Blogger of the month

From talula.net, a blog I happened on randomly. The only thing that kept me from posting things like this when I was a teenager is, there was no internet yet, much less blogging. But now we can all be voyeurs as some drunken teen confesses all:

Aaaaah! I'm so excited! Amy and I are going to see Imperial Teen tonight in SF. I haven't been to a show in AGES. I think a guy from Redd Kross is opening for them. But you know, I secretly know that Jon is going to be working at the merchandise booth for a while. So I am going to dress up to look extra-extra-extra hot, and then totally ignore him. I will flirt with lots of guys right near the booth but pretend I don't even see him. You know he hasn't called or emailed me since we spent that night together? Of all the nerve. I guess I could have called or emailed him, but whenever I do that boys think I am in love with them or something and they freak out. So this time I am playing it cool but I still think what the fuck? Oh well, I have to get going to I have time to get dressed. I will report back later. I am glad Amy has a car! She'd better not get drunk though. I am the only one who's allowed to get drunk.

Then:

Dear World, Yes, it's after 5 am and I am just getting home. You will not believe the shocking adventures I had tonight! Oh. My. God. I am still a little bit drunk so I will try to be coherent. By the way, Amy did get drunk too which means she drove us home drunk, which is ILLEGAL!!! She should not have done that and I am going to use it against her if I decide to be mad at her. But I might not decide that. So you want to know what happened? Well. As I said I was going to, I dressed up all hot and when Amy picked me up I saw that she was looking all hot too, which immediately seemed suspicious. Then we went there and we got some beer and we had about two beers each while the opening band was playing and then Amy said "Let's go see if we can buy a t-shirt!" and dragged me over to the merchandise booth. That pretty much foiled my plan of ignoring Jon right there. I decided to play it really cool anyway. So we got up to the booth and I kind of hid behind Amy while she went up there to ask for a shirt and Jon said "Oh! Hey, Amy!" and I was shocked! I didn't know that they knew each other! So I showed myself and he said "Hi Talula..." and then he started looking awkward. He said "I didn't know you guys knew each other!" and I said "I didn't know you guys knew each other" and Amy said "I didn't know you guys knew each other!" and we all just looked at each other for a second and then I grabbed Amy's hand and dragged her off and into the bathroom. This is how I found out that Amy had also slept with Jon and he had also not called her afterward. So guess what, we decided that it's so typical of women to get mad at each other over a guy and that is dumb, so we decided to be clever and torture Jon! We decided that from now on it is our mission to torment and confuse him. Our first action would be to force him to get an embarrassing erection in the merchandise booth. Maybe we could even make him screw up while counting change and get him in trouble!!! So we went back there but we totally pretended to ignore him and we got more beer but only one cup and we shared it, and we got all slinky-sexy on each other. We whispered and giggled and acted like girlfriends so he would think we were sleeping together. I glanced over at him and his face was turning red as he was trying to help a customer. Hee hee hee!!! Then the real band came on and we went in to see the show and we danced sexy together just in case he was watching. Then afterwards we left holding hands and we said "Bye, Jon!" and walked out. I bummed a cigarette from Amy and we smoked before we went to her car because she was still drunk. All the people came out and then Jon came out too and he came up to us and said "Hey, you guys" and we just acted like we only knew him casually. "Hey," we said. "Well ok, see ya," he said and then he went away. We were giggling unstoppably and we went to find her car which took a really long time because we forgot to pay attention to where we parked it but that was good because Amy got to walk off some of the alcohol but she still had a buzz when we were driving home and we are lucky that we are not both dead tonight!

It's like reading a blog that the blond girl in Ghost World might have posted, only her friend sounds equally vapid and silly. Enid from Ghost World would never have slept with Jon, I'm sure.

I don't post nearly enough stuff like this. Let's give it a try:

Dear World, Ahhhhhh! I can't believe it! We still have cheesecake left over from Thanksgiving. I am going to dress extra sexy and eat a big slice, and I'm going to eat it in front of Cris.

No, that's not right at all. Let's try again.

Dear World, ohmigod, I went out in the car, and, like, I parked on Church St. and I went into the crepe place and ordered scrambled eggs, and I saw out of the corner of my eye this hot girl leaving, but she didn't see me! And then I went into Muddy Waters nearby and that skinny Arab girl was playing her weird Arab-pop, and I wanted to ask her, you know, like, are you playing that ironically or are you playing it for real, because if its' for real, I think you really need to look at yourself and your tastes. But I didn't say that. Then I went over to the church and worked on my novel, taking a nap inbetween two scenes I worked on. I was like, two scenes! Two thousand words! Right on!

