chronology of Carolina Circle Mall:

Greensboro News & Record
Sunday, July 28, 1996

1958: Developer Joe Koury starts talking about building a shopping center in southwest Greensboro. He expands his plans several times during the 1960s but doesn’t start the project. While he waits, other developers make plans of their own.

1972: Alpert Investment Corp. of Atlanta proposes building a mall off U.S. 29 in northeast Greensboro. Then, in October, Koury’s Imperial Corp. breaks ground on Four Seasons Mall.

April 1974: Alpert breaks ground on the Carolina Circle Mall in the city’s northeastern outskirts. The owners figure the location will attract shoppers from Reidsville,Eden, Burlington and even southern Virginia. The site is difficult to reach by car, but Mayor Jim Melvin and other city leaders push successfully for public money for street improvements.

February 1975: Koury’s Four Seasons Mall opens off High Point Road. The two-level mall features about 95 stores and 900,000 square feet of retail space. It’s the city’s first enclosed mall.

February 5, 1976: Belk opens at Carolina Circle. It’s the mall’s first store.

June 1976: The mall’s ice skating ring opens.

July 30, 1976: The mall sponsors a gala ball benefiting the Carolina Theatre. More than 1,200 people dance to Glenn Miller and other Big Band music. There’s talk of making the ball an annual event.

Aug. 4, 1976: The mall holds its grand opening. Mall manager Ray Brantley says the special features like the ice rink will appeal to children much as Ronald McDonald and McDonald’s playgrounds help sell hamburgers. “The housewife spends most of the disposable income in the family,” he says. “And who controls the housewife? The kids. It’s true. We want this to be a pleasant place for kids to be.” Twenty-two stores opened, with another 50 to follow within a few months. Visitors also notice the smell of the city’s nearby sewage treatment plant. Equipment is later added to the plant to reduce the smell.

November 1976: Piccadilly’s cafeteria and the mall’s six-screen cinema open.

December 4, 1977: At 10:30 on a Sunday morning, three deer,apparently startled by cleaning equipment churning through the mall parking lot, panic and run through two plate glass windows. The deer then fall 18 feet to the mall floor, near the ice rink. One doe breaks its neck and dies. The other two are captured and released. Deer are a common site near the mall, which is still on the outskirts of town at this time.

August 1986: An Australian firm buys Carolina Circle through its U.S. subsidiary, Sunshine Properties Inc. of Dallas. The new owner promises to renovate the mall to keep up with Four Seasons. At the time, Carolina Circle’s vacancy rate is 10 percent, compared to 1 percent at Four Seasons. Shopper traffic is sagging.

April 9, 1987: Four Seasons opens its new third floor after 18 months of construction. That brings the mall’s repertoire to 200 stores.

June 1988: A $6 million renovation project is completed and Strouse Greenberg unveils the new Carolina Circle Mall.Changes include a new logo, brighter lighting, and a $250,000 custom-built carousel. The owners eliminate the mall’s most distinctive feature: the ice rink. Merchants and skaters are incensed. It was the only ice rink in Greensboro.

Jan. 15, 1991: Robbers shoot and wound a 54-year-old man while he walks out of the mall’s Montgomery Ward store with his two daughters. The incident fuels a perception that the mall is dangerous.

Sept. 11, 1992: Greensboro police open a satellite station at the mall. The city pays $1 a year for the space. City leaders say they hope the station will make shoppers feel more secure. Some Carolina Circle merchants complain that having a police station is a bad thing because it gives visitors the impression that the mall needs a police station.

Sept. 30, 1993: George D. Zamias Developer, buys the mall for $16 million in cash and agrees to take over the $21.17 million mortgage. Company president George D. Zamias promises to market the mall aggressively.

February 1994: The U.S. Postal Service signs a 10-year lease to put a mail facility in the first floor of the Carolina Circle Belk’s department store. Belk keeps the top floor open as a store.

July 1996: Some of the mall’s bread-and-butter stores -Camelot records and Waldenbooks, for instance – already are gone as Piccadilly Cafeteria says it will close its doors at the end of the month. A few days later Radio Shack says it, too, will move soon. Remaining merchants worry about how they’ll survive.

Updates:

1998: Belk and Dillard’s finally close their stores, leaving Montgomery Ward as the sole anchor.

Fall 1999: Guilford County has tentative plans to purchase the mall and convert in to offices and a community college campus.

January 2002: Carolina Circle Mall is now pretty much completely deserted. All the retailers have moved out, and the plan is that the center will eventually be converted into a new sports and retailing facility. I have my doubts…

 

July 2003: There is a sports center, of sorts. Several parking lots are now tennis courts and soccer field. Many of the surrouding banks and other buildings have been converted to storefront churches. The mall building is in a rather sad state of decay.

