It Hurts

Sometimes, it just does. Ya know?

The Little Engine That Could Not

Sometimes you get tired of thinking. It never ends.

Think think think THINK THINK THINK think think think……like the little engine in your head that could NOT ever just shut the hell up.

Sometimes, you want to stop all that.

You just want to believe, or you want to feel, or you want to accept or……I don’t know……you just want to be a part of the river, instead of watching the river, observing the river, measuring its tides and speeds and direction and analyzing which choice will best benefit the river……

Sometimes you want to let go.

And on that note, my favorite e.e. cummings poem:

let it go-the
smashed word broken
open vow or
the oath cracked length
wise-let it go it
was sworn to
go

let them go-the
truthful liars and
the false fair friends
and the boths and
neithers-you must let them go they
were born
to go

let all go-the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things-let all go
dear
so comes love

Cueste Lo Que Cueste (or, Dear Perry......)

Hello mate, glad you asked.

'Cueste lo que cueste' has been my mantra du jour of late.

As my best friend, who is bilingual, explained it to me, it literally translates as 'it costs what it costs,' but is used to mean 'it is what it is,' 'whatever it takes,' 'at any cost,' etc. I am partial to the 'it is what is is' meaning.

If anyone can confirm, demur, digress, or otherwise elaborate, I'd love to hear about it.

The Apple Don't Fall Far From The Tree

OK, so when Googling 'Catholic tattoos,' I somehow stumbled across an article about this chick, a typist-turned-stripper-turned-blogger-turned-author-turned-screenwriter. And she relayed something so apropos that I had to tell my dad, who is, shall we say, just a touch on the eccentric side. So the email exchange went, well, a little something like this:

Dad, had to share this:

"My dad always told me that his main objective in life was ensuring that I was not ordinary. So he's happy to see me stand out," she says.

So then my Dad writes back and says:

"Well, yeah; kool,but also, Osama bin Laden is not ordinary, so, yes, to stand out, but in a good way."

Sometimes....sometimes I just love that guy.

Today's Brilliant Little Bon Mot

"You might not be where you want to be, but you got to be glad you ain't where you was."

Dear Perry (from the UK?)

Dear Perry,

I named the new car Chelsea. I pat her on the dashboard frequently to thank her for her hard work and trustiness and praise her by name. She seems to dig it. Thanks for asking!

Your pal,

Fahrenheit519

I Don't Care How Broke

I don't care how broke I ever get. I don't care if I have to stop getting my nails done, or stop buying Bumble & Bumble shampoo, or sit with my dogs on the traffic island begging for change. I don't care if I have to EAT those dogs (the girl would make a good repast, being just about the size of a large roasted chicken, but I'm afraid the boy dog wouldn't equal more than a couple of buffalo wings) so I can pay my student loans off, you will never, ever, EVER catch me doing this.

Yeah, I Said It

About eight years ago, on my first long trip to Ireland, I boarded a bus out in the back of beyond, bound for Eyre Square in the city center of Galway. It was a lovely, sunny day, especially for October, and I was just enjoying watching the landscape of the Connemara go by, in all its lovely reds and oranges and, natch, greens.

Then we stopped and some schoolboys, perhaps about 11 or 12 years old, got on. They sat a few seats in front of me and as the driver put it in gear, all of sudden…….it began: the hail of cussing. A shower of ‘fookin this’ and a storm of ‘fookin that’ and a deluge of ‘ye bleedin cunt ye,’ and we weren’t even in Dublin or anything, where such things expressions generally mean, ‘please,’ ‘thanks,’ and ‘don’t mention it.’

I am not easily shocked. I can be a bawdy, profane woman myself, but to hear such filth streaming from the mouths of such tender young things had me beside myself. When I went home that night to the flat I was sharing with two boy Galwegians, I told them what I’d heard.

“Such language!” I exclaimed, with highly uncharacteristic primness.

