I feel a little dirty. I accidentally landed on Big Brother tonight while changing channels during a commercial. I saw about thirty seconds of it before I could get back to “King of the Hill”. Now I can no longer say (with a nice blend of smugness and haughtiness) that I missed all the stupid reality shows of the summer of 2000.

More stuff I could do without this week:

• The current SF weather. It’s not all that terribly hot during the day (although it’s hotter than I like), but it’s also not cooling down at night like it should. I am not amused. I am also not sleeping.
• The “Facts of Life” marathon on Nick-at-Nite.
• Bad news about a friend I haven’t talked to in very many years.

Better news: my mom’s coming for a visit in a few weeks. I actually have room for her to stay here now, so I get a full-week visit. I probably won’t take her to the corner sex bar, but it should be fun anyway.

And now for an ethical question (gosh, aren’t we jumping around today?):

Supposing you used to have regular trysts with someone in a tearoom when you were in college. Supposing you had an awful lot of fun together on many occasions, even shared many of the same fetishes, and even made a little video together with your Fisher-Price camcorder. Even though you visited each other’s houses a couple of times, you didn’t officially know each other’s names. It was a tearoom thing, after all.

But supposing you (that would be me) really did know the guy’s name and just happened to do a Google search and find that he’s currently working as a college professor and thus has a very available email address. You’re sure it’s him (there’s a picture).

Do you contact him, offering to send him a copy of the video you promised him ten years ago and telling him you wouldn’t mind making another one the next time you happen to be in the same state?

What would Miss Manners say?

Things I shouldn’t have had to deal with this weekend:

1. Seeing Rick Schroeder wearing leather pants on a VH-1 special. Not only was he making the mistake of sporting such inappropriate trousers, but he was also wearing them with (blecchh…) a wool sweater. That’s so very, very wrong. My pronouncement du jour: from now on, anyone wearing leather pants in my line of sight MUST (a) be a rock star, (b) be performing on stage, and (c) be clad at MOST in a tank top or torn T-shirt. Anyone not meeting all of these simple criteria runs the very real risk of looking like a complete moron. And yes, patrons of queer bars included are included, thanks…
2. Two mildly insomniac nights in a row (no doubt from thinking about people other than Jim Morrison wearing leather pants)…
3. The cute boy with the mischievous sneer at My Place Saturday night who I would have fucked all night had he not, within five minutes of meeting me, gone into way too much detail about the 15-year-old he’d gotten high with and screwed recently at a rave. If he’d saved this revelation until, oh, an hour or two into the conversation, I might possibly have dealt with it, but jeez…
4. The two or three complete strangers who bored me tremendously by babbling on about their assorted recent drug experiences. I don’t get high, I really don’t give a fuck, and I’m not going to give you a knowing, conspiratorial wink no matter how much of a chemical catastrophe you mistakenly believe me to be, OK?
5. The asshole in the BMW (redundant, I know) on Highway 101 today who, as I was passing another car and doing 80MPH, ran directly up my ass, and then, as I signaled and began to move right so he could go around, proceeded to pass me on the right, keeping me from getting out of his way and almost causing a 5-car pileup. And he seemed genuinely shocked when I gave him the finger…
6. The thousands of Silicon Valley wankers who think their ability to afford an overpriced car somehow makes up for their complete inability to drive it correctly…

I’m home, in case anyone was worried. Road trip to Redding and points adjacent and along the way was great. Commentary and pictures coming soon. Sleep coming now.

 

I checked out of the motel by 10:00 on Sunday, checking carefully for lice, and grabbed a quick breakfast before heading south toward Chico. When I left I-5 at Red Bluff, I left freeways behind for most of the day.

 

Chico was less exciting than I wanted it to be. I expected there to be cute college boys (like the one from the Doggie Diner) everywhere, especially since classes were starting Monday. There weren’t many, so I drove to Paradise, which proved less idyllic than I’d imagined. It wasn’t a bad place, just not a terribly exciting one. Ditto for Oroville. I wanted to look around Marysville and Yuba City some more, but it was getting late. I’d been there before anyway.

 

For some stupid reason, I decided to take I-80 home rather than my usual Sacramento-SF route through the Delta. I realized it was a mistake as I found myself doing about 15MPH through Vacaville. I finally got off in Fairfield and just drove through town. Things got better south of Vallejo and it was alarmingly traffic-free through Berkeley and Emeryville, until I hit the Bay Bridge. But by that time, I was so glad to be enshrouded in fog that I didn’t even care.

 

Random thoughts on Redding:

• It’s a very white place and people sound like they’re from Minnesota. Fortunately, it’s more white trash than white yuppie.
• I love the fact that there’s only one Starbucks downtown and it looks a little seedy, housed as it is in a former Long John Silver’s.
• “Fast food” is an oxymoron here.
• Redding and the surrounding area should be sort of a resort destination, but there didn’t seem to be any tourists anywhere, even at Shasta Dam (which was basically deserted).
• Housing is just as cheap as you imagine it would be.
• It sure is nice to see some trees scattered about, not to mention a landscape which isn’t quite so brown. Oops, I meant “golden”…

I wouldn’t want to live there, but I’ll probably go back to visit. It probably won’t be August when I do so.

 

 

I woke up early Saturday and did more exploring after moving from the expensive Motel 6 to the cheap Americana Lodge downtown. It’s a nice enough place, even though that the air conditioner smelled funny, the TV was in the closet, and one of my night tables was a dorm-size refrigerator.

My new digs only set me back thirty bucks and provided the twin benefits of being a block from the queer bar and next door to a skateboard shop. This would, I figured, allow me to get sexually frustrated in the afternoon and to pick up a willing outlet for it that night. Redding is full of scruffy, adorable, lost-looking boys. I like that in a town.

 

I covered a lot of ground Saturday, from Red Bluff to Anderson, from Shasta to Shasta Lake City to Shasta Dam, and from one end of Redding to every other end.

 

After driving around a lot, I decided to walk some, and I visited the creepy Redding Mall. This was one weird place. Essentially, the city put a roof over about three blocks of Main Street downtown, a misguided act which other small towns (Rock Hill SC) also committed in the 1970s. If “saving” downtown was the goal, it didn’t work. The mall was almost empty save for a half-stocked Rite-Aid (which hadn’t even bothered to take down its old Payless Drugstore signs inside) and a collectibles store.

 

I had dinner at a place called Buz’s Crab, which might be my favorite restaurant north of Sacramento now. It’s a cheap place specializing in (surprise) seafood. Loved it. Reminded me of Libby Hill in North Carolina, which is a good memory to have.

 

I tried to take a nap. I didn’t succeed and I watched The Seven-Year Itch instead. Hit the Club 501 on Center Street at about 11:00. There were about 10 people there, which I guessed was about half the queer population of Redding. The bartender, who was nice and bought me beers, told me the sparse turnout stemmed from the fact that every Sodomite in town had been at the pride festival in Chico all day.

It was a nice bar, tiny and (legally) smoke-filled. There was a juke box with the requisite sucky faggot disco which I often forget is so common outside the city. The crowd was friendly and some of it was even attractive. The bartender told me that the building housing the bar had originally been Redding’s first hotel, and later its first brothel.

Getting laid seemed less and less worth the effort by 1:00, so I went home and slept. I stand by my decision.