Today was a shitty day.

Woke up against my will at 7:15, same as on a workday but without the alarm. Masturbated myself back to sleep until 8, but I wanted to sleep more. I'd been awake half the night, for no reason except the ordinary insomnia. I always want eight hours and settle for six, but last night I got maybe 4½ hours of sleep, and I yawned all day.

Long and boring backstory: I’ve been an insomniac since seventh grade, the onset of adolescence, when sleep became elusive. Part of growing up, at least for me, but not my favorite part. I've had about half a dozen good nights of sleep since then, and under my eyes are always dark sooty bags. Even if you’re fascinating I’ll still probably yawn in your face. Don’t take it personally.

Or take it personally if you’d like. Your choice.

Counting sheep doesn't work, but I've counted thousands, and tried everything else from warm milk to chakra chants. Sleeping pills sort of work, if I take double or triple the recommended dose, but I'm paranoid about getting addicted so I don’t often swallow pills.

When somehow the ZZZs finally come, I'll wake up in the middle of the night to pee, and won’t get back to sleep. Or a car horn honks at 4:00 in the morning, and I can’t get back to sleep. And so it goes, last night and just about every night.

♦ ♦ ♦

Usually Margaret calls me at work, or if she leaves a message on my service I'll buy some quarters and call her back the next day, or maybe the day after. This time I wanted to talk, though, so I called her, and she spent the first few minutes teasing me about it. Seems the gentleman is always supposed to call, but she said I’m no gentleman. "You never call," she told me ... when I called.

“We broke up, right?” That's me, getting to the point quickly.

“God, yeah,” she said with a laugh, “I’m not moving to San Francisco, and you’re not moving to Washington, so we broke up. We’re just friends, and you'll never get all this again.” The way she said all this, I knew she was doing her sexy shake at that moment.

When I didn't say anything she said again, “God, yeah, we’re exes. Why do you even ask?”

I deftly changed the subject instead of answering, and we talked about her mental health until I got tired of standing at a phone booth and said goodbye.

Why did I ask, though? Only in case my dinner with Kallie turns out to be something more than a couple of office pals having dinner. It isn’t, of course, and it won’t, it's impossible, and it’s stupid to even imagine it could, but … I wanted to make sure I’m a free agent.

What’s annoying, though, is that when I asked if we'd broken up, Maggie didn’t hesitate. She didn’t even say “Uh.” She said, “God, yeah,” said it instantly, said it laughing, and said it twice.

We're over, and we’ve been over for months, but you know, she didn’t have to answer quite so quickly and with a laugh.

♦ ♦ ♦

Here, take a Muni quiz: I thought I’d see a double feature at Stonestown. That’s a 30-minute ride on the M streetcar, which runs every 12 minutes. So how long before showtime should I be waiting at the Powell Street metro station?

42 minutes minimum, right? Muni is notorious for delays, though, so I allowed plenty of margin for derailments or whatever. I was waiting on the platform an hour and fifteen minutes before the movie started.

Not enough Muni margin. I flunked the quiz.

A K train went by, then two Js, two Ns, and an L. Then another K, two more Js, K, N, L, and then five minutes of nothing. Then two Js, another K, a J, two Ns, a K, and an L, and by then it was too late to possibly reach Stonestown in time. Dunno where the M trains were, but there will be no movies today. Maybe I’ll try again tomorrow.

♦ ♦ ♦

I would bet thirty bucks that I had thirty bucks in my pocket when I left for the train station — three tens. That's more than I'd need to see the movies, because I was also planning to buy underwear and batteries at the Stonestown mall. I clearly remember guessing how much money I'd need, thinking it should be less than twenty bucks, but everything's always more expensive than you'd think, so I put three ten-dollar bills in my pocket.

When I came home from the train station, already grumpy, and emptied my pockets to go pantsless the rest of the day, there was only one ten-dollar bill.

Had I been jostled and nudged by a pickpocket? Honestly, I don't think so. If you're as uncomfortable around humans as I am, you notice when people come too close, and anyway, a pickpocket wouldn't have left me ten bucks. I think two out of three tenspots blew out of my pocket while I was walking.

That's worse than being pickpocketed, ain't it? At least with a thief, you can respect someone's effort and skill. At least you've been victimized by someone else, not by your own damned self. Dumb Doug — I carry a wallet, but put the money loose in my pocket.

Twenty bucks, gone with the wind.

So, yeah. Today was a shitty day, the weekend is half over, and I'm not in a good mood. I’m taking three sleeping pills and going to bed. Not going to sleep, probably, just going to bed, where I'll lie there wishing I was asleep.

Doublechecked the Muni map, like I should’ve done yesterday, and saw that I could’ve taken any K or L to West Portal, and transferred to a 17 that would’ve taken me to the mall. Ya live ya learn.

An M to Stonestown — the train I never saw yesterday — pulled in as soon as I walked onto the platform. Smooth ride, no waiting, and I saw that double feature a day later than I’d intended.

The Client takes place in a reality I recognized, with poor people who really seem poor, working crap jobs like mine or even crappier. It was nice not seeing all the righteous cops and morally starched and dedicated lawyers you see in so many movies and TV shows. These cops are basically bastards, and the lawyers are generally slime.

The story felt real too — a boy knows too much, and the feds want him to talk, and the mob wants him dead — for the first hour, anyway. Then it devolved into typical Hollywood slop. Susan Sarandon is excellent, as always, and so’s the boy playing the boy.

I came for Natural Born Killers, though, because I have an odd admiration for Oliver Stone. His movies usually frustrate me as being almost really good, but not quite. He’s had a few hits, though, so he gets to make what he wants, and he chooses interesting subjects nobody else would touch.

JFK, for example, was a complete mess, full of nauseating quick-cuts and historical lies. I didn't care for the answers, but nobody else in the movies asks the questions. Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July were both wildly melodramatic, almost operatic, and both were saddled with pretty-boy stars, but Stone’s the guy who gave those big-budget flicks their somewhat subversive point of view. His movies are the only Hollywood products with any point of view at all.

So I came to Natural Born Killers with mixed expectations, but it’s the first Stone movie I’ve really liked, without asterisks or caveats or disclaimers. It’s the hallucinogenic story of young lovers who are also psychotic killers, so it’s violent as blood itself, and also playful and sarcastic and then violent some more. It’s a flying karate kick to the groin of America, and I laughed my dang fool head off.

When it was over, I had a smashing headache, maybe because NBK was overwhelming, but more likely because both features were shown slightly out of focus. That seems to be corporate policy for United Artists theaters; it happens almost every time I see a movie in any box that says UA out front. Gotta respect the consistency, man. It's never unwatchable, only slightly blurry.

Complaining to the staff is pointless, so I didn't. They never do anything about it. They always say, “I’ll tell the projectionist,” and I say thanks, and go back to my seat, and watch the rest of the movie still out of focus.

Most of my movie-going is old movies, at theaters like the Roxie or Castro, where they specialize in old movies. The projectionists are in the same union, I think, but at those places the film is always focused.

There's a different crowd, too. At Stonestown there was more talking, and louder, than there would’ve been at the Roxie. More feet on the seats, stickier carpet, and today at least, a barbarian vibe. There’s ample blood and death in Natural Born Killers, and the audience was hooting and hollering, with light applause after some of the murders, and occasional shouts of “Kill him!” and “Yeah!”

The Strand was a trashy theater with trashy customers, and at the St Francis you expect drunks and psychotics and gene pool bottom-dwellers, and the kooky crowd becomes part of the appeal.

At a suburban theater like the Stonestown, it’s the American middle-class you’re surrounded by. During a lull in the violence I looked around at all these ordinary people, and clearly focused, it was as frightening as anything on the screen.

♦ ♦ ♦

At the mall after the movie, I bought underwear and batteries, and told myself I’d never come back to the mall, but I’ve told myself that before. Then I streetcarred home and spent the rest of the day writing a few letters, and working on the September issue of the zine. I let the mumbling man into his room, and picked my nose and farted frequently.

Had two cans of refried beans for dinner, to keep the farts coming. Genuine Goya brand, on sale at a stupid low price a while back, so I stocked up. Stir in some chopped-up onions and just a smidgen of peanut butter, and beans become a delicacy.

Showers in the rez hotel are often an adventure, but this morning's was particularly bad. The water temperature was never constant for ten seconds — too hot, too cold, way too cold, too hot, way too hot, etc.

When the variations never stop, it means someone in another shower somewhere in the building is twisting their knobs and going through the same frustrations. Sometimes I shower in the middle of the night, if I’m awake, just to beat the rush.

♦ ♦ ♦

Last Thursday night, on an errand for oranges, I walked by the Curran Theater. That's a fancy playhouse not far from where I live, and it was almost showtime for Phantom of the Opera. Many over-dressed white people were ignoring the homeless and hungry folks, rushing to get to their pricey seats, and I gave a hungry guy a dollar in defiance.

Then a man on the sidewalk started semi-shouting, “Tonight’s show, ten bucks.” A scalper? Or maybe he works for the theater? It was 6:55, showtime's at 7:00, so maybe they reduce the price to fill the house?

Ten bucks is a good price for a traveling Broadway-style road show. At the box office, tickets start at $65. So for about three seconds, I considered buying a ticket instead of buying the oranges, but nah. I’m on a budget and can’t afford to blow ten bucks on a whim. And also, several people I hate have raved about Phantom, so I suspect it's awful.

Why am I telling a Thursday story on Monday? Keep your belt buckled, buster, I'm getting to it.

On Friday, Darla was wandering around the office making chit-chat with the employees, a ritual of hers that always makes me uncomfortable, but she’s the boss so I gotta participate. The ticket-scalper story was the only thing that came to mind, so that's the story I told.

Darla smiled huge and started telling me how fantastic the play is, how she loooved it, and how I must’ve been nuts not to buy a ten dollar ticket, she would’ve paid and gone inside and seen the play again... and I nodded. After she’d left I snickered.

Now it’s Monday, and Darla came to my desk and handed me a cassette — the soundtrack of Phantom of the Opera. I sighed and smiled and said thanks, and since my cheap tape deck is right there beside my monitor, what else could I do? I put my headphones on, and hit ‘play’. Yes, my boss forcibly _Phantom_ized me, right there in the office.

In fairness, it's not unreasonable to expect that I'd love Phantom of the Opera. I'm out of the closet at work, might as well come clean here, too: I love musicals. I listen on the headphones and hum along so loud, so often, co-workers walking past my desk sometimes play “Name That Tune."

Yes, dammit, I want to live in a world where anyone might burst into song at any time, and everyone in the background dances along. The Music Man is a favorite, but also Annie or A Chorus Line or Oklahoma.

Phantom of the Opera, though? Meh. I listened to the music, and returned the tape to my boss. Told her I loved it, and thanks, but honestly, the songs were a mixed bunch. A few were pleasant or romantic, but most seemed bombastic and overwrought, and is there a melody in there somewhere? Haven't seen the play, but the music wouldn't make my Top 50. I got more out of the oranges.

San Francisco was sound asleep, and I wished I was. Instead I was wide awake. Again. I've been sleeping so crappy the past few nights.

And it was hot and stuffy. I opened the window to get some air, admiring the view of the dumpster below. Almost directly below. I've trash-bombed the dumpster sometimes, when they've left the lid up. If I arc my toss just right, and if whatever I'm dropping is heavy enough it doesn't blow away, I can dumpster drop from here. The lid of the dumpster is usually down, though, and it's down now.

Couldn't sleep, so I just stared out the window. It's not a picture post card: mostly you can see the windows of another rez hotel across the alley, the dumpster and concrete three floors below, and about ten feet of a street that's barely a street. It's just a bigger alley, that connects to the smaller alley under my window. At the driveway where the two alleys meet, there was either a corpse or a drunk sprawled out on the asphalt.

For a few minutes, I watched that body lying there, to see if it would move or twitch, and it didn't. At least not that I could tell. Dead or alive? Or soon to be dead — it's a stupid place to sleep, smack-dab in the middle of the alley, where the truck will come when it's time to empty the dumpster. And that would be soon, around sunrise. I know, cuz the ruckus reliably wakes me every time. It was sure gonna wake that guy down there — and flatten him, if he didn't move and the truck driver didn't see him.

Should I have hollered at him? "Hey, fucker, sleep on the sidewalk, not the driveway!" Nah, that would wake up everyone in both rez hotels. Should I have gotten dressed, gone down the stairs, and tried talking to him? Nah, too much hassle, and if he's alive he'd punch me, and if he's dead there'd be a cop asking me who and why and what's my blood type.

There was a third alternative, though, quieter and lazier. I filled a couple of zip-lock sandwich bags with water, and aimed at the ground near the bum or his dead body, as a wake-up call. Like a giant beanbag toss.

It was a tricky angle from my window. It's physics or geometry, which I was never good at, and it's athletics, which I was also never good at. Launched my first waterbaggie, and it took longer than you'd expect in flight, a gracious, leisurely curve through the air, and then it bounced off the wall of the other rez hotel, and disintegrated. That's why I'd filled two, though. My second toss was more accurate, and splattered maybe ten feet from that guy. He sat up, looked around, and flipped off the world, but then he moved himself closer to the wall, instead of right in the middle of the driveway, and laid down again.

To be clear, it was not my intent to drench the man, only to wake him.

Mission accomplished. I'd done a good deed, albeit using asshole methodology. Then he went back to sleep, and I remained wide awake. I showered, with no competition for the hot water at 5 in the morning. Then I read a zine, and looked out the window at that bum again, still down there.

You know, a lotta things suck about my life, but I am not passed out drunk in an alleyway. Not yet anyway.

♦ ♦ ♦

At work, Beatrice and I agreed that we're going for a beer Thursday night. It could be fun, I suppose. I’ll try to sparkle. Gotta try to get a good night's sleep tonight and tomorrow night. We'll go to a bar, and I'll probably sit there and look stupid and dribble something on my shirt.

Also at work, the Tuesday pile of papers arrived at 12:30, and we got it all organized and input by 5:00. That's great, not because I care, but because it means some angry executive won't call tomorrow.

♦ ♦ ♦

Hey, it's early in the evening and we’re having a big, loud thunderstorm out the window. It’s been raining like Niagara, turning to hail now, and the thunderclaps that were in the distance aren’t so distant any more. There's a blast of light, and then almost immediately a blast of sound. If I remember the science right, that means the lightning strike was two blocks from here.

That bum I woke up with a waterbomb this morning ... I hope he's someplace dry.

Boom again, thunderbolts and lightning. Well, I can’t afford a new typewriter if an electric spike fries this one, so it’s time to shut down for the evening, unplug it, turn in and try to sleep. Toodles until tomorrow. Boom again!

To fight insomnia at night and the resulting narcolepsy in the daytime, there’s generic Sominex and generic No-Doz on my shelf. Unable to sleep, I took two of the sleeping pills, or thought I did, but soon as I’d swallowed the aftertaste told me something wasn’t right.

Yeah, I’d grabbed the wrong bottle, and taken two caffeine pills instead of diphenhydramines. Both bottles are the same size, dang it, and almost the same shade of green. And they were side-by-side on the same shelf, because I’m an idiot.

Now it’s 2:00 in the morning and I’ve never been more wide awake. I’ve killed three roaches, read some zines, re-read some zines, and washed the dishes. After typing this I’m going to hunt some more roaches, and tomorrow’s going to be a bad day indeed.

♦ ♦ ♦

Giving up on sleep, I decided to take a walk around the neighborhood in the dark of night. Or as dark as night gets in the city. There are streetlights, after all, and most of the shops leave a light on, or even a sign. And I'm big and male and carrying mace, so I don't much need to worry about being mugged.

