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Thursday, 20 April 2000 (when the ship comes in) 6:26am Remember when you first heard Jane's Addiction? It was either late '88 or early '89; all my brother said was, "You have to hear this." We listened to Nothing's Shocking all the way through without saying a word, and nothing's been the same since. A tape with that on one side and Pete Townshend's Empty Glass on the was other was my constant companion through all of '89. My mother showed a burst of relatively surprising parental concern about the group's name. Were they songs about a girl with an addiction? To her credit, though, she defended me when I got accused of misogyny for wearing one of their t-shirts, a fairly classic painting of a chained woman in flames. Hell, Leonard Cohen used it on the back of his first album, which is likely where Perry Farrell first saw it.
A couple years later Ritual De Lo Habitual came out,
and "Three Days" hit the reset button once again. And here we are
now.
Littleton, Colorado.
For some reason, that strikes me as very appropriate.
Still, though: communists? Communists? What the hell? Communism
is friggin' deader than god, people! (The basic ideas are sound, but
much like a religion, once humans got involved it was damaged beyond repair.)
The scary part is, Burnout described
him as being "a younger guy," which probably means around my age. That
anyone born after 1960 would still be afraid of the big
evil nasty Reds just goes to show how in trouble this country really is...
A few months back, it was looking like that might have been me. I talked to my old boss about possibly moving to his current department in the capacity of editing and writing copy, but it never panned out. Part of that, admittedly, is because I never really followed up on it. I felt that lethargic inertia that I hadn't experienced since I was in school and had to write papers. In this case, it was rewriting the stock option instructions to make it more accessible. Except that even having been through that process, I still don't understand it enough to rewrite the existing instructions. I've also been informed that the higher-ups don't WANT the instructions to be too clear, lest it seem like they're encouraging the employees to actually use their stocks. Argh. This stuff gives me a splitting headache. It goes to show just how absurd the internal review process is, though. One of the reasons I was looking into possibly switching departments (or at least expanding my current duties) was for the annual review, to show that I had ambitions, want to grow, etc. So Brian and I went through a very painful process of trying to come up with the minimum number of "goals" for me over the next year. Do I lack ambition or the desire to grow? No, but I have a difficult time itemizing it. Hell, I can't even itemize what it is I do now—I dread the day when I have to update my resume. Anyway, the primary thrust of the review was all these big grand plans I have to move on to bigger and better things. Then, a while later when I get called in for the "compensation" portion of the review process, what do they tell me? That they love my work and don't want me to leave. So, for a positive review I need to detail all the things I'd rather be doing...then they tell me that they want me to stay right where I am. Corporate logic at its finest.
Oh well. At least I still like what I'm doing. Sometimes it seems like I'm in more
of a supervisory/consulting position, since Leigh does the majority of the grunt work
(i.e., coding). Happily, I might add; her eyes light up when I hand off stuff to her,
and she always offers to help when she has nothing to do. It's days like today when
I feel like I'm actually earning my keep, since I was able to step back from a semi-major
project that was getting way too complicated, realize why it was so damn bloated and
simplify it considerably. (Um, no. No, no, no. There is simply no reason that we should
be contracting an outside company to collect form data which consists of an email address
and the value a checkbox.) It's a good feeling to be able to see both the broad strokes
as well as the little details, and to be considered useful for it...
If today was long, tomorrow is likely to never end.
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Wednesday, 19 April 2000 (persistence of vision) 6:38am Torrential rain, then one really big wave...why is it that when I dream, it either involves mundane anxieties or the end of the world? Am I missing something here? 3:13pm Oh, no. It was bound to happen, but it still hurts. Vacant ever since the Den Mother forced Elizabeth to quit back in August, the cubicle between TFQ and I is being filled. I suppose this could be good, but it could also be very very bad, since it may result in him talking more. The sound of that voice makes me want to do evil things that would require repainting the walls.
