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Christmas Day

You would have all been quite amused, if also a little frightened. Yer humble host spent an entire 24-hour period in a stunningly good mood. It was so uncharacteristic for me. Thanks are due to several good friends (and to a lesser extent to a pretty danged decent meal, along with Rudolph and the Grinch). I don’t think I grumbled once the entire day, although I did cuss when I burned myself on the macaroni and cheese casserole.

 

Note to self: throw more parties where you’re the only one in the room who knows everyone else. It’s fun.

 

The final menu was pork roast, collard greens, macaroni and cheese, pinto beans with onion and tomatoes (and a generous dollop of cayenne pepper), salad, bread, pound cake with strawberries, and assorted cookies and candy. And sweet tea, of course. There was wine and bread and pepermint hot chocolate, and more thanks to Dan and Sarah and Brad and Paula. Steve brought sugar. Mike brought wine glases and Chuck sent a card table in absentia.

 

I’m not sure what caused this Christmas stiffie I seemed to develop this year. maybe it’s my newfound domesticity. More likely it has to do with this being the first Christmas I’ve spent in San Francisco since 1995. It’s also possible that I was thinking this might well be my last Christmas here.

 

Whatever the reason, I was happy as a clam all day. I was boucing around the house singing along with Nat King Cole in the morning while I cooked. Dinner was great and the cramped quarters weren’t too horrible. We watched the Grinch and Rudolph and Charlie Brown and Dragnet.

 

Afterward, I even popped down to the Eagle and manage to have good time even in a public place. Miracles never cease. Of course, Eugene forced me to drink and listen to Blue Oyster Cult and Patti Smith and Al Green until last call, so I felt like death at 8:30 the next morning when my coma came to an abrupt halt, but that’s not a happy story, so I’ll skip it, being that this is an uncharacteristically positive journal entry. I’ll just admit to the world that my recent tea-totalling has caused me to lose my tolerance for booze (and hangovers).

Anyhow, my downstairs neighbor intimated that it was the best Christmas he’d had since moving to the city. That rather made it with the effort, I think.

On Email

Hmmm. How will I remember the final week of 1999? Probably as one where I was working an awful lot. This, of course, bodes well for things like eating and paying the rent, but not for answering email nor for site updates. Methinks the newest installment of Do You Bring Bottles will be delayed by a few weeks. Sorry.

It might do the whole site a world of good if I took a little break anyway. It seems I’m not writing about anything particularly interesting lately. I’ve been in a relatively good mood the past few weeks, which is cutting into my traditional crankiness. My life has taken a rather subdued turn of late. And I’m finding it increasingly difficult to spend leisure hours sitting in front of a computer, particularly with all the freelance I’m doing right now.

This is not to suggest that I’m giving up the site or even taking an extended break. I’m just threatening to pay a litle less attention for a few weeks, or at least until I feel inspired to write about something interesting or do something exciting. And I reserve the right to change my mind at any time. So there.

What I am admitting is that I’m taking a bit of an email break. It’s just gotten to be too much, I’m way behind (again), and I get this creeping sense of doom each time I look at my In Box. So I’m not going to worry about it anymore.

I used to answer all site-related email almost immediately, often at length. Two things have changed in the past few months: first, I get much more mail now and second, I’m less inclined to spend a couple of hours a day answering it. My lack of response has nothing to do with how I perceive the sender; in fact I often brush off interesting people more readily than quick questions, simply because the intersting mail requires a more thoughtful response (and therefore means more work).

I’m so very flattered that people take the time to email me about the site, and I feel bad about it, but I can no longer beat myself up about every single message I don’t answer (or take three weeks to answer). I just can’t spend so much time attached to a keyboard anymore.

This is, of course, not to say that I’m no longer answering email or that I don’t like getting it. I’m just answering non-essential, non-urgent mail at my leisure. And that means some of it isn’t going to get answered.

Ooh. That felt good.

New G4?

I’m thinking of buying a new computer. Of course, I’ve been thinking of buying a new computer for a year, but this time I’m thinking of buying one this very week, since I’ve found a nice new G4 on sale for about $1300. Strangely enough, this will be considerably less than I spent for much less machine four years ago.