During daytime the streets are jammed with cars and trucks and buses, and the sidewalks are crowded with workers and walkers and tourists and bums. In the wee hours the streets are nearly empty, and there's no-one to bump into on the sidewalk. No-one to ask me, “Which way is F.A.O. Schwarz?” while standing directly in front of the doors inscribed “F.A.O. Schwarz.” No-one at the corner pushing heroin or Jesus. No-one at all, except me and a drunk in a doorway.

Everything looks different under moonlight and lamplight. The tiny green leafy things trying desperately to push out from cracks in the concrete have a different, darker, deader color. The big permanent planters on the sidewalk, holding hopeless trees I hope are plastic, look even sadder than in daytime, with streetlights heightening the yellow of hundreds of scattered cigarette butts.

In Union Square the lights are out; walk the walkways at your peril, but I didn’t see any peril so I walked the walkways. Near Maiden Lane, I found a second homeless guy, reading a newspaper under a shop's neon light. He said, “Hello,” and I said, “Hello, neighbor,” because I live two blocks from here so he is my neighbor. But I kept walking.

Everything sounds different at night, and unlike the daytime cacophony, you can separate one sound from the others. You can hear your own footsteps, and someone else’s from around the corner, and someone whistling a block away, and a car door slamming somewhere. You hear traffic, of course, but the sound of a motor approaching and passing and fading away is only occasional, and it’s often the sound of just one car, coming and then going, and then silence until the next.

Things smell different, too, but it’s only the accumulated scent of urine. All the city’s public restrooms are closed, not merely overnight but always, to discourage the bums — and how stupid is that? Lacking any civilized option, the homeless pee on the sidewalk and poop in the bushes. Every morning at daybreak, the first worker at every shop hoses away the pee and the stink, but until then San Francisco smells like what it is — 47 square miles of unflushed toilets.

The electric signs still command when to WALK and DON’T WALK, but screw it, I’m walking here, anywhere I want. I paraded down the middle of Post Street for a block, but politely stepped aside for a truck bringing french rolls for fancy restaurants.

San Francisco is a beautiful city, but it’s prettier without people, I think. Richard Matheson should’ve set I Am Legend here, instead of in ugly old Los Angeles. Nobody would want to be the last soul in L.A., but San Francisco? Yeah, I could live alone here. It’s a city of 750,000, or 4,000,000 if you include the suburbs. And I am alone here. Just not literally.

No birds. No beggars. No traffic. No cops, no lawyers. No open stores or eateries. No hustle-bustle hurry and no place to be, except back in bed, dreaming of sleep.

On the first page of every issue, under the big words Pathetic Life, the subhead says "Diary of a fat slob." I’ve written about being fat, but not much about being a slob, so clear yesterday's dinner and dead roaches off the chair and have a seat.

Cleanliness is not next to godliness. It's next to stupidity, because beyond washing the plates now and then to avoid botulism, cleanliness serves no useful purpose.

Personal hygiene matters ... some. The appearance of personal hygiene matters more, and I do play that game. When I’m at the office or going to the movies, I make myself neat and presentable. My goal is to not be noticed, so I don't want to look or smell like I'm homeless. But c’mon, there’s no need to be fanatical about it.

I shower as often as necessary to smell OK and not feel too sticky. In the summer months, that might be every second or third day. In the winter months, twice a week. Showering more often than that is excessive. What’s the point, really? Who are you trying to impress, with your ‘showering every morning’ like fancy people?

There are only three valid reasons to tidy up:

① Safety — by golly yes, clean up anything that's a safety or health concern to you or those you live with. It's the botulism example, above, or loose knives on a low shelf if you have children, etc. Common sense!

② Appearance — You and your home (if anyone sees it) should be as neat as needed to prevent friends or strangers from calling 9-1-1, or from having any concern about your mental health.

③ You want to — Beyond safety and appearance, "wanting to" is the only valid reason to vacuum the carpet, wash the windows, or take an unnecessary shower.

I don't want to, so I don't.

A half-finished can of soda sits on my window sill. Should it be promptly cleared away so it doesn’t attract bugs and get all moldy? No. It's diet soda — no sugar, and there's nothing in it that'll rot or attract bugs, so I'm leaving that can right where it is. I might drink the rest of it a week from Sunday.

Before leaving home, I do a hand-over-the-mouth bad breath inspection, and if it stinks too strong, I'll brush my teeth. At work I sniff my arm-pits occasionally, and if it's too gawdawful I'll give the pits a quick soap-down in the men’s room, or spread some deodorant.

Here in the hotel, the dishes stay stacked in the sink for a few weeks until I'm in a dish-washing mood. Until then, I’ll wash one plate and one fork when it’s needed for a meal.

It’s the same sink I piss into at night, so you’ll correctly surmise that I’ve urinated on the dishes and silverware, many times. It doesn't matter, long as the dishes are washed before dining.

This room is my little fiefdom, a land where cleanliness is cheerfully forgotten. There are dead gnats on the refrigerator shelves, but they’re not in the milk so there no urgent need to wipe them away. Zines and books get stacked haphazard on top of each other, and I’ll make a slight effort toward organizing the piles only after they’ve toppled. Coat hangers are unnecessary; instead I've driven 27 nails into the wall, and my pants and shirts, underwear and T’s and keys are draped over the nails.

Let's talk about those clothes. I sit in an office chair all day. I’m not an auto mechanic, there’s no grease or grime, so my shirts and pants don’t get stinky. There’s therefore no need to do the laundry often, and I don’t. After wearing clothes, they go back to the nails on the wall, to be worn again in a few days.

When the underwear gets smelly or itchy I spray it with Lysol, or hand wash it in the sink with the dishes. Everything is laundered eventually, but not until the clothes get uncomfortably stiff or stink.

There’s maid service here, which is unusual for a residential hotel. Once a week some lady who speaks no English (or fakes it for me) comes in with stained but clean sheets and towels. She doesn't even put the sheets on, but she takes last week's sheets and towels away. That's all she does — no cleaning or vacuuming, no plastic-wrapped cup at the sink, no mints on my pillow — but knowing she's coming once weekly is motivation for me to pick up enough of the mess that she can get in the door. That's why this room is neater than my rooms anywhere else I’ve lived, especially on Tuesdays.

Back at my previous rez hotel, with no maid and no reason to clear the clutter unless something started to stink, that place got scary messy, even for me. When I moved out of that dump to come to this dump, I had to carry out a dozen Hefty bags full of old newspapers and tin cans and Hostess Ding Dong wrappers and everything else. It was piled taller than me, in the corner where the trash can was buried.

I'm OK co-existing with the roaches and other crawling things, but flying bugs get in my hair and on my nerves, so there’s always a Shell No-Pest Strip dangling from the light fixture. From years of experience, I know what kinds of trash attract bugs, and I’m lackadaisically fastidious about not letting that trash accumulate. Some of the non-moist and non-food trash, though, has been in this room as long as I have.

Some weeks ago, maybe a month, as I was sitting and typing and eating a second lunch, a splash of tuna fell out of my sandwich and landed on the rug. I was in the middle of banging out an enjoyable paragraph, so I resolved to pick it up later, but forgot about it instead. Now the tuna is gone, along with about one square inch of the rug. There’s a hole where the tuna was, and you can see straight through to the floorboards. This building has very industrious roaches.

Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like hovel.

Obviously, hypothetically, if someone came along who made it worthwhile to tidy up, brush my teeth three times a day, and all that tedium, I would cheerfully do it. I'd do the laundry weekly, shower daily, even change my underwear — for her.

For me, though, I ain’t doing diddlysquat. I am wearing yesterbritches and taking the trash out once monthly. It’s only my own damn business how messy me and my mess are, and if you don’t want to see it, that's great, you’re not invited.

♦ ♦ ♦

Beatrice canceled out on the beers. Something about picking up a relative at the airport. I’m a little relieved, to be honest, but we’ll reschedule.

For as long as I’ve been living in downtown San Francisco, there's been a man singing at the corner of Powell & O'Farrell. Almost every day he stands there, belting out old standards like “It Had to Be You” and “Moon River,” with a microphone and instrumental accompaniment (taped). It's pleasant, and I think of him as "the Crooner."

Today, though, instead of crooning, he was preaching about Jesus. He was handing religious tracts to anyone willing to take them, and asking people, “Have you heard the gospel?”

Dude, there is no-one in America who hasn’t heard. The Bible isn’t exactly underground literature.

Hearing music from Grandad's time always added something nice to my walk to work, so this is a double subtraction: We've lost the songs, and instead we get something that makes the world worse — yet another street preacher.

With the Whoremonger at Powell & Market ("American women, stop your whoring ways!"), and Bearded Brimstone at Ellis & Stockton ("Repent, ye sinners, repent!"), and now the Crooner not crooning at Powell & O'Farrell, I can't even walk a block without hearing the gospel.

He had a tin can for donations when he was singing, but this morning he didn't. That means someone is paying the Crooner to pester the pedestrians. It's an annoyance, but I'm trying not to be mad at him. Most of us sell our souls to make a living.

♦ ♦ ♦

After I'd sold mine for eight hours, I went to dinner at the Sincere Cafe, and a triple feature of Arch Hall Jr movies at the Roxie.

Maybe you're thinking, Who the heck is Arch Hall Jr? He was a B-movie star in the early 1960s. I saw him in a movie a while back, and it was strange — both the movie, and Arch Hall Jr. Everything about that movie is gone from my memory, except that Arch Hall Jr was in it, and he was strange. So of course, I had to come to the Roxie tonight.

The Choppers (1961) is a dated drama of teen hoodlums in Nowheresville, a bunch of toothy brats who never go by their first names — everyone’s ‘Cruiser’ or ‘Torch’ or ‘Nails’ or whatever. These tough kids talk like tough kids always talk in the movies, and their big crime is stripping cars for parts to sell to the local junkman. It’s a quaint memento of a time when the police and press cared about such petty crimes. If they ever did?

The movie does answer a question, though — Arch Hall Jr was kinda funny looking and not a very good actor, so what is it that made him a movie star? Arch Hall Sr was the movie’s producer.

Next up, The Sadist (1964), with Arch as the bad kid gone worse, on a maniacal killing spree across the western United States. Sorta like Natural Born Killers, I guess, only singular, not plural. The story begins with three teachers on their way to a game at Dodgers Stadium, and it’s not giving away too much to say they won’t be watching baseball this afternoon.

Arch plays the lunatic, emoting all over the place like a junior James Cagney, and to my surprise, it works. Tension builds to a frenzy, a crowded theater was hushed, and your humble fat slob got so close to the edge of my seat I could hear the springs buckling under my butt.

I therefore withdraw my "not a very good actor" wisecrack. Arch Hall Jr is no Lawrence Olivier, but he's believable as a sadist.

The last and least film of the night was Wild Guitar (1962), a goofy show that maybe lets Arch be Arch. He rides his motorcycle to Hollywood, finds fame and true love within the first ten minutes, and sings and strums his titular wild guitar. It’s like an early Elvis movie, but Arch ain’t Elvis, baby.

I’ve finally finished making the September issue readable, which should not be confused with “worth reading.” Now all that’s left is to print and copy and mail it out.

♦ ♦ ♦

The Navy's Blue Angels have been buzzing the city all day, frightening dogs and children and sane people, what few of us there are. Happy Columbus Day, vrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrooooom!

What do a bunch of testosterone soaked flyboys have to do with Columbus Day anyway? If I remember right, Columbus had three oversized sailboats, not rocket ships, when he dropped anchor someplace that wasn’t at all his destination.

There are people who enjoy seeing these Navy fighters in formation high, high overhead. I might enjoy seeing it myself, but I don’t enjoy hearing it. The mumbling man looked absolutely terrorized in the hall, and I think terrorizing people is part of why they do it. We’re supposed to be afraid, awestruck. I’m guessing they especially love to shake San Francisco because this city is famously liberal, and not as supportive of the military as the military wants us to be. Vrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrooooom again! Thank you sir, may I have another!

And whose damned idea was it to have fighter jets perform stunt flights above the city? There are people here. Quite a lot of us, actually. What happens when a pilot gets the hiccups during one of their intricate formation flights, and his plane’s wings jostle the next jet that's just inches away, and both planes careen into the Transamerica Pyramid, exploding in a ball of smoke and flame and death?

After that, maybe just maybe someone will exercise a smidgen of common sense and figure out that 200 decibel stunt flying ought to not happen above a major metropolitan area. If it belongs anywhere at all, and I'm not sure it does, let ‘em fly over the bay, or over the desert.

Columbus Day isn’t until Monday, which means we gotta endure this eardrum assault for two more days? Jeez, I need more aspirin.

There are many and much better reasons to slash the military budget, so start slashing to stop the bombings and invasions and unnecessary and illegal wars, but please don't stop slashing until the Blue Angels are grounded forever. Dismantle their jets and sell 'em for scrap metal.

♦ ♦ ♦

To escape the noise, I hid inside another psychotronic triple feature at the fabulous Roxie, a tribute to schlock director Jack Hill.

The Big Doll House (1971) is your standard women-in-prison picture, where none of the women are older than their early thirties, the warden is a cruel monstress, and there’s talk of escape. Et cetera. You’ve seen it all before, or at least I have, but here it’s done with a certain pinch of panache and bawdy humor. It’s nothing to nominate for an award, but it’s better than dry toast.

And Mr Hill must’ve had fun with it, because the next year he made it again, this time calling it The Big Bird Cage. My favorite performers from the first movie, Pam Grier and Sid Haig, were invited back and given more prominent roles in the remake, and the guards seem more sadistic, the female prisoners more sex-starved, and the story is juiced up and even more ludicrous the second time around, so Bird Cage is better than Doll House.

Switchblade Sisters (1975) shows similar snarling women, but before they get to prison. These are high school girls, in sort of a sorority auxiliary to their boyfriends’ gang of thugs, and eventually the girls figure out that they’re tougher than the boys. I am woman, hear me roar.

It’s campy and lowbrow and brainless, and all three movies include Hill’s heaping helpings of sex, violence, degradation, and some rape scenes I could've done without, so you have been warned. Actually, I'll admit I'm a little embarrassed that I enjoyed these movies. I don't think I'd watch any of them again, but they're a cultural artifact so I had to see 'em once.

Another day in beautiful downtown Beirut. The jets roar overhead every 3½ minutes. All day. If I’m sorta sane but I want to blow them out of the sky with a heat-seeking missile, I wonder how anyone, let's say, "less sane" is coping with it.

My guess? More fistfights that usual this weekend, more than the ordinary number of wives being beaten, and cops making especially brutal arrests. You can’t antagonize millions of people like this and not know that some of them are going to lose it.

I printed the September issue, with the roar of jets a mile high drowning out the roar of the typewriter a foot from my face.

Walked around Union Square for a while, with my overnight earplugs still in, of course, but I was feeling extra anti-social thanks to the Blue Angels, so I cut the walk short. Came back and ate a fat man’s lunch, four Spam sandwiches, and if four Spam sandwiches couldn’t cheer me up you know I was cranky today.

Tossed some stale bread at birds out my window, which I imagine pisses off the people downstairs, but to hell with ‘em. As the military monsters flew in precision formation through my forehead again, I gave up on getting any letters written, anything accomplished, or having two consecutive rational thoughts. Instead I’m (this'll surprise you) going to the movies.

Problem: There’s nothing much playing that I’m interested in, first run, second, last run, or rep. I settled on Fresh and Mi Vida Loco at Cinema 21, which, by the way, is a terrible name for a theater. Sounds like a porno place, doesn’t it? You'd expect the double feature to be Deep Throat and Deeper, but no, it’s an ordinary theater in the 2100 block of Chestnut Street in the Marina. Get it? 2100 = Cinema 21. A stupid name if you ask me, but so's the Blue Angels. Vrrrrrroooom!