Meanwhile, two entries today sputtered and died before I could get anywhere with
them. That's always scary.
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Tuesday, 18 April 2000 (spasmolytic) 8:53am Femme & Ultra-Femme: They're Cops On The Edge. 11:56am There. I did it. I made an appointment to get zapped this Saturday. That'll make everything better, right? Right. It does mean I'll have to be cancel my (admittedly tentative) plans with Lee, though. Ah, irony. 4:26pm Mina's scheduled to get spayed and declawed this weekend. She goes in on Friday morning, and thanks to some groovy new laser process which apparently lacks the fuss'n'muss of the old method, gets to come home on Saturday no worse for the wear—at the very least, she gets to avoid the bloody paws that her elders had to contend with after getting declawed. That same day I'm going in for electrolysis, and today after work I'm getting my hormone prescription refilled. All of which is going to be sucking the coffers dry, but more than that, makes me realize something very important: the body is not a temple. The body is not holy. The body is the furthest thing from holy. This does not mean it should be abused. Poisoning it with alcohol and tobacco isn't so much desecration of god's palace or any of that nonsense so much as it is pure self-destruction. It should be respected in the sense that it's what you have to live in. The body is our vessel, and if it's a temple, then it is a temple to who we are as individuals. If so, then it follows that what one does to one's body should be entirely up to the individual. If there was a god, I sincerely doubt it would give a flying fuck anyway. We are not made in its image; our myth of it is created in ours, and we're created by the sperm and the egg bringing DNA together. That DNA ain't god's work. If I were to be cloned, the result would be very different on many levels than the person I am today. This is not tragic; the only tragedy would have been if I hadn't been able to make the changes.
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Monday, 17 April 2000 (wasabi burn) 6:19am I've figured it out: getting zapped is like heroin. After a while, you need to do it just to feel normal. 9:09am Again with the heroin jokes. The X-Files last night got me to thinking, what's with chewing tobacco? What on earth could possess someone to take up that habit when the utterly gross effects are so well documented? At least with smack, you leave behind a beautiful corpse.
(Oh, relax.)
We place our order. I'm feeling wild and nutty and rebellious, so I decide to throw caution to the wind and get a Diet Coke. The waitress looks at me with a look of borderline disappointment, though there's a definite hint of playfulness. "Oh, no," she says, "You can't order a Diet Coke when you look like that!" I'm slightly flustered, but I laugh and explain that this qualifies as me indulging myself; normally I'd just order a glass of water. Maddy orders a (not diet) Coke, and the waitress observes with a smile that she can tell who wears the pants in the relationship. The waitress was obviously just kidding (although Maddy was wearing bluejeans and I was wearing velvets, which I guess means she has a point), but as I was in the restroom a little later I was thinking about what she said and was struck by a wave of identity vertigo. Looking in the mirror, I realized just how different a person I've become over the last few years. It wasn't regret or a sense that I was doing something wrong, not at all. (I'm still sad about some of the damage that my coming out caused, but that's another issue entirely.) More like I had moved far beyond what I could have even begun to think was possible for myself. Even if I am entering into what I may or may not eventually refer to my "unfortunate Crow phase"—specifically, I've gotten into the habit of drawing vertical lines above and below my eyes. I suppose it's also very mime-like, a connection which I don't care for because I hate mimes with a passion. The thing is, I like the way that it looks, and that's all that really matters. What keeps me from looking like I'm indulging in abject Brandon Lee worship, which I'm most certainly not, is both the fact that I'm actually familiar with the character in other formats, plus I'm not wearing pale makeup anymore. At least, I haven't for at least a month or so and I'm not sure when I will be again anytime soon. Didn't even when I went to Shrine a couple weeks back. Plain ol' ivory foundation from Cover Girl has been doing the job quite nicely, and while that's as light as you can buy when you walk into Walgreen's, it hardly compares to the stark white provided by the Manic Panic violet foundation to which I was recently devoted. I'd like to think this means I'm more comfortable with the way I tend to look naturally. Or maybe my finickiness surprises even me sometimes. The downside to a more natural look, though, is that my look has some very obvious natural flaws, namely my facial hair. My brilliant plan to not see Phil again until after Magenta's fashion show has been derailed by the ever-tenacious shadow and my extreme self-consciousness about it. With my luck, these last few weeks have been