“Ah now,” said Niall, the deadpan wit of the two, “ye see, that’s just the rhythm and flow of our language, like!”

And Niall has a point. Cursing, cussing, and swearing in Ireland goes along with the ubiquitous tea, whiskey, butter, and spray-painted sheep. It flavors the language, like salt, and gives an edge to the singsongity lilt of the (I cringe as I type this word) brogue. An Irish person who does not swear is, well, an oddity. And in Irish culture, it’s not so much gratuitous obscenity as a way of emphasizing a point or establishing a cultural commonality.

Take the word 'cunt.' In America, if you use that word within earshot of any female, your ass better run. Fast. It is nearly akin, in terms of pure power, to the N word, only bitches is crazy and shit, so you better think long and hard before you use it. Howeer, in Ireland, ‘cunt’ is actually fairly innocuous and generally denotes a male (ironic) who’s simply acting stupid.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to my point. Profanity has long been looked upon as the province of tramps, carnies, and hip hop gangstas. But I say this is unjust. Perhaps it is my Hibernian bloodline (or perhaps my deep faghaggotry), but I love a good cuss. It is so rich, so satisfying, so, at times, exalting and liberating that I cannot escape its heady allure. I am all for it. I mean, not at Thanksgiving with the folks or in the boardroom or meeting your man’s mom or whatever. It's like, I’m not going to walk up to my baristsa and be all, ‘Yo, snatch, steam me up a fuckin’ latte and put some stank on it, ho,’ or anything, but it has its proper place in popular vernacular.

A friend of mine and I were lying in Dolores Park the other day debating this. He said he figures if someone swears a lot it just means they don’t have much else to say. I must demur there. Oh contraire, brother! A good cuss simply peppers one’s speech with a spicy mélange of sass and rhythm. Drag queens, sailors, and the Irish have known this since time immemorial. Take me for example. I am not at a loss for words, ever. Sometimes even meaningful ones. Once in a while I can even border on the profound or the wise. So I don’t rely on the F word, the B word, the C word, or the M word to substitute for thoughts, but merely to emphasize my points, to spice up my soliloquies, because what is popcorn without salt? What is huevos rancheros without hot sauce? Not much. Fine, acceptable, if maybe a bit bland, and I like mine spicy, so pass the fuckin’ Tobasco already, baby.

The Skies Ran On Forever

The classic Orb song Little Fluffy Clouds has resurfaced twice in my life lately. What makes it especially spooky is that it’s come to me from two totally unrelated quarters – my two closest male friends; my ‘adopted brother,' here in the City, and my best friend, in New York City, who know each other only in a secondhand fashion, through me (poor bastards).

My best friend put the song on a CD he made for me for my recent SoCal road trip. It is a special memory between us, as I was working as an intern at its distribution label back in 1991 and it was one of the first acts I promoted, giving out copies of the CD like candy to my contemporaries at the time, including him. We were skinny and smooth and broke, happy to work together in menial jobs, making $5.50 an hour while singing along, ‘layering different sounds……when I lived in Arizona, the skies ran on forever……..’

It reminds us both of being so young and gorgeously reckless. We were deconstructing it recently and I said, ‘Doesn’t that remind you of being 20 and you’d go over to a friend’s house on a Sunday afternoon and they’d be all, hey I’ve got some E, you want some? And you’d be all, OK sure, and pop it like an aspirin, all, who cares if I have to work tomorrow? And now, you know, if you were going to take any kind of hallucinogenic, which you wouldn’t, because by now most of us have seen, you know, enough of the inside of our own heads, but let’s just say you were for the sake of argument, it’d be a goddamned two-week planning process. At least. You’d have to get everything all in order: your silky modal sheets, your favorite jammies, lotion, a couple gallons of water, 2 packs of cigarettes and a whole industrial strip of gum because you sure aren’t leaving the house and going into a store for anything, and 20 of the most perfect CDs, in fact you might have to burn some just for the occasion……….’ and so on. None of us can even be bothered with all that anymore. And we laughed, and said yeah, basking in the joy of understanding and mutual memory.

