that digression business

Reviving the art of the blog

2007-01-26T10:14:00.000-08:00

Walking into work today, a pink box of doughnuts sat on the sink-area counter.

Me: "What's with the doughnuts?"

Co-worker Jeremiah: "Well, you eat them, and then they go straight to your hips. Or maybe that's just me. . ."

It's time to revive my ocassional blogging. It's a whole new world these days--I've been dating vegetarian Bacon for almost a year, I had my 31st birthday a couple weeks ago (bowling and karaoke), and the Democrats are back!

Some things remain the same, though. I'm still working with Sally and Jeremiah and Eli (my boss' new pseudonym--I'm sure he'll love it the day HR alerts him to my blog and I'm dismissed from the office), and my cat Ferdinand's health is holding steady. He just kissed me this morning, before I emptied a can of Science Diet into his ceramic bowl. I think if an animal with whiskers and a wet nose sniffs you on the lips, you can legitimately say you've been smooched.

I listed my 5 favorite movie scenes back in the day, but I want to take a moment to list my Top 5 movies of 2006:

1. Half Nelson.

2. Little Children

3. 49 Up

4. Pan's Labyrinth

5. Volver

Also, here's my favorite scene from 2006: Clive Owen stopping a war for 90 seconds in Children of Men.

(I could devote an entire blog to Children of Men. In November, I was so excited for its Xmas release that I would go home and watch the trailer on youtube. In December, I saw it and was disappointed in its cinematic overreaching. But now it's January, and damned if that movie hasn't won the battle for my heart and mind. It may be the best movie of the year. For now, it's only the best scene of the year.) Check out below.

By the way, this is a huge 10-minute spoiler. Don't watch if you haven't seen it in the theater.

Jenny Lewis, through a cloud of nostalgia

2006-08-07T20:16:00.000-07:00

It's been nearly two months since I saw Jenny Lewis at Spaceland. A minute ago I tried to download a photo that showed how beautiful and melancholic she looked. But blogspot refuses to download. You'll have to make do with the image I will masterfully paint using words.

At 6 pm, Thursday night in late June, I stood in line outside Spaceland, reading a zine called "Nostalgia: the Zine for Lame Hipsters"--an ironic title, and thus the only way to get hipsters to read it. My ex-girlfriend (I'll call her X) joined me after she parked. We were buying tickets for our lollygagging friends--Beatriz, and the vegetarian Bacon--but it turned out tickets were not physical tickets; they were happy face stamps. You weren't present, you didn't get in. And then we were two.

Marked with the sign of the happy face, we made it inside. I'll skip the part where X and I waited forever, eating Thai food smuggled in from a local restaurant, enduring a bad opening singer and a cute, queer opening comedian. (She was adorable, actually--I'm sorry she had to put up with angry hipster faces staring at her. Jenny Lewis fans are the big drawback of a Jenny Lewis show; I kid, but kind of don't. I think I'm getting too old to mix with hipster white kids these days.) X, in a fit of exhaustion, actually took off right after Jenny Lewis came out.

So I was alone at a concert, a first for me. It was great, actually. I felt strangely adult, like those divorcees who take vacations alone to Paris to demonstrate that they're totally fine with being alone! It freed me up to listen to the music and voices and to people-watch with abandon.

She opened with the gospel "Run Devil Run," a capella with the Watson Twins, then "The Big Guns," which are the opening cuts to her solo album, Rabbit Fur Coat. You can listen to bits of it here and here. She performed a great set, very similar to the show I saw at the Orpheum Theater in April, and finished with "Born Secular" again.

Here's her signature good-bye: Playing "Born Secular," a piano chord-based song about religion and its absence, Jenny starts out playing a keyboard alone. Gradually her bandmates for the tour join her on their instruments, the song meanders and climaxes, and a bandmate sits down next to her and takes over the piano chords. She stands up, waves, blows a kiss to the crowd, and exits through the red velvet curtain. Slightly cheesy, but simultaneously sweet, like an old friend saying so long. I look forward to seeing Rilo Kiley in their fully formed state again.