Just in case your holiday isn't ruined yet

This article on law.com speculates that Supreme Court Justine Antonin Scalia, the court's most ascerbic and conservative member, is a good bet for Chief justice when present Chief Justice William Rehnquist retires. Just in case you forgot that there is a difference between Democrats and Republicans and that it does matter that the former are elected rather than the latter. And while I'm thnking of it, here's a big UP YOURS to those Florida voters for Ralph Nader. I'd wish them worse, but living in Florida must be its own punishment.

My Thanksgiving was unremarkable. I mean, the meal prepared entirely by Cris was terrific, and we had a nice time, but nothing untoward or unusual happened. Tomorrow (Saturday) I should get back to work on my book.

Five a.m. looms

Today was a good day: I wrote two scenes for a total of 1250 words, and did my four miles on the treadmill. I'm over the cold I had a week ago, and tomorrow, if we don't spend too much time at the store shopping for Thanskgiving dinner, I should get another scene done. Thinking of Sunday as the last day of a work week -- as I do now that the American work week has settled deeply into my mind, despite my current unemployment -- I had a terrific week. I wrote more than 5000 words, polished off several scenes in my novel... and went to the zendo only once.

It started last Monday when I was sick; I decided to sleep in, and I was glad I did. So the next day I went to meditate, getting up at 5:20 a.m., and man, did I feel it the rest of the day. So I fucked off all week long, and I felt much better. The one day I did go, Y. was back to his tricks, blathering something during zazen. It sounded like a poem this time, and not just some stupid aphorism, and it didn't bug me quite as much as it did when he showed up for the first time in... September, was it? and started off with his yapping during zazen. But it was still a distraction.

So now I'm well, and I guess I can go back to sitting, but I'm really wondering whether it's worth getting up at 5:00 a.m. anymore if I'm going to feel tired all day. What the fuck, why should I feel tired all day? And to tell you the truth, my meditation hasn't been going that great. I haven't centered on my breathing in a few weeks, and my mind wanders like crazy. I come back to my breath for about one breath, then it's off to the races again. Plus this fellow Y. bugs me. So I'm not getting a lot out of it.

The funny thing is that it took me until I'm unemployed and don't have to stay awake all day long to get to this point. When I was working, I would take naps on the floor of my office. Now I can take naps whenever I want and I actually take fewer naps.

Well, I guess I"ll set the clock for 5:00 and decide then whether to get up or not. I sure have been enjoying my sleep, though.

Who did you expect, Tinkerbell?

Who's behind all that spam in your email inbox? Just the kind of sleazebag you'd expect.

Let's review

It's sometimes hard to remember, given the amount of daily news and the way it pours in (pick your metaphor: onslaught, avalanche, firehose), just what we're fighting for. Of course, we all remember that we're anti-gun, anti-war, pro-civil rights for women and queers, and pro-choice. (Or, let's call it what the other side calls it: pro-abortion. Because abortion itself really is the core issue we're fighting over when it comes to (what our side calls) reproductive rights. Yes, we can fight over details of parental notification and sex education and the distribution of condoms and so forth, but all those are side issues compared to the big one: Can you or can't you get an abortion when you want one?)

My stand, our stand -- at least, given what I know about the eight or so people who even read this weblog -- on these issues, taken together, form what would be called (by us) a progressive agenda or (by the other side) an ultra-liberal agenda. Yes, I'm conscious of using the right words for things, saying "I'm pro-choice" or "reproductive rights," but I'm also conscious of what the other side calls things. They'd say "pro-abortion" and "the right to kill your baby." I know this because I listen, partly for entertainment and partly because I want to know what the other side is thinking, to right-wing Christian radio, and I have for a long time. Over the past twenty years I've witnessed the programming on right-wing Christian radio stations becoming more and more sophisticated, as right-wingers start to understand that nowadays they have to put an educated gloss on what even they admit are views that are out of the mainstream. The never-say-die campaign by the Christian right against the theory of evolution, for example, now uses a collection of arguments collected under the rubric "Creation Science." Of course, it isn't real science, any more than Scientology is, but if you call something a science and you have Ph.D.s making proclamations on its behalf, then it sounds more credible. The Nazis understood this, and the Christian Right does, too.

