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New Orleans feedback
Saturday, May 8 1999
This morning after she twisted my arm a little, Kim dragged me to a nearby yardsale and bought a $50 bookshelf from an aging former-biker dude. This piece was indeed rather elegant, complete with fancy Victorian-style cutouts in the woodwork. I've noticed that Kim's standards for furniture have been gradually ramping up along with our socio-economic level. For example, all the old plastic shelving she bought as an expediency back when we first arrived in Ocean Beach is soon to be relegated to the closets.
I never thought this would happen, but in my relationship with Kim I find myself doing exactly what my Dad does with my mother, frowning on big purchases to such an extent that Kim feels the need to provide a list of justifications for each purchase and then proclaim, with all the conviction of a true believer, that this is the last big purchase and she'll never need to buy anything else. I've heard it all at least a dozen times and the conviction never changes. It's kind of cute, really.
In the late morning Kim and I received a rather stressful call from Lisa L@tter about all the raw revelations I've been making in my in my journal concerning the recent New Orleans trip. It's an old story: someone is told about or discovers my journal, thinks it's amp, tells all their friends, and gets them reading it. The person wants to meet me, we do, we have a great time hanging out and doing things upon which our society frowns, and then I go home and write all about it, sometimes inserting a few snide personality critiques along the way. The friends read it, the parents read it, and a collective freakout ensues. But, you know, it almost has to be this way; I'm well aware that this journal would languish in obscurity if it didn't at least have the appearance of honesty and brutal intimacy.
Anyway, over the phone this morning, Kim somehow managed to calm Lisa down. As long as I avoid one especially problematic subject, everything, including the nudie pictures, can stay. For the time being Lisa has canceled her impulsive plans to hire a hitman to come to San Diego to rub me out. Now, if only all Lisa's avid-reader-friends would just quit stirring the pot, everything would be cool. It could have been worse, of course. Lisa once tried to get her Dad to read this journal back in the day, but he, much like my Dad, had absolutely no interest. I've also gotten a little smarter; you may have noticed that I've taken steps to ensure that the spelling of proper names are fucked up enough to avoid successful indexing by search engines.
(By the way, Kim pointed out an interesting hypocrisy in Lisa L@tter's reaction to my writing. Lisa is, it seems, a big perpetrator of phone pranks and other forms of intrusive creativity. I think doing such things is devilishly subversive and wonderful; indeed, stories about such things gave me a positive predisposition towards her. But one would expect people who do such things not to be so terribly thin-skinned.)
The interesting and most welcomed thing about this particular crisis (and another recent one) was that it wasn't Kim doing the freaking it out, it was some third party and it was Kim who smoothed everything out. She's grown so used to the way I write that it barely affects her. She's become my online-journal ally against a cold cruel world.
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In other things, yes, it's true, teenagers are still the same as they ever were.
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It goes without saying that on internet can you discover the strange little subcultural facts that you'll never learn in conventional media, let alone school. How about a story on gay male kissing? Here's an excerpt: "They'll shove a finger, or two, up a cute, willing butt, and then grab 10 other guys without ever visiting the sink."
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I was all caught up with my New Orleans writing, I'd finished the V!ctoria Rose website, and I'd shipped a long-delayed commission painting to Andy Shaver in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The week had, in other words, been one of non-work-related accomplishment. So, late this afternoon, I finally got the chance to just fuck around with my gadgets, without any concern for commitments. It's been my experience that commitments steal away far more time than is required to fulfill them. When they're hanging over my head, they're poisoning my free time, making it impossible to fully enjoy it. The solution, of course, is to just buckle down and do the work, but creative initiative cannot simply be summoned like the courage of a Marine.
I fired up my LINUX box for the first time in weeks and eventually figured out how to get the screen resolution in X-Windows up to 1024 by 768. But all the king's horses and all the king's men (well, actually just me and my co-worker Eric the Web Developer - as opposed to Eric the Defense Engineer) couldn't figure out how to get rid of the useless eyeballs that follow the cursor around the screen.
After all my accomplishments, and after all the hermit-like behaviour necessary to achieve them, I felt like I owed the world some socializing. Already this afternoon I'd skipped out on a popular annual block party in Pacific Beach, assuming it would be a festival of Schteves and Schtevettes (and besides, today was yet another clammy, dreary, cloudy San Diego spring day). All of my fun-loving co-workers had gone to the block party, of course, and Eric the Web Developer had even called specifically to invite me. Not having a car, I suggested that he come visit me instead.
Not long after Eric's arrival, co-worker Al came over too, hauling his acoustic guitar and a 12 pack of Coronas which I'd ordered. He'd left a napping Kevin the DBA back at his place. Poor Kevin; the company website's mail was acting up again and he was going to have to go in and deal with it at around midnight. What with all the hours he puts in, I wonder if he even makes minimum wage.
Al and Eric both like to play guitar, so I set up my electric to provide an additional musical tool. Perhaps predictably at this point, the boys launched into an endless performance. You know the sort of thing I'm talking about. There was no separation of one song from another. Here and there one of the boys would start a familiar riff and the other would start something completely different, somewhat out of tune. Usually neither could remember how to do the whole thing and would simply crap-out, only to sigh, complain about the pick, and begin something completely different. It was irritating to have to listen to this crap, and to realize that this was taking the place of possibly interesting conversation, but marijuana and Corona had me grooving to it anyway. I quickly gave up on getting a jealously-guarded guitar from either Eric or Al, and I began singing along instead. For some reason tonight, I had an unexpectedly strong voice, though I couldn't really think of any interesting lyrics to sing. When that got old, Al's suggested I play his harmonica. I'd never really played a harmonica before, and found it to be not so terribly logically different from a piano, so I could do my usual musical thing. It was repetitive and monotonous, but it provided structure to guide the chaotic random musical offerings of my chums. Every now and then we got into a groove and even occasionally sounded good. If the boys had only broken loose of the blue scale, something beautiful might well have happened.
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