Of course, my move into the USB universe will require new peripherals, etc., so it’s not like I’ll get off quite as cheaply as the above might suggest. But it sure would be nice to be able to open big files and not to worry (for a while at least) about cataclysmic disasters involving my hard drive. It would be great to get DSL without having to buy a new card and without worrying whether it would do any good with my wheezing old 1995 machine.

And why not spend all this money right now? My finances are always precarious, but this way I’d be broke with a much faster computer. That’s an improvement, right?

Maybe it’s time for the first annual Planet SOMA Pledge Drive. I could insert pledge breaks right in the middle of all my most popular pages, making appeals to guilt and offering overpriced premiums. For a $10 pledge, I could offer an autographed JPEG. For $25, a color copy of my Best of the Bay award from 1998. And $100 could get you a cum-stained jockstrap or a pair of official Planet SOMA used Nikes. But I hate to think what I might have to do (or to whom) for $500.

It could work, couldn’t it? Or did I piss everyone off yesterday with my email sabbatical?

Things I love today:

Things I hate today:

  • “In the Heat of the Night” at 6:00 instead of 5:00 on TNT
  • Michelina’s Signature frozen entreees
  • The new condo-loft project which is about to obscure the Herb Caen mural on Mission Street
  • This damned “freezing cold inthe morning but warm in the afternoon” weather which renders a coat first a necessity and then a burden

Late

No new computer. No one’s made that $500 pledge yet either. But I am finishing work before 11 tonight. That’s something, isn’t it?

The End of the World

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I don’t care.

OK, so the world isn’t really going to end, but it sure seemed like it was at my friendly neighborhood Safeway tonight. The lines were ten deep and there wasn’t a jug of water nor a decent can of soup in the place. It was crazy. Looked a little like a supermarket in North Carolina when half an inch of snow is predicted.

Me, I was just excited to see that Safeway has started carrying Sylvia Queen of Soul Food canned beans and still had Frosted Mini-Wheats on sale. I have milk jugs and can store my own water just fine, thank you.

The SFPD (all of whom are working tomorrow) have commandeered a majority of the parking spaces within three blocks of my house. Shops in Union Square are boarding up their windows for the weekend. It’s getting a little creepy ’round these parts.

Yer humble host has arranged to be safely stowed on the eastern side of Potrero Hill watching the fireworks in a purely residential area which drunk idiots and terrorists will probably avoid. I’m leaving my car there for the weekend.

So I guess this will be the last journal entry of the 1990’s (or the 1900’s, or even the 1000’s, for that matter). Should I say something profound? Should I wax nostalgic about the last 100 years? Probably not. The older I get, the more sketchy I am about what really happened the Middle Ages. Must’ve been all those mushrooms.

I’ll just close by wishing everyone a happy new year and inviting you to visit a dramatically unchanged Planet SOMA tomorrow.

Adios 1900s

Off I go into the night. If I’m attacked by roving gangs of survivalists (who crave my stash of canned peas) and don’t return, please remember that you can always say “Planet SOMA? That went out with the twentieth century…”

1 January 2000

It’s 2AM in San Francisco. The world did not end. The lights are on and the cable works. The web did not fail. I’ve sent and receieved email. There were no major riots. For a Friday night, it’s strangely calm and quiet South of Market, even though the bars have just dismissed their New Year’s Eve crowds into the streets.

Apparently, this “millenium bash” was one of the calmest New Year’s Eve celebrations in San Francisco history.

For my part, Dan picked me up at 7:30. We then grabbed Steve and Jamie and took the back rodas to a house near Geary and Masonic for dinner with some friends. We watched the celebration at Times Square. As we talked, we realized we’d all been watching the live coverage of the events worldwide all day. At this point, we gave up on all traces of urban sophistication and pretension (pretense?).

After dinner, we all drove back to Steve’s house on Potrero Hill to bring in the new year and watch the fireworks over the bay. It was all very low-key, we were seven nicely agreeable individuals, and Steve and I (the only two drinkers of the bunch) couldn’t even manage to kill off one bottle of champagne. We did have streamers and balloons (five of which are now in my living room) and cookies and bread and cheese.

We laughed at the sparse turnout for all of San Francisco’s “official” celebrations. I occasionally looked out the window to make sure than South of Market wasn’t on fire. It wasn’t.