So then last week my ‘adopted brother’ sent me a YouTube link to the video, which I’d never seen.

“OMG!” I typed back in IM, “No way! I didn’t even know you knew that song! That song has total meaning in my history!”

He replied that it had deep meaning for him, as well as for nearly everyone he ever knew from Back In The Day. But it doesn’t mean anything to his girlfriend, and that makes him just a little bit sad. She is mad cool and all, not a dork or socially inept or anything, but she just wasn’t, you know, down like that. She can’t, though she may nobly try, get his references in that respect. She was too busy getting a degree, on schedule, and getting a good job, while the rest of us were pole dancing or rolling in the desert or winning Mr. Pan Dulce contests or whatever.

But eventually all of us got off the pole or out of the desert and got our shit together. We went to school (or not), got ‘professional’ jobs, made our way in the world in whatever fashion is working for us and became timely rent payers, tax filers, and general all-around responsible citizens – but with flava. And there’s the rub. My best friend and I have lamented long into the night about the elusive Holy Grail of Boyfriends – a man who is both equally well-seasoned, rich with life experience and sticky floors and long nights, and yet gets up on time and goes to work and balances his checkbook, uses big words and buys decent bed linens and doesn’t get busted for driving drunk or selling pills or not paying child support or have a whole bunch of court dates on his dance card – a man more like, well – us.

Hot, sweet, charming, and problem-addled boys are easy to find and easier to enjoy – until Monday morning, when they’re sleeping off the weekend while you force yourself out of bed to make coffee and get your downtown game face on. Or until Thursday night, when you come home after a hard day at work dealing with The Man and he’s sitting around in his shorts illegally downloading music onto your laptop and smoking cigarettes in your living room, and dinner isn’t on the table and the dishes are piled up in the sink. And that just won’t do.

And then there’s Mr. Milquetoast, Mr. Good on Paper. He’s easy to find, too. He’s passably attractive, if not smolderingly alluring, and he does all those responsible things that you do and you appreciate in a partner, but he doesn’t get Little Fluffy Clouds or comedowns, tales of skinned knees and dollar bills and playa dust. He may not judge you, but he doesn’t get you, and he usually doesn’t have very good taste in shoes, and that just won’t do, either.

It’s not as simple as Nice Guy/Bad Boy. Would that it were. Where is the hybrid, the blend, the guy who is just like me and like my best friend, who pays the rent but wears cool kicks and gets it? Where, I ask you, is the love?

City of Saint Francis

I always keep Animal Care and Control’s emergency number on speed dial on my cell phone, and I cannot tell you how many times I’ve used it. Sadly, sometimes it’s to report dead animals on the street, though more than a few times I’ve called to report a dog running loose or, once, a pigeon trapped in one of those awful nets nailed to an apartment building. Last night as I driving home, there was a big bloody raccoon carcass lying in the left lane next to a traffic island on chaotic, rush-hour Geary Boulevard. Geary isn’t a place one often spots roadkill, so this was doubly jarring, though I suppose it was probably a stray coon that lost its way and wandered out of Golden Gate Park. I hit speed dial and as soon as I mentioned the intersection, they said, “Dead raccoon, right?” I said yeah and I gotta say, I was pretty proud of my fellow citizens for giving a fuck.

But it was still awful to see. I can’t stand to see animal corpses in the road, just lying there, being swerved around or, worse, run over, by all those cars on their way to somewhere. It seems so undignified, so unbefitting its innocent little creature spirit. And every time I do see a dead animal in the road, I say a little prayer to God to take care of it and maybe let it be reborn as something better, luckier.

Sweet Things About Living in San Francisco - #1

The air raid sirens that bust out every Tuesday at noon. I love it, and it always fills me with civic pride.

What A Girl Wants

You know it, baby.

