They feel familiar so far, like I've worn them before. That's a good start. And they're nice boots. We all know what that means. Maybe I should go out tonight and try my luck.

Speaking of good starts, I received my first payout check from Sherilyn's Grindhouse, my NakedSword affiliate site. It's a very very small amount, about the cost of the most expensive burrito at Cancun, but damnit, it's pr0n money. Which isn't to say I don't make money off of pr0n as it is (that's what my company does), but damnit, someone went to my silly little NS Direct theater, paid their money, and, one hopes, beat their meat. How can I not be proud?

After a while, I began to get seriously cold feet, as I realized that not only am I marrying a man—what the hell?—but I had no idea who he was. I tried to think of what he looked like or how we met, and nothing. It's the latter detail—that I can't remember how we met—which I use to justify to people that I'm backing out. Also, I realized it's better to do it now, before the actual ritual of commitment has been done. Oh, sure, it's reversible, but still, harm reduction and all. Nobody really gave me much grief about it, though when two certain authority figures were discussing my mysterious groom later on and agreedd that I did the right thing, they insisted on referring to me as "him" and "he," even after I corrected them. I have no idea how I'm dressed, if I'm appearing male or female, if they're considering it a queer or straight marriage. I sincerely hope it's the latter, but my brain does hate me.

I tried to call Vash on the trip back home (on a bus which functions weirdly like a cab in that people pay for distance traveled, BART-like) to let her know the wedding is off, but can't get through. Though she didn't live there, my home was actually Vash's place in Oakland. The driver followed me inside and a friend was babbling on at me about the paint on the walls when the insurance company called to say that just because I cancelled on the wedding didn't mean I wouldn't have to pay for the whole thing. Just like real life, that. Then, thankfully, I awoke.

As fascinating as his ideas are, certain elements of Dick's writing are difficult for my delicate post-millennial sensitivities. His racial and gender politics are questionable but understandable given his generation, but certain moments still have a needle-flying-off-the-record feeling. Which actually brings up one of things I most appreciated about the movie: the casting of Winona Ryder. The character in the book barely out of her teens (ol' Phil liked 'em young and pert, oh yes he did), and even if she was described as older, we're talking modern Hollywood.

Yeah, the movie was shot in the director's home state of Texas, but it's still bankrolled by a major studio—the same studio that horribly bungled the casting of Superman Returns, using actors in their mid-to-late twenties to play Lois and Clark, who should have least been in their thirties based on the series' own continuity. At least they showed some restraint and cast the age-appropriate Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor. It's a wonder they didn't use Ashton Kutcher. (Okay, I confess to having a small crush on Allison Mack from Smallville. At least when the series started she was a nineteen year-old playing seventeen. That's different, somehow.) For as much as I wanted to like Returns, I just couldn't get past the youth of the leads. Kept jarring me right out of the picture. Didn't help that they were lousy actors.

Anyway, not only can Winona act, but she's in her mid-thirties. That's practically dead by Hollywood standards. Score one for Generation X!

2:04pm

Busy weekend ahead, as Vash and I are going camping on the beach in Bolinas with c0g. So, I'm going straight home after work to do as much packing and preparing as I can, then driving to the Queer Open Mic and back. Tomorrow morning I'm helping Cindy do some final moving, and Vash and I will be heading to Bolinas immediately after that, hopefully arriving by two. As near as I can tell, getting to where we'll be camping will involving traversing a cliff in one fashion or another. What could go wrong? Vash has her monthly art salon on Sunday at two in Oakland, so we'll be getting back in time for that. I'll probably take the BART from Oakland back into San Francisco, and if upon arriving home I discover that Lifeforce didn't arrive on Saturday the way GreenCine said it would, I'll turn around and get it from Le Video, what with it being that night's Bad Movie Night feature. After which I'll exhale.

sometime after midnight

I wore my top hat tonight, because I wanted to.

Vash pointed me towards a Craigslist ad which read as follows:

Girl/Girl Hardcore Top Dollars

If your a real Lesbian or bi Couple and interested in making some serious money please respond, looking for Lesbian Talent ONLY, $700 per scene must be 19 -45, TWO FORMS OF PICTURE ID, Please NO Scamers, want-a-bees,

no -- it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
Compensation: $700 per scene

Vash and I have been wanting to do some sort of pr0n for a while now, and were talking to Ryder about being in her next project before she disappeared off the face of the planet. I don't think this is going to be it, though. Even if I could get past the mangled, ignorant English of the writeup, I suspect they would consider me a "want-a-bee" [sic]. Because, you know, born with a dick and all. That seems to be a dealbreaker for most people regarding my "girl" status.