(That was a cheap shot. The Nazis also understood that the Volkswagen was a good, dependable car, and that doesn't make everyone who drives one an anti-Semite. I know when I'm taking cheap shots, just like I know what I'm doing when I watch pornography. But it doesn't stop me from doing it.) (You'll notice a plethora of parentheses. This is the way I think. I make one statement and then I also think of what somebody might think of it, or I think what somebody on the other side might say. This deep-seated ambivalance about language, this recognition of how maleable it is, is what keeps me from being an effective essayist.)

So we've got these "progressive" political stances. But the point I was going to make is, do we all remember why we have them? Let's review.

The top priority for all the threatened white men is to take away abortion rights, and then birth control. The reason is utterly simple -- they want women burdened down with children and out of the workplace. For the same reason, they'll work to reverse other advances that have torn down the patriarchal edifice: domestic partners' laws, for example, not to mention the right of queers to marry (not that we're there yet) and thus gain access to all the marriage-related property and tax rights. And they'll fight against the recognition of queers as persons and queer sexuality as acceptable, because recognition that queers exist and are entitled to human rights also threatens the white-male dominated workplace.

The next priority for the threatened white men is to keep non-white people at each other's throats. That's why they fight so hard against the legalization of drugs: because the bigger the drug trade, the more blacks and latinos kill each other trying to control it. The huge amount of money generated ("wasted," according to the right-wing pundits, and it is a waste, though they don't really believe this) by the prison system, the anti-immigrant system and the police system goes mainly to this threatened white group, but more importantly, keeping drugs illegal keeps minorities in poverty by undercutting the economic and social health of their communities. Then they make sure guns are widely available by working to defeat gun control laws.

The next priority, and here the Bush administration is making a lot of progress (from their perspective), is to roll back environmental protections so they can make absolutely as much money as fast as possible from raping the earth. Similarly, the vast fast-food economy which dominates the diets of everyone in the U.S. and which is being pushed into other countries as fast as possible, plus the tobacco economy, is designed to exploit (and incidentally destroy) human ecosystems as surely as oil, gas, automobile and construction companies destroy geophraphical ecosystems.

You get the picture. I'm not saying there's a vast right-wing conspiracy by big blue meanies to destroy the world and control everybody; I'm saying that the right wing's intentions are purely economic. For example, though a huge Christian Right system exists to push the "pro-life" agenda under the name of religion, the fact is that the rich white men funding the system don't give a shit about religion or "saving babies" or saving anyone's souls. They just want women out of the workplace. That's all it's about.

You could put your eye out

What happens to all those 4" Swiss Army knives confiscated at airport security checkpoints? This page answers the question for the Sacramento area. (Link courtesy BoingBoing.)

Memories of bullies

Today's front page Wall Street Journal feature is a riveting account of a typical school bully and his surprising (and, to me, satisfying) end. Upon being informed through his family that the schoolmate who had inflicted endless torture on him during the second through fifth grades had died of AIDS, reporter Jonathan Eng went back and discovered the truth about his former classmate's violent family life and the aggressive lifestyle that led to his demise. Definitely worth reading, and do it today, while it's still free.

I too had a bully who made my life miserable during grade school. I was the smallest kid in the class and he was the biggest. From the third grade to the seventh, I was oppressed by a boy named Bruce H_______. There was little actual pounding, more chasing (I got to be surprisingly fast for my size) and intimidation. Recognizing the odds -- by fourth grade, he was as big as some of the seventh graders -- I almost never fought back, except for once or twice when I was completely enraged. And although we attended a parochial (Lutheran) school, neither the teachers nor my parents did anything about the incessant bullying. Only last year -- approximately 35 years after the fact -- did my mother reveal an extremely pertinent fact: Bruce's father was the president of the congregation that ran the school and of which our parents were all members, and he ran it with an iron hand. My parents were afraid of social retaliation if they went to the H_______s with any complaints. So they left me and Bruce to work it out together.

We didn't work it out. He finally grew out of it somewhat, and then in the middle of the eighth grade (the school was K-8), my family moved away and I never saw him again. But I still have fantasies about showing up at his front door and wreaking revenge. A web search shows he lives in suburban St. Louis and is part of a Christian businessman's group. I suppose that's no more pathetic than some of the organizations I've been part of. But I would have been much more satisfied if I'd found, like the author of the WSJ article, that Bruce had died penniless of a hideous disease. That's where my sense of compassion and my maturity end.

