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It was bright and beautiful this weekend. Today, not so much. I've clambered back onto the gym wagon. The speaker directly above the crosstrainers was mercifully turned off yesterday, but it was on and very loud this morning. Coil's Live in New York City and Acid Mother Temple's Electric Heavyland helped me retain my sanity. Noise must be fought with noise.
When you're lost in the rain in Juarez
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From The Complete Manual of Pirate Radio by Zeke Teflon, which I bought at the Anarchist Bookfair: The use of television is, due to public access cable channels, somewhat more within reach. Thanks to public access cable corporations and channels, almost anyone who wants to produce his or her own cable show can do it—for free (though they'll have to do a lot of work.) (Unfortunately, most of those taking advantage of public access TV are religious nuts, astrologers, UFOlogists, inept rock and rollers, and other miscellaneous egomaniacs.) Public access cablecasting truly presents wonderful opportunities, and I wish that many more radicals would take advantage of them.I'm not going to kid myself that our show presents a radical viewpoint, but Maddy assures me we do not fall into the "miscellaneous egomaniacs" category, either. I worry, though.
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The Anarchist Bookfair was yesterday. Lotsa lefties, many in black, for as far the eye could see. Sorta. Even though we missed a few of them (in spite of the fact that we both tend to tower over people, (e) and I somehow never saw each other), it was nice to know that all our friends were there.
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There's a restaurant in West Portal called the French Village Cafe. On the table next to the window is a small model of the Eiffel tower, surrounded by American flags. The message is obvious in this painfully stupid and xenophobic climate of "freedom fries" and eBay sellers refusing to deal with Canadians for political reasons; no doubt their business has declined lately because of pseudo-patriotic fools wanting to send a message to those dirty, unpatriotic French people. Even though the owners and employees probably aren't French (I'd guess it's Asian-owned), and even if they are, they probably don't have any influence over the French government. Fuck you, America. Don't even look at me. I don't know you.
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See? All better now. Whee!
7:32pm And sometimes things have to grind to a halt. I had a good long skid, anyway. The surgeon whom my endoc had originally suggested to me for an orchie no long performs them. His receptionist didn't say why (and I didn't ask), but my endoc's suspicion is he doesn't want to run the risk of getting sued by an unhappy patient—and not for botching the job, either, but for getting it right. Although the story about the tranny on the operating table deciding realizing they're really a man just as they're going under and subsequently committing suicide (certainly preferable to life without a dick) is an urban legend, there are a very small percentage who essentially change their minds afterwards and go back to their birth gender. It's even happened with a few of my endoc's patients. The net result is that there aren't many surgeons who will do vaginoplasty and fewer still who simply do orchies. ("Orchie" being short for orchidectomy, an arcane word which allows castration to be discussed in mixed company.) The reason why more will do the considerably more difficult procedure than the simpler one is, unsurprisingly, financial. SRS usually costs well into the five-digit range, and more worth the risk of getting sued. An orchie, comparatively, is just a few grand. The low profit margin isn't worth the risk. Of course, that this sort of thing can be done at all is pretty remarkable; as of a few decades ago, any kind of gender-related surgery was considered unethical by the patriarchal medical establishment. They said it was mutilation, no different from a voluntary amputation. I think they were confusing "ethics" with "castration anxiety." Anyway, she suggested a couple other surgeons to try. One is here in town and not so well known, and the other is a rock star (ask pretty much any tranny considering surgery and they'll know his name), located less conveniently in Arizona. I suppose I'll be contacting them both, even though it's all academic. I can't afford it, and probably won't be able to for a very long time. Also out of my range is the new electrologist(s). I had a consultation with him them today (a husband and wife team who often work in San Jose), and while they seem to have more on the ball than my former zapper, they also cost more. For better results, no doubt; they were appalled at the damaged texture of the skin around my mouth, caused by bad settings. It'll (probably) heal up eventually, they said, with judicious use of a specific kind of moisturizer on my part and even more judicious use of their mad electro skillz to avoid further damage. Their estimated time on the second part, to actually make my face all un-grizzly, is roughly a hundred and fifty hours. A hundred and fifty more hours, after the two-hundred thirty-two I've already had done, and I can't really afford it at this point0. I'm trying not to think too hard about how much time and money I may have already wasted. Those aren't good thoughts. To give them as much to look at as possible for the consultation, my facial hair's been unshorn since Sunday morning. Since then, I haven't liked looking at myself in the mirror. It's felt terribly wrong. I should not have a goatee. That's not me and it's been making my head very strange. (You know that feeling when you're standing on the edge of a great height, and you begin to worry that you'll be gripped by an irresistible urge to jump? I got it driving home on 280 today. It would be so easy, just turn the wheel sharply... It wasn't wanting to, but rather the fear that the idea would enter my mind and not leave.) I've never regretted transitioning, and times like this remind me that however far I go, I'll never want to go back. There's really no way to convince anyone else of this, but I know I'm doing the right thing, and I suppose that's all that really matters. So if I have to shave daily for the foreseeable future and parts of my body keep producing things I really don't need, well...