Blogger's cooperating again. Here's a close facsimile of what the Spaceland show looked like. Go, retro-country!

I saw Jenny Lewis at Spaceland last night

2006-06-30T14:23:00.000-07:00

More to come.

six feet and rising

2006-06-21T19:18:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling tired and not that interesting, despite the fact that in the last few days
1) I rode in a police department helicopter (300 feet up, 75 miles an hour, no door on my side and not-as-windy-as-you'd-think) and
2) I lied to my therapist (I wasn't in the mood to see him on Tuesday).

Let's see if any of these favorite Six Feet Under quotes get me going:

Margaret: [on having sex with other people] You can't fuck my friends, I can't fuck yours. No fucking of mutual friends. Never in Hawaii. Never in a hotel that costs more than $300 a night. And never in a hotel that's under $75 a night. Not on holidays. And there are others, I just can't remember all of them at the moment.

I'm not going to be fucking other people any time soon. The vegetarian Bacon is a winner on several fronts--all of her quirks are charming, from her love of sweet alcoholic drinks to her nervousness that she's boring me ("I must be totally boring you...") every time she speaks for longer than 8 seconds. She can small-talk just about anyone, with an edge of shyness that endears her to all, and her My Little Pony trivia knowledge is endless. Also, whenever I start to make a thumping electronica sound with my mouth, she lifts her ams up and does a semi-sincere parody of a teenage dancer at a rave. I was going to say that I'm smiling just typing this, but that's not exactly true--my facial expression is stoic, but my heart sings.

Ruth: Thank you. I've had the best time coming to this funny little restaurant and having you yell at me in the bathroom.

A vice-president took out my department for lunch today, as a thank-you for some extra work we accomplished three months ago. I ended up sitting at the corner of the table with Sally and Jeremiah. Sometimes rattlesnakes invade the parking lot where we work, so the vice-prez told us a few stories about security guards picking up baby rattlers with their bare hands.

By the time we walked back from the restaurant, Sally was talking about the time she camped with friends. They needed to scare away a circle of hungry-for-their-BBQ'd-chicken wolves. It involved lots of shouting and singing of "White Rabbit."

"So we crouched down with our backs to them and turned around and lifted up our arms and shouted, Yaaaaaaaa!" In demonstration, she turned her back to us and spun slowly around and raised both arms, ha ya! I almost took off for the hills.

Maggie Sibley: I know that if you think life's a vending machine where you put in virtue and take out happiness, then you're going to be disappointed.

I'm done. I almost deleted this post. But I kept it, because I want to remember my thoughts about the veg Bacon on this day, the longest of the year.

we're here, we're queer, we want more beer

2006-06-16T12:23:00.000-07:00

Last weekend was pride (uh, Pride, but I suspect only San Francisco should be allowed to capitalize theirs). The official agenda: Love. Equality. Pride. The real agenda: Hot queers. Equal access to drugs. Yelling "woo-hoo!" as the Bangles play the opening chords of "Hero Takes a Fall." I steered clear of the drugs but couldn't avoid the Bangles, a brief concert I attended with veg Bacon and a couple of gay ladyfriends.

We weren't particularly queer that night, even when we were drinking at a Silverlake leather bar after the Dyke March. Pride is not a particularly queer event, a term which implies progressive politics and challenged gender roles and leather wrist cuffs. Queer itself has many variations--the gay punk Latino high school kid, with fake ID and nervous Robert Smith hand motions, or the hipster dyke with slim hips and emo hair, or the straight-laced, athletic, cubicle-lurking FTM--and the variations continue with gay (Ambercrombie & Fitch boy? entertainment industry lesbian with Ellen-style sneakers? homeowners with 1 dog and 2 adopted kids?). But queer and gay just barely cross in the Venn diagram.

I like to think of myself as queer--it stays out later, it frequents cooler clubs and better concerts. But sometimes I am so, so gay. I work an office job complete with cubicle, work email, health benefits, and professional dress code. I own a cat and attend a gay-friendly Episcopal church. I shop at Trader Joe's.