Interesting things

Middle-class Jews from Buenos Aires have begun to emigrate to Montreal, fleeing Argentina's economic crisis, says this article from the 18 Nov 02 Toronto Globe and Mail (link courtesy BoingBoing). They were invited by representatives from Montreal's Jewish community eager to replenish their shrinking numbers, the story says. So in a few years you'll be able to go to Montreal and dance the tango with a bunch of immigrant Argentinians. Cool.

This piece by Laura Miller in Sunday's NYT Magazine is an amusing and insightful piece on the spreading use of "meta," or self-referential strategies, in popular culture. And speaking of Salon -- where Miller built a steady following before becoming my San Francisco generation's leading literary arbiter -- a similar figure from the previous generation, Greil Marcus, is still holding forth, and always worth reading. Marcus refuses to confine himself to jazz and pop (or pazz and jop, as Marcus' longtime employer the Village Voice has it); his "Real Life Top 10" are ten experiences, not records. He may be old, but he still has ears for things like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Downtime

I caught a cold, something I'd been avoiding for the past two months while everyone around me, it seemed, was getting it. So far it's very minor, just a bit of fever and sniffling, but I'm spending Sunday at home and trying not to do much. It's another absolutely spendid fall day in San Francisco -- quite cool in the morning, sunny all day. Too bad I'm "wasting" the beautiful weather by staying inside, but I know from experience that if I rest on the first real day of a cold, I'm much happier for the following week.

What's sicker is my laptop. Two years ago I got a Gateway laptop with Windows ME and it's worked great until about a month ago, when the hard disk started acting up. It makes a clacking sound, has boot errors from time to time, and once in a while simply crashes. I called Gateway and they had me download a utility that would supposedly scan and repair the disk. But the utility didn't find any disk errors, while the problems continue. I guess the only real solution is to replace the hard drive while backing up my work at the end of every work session. I've been doing the latter, and sometimes I back up files to a floppy during a work session, so I won't lose even an hour's worth of work.

Even so, yesterday the only work I did on my book was on the outline. Thought I "completed" the outline of the final chapters for the first time a couple of weeks ago, I always knew it was subject to change, and yesterday I realized I'm going to have to give a little more weight to the B story as the climax approaches. However, I'll spare readers any extended notes like the ones I quoted in my entry of the 14th. I just wanted people to get an idea of how I work. Those notes are from a file which is half as long as the book itself -- it documents the creation of the book and is, itself, sort of a shadow of the book, or a meta-book. It contains not only the characters and plot lines that actually go into the book, but all the alternatives I reject along the way. The contents are, of course, only of interest to me, but the technique may be of interest to other writers.

Novelist sighting

Last night I went to a reception, hosted by WIRED Managing Editor Martha Baer, for author Frederic Tuten. Tuten was Martha's old prof and mentor in New York, and she invited a passel of writers and journalists over to her Mission District digs to meet him. Tuten's new novel The Green Hour, garnered a review by John Updike in the Nov. 11, 2002 New Yorker. I read the book in preparation for meeting him. His writing is casually elegant, beautifully paced, and he's not afraid to be romantic. (The NYT Book Review even said the characters belonged in a romance novel, which I think is way overdoing it.) Tuten himself was warm, generous, and cheerfully energized by the crowd of youthful admirers. Martha said she told him all about the "Joey Bishop novel" I'm working on, which was a nice introduction to give me.

Looking at her collection of Tuten's novels, I noticed with amusement that his first book, The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, was "A Richard Kasak Book." As Kasak was my first publisher, I went to Tuten to compare notes. He told an amusing anecdote about a disagreement he'd later had with Kasak -- a figure in New York publishing for many years -- who bragged about low-balling young naive authors who were so eager to get their first book published that they'd accept pitifully small advances. "They'd even pay me!" Kasak reportedly said. This was especially humorous in light of the experience of my friend Marilyn, who has had dealings with Kasak on and off for several years; he published her first book too. Recently he's started a new venture of bringing out "Erotic Romance" books, reportedly offering ridiculously low pay.

