Category: Reminiscence and Reflection

’90s Retro

Since the turnaround time for “retro” and nostalgia seems to be approaching about five years lately, I figured this might be a good time to begin compiling some official “90’s retro” items which will soon seem as quaint and dated as acid-washed jeans, Cold War propaganda, or avocado appliances.

Here’s my list so far:

  • Simple Shoes
  • Twin Peaks
  • The Macarena
  • Queer Nation
  • Jesse Ventura
  • Conan O’Brien
  • Ridiculously exaggerated baggy pants
  • Emoticons
  • Melrose Place
  • Martha Stewart
  • Boston Market
  • Real Stories of the Highway Patrol
  • Cigars and cigar bars
  • Boy bands
  • “Extreme” sports
  • “Extreme” anything
  • High-tech stock boom
  • George Magazine
  • Olestra
  • Leonardo DiCaprio
  • Modems
  • Windows 95
  • Jokes about stained dresses and oral sex
  • Star Trek spinoffs
  • Y2K paranoia

A couple more things for your soon-to-be-retro-kitch list:

  • Girls smoking (very big) cigars
  • Jesse Camp, the “people’s choice” host of MTV
  • All of MTV, especially Loveline
  • Jesse Ventura, the other “people’s choice”
  • The Blair Witch Project
  • Blair Witch Project send-ups (like the Scooby-Doo commercial)
  • Giant talking M&M’s
  • Ralph Reed
  • Newt Gingrich
  • Non-genetically-altered food
  • Campaign finance reform
  • Any Internet-related service not dominated by phone companies
  • Phones with cords
  • Personal comfort, privacy and dignity for airline passengers

October 1984

I found it tonight while looking in a box for something else: a scrap of paper which apparently never made its way into my 1984 journals. Coincidentally, I wrote it fifteen years ago, almost to the day. It fits my current state of mind startlingly well. Such timing:

9 October 1984:

Life never gets any easier, no matter what I may do or how I may change. It just brings different problems given different situations.

“Coming out” was not the catch-all and end-all I believed it to be during high school. The biggest change I see now, at age 20 and in my third year of college, is that I have no more idea where my life is going than I did in high school — perhaps even less. My dreams and my idealism (as well as my motivation to work for what I want) seem to have disappeared. What happened to all those things I was going to do? I hope they’re not gone forever.

I try to blame it all on a bad couple of months, but everyone has rough times. Those times, however, don’t cause them to lose sight of life. There’s something deeper involved. I don’t really know what’s wrong with me, and quite frankly it scares living hell out of me.

But I’ve got to go to class now. There’s not much I can do about it at the moment.

Self-analysis or self-pity? You be the judge. Either way, it hits pretty damned close to home for a 15-year-old piece of paper ripped out of a composition book…

October 1992

Seven years ago today, I was in Denver for the first time. It was the middle of a pretty exciting week for me. I was 28 years old. I had just said goodbye to my friends and family in North Carolina. I was driving across the country for the first time, headed for a new life in an unfamiliar place.

I had no idea what I was getting into. I’d been here exactly one time before and decided on that two-week visit that I needed to live here. I had a grand total of five friends on the west coast. Four of them were in San Francisco. I would be living with two of them in a studio until we found a bigger place.

I was a long-haired malcontent working for a retail chain making eight bucks an hour. I’d just bought a 1990 Chevy Cavalier for the trip, which took me through Nashville, Kansas City, Denver, Salt Lake City, and Winnemucca. I liked Denver so much that I considered staying there. Strangely, I haven’t spent any significant time there since.

Of course, I ended up living with another of my four friends for over six years. I shaved my head. I went on to become a manger with said retail chain, making significantly more money, until I eventually quit to become the marginally-employed freelance type you know today. Someone torched the car. I started a little personal website which became a big personal website. San Francisco has lost most of its mystery.

Everything was so exciting during those three days in Denver. Everything was new and different. I had a sense of direction and I was looking forward to the future.