A Simple Kind of Life

So I was married once. Almost had a kid with the guy. But didn’t. It was sad and tragic and hard, and I came out feeling like I’d had a layer of skin burned off but much wiser about who I am and what I do and do not want – wisdom that money just can’t buy, but blood and guts and tears sure can.

Me and the ex have stayed friends and usually have monthly conversations in which we catch up – I tell him about my dullsville but decently-paying job, my dogs, or my latest purchases or plans for short-range trips, and he tells me about his endless Bacchanalian partying, the girlfriend du jour, any recent legal woes, and all the working for a living he’s not doing. And then we laugh over milky Irish tea and old memories and know that we love each other still and always will, no matter what, even though our couple of years together chewed us both up and spat us out, but the love was real and always will be.

Last time we talked, a few months ago, he was going to go to France and Spain to hang out and party on the Continent with his new ho, I mean bitch, I mean, ahem, love interest. I’m just teasing. I’m sure she’s a lovely girl, but I never miss an opportunity to take the piss, especially at the French, which she kind of is. But anyway. If I sound bitter, it’s not over the love interest, it’s that he’s fucking off across Gay Paree while I’m sweatin’ the spreadsheets and ain’t nothin’ goin’ on here but the rent, yo. But the truth is, that’s on me. I had my chance to sleep in train stations and shift sultry foreigners on rocky beaches and do lots of drugs on MDMA-addled moors and, historically being far less adventurous than I’d like to believe I am, I didn’t. If my ex has the chance to fecklessly shag and roll his way through Western Europe, more power to him. God bless him. I just hope he doesn’t drink himself into the grave while doing it, which is a real possibility.

It dawned on me a couple of weeks ago that I hadn’t spoken to him in ages, so I tried to ring him but it wouldn’t go through. Ah well, that’s broadband phone service for you. Whatever. Then, yesterday, out of nowhere, I get a text message (he’s European, so he can be forgiven) from him reading: “Hey darlin. How u doin. Got news 4 ya. Gimme a ring whenever.” Now I know, surely as I know the sun rises in the east, that ‘news,’ phrased thusly, means one of two things: a bid or a baby, and I was pretty sure I knew which it was.

And I was right.

Thank God, no stints in Mountjoy. His current sentence will be much, much longer: the fertile little Frog is six weeks along.

“When’d you find out?” I asked.

“Saturday,” he said.

“Wow,” I offered, “so, how do you feel about that?”

“Well,” he replied, “I’ve been on the piss ever since,” meaning, as I quickly did the math, he’s been drinking for five days straight.

Which reminds me of an awful late August night, many years ago, when I took him up on the back stairs of my flat with a bottle of Jameson's in hand, overlooking the dome of City Hall* (where we shortly thereafter got married) and the sparkling lights of downtown, and as he unscrewed the cap I told him there was a stork in the post. He blinked, blinked again, swallowed hard, and then cocked back his arm and threw the cap of the whiskey bottle off into the vast, dark night and said, “Well, we won’t be needing that again," for which I will always love him. And then he asked me what we were going to name her.

But this is now, today, 2006, and he’s in Ireland and I’m in California and he’s giving me this difficult news, telling me he’s been on a weeklong piss-up, and then does the quintessential Irish recover: “Ah no, no, it’s grand like, it’s cool, it’s cool,” and my heart sank, because I know this boy, and I know it ain’t cool. Not at all.

I congratulated him and we agreed to talk later, when he’d sobered up and I had more time. And I sat and observed my emotions flow by like fast-moving clouds in the sky: shock, apprehension, anger, sadness, melancholy, relief, and hope for him and her and he or she, which is where I’ve arrived at and hope I will stay.

It’s like this: it’s on me that I didn’t sleep in Spanish train stations or drop E in cornfields when I was young and meaninglessly employed and easily could have, and that, I regret. And it’s also on me that I kicked him to the curb (which he would never have done to me), put him on a plane and sent him home (although he managed to get a two-week holiday in the Scrubs between the two, but that’s another day, another blog) to get himself together because it sure wasn’t happening in my house, and that, while it might sadden me just a little, I don’t regret.