July 2004: Carolina Circle Mall is to be demolished and replaced with an entirely new retail development anchored by a Wal-Mart Supercenter.

Fall 2006: All traces of the mall, except for one or two outbuildings, are gone. A new Wal-Mart Supercenter occupies the space, and other stores are under construction.

My Old Store:

“Texas Jeans” was the name given to mall locations of the “Cheap Joe’s Jean and T-shirt Stores” chain. Malls preferred not have stores with “cheap” in their names at this time. I think there were a total of five Texas Jeans stores (Greensboro, High Point, Columbia SC, and two others) among the fifty or so Cheap Joe’s units. Cheap Joes was a fairly well-known NC chain, selling cheap “youth” clothing, knock-off T-shirts, and its own brand of jeans (Texas Jeans) modelled after Levi’s.

In 1986, the Texas Jeans stores were remodeled and rebranded as “The Exchange” to associate them with the “Surfers Exchange” surf and skate shops the chain had opened in Myrtle Beach and Charlotte.

The Carolina Circle branch was on the lower level next to Hardees and across from the food court and skating rink. The space had formerly been a resturant of some sort, and had a really large back room in what had apparently been the former restaurant’s kitchen. This extra space was used as storage for fixtures and other items for the whole chain.

I’m not sure when this branch opened. It was probably the early 1980s. It closed about 1987 or 1988. The whole company was gone by 1990. I was assistant manager here in 1985, and managed the store for several months in 1986 before moving to Myrtle Beach and then managing the Charlotte Surfer’s Exchange store from 1986 to 1989.

Photos are from 1985-1986:

080185 100185-06 100185-07
100185-08 100185-09 030186-1
030186-2

Related:

Carolina Circle mall City: A tribute to the late mall.

Things I Never Did

I never saw “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”. It’s been almost twenty years since I first even considered it. I lied to my parents on New Year’s Eve 1979-1980, saying that’s where I was headed. I ended up getting drunk for the first time instead.

All my friends in high school and even into college had seen it, many of them numerous times. None of them could believe that I never had. After a while, I started seeing it as a sort of badge of honor. I decided I’d never see it. I consciously avoided it on video and anyplace else. It became sort of an understated running gag.

Tonight, I decided “enough is enough”. I sat down to watch it for the very first time on VH-1. I was even a little excited.

After about 45 minutes, I realized I’d completely lost interest and changed the channel. I didn’t get it, it wasn’t funny, and I just didn’t care. This isn’t my “cerebral inner critc” speaking. God knows, I watch some flat-out crap and absolutely love it. Maybe you just need to see “Rocky Horror” in a theatre full of intoxicated 18-year-olds in order to fully appreciate it. Or to appreciate it all.

Color me severely disappointed after a 20-year wait. But at least I can still say I never really saw “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”.

While I’m at it, here are some other defining cultural moments of my generation which I’ve missed:

  • I never played Pac-Man (or any of its derivatives).
  • I never read “The Outsiders” (but I think that was more of a “girl thing” anyway).
  • I never talked on a CB.
  • I watched “Guiding Light” instead of “General Hospital”.
  • I never lived in a dorm.
  • I never made the switch from briefs to boxers and probably never will.
  • The first “Star Wars” movie is still the only one I’ve ever seen.

I’m so ashamed…

Friday Nights, 1972-Present

Friday night rituals over the years:

  • 1972: The Brady Bunch. The Partridge Family. Room 222. The Odd Couple. Love, American Style.
  • 1977: Stay home. Get depressed because I don’t have any friends.
  • 1979: Football games. Smoke cigarettes. Impress potential friends.
  • 1980: Go to the mall. Smoke cigarettes. Get stoned with new friends. Come home and pretend I’ve been doing neither. Fool no one.
  • 1981: Work at McDonald’s. Smoke cigarettes. Come home and pretend I’m not depressed about the fact that I no longer have friends since I no longer get stoned.
  • 1984: Radio show. Smoke cigarettes. Pretend I’m not depressed about not having a boyfriend.
  • 1985: Drive drunk to the queer bar in Winston Salem with friends. Get still drunker. Misplace cigarettes several times. Drive home. Pretend this isn’t a problem.
  • 1990: Spend the evening drinking lots of free beer at XTC, smoking cigarettes, and being aloof. Drive home.
  • 1994: Sit at home depressed and wishing the boyfriend I had could actually spend some time with me like he said he would. Smoke lots of cigarettes.
  • 1995: Hole in the Wall. My Place. Ringold Alley. Manic anonymous sex. Cigarette afterward on the way home.
  • 1999: Dinner with Dan and Jamie. Smoke cigarettes, while pretending not to be generally freaked out by life right now. In bed alone by midnight. Sigh with relief that at least I pretty much don’t drink anymore. Drinking might not be prudent this week.

There’s a message here. I’m not sure if I know what it is or if I want to hear it.