Monday night I was too tired to type this, all my energy gone after the concert. Nothing much happened today, though, and I was sleepwalking anyway, so let me tell you ... the rest of the story ... about what happened after the Rolling Stones concert last night.

Kallie and I waited in line an hour and a half at the BART station, train after train, because every time a train pulled in, a thousand people from the concert filled it up. No complaints about that, really. It was a crowded concert, lots of people took the train, and that's smart. People should take the train.

When we finally got onto a train, though, it was the last train of the night.

Yeah, this has always seemed stupid to me, but the Bay Area Rapid Transit system — transit backbone for nine counties, and about 4,000,000 people — shuts down overnight, every night. After midnight, you're on your own. I'm usually not out so late, so this was the first time I’d ridden the last BART of the night, and it was chaos and madness. Cue the music from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

Kallie and I and a thousand others wedged ourselves onto the last train, but the train didn’t move. The driver announced, “This is the last train of the night. If you don’t want to spend the night in Oakland, you must take this train to your northbound destination.” Five minutes later he announced it again, and then five minutes after that and five minutes after that.

My theory: After a concert, BART expects stragglers, so they ordered the last train to wait. But there were no stragglers. Nobody on the platform, nobody running for the platform. The train idled for twenty damned minutes.

When the doors finally closed and the train rolled away, the next few stops were routine. The driver made no “last train” announcements to nobody. And then, at 12th Street Station, the train waited for ten minutes, and it got confusing.

I guess the typical track and platform transfers aren’t applicable for the last train of the night? The driver clicked the p.a. on, and gave unclear and contradictory instructions about which platform to go to for a San Francisco train. And then he said “Just a minute,” clicked off the p.a., and when he came back he said, “Disregard everything I’ve told you, there’s been a change in tracks.”

He explained, there would be no transfers at all at this station. Just this once — unlike every other BART ride ever — anyone headed for destinations on the Concord or San Francisco lines should stay on this train until MacArthur Station, and transfer there. Then the doors opened, hundreds of people said “Huh?”, a few people got off, and I hope they knew where they were going.

Similar turmoil at MacArthur Station. The driver announced what platform the other trains would be at, then corrected himself as trains arrived on platforms where they weren’t expected. I don’t understand this track confusion — trains run on tracks, and BART should know which tracks the trains will run on. Not knowing can cause oopsies. Oopsies can cost lives.

When Kallie and I found our train, we sat and waited for 32 frickin’ minutes. Turns out our first train hadn't been the last train after all. BART had sent an extra train to pick up some lost souls at the Coliseum. The train we were on, though, would still be the last train under the bay to San Francisco, so we’d have to wait at MacArthur until the extra Coliseum train got there.

Nice of BART to send that extra train. I'm all for it. But everyone on our train had caught the right train, was in the right place, knew where they were going, and we were punished for the stupidity of others.

That’s why it took three damned hours to get from the Coliseum to Powell Street, which is usually a 22-minute trip. That’s why I got home at 2:10 in the morning, and after writing yesterday's entry, got to sleep at about 3:30. That’s why I was groggy and generally worthless at work all day.

All I remember from the office is asking Kallie how she was doing, and she said, “I’m on speed, so I’m doing fine.”

The dentist’s office called me at work late this morning, asking if I'd please switch my appointment from next Wednesday to today_,_ to cover a cancellation. Darla said OK, so two teeth came out, one on each side.

They were just jagged stumps anyway, useless for years, painful when chewing, and they stank of death. I'll be better off without them, and hooray for surprise double extractions! They called at 11:30 and I was in the chair at 1:00, so I skipped a week of miserable worry and fear, compressing it into a quick bus ride.

My chair kept sinking, though. You know those hydraulic chairs you sit in for dental drilling? I’m heavier than it could handle. It's unsettling to suddenly drop an inch, just as the dentist is about to pierce your jaw with a big needle, so he fiddled with the chair's controls, but when it dropped an inch again, he gave up. They moved me into a different chair in a different room, and that dentist and a much skinnier patient moved into the chair that couldn’t hold my 300+ pounds.

They shot my face full of Novocain, of course, and during the yanks I only had to open my eyes a little wider, and they’d give me another shot of the painkiller. Good system. Something like that should be available every day, only without the dentist.

Then the tooth-pulling commenced. We’re knocking on the door of the 21st century, so maybe there’s some high-tech tool for tooth extractions, but if there is my dentist doesn’t have it. He pulled both teeth with his bare hands, basically.

He started with a glorified wrench, clamped it on a tooth, and pulled and grunted. Shattered and stained bits emerged, and then he used a screwdriver-ish chisel thing to gouge what was left out of my gums.

Eyes open wide, more Novocain delivered, thank you.

Doc stood there, hunched over, and pulled and pulled, his veins pulsing, while his pretty assistant cradled my chin in her palm, pushing my jaw in the opposite direction, toward the dentist. It’s difficult describing it, but it seemed ... precarious. He was putting so much torque into the effort, if his grip had slipped he would've punched me full in the face, maybe sliced a hole in my cheek with his tool. His arm was quivering with the work, and he was so close to me I could count the whiskers on his 1:00-shadowed face.

He didn’t slip, though, neither did his chin assistant, and I held firm between them. It's dentistry not much different from the 1830s, just with better drugs, but so long as I’m doped up and not in agony, what’s to complain. No lollipop was offered, though.

They gave me a prescription for something wonderful, because Doc Dentist says it might hurt tomorrow.

♦ ♦ ♦

I always buy a Chronicle on my walk to work, and usually buy an Examiner on the way home, yet I’ve never read any coverage about labor troubles at the newspapers in the newspapers — only in the weekly Bay Guardian. Anyone who doesn’t read the Bay Guardian must’ve been baffled to find no newspapers this morning.

The strike is on, and when it’s eventually settled please remember that the Chronicle and Examiner didn’t think it was newsworthy. Seems curious, yes? There was a recent labor dispute at BART — a strike was threatened but averted — and the newspapers reported every step of it. Here's what the union says, and here's what management says. For weeks.

The papers couldn't report on their own labor dispute, though, because reporting both sides fairly would've made management look like greedy assholes. Thus, the threat of a news strike never made the news, and now — surprise, there's no paper on your porch.

Newspapers report the news, but they also decide what’s news, and the millionaires running both papers decided that you didn’t need to know a strike was coming. Ever wonder what other news the newspapers have decided you don’t need to know?

♦ ♦ ♦

Doc Dentist was right. My mouth hurts. Pill time, then bedtime.

With the gauze gone from where those two teeth were pulled, this morning I cupped my hands over my mouth and nose and exhaled, and it smelled like breath, not death. The horrid stench I’ve been exhaling for so long is gone. I smell so kissably sweet I want to kiss myself. Thank you, Doc Dentist!

I'm a quiet guy, but my awful breath has kept me even quieter, and I usually don’t want to sicken whoever I’m talking to, so I’ve developed the habit of talking through the side of my mouth. No more sideways talking, though it might be hard to break the habit.

Halitosis isn’t what’s made me a loner, of course. I’ve consciously chosen a life of 99% solitude, because most people are brainless robotic cliché-mongers without an original thought anywhere in their heads. That’s what’s available for a social life, so I'd rather be alone.

Losing most of my bad breath won’t make me a club-hopping socialite, but I’ve been inhibited about getting to know those very rare souls who might be interesting. Maybe now, I won’t unintentionally repulse people I want to say hi to.

♦ ♦ ♦

Some selected shorts played at the Red Vic tonight. It seemed like a worthwhile gamble, and it was. With two very good mini-films, an excellent one, a stinker, a double-stinker, and one that was so-so, it was a fine night's entertainment, all for the price of just one hole punched in my Red Vic season ticket — about four bucks.

First was Spring Break (1994), a low-brow comedy that delivered laughs. When a New Jersey scumbag’s girlfriend tells him she slept some some guy during spring vacation in Florida, he gets his best friend and his mom's gun, and drives to Florida to kill the guy. Does that sound hilarious? Well, it’s funnier than it sounds. The final punchline was a letdown, but the build-up was good enough that I’d like to see more from the writer/director, except I don’t know who it was. I wasn’t taking notes, and the theater had no program or photocopied fliers or anything.

Faeriefilm (1993) is a concept I hadn’t seen before, and it was quite well-executed. It’s a documentary, with gay gents telling how they deal with their sexual selves. It would’ve worked fine as a typical documentary, but instead of typical — talking heads, yak yak yak — we heard the interviews’ voices but saw original cartoons inspired by what they said. It was beautiful.

Doper (1994) is one of the funniest, most rewarding shorts I’ve ever seen. It’s ostensibly about a young man who’s a productive member of society and recently won “Employee of the Month” at work, but he’s not quite the candidate for the Rotary Club that he appears to be. Always, no matter what he’s doing — driving the forklift at work, seeing his girlfriend, or just relaxing at home — he’s stoned. Hilariously bursts the bubble of the war on drugs.

Queen Mercy (1994) was one of the stinkers. It’s an intriguing idea, about a woman working in a sex club, who hates men and kills them as a hobby. With that concept, there's plenty of potential to make a strong statement, but if it had anything to say it must’ve been whispered, and I didn’t catch it at all.

Detritus (1993), however, makes Queen Mercy look like the winner of eleven Oscars and six Golden Globes. With plotless and pointless images, it’s the kind of avant-garde experimental pretentious horseplop that keeps me away from San Francisco’s Cinematheque. For all the art critics and poseurs who claim they appreciate and admire this stuff, five simple words: The emperor has no clothes.

Pleasant Hill U.S.A. (1994) examines the aftermath of a bank hold-up and double-murder in a tiny American town. I’d heard good things about this one, and it’s what brought me to tonight’s sextuple feature, but it’s not what I’d hoped for. It seems to be compromising itself as it goes along — it starts with strong cynicism, but evolves by the end into maybe an audition reel for Inside Edition.

♦ ♦ ♦

I’ve got a simple question. Is it true, is it fiction, or is it as I suspect a little bit of both? —John Hudleston

John, I really am fat. I really am a slob. This really is the diary of a fat slob. If I was making stuff up, I’d write myself fighting crime, or shoplifting, or winning at sidewalk chess, or at least going on dates and getting lucky twice in a while.

I’m not a reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, though, so I might add a wisecrack once in a while. Often I fudge the dates — if a whole lot happens on Wednesday and nothing happens on Thursday, half of Wednesday might be moved to Thursday. The extra boring parts get snipped away, leaving only the boring parts, and the names have been changed, of course. Other than that, yeah, this is my life. It’s 98.5% true.

Addendum, 2021: I was curious, so I researched three of those six short subjects (the ones I liked).

Spring Break was made by Frank Sebastiano, but it's so obscure it's not on his IMDB curriculum vitae. Sebastiano went on to a long career writing and producing for television, on shows including Saturday Night Live, Late Show with David Letterman, and Everybody Hates Chris.

Faeriefilm was made by Eugene Salandra. He's had a successful run in animation ever since, but the only other thing he's worked on that I've seen is Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996).

Doper is where my Googling surprised me most. I still remember the film, remember laughing and laughing and loving' it. Three people were principally involved in making Doper, and based on IMDB's pages, none of them ever did much of anything else that seems of interest, at least not to me.

The weekly Bay Guardian comes out on Wednesdays, but this week and for the duration of the newspaper strike, they’re printing on Friday, too. So my biggest problem of life without the dailies — no Friday edition, with all its movie listings and reviews — has been solved.

Yeah, I miss the news in the newspaper too, but I can get news elsewhere. Long as I know where’s the best double feature of the week, that's "fully-informed."

Also picked up the first issue of the strike paper, called Free Press, written and assembled and distributed by the striking staff of the Chronicle and Examiner. It’s nice to see Herb Caen’s column again, and Free Press is free, so I shouldn’t complain. If people didn’t complain, though, we’d still be living in caves and eating raw dinosaur gonads, so ...

Free Press is too damned detached, that’s my complaint. It has a welcome helping of local news, including coverage of the strike, but it’s written in that all-too-familiar and aloof “objective journalism” style, perfectly up to the Chronicle and Examiner’s standards of dullness.

Objective journalism bites. Report the facts, yes, please, but if a reporter is angry about the situation — and they’re on strike, so they have some things to be angry about — then that anger is a fair part of the story. Don’t suppress it, tell us about it.

I’ll take fair but angry journalism like the Anderson Valley Advertiser or Bay Guardian over impartial-observer play-acting like you find in the dailies, and now, sadly, in the Free Press. Finally unshackled by the millionaires (maybe billionaires?) who own the Chronicle and Examiner, its workers have delivered something just as bland, but without Calvin & Hobbes.

♦ ♦ ♦

Regular readers have heard me grumble about the company I work for, but for any newcomers, here’s the basics: It’s one of America’s largest retailers, operating hundreds of department stores under several different names. This company has been in Chapter 11 bankruptcy for several years, but they’re now in the process of merging with their top competitor, which ought to be illegal. It will create an international conglomerate of almost 500 stores, operating under fourteen names — regional chains, national chains, and international chains.

Think of it — any time you walk into any department store, more than likely it’ll be one of my employer’s stores. When you think you’re getting shabby treatment at one store, and you vow never to return and take your business elsewhere, harrumph? You’ll probably be taking your business to the same corporation, just with a different sign on the awning.

Dissatisfied with your Pontiac? Buy a Buick next time. That'll show 'em.

The merger hasn’t cleared anti-trust regulators yet, and won’t be approved by the feds until December at the earliest. That’s just a technicality, though, and technicalities be damned, corporations are more important than laws, so today in our e-mail directories, everything came together. Both corporations, all stores. I can now send an interoffice communication to the flunkies who do what I do in any of those other chains that aren't really "other chains."