And it’s on me that I won’t ever be giving the news that he gave to me to anyone. I don’t want to birth kids of my own, and I’m cool with that. Real cool. I’ve seen what sacrifices people, especially working- and middle-class people, have to make in this country to have kids, and I am not signing up for that shit. I have never been a patient woman, and I don’t particularly fancy wee humans for more than a few hours until they can, you know, reason, and as an only child of crazy parents, I’m not big on dependent and needy, so, small children are pretty much out.

But my ex, I always thought he would make a great Dad. His playfulness, his imagination, his own childlike qualities in general, and the fact that he was second oldest in a brood of five all bear out this belief. When we babysat my Goddaughter, he was the one with her up on his shoulders and running around the jungle gym while I sat on the bench reading the Sunday paper and worrying the crossword puzzle. Whether he can manage to be a good partner to the mother of his kids is another story, but I cultivate a cautious hope, like millions before me, that perhaps this child will be the key to him finally living up to the promise of his manhood and turn him into the stand-up guy I always wished he would be. And me? Though I have nothing but respect for parenthood and motherhood, I have turned my back on that cozy, damp, claustrophobic domesticity and towards something else: autonomy, sleeping in, writing letters til midnight, the open road, cheese and crackers for dinner if I damn well feel like it. Some might call that selfishness. I don’t give a fuck.

These are the decisions we make, that we have to live with, and that we learn to make peace with and even love, even though we might sometimes play the ‘What-If Game’ or think about roads not taken. About a month ago, I was driving down the 5 from San Clemente to San Diego, listening to CDs my best friend, also fiercely independent, had made for me. As I was crossing the bridge that spans the Batiquitos Lagoon in Carlsbad, which has always seemed magical to me, Gwen Stefani sang out of my speakers, "Sometimes I wish for a mistake/now all those simple things are simply too complicated for my life/how'd I get so faithful to my freedom?" and a fierce wave gripped my heart and my chest hurt. But I wasn’t sad, I was joyous: joyous to be free, be at peace with my decisions and their consequences, which, while not easy, were absolutely, irrevocably mine.

* - Thanks to Crow_Soup for this badass photo

Today's Beautiful Visual

It’s a beautiful morning; blustery, windy but in a clean, fresh, clear-out-the-cobwebs kinda way. The clouds are moving fast, racing across the sky, which is thankfully, after weeks of gloomy British steeliness, blue. I was in a good mood today driving to work, singing along to an angsty-male CD I made, and as I turned a corner there in the street were thousands of little white somethings, bobbing up the street, pushed by the wind. As I looked closer, I realized someone must have loosed a box full of Styrofoam peanuts, and they looked for all the world like a little tiny white army bouncing up the hill in unison. They looked too merry to be equated with marching, really, and too orderly to be, say, raving, but they had the look of a mass of very joyous little things on a journey to somewhere good, some place to look forward to. It made me very happy.

Ain't No Way To Live

I used to do a lot of thinking about women. Not, you know, that kind of thinking, ‘cause I’m pretty firmly a Kinsey 1 (behaviorally 0, but you know, a girl has had her experiments), but thinking about women’s rights, women’s condition in the world, and so forth. After all, I was born in Berkeley and went to possibly the most feminist college in the country and was pretty much weaned on Ms., and then, as I got older, Bust, Bitch, and the riot grrl aesthetic. I was a regular booty-shaking, sex-positive Third Waver, with both Mary Gaitskill novel in the hand and pair of Georgia boots on the feet with which to layeth the smackdown upon any foolish, double standard-spouting Bubbas who had the misfortune to cross my extra-bitchy path.

