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Monday, 30 June 2008 (horse to water) 10:46am Got to the office bright and early this morning only to be greeted by the surly dismissiveness of my archnemesis. Alas, there's the whole humble-ness thing (though, really, there's never been a shortage in my life of people who don't care for me), plus the fact that I won't have to look at them so damn much when the office moves. At a staff meeting on Friday afternoon, Officer Dave told us that we're all expected to be at work on Monday morning. It's a Pride Weekend thing, of course. Unless you've already requested the day off ahead of time (as I did last year when I organized the Tranny Stage), no excuses. he said: if you're hungover, that's fine. come in hungover. Can't speak for anyone else, but I'm not hungover. Didn't drink at all this weekend, in fact. After work on Friday night I spent a few hours at Brainwash writing and coming to terms with my unhipness, then ran some errands with Rimma, and finally returned home. Being the Friday of Pride Weekend there were a million cool things I could have gone to, not the least of which was Cindy's final night as host of the Queer Open Mic, but I was feeling a pretty severe social agoraphobia. I just wanted to be alone, in my home. Which I did, not leaving again until six on Saturday evening. Earplugs always in an headphones on most of the time, I wasn't aware of the giraffe or the Bad People at all. (I win!) I honestly don't recall when the last time was that I stayed home for so long, especially on a Saturday, without being ill. But I just wasn't wanting to face Pride, and my the Black Light District was in dire need of a cleaning. So, Pink Saturday was a housecleaning day, which felt just fine. When I eventually left, it was to go see the movie The Fall with Bunny at the Kabuki. Afterward I dropped her back off at her place, then attempted to swing by The Dark Room, but was prevented by Saturday night parking in the Mission which was even worse than usual. For obvious reasons. I picked Bunny up again around noon on Sunday and we headed south. Though our primary destination was the Santa Cruz area, I took a detour down Skyline, through Woodside past The Mountain Housetowards Alice's Restaurant. It wasn't the most efficient way to get where we were going, but I love that stretch of road so much and am always looking for an excuse to drive it. It's still at the top of my list of places I'd live if money wasn't an object. Where we were going was the Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park for a hiking excursion. It just seemed like the right way to spend Pride Sunday, and it was quite lovely and isolated. (The view from the Overlook Bench was neat, too.) Being amongst redwoods reminded me of the Redwood Trail in Golden Gate Park. Ripley and I went there once, but it was right after a night-long breakup with Vash, so I hadn't really been in the mood to appreciate it. I should go back. Nothing is perfect, of course. There were lots of Norms and families, unsurprisingly, at one point as we passed a group a woman sneered: those boots look very hot on a day like today. I replied: actually, they look hot every day. Jesus, though. It wasn't that warm, surely the fact that I was wearing a long velvet skirt was more unseasonable than my Fluevogs, and what the frack is it to her? I guess she just couldn't bear to let her disapproval of my fashion choices go unmentioned. After the park, we went into Santa Cruz (Capitola, pick pick) and had dinner at Pink Godzilla. Mmmm, Scallops Mitsu. We took Highway 1 back to San Francisco, stopping first at Aņo Nuevo. I'm not sure why I've never been before, since almost without fail when The Ex and I would drive past it (a couple times a year), she would mention going to see the elephant seals molting. But we never actually did it. (Says a lot about our relationship, perhaps.) (On the other hand, I was conscious of how much I talked about her, many sentences starting with so this one time the ex and i went to... Which also says a lot about relationship. As gnarly as things got towards the end, as gnarly as things always get towards the end, and as much as we've both grown and blossomed in the decade since we split, I still have a lot of love for her and wish her well.) The elephant seal viewing was over for the day and we weren't able to go much past the parking lot, but with the foggy weather and the abandoned house on the island off in the distance, not to mention the lack of rangers, gave it a nice spooky feeling. Bunny described the beach itself as being a "Lucio Fulci-esque hellscape," which of course piqued my interest like mad. Our next impulse stop—for my money, those are the best kind—was the Arata Pumpkin Farm. I'd somehow never noticed in on the dozens of times I've made the drive, but Bunny practically leapt out of her seat when she saw they have a hay maze. (Which some of my friends evidently already knew about.) We spent about half an hour wandering through it, expecting to find a Dementor around every corner. That was me, anyway. Our final scenic detour was a driveby of the Old Princeton Landing the tiny bar where The Ex and I saw Neil Young and Crazy Horse perform live back in '96. Bunny's not a Neil fan so it didn't mean much to her, but it seemed like something to do. Near the Old Princeton Landing I noticed a relatively new restaurant, surely not one that was there twelve years ago, called Barbara's Fish Trap. For no good reason, I decided that I want to go there with Ennui went she gets back into the country. (Which won't be for another week, at least.) Back in San Francisco, I dropped Bunny off at her place and went to The Dark Room for the rest of Bad Movie Night. It was already half over (or half begun, depending on your point of view) and it wasn't my night, but as is so often the case, it's where I wanted to be. Hung out there with Jim and Rhiannon and Sean and Alexia until entirely too late. Tonight, I'm going to Creating Queer Community, a workshoppy thing for people who want to put on shows for the National Queer Arts Festival. I have some ideas. | ||