That was Saturday. On Sunday, disgusted with the whole enterprise, I sat at Panini's off Santa Monica Blvd. with my gay-married friends Wilder and Oscar (get it?) . With three other queers, we drank pitchers of hefeweizen, smoked clove cigarettes, and watched the world go by. It was a long, drunk, happy day.

the bitch is back!

2006-06-16T11:42:00.000-07:00

I had that phrase run through my head recently; I was trying to recall where it originated, and I settled on the ad campaign for Alien³. In Aliens, Ripley uttered the famous "Get away from her, you bitch!" Which would make "the bitch is back" a perfect tag line for Alien³--even though imdb lists Alien³'s first tag line as the incomprehensible, In 1979, we discovered in space no one can hear you scream. In 1992, we will discover, on Earth, EVERYONE can hear you scream. Um...what!?

But I'm back, after an extended leave of absence. I know my 1-2 readers will be thrilled by my return to the internet stage. I'm somewhat delicate these days; my feline friend Ferdinand (let's call him F³) has been ill, with a mysterious malady.

The vet, who seems smart to me because he has a brusque manner, ruled out the all the usual suspects of feline AIDS, leukemia, diabetes, etc. We know from blood tests that F³ is anemic. We know from X-rays that F³ has a slightly enlarged heart. (Awww! He's got a big hawt!) What we don't know is why he became listless, lost 2 lbs., and developed a fever a few days ago.

Right now he's lounging around at home, meowing at the slightest mood change, getting picked up and cuddled every six seconds, and basically doing all but ringing a bell and ordering me and my roommate around the house. He's on the mend, folks! God bless 'im.

I could be delicate for other reasons. I've cried twice in front of the vegetarian Bacon--once thinking about the fact that her mother died two years ago, and is never coming back; and once on Tuesday night, when F³ had been admitted overnight to the brusque vet's office. Both times vegetarian Bacon ended up comforting me and, the time about her mother, giving me some kleenex. Maybe I'm just sensitive. Call me Jewel.

no particular reason

2006-05-11T18:35:00.000-07:00

It just occurred to me to do a Top 5.

Top 5 Movie Scenes of All Time

1. Jules' speech at the end of Pulp Fiction

"There's a passage I got memorized. Ezekiel 25:17. The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness. For he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.

I been sayin' that shit for years. And if you ever heard it, it meant your ass. I never really questioned what it meant. I thought it was just a cold-blooded thing to say to a motherfucker before you popped a cap in his ass. But I saw some shit this mornin' made me think twice. Now I'm thinkin': it could mean you're the evil man. And I'm the righteous man. And Mr. 9mm here, he's the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness. Or it could be you're the righteous man and I'm the shepherd and it's the world that's evil and selfish. I'd like that.

But that shit ain't the truth. The truth is you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard to be a shepherd."

2. The moment the boat breaks in half in Titanic.

That scene took the breath out of the theater every time I saw an advertising trailer for it. A phenomenal fucking scene.

3. Trinity running from the agents at the beginning of The Matrix.

Just a gorgeous scene like nothing you'd ever seen before.

4. The campfire scene in My Own Private Idaho

Scott Favor (Keanue Reeves) : I only have sex with a guy for money.

Mike Waters (River Phoenix) : Yeah, I know.

Scott Favor: And two guys can't love each other.

Mike Waters: Yeah. Well, I don't know. I mean... I mean, for me, I could love someone even if I, you know, wasn't paid for it... I love you, and... you don't pay me.

Scott Favor: Mike...

Mike Waters: I really wanna kiss you, man... Well goodnight, man... I love you though... You know that... I do love you.

5. The walk down the sidewalk in You and Me and Everyone We Know.

A typical quote from the movie:

Richard (John Fawkes) : I don't want to have to do this living. I just walk around. I want to be swept off my feet, you know? I want my children to have magical powers. I am prepared for amazing things to happen. I can handle it.