In addition to all the drama involving my car and my nearly-lost bag, I discovered that my credit card had gone tits-up when I tried to use it to buy tickets to Annie Sprinkle's play at the New Conservatory Theater. Vash went ahead and made the order, and all was going well until we parked her car on 17th between Mission and Valencia, around the corner from the restaurant where we were to meet some friends for dinner. After killing some time in Good Vibrations, we returned to her car to find a note underneath the windshield and the area around the driver's-side headlight mangled. The note was scrawled by a safeway.com driver who copped to having hit her car, but the number he wrote turned out to not work. We attempted to continue on with our dinner plans, but the frazzle-making nature of the situation resulted in us deciding to just go back to my place to she could call her insurance company. Returning to the car, we found another note, this one from a witness. Thankfully, the damage is mostly cosmetic. By the time she managed jumping through the insurance company's phone-hoops (not to mention calling safeway.com itself, and adventure in modular bureaucracy), it was too late to actually go to the play. We got Japanese food to go and watched Cronenberg's eXistenZ, which she said made her want to do drugs with me again. The proper reaction, to put it mildly. It also introduced the word "bioport" into our couple's lexicon.

Saturday was all about getting the computer Vash recently bought from Jim up, running and online. (I can remember back when going online was a secondary concern for personal computers, not to mention the constant clashing between my mother and I regarding the use of the phone line. Damn, but I'm old.) This first involving bouncing around the Best Buy system to buy her a scanner, and then hooking up the DSL. Her phone jack and her computer are about as far apart from each other as you can get while actually still being in her home (we're talking well over fifty feet), but a former girlfriend of hers had wired a data cable from point A to point B many moons ago for this very reason. We had to make a run to a hardware store to get a modular connector and a crimping doohickey, then figure out how they actually worked, but between the two of us we got her up and running. If I ever meet said ex-girlfriend I'd love to thank her for having already done the heavy lifting of wiring Vash's house, but considering the utterly malevolent way she glared at Vash and I when all three of us were at a play party a few months back, I don't think that's going to happen.

Vash had a bridal shower to attend, so we drove back into the City. I dropped her as close to the Union Square hotel as the traffic would allow, then headed into the Castro. Upon finding a parking space (never easy at seven in the evening on a Saturday), I headed into the Muni and went home to change into warmer clothes. It was an increasingly chilly evening, and I had a lot of waiting outside ahead of me, since I was going to be in line outside the Castro for their 70mm midnight showing of Tron, oh my yes. Vash joined me in line after the bridal shower, which is probably the first time that someone's actual real-live girlfriend accompanied them to that movie.

Never especially reputable, its laughingstock fate was sealed by The Simpsons, as is so often the case. As the line was forming, one fellow approached and said you're waiting in line for tron? what for? Seems to me he'd just answered his own question, but I don't think he grasped that. Someone else, who actually bought a ticket and everything, said they remembered it as being a really bad movie, and they weren't sure if they would be able to watch the whole thing. Dude. You paid nine dollars to watch a movie at midnight and you don't know if you'll like it well enough to finish? I don't get people sometimes.

I'd like to think that what differentiates my fannishness from that of others (like that certain comedian who got dour and humorless when he found out that we were going to do The Phantom Menace for Bad Movie Night) is that I will fully admit to flaws in what I love. No work of art is without it imperfections. (Nobody heard him say "Rosebud," and frankly, I think the butler was full of shit when he said he was in the room at the time.) I know everything that's wrong witht Tron, or, at least, I can compile a long list. Same for Star Trek or just about anything else I'm fond of. And that's fine. I won't defend them against criticism, though I'll concede to the points and talk up their strengths.

That said, I was fully anticipating the hipper-than-thou audience to treat the film as a knee-slapping farce from start to finish, and I was not disappointed. Annoyed, of course, but not disappointed. That's what they paid their nine bucks for. Ironically, reacting to the movie like that diltured the impact of the more overtly kitschy/campy moments. You lose a bit of the dynamic when everything is laughed at, which is something most post-modern types don't get. Oh well. After a while a lot of them actually got into it. Imagine that.

My tastes being at odds with the people around me has been a recurring theme in my life, up to and including the guy here who has expressed his displeasure about my Manson posters. (He also necessitated the "please don't use male pronouns" email, which is surely a coincidence.) If that hasn't changed by now, it never will, and Oscar knows I'm used to it.

Sunday morning was the Merced Death Jog, after which Vash headed back home. For as nice as just relaxing sounded, I had to head out a few hours later for Bad Movie Night (Orca: The Killer Whale). One of the better reasons to leave the house, all things considered.