♦ ♦ ♦

Sigh. I should’ve known. Frisco has the the most frequent but least reliable transit, and you can’t get to the Marina on Muni. Not today, anyway. Three #30 buses went past, on schedule but without taking passengers, because the buses were so tightly packed with people, there was no room for more. The driver didn’t even pull over. Me and two strangers waited under Bush on Stockton, stranded. I was the first to give up, because the first show is the only discount matinee, and I’m not intrigued enough by either Fresh and Mi Vida Loco to pay the full-price seven bucks admission. Screw that.

Several years back, some executive in the mayor’s office — maybe the same moron who invited the Blue Angels to ruin the weekend — must’ve commissioned a study to determine which bus routes had an occasional empty seat, and of course, those routes were cut back. Now if it's daylight hours on any of the busy routes, “riding Muni” means standing on Muni, and only if there’s room to squeeze aboard.

I returned to the hotel to seek cover from the bombers, wrote what I just wrote, and checked the movie listings for a second choice. Here we go: A double feature of Harvey Keitel movies brings me back to the Roxie for the third day in a row. And I can take BART instead of Muni, so there'll be a seat.

♦ ♦ ♦

Harvey Keitel is a great American. I don’t know if he’s a good actor, because he always plays the same crusty, tired, miserable douchebag, but speaking as a crusty, tired, miserable douchebag, I like the character he always plays.

Cop Killer (1983) has Keitel as a corrupt police lieutenant (badder than Bad). By day he’s on the NYPD vice squad, and at night he listens to the same song over and over again on his record-player, in a stark, unfurnished flat he shares with another corrupt cop. So he's a crusty, tired, miserable douchebag, and then Johnny Rotten knocks on the door to confess that he’s the serial cop-killer who’s been terrorizing the city. After that, the only question is who’s a more miserable douchebag, Rotten or Keitel?

Fingers (1978) has Keitel playing the piano, when he’s not beating up deadbeats who owe money to his father, a small-time loan shark. He has some painful personal and pecker problems, and carries a cheap boombox everywhere he goes, playing 1950s girl group songs way too loud.

Two solid, early performances from Keitel, and nobody plays Keitel better than Keitel. I'm convinced that all his movies are sequels to each other. Coming soon: Miserable Douchebag, Part 19.

♦ ♦ ♦

By the time the movies let out, the Blue Angels had landed for the day. With a few hours of peace at last, I wrote a letter and went to bed early. I’ve got appointments with the dentist and an eye doctor tomorrow, so I’ll go to work a few hours early to make eight hours.

♦ ♦ ♦

Before I turn in, though — here's a thought that's been percolating since I typed “vice squad” several paragraphs ago:

The concept of a vice squad is bullshit and it shouldn’t exist. They’re the cops who come after you for gambling, prostitution, drug use, or pornography, which in a free society ought to be not a crime, not a crime, not a crime, and not a crime. Vice laws don’t do anything except make people miserable, all for no purpose except the joy of making people miserable. Sorta like the Blue Angels.

Today Darla told me to work on the regular work — though there isn’t much of it, and none of it’s rush-rush — instead of working on a more important project that’s a little removed from my job description, but absolutely must be done by tomorrow.

It’s not smart, but her ignorance isn’t her fault; she’s not the fool who decided she should be the manager of an office where she doesn’t understand the work. But we know what we’re doing, know how to prioritize the tasks, and a boss ought to let us do what we do. She ought to just be there when we need her, not micromanaging things she doesn’t understand.

When I had a chance in the afternoon, I disobeyed and switched back to the urgent project. Sorry, boss, but if the urgent work doesn’t get done, you wouldn’t like the ramifications.

♦ ♦ ♦

The dentist says I have special spit, something in my saliva that impedes the build-up of plaque. So even though I brush only 3-4 times a week, and my teeth haven’t been dentist-cleaned in years, today’s cleaning that was supposed to take an hour took only fifteen minutes. I’ll bet he bills insurance for the full hour, though.

I returned to the store and worked for an hour, before busing out to Kaiser’s optometrist, and what a joke that was. The optometrist was an intern; another optometrist was there “to observe,” and the guy examining me was so nervous it made me nervous. I had to ask a fairly simple question twice, to get an answer that seemed memorized from a textbook and unconcerned about my blurry vision. He told me blandly that I don’t need bifocals, though I have to take off my glasses to see what’s closer than about ten feet away, and put them back on to see farther than that. How is that not someone who needs bifocals?

Yeah, yeah, any rookie needs to be taught on the job, and I don’t seriously oppose the concept of training the new kid. But, you know, they’re my eyes. It would be nice if I could see an eye expert about my eyes, and nicer still if I could see an eye expert clearly instead of blurry.

What keeps me with Kaiser Permanente is that I’m not allowed to leave. Nobody is allowed to take their business elsewhere, except once a year for two weeks, when the company’s health care is declared “open.” Then and only then, workers are allowed to switch, if we wish, from one incompetent, barely functional HMO to another that’s probably just as bad.

Will I switch? Probably not. By the next “open period,” next spring, I'm sure I'll have been laid off, which means I'll have no health care at all. In America, only employees get health coverage; the unemployed are outta luck. The whole system is not really a system at all.

Question: Why can’t America have nationwide, everybody’s-covered health care, like England and Canada and other civilized countries have? Answer: Because that would make sense.

♦ ♦ ♦

I’m delivering the TV to Kallie’s house tomorrow after work, and we’re having dinner, either at her house or at a Chinese place she likes — she hasn’t decided yet, but says it’s her treat either way.

After making those arrangements, a little later in the afternoon, she said something peculiar. We were talking about what we’d done over the weekend, and agreed that we hated the Blue Angels, and then she mentioned that one of the roommates in her shared house had brought home a weekend guest. “I wouldn’t mind the grunting and groaning,” she said, “if it hadn’t been so very long since I’ve gotten any. It’s been two years.”

Based on some workplace seminars I've attended, I believe that’s what’s called an "inappropriate workplace conversation," and definitely more personal that anything we’ve shared in the office until today.

I can top that, though. I’ve gone two years, three years, and five years without. I am not Warren Beatty. And tomorrow I’m having dinner with Kallie, and I’m pretty sure it is not a date.

♦ ♦ ♦

Darla is new at being our boss. She transferred in, and she’s learning how we do the work we do, and she’s not an idiot or anything, but sometimes I can't figure out what she's figuring.

Because of my dentist and eye doctor appointments, I came in hours early this morning. But because of my special super-saliva that made the dentist’s appointment short, I was able to come back and work an hour between my appointments, which should mean I could leave work an hour earlier than usual.

But, no. When I ran it by Darla, she said I had to stay until my normal quitting time, even though the last hour was overtime, even though there wasn’t much work to do, and even though there were other people who could answer the phone, because, “We must maintain standard business hours.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Back to the Roxie after work, fourth night in a row I've been there. They’d know me by name, if I was sociable. I’d buy season tickets if they had ‘em.

It was a Jack Webb double feature. Bet you didn't know that Joe Friday from Dragnet made movies, too.

Appointment with Danger (1950) is a good piece of noir, once you get past the concept of a hard-boiled, tough-talking, no-sense-of-humor scowling steadfast slalwart super-cynical … postal inspector?

I shouldn’t snicker, but postal inspectors are barely cops. They investigate mail fraud. Well, hold your pony express, in this movie a postal inspector is murdered, a nun is the only witness, and another postal inspector (Alan Ladd) is sent to investigate. So I guess postal inspectors investigate mail fraud and the occasional murder of other postal inspectors.

If you can get past the whole ‘postal inspector’ thing, it’s a well-made noir thriller. There’s plenty of clever rapid-fire staccato banter, and the inimitable Mr Webb steals the show in an early supporting role as a bad guy. Also, Webb’s accomplice is Harry Morgan, who later co-starred as Webb’s sidekick in the last several seasons of Dragnet, and it’s strange seeing them together but on the wrong side of the law.

The second feature was The D.I. (1957), directed and produced by Jack Webb, who also stars as a psychotic Marine drill instructor (“D.I.”) who, since it’s a movie made in 1957, isn’t allowed to use foul language as he screams and insults and dehumanizes his platoon.

I’m not a big fan of “so bad it’s good” movies; Plan Nine from Outer Space bored me, and I left early. With films like that, the laughter usually runs out before the second reel. But I have never seen a better-worse movie than The D.I.

It is unintentionally hilarious all the way through. I laughed myself hoarse. There were tears rolling down my cheeks even before the opening credits, as one by one Webb’s raw recruits knock on his office door to receive their morning dose of humiliation. Webb is so unrelentingly serious as he delivers every line with his patented “I’m right and you’re wrong” attitude, it makes this movie madly marvelous. If it had screened more than once tonight, I would’ve stayed and watched it a second time, just to hear whether Webb’s girlfriend actually said “Yes Sir” after a kiss. I think that’s what she said, but hundreds of people laughing drowned out the dialogue sometimes.

The story, if it matters, is about one recruit who’s a slacker, so un-American he tries faking a headache to get a day off from boot camp. Sergent Webb, though, is determined to make him into a man and, more importantly, a Marine.

It’s all so red white & blue you won’t believe it’s black & white. Most of the recruits are played by genuine jarheads, and the auteur Webb isn’t content to simply thank the US Marines for their cooperation in the making of this film; he also thanks them over the closing credits for every battle from Tripoli to Iwo Jima.

If you’re a Marine, hey, I do respect what y’all do, and we need you on that wall — though honestly, we don’t need you on that wall as often as you’re posted to that wall. But the patriotic fervor in this movie is just nuts. It’s uproarious, but also unsettling to think that not so long ago, a film like this was taken seriously by the audience.

What I wouldn’t give for just one good night’s sleep a week. Even one a month.

Last night I was up too late, and this morning I was awakened by loud music from someone’s open window across the alleyway. Not angry rap or industrial rock like you usually hear from boombox bozos, no, it was the sound of Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky and the classics, but a little too loud. The only thing missing was Mr French in his tuxedo saying, “You can’t buy this collection in any store.”

♦ ♦ ♦

It was a boring day at the office.

♦ ♦ ♦

After work, Kallie and I took the J train to her house, and I said goodbye to my old TV and plugged it in and toggled the antenna, and now it’s her TV. Kallie no doubt knows how to plug in a television and putz with the antenna, but it's something society expects the man to do, and Kallie asked me, so I did it.

Then we went to dinner at the Happy Palace on Monterrey Blvd, Kallie’s favorite Chinese restaurant, and I can taste why. She had salt & pepper baked squid, and I had oysters on the shell in a black bean sauce — an exotic meal, by my standards. My idea of seafood is a tuna sandwich. Kallie paid, I tipped, the oysters were scrumptious, and I ate some of Kallie’s squid, too. Happy Palace is swanky (cloth napkins!) and pricier than the Sincere Cafe, but it was swell, and I’ll return if I’m in the neighborhood again.

And I might be in the neighborhood again, maybe even with Kallie. The conversation came easy all night, which wasn’t a surprise. Heck, I hadn’t even been very nervous at work before we left. We like each other, so we’re past that phase already.

After dinner, we walked back to Kallie’s house and had a singalong at the piano, which sounds very Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland, but it was fun. Kallie is soft-spoken, which, combined with my growing deafness, means I’m often saying, “Huh?” When she sings, though, it’s loud and clear, and she plays a powerful piano too. She played and sang four songs she’d written, quite pleasant tunes to my uncivilized ear, with poignant lyrics, too.

Soon as she started playing the piano, her flatmate from across the hall came out and started singing with us. The flatmate, Janey or Jilly or something like that, is the effervescent double-bubbly sort, someone who’d get kicked out of Up With People for excessive cheeriness. I disliked her instantly, and if she lived across my hall I'd hate her.

Then a stack of old sheet music emerged from somewhere, and Kallie played the piano while all three of us sang songs by the Beatles, the Monkees, Depeche Mode, and Pink Floyd. Then suddenly it was almost 11:00 on a work night, so I BARTed home.

My only maybe-misstep was during a lull in the singalong, when Janey/Jilly/Judy/Jodie asked me if I played any musical instruments. I said, “Yeah, if I have beans for supper I can fart the theme from Oklahoma.” Kallie laughed, and her friend thought it was just sick, which was the best possible response I’d wanted from both of them. Her flatmate can bite me anyway, and chip a tooth. She’s way too Meg Ryan, and anyone who finds fart jokes offensive has their chain pulled too tight.

Kallie cracked better jokes than mine, and she was smart and seems well-informed. She’s enough like me that we could talk about more than the office, and enough _un_like me to be interesting to listen to. All three of us shared a few puffs, and I wouldn’t mind hanging out with Kallie again.

Twice I had a fleeting urge to kiss her, but that would’ve ruined the evening, and besides, I’m more comfortable doing the platonic thing. This may have been the first evening I’ve ever spent mostly alone with an attractive woman without plotting my move to the next step. There’s not a next step here, and that’s OK.

One minor red flag: Kallie has a degree in parapsychology, runs a sideline business as a hypnotherapist, and she told me about some of her past lives. I’ll have to go to the library and look up parapsychology — it’s not in my dictionary, but my dictionary is small to match my vocabulary. If it means what I think it means, I don’t think it’s a real thing, and I didn’t know you could earn a degree in it. Hypnosis is real, of course, but past lives is dried horse ploppings.

Kallie is easygoing in her spirituality, though, not loopy about it like some people. When I said I was surprised to hear it, she said she keeps her spiritual side secret at work, and I can understand that. I keep everything about myself a secret at work. From experience I know that too many people judge even the slightest weirdness too harshly, and I’m weird … and yet, here I sit, maybe judging Kallie’s weirdness a little too harshly.

She’s good people, and the whole evening was wholesome. Despite my recent lack-of-sleep, I didn't yawn much, and except for the doobie, everyone was so well-behaved my Mom and Jesus would've been proud.

I hadn’t known that Kallie is creative, writing those songs that didn’t make me cringe. Being creative is important; it’s one of the few things separating humans from the other apes. Creating something that’s good is almost too much to hope for, but Kallie’s accomplished that. I wondered for a moment whether I’d have the courage to let her see anything I’d written, but of course I wouldn’t.

Something is up at home. There's a message from Mom, saying, “Please call me.” No details, which is ominous. She’s usually quite chatty on my machine, same as in real life. Mom could go on for five minutes about how funny Ziggy was in this morning's paper.

Like the good boy I’m not, I called — several times, but there was no answer. Her machine is switched off, and that’s a bad sign, too. Mom is a people person, she loves hearing from people, so her answering machine is always on.

Most likely someone’s dead, and she doesn’t want to break bad news without being able to hear me gasp long-distance.

So that was the backdrop to my day. Call Mom, worry, wait, call her again, worry, wait, again, again. Whatever else I was doing, Mom’s message was on my mind.

Yesterday, not hearing from the family, was such a pleasant day. Today, a brief message from Mom made my spirits dive like a DC-10.

If I was a better man I wouldn't mention this, but — I don't have a phone, only an automated messaging system. And I can't call long-distance from work. Every time I call again, it's five minutes away from my desk, to ride an elevator down to the basement of the store, and put coins into one of the four phone booths between the closeout sales and the post office. Obviously, the hassle of making a phone call is not as important as someone probably being dead, but it's a pain in the butt.

Mom, if you have bad news, please leave it on my machine, or leave it on your machine, or be there to answer the phone when I call, or don’t call at all and just mail me a post card. Whoever’s dead, I’ve worried enough, and the dead will still be dead whether I find out sooner or find out later.

♦ ♦ ♦

Workplace stupidity continues. This story is long and complicated, and I’m not sure I can make it interesting, so feel free to skip ahead. It’s your three dollars, after all.