I was and always will be an ardent feminist, in my own lipsticked, cha-cha heeled way, and I used to be very fond of saying that ‘feminism is good for men, too’ – though it arguably depends on how you define feminism. But as I’ve gotten older and learned to appreciate men in richer, more holistic ways, I’m disappointed with feminism for leaving men and boys out of the conversation. Not that I don’t understand the whole ‘by us for us,’ safe-space mentality, but the truth is that most of us women love, live with, work with, and raise men every day and cutting them out of the picture is both counterproductive and, well, offensive.

I’m troubled because the whole conversation about what being a man means seems to have been left to two troubling factions; the shrill, feminists-are-seeking-to-usurp-our-God-given-role crowd or the largely white, Boomerish drum-circle types appropriating Native American imagery and beating their chests in the forests at the indignity of alimony. I mean, these are our options?

It ain’t easy to be a man these days. We need to think about how fucked-up our cultural ideas of masculinity are, and how they twist and murder the male soul. Manhood seems to be defined in terms of dominance – economic or physical, the latter being ultimately expressed in violence. How does a boy learn what it is to be a man? What makes him one? His first fistfight? His first wet dream? First paycheck? First drunk? Joining the army? Getting laid? And in some circles, his first prison bid?

Yesterday I went to go see Quinceañera (one of the year’s best films, if you ask me). A Quinceañera is the Latin American version of the Sweet Sixteen, a rite-of-passage for girls into womanhood. For all our grousing about how tough we have it, which we do, at least we as women have the bare biological menarche to mark our transition, and cultural rituals such as Quinceañera, Sweet 16, Deb Balls, et cetera. At a Quinceañera, a girl gets to wear her first makeup, is presented with her first pair of high heels, and the line is clearly demarcated between girl and young woman.

Boys got nothing like this coming here. In other cultures, or at other times, they might undergo scarification, or go on a hunt or walkabout, or raise a barn. They did something that was useful and meaningful to their people. What do we have to offer them? Date rape and touchdowns? MBAs and drinking stories? If you can’t bring home the bacon or bang the cheerleading team or bust some grapes, you ain’t a man here. And that, as they say in New York, ain’t no way to live. Not for anybody.

I’m not suggesting scarring our sons or or sending them to wander the desert, but I am saying, teach our boys that being a man means more than being able to make money, or make a baby, or make a fist.

Trip Memory

Late on an August Sunday night. Two days in a row back and forth from San Diego to San Clemente, emotionally elating and exhausting all at once. Sunday evening I leave two new friends near the pier in Ocean Beach and get back on the 5, headed north back to SC. At the last minute, rather than heading back to my grandmother's house, I decide to go enjoy sunset on the pier alone. Idyllic, perfect, quintessentially coastal SoCal. Just beautiful.

On the way home, after dark, I stop at the grocery store to pick up milk for coffee and batteries for the fire alarm for my Gran. By this time I'm tired, cranky, mean around the edges, all I can think of is bed.

Not many lines are open, so I pick the least of all evils, right behind a cute Latin family; Papi, Mami, and Papito, with a huge cart full of stuff. Oh well, it's traveling, chill out. I zone out, looking at the covers of the trashy tabloids tantalizingly racked near the checkout counter, squinting and trying not to be too angry about the flourescent lighting, which I disagree with philosophically as well as aesthetically.

All of a sudden the Papi in the family turns and wordlessly waves me through because I've only got the milk and batteries, and I figure out that they don't speak much English. I thank them profusely and whisk though the line. I am so deeply touched by this simple thoughtful act that all grouchiness melts away, replaced by a spreading feeling of warmth and faith in humanity. This magnanimity follows me out of the cavernous store and out into the warm, dark suburban parking lot. It is a perfect moment, the kind held in memory forever, conjured up on less kind days to warm up a heart sometimes in danger of icing over.

What Happens When You Work With All Women, #2

I am not really a cat person. I don’t dislike them at all; I’ve been known to coo and cuddle and buy ridiculous gifts for other people’s cats. But, as with children, I don’t really want any of my own. Nevertheless, I am a fool for an animal in need. Any animal.