Honorable mention:

Any conversation from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Clementine: This is it, Joel. It's going to be gone soon.
Joel: I know.
Clementine: What do we do?
Joel: Enjoy it.

song for a melancholy moment

2006-05-02T15:33:00.000-07:00

The 40-Year-Old Waitress game that my coworker Sally used to play deserves its own blog entry.

In December, I was feeling rather melancholy--mostly due to a girl, who had allowed me to kiss her and crush out on her before she realized she wasn't into me. Such things happen. It was a Friday night and I had nothing to do, so I invited myself into Sally's car to go see our student art show. An hour later, I sat outside, smoking a cigarette and looking beaten-down. "I feel melancholy," I said. I think I was trying to look like this:
"You know what you're doing," Sally replied. "You're playing 40-Year-Old Divorced Waitress." Hmmmm? "Sure, I used to play that when I was a kid. I was a waitress, divorced, living alone, coming home to my empty apartment. I used to struggle at the door with my keys...that was important, the struggling and rattling with my keys...then I'd come in, take off my shoes, rub my feet. Smoke a cigarette. A fake one, like a crayon or something. And I'd feel sad about my lonely life."

"You played this as a kid?"

"I was about nine. Ten. I still play it sometimes. My friend will give me a call at night, and I'll answer the phone with a pathetic voice--'yeeees?'--and she'll say, 'You're playing 40-Year-Old Waitress again, aren't you?' She always catches me. So that's what you're doing."

We paused, while I smoked.

"When you're melancholy, I say revel in it! It's so freeing. Claim the moment."

Feeling faintly ridiculous now, I ditched the cigarette, and we walked back inside.

Sally gave me a burned CD for Xmas--Peggy Lee. She labeled it with a black permanent marker: Songs for a Melancholy Moment. Of course, for about a week after that, I was completely crushed out on Sally. I got over it when she started ordering me around the office again. I still play that CD, though. Revel in it!

workaday

2006-05-02T12:44:00.000-07:00

At work today, I approached Sally Pseudonym's cubicle to ask her a question. She has a charcoal sketch pinned to the outside wall of her cubicle--we are an art school, after all--and in leaning down to talk to her, I inadvertently pressed my palm against the sketch.

"Aaarrghhh...ahhhh...." I said, slapping my hands together to get the dust off. I looked at her and explained the clapping: "I put my hand on the drawing."

"Oh," she said, "I thought maybe you were, you know, hearing the beat."

Sally shouldn't act so non-neurotic. She's the first-born in her family (hence our office manager, ordering folks around with abandon), and she used to call her parents "Ma" and "Pa" due to the Little House on the Prairie books. Also, she used to play a game called 40-year-old waitress that involved rubbing her feet and smoking fake cigarettes; she was nine.

Anyway, the nude sketch above is not the drawing that I sullied. It is one of my favorite pieces, though, from a class we're holding in South Los Angeles for youth age 14-24. The students are all Latino or African-American, almost all local public school kids from Crenshaw High School or Washington Prep, and I'm proud of the class. I'm proud of what we're trying to achieve in southern California.

Posted below is a piece from a high school illustration class. These kids are good. I may post more, just to satisfy my pride in them. Our students are quick, witty, and rather modest, considering their abilities.

My co-workers are also very funny, if not a little too focused for my slacker INFP self. Especially Jeremiah, who once told me this story:

"So I go up to this guy [at an Armenian fast-food joint] and give him a twenty. He looks at it, trying to figure out the denomination, you know, so I say to him, 'It's a twenty.' He goes [Armenian accent], 'No waaay! You must be kiddin' me! It's a twenty! Hey, Shant, you ever seen one o'these before? It's a twenty!' So I tell him, 'Oh, yeah, I got a whole wallet full of 'em. You want me to sign it?' and he says, 'Oh yeah, sign it for me!'. I ask him for a pen and he gives it to me and I scribble on it, then give it to him, y'know--'There ya go. Keep it, I got a bunch of 'em.' He's like, 'Thanks so much!' and gives me my change. Asshole."

"You're crazy, Jeremiah," I told him.