There are four people involved, plus me, of course:

• Marcia, the smart co-worker who’s quitting
• Jennifer, the dumb co-worker who’s our team ‘lead’
• Darla, my boss, who’s new at being my boss and still learning what we do
• Babs, Darla’s boss, a strange and snooty executive who speaks with a slight (but fake) British accent, and whose real name is something like ‘Barbara Smyth-Worthington’

So. Babs sent an e-mail to the computer department, CC’ing me, asking that my access to higher-level programs be increased to match Marcia’s, and misspelling my last name. This was a surprise. Nobody has talked to me about this added access or why I’d need it, and I’m also surprised that Babs knows who I am.

So I e-replied, CC’ing everyone, “If I’m supposed to know what Marcia knows and do what Marcia does, the training had better start soon.” Her last day is Friday.

Babs didn’t answer, but Darla did. “We have the highest confidence in your abilities.” Uh, no you don’t, and also, that’s not the point.

So I went to Darla to ask what’s what about all this, and she says, yeah, they’re planning to dump some extra responsibility on me. Do I get a promotion? Nope. Do I get a raise? Nope. Why not give this extra work to Jennifer, who is, after all, paid extra to be our ‘group lead’? “No, we think Jennifer has her hands full already.”

I don’t care about a raise or promotion; I’m lucky they haven't laid me off, and adding some extra responsibility would make my job more secure, so, OK. And I don’t care that Jennifer outranks me and gets paid more but does less and can't reliably answer any questions; all of us are accustomed to basically ignoring Jenn anyway.

No, here’s the part that’s stupid: These new Marcia-things that I’m supposed to do after she’s gone? Darla and Babs have told Marcia not to show me how to do these things, unless they’re both there to learn it too.

Uh, it's Wednesday. Marcia is gone on Friday. I don’t know any of these fancy things she knows. And I’m not allowed to learn, unless all four of us are in the same room?

I can respect Babs and Darla for at least knowing how much they don’t know, and wanting to sit in on my sessions with Marcia. But Babs is an “assistant vice president” and Darla has meetings all day, every day. It's unlikely they're going to clear their busy-with-bullshit schedules, and if they only come up with an hour or two that might not be enough — whatever Marcia does, I've seen it from a distance and it's complicated crap, and I am not a quick learner.

My e-mail to Babs and Darla: “If you both both want to be there, super, but please reserve a large chunk of time. I’ll need at least several hours with Marcia, or I simply won’t be able to learn this stuff.”

I sent that message a little before 10:00 this morning. No response, all day, so now there's only Thursday and Friday for me to learn to be Marcia.

♦ ♦ ♦

And here’s another piece of work stupidity, but this one’s shorter and not as complicated. One of the many, many junior executives who float around the building asked Kallie to input some new data on a Lotus spreadsheet.

We’ve all seen this spreadsheet, and worked off it, but this was the first time any of us have been asked to make changes to it. It is ugly, with columns much wider than they need to be, and tiny text that sprawls wider than the screen.

While Kallie was inputting the data, she also de-uglified the spreadsheet — narrowed the columns, made the text bigger, so you could read the data and grasp it with a glance. She showed it to me, and I thought it was great. She showed it to the junior executive, and she was scolded, and told to restore the spreadsheet’s old, ugly formatting.

See, improving anything is against company policy.

♦ ♦ ♦

After work, I went home and ate dinner, then came back to the office and finished printing the September issue of the zine. Mom’s message is still on my mind, but having called six times already I’m stubbornly refusing to call again … until tomorrow, at least. “Please call me” has been screwing with my head all day, though, and making me seriously blue.

Even now, re-reading pieces of September while prepping envelopes, I wonder if this zine is worthless piffle. It’s not as good as the August issue, which wasn’t that good anyway.

It’s an odd psychosis, the way my mother messes with my mind.

Marcia’s last day is tomorrow. I’m supposed to learn what she knows, but they have to be there too, both of them. That's the Babs-and-Darla-Edict.

So all four of us were scheduled for an hour together at 9AM. An hour is nowhere near enough time, but we didn't even have that — something came up, and Babs couldn’t be there, so this morning’s class was canceled.

Again, Marcia’s last day is tomorrow. I'm supposed to learn everything she knows, by tomorrow, and we haven't started.

♦ ♦ ♦

I rode the elevator down to the basement to call Mom again, but all four booths were in use so I rode back up to the 8th floor.

Tried again half an hour later, and there was a phone booth available, and for a handful of quarters I called again, and got through to Mom's answering machine. I left a message, so I've done what I was supposed to do. Now it’s Mom's turn to call me.

♦ ♦ ♦

In the early afternoon, we got an e-mail from Babs, announcing that she was leaving early for the day to go home and take care of her sick daughter. If a worker did that, of course, it would be half a day without pay, but management has different rules.

By the Babs-and-Darla-Edict, that means no training with Marcia today — but hooray, a few minutes later Babs sent a second e-mail, saying it would be OK if Marcia trained me today, as long as Darla was there. So Darla scheduled an hour, and the three of us met for a crash course. Or a crash and burn course.

Because Darla was there, and Darla doesn’t really know the basics of what we do, Marcia had to explain things more slowly. She covered a few tidbits of the Marcia-magic stuff, but Darla’s questions slowed everything, and when the hour was over, Darla asked me how much more time I’d need.

“Why are you asking me?” I asked, which was too blunt, but — hello? I don’t know what I don’t know. Marcia knows what I don’t know. Ask Marcia.

Marcia said, “At the pace we’re going, we’ll need four more hours, maybe six.”

Darla nodded and said thanks, and I said, "I'm available right now, can we keep going?"

Darla, though, had another meeting, and as she walked away, she reminded us, "Please don't discuss this unless I'm present."

After she was gone I said to Marcia, “We’re screwed, aren’t we?”

“Well,” she said, “I’ll show you as much as they’ll let me show you,” and she made a shrug face and walked back to her desk, and I walked back to mine.

Despite working with Marcia for a few years, I don’t know her very well, but I think she's done giving a damn. That's perfectly understandable, of course.

♦ ♦ ♦

I checked my messages after work, and there was still no word from Mom. I refuse to worry any more, and anyway, it’s Roxie noir night.

The Missing Juror (1944) is a waste of film, not bad enough to be enjoyable as camp and nowhere near good enough to call it entertainment. I wants to be a mystery, but the killer’s identity is obvious at the start, and as the story trudges on there’s never an unexpected moment in the script. I only endured it to get to the second feature.

Black Angel (1946) is by Cornell Woolrich, the master noir novelist whose name is attached to some of the genre’s best stories, and this is one of them.

A loyal, loving woman stands by her man even as he’s convicted of murdering his mistress, and as the day of his execution approaches she sets out to prove her hubby innocent.

There's cynical dialogue, an alcoholic songwriter, unexpected plot twists, Peter Lorre hamming it up, soaring cinematography, an eerie performance by the young Broderick Crawford in a supporting role, and a satisfying conclusion. It was worth the price of admission, and also worth enduring the first feature.

♦ ♦ ♦

I checked my messages again at the phone booth near the rez hotel. No messages from Mom, or anyone else. Should I say again that I'm done worrying? I've said that already ... but obviously I'm not.

Cheeseburgers in my dreams, and double cheeseburgers, and double bacon cheeseburgers … and I woke up on a pillow wet with drool. There was nothing in the dream but cheeseburgers — no people, no plot, not even a side of fries — just cheeseburgers. Juicy, charbroiled, sizzling cheeseburgers for me, but none for you, thanks.

I switched to a casual-vegetarian diet a few weeks ago. Meat is still allowed, but usually avoided, and I haven’t had much or maybe any. Hadn’t thought I was missing meat, but I guess I’m still the carnivore.

Today’s Friday, and I’ll be the opposite of Catholic — I’m eating meat, and lots of it, starting with fried Spam for breakfast.

♦ ♦ ♦

Babs was in her office today, and Darla was in hers, but neither of them wanted to hear anything about the duties I’m supposed to take over from Marcia. Important duties, I've been told, but I’m not allowed to learn it unless Babs and Darla are there, learning with me.

I sent an email at 9AM, to Babs and Darla and Marcia: “It’s Marcia’s last day. I’m supposed to take over her duties, but I haven’t been trained. This could potentially be a problem.” When no-one answered after half an hour, the zen washed over me and brought peace within. I am not going to be the only person who gives a damn, when people making triple my wages don’t.

♦ ♦ ♦

For Marcia’s last day, everyone in the office marched several blocks to Chevy’s. That’s a chain of quasi-upscale Mexican restaurants owned by Pepsi, the noted experts on Mexican cuisine. Pepsi also owns Taco Bell, and it’s the same food but priced higher. I’d never been to Chevy’s before, and can’t think of any reason to go there again, but we were paying our last respects to Marcia so there we were.

There were thirty of us talking too loud at six tables that had been dragged together. Everyone was eating so-so food and trying their darnedest to find something sociable to say to the idiots within earshot, when they weren’t badmouthing the other idiots who were farther down the tables.

Babs was there. Darla was there. They seemed to be avoiding me, or maybe I was avoiding them. It's hard to tell, but there was definitely avoidance.

Lunch with co-workers could've been awful, but thanks to Kallie, it wasn't that bad. She'd taken the day off to “get ready” for a concert she’s going to tonight (what the hell is Nine Inch Nails?), but she came in for Marcia's big going-away shindig. If not for Kallie, I would’ve been stuck between two people — pick almost any two — I don’t particularly like, and might have forgotten which idiots were which and badmouthed the senior executive across the table.

It’s a work event, so you’d expect the company to pay, but hah, not this company. One of the executives said she’d put it on her expense account, but when someone said “Thank you!” she explained, she meant she’d put her share of the tab on account, not the whole tab. Everything was divided unfairly — grand total + tip + Marcia’s lunch ÷ 30, the number of people present — so despite ordering the cheapest taco salad on the menu and a glass of water, my ‘share’ of the bill was almost $13.

Last time we had one of these office events, the same thing happened, so I should’ve known. I’ll remember it next time, though, and either let them go to lunch without me, or stuff my fat face.

♦ ♦ ♦

After lunch ... still no reply from Babs or Darla or Marcia.

And now, two hours later, Marcia is gone forever in an hour and a half. I chuckled under my breath and returned to my work.

There’s a tendency, I think, to assume that responsibility goes to responsible people, and people in authority must know what they’re doing. The evidence suggests that’s a misnomer — not just at work, but in Congress, in a hospital, in a church, everywhere — the people in charge tend to be idiots, or crooks.

Well, I’ll say this for Babs and Darla: They’re not crooks.

Marcia, though, is that rarity — a responsible adult. At about 3:45 she came to my desk, and handed me twenty photocopied pages, stapled, all filled with her tidy handwriting.

“These are my notes,” she said, “and I’ve added some notes to my notes. It’s all the things I do, in detail, and I think you’ll be able to figure it out.”

“Thank you,” I said, surprised. I flipped through a few pages — short, legible 1-2-3 lists, with some red-ink writing she’d added after photocopying. I asked, “Do Darla and Babs have a copy of this?”

“Nnnnope,” she said, and smiled.

“Do they know that I have your notes?”

“Nnnnope,” she said again. “If you have any questions, just ask, any time until 5:00.”

I said thank you again, then ignored my ordinary work and skimmed the notes. Everything’s there, I think. The size of the list is daunting, but all the individual items seem to make sense, and what she’s added for me seems very helpful.

Here’s one: “This query is run every Monday PM, put the printout in Mike’s in-box,” with instructions on how to run the query. It's about fifty words in Basic, and Darla added the note, “If it doesn’t work you made a typo, try again.” I tried that particular query, and it worked, after fixing two typos I'd made, so yeah, I think I can do all these things.

I’m not sure I will, though.

My desk has no drawers that lock, so I put Marcia’s notes in one of the filing cabinets, in a folder with some real estate documents that have nothing to do with our department’s work. Nobody but me will know it's there.

A few minutes before 5:00, I said goodbye and “Thank you again” to Marcia. I’m not a wordy guy in person, and in the couple of years we’ve worked together, me and Marcia said maybe fifty words to each other. I wasn’t even sure I liked her, until this afternoon.

♦ ♦ ♦

Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty I’m free at last. That’s the feel of riding the elevator down and out of the office on any Friday afternoon.

Tonight I celebrated by taking the L train to the zoo. Standing room only, of course, because that's what you get on Muni. Didn’t actually go into the zoo — all the caged animals are too depressing — but I walked around across the street, and had three chili dogs at the Doggie Diner.

Then I took the next L downtown again, enjoying the city scenery out the window. There were lots of seats on the inbound ride, since it’s rush hour but I was rushing to and everyone else was rushing away.

♦ ♦ ♦

Mom left another message on my machine, so I called back and left another message on her machine, but not as nice this time. “You asked me to call you, but didn’t say why. I called, and I’ve called several times, and you call me back and just say ‘Please call me’ again. it’s $1.80 in coins every time, so I’m not calling again unless you call and tell me why I’m calling, not just ‘Please call me’.”

♦ ♦ ♦

At home, I topped off dinner with vanilla ice cream over Spam. You're thinking that sounds disgusting, right? Well, you're right. It was disgusting, but I'd had meat for all three meals and I wanted meat for dessert, and I'll try almost anything once.

Man, this is the life. Saturday alone. I do not understand people who’d prefer to spend their Saturday with … people.

Sure, there were people in the background today, on Haight Street and at the movie theater. Thousands of 'em, probably, but they weren’t people I needed to talk to, or worse, listen to.

Started the day by lazing in bed all morning, reading zines and eating beans. Refried beans, from a can. Two cans, actually. Went for the mail at noonish, then came home and lazed in bed most of the afternoon, reading more zines and eating a big bowl of generic macaroni & cheese. Then another.

Took a bus to the Haight, walked around the neighborhood, loitered and bought a few zines at Bound Together Books, and saw Easy Rider (1969) at the Red Victorian. It’s one of those movies I’ve always heard about but never seen, supposedly a classic, but I’ll decide for myself, thanks.

It’s the story of two drifters/stoners riding their motorcycles from L.A. to New Orleans, and I’ve decided it’s a classic. It is certainly not the feel good movie of the ‘60s, but there’s rock’n’roll, an ambiance of freedom and stick-it-to-the-man, and a line that seems truer today than it could have been 25 years ago: “It’s hard to be free when you’re bought and sold in the marketplace.” Right on, and don’t bogart that joint.

I was barely there in the '60s (just a kid), so I can’t say whether it’s honest or just earnest about the era, but it’s honest about the drugs. There's a hilariously cosmic conversation under reefer magic, and an LSD sequence that’s realistic, for a medium limited to only visuals and sound.

The protagonists, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, buy and sell and snort cocaine in the opening scene, and it occurs to me that I’ve never seen that in any other movie. Maybe the Hays Code is over, but there are still “movie rules” that are almost never broken, and one of the rules is that if anyone in a movie is involved with hard drugs, it defines that character as the bad guy.

♦ ♦ ♦

On the ride home, three pretty girls got on the bus at Masonic. They were maybe 15 years old and maybe not even that, and a man on the bus who was older than all three of them combined started his spiel … “You girls from out of town?” … “What’s your name?” … “Do you want to go to a party?” … “Could I buy you a drink some time?” …

Half of me wanted to tell him to shut the hell up, and the math is accurate — I'm only half a man. Before I could muster the courage, someone else yelled at Mr Pick-Up Line, and he mellowed. I’m sure the girls have heard it a thousand times before, in worse versions than that guy’s putrid patter. And they’ll hear it again tomorrow.

Out in public, all I want to do is blend into the crowd and mind my own damned business without being bothered. The ability to do my thing is what keeps me borderline sane. That's what freedom is.

A pretty woman isn’t allowed that freedom, the ability to come and go as she pleases. She can’t simply be in any public place without being pestered by men who want to ‘talk’ but really, of course, want to fuck.