It's just Tourette's

Props to WilliamTed for this blog entry showing a slice of San Francisco life. The "Shouting Man" whom he profiles has been there a lot longer than the seven years he's seen him, though. He was there in the early 1980s when I had a long-running temp job in that district. One thing WilliamTed doesn't seem to realize is that the "Shouting Man" isn't really a colorful San Francisco character -- like Mr. Lee, the Chinese guy who walks up and down the Financial District carrying a sign with a delusional screed about "12 Galaxies" and various names from presidential history. The "Shouting Man" merely has Tourette's Syndrome.

Flesh for peace

As if Nancy Pelosi becoming House Minority Leader weren't enough, these women from Marin County have upheld the fine tradition of northern California women working for the cause of peace. (Link courtesy randomwalks.)

Small road trip

I've been working on my book almost every weekday for the last two weeks; yesterday I managed to finish another chapter, and according to the outline, there are only five chapters left. Slowly I'm whittling them down.

This morning I skipped zazen and slept in. I then spent the morning puttering around the house and exercising; I've recently upped my daily mileage on the treadmill to at least four miles a day. So I didn't even get a chance to get down to work until mid-afternoon, and I found I could hardly even look at my notes, much less write anything. I packed up and went on a drive instead. I drove down highway 1 a little ways to Half Moon Bay. It had been two years since I last drove through Devils' Slide, a treacherous five miles of coastal road south of the city. The last time, I was driving with my friend Katia, and we nearly got creamed by a car coming the other way. The guy went into a curve too fast, came out of it and almost creamed us, lost control and got the guy 50 yards behind us instead. It wasn't a terribly serious accident for a head-on crash, but it was bad enough. I got out and stopped traffic and then ran to an emergency phone. As we resumed our drive back to the city, Katia said that the fact we'd avoided a crash meant that our new relationship wasn't going to be a metaphorical car wreck. I thought this was a very poetic way to look at it. Katia's a novelist.

Today's auto tour aside, I'm really working hard to finish this book. That means this blog is going to get kind of boring. About all I can say is, I went to zazen, I exercised, I worked on my book.

Oh, I know what happened. I got my first unemployment check today.

Sample notes:

Then I thought of bringing in Lucy. Bobby’s old girlfriend whom we spent parts of two chapters on several chapters ago. I had the idea a while back to actually bring her forth during the convention sequence in order to further humiliate Bobby. It will turn out that one of the things Bobby has to do for Frank (and thus for JFK) is to beard Lucy for JFK. In other words, Bobby has to accompany her to an event as her date but the real purpose is to provide a way for her to get past all the reporters and into a private clinch with JFK. (I haven’t answered the question of how Frank notices her or procures her for this purpose, but I’m not too worried about handling that.) Now I’m thinking it might work to bring her in now. Is it too early, or will it be effective to introduce her now and give Bobby a chance to react to the whole situation?

However, she couldn’t come as Giancana’s date, for the same reasons as Campbell couldn’t. Therefore if she’s going to be in 23d she has to come with Bobby, so he beards her on this occasion.

Q. What are the advantages of that?

A. It creates more tension in the scene, where now there is none; all I have now is to make it a farce. Also there’s no real reason for Bobby to even be present at the dinner, unless he serves some purpose for Frank and/or JFK. Thirdly, it creates tension for the reader to anticipate the convention.

5:00 pm -- I didn’t do that after all. I did rewrite the first part of 23d, but instead of having Bobby pick up Lucy, I had him pick up just an ordinary political groupie. This introduces the whole idea of bearding someone, so I can just have the Lucy thing happen in the next chapter (or wherever it comes) without any explanation. Also I put a few words into ch. 20 to prepare for it. Then I wrote 970 words for the first part of 23d, and had Sammy drop the bomb that Frank won’t let him get married to May Britt until after the election. This speaks volumes about the social politics of the time (and is also what actually happened). This lends the requisite tension to the scene and saves the Lucy bombshell for closer to the climax. So I feel satisfied with my two day’s work even though I haven’t made much progress. Tomorrow, back to it.

Pleasant dreams

I awakened this morning with an optomistic attitude about finishing my current chapter and the book itself. I had peaceful dreams both during the night and during a nap I took from 8:00 to 9:30, after falling asleep in the bed while reading the morning paper with Cris. The dream during the nap involved being on the edge of a cliff over a dark ocean, but no fear whatsoever; I felt complete confidence that I could, and just might, float down to the water or to a ledge just above the water. It was nearly a flying dream, for me. I don’t have flying dreams where I’m flying like a bird; mine involve taking fifty-yard strides, or being able to fly at only 5 feet above the ground, or being able only to float down from a great height rather than falling uncontrollably fast. But even though it might seem as if there’s a lack of exaltation in these dreams, they’re always pleasurable and leave me with a feeling of blissful contentment.

