Random babbling on a Friday morning:

• To the cute guy who kept glancing at me at Wendy’s on Pine Street yesterday: please contact me and tell me if you were interested in doing the nasty or just thought I was some kind of freak. Thanks. By the way, your jeans fit quite nicely…

Other random thoughts for a Friday morning:

• They tore down the giant neon Canadian Club sign by the freeway a few blocks from my house. I didn’t hear a word about it until I read it had already been done in Scott Ostler’s column. San Francisco is now one step close to becoming Walnut Creek. I imagine the 17 Reasons sign on Mission Street is next.
• Someone appears to have torched another live/work project under construction South of Market. Note to idiot: there are better ways to express your opposition. It doesn’t do much good to “save the neighborhood” if, in tyhe process, you risk burning out the very people you’re trying to save.
• Thanks to Becky for this article on the virues on livermush (which is NOT the same as liver pudding, even though I do come from east of the Yadkin River)
• A new selection in the “give me a fucking break” department.
• Cry me a river. Goodbye, Julie London.
• A site after my own heart.

It’s back to the Poseidon Adventure on AMC for me now. I may hop over to Boardboys too, where chapter three of my first published porn story premieres today. But I already know how both of them end, so I might just go for a walk instead…

I was trying to answer email from yet another person wanting advice on moving to San Francisco tonight. I tried to come up with a few positives to balance all the negatives. It was damned difficult.

The rents are ridiculous; there is no one-bedroom apartment on this planet worth two grand a month. The proportion of creative and interesting people to workaholic corporate drones is becoming dangerously low. The music scene is moving to Modesto, the small movie houses are closing, and the bars on Folsom have become a dismal shade of boring I never could have imagined.

There are long lines everywhere. There’s no parking anywhere. A collection of commercial radio stations (which wasn’t great but was still among the best in the country) has become a mushy corporate stew. We have room for 60 Starbucks, 9 Kinko’s, hundreds of live/work lofts, and a Walgreen’s and a Rite-Aid on every corner, but we can’t find a place for bands to rehearse or for people without stock options to live.

The city is becoming older and less lively. Or at least it seems older, because the only younger people moving here are working 70-hour weeks and are rarely seen in public doing anything more exciting or social than talking on cell phones or mowing down pedestrians on their stupid scooters.

And despite all the posturing in this year’s election, I seriously doubt there’s much that can be done about it. And even if there were a solution, I doubt it could be implemented (or not soon enough, at any rate). I’ve never felt quite so fatalistic about San Francisco’s future.

Any realistic ideas? I’m fresh out, and I’m starting not to care anymore.

For your perusal, I’m testing a new page design in this section. If I continue liking it, I’ll probably get all the bugs out and use it site-wide. Opinions? Yes, I’ll probably get rid the rollovers; I’m just testing…

It’s all about anniversaries for me. When I was keeping my journals in high school, even, I used to keep up with them sort of obsessively. I’d cover the one-year anniversary of the first time I got caught smoking, or the ten-year anniversary of the very first “Brady Bunch” or whatever. Maybe that’s how I get my frame of reference in life. Or maybe it was an early indicator that I’d grow up to be an obsessive nerd.

Anyway, today’s the anniversary of the day in 1992 that I landed in San Francisco. Eight years. Jeez. It doesn’t seem like that long. And it definitely DOES seem like that long. Understand?

Suitably enough, after I crossed the Bay Bridge into the city, my first stop was at Safeway, the one on Market Street, where I called my friends and warned them I was coming. I was nervous. I was also anxious to converse with an actual friend in person after having just driven across the country alone. I calmed down later that night, with significant assistance from Henry Weinhardt. I went to work two days later, moved into this apartment a month later, and all of a sudden, I realized that I lived here.

This week in Planet SOMA history:

• 11 October 1980: I got my first blowjob in an adult bookstore at the tender age of 16. Being a precocious sort, I also got fucked for the first time. I didn’t much care for it.
• 4 October 1982: I was breaking up with my first college boyfriend.
• 3 October 1983: Danny Elfman rode in the front seat of my car.
• 1 October 1996: Feelin’ Minnesota.
• 5 October 1997: Gallup, New Mexico, as I completed the Planet SOMA US Tour 1997.

Quotes du Jour:

• “Very few animated cartoons are broadcast live; it’s a terrible strain on the animator’s wrists.” (Simpsons)
• “More people would have babies if they came with free garlic bread.” (3rd Rock from the Sun)
• “What’s the use of being a writer if you can’t irritate a great many people.” (Norman Mailer)