Christmas Day

You would have all been quite amused, if also a little frightened. Yer humble host spent an entire 24-hour period in a stunningly good mood. It was so uncharacteristic for me. Thanks are due to several good friends (and to a lesser extent to a pretty danged decent meal, along with Rudolph and the Grinch). I don’t think I grumbled once the entire day, although I did cuss when I burned myself on the macaroni and cheese casserole.

Note to self: throw more parties where you’re the only one in the room who knows everyone else. It’s fun.

The final menu was pork roast, collard greens, macaroni and cheese, pinto beans with onion and tomatoes (and a generous dollop of cayenne pepper), salad, bread, pound cake with strawberries, and assorted cookies and candy. And sweet tea, of course. There was wine and bread and pepermint hot chocolate, and more thanks to Dan and Sarah and Brad and Paula. Steve brought sugar. Mike brought wine glases and Chuck sent a card table in absentia.

I’m not sure what caused this Christmas stiffie I seemed to develop this year. maybe it’s my newfound domesticity. More likely it has to do with this being the first Christmas I’ve spent in San Francisco since 1995. It’s also possible that I was thinking this might well be my last Christmas here.

Whatever the reason, I was happy as a clam all day. I was boucing around the house singing along with Nat King Cole in the morning while I cooked. Dinner was great and the cramped quarters weren’t too horrible. We watched the Grinch and Rudolph and Charlie Brown and Dragnet.

Afterward, I even popped down to the Eagle and manage to have good time even in a public place. Miracles never cease. Of course, Eugene forced me to drink and listen to Blue Oyster Cult and Patti Smith and Al Green until last call, so I felt like death at 8:30 the next morning when my coma came to an abrupt halt, but that’s not a happy story, so I’ll skip it, being that this is an uncharacteristically positive journal entry. I’ll just admit to the world that my recent tea-totalling has caused me to lose my tolerance for booze (and hangovers).

Anyhow, my downstairs neighbor intimated that it was the best Christmas he’d had since moving to the city. That rather made it with the effort, I think.

Chritsmas Eve

Yeah, it’s last year’s Christmas picture. No, I don’t look much different…

Christmas Eve greetings. Should you prefer another holiday, or none at all, please feel free to indulge yourself at your own pace.

Christmas plans are progressing successfully. I have a pork roast. I have both macaroni and cheese. I’m picking up the collards tonight, and I baked the cookies last week. Should be a regular Southern-fried feast.

I love my building. Unsolicited, I already have an offer of an extra table from my landlord (who rules the landlord universe) and extra oven space from my downstairs neighbor. It feels like kind of a cross between 28 Barbary Lane (minus the sex change) and a Lower East Side tenement about 1910 (minus the Yiddish).

Contrary to popular belief, we city folks actually do know our neighbors. We often even like them. This statement should not be construed as a dinner invitation to the new residents of the yuppie barn across the street. I sense they wouldn’t appreciate good collards anyhow.

I’ll move past Christmas now, in case I don’t have time to update in the next few days:

I’ve decided that I don’t really care that the new millenium doesn’t really start until 2001. It’s all semantics andway. The dates change in ten days and my checks with the “19__” on them become quaint souvenirs. On the other hand, I’m still annoyed by the semantics of those who continue to say “the year 2000” instead of just “2000”, unless they’re also in the habit of regularly calling this year “the year 1999”.

That said, I’ll note that I still have no plans for the big event. As previously stated, I hate crowds. I’m also not wild about New Year’s Eve in general. But I do have two bottles of sparkling cider and one bottle of cheap champagne. They were on sale at Safeway, so how could I resist? I’m still thinking of renting a room at the Motel 6 in Fresno and polishing them off by myself. The only down side would be that none of the thrift stores will be open on New Year’s Day.

Last but not least, look for an article (link forthcoming) featuring an interview with quotes from yer humble host coming soon to a Latino-Hispanic news site. Subject: gentrification. It’s always a strange thing being interviewed, and I’ve actually had the pleasure several times since Planet SOMA went live. I guess the strangest part is that I’m not sure I’ve ever done much of anything to make me particularly worthy of being interviewed. What a strange thing this Internet is.

Off to cook them collards now…

20 December 1999

Question du jour: Do you pronounce “GIF” with a hard or a soft G? I prefer the hard G, simply because the G stands for “graphics”, as in “graphics interchange format”. To pronounce it with a soft G makes me sound as I’m describing a brand of peanut butter. On the other hand, if you think of “GIF” as a word rather than an acronym, the soft G would be correct.

Question du jour #2: Does anyone other than me find it completely creepy that it’s so warm in San Francisco this week, the first week of winter? It was 75 yesterday. It rarely gets that warm in the SUMMER here. People were barbecuing. I was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt all day and still broke a sweat. I had to take the extra blanket off my bed last night. It’s just not right.

Note to readers in New England and the Upper Midwest: Please don’t send me death threats for discussing the weather.

