Menu Close

2001

Weekend Superlatives

Best way to kill off the better part of a Saturday: Thrift stores in Sacramento with Jamie, accompanied by copious amounts of Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne on the radio.Most entertaining disco song from my past heard in a queer bar I shouldn’t have been in: “High Energy” by Evelyn Thomas.

Most disturbing realization of the evening: I know the title and artist associated with the aforementioned song.

Second most disturbing revelation of the evening: I purchased the 12-inch in 1984.

Third most disturbing revelation of the evening: I still speak French passably well after a couple of beers.

Biggest disappointment of the night: Putting a boy I rather like into a cab at 8:00 because he started drinking way too early.

Pick of the week

Not to brag or anything, but Bottles is a Yahoo Pick of the Week as of today. I haven’t had one of those since about this time in 1996, when Jonno and I were both featured (which is actually how we “met”)…

I think this year’s annual Memorial Day walk across San Francisco (1999 or 2000 for reference) is officially cancelled. I woke up at 5:00 this morning (after going to bed at midnight) and never quite got back to sleep. Now I just feel like sitting. Or maybe even reclining…

God forbid I should answer some of the email I’ve been ignoring for the past week or so…

Not to…

It strikes me upon looking back at yesterday’s entry that anytime someone starts a sentence with “not to” (as in “not to brag” or “not to change the subject”), they’re about to do precisely the thing they claim not to be doing…

Anyway, it’s about to be a week from hell for me, so I’m warning in advance that I’ll be all but useless with respect to updates, email responses, and the like. More so than usual, even…

Now get out of here and go tell Sarah to have a happy birthday before it’s too late, dammit…

Hot

It felt miserably hot today, but not this hot. After all, it was only 39 degrees above normal. To make it worse, my bus broke down on the way home. At least I wsn’t on BART; it caught on fire

Some nights I’m just glad to be sitting at home in front of my fan, working my butt off…

Dang

Good Lord. Bottles has fairly exploded with this Yahoo link. Over 5400 people visited today. Suffice to say, I’ve never had 5400 visitors to any of my sites in a 24-hour period before. Nor anything particularly close to that. They should give a guy a little warning…

It’s sort of fun for now, but it should all calm down next week…

Trent’s Words

Maybe Trent Lott (who’d always be good for a laugh if he weren’t so powerful) should choose his words more carefully. Quoted in an AP article today he states that the “American people, and the people of Vermont for that matter, did not vote to put the Democrats in control of the Senate.”

Interesting. Brings to mind the somehwat commonly-held opinion that the people of America may not necessarily have voted to put a Republican in the White House either…

Funny how these things work out…

My Ocean

I visited my ocean today.

A lot of people who live in San Francisco seem to forget that we pretty much live at the beach. It’s true, even though SF is not really a “beach town” and even though our beaches are very often cold and foggy. Neighborhoods near the beach are not among the most popular and “in demand” areas here, possibly because of that very fog as well as the distance from downtown.

San Francisco orients itself toward the bay, and people on the east side of Twin Peaks have this semi-irrational fear of anything to the west of it. It’s much the same fear that San Franciscans in the northeast quadrant seem to have of just about anyplace outside the quaint little 15 square miles or so of unchallenged assumptions and pretentious coffee joints they call home.

But all the same, the Pacific Ocean keeps right on being our western border, even though much (maybe most) of the city keeps right on ignoring it. But me, I like to go visit my ocean once in a while.

I’m not really a beach person, but at the same time, I am one too. The idea of lying on a hot beach, baking in the sun, is about the closest thing I can imagine to hell. I do not swim and I do not surf. But I do like being at the beach when it’s cold or foggy or stormy, and especially at night. It’s not a nature thing for me; I like shabby, run-down beachfront buildings and piers, and the sound of waves. And yes, I like watching surfers change into their wetsuits in the parking lot too.

On a few rare nights when my apartment six miles inland was like an oven, I’ve actually even had sex on the beach here, which is something most natives won’t admit to.

Today I visited my ocean down in Pacifica. I had to return to my car for a jacket. There were no sunbathers and no volleyball players. There were also no fashion victims nor speed freaks nor cell phones. There were just about fifty quite pleasant and unremarkable people watching their dogs and fishing and strolling by the pier trying not to get too cold.

My ocean and I had a nice visit. I sort of didn’t want to come back. And I was sort of glad that most of San Francisco was ignoring the seahore today, just as expected.

I’m Alive

At this point I’ll just duck in and acknowlege that I am in fact alive. I just don’t have anything particularly interesting to say. Sorry…

21.75 Hours without Email

There’s something sort of nice about wandering in to the front room to check email at 9:15 PM and realizing that you haven’t done so since 11:45 PM the previous day…

Not to mention the fun of realizing that, once you finally sat down in front of the computer, it was just in time (three minutes to spare) to win this auction that you’d almost forgotten to bid on…

I’m abandoning said computer again now to go read a book. Time spent online today: 26 minutes, including the time it took to type this…

Movies

It might make a good litmus test to see how compatible I am with someone else. There are certain movies I can watch over and over again without ever getting tired of them. Taken together, they probably say an awful lot about me, but I’m not really sure what it is.

Anyway, here’s a list of some of my favorites which stand up to repeated viewing:

And a second tier. Think of these as the ones I might watch once a year rather than twice:

Analysis? Think we’re meant to be together? Think Alfred Hitchcock or really desparate characters are over-represented? Think I need to contemporize? Wondering how “The Crow” made the list? Got a list of your own? Post it here or on your own site (and let me know for the obligatory free link)…