First thing I noticed, scrolling through a directory twice as big as yesterday, is that there are lots of people doing basically the same work I do, in the other corporation, and in various branches of the monstrous merged entity. Will there be layoffs, then? "Efficiencies" to be sought, people to be pink-slipped?

Why, absolutely not. What a silly question. Someone in New Jersey sent everyone in the company a memo today, reassuring us that no layoffs are planned.

A memo from New Jersey? Well, I’m certainly reassured. How stupid to they think we are?

♦ ♦ ♦

Where my latest two missing teeth used to be, there was no pain yesterday, but plenty today. The two extractions aren’t healing the same way. One toothless hole has the pink color you’d expect two days after surgery, but the hole on the other side of my mouth has turned white and painful, the pain increasing as the day goes on.

I’ve taken several of Dr Dentist’s marvelous prescription pills, but to be safe I called his office, and explained what's going on in my mouth. Whoever answered the phone reassured me. "That's normal," she said. "It'll take several days, up to a week or longer to heal."

I don't think she heard or understood what I'd said — that the holes are healing differently — and I believe her reassurance that "That's normal" about as much as I believer my employer saying, “No layoffs.”

Something’s gone wrong in my mouth. Playing with it like I probably shouldn’t, I tongued a gooey oblong black and pink blob out of the tooth gap that’s hurting, and with a little pressure the blob squirted all over. It’s not a remnant from breakfast or lunch, and not the right color or consistency to be congealed blood.

Oh well. Took two more pills, and I'll call again in the morning.

♦ ♦ ♦

Kallie invited me to join her, and several of her flatmates and friends, some night soon, and watch the Stones video she purchased at the concert. I told her I'd check my calendar and get back to her, because simply shouting NO! would've been rude.

I like the Stones and enjoyed the concert, but I’m not especially eager for another night of the Rolling Stones right away. And with all of Kallie’s friends and flatmates there, too? It sounds suspiciously like a party.

Kallie is cool, but — a party? No.

I’ve been to so many parties (at least three!) and regretted it every time. Hang out with a bunch of strangers, whose names I’ll forget thirty seconds after shaking their hands? No.

It’s a Kallie event, so there will undoubtedly be marijuana and probably harder drugs. If it was just Kallie and me, the drugs might be a plus, but unlimited drugs in a room with an unknown quantity of strangers? Mama told me not to come, so — No.

Just, 77 kinds of no. I’d rather have more teeth pulled.

♦ ♦ ♦

Silk Stockings at the Paramount Theater was not bad, for fluff. It’s Ninotchka with tunes, and also with Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, and music and lyrics by Cole Porter. Cold war comedy about good old American romantic know-how that melts a communist woman’s heart. There's also a peculiar performance by Peter Lorre, as a comical commie who almost sings and almost dances.

It’s pleasant but dated, and the movie’s 1957 vintage turns sour when Charisse sings, “A woman to a man is just a woman, but a man to a woman is her life.” What the hell? Did people really believe that crap, even as lyrics in a silly song? Charisse and Astaire have an argument a few minutes later, though, and she tells him off in fine almost-feminist fashion.

The original Ninotchka — Billy Wilder! Greta Garbo! — is preferred, and not marred by any songs. Also, the remake would've been better if I'd won Dec-O-Win, the spinning wheel game they play on stage before every screening. I've been to dozens of shows at the Paramount, so one of these nights, odds are, I'll finally win Dec-O-Win. Tonight was not that night. I was singing songs from Silk Stockings on my BART ride home, though.

It started raining last night, then started raining hard, and it still hasn’t let up. For 18 hours now, it’s been a rainstorm like San Francisco doesn’t often see. Hell, I’m from Seattle, a place famous for its rain, and I’m impressed. Paging Noah.

When I rolled over in bed this morning, the pillow was soggy. Water was dripping down from the ceiling, and the paint up there was bulging, all puffed, like if you fill your cheeks with air. It wasn’t air, of course. Just more water, under the paint.

I’m on the top floor of this dive hotel, and they re-tarred the roof over my head just a few weeks ago. That’s American workmanship for you, but I’m sure they didn’t use union roofers or anyone who knew what they were doing. Probably the landlord’s brother-in-law did the work.

So I rolled my tiny bed out of the way of the drips and the bulge, put my biggest garbage can underneath, then climbed up on a chair and poked a hole in the swollen paint, and watched that gusher go Whoosh! Lots of the waterfall missed the garbage can, though. Sorry, Mr Patel.

Everyone on the top floor has water in their room, and the mumbling man was crying, so I went into his room and helped him move some waterlogged boxes out of the way of more water. It wasn't dripping, it was flowing steady. He didn't say thanks, but that's OK. I don't think he's capable of saying thanks.

It never stopped raining all day. I had planned to visit the Rainbow Store, and maybe see a movie, but since I felt crappy and less than waterproof, it was easier to stay home and read zines.

♦ ♦ ♦

What do you call a toothache where there’s no tooth? A toothlessache? It hurts so much that the codeine can’t keep the pain hidden, so of course I phoned the dentist. Got frickin’ drenched phoning the dentist, from the phone booth in front of the hotel. This being Saturday, all I got was a recording, and an automated promise that the dentist would call back. He hasn't called back.

Where two of my teeth were pulled on Wednesday, one gap is healing nicely, and in the other gap there’s this grody white skyscraper-shaped stuff where the tooth used to be. It looks a little like a tooth, actually, but it’s nothing toothlike. It's fuzzy. I scraped it away with a q-tip, took a whiff and it made me want to gag and barf and die and take you with me. A few hours later, the white grody skyscraper had grown back, and there's a fever, too.

It’s an infection, of course. I don’t need four years of dental school to figure that out. Also, though, I don’t need to spend four hours waiting in Kaiser’s emergency room, and pay whatever preposterous price they’ll charge for ignoring me. Instead I dipped a q-tip in generic Bactine, spread it all around on the infection, and took what must’ve amounted to an overdose of aspirin along with the dentist’s happy pills.

It's still raining, hard.

Feeling fairly crappy, I called the dentist again, and again left a message telling anyone who’s listening (is anyone listening?) that I’m infected where the tooth came out. Moderate agony here, and the pain pills are running low. Please call me back or just call the pharmacy and get me a prescription for antibiotics. I was electronically promised, "Your call will be returned shortly," but again, my call was not returned shortly.

I also called my doctor from Kaiser-Permanente, and left a message there. They also promised that my call would be returned shortly. That call has also not been returned.

Yeah, I know, it’s Sunday, but the doctor and dentist’s messages didn’t say anything about the weekends. The doctor’s machine says, call 9-1-1 and go to the emergency room if it’s an emergency. Well, yeah. Of course.

But I’m not doing that. Not until I’m closer to death, sorry. Non-lawyers can’t comprehend much from the four-page small-print basically-bullshit contract Kaiser-Permanente sent when I'd earned "coverage," but I found the words "emergency room" directly adjacent to something saying I’m responsible for the cost incurred.

Instead I continued bathing the infection in generic Bactine, taking the pain pills (only two remain), and taking aspirin. I also did some doobie, because I’ve read that it helps deaden pain, and ate a lot of ice cream. The ice cream serves no medicinal purpose, just tastes good, but that’s important, too.

♦ ♦ ♦

Speaking of useless phone messages, do you remember the phone tag my mother and I were playing? She kept calling and saying simply, “Please call me,” which is not like her at all. Usually when she calls and gets my machine, she talks and talks and talks.

I kept returning her calls, and getting her answering machine, so I’d say, “I called back. Whatever you keep calling me about, please leave a message on my machine.”

And then she’d call me back, and simply say to my machine, “Please call me.”

After six rounds of this it pissed me off, and I quit calling back. After that, Mom quit calling. Now it’s been weeks since I heard from her, so today I called her number, and she answered, and we talked until I ran out of quarters for the phone booth. And she’s fine. Nobody was sick. Nobody’s died.

“Well, why did you keep calling, Mom, and keep saying, ‘Please call me’?”

“Oh, no reason,” she said. “I just miss your voice, and wanted to talk.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Felt lightheaded. Took a long nap. Woke up wet, but wet with sweat this time, not rain like yesterday. It’s mostly stopped raining. Generally I'm miserable, but what the hell, I’m going to the movies.

Packed the backpack with candy, water, and codeine I wish was cocaine, and BARTed to Berkeley for a noir double feature at the Elmwood — free with one of my Forrest Gump memorial passes.

Key Largo (1948) is Humphrey Bogart at his best, and Bogey's best is basically the best. We’re at a small resort in lovely Florida, but a hurricane is coming, and so are some bad guys. Lauren Bacall simmers on the side like delicious green beans with slivered almonds, and Edward G Robinson is Edward G Robinson, nuff said. There’s a subplot that’s racially insensitive by present-day standards, but the movie was made almost fifty years ago, what did you expect?

Casablanca (1942) is simply one of the greatest films ever made, and there’s nothing new I can say about it. If you haven’t seen it, or for that matter Key Largo, you don’t squat about good movies.

The theater seems to have solved its sound problem of a week ago, but now there’s another grave problem. The popcorn was far too salty.

♦ ♦ ♦

Home. Ate a little. Tired. Mouth hurts. Took more happy pills. Took more aspirin. Smoked more pot. Went to bed. Obviously I'm alive to type the tale, but I am not having a good time.

There were garbage bags draped over all the computer terminals in the office, and my first thought was that the company was out of business. But no, they would’ve shut the elevators off.

Remember the rain all day on Saturday? Well, it rained where I work, too, and the store’s roof is no more waterproof than the waterlogged roof of my rez hotel. Water, water everywhere, and I don’t work on the top floor of the department store. There are two floors above me — executive offices and some messy storage areas — so I assume and certainly hope they were flooded even worse than my area.

The carpet was soggy, the chairs were smelly, and it dripped so much on the photocopier that it was out of order, so I couldn't copy my zine. And yet, we were open for business, with big fans set up to blow wet stinking air all around, and we sat in uncomfortable folding metal chairs while our wet chairs were upside-down and drying out.

It was at least interesting, unlike most days at the office.

♦ ♦ ♦

What's the toxicity level is for aspirin? I am swallowing three orange enteric-coated tablets every hour or so, the keep the toothless pain subdued, now that all the stronger stuff the dentist prescribed is gone.

Nobody called me back, from the messages I left at the dentist’s office and at Kaiser-Permanente. I called the dentist’s office, and spoke to whoever answered the phone, because, “Dr Dentist does not talk to patients on the phone unless it’s an emergency.”

She wouldn’t believe it’s an emergency, and told me the same things she'd told me when I called on Friday — my pain is perfectly normal, she said; it’s not unusual that the two tooth extractions are healing differently, she said; it’s normal for disgusting crud to ooze out of the wound, she said. What I said was, “You don’t really give a damn, do you?”

It is visually obvious that my mouth is infected, so why can’t I just walk into a drug store and buy an antibiotic? Why am I required to get a prescription from the dentist, who caused the infection, and who seems to pay people to keep me from talking to him? He probably wants me to come in and see him for whatever that costs, before he’ll let me have an antibiotic.

♦ ♦ ♦

Did some rush-rush work for Babs, and some unrelated rush-rush work for a junior exec. Babs is my boss’s boss, so I cleared everything off my desk and my morning and did what she wanted to do. Didn’t make a pip. The junior exec, though, isn’t in my chain of command, plus I’ve assessed him as almost human, so I unloaded a little:

“Four people used to do the work I do now, and if you need something ‘rush-rush’ you’ll have to hire a few of them back, or take a number and wait your turn, because Babs outranks you so I gotta do her crap first.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Another example of how stupidly this company is run:

Carlotta has been working in our group for a week now, but the suits in charge still haven’t given her access to any of the programs we use on the computer. It's not intentional, it's incompetence. Darla tells me, "We're working on it," but what's the point of bringing her on board if she's not able to work?

We’re sort-of training her by having her sit beside us and watch us work, but we’re way, way past the maximum she can learn from that, without ever clicking her own keyboard and looking at her own screen. I was working on my own by my first afternoon here, and I assume Carlotta is smarter than me. Most people are. But we have her doing dummy-work, stuff so unimportant that we sometimes simply trash it when it’s stacked too tall.

♦ ♦ ♦

I found today’s Chronicle in the pooproom — the paper is now being published by management and strikebreakers — and saw the front page long enough to absorb just one headline: A striker was killed, electrocuted, while trying to disconnect the power at one of the papers’ distribution centers. This was reported “by Jim Harrison, Chronicle staff writer.”

Fuck you, Jim Harrison.

I’m not even a big union man, really. Office flunkies have no union.

When I hear about a strike, though, any strike anywhere, that's all I need to know. Do you root for Goliath? No. Nobody walks away from their paycheck on a whim, so if workers vote to strike, any workers, any strike, I’m on the strikers’ side.

It's damned low to be a strikebreaker, a scab, unless you're starving to death, and maybe even then. Being a scab with your byline on the front page, reporting the death of a worker who was trying to keep you, Jim Harrison, from taking his job? That's major league low.

I would not want to be Jim Harrison, Chronicle staff writer. He should meet a few Teamsters on a cloudy, moonless night.

♦ ♦ ♦

With a never-ending toothache and a new bottle of aspirin in my backpack, I BARTed to the Roxie for a cheap 1960s exploitation double feature, but both movies surprised me. I was expecting enjoyable schlock, but the first movie was quite good and the second was better.

The Shame of Patty Smith (1961) is that she’s pregnant, doesn’t want to be, and abortion is illegal. She goes to her doctor, a balding man who calls all women “child,” and gets a lecture on the law. She goes to church and gets a wide-eyed sermonette from the priest. Finally, she makes a phone call to someone who knows someone who might be able to arrange an abortion, if she can pay an outrageous price. It’s a chilling look at a time some cruel bastards want to return to, when police detectives from the abortion squad arrested doctors, and every pregnant woman was required by law to give birth.