the all-important "active cycle" or whatever the hell it's called, and had I been going I'd have made a great deal of progress. Bitch, moan, whine. Just after 9pm we were downtown on Pacific Street. Although most of the stores I wanted to hit were closed for the evening, I'd been jonesing for a post-sushi cookie from the Pacific Cookie Company. Much to Madeline's shock, I subjected my body to more sugar in one sitting than it usually gets in a week: a scoop of mocha almond fudge ice cream atop a triple-chocolate cookie. Just like marijuana inevitably leads to heroin (it's in the Bible, just before the part about transsexuality being a sin and the 49ers being God's chosen team, though I'm told that in certain parts of the country it refers instead to the Packers in compliance with community standards), a Diet Coke leads to ice cream. Washed down with Producer's whole milk, proudly emblazoned with Hopalong Cassidy. I haven't seen cartons with Hoppy on them in years ("Hoppy's Favorite"); a cowboy on your milk carton is just one of those things you got used to growing up in Fresno. Afrerwards, our mutual radar picked up on a rather cute goth walking down the street, the slit in her dress running up the entire length of her leg. (Madeline commented that I would look better in it. I have my doubts.) She went into a bar which I've seen for years but never actually gone into, The Blue Lagoon. I was vaguely aware of its reputation as a gay bar, possibly the only one in Santa Cruz. A sign outside the door confirmed this, stressing/warning that all orientations, lifestyles, genders, et cetera were tolerated inside and that intolerance itself would not be tolerated. (Ah, the great liberal paradox.) Knowing a likely candidate when he sees one, the bouncer told us that there was no cover until ten, and that there would be DJs tonight. I asked what kind of music, and he said house. I was a little disappointed, since I knew there was a goth club in town called The Box, and seeing the girl come in earlier and seemed a hopeful sign. Still, it sounded kinda interesting—I'd been wanting to see the inside of this place since before I was old enough to get in—and when I told the guy that we may come back before ten, he offered to go ahead and stamp our hands now. The classic hard sell, except that it was guaranteeing that we wouldn't actually pay. All the same, we walked away with the word PAID stamped on our wrists. A bit of changing was required, so we returned to the car so I could change out of my velvets into the skirt I'd brought along. This required unlacing, removing, then putting back on and relacing my buetz, no simple feat in the car considering I couldn't sit at and angle which allowed me to actually see my hands. Foresight is in short supply, however, for while I'd remembered to bring the skirt along just in case, it apparently hadn't occured to me that if I was going to be wearing the skirt that maybe I should also bring along an appropriate top. All I had was the long, fairly shapeless t-shirt I'd been wearing. Alas. Using a scrunchie in the back to create a vestigial tail helped a little, and the red-and-black stripeys still looked nice with the buetz. As I suspected it would be, the inside of The Blue Lagoon looked pretty much like any other gay bar, and the layout especially reminded of The Cat Club, where Bondage A-Go-Go is held. The rush began shortly after we arrived, and before the dance floor filled up too much I danced to house for the first time in over a year. Doesn't lend itself to swoopiness as much as...well, as much as ANYTHING that would be played at a goth club, but that's what I got for being there on a Saturday night. As it turns out, the Blue Lagoon is in fact the home of The Box, but only on the first Monday of the month. Makes one appreciate the plethora of clubs available in the City every night, even if one seldom indulges in them. I'm paranoid. If I claimed not to be, I'd be lying. All the same, I think I can tell when the nudge-and-nod is really happening in my direction, and I caught a bit of it while dancing. I know I stood out; among other things, I was the only person out there without any light colors on. Even the one other noticeable goth (besides Maddy) was wearing jeans and a white t-shirt. (Oddly enough, I didn't see the girl we'd originally observed entering the bar earlier. I don't suppose I can rule out the possibility that she never actually existed, and that she was simply a hallucination brought on by mixing wasabi and Penguin Mints. Madeline had seen her as well yet hadn't indulged in either substance as much as I had, but, you know, body weight and all.) It was also obvious that this was a group which probably didn't get as many visitors and one-timers as the clubs in the City. A unfamiliar, 6' tranny is going to be noticed. All during the weekend, we saw headlines of the stock crash and tailspin into which it seemed likely to send the tech industry. It reminded me of being in Las Vegas for my 21st birthday in '94; the day we'd arrived, every television set we glimpsed was showing aerial footage of a white Ford Bronco being chased down LA freeways. For better or worse, the two events are forever connected in my mind.