Now that I’m bored with almost every aspect of my existence and too damned lethargic to do anything about it, I really miss those days and that thrilling, wonderful, frightening trip across the country. I wish I could get that feeling back.

Here’s the Story

Damn, do I feel old…

It was thirty years ago this week that the Brady Bunch made its primetime debut on ABC. And I remember watching it that first year. I almost never missed it. The few times I did usually involved a trip to the brand new mall in Burlington. I was usually grumpy the whole time.

The number one song in America on this important date in American history was “Sugar Sugar” by the Archies. It was a bubblegum universe, to be sure. No Vietnam, civil rights issues, or junkies in sight.

At one point, by the time I was 11 or 12 (a year or two after the Bradys had moved into syndication heaven), I remember catching upto four episodes a day. Must have been a special slice of heaven for my mom and dad.

Unrelated…

  • I had a job interview last week. Imagine my delight at not being asked one single question which started with something like “you are trapped on a desert island with two rubber bands and a piece of gum…”
  • Why did I pick the hottest day in two months to hover over the stove making gumbo?
  • Am I some sort of freak? My voice never cracked when it was changing.
  • Yes, that last rhetorical question was inspired by the Brady Bunch marathon I’m watching.

Happy Monday.

The Summer of ’82

Seventeen years ago tonight, I was on the radio for the first time. I vaguely remember that the music I played included “Mesopotamia” by the B-52s, “From the Air” by Laurie Anderson, and “Love Steet” by the Doors. And there was this public service announcement for the Runaway Hotline which started “cold out here…dark too…”, which became sort of a running gag among my friends and family for years.

Actually, it’s still a running gag among some of us, especially my Dad.

That was a great summer. I met some of the people who remain among my closet friends to this day, including Duncan and Carroll. My taste in music moved more from the 1960s and 1970s into the 1980s.

In honor of the occasion, I spent last night helping give birth to a bouncing baby website for the Swingin’ Utters. Punk rock sure has changed. Friday night used to mean going out and getting plastered while slowly developing tinnitis. Now it means sitting in an apartment in Lower Haight with Mom, Dad, and the cutest baby in the world working on the website.

Oddly enough, I have no major objection to this change…

What I have objections to this morning is the way that Southwest Airlines is fucking over my friend Scott who was scheduled to arrive from Detroit at 1:00. It’s noon now. He’s still in Detroit. His itinerary has been changed four times and they STILL can’t tell him when he’ll be leaving (or when or where he’ll be arriving). This is why I never fly, except in emergencies. Airlines in general suck and couldn’t give a rat’s ass about customer service.

Off to the laundromat now, as I seem to have an extra day to kill…

The Great Smoke-free Experiment of 1999

I gave up smoking for fourteen hours today and lived to tell about it.

I’m not sure what possessed me. I’ve been thinking about it for several weeks. So I let myself run out of cigarettes last night. I then managed to get through most of the morning without one. I held out until about 11:30.

It was quite unpleasant, although not quite as bad as I might have expected. I may try it again some time. Maybe I’ll attempt an entire day soon.

I’ve been smoking for over twenty years. I started in junior high, where it caused some problems. Smoking was legal at high schools in Greensboro back then, and that’s where I got really hooked. I’ve never been particularly apologetic about smoking, although I’ve generally tried to be considerate about it. I draw the line, though, in my own home or car, or in bars.

I also draw the line here at Planet SOMA. I’d like to think that if I were to quit smoking, I’d never become a self-righteous asshole like this guy who had the audacity to tell me not to feature pictures of myself smoking on the site.

Anyway, given my chemically-deprived state last night, I didn’t answer much email (I know…I promised…I’m sorry…) I’m not making any promises about tonight either. I also have not added my rally pictures. I may not do so. I fear the time has passed. All the same, feel free to browse the SF Weekly’s admission of responsibility…

On 1984

Fifteen years ago today was the day I realized I was falling hard. So began my first really big and heartbreaking case of unrequited love. The whole thing seems pretty trivial in retrospect, but at the time, I was a complete and total wreck. The three or four of you faithful readers who were there at the time will probably not dispute this.