It Won’t Rub Off, Baby (a/k/a Sweet Love, Bitter) is about race relations circa 1968, and I’m not sure much has changed yet. Against a backdrop of drugs, booze, and beautiful jazz, Dick Gregory and Don Murray forge a friendship. Gregory’s character is a sax player with a heavy drug habit, clearly a riff on Charlie Parker, and Murray plays a college prof intent on drinking himself to death after the death of his wife. This movie is tough, realistic, and relentlessly depressing. Hard to watch but I’m glad I did. Excellent music, too.

Sometimes people bring snacks or sweet-somethings to work, put ‘em on a counter and everyone shares. Once or twice a month Jennifer bakes cookies. Darla occasionally buys a box of donuts. Peter brought nachos last week.

I tend to eat more than my share of such snackage, so I bring something too, sometimes. This morning I brought a jumbo-size bucket of prunes. Help yourself. Just about everyone at work is full of shit — I certainly am — so it can’t hurt and might help.

♦ ♦ ♦

The office smelled both mildewy and chemically, because they applied something to the carpet overnight. Neither stink was overpowering, though, and I got to sit in my soft chair again, nice and dry, instead of resting my rear on hard metal.

And then nothing interesting happened all day. The closest to interesting was, while inputting price changes for a long list of panty hose UPCs, I decided to change a line of data from ‘color:flesh’ to ‘color:caucasian’. Dragging the company into the late 1960s, against their will.

♦ ♦ ♦

After work, Beatrice and I finally got together for that long-threatened beer, which was also not interesting. We talked about the election (she cares) and about work (neither of us care), and we had a few light laughs like people are supposed to do, or so I’ve heard.

It’s hard for me to judge whether it went well, me and her at a bar after work, working at being friends. With minimal social life, I can only compare it to my recent evenings with Kallie, but sorry, Beatrice, but there’s no comparison. With Kallie I'm not nervous, and she seems relaxed, too. I like Beatrice at work, but tonight we were never quite relaxed, always unsure what to say next. Same as with people everywhere, in any social situation, we had nothing much to say. Now I have nothing much to say about having nothing much to say.

I always tip, and tip more than I can afford, but I didn’t tip the bartender when we left. The guy had been nowhere to be found, even though the bar was barely busy, and I had to ask for glasses when we ordered the beer. Like he expected we’d sip it out of the bottle?

Tell me if my standards are too high. I don’t drink beer much or often, and when I do it’s always straight from the bottle or can. Beatrice is a lady, though, and we were in a bar, not a dive bar but a place with napkins and ashtrays and “Girl from Ipanema” music. Other customers had their booze in glasses. And the biggest clue is, I was dressed — if I’m drinking beer from a bottle, I should be in my underwear and a t-shirt, max.

♦ ♦ ♦

The beer did seem to reduce my ongoing mouth pain, though, so after saying good night to Beatrice, I bought four six-packs on my walk home.

♦ ♦ ♦

It’s election day, and the polls closed at 8PM, so I had plenty of time to vote, but I didn’t. I never vote. Gave up on that some years back. There is no-one running in this election, or in my lifetime, who’s worth the bother of ten minutes’ effort on a Tuesday night.

Elections are decided by millions, thousands, or occasionally hundreds of votes, but one vote doesn’t matter. It’s like one pebble at the beach. The outcome won't be determined by whether one fat slob sits in his chair picking his nose or walks to the polling place and back.

Anyway, elections are a tragedy, on endless auto-repeat. People who might be able to solve society’s problems don’t run, or if they do, they’re eliminated long before election day. It's always a choice between a dullard possessing 2/3 of a single solitary clue and someone completely clueless. This idiot, or that idiot.

Today's top election is between California's Governor Pete Wilson and his ‘challenger’ Kathleen Brown, but I hate 'em both. Wilson is a millionaire, went to Yale, has been a politician for 25 years and accomplished nothing worth accomplishing. Brown is a high-power attorney, her father and brother were both Governors already, but I don't think the job should be inherited, and she hasn't said anything that convinces me she knows anything.

Is there a clump of kitty litter's difference between Brown and Wilson? They'd both lock me up for the disapproved vegetation in my cigarette. If it’s my “third strike,” they'd both agree I should be locked away for life. Wilson, being a Republican, would keep me in prison an extra ten years after I’m dead and call it 'punitive damages', but that difference isn't worth the small hassle of casting a ballot.

Screw ‘em both. Screw the elections, and screw everything that's wrong with America that nobody running for office intends to fix. I try not to give this country, or this world, a moment’s thought, but when I do I want to cry, more than I want to vote.

Addendum, 2021: My feelings about voting haven't changed, really. My marvelous wife always voted, though, and usually I accompanied her, so when we became a couple I began voting again. I've voted in every election, big or small, since 1997.

I vote not because it matters, but because it’s fun voting against Republicans. And because my wife wanted me to.

At work, me and two junior executives talked about Generations, the upcoming Star Trek movie. They say they can’t wait to see the movie.

I can. I can wait a long time.

I’ve always been a Star Trek fan, and been to all the movies on the day they opened. This movie, though, will be the bottom bill at a discount double feature in a month or two, because Star Trek: The Next Generation is taking over the Star Trek franchise.

I never enjoyed the second series as much as the original Trek. Data is fine but he’s no Spock, you know? The first few years of STTNG were so dull and plodding, I stopped watching. The show got better so I came back, but how many times did they bring Q on again and again, when the writers couldn’t think of a decent story to tell?

My biggest complaint, though, is Counselor Deanna Troi. The concept of her is repellent — a thought-patrol agent, searching everyone's minds without a warrant. That’s her job.

And she's not merely scanning aliens' and enemies' minds for signs of treachery, she’s also the ship’s shrink. Everyone’s on the Enterprise is supposed to come to Counselor Troi with their problems. You'd better tell the truth, too, because she knows when you're lying, and knows your emotions, maybe better than you do.

And in addition to oozing herself all over your moods and feelings, she also writes performance reviews for everyone on the crew, which seems like a major conflict of interest for a shrink. Your boss is also your psychiatrist, and walks around between your ears, and always knows whether you're happy, sad, grumpy, in love, or in despair? Uh, beam me down. I'd rather work for Burger King.

This new movie, Star Trek Generations, has one thing going for it, though, and that’s the secret everyone’s known for months — Captain Kirk is supposed to die. William Shatner has always been Star Trek’s weak link, so I’m already applauding Kirk's death scene.

Please, Paramount Pictures — don’t pull a Spock with Kirk. Spock died in Star Trek II, but came back to life in Star Trek III. When Kirk dies, please, keep him dead.

♦ ♦ ♦

The office's main photocopier was fixed yesterday, so today I came in early and stayed late at the office, and got the October issue printed. Sure is convenient that the company has lax security, and never searches my backpack.

After work, with no breaks and no dinner, I did nothing but fold and staple and stuff envelopes, from 5:45 when I got home until 8:51 when my work here was done. Then came two beers, one to celebrate getting the zines out, and one to hold back the mouth pain. I’m already tired of beer, though, so I stirred in cinnamon and sugar. Not recommended.

And all evening long while I was doing the above, an alarm has been sounding down the block. It’s still going. It’s not a car alarm; I have all the car alarms memorized. This is more industrial, more loudly insistent, like a warning that nuclear meltdown is underway. It has three distinct horns, squawking in rhythm and always in the same sequence, and every few minutes it stops ... then starts up again.

I’m eating dinner now. If the alarm is still sounding when I’m done eating, vengeance is mine.

♦ ♦ ♦

You know what’s almost as annoying as hearing that alarm for three hours? I put some raw eggs in Tupperware, and put the Tupperware and a hammer in my backpack, and rode the elevator down … but during the elevator ride the noise finally stopped.

♦ ♦ ♦

There’s a melody from Silk Stockings last Friday, and it won’t stop whistling in my head tonight. Can I egg and hammer that?

‘Friend’ is a trite word, the way most people use it. Working with you, knowing your name, being a neighbor, lunching at the same table, or passing a few sentences at a coffee shop doesn’t make you my friend. Please. I have standards.

You’re a friend if I can relax around you, and you're not offended or angered at something I might casually say, and if you can relax around me, without saying something stupid. That's all, but that's a lot, and that's why I’ve never had more than a few friends.

It feels like the truth, though, to say that I spent this evening with a friend, my first friend in San Francisco. I was Kallie’s little helper, shopping for supplies and then helping pack for her vacation. She’s going to the shores of some northern California lake, where she’ll be camping alone with a two-week’s supply of marijuana.

That sounds like a great vacation, even without the weed. Or without the camping, for that matter. It's the 'alone' part that makes it sound ideal.

We went to Radio Shack for batteries, Woolworth for a tablecloth, and the Rainbow Store for food and miscellanea. Kallie did the shopping, and I did the toting, because of her bad back.

She bought us dinner at the Chinese Gourmet restaurant in Glen Park (it was good, not great), and I schlepped the supplies into her house. Kallie showed me her collection of Rolling Stones albums. I’m beginning to suspect she likes the Stones. Her flatmate, Janey or Jilly or something like that, remembered me from the other time I’d been there, and I remembered her — all chatty and bubbly and annoying again.

Kallie danced (alone) to “Start Me Up,” offered me some pot (I declined), and then I came home. The time with Kallie was better than sitting alone in my rez hotel, and I like sitting alone in my rez hotel, but transcribing it further would be boring for me and for you.

My one-week vacation starts on the last day of her two weeks, so it’ll be three weeks after tomorrow before I see Kallie again. Maybe I shouldn’t be counting? I’ll miss her, though. Not sure what she might be or become to me, but Kallie is a friend.

♦ ♦ ♦

Today I took no aspirin, to see what the raw pain levels might be. The infected gap was painful from alarm clock to nighty-night, but the pain was bearable, and didn’t get worse as the day went along.

With a flashlight at the mirror, I can see that the good extraction has completely healed — it’s smooth and painless, and the same color as the gums around it.

The evil extraction is still white and fuzzy with whatever is growing on it, and I’m still bathing it with Bactine on a q-tip, and the q-tip still stinks like moist moldy diapers when I whiff it. No more stinking pus has been found in the gap, though, and the gums are slowly closing in around the white fluffy fungus — what had been a tooth-sized gash in my mouth is now only half as big. With the aperture closing, the white inside looks sorta like a sleepy eyeball looking at me, and it's getting tight, poking the Bactine q-tip into the eyeball.

Should I worry that what looks and smells and feels like an infection is slowly being sealed inside my face? Nah, I refuse to worry. After all, my dentist’s receptionist tells me this is normal.

This is how we honor the nation’s veterans — by not delivering the mail.

Veterans Day is one of those holidays that are only holidays if you work for the government. For poor schlumps like me, it’s a work day like any other, except that I stupidly forgot it’s a holiday, and futilely went to the post office at lunch to buy some stamps.

♦ ♦ ♦

Once I was a hard worker, as I recall. Seems to me, an employer is basically paying my rent and stocking my refrigerator, and in exchange I ought to give 'em an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, as the saying goes. So I've tried to be worth my wages and maybe a little bit more, and maybe I'll try again, at some job in the future. At this dump, though, I'm done trying. It’s a pigpoop company, so I’ve become a pigpoop employee.

An e-mail from New Jersey reminded us that the company’s e-mail system is only for work-related communications. In response, I wasted an hour today, sending and receiving replies to that e-mail, jokes and gibberish to and from 17 other inmates on the same cellblock.

I was also seriously distracted by Carlotta’s cleavage, so yes, it was a fine day at the office, making my minimal effort and waiting patiently to be canned.

Maybe it won’t be much longer. Merger-mania continues, illegally. An e-mail from Personnel (or ‘Human Resources’) claimed again that there’s no need to worry about staff reductions after the merger, but … since so many people have been asking, the e-mail said, here’s the severance policy.

“If” there are layoffs, ‘associates’ (workers like me) will get a week and a half’s pay for every year they’ve worked. I’ve been here for a year, so that's a week and a half's pay. Fire me now. I need the money.

♦ ♦ ♦

Jennifer was reading today’s scab Chronicle at her desk. What an asswipe. The strike has turned the morning newspaper into an asswipe-detection device, “and it really, really works!” Jennifer usually doesn’t read the paper at work, so did she buy a Chronicle only to announce she’s an asswipe?

We all already knew, Jenn.

I didn’t say anything about it, though. Office politics. I gotta work with that woman, five days a week.

♦ ♦ ♦

It’s twilight on a Friday. Home from work, I sat at the typewriter, and far as I’m concerned the weekend is already underway and it’s fabulous.

In this tiny room, in this dumpy hotel, with the sound of wind and traffic and a beggar on the sidewalk three floors below, with my 50-inch britches unbuckled and smelly t-shirt off, I am happily hitting the wrong keys and typing what I want to type even though it’s all worthless words.

No plans for tonight. No plans for tomorrow. Hardly anything planned for Sunday, and everything is going according to plan. This, dear diary, is the life Margaret called pathetic. It’s the best.

♦ ♦ ♦

More good news! I had my first bloodless b.m. in months just now, perhaps the first tangible evidence that my mostly-vegetarian diet is agreeing with my body. Also, it still hurts where that tooth used to be, but four aspirin every four hours seems to be exactly the dose and schedule that keeps the pain minimized.

It was a nice day to do nothing, which is what I did, interrupted only for a jaunt to the Rainbow to stock up on beans and rice and et cetera.

On my way out of the building, I was annoyed to see a Chronicle sports page in the hotel lobby, so I stuffed it in the trash can.

