Menu Close

All posts

39

Realizations upon hitting Jack Benny’s age:

  • Love has a way of sneaking up on you and finding you when and where you least expect it, and of being a more wonderful thing than you ever thought it could be.
  • Domestic bliss can be amazingly sexy, even when it involves seven or eight potted plants sitting in the bathtub.
  • Health insurance is a pretty damned nice thing too.
  • Most people on the planet will never drive, walk, write, nor place orders at fast food restaurants the way I think they should. The fact that they all suck will probably never motivate them to change.
  • A cheap roadside tacqueria is a wonderful thing.

11 August 2003

The cure may be worse than the disease: ever since I went to physical therapy (for my elbow) this morning, my lower back has hurt like hell. If it’s not better by tomorrow, I will be much pissed, since I neither wanted nor needed physical therapy in the first place, and even the physical therapist herself admitted as much…

The birthday was low-key, involving pizza and snuggling on the couch. Mark got me cool stuff, including a pipe and a pouch of tobacco, which I’m using to wean myself off cigarettes. Thanks for all your cards and letters and assorted good wishes…

And, in case you were wondering, a video camera CAN successfully recover from being doused in grapefruit soda, even without a repair bill. Not that I know this from experience or anything…

I’m Alive

Baby, it gets even worse after living in the fog for more than a decade. But living under the same roof with you for the past 363 days has made this city almost palatable…

Sorry for the extended absence. It’s been a long couple of weeks…

Cohabitiversary Weekend

I didn’t really want to get up at 6:45 on Labor Day, but I was swayed by the idea of getting four hours pay (twelve, if you ocunt the holiday pay) for slightly more than one hour of work, so here I am…

The weekend was nice. Mark and I had dinner at The Dead Fish on Sunday to celebrate what I’m calling “anniversary lite”, which is the day Mark moved in with me. Our officially celebrated anniversary is 26 October, which is the day we first met. But an excuse to eat at The Dead Fish is always welcome…

After dinner, there was a surprise visit from my aunt and her husband, who are on a five-week bus tour around the country. We met them for dessert and showed them around a bit, and it was nice..

Gonna go watch movies now…

Letters to the Editor

Ah, a brand new month and a brand new “most idiotic statement I’ve read this week’ in the Chron’s letters to the editor:

Homelessness will end in San Francisco after we elect Newsom mayor on Nov. 4. Human lives are at stake.

There are some compelling reasons to support both Gavin Newsom and his “Care Not Cash” initiative, but come on. Isn’t this just a little bit of a stretch?

Moving on, there’s this bit of faulty logic:

Basic justice says everyone, no matter what their income, should have equal access to all parts of the city — every day, at all times of day. Muni is the most basic transportation system for city residents. Equal right to access throughout the city can’t be met unless Muni fares are kept low. Fares need to be cheap enough that they aren’t a burden to anyone, no matter how low their income is… The right to transportation is part of the right to life in a city.

People, please get the hell over it. San Francisco has one of the cheapest mass transit systems of any large city in America. The right to “equal access to all parts of the city” does not necessarily suggest that this access has to be provided at the individual convenience and whim of all 793,000 residents, nor is “right to access” necessarily synonymous with “right to transportation”. The fact that I have a right to visit North Carolina or New York City whenever I choose does not suggest that the airline must provide a seat of my choosing, day or night, at whatever price I’d prefer to pay…

It’s a quarter. Learn to cope. Most of us already have. And by the way, who is this “Basic Justice” character, and where can I read more of what he’s said?

Unrelated: here‘s one of those cases where male privilege definitely works to my advantage…

The S&M “Community”

An antidote to yesterday: today we’ll be featuring one of the funniest things I’ve read in weeks (and how surprised am I that it was in the Guardian, which tends to get a little more humor-free with each issue):

Why is it that any mention of S-M nets more picky, niggling “corrections” than any other topic? … It’s the nature of the S-M community, which tends, as a group, to think too much and talk too much and write self-important e-mails when it could be playing. This could have something to do with it being full of the sort of people drawn to activities that, while they appear edgy and daring, are in fact safer than golf, which at least carries a risk of being struck by lightning. S-M lends itself to overplanning, overequipping, and an obsession with detail. In other words, it’s for nerds. I say this with all due respect and (as a risk-averse, nerdish person) self-recognition, but I say it anyway: S-M isn’t exactly running the bulls at Pamplona; S-M is a petting zoo. Get over your bad selves.