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The key to surviving a bad trip is usually the same: just ride it out. Tomorrow morning, I'll probably wake up feeling just fine. Until I see my reflection, anyway. Daniel Ellsberg has been arrested at an antiwar protest. For pete's sake, he's seventy years old and already done more for the pursuit of peace and justice in this country than the most of us could hope for. What's my excuse? Why aren't I out there, doing what needs to be done? Weaselboy was also recently arrested at a protest, and said that's he gotten far more static from his friends about it than he would have expected. God, but that's wrong. Well, he's got my admiration and support, for whatever that's worth. (I wonder if one of those friends is the pro-war writer who, on their site, put a picture of Calvin urinating on the Iraq flag, with the self-evident tag of "I just couldn't resist." I only sorta met the person at the first SpookyCon, and I hope I don't see them at the next one. Ignoring for the moment that things like that don't help his side's claim that the war is about liberating Iraqis from their oppressive government, I suspect he'd raise holy hell if some foreigner did that to his beloved Yankee Swasti—er, stars and stripes.) Boy, I oughta just go to Baghdad where I belong, huh?
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Though I've been too much of a pussy to go downtown and witness the fracas—one of my more official excuses is that I don't want to leave Maddy alone for an extended period of time because she's spooked by the horror movies we've been watching—we haven't been hiding at home this week, either. While watching Andrei Tarvoksky's original film of Solaris last night (no, it's not one of the horror movies in question, though a lot of people have run screaming from it), we got the idea to go to the top of Twin Peaks and seeing what we could see. It turned out the observational peak was blocked off by the police, no doubt for reasons which would vary from "terrorists" to "protesters," depending on who you asked. As we were driving back down we pulled off and joined a few other groups of people from slightly less altitudinal vantage point. From that angle we couldn't see far enough down Market to get a sense of what was happening, but it was still beautiful—Maddy's never seen the City from Twin Peaks at night before—and there did seem to be a few more helicopters and other low-flying air vehicles than usual. From there, we went to an SF Indymedia video screening in Dolores Park, mostly of video footage from the recent protests, as well as from the first Gulf War. Living in Fresno at the time and having little access to alternative media, I didn't realize anything was happening in San Francisco. The most exposure I had to the broader anti-war movement was a muddy tape of Jello Biafra's "Die for oil, sucker". It wasn't much, but it was something, at least. One of the highlights for me was a clip from '91 Peter Jennings announcing that with the invasion of Iraq, "Operation Desert Shield" was now now known as "Operation Desert Cloud." He was quickly corrected, but, damn. "Desert Cloud." I'm still giggling over that one. I wasn't at all surprised to see cops at the screening. They kept their distance, and didn't even stay through the whole thing (aside from a circling helicopter), though Maddy and I made sure to have identification on our persons, just in case. We ran into Shauna, who'd been marching all day long and was heading back out—if you gather a couple hundred lefties in one place in this town, we're going to know at least one of them—and it made me feel a little more like I'm participating, at a time when participatory democracy is being exposed for the myth we've always suspected it was. Not that we haven't taken it to the streets at all; on Friday night we did a bit of unexpected, though not unwelcome, marching. After an unsatisfying dinner at a painfully trendy Market and Church restaurant to which we will be giving no more of our shekels, we went outside to discover a march rounding the corner, heading down Church