Atop the BART escalator, some scab was selling papers, and I shouted at him, “You make me sick.” He said something back to me, but I couldn’t hear it, riding the rolling stairway down.

In the station, yet another strikebreaker was selling a tall stack of papers. Newspapers everywhere, many more this morning than I’d seen in the last week and a half. My mood was dropping like a hooker’s panties, so I growled up a thick wad of phlegm and took aim at an Examiner front page, and bent over to spit at it from inches away.

Tongue curled, lips puckered, loogie loaded, here it comes — but at the last moment I decoded the banner headline, upside down from my angle:

pǝlʇʇǝs ǝʞᴉɹʇs ɹǝdɐdsʍǝN

Swallowed my spit and kept walking, but regretted it within footsteps. Yeah, I should've loogied that stack of papers. If it’s still headline news that the strike has been settled, then that issue of the Examiner was written by scabs, and I’m not buying it.

Won’t buy tomorrow’s paper, either, because the vote to ratify usually takes a few days. Maybe on Monday morning I’ll buy a Chronicle from the old guy in the newsbooth at Powell @ O’Farrell, tip him big, and get back in the habit of reading the daily lies.

♦ ♦ ♦

After lazing and grazing the rest of the day, I was thinking about unanswered letters, with a sunken feeling in my gut. Letters to write is an obligation, and I hate obligations.

It's something I hadn't anticipated about making a zine — letters. There are two letters to be answered on my end table, one magnetized to the fridge, one taped to the light switch, and one next to the typewriter.

People read the zine, like it I guess, and that's what I'm hoping for. They write letters, and I love the letters ... but writing a letter back to Billy Bob Bifflesnort in Hog’s Hide, Iowa feels like a chore.

And after that, four more letters to write? Hell, I don't write that many letters to my family in a year.

There are other things on my to-do list — go to the movies, read zines and a few novels I’ve been meaning to get to, gross out tourists in Union Square, talk back to the street preachers, etc. Gotta write this drivel, too.

Therefore I am absolving myself of all guilt over unanswered letters. The new policy will be:

Letters are excellent and appreciated. I read 'em all, and print selected highlights if they’re interesting. But letters are never owed. You don’t owe me a letter, and I don’t owe you a letter, so those five letters are in the bin now.

If it sounds like I'm an ass, let me explain: I'm an ass.

Ten minutes ago, at 6:29 AM, just as I was unhooking April’s lacy frilly white brassiere in my dreams, a horn honked from the street below and into my open window, again, and then again. Someone’s an ass, and good morning.

Whenever traffic wakes me up, I think about switching to a different room in the rez hotel. I want a room with a window overlooking the street, so I can reply to the honks with eggs or tin cans.

Do I want my vengeance enough to talk to Mr Patel about changing rooms? Maybe. Do I want vengeance enough to pack up this mess and schlep it all to some other room, where my neighbors behind either wall might be louder than the neighbors I have now? Nah.

♦ ♦ ♦

Whale caroms. Don’t ask me what it means cuz I do not know.

When something pops into my mind while I’m away from home, I write a quick note to myself, to remind me to write about it later. It's the only way this zine could exist.

Here's a note, found in my windbreaker pocket this morning. It’s my handwriting, and it's on a piece of letterhead from where I work, so I must've written it at the office. It's legible, so there's no mistaking what it says, and it says:

Whale caroms.

♦ ♦ ♦

Kallie asked me to help her get packed for her vacation, so my afternoon and early evening was with her. Not that I have any muscles or rippling biceps or anything, but she has a bad back, and can easily wrench it if she lifts something wrong, so like Mighty Mouse, there I came to save the day.

BARTed to Kallie's house, said her flatmate, Janey or Jilly or something like that, opened the door but then thankfully disappeared. Kallie gave me a hug, and we lunched at Happy Palace, same place where we ate last month, and this time we both had the squid — chewy, yummy, but it’s on the plate alone. Everything else — we had fancy fried rice and oysters — is ordered separately, so the tab was twenty bucks for the two of us, not counting the tip. Wowzers. I’ll stay with the Sincere Cafe, where a $5 lunch is so big I sometimes can’t finish it.

Back at Kallie's house, I hoisted a few things — her sleeping bag, a blanket, a load of laundry — and carried everything to her van. She showed me her vacation’s worth of weed, which was more marijuana than I’ve ever seen in one place that wasn’t a movie, and she offered to share a bowl, but again I declined.

She keeps offering me drugs, and I keep declining. I'm not a teetotaler, but anything that muddles the mind is a rare treat for me, not a habit. Can't find the words when I'm high or otherwise impaired, and being wordless strikes close to the heart of me.

It was nice seeing Kallie, though, and then she was gone. Hope she has a nice vacation. I’m secretly hoping for a post card.

The newspaper strike is over, I’ve heard, but there was still nobody in the newsbooth on my walk to work, and the only newspapers in the self-serve box are the same papers that have been in the box since before the strike. I’ve read that headline a hundred times: Doomed plane fell ‘like a black streak’.

OK already. I get the idea — airplane fall down, go boom. I’m ready for new headlines, and a new strike-free newspaper. Maybe tomorrow?

♦ ♦ ♦

I was showing Carlotta some of my brain-dead morning duties, since she’ll be doing them while I’m on vacation later this month. Somehow we got to talking about job interviews, and she ended up crying, just a little. It’s a long and maddening story.

When I started temping for this evil corporation, Carlotta sat three chairs from me. She was one of only two people in that department with any brains, and the other one wasn’t me. Now I’m an actual employee, no longer a temp, and working in a different department, where Carlotta recently transferred and became my “teammate” again. So she’s “new” here, but she's been here longer than me, and we’re already work pals.

We were talking, and she told me that to transfer to our group, despite already working for the company, she had to apply and interview. When Darla offered her the job, Carlotta had to go to Personnel to file some forms. So far, so normal.

While she was at Personnel, though, an executive there tried to discourage her from taking this job. He said it might be too complicated for her, that she’d have trouble understanding the high-tech work we do.

Which is an asinine, racist thing to say. We do work any 8th-grader could handle with a few days’ training. There is nothing "high-tech" about it, except that we use computers. A TRS-80 would probably be "high-tech" to that exec. And also, Carlotta could handle brain surgery — she’s smart. Smarter than that executive in Personnel, for damned sure.

She told me she was speechless, unsure what to say, so she didn’t say anything, simply filled out the form and left. And then, before the transfer could be finalized, she had to interview a second time, with Babs, boss of all bosses in our quadrant. That’s peculiar, too — when I applied, I interviewed only once, with the boss who was my boss before Darla.

During this second job interview, Babs asked Carlotta, “Are you accurate?” Carlotta told me she thought for a moment about how to answer, but before she said anything, Babs said, “Do you know what accurate means?”

As if, because Carlotta has an accent, she can’t speak English?

And then Babs’ phone rang, she said “Excuse me” and took the call, turning around, looking out the window to talk. Carlotta had a view of Babs' desk, and could read an e-mail that had been printed out — from that same exec in Personnel — recommending that Carlotta "not be hired, due to her deficient English.”

Bastards. Beyond bastards. Carlotta is Asian, and she has an accent. Big deal. This is San Francisco, not Oklahoma. We have people from all over, more colors and accents than the United Nations, and Lottie’s English is not a problem. Maybe once or twice a week I ask her to repeat something, because I didn’t understand it the first time, but so what? She understands everything.

Carlotta got the job, obviously, but after the ‘accurate’ question and that e-mail on Babs’ desk, she's wondering if she only got the job because Darla, our boss, has an accent, too — she’s Filipino. That’s when Carlotta reached for a Kleenex and started dabbing her eyes. She was crying, and said she’s had no self-esteem since that second interview.

“Self-esteem comes from here,” I said, pointing at my forehead. One of the rare moments when I’ve almost/maybe said the right thing at the right time. She smiled, but it was a sad smile. I wanted to say more, but what? I was and still am utterly jarred sideways by the whole story. I knew this company was a terrible place to work, but thought at least it was an equal-opportunity torturer.

Carlotta said she’s thought about calling the city bureaucracy that handles discrimination complaints, but she’s afraid the store would retaliate. And she’s probably right. “Anyway,” she said, “I got the job, so I don’t think I have any legal grounds for a complaint.”

I should’ve said something more, but I was speechless at all of it. Saying the right thing once is all I have in me, and anyway, what does a white dude know about discrimination like this? Nada. All I know is that this company has some astoundingly stupid executives, which I already knew, but now I know they’re even stupider than I’d known.

"Forget about it," Carlotta said, and we went back to talking about the work stuff I was showing her. But no, I won't forget about it, and neither will she.

Maybe it’s time to get off my plump rump, update my resumé, and look for a better job. Which would be any job.

At work, the conversation with Carlotta took a few unexpected twists. Before telling that story, though, you need to know that she’s a major babe. I haven't mentioned that before, because it’s irrelevant on days she’s fully buttoned up, but Carlotta is 25, I’d guess, with a pretty face, Playboy bod, chic clothes, etc. I appreciate the view but try to ignore it. We’re at work, and she’s married, plus just look at me, so saying anything would be ridiculous.

Today, though, she was talking about dirty jokes. Not telling dirty jokes, but she wanted my advice on who in the office would be receptive to dirty jokes, and who’d be offended. I told her I’d be receptive, and Kallie when she’s back from vacation, and Peter if no clergymen are involved. Definitely not Jennifer, though.

And then, Carlotta said she thinks she might want some of those new female condoms, and she asked me if they're prescription, or over-the-counter. “How the hell would I know?” was my answer. Why was she asking me? I’ve never seen one, never, uh, ‘used’ one, and probably never will. All I know is, I saw an ad for female condoms, and they look very un-sexy, like something for washing dishes.

It’s nice that Lottie is comfortable enough to talk of such things around me, but I’m not. Dirty jokes I can handle, but talking about birth control with a beautiful married woman — that's on the other side of whatever line I’d draw for workplace conversations.

♦ ♦ ♦

I wonder what I don’t know, from two weeks without buying a newspaper. I know of no news since late October.

San Francisco’s two papers aren’t anything special, but they're far better than the shallow newscasts on TV or NPR. I am glad the papers are back, and the regular staffers have returned. Based on their coverage of themselves, it sounds like the strikers got most of what they wanted.

This morning’s Chronicle was thin like bulimia, though. The sports section was only two pages, which would be one page too many for a sane society. A blurb on the front page apologized for the paper’s skinniness, because “some production facilities were damaged in the strike.” Teamsters, buddy. Don’t mess with the Teamsters.

♦ ♦ ♦

Went shopping at Woolworth after work, with a dual strategy for eluding the awful ads they drench shoppers with. At a store in Chinatown a few weeks ago, I’d purchased a $2 plastic pinchy picker-upper. I don’t know what else to call it — it’s a stick two feet long, with a C-shaped slaw at one end, and a handle at the other. Squeeze the handle, and the claw closes at the other end.

The TVs at Woolworth are mounted too tall to reach with your hands unless you’re Wilt Chamberlain, but with my pinchy picker-upper, reaching up and turning down the volume for every Woolworth infomercial down every aisle, serenity and tranquility transformed the store. Soon the only sounds were the quiet murmur of shoppers, the squeak of wheels on the carts, the beeps of the cash registers, and the benign background Muzak, which was frequently interrupted by ads via “the Woolworth Shopping Network.”

Short of hacking their computers, those ads can’t be stopped, so retaliation was called for. Every time The Voice said, “Hello, Woolworth shoppers,” I destroyed something. When The Voice started its first sales pitch, I was in frozen foods, and they’re not frozen any more. Well, a few items, anyway. Next time The Voice came on, I was in the kitchen and cookware area, and folded some Rubbermaid lids so they’ll never “seal in freshness.” When The Voice spoke next, I opened three cans of cat food and left them on the shelf.

When I’d finished shopping, I paid for the forks and popcorn and mayonnaise I’d needed, but my visit cost the store triple what they rang up. I’ve never been a more satisfied customer.

That was childish, you say? Yes. Irresponsible? Yes. Illegal? Call a cop.

This is western civilization — each of us is a collection of fears and phobias and emotional bruises and rusty miswired synapses, and for any of us, it could all come unraveled at any moment. Maybe you don't notice, or don't care, but to me endless ads like that are an attack on my fragile mental health. Everything I did was in self-defense.

It’s a swarm of gnats buzzing at my ears. What do you do in a swarm of gnats? Just stand there? I slap at ‘em.

♦ ♦ ♦

At the back of the zine every issue, I’ve been saying, “Give me a call if I sound like someone you’d like to meet.” Well, someone's finally taken me up on it.

Got a phone message on my machine from Leaf Smith, who writes What Is the Meaning of Human Existence?, a good zine with an unwieldy title. He told me to go to hell — Dante’s Inferno, that is. It's a movie based on the book/nightmare, and it’s playing Thursday night at P.F.A. We’ll meet before the show, and see it together. If he’s half as open in person as he is in his zine, and if my conversation switch is “on” Thursday night, it might be fun.

My conversation switch is unreliable, though. It's one of those rusty miswired synapses. Sometimes it doesn't let me say much, even when I want to say something, so Thursday night might be no fun at all.

Either way, it costs the same five bucks to see the movie, and the movie looks good.

♦ ♦ ♦

“Do you seriously urinate on your silverware? That’s not just hygienically unhealthy and an invitation to disease, it’s also mentally unhealthy…
—Gary Randall

Whoa there, Dr Randall. Read it again (October 6). I don’t pee on the knife before spreading jam. I simply stack dirty dishes in the sink til I get around to washing them. And, since the toilet is a long walk down the hall and I might not be wearing pants, I piss in the sink. If anything, peeing on the dishes is an incentive to wash 'em even more thoroughly, when eventually they’re washed — so it's excellent hygiene.