Nostalgic indulgence du jour: I miss Bloom County, dammit. I dragged out my books this weekend and re-read the whole saga, from the Meadow Party’s 1984 convention in San Francisco to the Mary Kay Commandos and the Peguin Lust trials. I re-lived Steve Dallas’s alien transformation and re-visited Binkey’s anxiety closet. I’m convinced, in retrospect, that Bloom County is the only thing which made the 1980s bearable.

Salute du jour: Viva Berkeley Breathed.

Ego boost du jour: I was finally told by someone I’ve slept with that I seem to have lost a lot of weight. It doesn’t really count until someone you’ve slept with says it.

Diet foods du jour: homemade cookies, Sausage McMuffin, Sylvia Queen of Soul Food pinto beans, plus whatever I have for supper.

Question du jour #3: Is your evening meal called “supper” or “dinner”? How about your parents’?

Realizations du jour: I can’t think of much to write about today and some day soon people will start catching on that most of the pictures I’ve used lately are re-runs or weren’t taken by me, because I haven’t gotten my camera fixed yet.

A Big, Butch Housewife

There are those Planet SOMA readers who have somehow gotten the impression that yer humble host is some big, butch leatherman or, God forbid, a “bear”. I cannot begin to say on how many levels that assumption would be incorrect.

For now, I’ll skip the obvious facts that the only leather clothing I own consists of two belts and a few pairs of shoes. I shan’t mention that I find pain (given or received) to be anything but erotic. I’ll refrain, once again, from discussing how I’ll answer to “big, hairy guy with a gut” all day, but never to “bear”. No, today let’s concentrate once again on the “butch” part. I’ve written about it before, but not on quite such a personal level.

How did I spend my Saturday afternoon? Why, I popped in the Nat King Cole Christmas album and baked a big batch of cookies, thank you. They were passable cookies: those peanut butter sugar cookies with a Hershey’s kiss on top. A recipe my mom gave me several years ago which I’d never yet tried.

I mixed everything precisely. I rean a few “test runs” down the stairs to my neighbor who was refinishing a door in the basement (he being much butcher than I). He loves it when I test my baked goods on him. When thy didn’t turn out absolutely perfect, I even instinctively knew that I’d put in about one tablespoon too little milk.

So, yes, yer humble host bakes cookies. I even bake a quite tasty scratch pound cake, thank you. I’m a pretty good cook. I make dinner every night and carefully save the leftovers. I own two large and one small casserole dishes. I have frozen pie crusts in the freezer and brown sugar in the cabinet.

What’s more, I discussed the relative merits of certain cleaning products with Dan and Jamie over lasagna at Joe’s last night. I vacuum when I know I’ll be having guests. I comparison shop at the supermarket. I even scrub the bathtub from time to time. I’m getting to the point where I’ll make someone “a good little wife”.

However, for those of you who would still like to believe that I’m a big nasty masculine aggressive butch sort of fellow, I DO have a big pile of dirty laundry on the floor in my bedroom, because I haven’t been to the laundromat in two months. And I DO know how to change a tire. Will that be sufficient? Have I managed to salvage at least a piece of your fantasy?

Anybody want a cookie?

Since 1984

As I was having dinner tonight, I heard a sad song from fifteen years ago. About this time in 1984, it (along with several other sad songs in an era full of them) would have had the power to make tears flow, so melancholy was my state at the time. It was messy.

But that wasn’t what I was thinking about as I ate my meal. I was wondering how I came to be sitting alone in this improbable little hoffbrau in Daly City, California, eating turkey with mashed potatoes and green beans. A strange little place, it was. A relic from the time when Daly City was populated mostly by meat-loving WASPs. I was a little baffled by my surroundings, and I realized this was the last place I would’ve expected to be fifteen years ago. I wasn’t really sad or depressed. Like I said, I was just a little baffled.

I kept listening to the song (and munching on the wilted green beans) and remembered spending a weekend crying my eyes out to the same song in an apartment in Raleigh, North Carolina, and getting completely plastered with a friend whose whereabouts I no longer know. I thought the world was ending.

Of course, it didn’t. I’d get the idea that the world was ending many more times in the coming years. Somehow, it never did. Even though things never quite worked out as I’d planned, the world never once ended, and that’s probably good thing.

I’ve bounced around from place to place to place (and lots of places in between)without any particular plan or direction. I’ve done fun stuff, stupid stuff, and just plain pointless stuff in this impromptu approximation of a life. Sometimes I wonder what a nice, orderly existence would have been like. I think about how it might have been to go directly from college into a normal job, house, and relationship. It sure would have been less stressful. But I have a sneaking suspicion it wouldn’t have been quite as much fun either.

When I used to start bawling to that song, this “normal” path was the one I was planning on, but I guess I knew it was no more likely in 1984 than it is now. But of all the places I expected to wind up, last on the list would probably have been that little dive in Daly City on a Wednesday night pondering that stupid saccharine song. A chance combination of the music and bizarre surroundings put me in a very odd mood for five minutes or so.

Such, I suppose, is the power of a song. And no, I have no intention of naming it, thank you. I’m also not admitting that the photo above is of a truck stop near Bakersfield instead of a hoffbrau in Daly City…

Coming tomorrow: the election commentary I was too pissed off to post tonight. Until then read this.