Quickie version of the story: he was a friend who MIGHT have wanted to be more than a friend but, if so, he was unable to admit it. And I didn’t help the situation much with my own lack of honesty about my own feelings. And after many months of this drama, we actually got drunk and slept together. That was the beginning of the end.

Lest this sound like some cheesey “coming out” story, it’s not. We were both quite “out” at the time, thank you.

I have never been such a mess in my entire life. I couldn’t think of anything else. I let my entire life go to hell. I cried my eyes out weekly, and sometimes daily. I made my friends crazy with my depression and most of them never even knew what was causing it. I dropped out of school. I nearly dropped out of life, although not in a suicidal sort of way.

I often wonder if I EVER completely recovered from this one.

Since 1984, I’ve never let myself become so obsessed with anyone (although I have gotten moderately obsessed once or twice). This is probably a good thing, but I sometimes wonder if maybe I didn’t go a little too far in the opposite direction. I came out of it all perhaps a little less loving and giving and a little more selfish, particularly with respect to relationships.

Obviously I can’t blame every “negative” apsect of my life on this one failed romance. I was 19 years old; everything is a crisis by definition at at that age. But I did learn some frightening truths about myself from it. And this one coupling has affected every subsequent one at least in some ways.

1984 has some mighty tall and lingering shadows for me. All in all, I don’t much miss it…

I Want My Recession Back

When I first moved here in 1992, San Francisco (and California) were still feeling the lingering effects of a major recession.

I want it back.

It sure was fun here back then. Things were expensive here even then, but people with marginal jobs and marginal incomes could still move to the city and have intereting lives. It was possible to share an apartment for a few hundred dollars a month. It was possble to rent whole houses in Potrero Hill for about a thousand a month. If you looked hard enough, you could still find a certain seediness even in sanitized zones like the Castro, in places like Castro Sataion or the doughnut shop across the street.

South of Market was a great place: it was cheap, you could park on the street, the bars were fun, and you could even find … ummm … companionship walking down Folsom Street or among the still-industrial alleys. South of Market residents were a quirky and odd bunch, and most of my friends couldn’t believe I lived here. AIDS paranoia was lifting and the “new golden age” of sex clubs like Mike’s Night Gallery and the Church was flourishing in cheap Victorian flats. And a live/work loft was a drafty warehouse which provided cheap space for artists.

The dowdy, 70s-era Safeway down the street was never crowded. The 12-Folsom buses ran on time. Sort of.

The came the boom. Now the economy is jumping. What have we gained?

First of all, it ain’t “jumping” for everyone. A certain set of skills is needed for this economy and not everyone has them (or can get them). And, of course, what’s really “jumping” is low-paying service jobs, which means a smaller proportion of people are making any money anyhow. And these jobs most definitely don’t pay enough to survive in the new San Francisco of $1000/month studio apartments and $400,000 one-bedroom condos.

So once again, what have we gained?

A new whiter and wealthier demographic, for starters. The marginal types who used to make the city lively and interesting can’t afford to move here anymore. San Francisco has always depended on new arrivals of artists, musicians, and immigrants both for its character and to staff its many service jobs. Sure…we’ve added new jobs, but most of these jobs just won’t pay the rent. Very soon we may face a city populated by upscale citizens who wonder why (a) it’s just not very exciting here anymore and (b) why Starbuck’s can’t “just hire more people” so the latte lines would move faster.

We’ve also gained the privilege of living with perpetual construction. Everywhere. It’s noisy, it’s irritating, and it slows down the traffic (which has also increased). We get to watch neighborhoods overrun with poorly-designed plywood “luxury condos” and wall-to-wall chain stores.

We’ve become a city which targets the homeless rather than the economic and development issues which make MORE people homeless. We gleefully allow developers to destroy neighborhoods and drive up rents in the name of “progress” and then run the displaced out of town or throw them in jail.