If it bothers you, by all means don’t drop by for dinner. And if you call me “mentally unhealthy” again, I swear I’ll kill myself.

There’s so much in life that I want to do, see, say, hear, wonder about, laugh about, dream about, ask about, answer, admire, inhale, touch and feel, understand, share, fart around with, read, and especially write, but instead I have to go to work.

♦ ♦ ♦

And what a day it was at the office. Here's the morning idiocy:

Darla’s only been our boss for a couple of months, and she knows what we do, but she hasn’t really known how we do it, so a few weeks ago, she asked Jennifer for a crash course. They spent a few hours together, and Jennifer said it went well, and now Darla understands how to use the software and the basic rules for how we process price changes. Sounds like a good thing, right?

Last week, we were briefly behind on the data entry, and Darla offered to help out. Sounds like an even better thing, right? How often does a boss anywhere volunteer to pitch in with the actual work? The gesture was appreciated, sincerely.

Or I thought it was, until Darla finished her short stack of work, and returned it to me (because Jennifer (my ‘lead’) was out today). “All done,” Darla said, “but I did a goof on this page, and on this page. Can you fix it?” Sure, I can fix it. Everybody makes occasional mistakes, and Marcia showed me how to make corrections, before she quit.

When I went into the fix-it program, though, and started poking through what Darla had done, she hadn’t done any of it right. She’d skipped fields that must be input, made huge typos that would print on every price tag, changed prices on some of the wrong items, and not made price changes on some items that need the prices changed. Basically, she did everything wrong. If she was a temp or a new hire, I’d be concerned, because even rookies don’t make this many mistakes.

I spent the rest of the morning fixing my boss’s fuck-ups, on a small pile of work that would’ve taken me half an hour to input correctly. And then I swallowed hard, and knocked on Darla’s door, to ask her not to help us any more. Said it about as politely as it could be said, but she took it as an insult, got defensive and dismissive, and said something like, “Thank you for fixing my many mistakes,” but she said it sarcastically.

“No problem,” I said, and went back to my desk.

As an employee, I believe it’s part of my job to bring problems to my boss’s attention, so that's what I did. With that response, though, I'm not going to say it a second time.

If Darla volunteers to ‘help’ with our work again, I’ll fix her mistakes again, and do so for as long as I work here. And then, when I quit or get laid off, there’ll be a little booby trap — Darla’s mistakes suddenly won’t be corrected.

Better yet, since she (thinks she) understands the intricacies of the work, maybe Darla will train my replacement to do price changes the same way she does them — wrong.

♦ ♦ ♦

And here's the afternoon idiocy:

One of the junior executives dropped some paperwork at my desk, and then he paused a long moment. I was getting ready to say something snide, when he said, “Do you smell smoke?”

You can often smell smoke in the office, because a few of the senior executives still smoke at their desks, though that’s been against company policy for several years. I took a deep breath, expecting to taste tobacco in the air, but it was different — slight, but sooty, like wood burning in the distance.

With images of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire smoldering in my mind, the junior exec and I walked around, poking our heads into a few doors. Finding no explanation for the scent in the air, we knocked on Babs’ office door, and she made an executive decision to abandon ship.

“Everybody out!” Babs shouted as she came out of her office, "but do not take the elevators!" I don’t like Babs, and I’m not sure I respect her, but I respected that — it's a safety rule I had completely forgotten, so it's good that she remembered. She said it several more times, too. That was the only thing she said in all the commotion, now that I think about it.

Everyone from our side of the eighth floor (except two temps, who were on break — Darla left them a note) traipsed down the hall, past another office where people were still working. We tried to rouse them, but their manager said, “If there was a fire, the alarm would’ve gone off.”

Yeah. More about that later.

“It’s a job,” I said to him, “and not a very good one. It ain’t worth your life.” Boss Babs looked at me as if she disagreed, but I’m pretty sure she’s their boss too, and she didn't say anything. She didn’t tell them to come with us, so we left them to burn.

As we walked toward a fire exit, the smoke became visible, just barely. Seeing it, not just smelling it, we turned back toward a different exit, and walked past the same office where those people were still working. “It’s too smokey to get out that way,” I said casually, “so if your workflow allows it, take the exit down the other hallway,” and I pointed.

My eyes had naturally fixed on a pretty woman in that office, and she looked relieved when her manager said, “Everybody out,” and grabbed his jacket. Staff has been given permission to survive.

Their bunch joined our bunch, all of us marching toward the stairs, and Babs said again, “Don’t take the elevators!” When we reached the door to the stairwell, it had a big red bar across it that said something like, Alarm will sound if door is opened. Babs, leading the way, saw this and hesitated, so I reached around her and pushed the door open myself.

I am not willing to die for that company, and besides, I’ve always wanted to push those bars and set off those alarms. Sure enough, it started buzzing, but not very loudly — not like a fire drill. It was more like an alarm clock than an alarm, but any racket that might get people’s attention was welcome.

Peter turned around and shouted, “Fire!” behind us, which was smart. We were about to go down the stairs, but our little parade wasn’t everyone who works on the eighth floor, and the only alarm sounding was that door alarm, a polite little beep that sounded more like a dial tone than anything urgent. We should've been shouting earlier, but nobody'd thought of it.

Peter shouted “Fire!” several times, and some of us joined in, and then we walked down eight flights of stairs, with Peter and others opening the door on every floor and shouting, “Fire!” All the floors below ours seemed to be empty, though, like they'd already evacuated.

When we got to the ground floor and emerged on the sidewalk, hundreds of employees and shoppers and gawkers were staring up at the building, but the building just stood there, non-smoking.

Nine (9) hook-and-ladder trucks were out front, completely blocking the usually busy street. Yellow ribbon-ropes had been strung up to keep people back, and firemen had to lift them to let us pass. Other firemen were carrying hoses into the store.

Someone in a suit and a firefighter’s hat was bellowing into a bullhorn for people to walk in one direction, not the other. He was an SFFD executive, I decided, but his instructions were confusing to me. I didn’t see anyone walking in either direction, just hundreds of people standing around.

That’s when I started thinking, hey, I’ll have something interesting to write for the zine tonight, but that’s also when it stopped being interesting. We were all standing around, getting sore necks looking up at the building, which did not appear to be on fire.

We found out later that all the smoke and flames and real action had been on the other side of the building, where the first stairwell we’d almost used would’ve taken us. Not knowing that as we stood on the street, though, it just looked like a whole bunch of nothing happening, and eventually Mr Microphone announced that store employees could go back into the building, but not shoppers.

With the fire over, the elevators were safe to ride, which is good, because eight flights of stairs is six more than I'm willing to climb. Back on our floor, there was the smell of stale smoke for the rest of the day, and the next day’s paper reported that nobody was hurt, but tragically, there was almost no structural damage.

The fire alarm never sounded on the floor where we work. We have regular fire drills, so everyone knows what the building's fire alarm sounds like, and where the exits are. If the alarm had sounded, everyone would’ve been out of the building five minutes quicker than we were. Several workers on the eighth floor didn’t exit the building at all.

Now, get this: It wasn’t a malfunction. The fire alarm didn’t go off, according to my boss, because fire alarms sound first in the Security office, where the guards sit and watch shoppers on video screens. It’s up to the security guards to decide whether to trigger alarms all over the building, and some doofus with a badge decided to use the building’s public-address system instead of the alarm, “so as not to panic the customers.”

Well, that’s nice, but on the eighth floor, where I work, we have the store’s Muzak turned off, to preserve our sanity against endless Mantovani strings. Nobody ever told us that turning off the Muzak also turned off the public-address system, so we heard no announcement asking us to exit the building in an orderly manner.

That seems worrisome, don’t you think? It didn’t make me feel like “a valued employee.” It made me angry, so for the second time today, I knocked on Darla's door. I politely summarized the facts, hoping she'd come down on the Security Department for leaving us to roast, but Darla's response was a promise that she’d call someone ... to have the Muzak/public address speakers turned on again.

At work, still smoldering over yesterday’s fire at the store, I wrote a polite but pointed e-mail to the Security Department, and CC’d my boss and her boss.

“We knew nothing about yesterday’s fire until we smelled the smoke. The building has a fire alarm system, as required by law, and we have drills every few months, so we know it works. Next time there’s a fire, we’d appreciate it if the fire alarm was turned on.”

Both Babs and Darla replied, separately, telling me my email was inappropriate. Darla said I should’ve brought my complaints to her, as this is “a management purview,” but I did bring it up with Darla yesterday, and all she said was that the Muzak would be turned on again.

Babs told me I should've gone through proper channels, and she sent a separate e-mail to Security, CC'ing me, telling them, "Please disregard Doug's e-mail." She said that Security would be hearing from her “within a few days,” which is probably supposed to put my mind at ease but does not.

Was my e-mail out of line? Do I care? No and no. Yesterday was a real fire, not a drill, and it showed that the fire drills are bullshit. It’s “a management purview”? Maybe, but management has fucked it up so it's also going to be a Doug purview.

I did not reply to Darla or Babs' responses to me, but I did reply to Babs’ e-mail to Security — the one where she told them to ignore my e-mail.

“I work here, do what I’m told and don’t make waves, but I'm not going to die here. My request for a working fire alarm is not unreasonable. If it’s disregarded, as Babs has requested, I will next contact the Fire Department and the Chronicle.”

No response to that, yet.

♦ ♦ ♦

In the mailbox, a letter from Stuart Mangrum, publisher of Twisted Times, with some compliments I don’t deserve, and asking me to write film reviews for his zine. Flattery will get you a movie critic, Stuart. I phoned him and said sure, asked a few questions about deadlines and formatting, and now I feel good all under.

Nice letters are always appreciated, but this one made my week. Twisted Times is a major-league zine — it’s been around since forever, always well-written and thoughtful-slash-fun reading, has a deservedly great reputation (jeopardized by a new movie critic), and an improved format for the current issue makes it look almost slick, but not in a bad way.

I’ll be proud to be part of it, until Stuart wises up and kicks me out. You can get your copy of Twisted Times by sending three dollars to ████████, CONCORD CA 94527.

♦ ♦ ♦

I was out front at the Pacific Film Archive, making eye contact with every youngish white guy who came alone, because that’s all I knew about Leaf Smith. He was already inside, though, approaching every fat white dude he saw, with similar un-success. When I gave up and went inside to buy a ticket, he approached me (“Fat and ugly, that must be Doug”) and we had a few minutes of light conversation before the lecture began.

Yeah, a lecture. Some literature professor from U Cal Berkeley had seen the movie before, and wanted to analyze everything about it, which sounds like something I might enjoy — but not before the movie, damn it.

The film, Dante’s Inferno (1935), wasn’t what I’d expected, though I'm not sure what I expected from a 1930s film of the hugely overwrought 700-year-old poem about the punishments of Hell. It’s Americanized and set in the 20th century, of course. Spencer Tracy plays a gruff ignoramus who gets a job as a carnival barker, for a sideshow called Dante’s Inferno. With a promise to “put Hell on a paying basis,” he makes this dodgy business so successful he’s soon creating a new Inferno attraction that could rival Disneyland.

Some of this seems very dated, and time is crazily compressed — Tracy meets a woman, dates her, proposes, and they’re married with a child in about a minute and a half. The story draws you in, though, and the effects are excellent, especially a brief reading from Dante’s poem, stunningly visualized. The characters are vintage 1930s stock, caring about quaint concepts like integrity and honor and all that rot, but overall it still packs a wallop.

Afterwards, Leaf and I walked to downtown Berkeley, and went into a bar so fancy that when I ordered Bud the waitress said, “Not here.” We sat in the patio and talked for a couple of hours, drinking imported beers — same pissy taste, but more expensive. Whenever the conversation went quiet, I babbled about meaningless nonsense. I can babble, man, just look at the zine.

Leaf is a likeable guy, not as immediately wide open in person as he is in his zine, but in life instead of on paper that would be difficult, maybe dangerous. We talked about a zillion things, most of it interesting, at least to me, and most of them forgotten, because I can’t drink two beers and remember much detail the next morning.

What I remember is that I had an OK time, the waitress had a pretty smile and a tight sweater we left her a good tip, and I’m not sure but I think Leaf paid for the beers. I don't want to marry him and have his babies in a minute and a half, but he seems like a good guy. Any time you’re doing nothing, Leaf, feel free to dial my digits and I’ll do nothing with you.

His zine is very good, and you ought to send a couple of dollars to Leaf Smith, ████████████████, BERKELEY CA 94704 for a copy. It’s written in a diary format, like this zine, and it’s honest, angsty, and smart, but without my annoying anti-social attitude.

Addendum, 2021: I don’t remember writing any movie reviews for Twisted Times, and I don’t remember ever seeing Leaf Smith again, after that night.

At the office this morning, maintenance workers were climbing ladders and tweaking knobs, restoring the Muzak to an inescapable volume. The first speakers they turned on were right over my desk, so I put on my headphones, cranked up the volume to drown out the Muzak, and the office will never again see me without headphones.

Next time the building is on fire, when they announce it over the public-address system instead of sounding the fire alarm, I hope a co-worker will tap me on the shoulder and let me know.

♦ ♦ ♦

It’s been only a week since the last lying e-mail from management promised that no layoffs were being considered, and today there was another round of layoffs. There was no announcement to employees. We heard it from the news on the radio, at about noon.

The company is shuttering one of its subsidiary chains of department stores. 13 locations will be closed, and about 2,000 people will be “let go.” It won’t affect anyone in the building where I work, but it strikes close to home — the largest store in the soon-to-be dead chain is next door to the store where I work, overlooking San Francisco's Union Square.