So yesterday morning I’m sitting at my desk, crunching yet another ungodly spreadsheet when I hear a coworker on the phone outside my office talking about what sounds suspiciously like finding a critter of some kind. I bolt up and out, and there in her arms wrapped in a black wool jacket is a tiny little kitten. Then I heard the words I never want to – ‘SPCA,’ because even though San Francisco’s SPCA totally rocks beyond all belief, it’s still a shelter, and it’s still scary for a little guy, and I think you have to take strays to the pound (which, here in SF, also rocks) first anyway. And these are both good facilities, but still, nothing beats a home sweet home.

So she gets off the phone and tells me she was on a particularly stalled freeway merge in Oakland when this kitten ran in front of her car. She heroically put the car in park and chased it down. I liked her before, but now? I worship her. You just don’t find that kind of person very often (and to the guy honking behind her and being a dick about it? Suck it, buddy).

Soon the whole office knows and Team Estrogen shifts in to high gear. I’m on the Craigslist Pet Forum, trying to find out how to keep it fed until we figure out what to do with it. I’m on the phone, calling my vet for advice. Another coworker comes in and almost starts to cry because she’s been wanting a cat, so she’ll adopt him. Hurray all around. Then her landlord says no, and boo all around, but he says she can foster him for a couple of weeks, so hurray all around, sortof, and now she’s crying because she can’t have him. But then another coworker comes in and she might want him. Up, down, up down, more times than a Catholic at Mass, as my grandfather used to say.

The woman who found him takes him the vet at noon. It’s a boy! And he’s got fleas and a very slight fever but other than that seems to be OK. I dub him Oliver, because, well, he’s an orphan and he just looks like an Oliver. And I love to name things. He’s given to me for the last babysitting shift of the day, until 6pm, when his foster mom can come collect him. I wrap him in a blanket I keep in my trunk for just such occasions and he snoozes in my lap all afternoon. I am deeply amused by his acrobatics and sleeping practically upside down with his big paws hanging out over the blanket. I give up trying to work and just read about the Chrysanthemum Throne and the old Japanese class system on Wikipedia, just killing time.

6pm comes, and so does foster mom. We pick up the box he’s been temporarily housed in and I drive her from the subterranean parking garage to her car a few blocks away. We make the transfer. I bid Oliver goodbye and wish him a long and happy life. And then I go do laundry and go home to my own dogs, whom I rescued from miserable fates, and we all cuddle and catch up on our Tivo backlog and order Thai food. Sometimes, good things happen.

Gin & Juice

There is nothing like sitting up in one's office in a semi-stuffy professional atmosphere with the door closed, looking at the view and listening to 'Gin & Juice' from nineteen ninety fucking three.

The Bigger The Hoops...........

I love me some hoop earrings. I don’t care how ghetto folks in some quarters may consider them; they are to us low-rent (as if such a thing exists in San Francisco) hipster chicks what pearl studs are to sorority girls. But I digress.

This affection has led to years of searching for the perfect hoops; the elusive Holy Grail of B-girl accessories, with just the right combination of size, shape, bling, and uniqueness. But sometimes one just has to go with classics, you know? So I was hella excited when I spotted both gold and silver hoops with a ginormous circumference (I always have trouble keeping radius, circumference, and um, whatever else straight; geometry wasn’t my best subject) at Multikulti, my favorite cheap-bling place on Valencia Street. These bad boys were big – total shoulder-dusters, and in fact, were inappropriate for work given not just their extreme ghetto flavor but also the fact that they interfered with the ability to talk on the phone and write at the same time. Aw yeah, baby. Ring ‘em up!