Possibly, possibly, the attention might be flattering once in a while, but for a woman who’s cursed with a clear complexion or breasts (or heaven forbid, both), it never ends. Everywhere she goes, she’s interrupted by another man with a glib line, or louts and losers who leer or whistle, and of course, she always needs to be on the watch for men who’d take what they want.

If I believed in God I would whisper a prayer of thanks that I’m not an attractive woman. If I couldn’t walk the streets or browse in a bookstore without strangers trying to sweet talk me everywhere, I’d become Ms 45.

Fire engines have been roaring all night, the louder the better. The roar helps scoot cars out of the way, so it's a good roar and I wouldn't complain, except holy crap. It's like the 1906 quake happened an hour ago. Is the whole city ablaze? Fire trucks have shaken my street seven times this morning and the sun isn’t even up yet.

Uh-oh, he’s ranting.

If the window was closed I could’ve slept all night, but the window must never be closed. That’s one of the annoying idiosyncrasies of this tiny room in the rez hotel. It’s an old building, with water radiators for heat, and I always have my radiator off because who needs heat? The hot-water pipes for all the building’s radiators are in one of my walls, and you’d be uncomfortable leaning on that wall. It's literally warm to the touch, and it keeps the room hot enough to roast this turkey — me — when the window isn’t open, so the window is almost always open. Even when the Blue Angels made me close the window last weekend, it could only stay closed for half an hour before the room became unbearably hot and humid. If I'd closed the window this morning to blot out the fire trucks, I still couldn’t have slept — the room would be a sweaty steambath.

Still, this rez hotel is better than my previous rez hotel, where the window had been painted shut in the 1930s and wouldn’t budge, and ugly crack whores rented rooms by the hour, and you’d see used hypodermics floating in the communal john, and the rats chewed into any food that wasn’t canned, and insane tenants screamed at imaginary enemies, and the landlord spoke maybe ten words of English and four of them were “don’t give a damn.” One day maybe I’ll tell you about that place.

♦ ♦ ♦

a while back I read a good review of a zine called chaos, so i sent pathetic life in trade for a sample copy. when chaos came, i liked it. it was a nice stream-of-consciousness read with playful punctuation — no capital letters allowed. well-written, though, so i sent the next two issues of my zine to keep the trade going.

got another chaos a few days a

go, and it baffled me when i o

pened it, so i put the zine as

ide and waited for a better mo

od. this morning, in the oppos

ite of a better mood, i sprawl

ed out on the bed and tried re

ading it again, and it’s frust

rating. words have been sliced

open at the end of every line,

an experiment i guess, sacrifi

cing the language for the layo

ut. it’s chaotic on purpose to

match the title. i'm giving yo

u one paragraph as a taste, bu

t if you could read a whole zi

ne like this you have more pat

ience than i.

Of course, zines are often full of typos, and that’s part of the charm. There will doubtless be several typos in this issue of Pathetic Life, but they’re not on purpose. Doing a whole zine of intentionally broken words, so reading it requires decoding it, well, that’s just annoying.

Uh-oh, he’s ranting again.

I write this pathetic zine to communicate with others about whatever’s on my mind, which often isn’t much, but at least I'm trying. It wouldn’t occur to me to obfuscate the message on purpose, and then charge you $3 for the obfuscation.

That's what Joel Epanouri, the man behind Chaos zine, is doing, and what's most annoying is that Joel is a good writer. He's screwing with his writing on purpose, and I just don't get it.

Have fun doing whatever you’re doing, Joel, and please drop me a note when the experiment is over. Until then, though, we’re finished trading.

♦ ♦ ♦

I checked my messages, and Mom called again, and simply said, “Please call me.”

My reply would be “Please bite me,” if I was tough enough to say that to my mother. Whatever’s going on, whoever’s dead or has cancer and Mom wants to tell me about it, frickin’ tell me about it. I don’t have a phone, but I have a phone number, you can call any time day or night and it’ll take a message of unlimited length. Talk your heart out, Mom.

But nope. She calls and calls and all she says is, “Please call me.” And when I call her, the phone rings and rings, and if I'm lucky and the answering machine is on I can say again, “I called.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Like Julia Child no doubt harbors a secret hankering for TV dinners, I crave a certain genre of junk movies — action movies, especially with Arnold Schwarzenegger. A good action movie shouldn’t be taken seriously, and Arnold really can’t be taken seriously, so they’re two great tastes that taste great together.

Trotted two blocks to the St Francis for True Lies, but it was a double feature so first I sat through Timecop, with Jean-Claude Van Damme. He’s a discount Schwarzenegger. I like science fiction and the movie is about time travel so I thought I’d like it, but it was only so-so.

First off, Mia Sara is in it — from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — but she's barely in it, and she deserves better than to play The Woman Who Dies and sets the story in motion.

And I might be wrong, but wasn’t Van Damme actually a kick-boxing star before he became a movie star? If so, why are the fight scenes so uninteresting here? They're mostly quick cuts stitched together by the film’s editors, like this:

Swinging fist, cut.

Falling man, cut.

Bloodied lip with angry sneer, cut.

Another swinging fist, cut.

Repeat repeat repeat, until the fight is over.

It’s all transparently phony. Go see a Jackie Chan movie and learn what a long shot can accomplish.

The director, Peter Hyams, has been a disappointment since Capricorn One, a nifty little anti-sci-fi flick from fifteen years ago that remains the high point of his career.

James Cameron, on the other hand, knows how to make a movie. The Abyss is the only flick he’s made that left me cold, and he repaired the damage with his re-released director’s cut of The Abyss last year, which was much, much better. And he made True Lies.

True Lies is no masterpiece, but it’s better than Jean-Claude Van Damme. Essentially a domestic comedy inflated to Schwarzenegger size, it’s completely preposterous — something about a rogue American spy with an Austrian accent who appropriates or hijacks any and every espionage tool there is, to keep his philandering wife faithful and his annoying daughter virginal.

It’s all indicative of someone’s screwed-up ideas of what makes a man a man, but that’s an argument for someone who gives a shit. Me, I enjoy mindless action movies, and True Lies was especially mindless, and I enjoyed it.

There were several orders last time I visited the maildrop, so I went to work early, and ran twenty more copies of the September issue. Then I put the piping-hot zines in my backpack, and napped in what used to be the break room, until it was time to punch in.

The break room … Let me tell you about what used to be the break room.

When I started working at this department store I'll never name, the break room was a quiet alcove off the employees’ cafeteria. It was nothing fancy, but it was a quiet retreat from the office, with an easy chair, a comfy couch that had been there probably longer than I’ve been alive, a candy machine, a table, and a few more mismatched chairs. There was also a TV, but you could turn it off if you needed a few minutes of sanity.

Then the company — while in bankruptcy, remember — spent over $300,000 remodeling the cafeteria and break room. The comfortable chairs and couch were replaced by metal seats and benches, without a stitch of padding. I'm a fat guy and those metal chairs hurt my butt; they must have been worse for skinny people. The TV multiplied itself like loaves and fishes at the Sermon on the Mount — big screens were hung near the ceiling all over the cafeteria and break room, so always it’s Oprah or a soap opera, and not in a corner for those who are interested, but everywhere — and mounted higher than any human can reach, to change the channel or turn it off.

About a year after the remodeling, when almost everyone had stopped using the now-unbearable break room, it became another executive meeting room. So now there’s no break room. Everyone takes their breaks in the cafeteria, or at their desks, or in the empty offices of the many, many workers who’ve been laid off. I spend most of my breaks on the toilet in the men’s room, where you can hear yourself poop but you can also hear yourself think.

They don’t lock the former break room overnight, so that’s where I napped, with no TV, with the door closed, tilted back in an overstuffed leather recliner that usually holds an executive's ass and probably cost $1,000.

♦ ♦ ♦

My first post-Marcia Monday at the store was odd. There were plenty of new things to do, maybe more than I can keep up with — my regular work, plus all the things Marcia used to do.

Or actually, about half the things Marcia used to do. I’ve trimmed the list substantially, beginning by eliminating all the computer-queries she was running for junior executives. They're adults, they have fingers, so they can run their own queries. Or ask me and I’ll run them for them, but I’m not going to be an administrative assistant for every junior exec in the building unless someone at least asks.

I'm also not checking the status of a dozen things Marcia checked every day. Just, no. Her list includes instructions on what to do if the status isn't what it's supposed to be, and OK, I'll fix things if the status is "red." But I'm not spending half an hour every morning clicking through eleven different software systems just to ensure everything is status "green," not when the boss doesn't even know I'm checking. Screw that. I have real work to do, work my boss expects me to do.

Another of my Marcia duties is that every morning, I’m supposed to log the volume of incoming work in about 222 different categories, using the company’s elaborate waste-of-time keep-track-of-everything filing system. I couldn’t do it this morning, though, because it’s a physical ledger book, there's only one copy, and Darla had it propped open on her desk. I asked for the book so I could make the morning entries, and she scowled at me like the insignificant interruption I am, so when she looks at the book tomorrow, today’s entries will be blank.

In the afternoon, I flagged Darla down to ask a management question: I’d made a short list of what seems to be my major new responsibilities, and asked her to help me prioritize. “When I’m swamped like today, which of these are the most important?”

She looked at the list, then at me, then looked again at the list, and said, “They’re all important,” and she walked away. Got it, thanks. I will do whatever I have time to do, and the rest won’t get done.

♦ ♦ ♦

Mom called again, and left the same message for the fourth time on my machine: “Please call me.” I didn’t call her.

♦ ♦ ♦

The fleet of fire trucks that woke me early Sunday morning? Seems they were on their way to an old building a block away from my office. I happened to walk by there on my lunch today, and there’d always been a little drug store on the verge of bankruptcy that never had what I needed, but now that store is boarded up. Black char from the flames climb up from all the first and second floor windows.

The newspaper says nobody died, nobody was injured. I’ll bet that crappy little shop was insured for more than it was worth. Where was its proprietor at about 3:30 yesterday morning?

Living so close to work means there’s almost no commute time. I take the elevator down from my room at the rez hotel, walk half a block and cross the street, walk another half-block, and take the elevator up to my office above the store. Sure beats idling in traffic.

As I type this, underwear and socks are all I’m wearing, and I’m supposed to be at my desk in 14 minutes. Haven’t made my PBJ sandwiches yet, but even if the elevators are running slow, I’ll be at work a few minutes early.

♦ ♦ ♦

My boss Darla was taken aback when I said, “Good morning, Darla,” since Darla is not her name. What I’ve written about work would get me fired, and what I’ve written about family could be uncomfortable if they ever see it and I ever see them, so everyone gets new names when they’re mentioned in the zine. And sometimes, like this morning, it’s more than my feeble mind can keep track of.

Reading through the September issue, I noticed that Kallie was both Kallie and Kellie, which I've now corrected. Her actual name is something else entirely.

♦ ♦ ♦

I’ve been employed by this company for one year today. Prior to that, I did the same work at the same desk, but I was a temp. Temps don’t get vacation, but workers do, and I've earned one week’s vacation, with pay, long as I take it by the end of the year.

There’s only one place I can afford to go on vacation, and that’s the movies, so it doesn’t matter at all what week I’m off work. Just being off work will be vacation enough. I told Darla to pick a week, any week.

Apparently, that's not the way people schedule their vacations. She was befuddled, but I insisted I didn’t care which week I had off, so she gave me November 28 - December 2. Can’t wait to check the theater calendars and see what movies I’ll be seeing.

♦ ♦ ♦

Society news: Beatrice e-mailed that she has no social life, so she’s available for our long-promised “beer or two” almost any night after work. I replied that I have no social life either, so now we both have a social life: Beers on Thursday.

Also, I gave Kallie the asking price for a small supply of green. She says she’ll buy it over the weekend, and have it for me Monday next.

Actually, scoring weed has been a problem since I moved to San Francisco. Drugs is winning the War on Drugs, obviously, but you have to know someone to get a supply, and it’s hard to know someone when you don’t know anyone.

One shitty day in high school, I was taunted for having dried white scuz around my neck. That morning I hadn’t quite rinsed all the shampoo out of my hair, so the kids called me cum-neck, and I ran to the boys’ room and got my shirt all wet rinsing the back of my head.

Ever since, it’s been a compulsion to triple-rinse my hair when I shower. I spend more shower-time rinsing than shampooing. Other than that phobia, though, I don’t much care about my appearance.

Why should I care? I look like what I am — a fat guy with a crew-cut and a scraggly beard, wearing Salvation Army clothes and ratty shoes with holes at the bottom. A stylish haircut won’t get me a better job or get me laid. There’s no dried white scuz around my neck, and that's my maximum effort in personal grooming.

I don't even comb my hair. I have a crew-cut. When it looks like it needs to be combed, I plug in the electric clippers and shorten the crew-cut.

Why am I telling you this? Because I have nothing to tell you about Wednesday, October 19, 1994. Very nearly nothing happened. The above is filler. The below is filler. The whole zine is filler, ain’t it? Send $3 for the next filler-filled issue!

♦ ♦ ♦

Darla pulled Kallie and I aside this afternoon, told us her father’s had a stroke, and asked us to keep things running smoothly while she’s gone. No telling how long she'll be gone, she said. Might be just today. Might be a week. Of course, I hope her father recovers, and I clumsily said something like that because even a schlump like me knows that's what you're supposed to say.

Also, yeah, we’ll keep things running smoothly. That’s what we do. Does Darla imagine that she’s the one keeping things running smoothly?

♦ ♦ ♦

Mom called again, said “Please call me” and hung up. I called her back, and told her answering machine — again — that I can’t afford to keep calling if we’re not connecting. $1.40 every day adds up. “Please, whatever you want to tell me, tell my machine. Me and my machine have no secrets.”

Cripes, I have lost track of how many messages we’ve exchanged in the last week, while Mom refuses to tell my machine what’s going on. I’m tired of putting quarters into a phone booth to call her back, tired of writing about it, and damned tired of hearing the computerized voice say, “You have — one — new message,” and knowing the message is Mom saying again, “Please call me.”

The office where I work is on the eighth floor of a department store, above seven floors of pants and pillowslips and toaster ovens and everything else that powers the American economy.

The store doesn’t open until 10:AM, and I gotta be at my desk at 8:30, so to get into the building, I have to flash a badge at a security guard on the main floor.

After that, I can turn left and make my way past all the boxes in the backroom, toward the employees’ elevators.

Or turn right, and emerge on the as-yet-uninhabited and thus dimly-lit first floor of the big store, and walk past all the dark counters toward the customers’ elevators.

There’s a third option, I suppose — walking up eight flights of stairs, but that's never happened yet and never will.

Going through the store is quicker, because there are eight customer elevators and no customers yet, so no waiting. If I choose the backroom route, there are only two elevators, and they’re freight elevators, which climb much more slowly. But I usually choose the backroom and freight elevators anyway, because there’s a time clock in the backroom, so I can punch in, and get paid to wait for an elevator and ride it, instead of elevating on my own time.

This morning, though, I was running too early to punch in — you're not allowed to click on-duty more than 7½ minutes early — so I entered through the store, for the first time in months. Which brings me to what I wanted to say:

There’s something authentically American about a fully-stocked department store, hours before opening. No customers yet, but oh yeah, we're ready. There are dozens of shelves stocked with panty hose in hundreds of colors, all sizes. Past the panty hose is the enormous, sprawling cosmetics department, with acres of weird chemical compounds for women and some men to hide behind.

Each brand of these odd products has its own counter on the first floor, where powders and perfumes worth pennies (if they’re worth anything) and sold for many, many dollars. Employees stand there all day, dishing out false compliments to anyone who brushes or puffs a free sample.

None of us measure up to what we're supposed to be, what we want to be, or even how we see ourselves. That's the human condition — dissatisfaction with ourselves. We know it, we live with it, and maybe we work on making ourselves better.

