Month: July 2008

Planet SOMA is over

I think this is pretty much the end of Planet SOMA as a standalone website.

I thought this “memoir of San Francisco in the 1990s” was the thing that might bring it back to life, but it’s not working. I don’t really need nostalgia in my life right now. I need to be looking forward. And writing about things I did fifteen years ago isn’t really conducive to that.

Planet SOMA is and was about San Francisco. That part of my life is over, and there’s no real reason for this to be a separate website anymore. Thus, I’ll probably start redirecting this domain to Otherstream, which has been my real home on the web for the past seven or eight years anyway.

It’s been a great twelve and a half years, though. Thanks.

Atlanta rising

To me, the most interesting (and under-reported) story in the Census Bureau’s recently-released city population estimates for 2007 is the dramatic increase in the inner-city population of Atlanta over the past few years.

Atlanta is landlocked and can’t grow by annexation, and for much of the late twentieth century, its population was actually declining, although the metropolitan area was growing at a pretty spectacular pace. Since 2000, however, the city has added over 100,000 residents — a population increase of nearly 25% in just eight years, from 416,000 to 519,000 residents. This is absolutely amazing, and is almost unheard of for an older urban center surrounded by suburbs, particularly one that had long been viewed by many as somewhat “in decline”.

Even booming Charlotte (which isn’t landlocked and can still annex surrouding territory) can’t boast of quite so large a percentage increase. Is it really a “back to the city” thing? Is it about the much-publicized draw of Atlanta for the black middle class? Is it because Letser Maddox finally died a few years ago, and sane people now feel safe in Georgia? I’m not really sure, but whatever they’re doing down there, they’re apparently doing it extremely well.

Catch-up

I’d love to pretend that my absence was due to all the exciting things I’ve been busy with lately. It hasn’t. I have been very busy, but it’s mostly been with pretty tedious stuff.

Birthday

Some exceptions:

  • A birthday dinner for Mark at the Old Salem Tavern last week. We were both pretty well impressed with the place. It’s kind of cool eating good food in a 200-year-old restaurant, even if it no longer has sleeping rooms upstairs nor drunk Moravians roaming about.
  • My last day at the part time job I’ve been sleepwalking through for the past year or so. I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite so little emotion upon leaving a job. I guess my “engagement” level just wasn’t very high. Anyway, no more Agnes. Yay!
  • My exciting new digital converter box. The one that was dead on arrival and that I have to return.

OK, so my life is exceedingly boring. I realize that. That’s why I haven’t been saying much lately. I’ll try to be more interesting (for my own sake) but I make no promises.

Maybe a road trip soon…

He no longer stands anywhere

Jesse Helms has begun to decompose. Over the next few days, any number of North Carolinians will be writing commentaries that begin with “I didn’t agree with him, but…”

I’m not one of those people who will write sweet, apologetic obituaries despite my differences with the man. The fact of his death does not suddenly transform him into a great and honorable man. He was neither great nor honorable. He was a small-minded bigot and political opportunist who used his considerable power to make many people’s lives more miserable than they needed to be. The fact that you “always knew where he stood” is irrelevant; consistency isn’t an asset when one is consistently wrong. Jesse Helms was an evil son of a bitch, and now he’s an evil son of a bitch who also happens to be deceased. Period.

I won’t say I’m glad that he’s dead, and I don’t mean to suggest that he deserved to die for his opinions. However, I also won’t pretend that I’ll miss the man, nor that I feel any particular sense of loss upon his passing. He’s dead. It doesn’t change my opinion of him in any way.