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Sunday, 29 June 2008 (supernatural superserious) sometime after midnight So that's it for June. Mostly. | ||
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Friday, 27 June 2008 (for feelings that should never have ended) 11:26am For as much of a rock star as I felt like on Wednesday night—especially when people came up to me afterward and used words like "witty" and "clever" and "intelligent" to describe my essay, since the best compliment I can receive is that I'm, like, smart and stuff—going to yoga on Thursday afternoon humbled me right back down to Earth, as I spent most of the time looking at my unpleasant body, too large and ungainly and discoordinated, sweating buckets and noticeably unable to do most of the even basic positions. It didn't help that there was biological male next to me who was roughly my height who was nailing every single move, thus deflating my operating theory that I'm too tall for yoga. Nope. Just too out of shape and inflexible, but I already knew that. It's why I'm going in the first place, but still. Ick. After class, a woman came up to me and said that I was actually doing pretty good for such an obvious newbie, to keep at it, not give up, and so on. It was unsolicited, and very kind. My dopey feeling as I walked back to Phoebe was increased by the life-on-Mars vibe of the late afternoon light, the sun turned red from the wildfire haze. We had a forced office lunch this afternoon, but thankfully we actually stayed in the building. Even better, my archnemesis kept her distance altogether, just ducking in to grab food and disappearing again, which is usually my move. I made a point of being as gregarious and outgoing as possible, which I can do quite well when I want to. I figure that should give me enough sociability credit to glide for a while. So I finally asked Officer Dave about bringing Perdita to work when we get to the new office, and much to my surprise, he said yes. It would only be on Fridays, which he's designated as Doggie Day—there are currently three small yappy canines running around the office at the moment—but that's okay. It'll be an interesting experiment nonetheless. | ||
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Thursday, 26 June 2008 (for days long dead) 12:21pm The show last night was fantastic. After working most of the day and evening before the show on the piece, I finally got it to a place where I was truly happy with it a few minutes before the show started. Which is usually how it works. It was well-received, getting laughs in most of the places I was hoping for them as well as a few places where I wasn't, but not the bad kind of unintentional laughter, either. Again, that's usually how it works: I'm a too close to the material to be directly conscious of the humor in it. I'm just glad the humor's in it at all. For as dark as my stuff sometimes gets, nothing's more disconcerting to me than doing a reading and not getting a single laugh. It means I'm doing something very wrong. Friends in attendance were Bunny, Ilene, Sadie, and two people I was very surprised to see, Leni and Imani. It hadn't even crossed my mind that Imani would be there at all—we haven't seen each other since a party at Temple's in 2005—and while Leni had said she'd try to make it, lots of people tell me they'll try to make my shows. From a statistical standpoint, however, they almost never do, so I don't get my hopes up. (Were Ennui not out of the country, I'm sure she would have been there, too.) Unfortunately, she arrived just as I was finishing my piece, but she stuck around for the rest of the show (having paid to get in) and joined Bunny, Sadie and I at the Orbit Room afterward. It's so odd the way circles shift, how the people who surround me and love me seem to change with the year, if not the season. I miss the people I lose—my heart started aching for Vash again before the show—but impermanence is the nature of the universe, and I'm still pretty damned lucky. | ||
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Wednesday, 25 June 2008 (in a world we set on fire) 12:32pm Instead of going to yoga yesterday after work, I went to The Dark Room to work on my piece for Coming Out..Again tonight. I'm going over the details, every sentence, every word choice, how everything fits with everything else. Though I'm long past the compositional stage, I'm still taking stuff out and putting stuff in, taking out jokes or turns of phrase that I'm especially fond of, for brevity or clarity or both. I've killed a lot of babies on this piece, perhaps more than any other. The current draft is about seventeen hundred and fifty words, and that's after writing and editing out at least three thousand more, possibly four. Those words all still exists, of course, in a few dozen early drafts. Maybe I'll revive it for something else, maybe I won't. Even the name