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January 2003

Where Alfred Walked

Sometimes it’s not enough that I married the cutest, geekiest boy I could find. Yes, sometimes I need to commune with large groups of obsessively geeky people in one room. Last night was one of those nights, and I found myself in the main library (being geeky, I live only four blocks away) watching a slideshow and presentation by the authors of this book…Yeah, it gave me a stiffy. They’ve painstakingly researched the geography of every Hitchcock film even vaguely related to the Bay Area, added maps and recent photos, and generally created by new favorite bathroom book. In short, they’ve done the same things I do when watching “Streets of San Francisco” reruns, all 120 of which I have on tape, and when researching supermarkets…It was exciting…

USA Today

New in the “it’s really cool and all, but I wish they’d give a guy some warning” department: apparently Bottles was featured in yesterday’s USA Today. I’m not sure if it was in the print edition too. Anyone have a copy?

Where I Live

So everyone’s buying houses lately. I want to buy a house. Of course, it will never happen in San Francisco for two big reasons, the first being that we’ll never be able to afford one here, and the second being that doing so would require much more of a commitment to San Francisco than I’m willing to make at this point…

But the apartment’s comfy, if small, and it’s time for an updated tour, I think:

 

This is the house where I live. It’s a different color now, but I don’t have a new picture handy. Inside is our mailbox…

This is the hall. It is long and narrow and has lots of Apple posters in it. It was rebuilt in 2001 to accommodate a new heating unit. Afterward, the hall has always been toasty warm, no matter how cold the rest of the apartment might be…

 

The front room is the office. This was where Otherstream and Murdering Mouth and all the other assorted websites live and breed…

 

We have a lot of books…

Next you come to the bedroom. It is very small, but quite adequate for purposes of sleeping, watching “Streets of San Francisco” re-runs in bed, and, ummm, other things…

There is also a bathroom. This is the room where we shower, release waste, and brush our teeth. It is also the room where Mark and I said that we loved each other for the very first time, but that’s a different story entirely (and it doesn’t involve watersports or scat, thanks)…

 

Now you’ve arrived in the living room. When the building was first built in 1912, this would have been the dining room. You can’t see the dish shelf, which is stocked with hundreds of videotapes. You can, however, see the porn, the DVDs, and the shelf of good juju…

 

We use the chairs for sitting, and the entertainment center for entertainment. And sometimes vice versa…

 

The back room (pardon the terminology) is the kitchen. It is the largest room in the place, and I like it. Probably because that’s where all the food is…

 

From the back door, you stepp onto the deck. This is where I smoke cigarettes and wish that the grill were being put to more use…

And that is my house. Thanks for visiting…

Stupid Sports Fans

It’s apparently the hot new trend nationwide. Your team makes it to the Super Bowl. You celebrate by trashing the neighborhood. I don’t get it, but I’ve never really understood the appeal of football itself either. I used to do some stupid things when I was drunk, but setting fire to an auto-repair shop never seemed all that exciting, even when I was REALLY drunk…

It’s raining. I’m excited…

Randomly Monday

Random tidbits for a Monday afternoon:

  • It takes the most extreme bravery and courage of one’s convictions to express oneself dramatically by, say, breaking windows and kicking over newspaper racks. Really. Must’ve been just terrifying fighting those inanimate objects.
  • Yes, I do believe most people who describe themselves as “anarchists” are little more than blithering idiots, and haven’t the foggiest notion what they’re talking about.
  • The problem with too many Bay Area bookstores: the tarot section is often the same size as (or larger than) the economics section.
  • Quoth the most wonderful boy in the world this morning when confronted with too many recent news stories about stranded hikers and campers in the mountains: “Why do people go camping when it’s freezing cold and snowing outside?”
  • Did I mention that I’m a devout believer in natural selection?

Troll and Fashion Victims

Saw Troll at the Peacock Lounge last night. They’re an interesting band and I’d like to see them again someplace that doesn’t, well, suck. We also saw this very stupid-looking boy in a fur hat and goggles and a tough question was raised: are fashion victims among the protected classes who get to use the handicapped seats on buses?

Note to the fine folks at Hahn’s Hibachi on Haight Street: annoying circuit clone techno-dance music is not conducive to good digestion…

Time for breakfast. Mmmm. Manwich omelet…

Shopping

Christmas was rough on a lot of retailers this year, and apparently my little Safeway in the Financial District is still wooing those ever-elusive holiday shoppers. I stopped by on the way home tonight just as “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” kicked in on the Muzak…

It was rather sweet, in a creepy sort of way…

Unrelated (more or less): a letter-writer in the Chronicle today stated “I am amazed that Californians living near the Oregon border who shop in Oregon because there is no sales tax remain in California! If they don’t feel any responsibility for sharing the cost of California public services, why don’t they move?”…

Spare me. I was surprised to see that the writer was from Sonora, as he has a very San Franciscan viewpoint: specifically that one must repeatedly (and cheerfully) be gouged just for the “great privilege” of living here. Bullshit. If I could save 10% or more on all my purchases by making a short trip to a place which does a better job of managing its finances, I’d do it in an instant…

My sense of civic pride does not require a vow of poverty, thanks, and if I were forced to do all my shopping in San Francisco (or California) as a requirement of residence, I’d most definitely move…

Updates

Hmmm. An unexplained and unplanned 12-day absence. This is to confirm that I am in fact alive and relatively healthy. And that’s about it. Not, mind you, that anything’s wrong. I just haven’t had much to say lately. I’m once again thinking of my computer more as a workplace than an entertainment zone…

But, by way of quick updates:

  • Road trip last weekend. Pictures soon.
  • Planet SOMA — and this whole personal web-publishing thing to which I’m paying almost no attention lately — celebrated its seventh anniversary on Monday, and I had to be reminded of that fact by reading Becky’s site.
  • Liking Safari. A lot. I’ll like it even more when it starts having actual preferences settings.
  • I now have friends in Albany, which is a whole new experience for me.

Funniest read of the week (from The NYC Anti-Hipster Forum, via Chromewaves)…

Home

Sunday morning brought more free pastries, a Mexican breakfast, and laundry with the locals (which is fast becoming a vacation tradition). We headed back to san Francisco early in the afternoon, stopping in Sacramento for a Wal-Mart run and in Isleton for a crawdad melt. Of course, we made it home in time for The Simpsons, even though we were too tired to care very much…

It was a good weekend…