"Fuck him and his wise-ass remarks. I'll sign the goddam twenty for him every day of the week. Twice on Sundays."

That's my office right there--quick, helpful, sarcastic, won't give an inch. I'm doing my best to fit in.

friends don't let friends...

2006-04-28T12:43:00.000-07:00

How did people drunk dial before cell phones grew so popular? Did they have to wait till the morning after? I drunk dialed a few times this week--first, from the Heritage Wine Bar in Pasadena. I ended up there with a co-worker after a really bad meeting. Two glasses of syrrah and a basketful of bread later, I was shouting into Beatriz's phone, "Listen carefully because I'm a little bit drunk: karaoke. The Brass Monkey in Koreatown. It will happen."

It didn't happen for her, but we did manage to field a team of four--two folks from work, myself, and Kevin Bacon. (Bacon for short; she's a vegetarian and likes Irony.) I covered 70s Brit punk with the Clash, and somebody did an is-she-on-heroin-or-just-really-dedicated-to-the-craft-of-karaoke version of Tina's "Private Dancer": "... a dancer for muuuuney / I do what you want me to doooooo..."

Drunk Dialing #2 was Thursday night. I was at Akbar, getting hit on very aggressively by a bisexual girl who wasn't hearing "no" very well. There have been times I would've dug this immensely, but Thursday night wasn't one of them, and I stumbled out the door.

Alone on Sunset Blvd. again, the taste of beer in my mouth and whiff of Marlboros in my hair, I pulled out my phone and woke up the vegetarian Bacon. Her cheery voice thrilled me. My car careened the 15 miles to her house without ever slowing to a complete stop, and waiting on the broken sidewalk outside her building, boy, I was saved.

dilemmas

2006-04-25T11:43:00.000-07:00

I've had scary three-degrees-of-separation experiences with the girl I'm dating. We met pretty randomly--OK, Tom set us up--but we discovered the following:

1) My ex contacted her and asked her out through match.com just after our first or second date.

2) After I watched Brokeback Mountain with a group of law school students, we discovered that a friend of hers was in the group. They were planning to meet for coffee just a few days later.

3) I met her at my friend Cathy's birthday party two years ago. My now-ex and I chatted with her now-ex and her for almost 30 minutes, apparently. I vaguely remember talking about Meow Mix in NY with some gay girls that I wasn't too engaged with. Cathy figured this out last night.

As Scooby would say, spooooooooooky. So now I'm torn about what name to use as her pseudonym.

Should it be......................Scooby?

Or Kevin Bacon?

Highlights for children

2006-04-24T10:11:00.001-07:00

Listening to Morrisey right now--God, his voice is so great. A combination of wisdom and lust.

Weekend Highlights:

* Omar is being stalked by an old customer at his part-time job. "With my happy demeanor and pretty face, I'm surprised it doesn't happen more."

*At my friend Wilder's 30th birthday, an actress I know talked about lunching with her ex-girlfriend recently. "I told her, 'Yeah, it really bothered me in our relationship that you wouldn't open up and be vulnerable.' She said, 'I know I did that sometimes. Did it make you feel bad?'. I told her, 'No, it made me feel patronized.' "

* Same birthday party. A little dog belonging to the owner of the house ran around, wearing a green sweatband on the "wrist" of his front paw. He looked ready to do some aerobics.

* Same actress, about super-organized people: "Those people who show up on time and know all their lines and are always polite, they're bland as hell. I'm late and flaky, but goddam, sometimes I'm brilliant. In the last 10 years or so, it's been popular to be very together and on time and organized. Things'll change. We will rule again!"

* A queer girl at the Bigfoot Lod ge: "Our waitress smells so good. Like shampoo and sex."

* Jennifer Aniston in the movie Friends With Money: "Yeah. I got problems."

* A twentysomething guy with messy blond hair, zeroing in on my date as we walked out of Bigfoot Lodge: "Hi, I'm Tom, I just had to say hello, I'm over there with my friend...". Startled, she politely shook his hand, but I pressed my palms against her back and didn't break my stride. "Keep walking, sweetheart," I muttered, "keep walking."