In fact as we drove through the remarkably sedate Mission district and onto Folsom Street on the way home, I noticed that the crowds on the street were pretty small even for a normal Friday night. I think people were terrified. Or just tired of all the hype.

All in all, it was a damn fine New Year’s Eve. When I got home, I turned off all the lights I’d left on, emailed my mom to let her know I was still alive and now I’m going to bed.

The traditional collards and black-eyed peas will be served tomorrow afternoon, although Safeway was sold out of fresh greens. All in all, I’d say that this shortage may suggest that there’s hope for the Bay Area after all. Or at least a hell of a lot of Southern transplants.

That said, happy New Year to you all!

Planet SOMA 1999 Stats

Just in time for my fourth anniversary (with eight days to spare, yet), I’ve compiled the official 1999 Planet SOMA statistics, giving an exciting (OK, maybe not exciting) look at which pages are most popular, where links are coming from, etc. This front page, for example, was accessed over 128,000 times.

It’s no big surprise that the San Francisco front page is number one, with 22,333 accesses. It is a bit odd that my sex club page, which hasn’t been updated since I stopped going to sex clubs about three years ago, came in fifth. Anyway, the top ten is follows:

The strong showing in the 1970s section is largely due to a link on Suck.com a few weeks back (which actually shut down the site for a few hours), although the front page probably would have been in the top ten anyway. The loft boom is a result of this section’s being featured in a couple of Yahoo Full Coverage sections.

Yahoo was by far my largest traffic generator as a whole, along with several other search engines and “that interview” in Nightcharm.

Of course, all this can distract you from the fact that I still don’t have anything particularly exciting to write about. This weekend I brought in the New Year, solidified my good luck with black-eyed peas and collard greens, and drove upto Sacramento on Sunday (through the delta on Highway 160) just to get out of the house. And I worked.

It rained today. That was nice. And I had some really good pork chops for dinner. I almost threw a computer through a plate glass window at my evil and hateful part-time job today, which would have made an interesting story had I actually done it. And I won free stuff at the vending machine twice. But that’s about it.

Big damn deal, huh?

Bland, Slimy, and Annoying

Why is it that every time I see or hear the disposable sounds of the Grammy-nominated Backstreet Boys, I get this uncontrollable craving for a big ol’ mayonnaise and Velveeta sandwich on white bread? Has anyone else had this problem?

While I’m at it, does anyone else find this whole boy band thing to be a big insult to such classic boy bands as the Osmonds or New Kids on the Block? And has anyone else accidentally caught Joey McIntyre on one of his recent VH-1/MTV guest appearances and wondered at what a slimewad he seems to have become?

Speaking of slimewads, has anyone visited Cybersocket lately? I don’t recommend it; it’s a stupid publication with an ugly website. Even better, it features misleading descriptions of sites. Holy Titclamps, for example, is a “celebrity gossip” site while Planet SOMA is a big promoter of “queer culture”. I love the way that professional homosexuals try to re-work the universe to fit their narrow view thereof. If anything, my site’s function is to convince the world what a complete crock of shit the idea of “queer culture” is.

The above would be worth a brief chuckle if these assholes also didn’t keep spamming me (six messages yesterday) and telling me it wasn’t spam because I’d signed up for their “mailing list” Of course, this is bullshit, since the spam comes to specific addresses they harvested from my site and don’t use otherwise. It’s idiots like these who are responsible for the fact that I don’t have direct email links on the site anymore.

Other things I hate today, dammit:

  • All versions of Microsloth Word released after version 5.1 for Mac in 1992. It’s been downhill ever since for this increasingly bloated piece of crap which now does just about everything badly, except for word processing, which it barely seems to do at all.
  • A 15% price increase on Sausage McMuffins.
  • Radio stations with formats like “smooth jazz”, “new country”, and “the hits of the 70s and 80s with no rap, metal, or spontaneity”. OK, I made up the “spontaneity” part.
  • Those stupid “people do” Chevron commercials (still).

Links du jour:

Crazy

The pace continues to be crazy down Planet SOMA way, so my apologies for the sparse update schedule of late. I do have some interesting stuff planned for the site’s upcoming fourth anniversary on Thursday.

Coming soon: the excitement of two trips to Salinas in one day, the surprise of hearing from an old friend after a couple of years, and more. Sounds enticing, doesn’t it?