The announcement didn’t even come from my employer, the company that owns the stores that are closing. Nope, according to the news, the announcement came from the company that’s buying/merging with my employer. The merger is still “pending before the FTC,” but while it’s pending, the company that’s not legally running things is running things.

The news report said they'd rebuffed a buyout offer for the chain that’s being closed. The new management felt it would be "more profitable to liquidate the assets.” There’s your true meaning of Christmas, Scrooge-America: Two thousand people are out of work, because there’s more profit in selling the real estate, than in selling handbags, umbrellas, and ladies’ coats, or than selling the company itself.

It’s wrong, it’s cruel, and it ought to be illegal. And even from a capitalist perspective, it’s stupid. I don’t have an MBA or a BMW, but check the calendar: It’s November. It’s moronic to slash prices and have a frenzied going-out-of-business sale now, just as the Christmas shopping season is starting. Until December 24, any store that doesn’t physically slap customers in the face will make triple its normal profits.

Even if those stores must be closed (which obviously isn’t true — they’re not losing money, just not making as much profit as the company wants — and there was a buyer!), wouldn’t it make more sense to have a normal Christmas shopping season, and then announce the going-out-of-business sale on December 26?

These are the brilliant minds running the corporation that’s buying the bankrupt corporation where, for now, I work.

♦ ♦ ♦

What with the merger, the fire, and now the announcement of stores closing, the name of the company that employs me must be obvious to anyone who reads a newspaper. Yeah, that’s right. We’re the huge balloons parading down the streets of Manhattan every Thanksgiving Day.

♦ ♦ ♦

Here’s an object lesson about friendships, and why I don’t have many. For months, since Beatrice was transferred out of the department where I work, she and I have chatted via e-mail, trading complaints about the company and whatever else is on our minds — within limits, of course. You always have to be careful at work, not to accidentally reveal an opinion about something that matters, because that could piss people off.

On Wednesday, Beatrice and I were ‘chatting’ via e-mail, and the newspaper strike came up. I typed to her what I’d said in the zine on Tuesday: “Don’t mess with the Teamsters.”

Well, that was too political or too subversive or just too much for Beatrice. She wrote back, “The ends never justify the means, Doug, and strikers who vandalize company property ought to be penalized to the full extend of the law. I hope you don’t *really* believe violence is ever justified.”

I’ve known Beatrice for a year, we’ve even had beers together, so I rolled the dice and gave her an honest opinion:

“Yeah, I meant it. I have no sympathy for a company that treats employees so shitty they're forced to strike. You do what you have to do. If a Teamster took a sledgehammer to one of the paper's printing presses, I understand it and forgive it.”

She replied, “Right is right and wrong is wrong, and vandalism or breaking the law is wrong.”

Having rolled the dice and lost, I went double or nothing. The whole friendship, riding on this next bet:

“If we had a union and walked out, I’d throw a brick through the window here. It wouldn’t bother my conscience. ‘Right’ and ‘wrong’ depends on how strongly you believe what you believe. No worries, though — we don’t have a union, and I don’t have a brick handy. So tell me, Beatrice, is all this getting too political for friendly interoffice chit-chat?”

It was two hours before she replied, and she said, “Yes, it’s too political,” and changed the subject to the fire. She hasn’t replied to the two e-mails I sent since then, one yesterday and one this morning, so it seems that with a few words of honesty, I have one less friend.

Que sera sera. If we can’t be honest, if she can’t handle a difference of opinion, or isn’t able to discuss it, then we weren't friends anyway.

♦ ♦ ♦

I wasted six bucks at the Castro tonight, not even including the popcorn, for what sounded like an intriguing noir double feature. Checking my old movie guidebooks, The Spiral Staircase (1946) was supposed to be a “superb Hitchcock-like thriller,” but there were no thrills. From the opening logo to The End, you’d need strong, black coffee to stay awake.

Then came Gaslight (1944), starring the incandescent Ingrid Bergman, but even she’s not enough to salvage this paint-by-numbers drama. Half an hour into it, with plot points the rest of the way laid out plain as a AAA map, I grabbed my backpack and came home. Both these movies combined aren’t as interesting as my job, which ain’t interesting at all.

Or, maybe they’re both masterpieces, pinnacle achievements of cinema. Between the fire, and the fire alarm that didn’t sound, and today’s layoffs, and getting scolded by Darla and Babs, and losing my friendship with Beatrice, maybe my mindset wasn’t right for a night at the movies.

Addendum, 2021: I Magnin (pronounced Eye Magnin) was the chain of department stores that was ended with a wimpy press release on this day in 1994, and I can't let it pass, even in retrospect, without a moment of remembrance.

I Magnin was unlike any other store I've seen. I couldn't afford to shop there and never worked there, but I'd been inside their flagship store in San Francisco, sometimes delivering paperwork or reports, since my employer owned the place. Sometimes I walked in just to gawk.

Nicknamed the White Marble Lady, I Magnin was almost literally a shrine to capitalism and opulence. The exterior walls were marble — genuine marble, not a facade. Inside, the first floor shopping area was what I'd call the sanctuary — it was two stories tall, perhaps three, with handmade display cases, beautiful murals behind glass on the walls, and enormous crystal chandeliers hanging from the gold-plated (or solid gold, for all I know) ceilings.
If you're lucky enough to know what an old-style movie palace was like, I Magnin was like that. Their San Francisco store was designed by Timothy Pflueger, who also built the Castro Theater, and the Paramount in Oakland, and many of the area's most physically beautiful buildings — the Pacific Telephone Building, the San Francisco Stock Exchange, the Mayan mansion called simply 450 Sutter Street, and the world's swankiest bar, the Top of the Mark.
I would conservatively estimate that I've stood to urinate at least half a million times in my life, and I Magnin was the finest place I ever peed. The restrooms had art deco pedestal sinks and other extravagant features, and everything was maintained in its original decadence. The urinal might have been mere porcelain, but it was fancy porcelain, older than me but pristine and unstained, and a sheet of marble protected my penis from view and my neighbor from my splatters. Even the tile on the floor was shiny, green, and clean. All the facilities had the same splendor as the day it was built.
I Magnin was the store where Scrooge McDuck would've shopped. It was undoubtedly evil and a phenomenon we wouldn't want to bring back. It was the opposite of egalitarian — an awe-inspiring structure where the world's wealthiest people were given (literally) white glove treatment, and people like you and me were tolerated at best — but damn, it was a beautiful place.
Trivia: I Magnin was founded by Mary Ann Magnin in 1876, selling upscale baby clothes she made by hand. She also sold wood carvings made by her husband, Isaac, and named the store after him because shoppers and suppliers felt more comfortable when she said she was working for her husband.
I Magnin was sold to Bullock's Department Stores in 1944, and Bullocks was sold to Federated Department Stores in 1964, and to Macy's in 1988. Federated Department Stores bought Macy's in 1994, and I Magnin was closed on January 8, 1995.
In a final indignity, Macy's, located next door, knocked door-holes through the marble walls, dismantled and removed whatever architectural features could be unbolted and sold, and expanded its mundane store into the former I Magnin space.
Macy's has since moved out, retreating to its older building next door. The former I Magnin building was sold in 2019, and in its next life it'll be a bunch of lawyer's offices underneath overpriced condominiums.

Walking to the train to the movies, there was an unpleasant altercation on the sidewalk. I was a block away, too distant to hear whether words came first, but some homeless guy pushed a well-dressed woman, she pushed him back, and they shoved and swung at each other a few times.

The bum tried walking away, but a man on the sidewalk grabbed him, and while he held him, the lady smacked the bum a few more times on his face, head, and back. Then he got loose from the man’s grip and ran off, and the lady climbed into a taxi, and it was over. Everything took a minute, max.

Post-fight analysis, on the train: I know some of our local bums, by face not by name, but this bum didn’t look familiar. He was a special guest bum, I guess. The lady wins, by unanimous decision. She was a tough dame, but she shouldn’t have to be that tough. The man who grabbed him did what strangers are supposed to do, got involved.

Would I have grabbed the bum, like he did? I don’t know. I think I’d be more likely to punch him than grab him, but there’s no knowing until it happens. Today I’d been too far away to help, but I had quickened my pace in their direction. I’m fat and it’s been years since I’ve actually run, so quickening my pace is the best I got. The whole mess was over, the lady was gone, the derelict was gone, before I got there or even got close.

I should’ve shouted, though. Yelling at them wasn’t even an idea in my head, until ten minutes later on the train. Too late by then. Living in a big city where crap like this happens sometimes, I need to be mentally prepared, and today I wasn’t. Should’ve shouted, damn it. Next time (and there will be a next time) I’ll at least shout.

♦ ♦ ♦

At the Castro, I'll have a big bucket of buttered popcorn please, and some Red Vines, and a Roman Polanski double feature.

Rosemary’s Baby (1968) stars Mia Farrow as a pregnant housewife whose unborn child may or may not be the spawn of Satan. With the marvelous Ruth Gordon putting a comical spin on everything, you’re never quite certain whether Farrow’s gone batty, or whether there might be some grounds for her paranoia. Except, it's a movie, so you know Satan will make an appearance.

It’s a classic thriller, and often the so-called classics disappoint me when I finally get around to seeing them, but this one did not disappoint. "The miracle of birth,” as everyone calls it, can be terrifying when viewed just slightly askew.

On another level, Rosemary’s Baby is also about the vulnerability of being a woman in a very paternalistic world, with decisions made for you by the loving husband and the male doctors. Ms Farrow doesn’t get to decide much for herself. It’s a subtext as eerie as the movie’s surface-level plot, and more true to life.

The Castro’s program had advertised Rosemary’s Baby as a new print, but it wasn’t. It was scratchy, and so warped that only one side of the image could be focused at any moment, as it spooled under the lens. If you’ve seen lots of old movies, you’ve occasionally seen warped prints like this. It’s a fact of old movie life, but several people in the audience kept shouting “Focus!”

On my way downstairs for a wizz between the movies, three guys had the manager cornered in his office, demanding their money back. Which is stupid another way — you don't get to watch the whole movie, and then ask for a refund.

Maybe because of the fight on the sidewalk earlier, or maybe because I was pretty sure these were the bozos who’d been shouting “Focus!”, I had to butt in. “You the manager?” I asked the chubby blonde guy (who was obviously the manager). He eyed me sadly, started to apologize for the print, and the angry men smiled, believing incorrectly that they’d gained an ally.

“Well, I’m not here to ask for my money back,” I said, more to the morons than to the manager. “If a theater shows old movies, they’ll get a crappy print now and then. Big fucking deal. It’s still a great movie, and my only complaint is the jerks shouting ‘Focus!’ like barking dogs, when focus was obviously not the problem.” That was fun. Then I peed and came back upstairs for the second feature.

The Tenant (1976) is one of those intense internal dramas where not a lot happens, except inside someone's mind. It's about a quiet, introverted guy (hey, I resemble that) taking an express elevator down to the depths of insanity (maybe I resemble that, too). Starring Polanski himself, it’s set in the wacko world of tenement life, where the new guy in the building is unpopular with his neighbors, annoyed by his landlord, and possibly possessed by the spirit of a lady who jumped to her death out the apartment window. Except for that last part, it could’ve been filmed on location in my life.

Complete with Polanski in drag, it might not sound like a delightful way to spend two hours, and indeed it’s not. It gave me goose bumps, though, and the ending was wild, so I’d maybe, maybe recommend The Tenant. I still don’t know what was going on with the movie’s communal toilet down the hall, though.

♦ ♦ ♦

Hey, I got a post card from Kallie. “I’m camping at Tannery Gulch and having more fun than you’re having at work. Ha ha!”

First thing every Sunday morning, there’s the annoyance of remembering that tomorrow’s Monday, and I’ll have to go to work. Most people hate their jobs, and I’ve hated other jobs, but I’m starting to hate this job like Republicans hate women.

It pays better than temping, though, and it comes with health insurance, so I stay … week after week, month, year, waiting for someone to notice my bad attitude and fire me. Or for me to notice my bad attitude, and quit.

A week from today, though, I’ll awaken without that dread. I’ll be on vacation. Paid vacation. One week of actually being alive.

♦ ♦ ♦

Spent much of the morning working on the zine — proofing, prettying up, and then printing the first few weeks of November. Reading through it, I was struck again by the plain fact that it’s boring as hell. Whyever do people read this zine? Nothing happens. It’s like the novelization of a snapshot, or still life on paper.

It’s the zine that sucks, though, not the life. The life is sweet, except for the job. Evenings and weekends I’m almost always alone, doing what I want, when I want. If I decide to do something, I don’t need anyone’s permission, don’t have to compromise with a Mrs, don’t need to phone home if I’m running late. And if I decide to do nothing, that's even better. I’m the absolute master of my (tiny, pathetic) realm, limited only by a chronic lack of funds and friendships.

It ain't much but it makes me happy, and writing the zine makes me happy, too, even when it sucks. Or even though it sucks.

I wanted to be a writer, when I was young enough to still have hopes. It became plain to me, though, that writing — at least, professionally — is something I cannot do. At a newspaper or a magazine they’d want me to have a college degree, and if I was writing books or stories they’d want me to have a plot or a point or something.

So I file papers to make the rent, and answer phones, and key numbers into a computer. In my spare time, I write.

The challenge is, can I take a true story where almost nothing happens, and make it hopefully, nominally more interesting than a blank sheet of paper? Not yet I haven’t, but I’ll try again tomorrow.

That song came on the radio, and with just the first few notes it swept me away with memories of someone. Hello, Robin.

We worked in the same office a few years back, at my first job after I'd moved to San Francisco. We sat side-by-side, and as always I never had much to say, but Robin was a talker.