has changed quite a bit, starting with what's possibly the second laziest name I could possibly give the essay, "Inside Out" (the most laziest being "Coming Out...Again," since it's the name of the show). Then it changed to "The Pen and the Sword," quickly morphing to the considerably less phallic "The Quill and the Sword." That didn't last long, since I abandoned the theme it referenced, and the next title was "Another Version of the Truth," a Nine Inch Nails song from Year Zero. Then it changed to "The Big Reveal," a phrase from the R.E.M. song "I've Been High." Unless I can think of something better today, the final title is "Garden Party," from the Rick Nelson song of the same name. My mother was very fond of the song when I was young, especially when it was just her and I a few years after the divorce as she tried to get her life together. I remember her singing along to the line you can't please everyone, so you gotta please yourself and telling me what a great philosophy it was. (Sadly, I forgot to mention the song during our big fight about my newly Bettie Page-ified hair in '98. She probably would have said it didn't apply.) It's an oblique reference at best, but that's okay. The more inside the joke, the cleverer it is. sometime after midnight I saw Ripley's father yesterday at his place of employment. I presume he recognized me, since I've been lead to believe that people tend to remember me after we've met, especially considering how Ripley had talked me up to him. We kept our distance and said nothing. If I had spoken to him, I probably would have said: i'm sorry things didn't work out between me and your daughter. i never meant to hurt her, just as she never meant to hurt me, and you have no idea how much i wish things had gone differently. but i tried, i honestly did. for all the ways we meshed, we clashed in tenfold more. and it's a damn shame, because the meshing was so wonderful. she's like a drug, and sometimes i feel like an ex-addict who has keep talking herself out of just one more fix, that maybe if we gave it one more shot, so i could feel that needle going into my arm again, which is the only metaphor which comes close...but it would be a very very bad idea so i'm not going to do it, plus she'd almost certainly say no, which would be the proper response. but just so you know, i don't think she's a bad person at all, and it's a damn shame that we crashed and burned as quickly as dramatically as we did. maybe it was purely an issue of timing: i was in too much emotional trauma from the drawn-out process of breaking up with vash—which, in retrospect, was a year overdue, the signs were unmistakable by the end of 2006 but i refused to give up—and if we'd met at another time i would have been stronger and we could have found a place where our massive neuroses could have coexisted, but as it was i just too sensitive and jumpy and vulnerable and heartbroken to be able to handle her and for her to properly handle me, except sexually where we handled each other better than either of us have ever been handled before or probably ever will be, which goes back to why i'm often temped to contact her, again the drug metaphor is the only one that works, i've never done i.v. drugs and i never will but i can glean the anticipation and desire...i don't know if she told you this—i don't know how much she told you, though i got the impression that i was all she could talk about for a while—but for a while there when it was looking like her and i had a chance, i wondered aloud how my mom would treat her, since she would almost certainly view ripley as being the cause of my breakup with vash. which is not true. was your daughter a catalyst? perhaps, but she's no more responsible than dietrich or ryder, both of whom arguably played a part—when your daughter and i started seeing each other, i hoped that she would become to me what dietrich was to vash, but it didn't work that way, i have yet to find anyone who's had that sort of impact, to be such a muse and open so many doors as she did for vash, and i'm trying to resign myself to the reality that i probably never will—because keeping our relationship alive was the responsibility of nobody but vash and myself, and we both failed spectacularly. and maybe we were doomed from the start, almost certainly we were doomed from the start, but it was still up to us, and we just couldn't do it. i don't expect anyone else to get that, and i guess it's neither here nor there. the bottom line is, i'm sorry things didn't work out between me and your daughter. Or words to that effect, anyway. | ||
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Tuesday, 24 June 2008 (water on the glass) 2:36pm The network was down at the office yesterday, so we got let to leave early. Theoretically I could have stuck around, as I have plenty of ways to keep myself busy which don't require going online, but any opportunity to get away from my archnemesis is a good thing. (Whatever one might care to say about my decor, at least I don't have dirty dishes or empty containers lying on the ground next to desk at work, or even at home.) It also meant I could definitely make it to the five o'clock yoga class. It kicked my ass the second time around, to say nothing of my knees: though I had been aware of a stinging, I didn't realize I was bleeding until toward the end of the class when I noticed red spots on the towel where I'd been kneeling. My best guess is that it's because the towels they provide (well, rent for a buck) were thin yet manufactured in a somewhat rough pattern, not to mention scrunch up around my feet real easy when I'm standing and moving my legs around. Plus they're small. So, I'll be bringing my own towels next time. Should save both a few bucks and, hopefully, my knees. Like on Thursday, the class was mostly comprised of small women. A couple of them felt like ringers, nailing every single pose and posture and move on the first shot, their concentration never wavering. Which is good, because it made me feel a tad less self-conscious about my bovine gracefulness. I was also not the only large person in the class. A few were even bigger than me, which is saying a lot. | ||