Before heading back home on Sunday, and mindful of the storm brewing overhead, we got in some quality
shopping time. The tiny record store in question did in fact still have the posters I'd been wanting to
get. In another, I was trying to brush off a major case of the nudge-and-nod from the two girls behind
the counter (and hearing my mother's
voice in my head, wanting to know what I was expecting if I went out in public like that) when one of them
approached me. Turns out she loved my buetz and wanted to know where I'd gotten them. Dana would have been
so pleased.
Wow...I just remembered that Matthew Sweet is playing at Bimbo's 365 tonight. Very odd that it slipped my mind.
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Sunday, 16 April 2000 (macerative impulses) 9:05pm Maybe it can rain all the time.
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Saturday, 15 April 2000 (revendication) 7:20am Today we're going to Santa Cruz on our first thing resembling a vacation, however brief, since...I don't know. Going to Fresno didn't count, and when we would end up in the East Bay most often it was so I could get zapped or to run an errand of some sort. This is the first time, I think, that we've actually gone somewhere just to enjoy ourselves. What a concept. It'll also be my first time going there with Maddy rather than The Ex or my brother. This is extremely overdue. This is called getting on with my goddamned life, something which I now realize that I haven't been doing much of over the last year. And, more importantly, doing it on my own terms, both accepting my demons and allowing myself to be myself, going about the business of my life in the manner which comes naturally. I must. I absolutely must. Otherwise, there's no point in living. I hope that record store downtown still has those import Manson posters. Maddy, meanwhile, is rather excited by the fact that The Lost Boys was filmed in Santa Cruz. So many pilgrimages, so little time...
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Friday, 14 April 2000 (angry flesh) 9:23am So I'm in Tower Records last night (I'm not proud of that) and I hear this incredibly raunchy, Link Wray-esque chord-heavy guitar rock. I'm immediately in love. Turns out it's Flamejob by The Cramps, a group I'd heard of but never actually heard before; I'd always assumed they were punk. I suppose it could be argued that they are, particularly for being such obvious Children of Link. Later on at home I found that a bunch of their albums (including Flamejob) had recently been posted to the Usenet. Ah, serendipity.
In the subway this morning, there was a girl playing the banjo.
She was wearing a straw hat, her hair was tied into
pigtails, and it sounded like she was playing and singing
traditional bluegrass. I dropped a dollar into her case,
but in retrospect I wish I'd put in...for the life of
me, I can't find a decent way to phrase it without sounding
like I'm making a double entendre. More money than I did, y'know?
Sheesh.
Although I feel I should point out that while it's frequently attributed to Plan 9 From Outer Space, neither Criswell nor Ed Wood Jr. can rightfully take credit for the observation that the future is where we'll spend the rest of our lives. (Since they're both dead, them taking credit would in fact be quite difficult, but I digress.) In fact, it was originally used in a short film about a World's Fair in the fiftes—found in Rick Prelinger's uttterly essential Ephemeral Films series—a typically gushing Eisenhower-era piece about all the wonders tomorrrow will bring. Where Criswell delivered the line with a gusto that assured you he meant business, the narrator of the short film is speaks in a tone which soporific at best. He must have figured Huxley was right. Still, the burning question remains: why don't they look?