I abhor talkers, but it’s more bearable when the person doing all the talking is a pretty woman, telling me things I’d hesitate before telling anyone. Her stories had few boundaries, and within a week I knew all about Robin, and her life, and her love life.

She was young, and had the appearance and mannerisms of being an innocent — think Mary Ann Singleton, from Tales of the City — until she talked about her evenings and weekends, and wow, she had busy evenings and weekends. She was dating three different men regularly, and other men occasionally, but no, she explained, not sleeping with any of them. (Memo to out-of-towners: San Francisco of the 1990s is still fun and a little wild, but not that wild.)

Robin knew all the city and suburban night spots, bars, and bands, and she had a special thing for drummers — two of her three boyfriends played drums in local bands. She often briefed me on which bands and which clubs — and which men — had their strong points and annoyances, what she found appealing about them, and what she didn’t. I learned which places to avoid in San Francisco, which was every place she recommended, cuz I’m a movies and maybe museums guy, never found in places with strobe lights or bouncers. Just listening to her, I also learned some things about what kind of man I’d never want to be.

Robin was not Marilyn Monroe, but she was certainly attractive, and there was something intangible about her — a sweet smile, a generous laugh, and she never kept it a secret that she was smart. And we both liked that song, when it came on the radio eleven times an day.

I always looked forward to my next shift at work, because her life was more interesting than mine. Maybe I wished I was a drummer, and thinner and younger and not at all me, but I'm fat and insecure, probably ten years older than her, maybe more, and I only had drumsticks when I was eating Kentucky Fried. From me, Robin never heard any of the compliments she deserved.

After she left town, not with any of the men she’d mentioned, but alone, to volunteer at a wildlife preserve, Robin wrote me a couple of letters — genuine letters, short but handwritten. I never got around to answering them, and yeah, I’m an idiot.

Wherever she is now, I'm sure she's still making men smile and breaking our hearts, maybe accidentally, but unforgettably.

None of the above is meant in a disgusting way, either. Today, just this once, I'm wholesome. I didn’t date Robin, and didn't want to. Didn’t know her that well, she wasn't at all my type, and I don't even remember her last name … but I remember her, at least while that song is playing.

Darla’s mother had a stroke, and everyone in the office heard all the details today. Mom was found on the floor. Darla couldn’t reach her brother on the phone. She wants to book a flight back home. She thinks her mom’s doctor is a quack. And so it goes.

Sympathy all around, sincerely. I said to Darla what you’re supposed to say in such situations, and I meant it. I chipped in for the purchase of a card we’ll all be signing tomorrow. Darla’s father had a stroke just a month ago, and it killed him, so this has to be extra rough on her.

I am an unrepentant bastard, though, because if Darla’s whole family is going to be croaking one by one, she needs to please stop talking about it to anyone at work who’ll listen. Just say “Family emergency” and leave for the airport, OK?

Privacy is a marvelous thing. I choose who knows about whatever's happening in my life, and choose what I want to know about anyone else’s life. What Darla was telling us is more than I choose to know. She’s not my friend. She's barely an acquaintance, but she’s my boss — so I can’t really say, I hope your mom gets better but please shut the hell up about it.

♦ ♦ ♦

For the past week or so, I’ve been having recurring fevers. Nothing serious, I hope, just a feeling like right now, hot forehead and red ears. I’ll take two aspirin and the fever will be gone in an hour, and then I'll be fine, thanks, but the fever comes back the next day.

I’m wondering if it’s related to the tooth that was pulled, leaving a gap that got infected and filled with white spongy growth. The gap where the tooth was yanked has completely healed, but I could see the white stuff growing in the gap right up until the moment the gums covered it. So I’m wondering, is the infection still alive and growing, inside my gums?

♦ ♦ ♦

It’s western week at the Roxie. Not my favorite genre, but gunslinger sagas have a certain appeal, with their stoic heroic leading men, and horses that come galloping when the star whistles.

So there I was in the dark, just me and Randolph Scott in Buchanan Rides Alone (1958). It was a perfect print, beautiful color in thistle-sharp focus, telling the story of an old geezer with a good heart and a ready smile, who rides into a town where the sheriff is a crook, his brother is the mayor, and his nephew is a hothead itching to square off against Randolph. You know I’d never give away the ending, but if you promise not to tell? The good guy wins.

The second feature, with Randolph Scott again, was Ride Lonesome (1959), a more complicated story with Randolph as a tough-talking bounty-hunter who tells the man he’s pursuing, “I’d hunt you for free.” It’s notable for the supporting cast, with young Pernell Roberts and James Coburn, and because even the bad guys are human enough you can’t quite hate them. All the characters have believable motivations, not merely ‘good’ and ‘evil’, which makes for a nifty drama. Worth renting at a video store, if you don’t have a Roxie in your town.

♦ ♦ ♦

You know, I really enjoyed watching the westerns at the Roxie tonight. I kinda wanted to go to last night’s cowboys-and-cattle double feature, too, but instead I stayed home and worked on writing and editing the zine.

Is that crazy? Has the diary taken over the life it’s about?

Well, I’ll be hornswoggled before missing any more good westerns just to work on the zine.

♦ ♦ ♦

Thanks for printing my comment (Sept. 16). Now I’m an expert on hemorrhoids — a lifelong ambition come true.

—Tim Ereneta

Addendum, 2021: I never had fevers unless I had a flu or a cold, until that tooth extraction. Ever since, to this day, once or twice a week I'll feel hot and sweaty, take two aspirin, and feel better in an hour.
Until re-typing this entry, though, I'd completely forgotten that the fevers began after the tooth extraction and infection.

Today a temp asked me if he gets tomorrow off for Thanksgiving. “Nope,” I said with a straight face, “we’ve all got to work.” He seemed skeptical, but any indignity is possible when you’re temping, so I had to confess that I was kidding.

“We get Thursday off, sure, but then we have to come in on Saturday to make up the time.” I think he believed me, but I’ll straighten him out on Friday, if I remember.

Hey, kiddo — I’m not the boss. Not even the lead. Ask a responsible adult.

♦ ♦ ♦

The Man from Laramie (1955) is James Stewart, and he has a score to settle with the Apache. It’s an agreeable adventure, if you ignore the plain truth that the Apache have a score to settle with America. Stewart’s co-star is an actress I’d never seen before, Aline MacMahon, and she steals the show as a grizzled rancher, ex-lover of the bad guy’s father, who befriends Stewart. The movie’s antagonist is presented as sane, even likable, and it makes for a good show.

3:10 to Yuma (1957) is one of the best westerns I've yet seen. Van Hefflin plays a bankrupt farmer who, with nothing to lose except his life and everything he owns, agrees to escort a captured killer to jail in another town. Glenn Ford, in a rare turn as the bad guy, is barely bothered by being a prisoner, because he knows that his gang will be galloping into town any minute, with guns ablazin’ to enable his escape.

I don’t like ‘film critic’ clichés like “a psychological study,” but if some other film is a study, this is a college education. The bad guy has a good side, the good guy can be led into temptation, and there’s so much tension here, I even believed the movie's improbable climax. Intelligent characters, in a well-written drama with moral implications bigger than the story being told. The audience laughed, cried, and clapped, and so did I. Written by Halsted Welles, and whoever the heck he is or was, he did outstanding work here.

Warning, though: Both of tonight’s films included theme songs warbled by Frankie Laine, or someone equally unwelcome. It's a vestige, I think, of the "singing cowboy" era, the 1930s and '40s, when many westerns featured cowpokes who sang a few songs for the camera, as lovably parodied in Three Amigos.

♦ ♦ ♦

After the movies, I walked a block and lingered at the window of the Sincere Cafe, reading the menu, salivating, and trying to talk myself out of eating dinner there. The food is great and it’s my favorite restaurant in Frisco. They don’t have much for vegetarians, though, and I’ve been mostly meatless for a couple of months now. They do have some shrimp-and-rice entrees which wouldn’t offend my new improved diet, because shrimp is a vegetable, y'know, but I probably wouldn't order it. If I walked inside and sat down, I’d order a Number 1, the porky delight I usually pig out on at the Sincere.

It could be my own Thanksgiving dinner, a special occasion, and I’ve been so good that I deserve a treat … But no, I was a good kid instead. Ain’t you proud of me? I walked a few blocks to Mission Street, and ate instead at Taqueria El Castillito, my second favorite restaurant in San Francisco. It's a dive with excellent Mexican food, at ridiculously reasonable prices.

El Castillito makes a veggie burrito that’s huge, hot, delicious, and filling, for only $3-something, and it comes with a big bag of crunchy tortilla chips. You should say "Hold the jalapeno" on that burrito, because the green sauce the comes with the chips is already hot enough to ignite your intestines.

I ordered two vegetarian burritos, one for tonight, and one for tomorrow. Ate the first one at the restaurant, and ate the second one as soon as I got home.

Since I’m recommending El Castillito, though, I ought to warn you about the homeless people and cockroaches. They have both. The bums come because the prices are so cheap, and it's probably their only nourishment that isn't from a bottle. The cockroaches come, just because they're roaches.

It's probably impossible to get rid of an infestation in that building, in that neighborhood, but there are never many roaches visible, so I'm sure the restaurant is doing their best. Usually I’ll spot one or two on the wall in the kitchen, but they're rarely in the dining area, and anyway, at the prices they're charging, don't be persnickety. I've eaten hundreds of burritos from El Castillito, and if a few roaches have snuck in with the food, I ain't worried. So long as you don’t think about it while you’re chewing, it’s yummy (and it doesn’t count as meat).

Addendum, 2021: My spellchecker doesn’t like ‘taqueria,’ and suggested ‘bacteria’ instead.
It looks like El Castillito is no longer on Mission Street, which is tragic. They've moved to Church Street, in the Castro District, a much swankier area that probably has fewer bums and roaches. Bums and roaches were part of the place's appeal, though, so it simply can't be as good as it was. And El Castillito now has a second location in suburban Livermore, for god's sake.
Also, in 1994 there was no IMDB, so finding out what else Halsted Welles had written would’ve involved a bus ride or long walk to the library. With modern technology, though, I can see his curriculum vitae with just a few clicks, and … he mostly worked in television, and wrote nothing else noteworthy.

It’s Thanksgiving Day. There’s so much to be thankful for, and thankfully, no god to thank.

Thank you, nobody, for my reasonably good health. Thanks for this tiny room at $85 per week, and thanks for a job I hate that pays the rent, sometimes even a few weeks in advance. Thanks for soles with no holes, canned beans with instant rice, and a pair of glasses that keep the movies in focus. Thanks for white skin in this racist nation, so I’m not routinely hassled or beaten by police. Thanks for the U.S. Constitution, which lets me write this. And thanks especially for a day without work.

There was no Thanksgiving feast. What, am I gonna buy a turkey and slice it into chunks small enough to microwave? I don’t much like turkey anyway, and I hate cranberry sauce.

Peanut butter sandwiches were breakfast, tuna sandwiches were lunch, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were a late dinner. T'was a glorious bounty on wheat bread.

♦ ♦ ♦

Wrote my first column for Twisted Times. My deal with Stuart didn't specify that I'd write something original, so I simply lifted a few movie reviews from Pathetic Life. Then I changed a line here and a punctuation mark there, same as any time I look at something I’ve written. When it wasn’t long enough, I grabbed and inserted another review.

I read it out loud, slowly, about twenty times, always stopping to switch a few words around. Then I re-did a paragraph, moved this sentence there and that sentence here, over and over again. Then I watched as the word processor printed it, and when I didn’t like the 14th paragraph I hit cancel and went back to editing. So even though I wasn’t really writing, it took hours. And I'm still not happy with it, so I haven't mailed it yet.

The zine comes out the same way. Every day's entry is like a painfully constipated crap, and then I re-crap the crap a week later, and re-re-crap the crap at the end of the month, and then I wipe up all this crap and mail it to you for three dollars. It’s only the monthly deadline that makes me eventually say it’s finished, else I’d still be editing the first issue.

♦ ♦ ♦

The Roxie’s western round-up ended today, with an oddly mismatched double feature. Wagon Master (1950) is about a couple of young bucks leading a wagon train westward-ho. The movie and the wagon train are filled with Mormons, floozies, and inbred thugs, and it adds up to a pleasant enough yarn, with a soft-spoken message about tolerance.

The Searchers (1956) has the opposite message, that if you’re not white then shooting you dead doesn’t count as murder or even a misdemeanor. Tough-talking John Wayne brings violence and vengeance, looking to slaughter the natives who killed his brother and kidnapped his niece. You get the impression, though, that killing any natives will do, long as they’re dead and the Duke can ride off into the sunset.

Obviously, The Searchers left me sour, but judged by the standards of its time instead of ours, it’s a fine adventure. It's on a lot of critics' top-10 lists, and Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide says it's a masterpiece. It is a real purdy movie, and it's from John Ford, who was terrific, and we're supposed to see Wayne as an imperfect protagonist. For me, though, The Searchers was disturbing, in ways I don't think its creators intended. It’s six years newer than Wagon Master, and that movie didn’t make me cringe.

♦ ♦ ♦

I brought some pitted prunes to nibble during the movies, and when I got home and put the leftovers in the fridge, I read this at the bottom of the package: “Best if served before 3/93.” That’s a year and a half ago.

Well, they tasted fine, and they’d been vacuum-sealed in plastic, so I don’t think they’ll kill me. I’ll finish off the prunes tomorrow. They’re having the desired effect tonight, and for that I’m thankful.

Usually there are dozens of executives on the eighth floor at work, but today the only executive was Babs, and my mouth probably flopped open as she explained why. “It’s a new innovation, we’ve never tried this before…”

That's not something you want to hear from management.