* Beatriz and I lost each other while shopping at the Cabazon outlets. It was all my fault, naturally, but it took me 45 grumpy and wind-toussled minutes to find her. She tried to cheer me up by telling charming celebrity stories: In college, she passed out inside a NYC dance club. While her friends stepped inside to gather their stuff and leave, Debbie Harry and the bass player Blondie found her sitting on the curb. They called her sweetheart ("You OK, sweetheart?"), fetched her water, and made polite conversation. Also, she met Gloria Steinem at a Dallas airport once—they talked about college classes, and the feminist icon loaned her a copy of Newsweek.

* One more reason to love Beatriz: sometimes, with chatty strangers on airplanes, she gives out the wrong name and tells people she’s an accountant. Why? The truth sucks them in. “They get all interested in my job and want to talk the whole fucking flight. Screw that, I’m not their mother.”

The Slowdown

2006-04-21T15:26:00.000-07:00

I blogged every day for a minute there, didn't I? Pretty prolific for someone whose site is still 100% reader-free.

I had a pretty uneventful week, which contributed to the slowdown. I did take the Metro Red Line to Hollywood & Highland to see the Dresden Dolls do an in-store show at the Virgin Megastore--an energetic performance (yaaaay) of only 6-7 songs (booooo), for a crowd overrun with...here's an email I wrote:

...the crowd was overrun with very sincere, very eyeliner-wearing emo boys with black hair in their eyes and skinny jeans on their hips. One kid kept miming the drumming and piano playing, because he just couldn't help himself.

So I did venture out. But I actually had to pull out my organizer to see what else I did this week.

This is OK; my social life tends to swing up and down, like the old Dragon Swing ride at Knott's Berry Farm. Some weeks I'm going out so much that my head's spinning, and I'll think, God! I'm popular; I'll start to complain, Paris Hilton-style, about the demands placed on me. Other weeks the phone quits ringing and I'm in my house with Ferdinand the cat, eating ground-turkey Sloppy Joe's, wondering where the hell is everybody?

(By the way, no pseudonym for Ferdinand the cat--he was, is, and always will be.)
If I'm in a healthy mood when such slowdowns hit, I start to work out more. If I'm emotionally needy, I start to call my phone list in alphabetical order, seeing what they're up to. Usually, they're up to nothing ("Um, I was just paying my gas bill..."), but I'm always suspicious that somebody's out there having a fabulous time. Or even a miserable time--but something! I can't stand when nothing's going on.

My therapist recently informed me, "You kind of like drama." That's why I pay him the big bucks, folks. But I sort of knew this already--you can see it in my track record of who I'd like to kiss. I admitted it Monday night to a girl I'm dating, who quickly answered, "That's it--get out of my bed. Right now." We can all hope she was kidding, but she's a sweet girl (with a breathtakingly level head on her shoulders), and I hate to think I'm bringing any bad vibes to the scene. Mostly I'm just too analytical for my own good, which happens to anybody. Errr...right?

So tomorrow we will run faster, Gatsby, stretch out our arms further...Two birthday parties this weekend, as well as an outlet shopping trip to Barbazon. (Cabazon, whatever.) And an illustration teacher at my work just informed me that his girlfriend dreamed we'd have a major earthquake on Sunday--so there's that to look forward to.

Alternate name for Jägerbomb: LIQUID COCAINE

2006-04-17T11:02:00.000-07:00

Birthdays, while a good excuse for a party and a Jägerbomb, also have the potential for resulting in a spate of inapproriate tears. Birthdays are just emotional, y'know? I observed this Saturday night with my friend and old coworker, Magdalena (the pseudonyms just keep on coming...it's kind of fun, like discovering your best friends living in an alternate universe). Magda hosted her 27th birthday party at a restaurant/club in Alhambra, with an excellent dinner followed by a reserved VIP room. The best part of the VIP room was this sign: A group of about 15 friends and family, including her shake-ya-booty mother, ate dinner and drank alcohol before dancing hard to raggaeton/ Kanye West / Bell Biv DeVoe mash-ups, concocted by a DJ who kept shouting, "This is how we do it on Saturday nights!". I was kinda ready to kill him, but he redeemed himself with a few slick moves on the turntable--including a dance remix of Nirvana's "Come As You Are." You, sir, haven't lived till you've heard Kurt's voice rumbling over an electric drum beat, "Take your time/ hurry up/ choice is yours, don't be late..."