There's something despicable, though, about taking that human dissatisfaction, and turning it into a huge, highly profitable industry selling people concoctions that don't work or (maybe) barely work, and selling them at insane markups.

I’m not criticizing the customers who buy this slop, but I’m definitely criticizing the companies that make and sell it. I work for one of those companies, and I’m a man, so go ahead and tell me I'm a hypocrite or ignoramus. You're right, I'm both, but also ... c’mon. Something is seriously screwy and wrong about everything on the first floor.

♦ ♦ ♦

Darla’s dad isn’t expected to recover, and she wants to be with him at the end, so she called to say she wouldn’t be at work today. Very strangely, she called me at my desk, before calling her boss, Babs. I mumbled some kind sentiments, and meant 'em, and told her not to give the store a moment’s thought. I certainly won’t.

♦ ♦ ♦

Beatrice canceled our beer night again, saying she had to work late. Am I disappointed? Actually, to my surprise, yeah, a little. I like her, and I'm looking forward to hanging out with her some night.

It’ll happen, and it was her idea after all, so I’m sure she’s not trying to weasel out of it.

♦ ♦ ♦

Another phone message from my mom. Guess what? “Please call me.”

I didn’t and won’t. I'm tired of even typing about it.

She was beautiful, with long brownish-blonde hair, brown eyes, a face full of freckles, and an inviting smile. Oh, and she was nude, this being a dream and all.

I kissed both her naked knees, then slowly wandered northward, smooching every mole on her soft, sweet, ever-so-slightly sweaty thighs and working my way up. This isn’t cheap porn so we’ll skip the details, but it was all done with the utter mastery of such moves that I routinely display, in dreams.

We kissed, lips closed at first, and then more passionately, tongues diving deep into each others’ mouths, my hands on her freckled flesh, and hers wandering under every ripple in my massive mounds of flab. Then she drew back. Something was wrong. She made an uncomfortable face and said, “Sweet Mary mother of God, your breath is terrible!”

Well, there’s a dream that needs no interpretation, and I was wide awake instantly. There’s no denying that my breath is less than delightful. I have two partially-missing teeth toward the back that have been rotting for ages. Even immediately after brushing with minty fresh toothpaste, I can put my pinky to the back of my jaw, finger the stumps where those teeth used to be, and carry the stink of it to my nose. It smells literally like shit.

That’s what the woman of my dream whiffed on my breath, what everyone in the awake world must notice if they come too close. I smell it myself sometimes, like when I’m about to have a glass of water but half an ounce of ‘exhale’ goes into the cup and up my nose, and blimey, what a stench.

Well, here’s good news for everyone eager to kiss a flatulent fat fellow: Those two rotting stumps are coming out early next month. The dentist’s appointment has been made. After that, my breath will be better, and this 300+ pound hunk of man will be available for serious liplocking, ladies. Please take a number, and queue in an orderly fashion.

♦ ♦ ♦

With Marcia gone, we have one worker less than a week ago, so instead of killing time, I’m actually working at work. We’re not swamped, though. There’s breathing room. They’ve reassigned some of our workload away recently, and if this place was run right, there might be some hesitation before hiring someone else.

And there is hesitation, but not because management is weighing the evidence. One of my co-workers asked Babs about hiring someone, and the answer is of course they’re hiring someone. There’s just a slight delay because some forms in quadruplicate haven’t yet been processed in Personnel.

♦ ♦ ♦

Someone came by with a small stack of workflow, and wanted to drop it on Darla’s desk, but Darla’s dad is busy dying, so there was no Darla today. The junior exec with the paperwork was bewildered at the concept of a locked office door, so I interrupted his confusion, and took the work off his hands.

After he was gone, as I dropped his paperwork into our ordinary workflow stacks, I noticed that it was days late. These were price changes for a sale that went into effect this morning, so 55 department stores across the western United States are engaged in false advertising — Buy these blouses for 25% off! But the price hadn't been changed.

This is really, really basic stuff in this business: If you’re advertising sale prices, someone has to mark the prices down. That’s what I do, and my co-workers, but someone has to bring the paperwork. Preferably on time.

How could this executive not know that price changes have a deadline, and that the deadline was days ago? If I hadn’t noticed the date, those docs would've gone to the back of the pile and been input next week.

Luckily, it wasn’t a big list of price reductions, only about 75 items with 590 UPCs. I split the work among all of us, and we got the price corrections input within an hour. I wrote a memo to Babs and CC’d Darla, because (a) I’d be in big trouble if I’d fucked up like that executive did, so he should be in big trouble, and (b) you should never do anything heroic at work without making sure management knows.

The rush-rush work kept me in the office ten minutes past quitting time, and with no authorization for overtime, it was a gift to the company. Well, I don’t give gifts to the company, so on my way out of the mostly-empty 8th floor, I pried a sign off a door — “Buyer Liaison Office” — and slipped it into my backpack.

Why would I want the sign? Who knows, I’m an impulse shoplifter, but that sign has always struck me as corporate craptalk. What does it even mean? It’s a department store, so we have people who buy merchandise, and they’re called buyers — but why do buyers need liaisons? Nobody else around here has a liaison, not even Babs. And why do these mythical liaisons need an office?

Now my neighbors can wonder what the sign means. It’s posted on the door of my room at the rez hotel.

Most of the morning was spent sitting and writing, filling in details and subtracting some of the longwindedness of diary days gone by. Then I did some slight grocery shopping, and checked my messages, dreading to hear Mom’s voice, but instead it was Maggie.

She still calls once or twice weekly, keeping me informed about the frustrations of her life, and I’m glad she does. She’s about the only person from my old life who’s kept in touch. Today she was mega-talky, and the abridged version is: her psychiatrist has taken her off lithium, so her mood swings are going into orbit again. Wish I could suggest something better than chamomile tea.

Here’s a bit of a looper: She wants her friends and family to chip in what they can afford, call it a Christmas present, to buy her a one-way ticket to San Francisco, to move in with Doug. What? What?

We have discussed this already, quite a bit, actually. Maggie decided, already, and announced clearly, already, that she did not want to move here and live with me. It was just a few weeks ago that she laughed and confirmed again that we were broken up. Now she’s changed her mind?

Well, I haven’t changed mine, and I said so. We are friends. If she's in the mood and in the neighborhood, a boink would be nice, but we are still broken up, and she’s not invited to move in. And she laughed like she’d been messing with me, but it’s hard to be sure.

There was a time not so long ago when having Maggie with me here in San Francisco sounded sweet, but that was the before-times. Then she visited, and sparks were flying in all directions, and I became a bruised and battered man — all of which ended any daydreams of happily ever after for Maggie & Me. I remain very fond of the lady, but she is not mentally well and I am not capable of taking care of her. I am barely capable of taking care of me.

♦ ♦ ♦

The 71 took me out to the Red Victorian for Tommy, the star-studded rock opera by Peter Townshend and Ken Russell. It’s over the top, but that’s what Ken Russell does, and it has too much Oliver Reed, which for me is any Oliver Reed at all.

Tommy is truly an opera — there's not a word of dialogue, only arias to propel the plot — and like most operas, several stretches of the story are incomprehensible. The music rocks, though, and Russell’s visuals are hypnotically un-not-watchable, so let’s not quibble about coherency.

It’s jumping with great songs and perverted plot twists and bad singing by Reed, and surprisingly good singing by Ann-Margaret. Even Jack Nicholson carries a tune without dropping it, but Roger Daltry, as that deaf dumb and blind kid who sure plays a mean pinball, steals the show from the pro actors. With Tina Turner and Elton John dropping in to sing one dynamite song each, I was humming Who hymns as I walked back home.

♦ ♦ ♦

Stopped at Naked Eye to do a little zine shopping and drop off the September issue. I always wish I could talk to Steve, the Naked Eye guy, for a little longer, but there are other customers waiting for his expertise. How unlike me, though, to want to talk to someone a little longer.

Had pastry and a spot of tea at the International Cafe at Fillmore, which is my favorite club because they don’t serve booze. You can sit back and enjoy the band without the obnoxious, rambunctious sorts who sometimes ruin the fun at liquorish night clubs.

I didn’t get the name of the band, sorry, but it was three white guys. One on guitar, one on drums, and an older fat balding dude (not me) on vocals. Send for their CD!

It didn’t occur to me until too late to take notes for a scene report, because this ain’t that kind of zine. I wasn’t being a critic on duty, just a plump putz pounding calories and tapping my toes. The band, whoever they were, was good in a Fogerty Joel Springsteen Crosby Stills Nash & Young way, but not good enough to make me want to ask the waitress for a dance.

Today was one of those wonderful do-nothing days. Nothing memorable or even interesting happened, nothing healthy was eaten, and nothing worthwhile was accomplished. I did not go to the movies, and like all the very best Sundays, I did not go to church.

I slept late, then ate a whole pumpkin pie for breakfast. Slightly tidied up the room, wrote a few zine reviews, and put away the chess set — I’d been playing someone by mail, and winning, so he stopped sending moves a month ago. Washed some t-shirts and Tupperware in the sink, put new batteries in the beep beep smoke alarm, blew soap bubbles out the window, and had a late lunch / early dinner at Tad’s Steak House, where the motto should be, "Reasonably priced, reasonably good."

After that, I was tossing out old rough drafts from the drawer in the end table, so I pulled the whole drawer out to dump the paper and dust, and I found a pay stub under the drawer. Fifty-six hours worked over two weeks in 1988, by some guy who must have lived in this room, and made more wages than me per hour, and didn't work as many hours. Which sounds good.

1988 means his pay stub has been there, under the drawer, for six years. I remembered where I was in 1988 — still in Seattle, still between girlfriends, still doing what was expected of me. I wasn’t normal but I was passing. Guess I'm still passing for normal, but 1994 is more abnormal than 1988. It's a long and winding road.

Wondered what else might be inside that end table, so while the drawer was still out I pointed a flashlight inside, and you know what that end table was full of? Roaches. Mostly dead roaches, but twenty or so were crawling around, scattered when they saw the flashlight, and died when they smelled my lavender-scented Black Flag bug spray.

Memories of Mr Wizard made me wonder what the roaches had been eating. Most of my meals are eaten in bed, so there’s crumbs on the blanket and on the carpet, so there are sometimes roaches on the bed and floor. Rules of the game. Chow down, neighbors. But I never eat on the end table, because it’s old and rickety and kinda gross, so what are they eating?

Careful examination reveals that the roaches have been eating the end table itself, or at least the back of the drawer. It’s made of that cheap synthetic fiberboard stuff, and about 1/3 of the back panel has been eaten away. I wonder how much more they can eat before the landlord expects me to pay for a new end table.

Darla’s dad died over the weekend, and she called today to say she’s taking the week off. Again, I don’t know why she called me at my desk — she’s my boss, I’m not hers — but I offered my clumsy condolences, of course. Death sucks and I’m against it.

♦ ♦ ♦

I'm pretty sure drug deals at work are against company policy, but at break time, Kallie handed me the tiny bag of pot I’d bought, and ten dollars. “It isn’t great stuff, just good," she said, "so there’s a small rebate from the dealer.”

I offered her a pinch of it for her trouble, but she laughed and said, “What I have at home would get me life in prison already.” I slipped the weed into my pocket, and looked at the ten-dollar bill.

“This should be enough to pay our expenses at the Sincere Cafe,” was the line I wanted to say. A chance to show Kallie my favorite Chinese restaurant, since she’d shown me hers. To say thanks. To get to know her a little better ...

But I only said "Thanks." I don’t trust my instincts and witticisms until I've had hours to think it over, so I hesitated as usual, left it unsaid forever, and slipped the tenner into my wallet.

♦ ♦ ♦

And then, an hour later, I guess I did trust my instincts in the moment, and blurted out something fairly stupid at exactly the wrong time.

I had chased several suits around the office, searching for the elusive straight answer to a question, and I was in a hallway asking that question for the third or fourth time, this time asking two junior executives and Babs, who’s a senior executive.

One of the juniors said to me, “Marcia knew all that stuff, didn’t she teach you?”

I said icily, “I’m not Marcia, and I never will be.”

“That’s for sure,” he said, and started walking away.

“Hey!” I said loudly to this junior jackoff who’s two, maybe two and a half ranks above me. “If you’re going to give me attitude, I can just take my best guess, instead of bothering you guys with quarter-million-dollar questions.”

The hallway either got really quiet or it sure seemed that way, and the junior exec turned back at me with a glare that could shatter the silence. The moment called for a grand gesture — I should’ve belched or something — but instead I did the smart thing and said, “Sorry.” Meek and subservient, just the way they like it.

Babs said something managerial to me, or maybe to him, but I was too furious to hear clearly, and walked back to my crappy desk, and the crappy job I hope I still have.

Also, for the record, when I got pissed and said it was a quarter-million-dollar question, that was an exaggeration. It was a $100,000 question, tops.

♦ ♦ ♦

In better news, I got a post card from Factsheet Five, with advance word on their review of Pathetic Life #1. They didn’t hate it.

You know, PL hasn't gotten a rotten review yet, which surprises me. It’s a diary where, most days, nothing happens. Maybe I go to a movie. I never get laid. I wouldn't have the patience to read this zine if it wasn’t about me. I don't even know why you're here.

“How was it?,” Kallie asked as soon as I came through the office door. It took me a beat to even know what she was talking about. Oh, the pot.

“Good morning to you, too,” I said and laughed. “Didn’t smoke it yet. I’m saving it for the weekend, or when the mood hits me.”

“Wow, Doug, what are you waiting for?,” she said. “When I’ve got it, I smoke it.”

I giggled. Not much of a stoner, me, so I'll save it for a special treat, but I do know exactly what Kallie means. For me, it's the same with ice cream. There's never any in the freezer, because when I have it, I eat it.

♦ ♦ ♦

When I first gave to United Way, at a job perhaps 15 years ago, I was happy to do it. They do good in the world, and they rattled the tin cup with gentle restraint. One of the women in that office came around with a clipboard, and made her spiel one-on-one. People who gave got a lapel pin, and people who didn’t give didn’t get harangued. It was just, OK, thanks for considering it…

My current employer does things differently. First there’s the meeting, which all employees are required to attend, and that bugs me. I’m at work, so I expect work-related boredom and required meetings, but a mandatory meeting to hustle us for charity seems, well, pushy.

The second thing to put me in the wrong frame of mind is that this meeting wasn’t in our office, or even in our building. It was a block down the street, in the vice presidents’ palace.

Long sigh, short explanation:

Because of all the layoffs, there’s half a square mile of empty space in the building where I work, but the top-level executives don't work there. Our building is 80 years old and looks it, so the superstar execs are housed in a swankier building up the street. I’ve run errands there, and it's jawdropping. Everyone calls it the Taj Mahal.

That’s where the United Way meeting was, and walking from our dungeon-like windowless department to the executive suite — where there’s plush carpeting, air conditioning, and hallways wider than my apartment — does not engender a spirit of charity.

Next thing that set me on edge: Department heads are in competition with each other, and there’s a prize for the boss who gets the highest percentage of workers signed up to donate. The prize is not a set of steak knives. It's an all-expenses paid weekend for two at Lake Tahoe.

Before I get too worked up, I should point out that the company, not United Way, is underwriting this prize. But that’s also an annoyance. If management cares about charity, give the money to charity. Nope, they're buying plane tickets and resort reservations, meals and car rentals and casino chips, as yet another perk for management.

The meeting started with a long lecture from Babs, who is not the poster face for charitable giving — she dresses like “Upstairs” in Upstairs, Downstairs, she rarely says “Good morning” to people of my dour rank, and she's the boss or boss's boss of everyone in the room. I have never heard her say anything that’s not work-related — which isn’t even an insult, because management is supposed to be about work work work — but suddenly she's telling me and my co-workers about our social responsibilities? What the hell does she know about social responsibilities? She’s not my minister. She’s not my conscience.