But they are fabulous for their intended purpose – being sported on the street in dubious neighborhoods under dodgy circumstances. It was on one such evening that my little Irish friend Charlotte and I were having dinner at Rotee on Haight & Webster and after our repast decided to go outside and take a cigarette break. So there we were, smoking shamelessly on the sidewalk, when out of nowhere comes a bald man on a bicycle tearing around the corner. He saw Charlotte, jumped off, and a slew of effusive greetings ensued. Turns out he was a stylist and had worked on Charlotte (quite well, I might add, having seen the photos) for a recent fashion show. He was natty without being obvious about it, in a charming green and white shirt that only boys like him can pull off.

Giving me a friendly once-over, he declared, “Love the earrings.”

“Well thanks, sugar,” I returned.

“And you know what they say,” he said, pausing for a beat, “The bigger the hoops.....the bigger the whore,” prompting us all to fall out, shrieking with laughter.

“Oh honey,” I said, letting the full force of my faghaggotry flow, “you don’t even know the half.”

I'm Very Afraid. I Have A Lot of Fears.

So my glamorous weekend was filled with things like washing the dogs, paying the bills, and stocking the cupboards. To this end, I decided a little jaunt to Trader Joe’s was just the ticket. Since grocery shopping on an empty stomach is a dangerous proposition that never ends well – unless you consider a larder full of peanut-butter filled pretzels and macaroons viable – I thought I’d stop in at Una Mas for just a little cup of tortilla soup before I entered the grociferous (yes, I made that shit up) fray.

I ordered my sopa, sat down, and opened my latest read. All of sudden, out of nowhere, this sad little man materialized next to my table. Middle-aged or getting there, very rumpled, baseball cap, clutching a tatty notebook. Too clean to be homeless, but had that off-kilter, transient vibe.

“Can I talk to you for a minute?” he asked in a stilted voice, to which I haltingly replied that I was reading for a school assignment (16 years of deflecting both homeless hustles and predatory male come-ons makes San Franciscan women really fabulous, off-the-cuff liars).

“Please?” he asked in a way that was so heartbreakingly plaintive I acquiesced. He sat down and I actually closed my book, pushed it aside, put my See Jesus In The Face of Outcasts hat on, and gave the guy my full attention.

“I’m really scared,” he said, “I’m very afraid. I have a lot of fears. Can I have a hug?”

Yeah. It was like that.

I never did give the guy a hug, but I sat there for fifteen minutes or so (wouldn’t you know, they lost my order, which I only found out after I went up the counter asked them to make it to go, please, andale) listening to him and answering his repetitious questions. I learned that he lives in a nearby board & care home, that they yell at him for eating too slowly, that he was called a child molester at the mall by a security guard (I checked out the Megan’s Law database when I got home; no sign of him), he has an older brother who told him it was OK to talk to ‘older ladies’ (ahem) but not younger ones, and that he’s 52. He asked me if I were married, and as every woman in public knows, the answer is always ‘yes.’ The conversation went kind of like this:

“I’m really afraid. I’m scared. Tell me it’ll be OK.”
“You don’t need to be scared. It’s OK. What are you afraid of?”
“Will your husband beat me up?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Cause he’s a nice guy.”
“Can I give you my address?”
“Yes.”
“Will your husband get mad? Will he call the police?”
“No.”
“Why? I’m really afraid. I have a lot of fears. Tell me it’ll be OK.”

………..and on and on and on. I managed to learn his name and get his address, and get a quick peek at his notebook, which seemed filled with pages of really trippy scrawls I’d have given about anything to get a good look at. He asked if he could go grocery shopping with me and I delicately extricated myself from that proposition, but I did let him walk me out to my car. He left me, waving, and yelling, “Bye!” as I drove away. I was glad the encounter had ended, but a forlorn feeling followed me for hours. Something about ‘retarded’/developmentally disabled/whatever folks has always brought out extreme pathos in me, kind of like abandoned pit bull puppies or stray kittens or something. And the guy was kinda pushy and everything but I couldn’t help wanting to, I don’t know, make him feel better. Or less afraid. Or something.