None of this explains why it’s always the scenesters insisting that any passing mention of perviness must include their own personal perversion. If I write about bondage, say, I’ll get “Of course, it’s originally an Apache initiation ritual, but you should never hang someone from their eyeballs without gloves. Also, I think you were remiss in failing to mention cortical saline inflation …” Sigh. I didn’t mention Apache cortical-inflation eyeball hanging because I was trying to make sure everybody understands what I mean by “top” and “bottom” first, and I only have this one little column to do it in, you self-inflated sixth-grade suck-up. Sit down. And don’t write me letters.

 

If I were going to have an affair with a woman, I think she’d be the one. Especially if she’d just keep saying this over and over again:

I’m just not convinced that sharing a taste for certain sensations qualifies a bunch of folks as a “people.”

Or maybe a community?

Insurance

Having health insurance is a wonderful thing. Trying to knock some sense into their heads and get them to pay claims properly is a much less wonderful thing. Makes me even more apprehensive about going in for a replay on Thursday. Oh well…

But this is definitely the most depressing news of the day…

Psycho Driver

So today’s was definitely my creepiest bus trip home in quite a while. Sometimes I get on the bus and know instantly that the driver is going to be, ummm, a handful. Today was one of those days. And I was right…

Through the whole lurching trip, she was having really loud conversations. With someone. Someone who either wasn’t there or had mastered invisibility. I didn’t see any evidence of a cell phone either, not that I would have felt much better about the state of affairs if there had been one…

About every third stop, she would yell “Who rang the bell? Where’s the stop?”. I can understand this, sort of. Maybe she wasn’t familiar with the route. This wasn’t really a stretch considering she also didn’t seem very familiar with how to drive a bus to begin with…

By the time we hit First and Harrison, she was engaged in a shouting match with another motorist. It went on and on. I thought she was going to ram the bus into his car, but she settled for the last word, calling him a “dummy” and adding “yeah, you know you are”…

She had trouble finding a couple more stops before getting to mine which, of course, she also bypassed. After the four of us who’d mistakenly assumed we’d be getting off the bus yelled “stop”, she told us to “please let me drive the bus” and informed us that there was another bus behind her, so she couldn’t stop in the designated zone. Funny, that hadn’t stopped any other bus I’d ever been on (nor had it stopped her at the preceding stop; she’d just come to grinding halt in the middle of the street)…

Anyway, we finally all exited the bus from hell. I stifled the urge to respond that I’d have been more than happy to “let her drive the bus” if she’d shown any particular skill at it. I just wrote down her bus number and dialed up the complaint line when I got home…

Knowing how Muni works, she’ll probably get a commendation rather than a mandatory crack test, but I did my part…

This Day May Not Be Salvageable

It’s 5:00 in the morning. I didn’t sleep much at all because it was hotter than hell all night long. I have to be at the hopsital at 6:00, and thus I also can’t eat or drink anything. And then I hear that Johnny Cash died last night. This is gonna be a great day, huh?

Idiots with Email

A sample of some of the mail I get about this site:

My name is k**** b****** of Fresno. And I was wondering why the save mart store on fruit ave is so run down. Is it because a poorer group of people shop there? and you don’t care its just a buck to you. Because I have been in the other stores and it seems Like there pretty nice,not like the one one fruit. I no what it is,you spent to much money on the save mart center and your over your head to really care about whats important. If you can’t take good care of all the stores just the same you should get out of Fresno period. Fresno Is getting run down and big corp like yourself should help because Fresno needs that kind of help. Thank you very K**** B*******

I get an average of one or two messages a month from people complaining about the service at Save-Mart, or asking me for a job at Save-Mart, or asking me where the closest Save-Mart is located. And, to a one, they’re all from people who seem as incapable as this one of (a) composing a sentence, (b) of spelling words like “you’re” or “they’re” or “know”, or (c) of using punctuation…

I’m not sure what it is about Save-Mart. The biggest problem, I think, is that the chain doesn’t have its own website and that my page on its history and architecture is one of the first to come up on most search engines. After clicking, the visitors with IQs above 60 (the ones who can actually compose a coherent English sentence) quickly realize that my site is not Save-Mart’s site and move on. The rest send me email…

I know it has nothing to do with the Central Valley in general, because some of the most intelligent life on the planet comes from there. And, as this recent quote from a Chronicle article on the RIAA suggests, Bay Area residents aren’t always the brightest bulbs in the chandelier either:

I thought, if it’s on the Internet, it must be OK… I thought it was becoming legal.

If it’s on the Internet, it’s OK. Classic. That would explain the spam, the child pornography, and all the assorted penis-enlarging schemes, not to mention the occasional virus or worm. To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, there is indeed no underestimating the intelligence of the American public…