We’re fast becomg a city of chain stores and trendy bistros and brewpubs, where it’s easier to buy a $400 lamp than a $4 hammer. We’ve sanitized our back alleys, eliminated smoke-filled bars, and all but guaranteed that anyone who can’t make the cut financially or socially will not be able to move here and cause trouble.

South of Market bars are packed to the rafters with gawkers looking for a scene which hasn’t existed here in quite some time (not that they want to PARTICIPATE in this no longer extant scene, mind you). I don’t dare drive anyplace during the week, lest I find myself unable to park when I get home. Even the tastefully renovated Safeway is a nightmare.

Yup. Things are jumping in San Francisco. This economic boom has a lot of people thinking about jumping the hell out of here.

I miss my recession…

9 April 1999

Hallelujah! McDonald’s has added sexual orientation to its non-dicrimination policy. Now queers have the right to cook really vile-tasting fast food for five bucks an hour. I’d imagine domestic partner benefits aren’t an issue. Does Master Ronald even OFFER benefits to his plantation workers? Maybe just to the overseers…

Maybe they need a visit from Michael Moore and crew. Yer humble host is most excited about his new show, The Awful Truth, which starts this weekend on Bravo. Michael Moore rules the universe as I currently see it. Among the planned excursions on the show: Michael drives a van full of sodomites through states which still have sodomy laws, videotaping the felonies they commit therein.

Beats hell out of another Friends re-run, huh?

In other breaking news, I’ve managed (thanks to Dan) to obtain something I’ve been wanting for a long time: an original Charles Chips cannister. For those of you who have no clue what a Charles Chip might be, this was a company which used to do weekly home delivery of potato chips. Yes, it sounds as strange to me as it does to you.

My aunt next door got Charles Chips delivered. Most of my other neighbors did too. I always felt a little inadequate as a child because we never had one of these cans in my house. Mom and Dad boughts Lay’s at Winn-Dixie instead.

But now I have one. My life is almost complete.

At the Track

Sure, the news today had stories about the fact that we now seem to be at war. There was also mention of the fact the Fred Phelps made his semi-annual visit to San Francisco on Friday (he’s done wonders for queers ever since we put him on the payroll as official spokesidiot for bigotry).

But today’s completely unnewsworthy story on horse racing at Golden Gate Fields was the one which caught my eye. You see, I grew up going to the horse races and I know what a wondrous thing it is.

About twice a year, my mom and dad and I (sometimes with my grandmother) would pack up the car bound for a little town called Charles Town, West Virginia and go to the races.

The trip was pretty similar each time. The first day, we’d drive up, check into our motel, hit that night’s races, and have a late snack at the diner downtown. On the second day, we’d drive to wherever there were races in the suburbs of Washington or Baltimore. My dad would watch the horses and my mom and I often hit a mall or whatever. Back to Charles Town that night for a repeat. On the third and final day, we’d either go to Washington (for culture) or one of the big theme parks in Virginia (for fun) and then home.

These were great trips. They weren’t really about gambling (although I did learn how to pick a winner). For me, and I suspect somewhat for my mom and dad as well, they were largely about people-watching. Some of the strangest characters in the world lurk about eastern race tracks: big fat drunk guys in plaid sportcoats, scary kids who looked like modern adaptations of Dickensian orphans, bored and damaged-looking mothers…

The food was great too: no frills pizza and hot dogs and hamburgers. There was lots of beer, too, but my mom and dad didn’t drink. The whole atmosphere was so incredibly seedy. I loved it. It prepared me for the pockmarked urban landscapes I love to this day. It was all about the working class (or maybe not even as well-to-do as that…)

Somehow, I can’t imagine that any track in the increasingly trendy and sanitized Bay Area could match up to Charles Town or Laurel or Timonium. No doubt, the uptight soccer moms of Marin County would be horrified at the idea of a child visiting such a place. It’s just too real for our sophisticated palates. I envision lattes and biscotti and sandwiches on focaccia.

But maybe I’m wrong. Anybody wanna check it out with me? Casino gambling bores me. Dog racing horrifies me. But I could be in the mood to hang out with the horses this week.