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Monday, 23 June 2008 (sticking drops) 12:37pm The magical gay elf in question was a neighbor of Jim's who swung by to pay Jim for a previously rendered service. He was fairly elfish (elven?), possibly but not necessarily magical, and definitely gay. If you're going to have to deal with strangers while 'shrooming—and I generally prefer not to—you could do a lot worse. I emerged from the weekend without a sunburn, probably because we weren't out in the sun all that long. It just felt like a long time, but in a good way. I should point out that the fish we observed as we sat with our feet in the Russian River (which was clear and placid and lakelike, bringing to mind Loon Lake, Washington, where my maternal grandparents lived) were in fact not luminscent but translucent, which is a different thing entirely. (That's why drugs are dangerous: you can't tell translucence from luminescence! Just say no, plzkthx.) It's a private beach, complete with a PLEASE DO NOT COME ASHORE sign, so the other people out there were neighbors of Jim's. We didn't tell them we were tripping, but we didn't exactly try to act sober, either, though we didn't do much beyond just sit on the shore with our feet submerged, watching the fish and the sparkliness of the water and the intense green of the surrounding trees. It was a perfect moment, however long it lasted. We rode out our concurrent trips inside the house, watching the already hallucinatory Star Wars Holiday Special with Rifftrax commentary, which for some reason led to me reading descriptions of seventies show by one particular IMDB contributor, which lead to marathoning cop show theme songs on YouTube. (Drugs!) We ate Hot Pockets and pizza, the latter having been acquired earlier in the day at a store a bit futher down the river at which I was also able to acquire a mocha. This was important, as I hadn't gotten much sleep the night before— I didn't get to bed until half past four in the morning, and was up again by nine—and I was determined to get some writing done. Indeed, we both worked on our respective books for a few hours before dropping. It's all about moderation and balance. I drove back to San Francisco on Sunday morning by myself, taking my time. I poked around Guerneville for a while, which was how I've always imagined South Park to look, except with no snow and lot more overt gayness. Picked up a used copy of Kinsey: Sex the Measure of All Things in Guerneville as a gift for Bunny at Twice Told Books, and stocked up on produce at Mike's Truck Garden in Fulton. My second-to-final destination was getting Phoebe a much-needed wash and vacuum at the only Bay Area drive-through car wash I was aware of, near my old office in Sausalito. The name of that company, which has since been bought out, was NewGate Internet, and the name of my boss was Tom . He was mean and emotionally abusive to me. At least I got a good story and a recurring show out of it. Sausalito continues to be bad luck: though I like that Phoebe is all shiny and clean now (and in general doing really well for a nine year-old car), the employees there were creepy and leery and stared a lot and I didn't like the experience at all, especially since they tried to overcharge me. Now I know. | ||
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Sunday, 22 June 2008 (little wonder) sometime after midnight What should have been a perfect ending to a lovely weekend—hanging out with Bunny after Bad Movie Night (the feature being Children of the Corn)—got cut short by invasive humies. I hate it when that happens. | ||
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Saturday, 21 June 2008 (bittering the roots) 6:26pm At Jim and Erin's place in Monte Rio, on the Russian River. I'm on mushrooms, and Jim is on acid. In spite of those particular chemical handicaps, a magical gay elf did just come in and give Jim fifty bucks. Honest. Not making it up, and no, it wasn't Rip Taylor. Earlier we sat on the banks of the river, shoes off, feet in the water under the sand, watching the tiny luminescent fish swim around. It was almost painfully idyllic. I imagine I'll pay for it tomorrow in terms of sunburn (and eventual fatal skin cancer, to say nothing of my confirmed heliophobe status), but it was quite lovely at the time. Oddly enough, it was also the second time in as many days that I had sand between my bare feet. After a party last night at Sadie's (where we mostly hung out with Dr. Hal), Bunny and I went up to a park in Portrero Hill, took off our shoes, felt the sand between our toes, and discussed mid-twentieth century fascist dicators as we sat on the swings. It was nice. Afterward, I picked up Jim at The Dark Room and we headed north. Two in the morning is definitely the best time for the drive. | ||
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