in the same direction we'd planned on going. Theoretically we could have kept to the sidewalk, and I was prepared to do so if Maddy wanted to because of the cops, but we joined them. As befitting my previously stated mathematics, (e), Claude and Susan were in the crowd. At 18th and Church, the march turned west towards The Castro; we turned east towards our original destination, the Dolores Park Cafe, for Erin Oh's Oral Fixation open mic. Erin was grateful we made it, as the turnout was understandably light. Lynnee was the featured reader, but I want to support Erin so I would have come anyway. (She mentioned my chapbook, so I gave her one, which I'd planned on doing anyway. Still, it's weird to think that she must have heard about it from someone else. Like, why would it come up?) Following her suggestion to be topical, I read a column I wrote for the Fresno Bee's Teen Tempo section back in '90 on the eve of Desert Storm about my decision not join the military. It was difficult resisting the urge to edit it; why didn't anyone tell me at the time it was bad form to start so many sentences with "I?" (They probably did, actually.) As hard as it is to believe, I was much worse about it then. At the time the piece generated a minor shitstorm, including a military recruiter calling me a "spoiled, selfish brat" (or words to that effect) in a letter to the paper, and an anonymous caller telling me that America would lose its next war because people would read my words and decide they didn't want to fight for their country, either. My critics probably wouldn't be surprised that I turned out to be a fucking pansy who wears dresses. (Maybe I should contact the Bee about a follow-up...nah...) Presently, the response was polite applause and people telling me afterwards that they really liked it. Much better. Thursday night, we went to see Matthue perform at Adobe Books. It was inspiring, as he so often is. One of the employees at Adobe said to let them know if anyone wanted to read there in the future. It's a very tempting thought.
11:12pm I wonder if our old neighbors had their annual Academy Awards party tonight. If so, I hope their guests were able to find parking. We saw Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times today at The Red Vic. Among other things, after having first heard about the attack on the World Trade Center from a friend who saw it on teevee, he instead turned on the radio. I liked that.
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sometime after midnight Our revolutionary act for today was cancelling cable. They've gotten enough of our money.
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I'm against the war too, but those protesters sure are making things difficult for the rest of us! There, I said it aloud, just like everyone else. Now nobody has to know what I really think. To date, the only people to have commented on my new glasses are Shauna and Shrike. For everyone else, I'm chalking it up to a combination of not noticing and not being able to say something nice, mostly the latter. The premiere party for Tristan and Ted's new comic How Loathsome was Wednesday night at Isotope, the comic book store at which Tristan works. I finally spoke to the old coworker of mine from Le Video, Kelly, the one I've been seeing around lately but sorta avoiding. (I still have some issues, okay?) Shrike, in fact, reintroduced us. He runs (or, as he put it, is) Penny Dreadful Press, which publishes XXX LiveNudeGirls, his wife Laurenn's comic in which he, Tristan and Shrike have all appeared. Michelle Tea has also written for the recently published Penny Dreadful Travel Guides: Volume One - The San Francisco Bay Area, and the owner of Isotope is on the poster which Laurenn did for Michelle's Strombolli tour last fall, one of which is hanging in our living room. Tiny world, even if it is blowing up.
sometime after midnight I wonder how many of the drivers who are angry about the protesters blocking traffic are in SUVs with "If You're Not Outraged, You're Not Paying Attention" bumper stickers.
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