Cris and I spent much of the morning hassling with a credit card bill. I sent them what we had left from my severance check. Turned out the bill was largely for the computer system and office furniture we bought in September right before I got laid off.

Cris happened to talk to Carl, whose house we visited ten days ago. He heard of a pubs manager job for me at a software company in Richmond, an industrial city north of Berkeley. Not such a great location, but I will need to get another job eventually, and, as Cris said, the way things work these days it will probably be until February before I would actually start. She also reminded me there was only a small chance I would actually get the job. I have ambivalent feelings. In a way it would be nice to be wanted, and it would be nice to make money. But part of me is almost annoyed; I didn’t want to start thinking yet about finding a new job, and I’d been half-hoping I’d never have to get another software job again.

Various forms of prayer

I’m going to apply for a residency at Headlands Center for the Arts. But the application deadline for 2003 is long past, so any application I make will be for 2004, when I’m bound to have another full time job again. So I’m applying for a “live-out” residency, where you get a studio to work in, but you don’t get a living space.

I went last night to lectio divina -- just me and Michael, as usual, but I think he enjoys it and finds it fulfilling as much as I do -- and after that I went to the zen center for a “practice meeting.” This is an event they used to have to discuss details of practice -- i.e. when and how to do various things, like bowing -- and decided to renew, perhaps to remove discussions of such details from the board meeting. We went through all the details of what people do in the evening. There were a few people I hadn’t seen before, which is comforting in a way, as the total number of people involved on a regular basis seems to be small indeed. I suppose they attend in the evening and never in the morning, as I come in the morning and never in the evening. Y. was a little less passive-aggressive than usual. Not that much, but he didn’t seem as much of a loser as he did the first time I met him, at that dinner several weeks ago. And he seems to want the right thing, which is residents who are really serious about their practice and put it first in their lives. Which would be a contrast to at least three of the four residents that are there now. As for Z., his factotum, she has apparently decided to be very friendly and encouraging to me. She praised me for coming so dependably in the mornings. In fact, I’ve missed at least one day a week for almost all of the last eight weeks or so, since coming back from New York in September.

Last night it rained heavily, cleared up for much of the day, then at 3:00 started again. At 3:30 it was really dark out, I had to turn on the lights in the church office as I wrote.

This morning I drove down to Redwood City and got rid of the scanner that’s been taking up space in the office for years. We got it a long time ago from SFSI -- someone had donated it to them, and we bought it by way of making a donation. Finally I sold it for $15 on eBay to a guy at a little aviation newsletter. He seemed really happy to get it, and I would be too, for $15. I found myself thinking I should have charged more, but then he was the only bidder and getting rid of it was the most important thing. I also sold a few books at a used bookstore and got $13. I celebrated and had a fancy seven dollar hamburger at the new place adjacent to the church, on my way in to write.

I got 1500 words done today, part of a long scene, the “cat disaster” scene I’ve been planning all year to write. I think I need to write more on it, though, so I can’t say the scene is done.

A suitable spot for Salvadoreans

Ahh, the rains started last night. Cris and I had gone out to Mount Tam earlier in the day to scout out locations for the scattering of her mother's ashes. I pointed out a majestic hilltop with a gorgeous view of the city, but she seemed to favor a wooded path. "Cool, dark woods," Cris said. "Anybody from El Salvador would like to be in here, under the trees."

"Really?" I asked.

"Oh yeah. Ask anybody from down there. They hate the heat. This would be like heaven." One of the requirements for a site, however, is a spot reachable by Cris's elderly aunt and by her mother's former caretaker, Francisca. Also, it's going to be wet out there from now on. We're not doing it for at least another week, though, so maybe we'll hit a nice day.

It was nice to be in the woods. We took a short hike, but I had already done my 3 miles on the treadmill in the basement, so I didn't want to go too far. Seven or eight years ago I made it a point to go hiking out there several times a month during the summer; yesterday was the first time I've been out there all year, and maybe the last, given the start of the rains.