Yeah, ye-ah-ah, yeah!

The collection of close friends and family members was probably overwhelming for Magda. The margaritas and Jägerbombs, the mother (who's divorced and still good friends with Magda's father--the most confusing type of divorce, I think) and sister, the clouds of cigarette smoke and flash of men's gold necklaces, it's probably all a bit much on the day you're turning 27, and you're still paying for school, and you're single by choice and wanted by the wrong kind of asshole guy.

Magda opened the martini glasses I gave her. They were packed in a tan box we kept joking was a cake. ("Happy birthday; here's your cake.") She very slowly pulled out one glass to look at, and I said, "Remember? You said you needed some?" and she nodded, brushing at her eyelashes, and I said, "Your eyes are red," and she said, "I know," and we sat quietly for a full minute. Birthdays, indeed.

My name is Ackleykid, and I'm a geek.

2006-04-17T10:42:00.000-07:00

I spent five hours at the Natural History Museum the other day, visiting the Bog People. The Mysterious Bog People lived in northwestern Europe during the Mesolithic period about 12,000 years ago; the museum is displaying six bog "mummies" preserved by the bog environment, including the remains of a 16-year-old girl that scared the hell out of Beatriz. I quote the web site:

Although she perished approximately 2,000 years ago, the woolen cord with which she was strangeld is still intact. Whether her death was a killing or part of a ritual is one of the mysteries surrounding the Bog People.

Pretty fucking awesome, yeah?

The Natural History Museum also has some great dioramas of African and North American mammals (including my favorite, the okapi, the closest living relative of the giraffe, discovered only in 1901). I thought the museum might be a little elementary-school for me, but as you can see, I'm just the right emotional maturity age.

Let my lusts be my ruin, then, since all else is a fake and a mockery. -Hart Crane

2006-04-14T14:21:00.000-07:00

More than I lust for people, I lust for friends and experience. The other night I went out to Akbar, a mostly boys queer bar in Silverlake. I sat with (cleverly disguised pseudonyms from here on out...) Omar and Beatriz, who are both tall, lanky, Latino, dark-haired and dark-eyed--at 25 and 30, they're probably my hottest friends. Not exactly Antonio & Salma hot, because my taste runs geekier than that--but they both move sleekly in their bodies and both have great taste in music. Call it brainy-queer-hot.

Digression: My friend Jack, who's about as straight-boy-who-watches-ESPN as my friends get, asked me recently, "Are there any lesbians who aren't cute in LA?" [By the way, hate the word lesbian--digression for another day.] As you can imagine, I almost choked on my soda. "Uh, yeah...they're everywhere." Jack said, "All the girls I've met through you are so cute." I nodded, and said, "Yeah, my friends are cute. I gotta keep the herd pure--I might have to date one of them eventually." Little-known fact, there are only about thirty-six lesbians between 25 and 35 in all of Los Angeles, and half of them are moving in together as we speak. End of digression.

So we drank (all three of us) and smoked (Beatriz is one reason I'm sucking down 10 cigarettes a month these days) and checked out the boys (Omar). Then Beatriz said she was tired. I patted her leg and kept chatting up Omar; but her head nodded forward and snapped up again, like a truck-driver crashing a big-rig at 3 am on the 5 freeway. It was time to go.