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Thursday, 13 April 2000 (down where we belong) 5:50am I swore I wasn't going to kvetch about the rain, so I'm not going to. 9:10am Not that there was any rain about which to kvetch. Instead, since it was a morning when I had to drive (waaah! No fair! I'm almost finished reading Snow Crash), the sun couldn't have been brighter. It'll probably start raining in a little while, then clear up by the time I drive home. As always, that's what I get for living in a part of town called the Sunset District. I got caught in the rain last night, actually, and didn't mind it one bit. It was kinda nice, really. Better than sun and heat. Among other things, I'd gone to Amoeba to get the new Lou Reed album. I also got a new (well, used) copy of further down the spiral to replace my badly scratched one, and for the second time in the last week I was asked if I've gotten my Nine Inch Nails ticket yet. Not if I was going at all—that was apparently a given. The answer, by the way, is no. I guess I'm not sure if I'm going to or not.
As much as I'd like another painfest along the lines of Magic and Loss,
all I can really expect out of Ecstasy is anger on the level of
"Riptide" from his last album, which was more mournful than anything.
(And my favorite song from that album is actually "Adventurer," which I
rather identified with Josie.) So far, it has not disappointed.
Yes, Tania, I think that's it.
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Wednesday, 12 April 2000 (harsh stone white) 8:40am As if driving in the East Bay isn't bad enough, a long-awaited Ikea store opens today in the worst possible place. Now, I don't much care for the word "yuppie," both because it's been abused ever since its incarnation in the eighties (much like "politically correct," another phrase whose meaning has been lost through misuse and intense backlash) and because I'm young, work in a city and am a professional. I don't bear a physical resemblence to the yuppie stereotype, however, and, I don't give a damn about Ikea. I'd never even heard of the company until I saw Fight Club, and I'm pretty sure that's not really how they want to gain recognition.
That said: damn, the yuppies around here certainly are getting all wet and squishy about it...
somewhere along the line, something went very wrong. what was corrupt found purity, and now corruption is seeping back in along the edges. and you are responsible. 11:50am I'm beginning to reconsider visiting Lee. The timing is feeling increasingly wrong. 3:54pm It's one of those great conundrums: sometimes, in order to retain your own identity and your most basic sense of self, you have to go completely against your nature. I'm not going to lose the progress I've made in my life. Not without a fight.
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Tuesday, 11 April 2000 (iodine) 7:09am This time, it really is from a cat. Honestly. 9:02am See? The insidious mark of the feline.
On the way to my office, I saw a dead skunk. It was lying in the gutter on Sansome, a pool of very red blood
around its head. Either it had just recently died, or skunk blood doesn't dry brown like human
blood. Can't say for sure. Oddly enough, it didn't smell. You'd think that when they died, they'd let
go in the same way that a human's bowels do upon dying. (So goes the conventional wisdom, at least. The
only death I've witness was Mary's, and that doesn't quite count.) But apparently not. Maybe it's a sign
of a mob hit. It means Luca Brasi sleeps with the skunks.