No strings attached

Since Nancy installed our wireless network in the house, I've had fun roaming the place with my laptop -- I'm writing this sitting up in bed, in fact. (Here's a good article in today's today's SF Chronicle.) And like all new owners of wireless network cards, I've discovered that many owners of home wireless networks don't protect the signal, so that you can pull your car up somewhere near their house and check your email right there. I found a page that lists a few wireless access points in the area, but merely by driving up Noe St. on Saturday I found that I was able to access a connection at the corners of 15th and Noe, and also at 19th, 21st, 23rd and 25th. (That's an affluent neighborhood so I'm not surprised there are so many wireless networks.) And today this NYT article predicts wireless networks with up to ten times the range of current ones. That means that the affluent neighborhoods of a city like San Francisco will be essentially blanketed by wireless networks.

Of course, if you don't have a laptop with a wireless (or "WiFi") network card, you can always get a messaging device like a Blackberry. Yesterday morning I saw a woman -- the president of the congregation, no less -- using one to check email during the slack moments after she had taken communion. (Offically they are not slack moments, but devotional moments. But few are the people who can sustain a meditative state after having eaten and drunk something. And yesterday the sermon was particularly long.) I've resisted the Blackberry so far, but I'll probably get a Handspring with messaging in a couple of years when the price comes down some more.

Today Cris and I will go for a little hike on Mt. Tamalpais to celebrate her brithday and also to scout ash-scattering sites. The weather is supposed to hold until the end of the week, when the rain is supposed to finally start.

Drunken louts rout partiers

Halloween in the Castro did not go smoothly, the local paper reported today, 36 hours after the event. As usual, drunken louts outnumbered costumed revellers by about 11:00 p.m., and things got ugly. This is nothing new. Eight and nine years ago when I was in the Street Patrol, we walked the Castro for hours, from about 8:00 pm to 3:00 a.m., on party nights leading up to Halloween. (Depending on what day of the week Haloween falls, people sometimes fill the streets up to two days in advance.) Every time, all the fun costumed people went home by 10:00 or 11:00, while beer-filled youths from the suburbs -- attracted by television news reports showing a fun party -- stream into the district. By midnight the crowd is just as large as it was at 8:00, but now 90% of it is straight and 100% of it is drunk. And of course they get in stupid macho street tussles.

This time four people were stabbed, one's in critical condition. Nobody is saying, at least yet, that the violence was gay bashing. I'll wager it was just dumb drunks. Nobody is more stupid or boring than an aggressive drunk. I really got my fill of them on those patrols.

Look at that one!

I was never much for dressing up in costumes, a social talent which is pretty much mandatory in San Francisco. For years I felt guilty and stupid that I wasn't able to get in the swing of things and have fun, but I finally decided, fuck it, I just don't like to. I don't like to play golf, do automobile maintenance, or get drunk either, and I can safely choose not to do those things without suffering people's disapproval. Finally, I have reached an age where no one is pressuring me to go to a costume party, thank goodness.

But that's not to say that a gathering of thousands of queers, all in fabulous costumes, is not a splendid sight. It's just that the huge Halloween street party in the Castro District got way out of control about 12 years ago, and now the crowd is at least 80% straight and 75% non-costumed. The adjective generally used to describe last night's event is "shoulder-to-shoulder," and frankly, I'm too old for that, too.

This year, I was able to witness a smidgen of it without getting my toes stepped on or witnessing much drunken behavior. My elderly mother and her husband came through town, and we had dinner at a hotel on Market St. where the dining room windows looked directly out onto the sidewalk. Scores of costumed people streamed past, a real treat for the senior citizens. My mother's husband Tom actually pointed out the window and cried, "Gladys, look at that one!" -- not once but several times. After about two hundred people had gone past, they were sufficiently puzzled to ask what was going on, and I told them there was a huge street party every year -- more than a mile away. They were amused and very surprised that so many adults actually go to the trouble. I told them that things like this were the reason a lot of people are in San Francisco in the first place, and with the evidence in front of them, they seemed to understand at least a little.

Of course it's utterly impossible for anyone in their 80s who did not spend their lives someplace like Greenwich Village to understand modern urban culture, much less queer culture. My mother lived a particularly sheltered life in the Midwest, with a blissful ignorance of events in pop culture. The most mainstream stuff failed to penetrate her awareness. About ten years ago, we went to see a touring production of "A Chorus Line," which features a song, "Dance Ten, Looks Three," in which the phrase "tits and ass" is repeated several times. Vulgarities such as these utterly shocked my mother, even though the musical itself had come out approximately 20 years before -- she had had no idea of the depths to which American culture had sunk.