Omar stayed to drink water and sober up. The next day, I called him to chat and he said, "This girl kept looking at me, and she came up to me and started talking and said--" (high voice denoting estrogen) "--'oh, you're so nice, I wish I could call you up and chat all the time.' She asked for my number. I said, 'How 'bout email?'. She said, 'Oh, you don't have to give me your number if you don't want.' I said, 'Well, I'm here a lot...maybe we'll just run into each other!" Such a nice blow-off.
How does this always happen to Omar? I went to a Tegan and Sara concert at the Wiltern with him, and when he was walking back to his car he ran into Sara and made friends. They chatted on the sidewalk and, I'm sure, one day will have babies together. Omar meets people, both good and bad, wherever he goes.

Anyhow, after leaving Omar to be harrassed at Akbar, I drove Beatriz back to my house (where her car sat) and made her stand in my front lawn with me while I smoked one last cigarette. The full moon shone on my little house. The gardener had just visited, so our grass smelled clipped and new. Despite a violent rainstorm being only two days away, it felt vividly like spring. Beatriz and I talked about the little night bird who serenades my street after midnight, but mostly it was quiet.

"I'm gonna fall asleep on my feet here, I gotta go," she said finally.

We one-arm hugged and she walked away while I stood on my front porch, smoking and breathing. It was nice to be home.

letting some things go

2006-04-13T12:23:00.000-07:00

I work at an art school that employs several nice guys on security detail; they certainly don't deserve to work with a lying smartass like me. The security guys walk around in grey uniforms, occasionally chatting, carrying walkie-talkies and making sure things are "OK in here." I was standing in our kitchen area the other day, washing my hands, when Danny approached and opened the lid to our First Aid box.

"Everything OK in there?" I said, stealing his line. He was OK with it, though.

"Yep," said Danny, snapping the lid shut. "Just making sure we got all our supplies."

"You know what we could really use? One of those heart defibrillators. You know...'clear!'."

"Oh, I'd be afraid to use one o' those..."

"No way, man, it's easy. You just take a one-hour workshop, use it anytime."

"You used one o' those before?"

"Sure. They're great. You can use 'em on your pets, too, if you just set the dial on low."

"Hmmm. Dogs, cats?"

"Yeah. Not hamsters, though. You gotta let some heart problems run their course."

Danny never called me on my crap there. I'd like to honor his rather stupendous tolerance. And quote poor overused Holden one last time:

I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera.

Richard Kinsella's queer, 21st century sistah

2006-04-12T18:39:00.000-07:00

That digression business got on my nerves. I don't know. The trouble with me is, I like it when somebody digresses. It's more interesting and all. - Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 24

This isn't my favorite Holden quote; and, to be honest, it's not Jerome David Salinger's most beautifully phrased thought. But I always liked the idea--poor Richard Kinsella should be allowed to talk about his uncle's goddam farm if he feels like it, and people should quit shouting "Digression!" at him in Holden's Oral Expressions class just 'cause he slips off topic.

Here's my actual favorite Holden quote:

He put my goddam paper down then and looked at me like he'd just beaten hell out of me in ping-pong or something. - Catcher, Ch. 2

I've gotten that look from a few people before. But I digress.

I've been hesitant to start a blog, even though all the cool kids are doin' it (or were doing it. . .like myspace, it's a little worn out at this point), because I have enough trouble keeping my goddam private life to myself. If you hold a conversation for more than 12.6 seconds with me, I'm suddenly going over the details of my latest, biggest crush with you--what do you think, no I mean, really.

But I'm not letting anyone know about this blog, so hopefully I'll get the patio space to write anonymously for a year before picking up 12 loyal transgender Bengali dwarf readers living in exile in Tibet.

But I have a few goals for this space.
1) I'd like to explore a few details of my life without fear of backlash from LA-based friends and lovers. (There are so many of them!)
2) I'd like to bone up my writing skills, which used to be stellar and are now a little too (overly) reliant on parentheses; I'm a big semi-colon abuser (as well).
3) I'd like to remember some nice goddam moments that happen to me.
4) And, of course, we'd like to free Tibet. Me and Richard Gere is all that country needs.

I want zero readers for 100 days--much like the free pass given to the President on his first 100 days in office. Until that time when we can actually dialogue, my Bengali lovers, I'll say peace and good night.