“Of course, giving is voluntary,” she said, but she said it as a senior executive, addressing staff, at a mandatory meeting, and bubba, it started gnawing at me.

“Last year, our office had the second-highest percentage of employees contributing in our California operations,” she said at one point. “This year we’d really like to be number one.” You tell me. Is that a plea for charity, or a woman who wants to go to Tahoe?

Then a tape got popped into a video player, and noted singer and babe Natalie Cole started telling us how great United Way is. She makes commercials for the store, and they sell Natalie Cole-branded tennis rackets or tampons or something, so it wasn’t a big surprise, even when she started singing.

The video was effective, too — a pro-made mini-movie with heartwrenching scenes and swelling music designed to manipulate your emotions and yank at your conscience, and it worked. I wasn’t the only one with a leaky nose, as all the sad stories on the video came to happy endings, all thanks to United Way, and won’t you please help?

The third and final video vignette backfired, though, at least for me, when the troubled teenager got his life turned around by United Way and became … a policeman. No doubt there are a few good apples in the rotten bunch, but I’m not wild about cops, especially uniformed police officers who know they’re being filmed as they kneel down and smile big at little kids.

Then came the Q & A session, and I was disappointed that nobody asked about United Way’s recent embezzling scandal. And then, hooray, the guiltathon was finally over, and I went to pee — not because I had to, but because you should never miss a chance to use the executive washroom.

Oh, man. It’s huge, it’s clean, there’s privacy even at the urinals, and the whole room smells like oatmeal cookies. When I was done, I washed my hands with their fancy pineapple-shaped soap, and dried with the genuine cloth towels, and remembered that the men’s room where I work had been out of both the cheap powdered soap and paper towels when I’d peed there this morning.

When I left that heavenly john, most everyone from my office was already gone, walking back to our building. It was just me and one woman I sorta know, waiting for an elevator. We talked about Natalie Cole and then United Way, and then she said, “I wonder whether Peter will contribute this year.”

I figure, whether someone gives or doesn’t give is his concern, not ours, but before I could find the words to tactfully say that, she added, “He’s the only person who didn’t give last year.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Well, it’s common knowledge,” she said, and the elevator doors opened and the conversation closed, but my mind was whirling. Required meeting. Taj Mahal. Guilt trip from senior executives. And then there’s not even any privacy if someone decides not to give?

You can say it’s for a good cause, and it is. I’ve always given to United Way, so don’t give me that helping-others crap. I’d been ready to sign up again today, same as every year, until that meeting. Maybe until that moment at the elevator.

Peter went up a notch in my estimation, and if it’s going to be “common knowledge,” spread the word: I’m not giving either. Screw the United Way. I’ll give to charity when I choose to, not when my boss’s boss wants a weekend out of town.

“You know that ten dollars you gave me back, with the weed?,” I said to Kallie this morning. “That should be enough to pay our expenses at the Sincere Cafe.”

Then I had to explain what the Sincere Cafe is, because it’s not exactly famous — just another Chinese restaurant in a city with hundreds, although in my opinion it’s the best.

Of course, I lifted my line from Casablanca. Anything clever I ever say is lifted from somewhere, but it worked and that’s all that matters. Kallie and I are on for dinner at the Sincere, sometime next week.

♦ ♦ ♦

Naked Killer at the Roxie was a disappointment. Billed as Hong Kong’s satirical answer to Basic Instinct, it’s supposed to be an action-packed kung-fu comedy slash erotic thriller, but, meh. It’s about a group of women who kill men who deserve to die, and I’d like to make a few nominations but not be one, please. It sounds like something along the lines of Ms 45, but this ain't that.

The action sequences are confusingly choreographed and oddly edited, the ‘erotic’ scenes are mostly heavy petting, and the only comedy I could find came via the most mistranslated subtitling I’ve ever seen — several times, it was obvious from the visuals that the subtitled text on-screen was the opposite of what the actors were saying.

♦ ♦ ♦

Now I’m home at the hotel, opening some mail, but not getting the letter I want. It’s not why I started this zine, but a few strangers have written and said nice things to me. Not a lot of people say nice things to me, so that makes my day, every time it happens.

Every time it happens, though, the person who’s read my zine and written a nice letter signs it Frank, or Paul, or Mike. Why can't I get a nice letter from someone named Betty or Sue or even Betty Sue? That letter hasn’t come yet, so I’ve allowed myself some fantasy leeway and written myself that letter …

I really enjoyed your zine. Your snide attitude and rude sense of humor appeal to me, and we have much the same anti-social habits. I even like your taste in old movies. I live here in San Francisco, so yesterday I tried the Sincere Cafe on your recommendation, and loved the place.
If you haven’t given up on the human race and the female gender just yet, maybe we could get together some time? I am a woman but no lady, single, cynical, sarcastic, stubborn, and some say psychotic but I’m not like Margaret and I’d never hit anyone. I am not a beauty queen, rarely wear makeup, and don’t shave my legs, pits, or mustache. I am a feminist and I know karate, and if you touch me against my will I will doublekick you in the balls.
If you’d like to meet, here’s my phone number. Call almost any evening after work. If I’m not there, leave a number and I’ll call you back, and who knows? Maybe I’m the love of your life.

Yeah, that’s the letter I’d like to find in the mailbag. It’s a daydream, but any woman reading this is sincerely invited to make it reality.

Sure, I weigh 300+ pounds and habitually pick my nose and my breath could drop a bum across the street, but I’m also a sensitive guy who reads books and cries at the movies. No long walks on the beach, but in a relationship, I don’t hit, cheat, or borrow money.

Don’t be shy, ladies, and don’t be picky — I’m certainly not. You can be my age, or twice my age, or half my age. You can be my color, or any color, or plaid. I’d prefer a movie nut or a misanthrope or both, but it’s not required.

All I ask is all I offer: A brain, a soul, some opinions, and a willingness to tolerate a few strange habits in an interesting person.

I dreamed about Darla, and no, It was nothing like what you’re thinking, you perv (though she is an attractive woman).

In the dream, she’d returned from her bereavement leave, and someone in the office had planned a “Dad’s Dead” lunch for Darla. Sounds like a bad idea, right? There was even a big, brightly-colored banner that said, "Dad's dead."

Darla herself told me to go home and change clothes, so I’d be wearing all black. I did, but my only black shirts are t-shirts. Then I was at Chevy's in a black t-shirt, and everyone from the office was there, in formal funeral wear, ties and tuxedos. Except for Kallie, who wore tie-dye. Darla clanged her fork against a glass, everyone hushed, and she started talking about her father.

I don't remember anything she said, but it was a sad and stupid dream. Analyze it, if you can. My guess is, it meant something about the stupidity of work life, the agony of human existence, and the finality of death. More likely, it meant nothing at all.

An unusually bad Twilight Zone episode, and I have decided not to mention any of it to Darla when she comes back.

♦ ♦ ♦

Went to a double feature at the Castro, two classics I’ve heard about all my life but never seen until tonight. You gotta see the classics, but you also gotta cross your fingers, because the flicks with the best reputations sometimes aren’t all that great.

The Lodger (1944) is your basic Jack-the-Ripper story with an unusual twist: it’s boring as hell. Right from the start, it’s obvious who the killer is, so what’s the point of making a mystery with nothing mysterious, a thriller without thrills? No point that I could see.

M (1931) is by Fritz Lang, Mr Metropolis, so it’s full of visual flourishes and interesting camera work. The story is startling, and feels ahead of its time, and ours. It’s about a serial child-murderer, pursued by police, feared by everyone, and hated even by the city’s criminal element. Sounds gruesome, and it was, but completely engrossing.

I was tense with the drama, so I don’t understand how I fell asleep halfway through it. I haven’t been sleeping well for the last twenty years or so, but insomnia is normal. Falling asleep during a good movie isn't.

Even without the middle section, though, I could tell it was great. Whenever my own snoring woke me, there was beautiful black-and-white photography, and a sense of eerie danger radiating from the great Peter Lorre as the psychopath, and then I fell asleep again.

M is a terrific movie, and I hope to see it one day.

♦ ♦ ♦

On the train ride home, I was intrigued by a man sitting toward the front, looking out the window. What was he looking at so intently? We were in a tunnel — there was nothing to see, just a blur of concrete, pipes, wires, and lights. He continued staring, and I noticed that his mouth was open.

Church Street station. The man blinked, surprised as the concrete ended and the train arrived at the platform. He didn’t move his head, though, just kept staring out the window. Subliminally chanting? Sleepy like me?

Van Ness. He was still staring out the window, but I don’t think he was seeing anything. As the train pulled out of the station, the lighting flickered and changed, and I could see a little spittle dripping from his open mouth. Is he brain dead?

Civic Center. He stood up, and a book dropped from his hand, or maybe his lap. He bent over, picked it up, and then bumped his head quite hard on the seat-back as he stood again. I was ten seats away and heard the thud. In a hurry to beat the closing doors, he didn’t rub his head until he was off the train, but when he did, as we began rolling out of the station, he dropped the book again.

Then he was out of sight, and you gotta wonder. There are many people bumbling about among us, and I only saw a few minutes of that guy’s life. Was it a normal snippet of his existence — the comatose look, the drooling, dropping a book, banging his head, dropping the book again — or did I catch him at an off moment? And how many more times would he drop that book, on his way wherever he was headed?

I'll never see him again, so I'll never know. It’s a big city, where we’re all more or less anonymous as we bumble about. Bumble onward, stranger, as do we all, more or less.

Well, that was an unusual conversation with Kallie a few minutes ago, here at work. Somehow we were comparing the cleanliness of women’s vs men’s restrooms, though obviously neither of us would know much about the other. Then I told her about the disgusting communal johns at my rez hotel, and she fought back with the, apparently, quite repugnant and repellent toilet in her shared house.

Just this once I’ll yield to good taste, by not detailing our dialogue at length, but the short version is, I win. Kallie's toilets are gross, but the toilets I use, at work and especially at home, are grosser.

A shared or public crapper puts the morals of the masses right where you’re sitting, and sometimes it’s not a pretty sight.

♦ ♦ ♦

Awkward moment of the day: Jennifer, my ‘lead’ who knows and does less than me or most of us, was wearing a pink ribbon on her blouse. There might be a color chart somewhere for decoding all the ribbons people wear, but I haven’t seen a copy. Red is against AIDS, I know, and yellow is for soldiers missing in action, black means someone died, and blue means your pig won the state fair, but I didn’t know from pink, so I asked.

“Breast cancer,” Jennifer said, rather curtly, and that’s all she said.

I expected more words, so I stood there waiting, but apparently saying “breast cancer” says it all, like Budweiser.

Finally I said, “OK, breast cancer. Thanks for the reminder.” Jennifer was not amused, and for allegedly making light of what’s certainly a serious subject, God will probably strike me dead with breast cancer. Men can get it too, you know, and from the look she gave me, I think that’s what Jennifer is rooting for.

Well, pardon me for being unpardonable, but if you wear an awareness ribbon, you ought to be prepared to say a few words about whatever you're aware of.

♦ ♦ ♦

You know, I'm good at accidentally making enemies. My goal is to go through each day as un-noticed as possible, avoid all the annoying human drama, and hurry home to my typewriter and zines. People are often pissed off at me, though, like Jennifer today, for reasons I don't understand.

I could write a book: How to Lose Friends and Annoy Strangers, by Doug Holland.

♦ ♦ ♦

Kallie skipped lunch so she could leave work an hour early. She’s going to the Rolling Stones concert tonight. She’s a big fan, says she stayed up late last night practicing her Mick Jagger dance. I don’t even know what that would be, and I didn’t ask to see it.

The Rolling Stones are good, but I can only name “Satisfaction," and I don't think any of their albums were in the pile I gave to Salvation Army when I dumped everything I owned and ran to California.

I'm not much of a music guy, anyway, and definitely not a concert guy. Maybe if I had someone to go with. And maybe if tickets didn’t cost a week’s rent. But I don’t and they do, so I hope Kallie's having a nice night doing her Jagger dance, but I'm going to the movies.

♦ ♦ ♦

There was a dash of guerrilla theater while BARTing to Berkeley. As the train rolled under the bay, three young men and one young woman, all wearing green camouflage uniforms, walked from car to car, sternly asking for everyone’s papers.

“Do you have your papers?”

“Do you have your papers on your person?”

“If you do not have your papers on your person, if you cannot establish your American citizenship, you are under arrest …”

I took their flier, and talked to one of them, and it’s all part of the campaign against Initiative 187, a particularly poisonous piece of Republican politics that wants to require not just citizenship but *proof of citizenship before you can get medical care. It would create a state-wide “citizens’ I/D card”, and bar the children of illegal immigrants from attending public schools, among other ghastly provisions.

“It can’t happen here,” they say, but all the polls suggest Initiative 187 will pass by a landslide in November. Call me an asshole, but please don’t call me an American.

I never understand why fearmongers single out Mexicans as “the problem,” but I also don’t know why Germans singled out the Jews. They’re not here to hurt you, you know. They’re trying to survive, same as the rest of us. The Mexicans gave us burritos and Cinco de Mayo, so they’re OK by me, and why should I care about legal or illegal? Some of my favorite things are illegal.

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The movie was Série Noire (1979) at the Pacific Film Archive. Film noir is supposed to be black-and-white, but this is in color. And in French. But it gets every detail of the mood and imagery exactly right.

Based on pulp-master Jim Thompson’s novel A Hell of a Woman, it begins as a deceptively silly story about a lowlife door-to-door salesman who talks to himself in his beater car, and practices tough guy poses in an empty lot, but avoids fist fights because he knows he’d lose.

As played by my favorite dead French actor, Patrick Dewaere, this guy is a working-class schlump you can’t help liking. And when big-money temptation enters the plot, it’s fascinating to see just how low a good(?) man might go. Loved the ending too, but — say no more, say no more.

One small quibble. (There’s always one small quibble, isn’t there?) Maybe something got lost in the translation from French to English, or from the novel to the movie (haven’t read the book, so I can’t say), but I’m not sure which woman in the story is supposed to be A Hell of a Woman. There are two main female characters — Dewaere’s drippy wife who knows him too well, and an underage hooker who barely speaks — but they’re both rather boring, and neither seemed like A Hell of a Woman to me.

It’s a hell of a movie, though.

Also, respect the twig. It’s Série Noire, not Serie Noire, and I had to finesse the typewriter to get the twig. Though honestly, I don’t even know what the twig is supposed to signify, and I don't know what the title means. The dialogue was subtitled, but the title wasn’t.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962) is playing at the Elmwood Theater in Berkeley, and I wanted to see it again, and see the theater.

It was a worn-out single-screen neighborhood cinema dating back to the 1910s or ‘20s, and it's out of the way via transit from San Francisco, so I'd never been there, but now it's been refurbished, remodeled — and plexed.

I hate plexed theaters, but if it's gotta happen I keep hoping some theater somewhere will take the time and expense to get plexed right. Sadly, the Elmwood didn't, and they’ve really gone cheap on the sound systems. Whenever Peter O’Toole wasn’t busy with rousing action in Lawrence of Arabia, I could hear America’s favorite retard, Forrest Gump, talking too loud on one of the screens upstairs.

On my way out I mentioned it to the manager, and she promised they’d fiddle with the volume and fix the problem. She also gave me two free passes for future shows, so I'll be back to the Elmwood.

As for Lawrence of Arabia, it's a frickin' great movie and everyone ought to see it at least once. It's about a guy named Lawrence, as the title suggests. Also, not to tell too much, but the story is set in Arabia.