About an hour ago I get a call from the front desk of my old buidling. The receptionist tells me that my "parents" are in the lobby; should she have them come over to my building? I tell her to have them wait, and I'll walk over there. When I get there, I ruminate that they probably made it around Coit Tower, saw the CNET logo on the old building and figured that would be close enough. No, my mom says, they looked it up in the phonebook, and this was the only address listed. Yes, I said, that's why I wrote down my actual work address for you the other day, as well as my work number so that you could call me and I could help you find my office. No, she said, you didn't do that. She asks her boyfriend if he has any recollection of my having written down my work number and address for them. No, he doesn't remember that at all. They look at me with the kind yet exasperated tolerance reserved for flakey relatives. I'm firm believer in choosing my battles, and considering the violent smorgasbord I have before me these days (all you can eat, visit as often as you'd like, no sharing please) I figure I'll just let this one slide. I shrug and say that she'll probably find it buried in her purse six months from now. We get into her boyfriend's car, and as we're pulling away, she looks into her purse. Hey, whaddayaknow—a folded piece of yellow notebook paper with my work address, phone number and company name on it. Whoops. Gee. As we're waiting for the elevator in my building, I comment that the stairs are kept locked, a source of great annoyance to me becuase I'd prefer to walk up. On the way from the elevator to my cubicle, I make the standard jokes about the guy at the front desk, the Red Hallway, etc. She doesn't get them. The posters in my cubicle doesn't shock my mother, but the dirty words on my monitor (the "i'm so fucking beautiful" sticker) do. I can actually see her averting her eyes every time she looks in that direction, and it must have been a great act of will for her to ask me to show her what I do since it by definition involves the monitor. The sacrifices have to make sometimes. She also comments on how dark it is; I tell her how, when we moved into this building last year, one of the first things those of us sitting in this area did was to disable the overhead fluorescent lighting, because it's evil. She finds the idea absolutely horrifying. No, she says, they help you to see. Well, yes, fluorescence in the strictest definition of the word (the emission of electromagnetic radiation, especially visible) is a good thing, but fluorescent lighting in the office sense is a very bad thing for eyes. No, it isn't, she insists. In fact, she says, her optometrist has told her that working under fluorescent lighting has actually improved her eyesight, that it's made her eyes better. I shrug, comment that I hadn't realized such a thing was possible, and let that one go. Turns out that Bill Gates is beloved. I mention that I'm worried about my company overexposing itself, getting too well known and creating a backlash similar to Microsoft's. Oh no, she assures me. That would be a very good thing. I point out that although Microsoft is ubiquitious, they're also strongly resented for that reason, and Bill Gates is the antichrist to many people. Oh, no no no, she says, that's not the case at all. Everyone is very fond of him. If it weren't for him, we wouldn't have everything we have right now, and anyone who doesn't like him doesn't know what they're talking about, and that the government is just plain wrong. Another one I let slide. She does agree that I seem very comfortable here, appear to be doing very well for myself, and that she is in fact proud of me. We walk back to the elevators; she seems surprised that we're not taking the stairs. I mention that the stairs are locked, and that I'd told her this as we were entering the elevator earlier. Yes, of course, she does remember that. As I walk them back to the car, my mother practically blurts out that she loves me and is very proud of me, but...well...she just couldn't see "springing" me on her relatives. They're all so old, you see, and they just wouldn't understand... Of course. Who needs that kind of stress? Right! It's not that she's embarassed of me or anything, it's just that they're old, and... ...and they come from another culture—the same country, yes, but from another time which essentially makes it another culture—and they're just not used to this sort of thing. To people like me. Yes, that's it. She loves me and she's proud of me, but— Interestingly, when I'd suggest that same concept regarding my father (that his generation is ill-equipped to deal with queerness, as it was something that was not talked about ergo didn't exist, the whole old-dog-new-tricks thing), she didn't buy into it at all, didn't understand what I was trying to say, and was very insistent that she didn't understand, that what I was saying was utterly nonsensical. Now, however, she was agreeing wholeheartedly. Well, it's not like you'd invited any of my brothers, right? It's not like I'm some shameful little secret. No, absolutely you aren't. I didn't invite them, either. It's just that, well, you know, they're just so old, and— —and they wouldn't understand. Right.
We hug goodbye, and she leaves.
Shortly afterwards, I pissed off one of the Marketing honchos royally.
That always makes me feel a little better.
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