T E Lawrence was a hero in one of those futile and silly wars our leaders love leading us into — in this case, World War I. Confession of ignorance: Until I first saw this movie four or five years ago, I’d thought WWI was entirely fought in Europe, but nope. WWI is when the West effectively took possession of the Middle East and carved it into nation-states, and with Lawrence of Arabia we’re there for the carving. You're supposed to root for the carvers.

I’m sure the facts have been heavily fictionalized, because that's what movies do when movies do history. That said, the first half is a grand adventure, and a complete and compelling movie all in itself. Then there’s an intermission, and in the second half of the movie Lawrence goes quite insane. That might be true to history, but it isn’t half as much fun as the movie's first half.

Also, my momma says that stupid is as stupid does, and life is like a box of chocolates. Forrest Gump would not shut up during Lawrence of Arabia, which leads me to something I haven’t tried before. Let's review that movie without seeing it, because I am not seeing it:

When I first heard about Forrest Gump, a few months before it opened, I was intrigued — it’s from Robert Zemeckis, who made Back to the Future and Romancing the Stone and some other popcorn movies that are inarguably among the very best popcorn movies of our time. The concept sounded good — history unfolding through an everyman’s perspective, so Forrest Gump was on my gonna-see-it list.

But I misunderstood the pre-publicity; Hanks isn’t playing an everyman, he’s playing a mentally retarded man, who earns great success in life. And that’s too close to American reality — if you’re white and polite and good looking you’re two touchdowns ahead before the kickoff, even if your IQ is 75. I don't need to see a movie celebrating that.

Forrest Gump is now playing at a theater near you, and it's a hit, and the ad in the paper says “America’s gone Gump!” and I believe it. The average American certainly seems more and more a moron to me.

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Coming back from Berkeley to my home neighborhood, I slugged a guy. I've never done that before, unless someone slugged me first. I am not a violent man. Or I thought I wasn't.

I was walking up Magnin (the street, not the store) when three teenish or 20's guys came rolling down the sidewalk on their skateboards. Happens every day. This time, though, as the skateboarders were rolling and talking to each other, one of them turned his head to yak at his friend, while boarding full speed and coming right at me.

Seeing this, I had maybe two seconds to decide what to do. I could’ve hollered something to get his attention. I could've flattened myself against a building and let the kid ram into someone behind me. Could've, would've, maybe should've, but it’s not my responsibility to protect skateboarders on the sidewalk. I’m not sure it’s legal to skateboard on the sidewalk, and more importantly, it’s stupid and dangerous, especially if you’re not paying attention.

The guy was crouched low on his board, looking the other way, and like I said, there was only a moment to make up my mind what to do. I didn't yell. Didn't jump out of the way. I did a bad thing. I balled my hand into a fist and held it in front of my chest like a bumper, at exactly the level of that guy’s face.

He hit it hard — blam! — and fell on his butt and started taking our lord and savior’s name in vain, while his skateboard careened down the sidewalk without him, and smacked an old man's ankles.

The kid had blood all over his face, and he apologized to me — “Sorry, man” — as he lifted himself off the ground. That startled me almost as much as my fist had startled him. You don’t often get apologies on the street, especially from teenagers, and I got an apology for slugging someone. I half-smiled and said “No worries,” and kept walking.

Better he runs into my fist, I’m telling myself, than he runs into some old lady or little kid behind me. Which is true, but it’s an after-the-fact justification. In the moment, I simply decided I wanted to deck him, so I decked him. Didn’t know I had that in me, and I’m not sure I like having that in me.

♦ ♦ ♦

One last movie thought before bedtime. In the paper today, it’s reported that Natural Born Killers has been banned in Ireland, but in Britain the censors will allow the movie to be shown, once “certain violent scenes” have been removed.

It's 1994. Have we not yet figured out that censorship is bad?

Addendum, 2021: Sorry about the word 'retard' up there. At the time, it was an insult but not generally considered an awful thing to say, and for authenticity I've decided to leave it as I wrote it.

Today I edited and printed several more pages for the October issue, and then BARTed to the Mission, and had a magnificent Number 1 at the Sincere Cafe — pork, prawns, and more pork. With a full belly, I walked to the Roxie for a Bernard Herrmann double feature.

Herrmann wrote the music for Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) and François Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black (1968), and the latter is supposed to be a tribute to Hitch, which is probably why Truffaut hired Herrmann. So let’s talk about the music: In both movies, the score soars and swooshes, and it’s moody and thrilling and sometimes full of wonder.

Hitchcock never disappoints, and you maybe read my review of North by Northwest two months ago, when I saw it at the Stanford. Tonight's second feature, though, well …

I know Truffaut’s great, a frickin’ arteest. He made many damned good movies, usually smart stuff with a light touch, almost all of which are worth seeing even if you can't stand subtitles, but The Bride Wore Black is the first absolute piece of crap I’ve seen with Truffaut’s name on it. It kept me on the edge of my seat, but only because I kept thinking I should leave.

It’s the story of a widowed bride who chases down the men who killed her husband, and it has three fatal flaws:

❶ It’s boring, and that’s a major problem. When the lights go down inside a theater, you can’t read a book and shouldn’t want to. I wanted to.

❷ After The Bride’s husband is killed, the murderers are shown making their getaway. The movie's lead actress, Jeanne Moreau, knows their names, and tracks them down — but they’re apparently never questioned by the police, never in danger of arrest? Also, the movie is boring.

❸ Moreau was an attractive woman, but never jawdropping, and when Bride was made Moreau was 40, and it shows. Yes, society and the movies are always judging women by their appearance, and that’s rotten and stupid and sincerely not what I’m doing (I think). The problem is, her gorgeousness is a key plot point of the movie, stressed repeatedly — she’s so beautiful that men are literally dying to pursue her — so it’s fair to say, Moreau was wrong for the role. Also, the movie is boring.

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It’s been a month or so since I went “mostly vegetarian,” and today's porky lunch at the Sincere was an exception to the rule. After the movie, I took the next vegetarian step — I went shopping at Rainbow Grocery, the city's most politically correct co-op. If it isn’t green, if it’s from a company with labor problems, if it’s excessively packaged, or if it’s not really good for you, it’s not for sale at Rainbow. And in the whole store, meat is not allowed.

If you’re looking for a punchline to the joke, sorry, I like the place. I’m as green and willing to live by my principles as I am vegetarian — mostly, at best, and with lots of lapses. I absolutely respect the place, though, and we should all have the principles I generally lack.

I bought peanut butter (“Ingredients: Peanuts.”), all-natural mayonnaise with about 1/5th the calories I’m accustomed to (it’ll probably taste like watery chalk), and some exotic-sounding bachelor food — herbal macaroni & cheese, canned organic beans and rice, etc. I resisted the urge to ask at the help desk, "Where's the butcher's department?"

I’ll never be a health nut, of course. I'll never not be overweight, and I expect to continue my family’s tradition of dying of cancer. But if I’m in the neighborhood (I was) and it tastes good (I hope) and the price is right (surprisingly, yes), then I’m happy to be Rainbow Grocery’s fattest customer of the day.

Well, here’s a day that took a turn I hadn’t seen coming.

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Kallie wore radioactive fluorescent pants with a colorfully crazy shirt and assorted glow-in-the-dark accessories, because the dress code at work is suspended every Halloween. She looked great, called it her kaleidoscope costume, and in my opinion she won Best In Show for the 8th floor.

Last year about half the staff dressed up for the day, but most of 1993's best-dressed have been laid off since, and other than Kallie’s, what few costumes there were weren’t much. Me, I came as a scraggy sketchy homeless-looking guy, with dirty pants, stained shirt, wild beard all over the face, and a surly attitude. Same as every other day.

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Carlotta is a new worker in our office. She started today, but I already know her, cuz I worked with her in a different department, when I started here as a temp. She’s bright, pleasant, Asian with an accent, and I told Darla (back from mourning this morning) that she’d made a good choice bringing her in. It’s irrelevant, but Carlotta is also very attractive.

Only problem is, she outranks me in years with the company, and they never admit it but they usually lay off the newest hires first. So come the next round of pink slips she’ll be safer than me.

Except for losing access to free photocopies, I don’t know, it feels like I’ve already come to terms with being laid off. It’s almost like, do it. Get it over already.

So, welcome to Hell, Carlotta!

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I turned in my United Way pledge sheet, with a big zero for my donation amount. Sure, I felt guilty. The whole United Way operation, at least as it’s run in this company, is set up to make you feel guilty if you don’t contribute, so you got me, I feel guilty.

I’d rather feel guilty, though, than feel forced, and I'm pretty sure that I’ve personally blocked Babs from a trip to Tahoe. Gotta love that.

♦ ♦ ♦

This morning Kallie was all excited and enthused — still — about how great the Rolling Stones concert had been on Friday night. She made it sound like something special, so I didn’t say this, but I didn't agree. I’d take Pink Floyd or the Moody Blues, thanks.

A little later, we were both listening to the same radio station, and the DJ said that tonight’s Stones show wasn’t completely sold out. My first thought was, the Stones played on Friday, took the weekend off just like me, and now they’re working again Monday. But Kallie looked at me and her eyes ignited, and she said, “Maybe I should go again,” and then she said, “Wanna come?”

I thought she was nuts. I often think she’s nuts, but that’s OK. I approve of nuts.

And then, before you could say Jumping Jack Flash, she was on the phone to BASS Tickets, buying two tickets with her credit card — one for her, and one for me. I’m supposed to pay her back for the ticket, and it’s $50, which is way out of my price range, but pay her back I will.

You only live once, unless you’re a Buddhist. No matter how boring your life is, and mine is quite boring, sometimes you ought to surprise yourself.

I hadn’t been to a major league concert since seeing Chicago in Seattle in the mid-1970s, but the Rolling Stones, last time I checked, are the Rolling Stones. Plus, the whole band is in their 50s I think, so they won’t be rockin’ much longer. See 'em now before they're gone! Have you looked at a picture of Keith Richards lately? I think he's dead already.

Also, I wanted to see Kallie’s Mick Jagger dance.

She suggested I should bring some pot, and why not? I'd been saving it for a special occasion, and this was a special occasion. At lunch I ran home and rolled a couple of phat ones in typing paper, for that literary feel.

We shared the first one in Golden Gate Park, before BARTing to Oakland. On the ride under the water she dropped some acid (“Not a lot, it’s a work night”) and offered me some, but I declined because, remember, I’m boring.

“Kallie,” I asked her, “Are you one of those wild California women my mom warned me about?” She laughed and laughed, but was it funny or were we stoned?

She painted a big star on my forehead and hers (no idea where the paint came from) and then, I guess, we were ready for the show. Since she’d seen basically the same concert on Friday, she said we could come late, and we avoided the long lines at the gates, missed the opening act (something called Seal), and climbed up up up to our seats, cheapest seats in the Coliseum, just as the lights dimmed and the crowd roared.

Mr Jagger stepped out all awhirl and started singing and strutting like he does, dancing and often full-speed running from one end of the giant bandstand to the other. I was impressed and almost turned on — Jagger is much older than me, but buffed to the max, and he never stood still, never slowed down for the next 2½ hours. Of course I'm only kidding that he turned me on, I think, but I was out of stamina just from tapping my feet through the first few songs. His energy probably isn’t organic; he has access to the finest drugs money can buy, so of course he’s wired when he’s on stage. It was kind of a turn-on, though.

Oh, shut up, Doug.

The whole band, the whole night was rockin’, and except for when Keith Richards was singing — standing still like a scarecrow — the energy level never lagged. Oh, and Richards got off a good line, “Every night of my life is Halloween.”

It was a stadium show, and the props and explosions of light were state of the art. Our seats were at an odd angle, so we had to turn our necks to see the stage, but I believe the Virgin Mary and Bouncing Baby Jesus were next to the seven-story inflatable Elvis when he appeared. The band threw hundreds, maybe thousands of trick-or-treat candy bars into the audience between and sometimes during the songs, but of course we were a zillion rows back so no Snickers for us.

Fair to say, it was the best concert I’ve been to in twenty years, and the only. It was a nice night. Maybe you think the Stones (and people who’d pay to see the Stones) are over the hill? Well, I saw about two dozen people in our section of the stadium using walkers or wheelchairs, so the audience is definitely getting along in years. And on the stage, Richards looked like a cough could topple him. Seriously, he wasn't at his best, and I assume he was either high or sick.

And say what you will about the Stones being owned by Corporate America. In fact, I’ll say it with you. They’re owned. Bankers were standing at the gates when we came in, handing official Rolling Stones MasterCard applications to everyone. Like the Stones need that endorsement money to pay their mortgages? It’s all about the money, always.

And yet. No matter how many millions he’s making, no man works as hard as Jagger worked tonight unless he’s having fun, and if he’s having fun then it’s rock’n’roll. Also, I got to see Kallie’s Mick Jagger dance, and it’s funny — she struts just like him and does something with her lips.

About halfway through the show, Kallie was digging through her purse for “more medication,” meaning more LSD. I am beginning to wonder about that girl.

“I have some hard stuff here in my backpack,” I said, and unzipped a pocket to reveal my stash of Tootsie Pops. Again she laughed loud, again it didn’t seem all that funny, but of course I was on the third deck and Kallie was on the fifth. She did another hit of acid, I licked Tootsie Pops, a few songs later we shared that second joint — and how Kallie is going to sleep tonight is a mystery to me.

There was an “only in San Francisco” moment, even though we were in Oakland. Some drunk on a walkway tried to pick a fight by yelling at me, “Hey, overweight guy with a star on your head, what are you doing here? Overweight guys can’t rock!”

I’ve heard worse, and in fact I’ve rarely heard milder. When you’re fat you get taunted sometimes, but I have thick skin. Thick, and loose. Mostly I mention the taunting because even though that guy was so drunk or stoned he could barely stand, he couldn’t call me ‘fat’ — just ‘overweight’. I’m taking that as progress toward a more peaceful, tolerant world.

Oh, and the music. I ought to say something about the music. Mick can still carry a tune. Keith never could but he carries a mean guitar. Charlie Watts looks like he’s ready to retire, or he should be wearing a tux and drumming for a symphony, but he never missed a beat. Bill Wyman did retire, yet the Stones keep rolling. Also, Ronnie Wood was present.

Surprisingly, at least to me, it all sounded pretty good, despite the echo and fade-away of the music at a baseball park. The amplification had enough bass to seriously rattle my chest on the low notes, which felt strange and awesome, and Jagger had enough adrenaline or amphetamine to keep Kallie and the crowd dancing all night.

The songs were a 50/50 mix of their old hits and new stuff off their 49th album, and all of it was sold rock, long as Richards kept his mouth shut and let Jagger do the singing. It was embarrassing when Richards sang, though, and I wonder what Jagger thinks when he’s watching Richards stand there, posed like a mannequin, singing slightly off-key.

After the concert we were about 30,000th in line to board BART, so Kallie and I had plenty of time to talk. I like her. She does more drugs in a week than I’ve done in my life, but that’s only a problem if you let it be a problem, and she has it under control. She’s employed and she has a lease, and hell, I don’t have a lease so she’s doing better than me.

She told me about her chiropractor, the man who twists her body into odd positions to keep her spine aligned. Which rhymes. She says he’s straight and she kind of likes him, but she’s impressed that even when he has his hands on her butt, torso, and legs, he’s always professional. He’s “vibe-less,” she says, meaning he gives off only doctor vibes, not guy vibes.

It’s a story I re-pondered before typing it, just now. Vibe-less is what I’d like to be, with Kallie. Friendship is too rare to risk it over some impossible romance that couldn’t happen anyway.

♦ ♦ ♦

Long day.

I’ll close with a whispered correction. I owe Kallie $50 for my ticket to tonight’s concert. That’s a lot of money, but it was worth it to me, so I might have been too judgmental a few weeks back, when I cracked wise about all the rich bastards paying huge prices to see Phantom of the Opera.

Kindly consider that rant retracted. Or mostly retracted.