Beginning today, Babs explained, and all through the Christmas shopping season, most of the company's executives are being required to spend two days a week in the stores. Working. As sales staff. And almost all the execs worked in the stores today, because it’s Black Friday — the day after Thanksgiving, when the annual orgy of Christmas shopping and American capitalism gets underway.

That's an innovation, yes, but it sounds like a Hindenburg moment to me.

Sales is work, and the executives — with all due respect, which is none — don't know squat about either sales or work. Our execs are not former salespeople who worked their way up the ladder — this company has no ladder. Our executives are hired directly out of college, as executive trainees. Being an executive is all they know.

And now these executives are in the stores, selling neckties and nylons and making gift suggestions for Uncle Eddie in Rancho Cucamonga? Executives don’t know how to work a sales desk, ring up customers, or explain the exchange policy. After you try on a blouse but decide not to buy it, executives don't know how to hang it up again on the right rack.

They'll be rookies at every sales-related task, basically new hires — on the busiest shopping day of the year. The only difference is, new hires want to make a good impression, but the execs will only want to get back to their desks.

Sounds stupid to me, so it was probably Babs' idea. It's going to piss off the shoppers, and the sales staff will hate it, too. Just imagine working with people who know nothing about the job, but outrank you.

Why weren’t office workers like me moved to the sales floor, too? Yeah, I’d be great in ladies’ lingerie. Maybe the janitors could work in home furnishings, and a cook from the cafeteria could be selling high heels.

We weren’t ordered to work in the stores because even management understands that the janitors and cooks and me and my co-workers do actual work that actually needs to be done. The executives don’t do anything that matters, so sure, send 'em to the stores, to clog up sales two days a week during the Christmas shopping season.

♦ ♦ ♦

Leaving the building at last, end of the day and on my way to a week’s vacation, I stopped to use the men’s room, and what to my wondering eyes should appear? Santa Claus!

Father frickin' Christmas himself stood beside me at the urinal, wearing so many little bells sewn into his costume that he jingled as he shook the last few drops from his North Pole.

Wish I could write that he was gruff and stank of whiskey, but he was downright jolly, smiled at me, and even gave me an unwarranted Ho Ho Ho when I said something wise about his balls. I suppose, since this is the downtown San Francisco store, west coast flagship of the chain, we get the best Santas. The whisky Santas must be working at the suburban malls.

♦ ♦ ♦

Wasn’t sure what to expect from the Roxie’s tribute to Tod Browning and Lon Chaney, but I took a chance and bought a ticket for tonight’s double bill. I’ve read that both of them, the director Browning (most famous for Freaks) and the actor Chaney (“Man of a thousand faces”) had a taste for bad taste, and tonight’s movies were both beautifully bizarre. I’ll probably be back for the whole week’s retrospective.

The Unholy Three (1930) is the only talkie Lon Chaney made, and he died before it was released. He plays a ventriloquist who quits the carnival, taking a dwarf and a strongman with him, and together they start using their powers for not merely entertainment purposes. With the dwarf dressed as a baby, Chaney in drag, and the strongman just being strong, they open a pet shop, where Chaney the ventriloquist makes the parrots ‘talk’, and his two cohorts rob customers while making deliveries.

This is a remake of Browning’s 1925 silent Unholy Three, but directed by someone else, and I wonder, could Browning’s original version have been any stranger? The talkie remake is damned peculiar and worth catching, if you can. It's one of the oddest non-John Waters flicks I’ve seen, marred only by a very fake-looking guy in an ape suit, which yielded unintended laughs from the audience.

The Unknown (1927) is insane. It’s set in a circus, and this time Chaney plays a man with no arms, who falls in love with Joan Crawford. She’s been damaged by life, and can’t stand to be touched by any man’s hands, but Chaney has no hands, so it’s a perfect romance, right? Wrong.

After that it gets complicated, but I can’t say much more without saying too much. With the possible exception of Waters again, or maybe David Lynch, there is nobody making movies today with plots so outlandishly twisted. Chaney drinks tea with no hands, and gets into fistfights despite having no fists. If the movies all week are as weird as tonight’s, I’ll need a bigger thesaurus with more synonyms for ‘lurid’.

♦ ♦ ♦

Got home from the movies at about 10:00, turned on the typewriter, and reached into my pocket for some notes to myself I’d pounded out at work. Often at the office, I e-mail myself about things I want to remember to write about. There's no e-mail at home, of course, so I print the e-mails at work, and put them in my pocket.

My pocket was empty, though, and I knew immediately what I’d done. I’d printed the e-mail at work, but forgotten to take the printout from the printer. This meant that some very personal and probably inappropriate stuff might be sitting in the shared printer at work, with my name on it.

Uh-oh. Luckily, I live only a block from work, and I’m on decent terms with the building’s overnight security guard. Within ten minutes I was back in the office, all alone. My printout wasn’t on the printer, but I found it in the recycling bin, near the top.

Had I written anything incendiary enough to be worth that walk to work at 10:00 PM? Yeah. There are two embarrassing lines.

One says, “Cynthia — new girl in Accounting, sexy, Rubenesque.” Since the pretty lady in question isn’t actually named Cynthia, I suppose it was only mystifying to whomever read it.

Another note on the same page says, “Carlotta wore a scoop-neck sweater. ‘Nuff said about that." Only I used Carlotta’s real name, and my real name is at the top of the page, in a very big font, because it’s my e-mail.

Someone saw that printout, presumably read it, and tossed it in the bin. I hope it wasn’t Carlotta, but if it was, well, c'est la vie. Which means, that's life. It'll be embarrassing, but there's nothing I can do about it except maybe not do it again.

Time to go back to writing notes to myself with a pen, on a piece of paper, and putting both pen and paper into my pocket.

Didn’t do a dang thing today, except go to the Roxie for a quadruple feature of old spooky movies.

Phantom of the Opera (1925) was excellent, as good as its reputation. Is anyone unfamiliar with the plot? You’ve got your masked and deformed lunatic living under the opera house, and he’s willing to kill to advance the career of the understudy he’s in love with. It sounds ridiculous and it is, but dim the lights and cue the organist, and it’s enthralling.

Especially with a good organist. Today's music was by Bob Vaughn, at the Roxie's puny-looking but semi-mighty organ. Vaughn wrote the score himself, I think, and travels performing it at screenings of this film. I've also heard him playing at other pre-talkies when they're screened at other theaters nearby, and it’s always remarkable. His music today matched the movie’s mood, scene for scene, and even matched the action. When Lon Chaney sat at the organ in the film and played a tune, I'm certain that’s the tune Vaughn was playing in the theater. The music was so perfectly synchronized with the movie, you could ‘hear’ doorbells ringing, water running, etc.

And the movie is nothing to sneeze on, either. Chaney’s performance as the Phantom is believably psychotic, and I’ve read that he created his own make-up for the role — when he was unmasked, I jumped and almost shrieked.

Unlike Andrew Lloyd Webber’s overhyped musical Phantom, Lon Chaney’s Phantom has no magical powers. It’s not necessary — he’s simply a man without morals, and that's terrifying enough. Evil is real, and real is much scarier than magic.

The print was crisp and clean, and I was drawn into the story, and then suddenly ... the audience gasped, and I was seriously shocked and goosebumped, as the film went from black-and-white to full color, for the masquerade scene.

I love movies, especially old movies, but I’m no expert, and I didn't know that color photography existed in 1925. Had the frames been hand-tinted? No, I’ve seen that effect, and these colors were too exquisitely natural. I asked in the lobby afterwards, and the Roxie’s manager told me it was an early, “two-strip” version of Technicolor. Hours later, I'm still surprised — there were movies in color, years before there were movies with sound!

Then came Where East is East (1929), a silent melodrama that came with a pre-recorded, tinny orchestral score. It was the original music that played in theaters when this movie was first released, which makes it authentic, but doesn’t make it good. Vaughan was better, and Phantom was far, far better.

The story is a bonkers soap opera, where the daughter’s fiancé is seduced by Mom, and Dad (Chaney again) is none too pleased about it. There’s also a guy wearing an ape suit, same as in Unholy Three last night. I do hope that's not going to be a recurring theme all week at the Roxie.

Mark of the Vampire (1935) didn’t do anything for me, but I’ve never been a big fan of vampire movies. Blood-sucking bats? Meh. It was a great print, though, and James Wong Howe’s cinematography is gorgeous, the bats fly on cue and you can’t see the wires, and one of the transformations involves an interesting visual effect. Lionel Barrymore, though, plays Dr Van Helsing or whatever, and delivers his lines so slowly it’s frustrating, not frightening.

That's three movies, but I said it was a quadruple feature? That's because I stayed, and watched and listened to Phantom of the Opera a second time.

Addendum, 2021: Sadly but not surprisingly, I've found an obituary for Bob Vaughn, the organist that night.

Rewrote the Twisted Times column again, but I’m still not happy with it.

Then I strolled down Market in the mist, enjoying all the beggars, drunkards, hookers, perverts, preachers, punks, dopers, dealers, narcs, slackers, losers, psychotics, and misplaced tourists who make San Francisco whatever the hell it is.

BARTed to nowhere and back, treasure hunting all the way (which means, picking my nose).

This was the second of eight straight Saturdays — a week's vacation. Ever so briefly my life is my own, not my boss’s, and it feels strange to be smiling so much. On the train I was softly singing the theme from The Partridge Family, a show I never really liked. “Danny got Reuben to sell our song, and it really came together when Mom sang along.” Join me for the chorus now, “C’mon, get happy!” …

DeBARTed at 16th & Mission, had a glorious Number 1 at the Sincere Cafe, and left a glorious number 1 at the Sincere Cafe. Then I walked to the Roxie for a somewhat disappointing triple feature of ancient movies.

West of Zanzibar (1928) is silent, with its original pre-recorded musical soundtrack. Lon Chaney’s wife leaves him, and her lover pushes him over a balcony, leaving him crippled. That’s in the first two minutes, and it's a pretty good two minutes, but after that comes an unpleasant melodrama about crazy Chaney taking vengeance. It’s dull, and rude on many levels — racist, sexist, and sadistic, not to mention ecologically unsustainable.

The Devil Doll (1936) was more fun. It’s Tod Browning’s tale of an escaped convict (Lionel Barrymore), whose hobby is shrinking people to 1/6th of their normal size. That would make me one foot tall, with a one-inch penis. Barrymore is deliciously malicious, and the sets for shrunken actors to walk through are convincing. There’s also trick photography involved, though, and it’s poorly done, even for its era, and then badly faded by time.

The Black Bird (1926) brought Bob Vaughn back from yesterday to play the organ, and he was smashing, but the film is a yawn. It’s a ludicrous love triangle with a lurid ending, but not lurid enough to bother sitting through the length of the film.

The organist, Mr Vaughn, was in the lobby and seemed available, so we had a brief but baffling conversation. I asked if he’d written yesterday's score for Phantom of the Opera, and he explained about the color process that was used in making that movie. Which was interesting, and it’s nice that he’s knowledgeable about more than just music, but his answer had nothing to do with my question.

Then I asked if he had, as it seemed yesterday, played the same piece that Lon Chaney had played on the organ in Phantom. His response was something about the organ he has at home.

Bob Vaughn plays the organ splendidly and that’s what matters, but he looks about 80 years old, and seemed disoriented. Or maybe he’s mostly deaf, and faking a conversation he couldn’t hear — we were in the lobby, which was crowded. And he must be tired of answering the same questions probably every time he performs, so maybe he switches up the answers just to screw with people. I'd do that, and love it.

Me, I won’t have to worry about getting old. Fat men usually die young.

♦ ♦ ♦

I’m re-evaluating my plans to attend every show at the Roxie this week. It’s a different double- or triple feature every day, but today’s shows barely held my attention. Browning directed all three, but only The Devil Doll was worth seeing. Chaney wasn’t in that one, but he starred in the other two, which both sucked. Browning and Chaney were each at their best doing strange stuff, but not everything they did was strange, and sometimes strange isn’t necessarily good.

I’ll skip tomorrow’s shows — some police movie, and a war movie, says the Roxie’s program — because neither sounds interesting to me. I’ll be back at the Roxie on Wednesday, when the calendar’s descriptions seem crazy again. Until then, c’mon get happy, y’all.

Addendum, 2021: I thought I'd somehow screwed up the days in my original printing of this issue — this entry says, "Saturday, November 27, 1994," but the previous entry was "Saturday, November 26," and the next day's entry is "Saturday, November 28." All the way to the end of the month and into December, every day was Saturday.
It's a joke so droll even I didn't get it, until the editing step, an hour later, when I caught a line in the fourth paragraph, referring to "eight straight Saturdays — a week's vacation." OK, Doug, very funny, but it's also confusing, so for these online reprints the days of the week will be restored.

At 8:30 this morning — coincidentally, about the time I’d usually be punching in at the office — I stood naked, clicked my electric clippers on, and began shearing myself. Crewcut the top, as always, and then the beard too, which hadn’t been trimmed since hellifIknow. It was getting quite tangled and came down to my nipples before the clippers; now it’s down to the Chronicle spread out on the floor.

Then I mowed the beard further and haphazardly, with scissors, bringing it down to a messy, uneven stubble_._ It's mildly repulsive, which suits me. I don't much care how it looks. The goal was only to reduce my shampoo time in the shower.

♦ ♦ ♦

On my walk to the movies, four teenage boys came side-by-side toward me on the sidewalk, leaving no room for anyone else. What’s a fat guy to do? I walked into one of them, toppling two.

I will not yield to people who won’t share the sidewalk, but I ranted about that a few months ago (July 23), and I don’t do reruns. My point here is only that any of those kids probably could’ve beaten all life and soul out of me, so maybe Dr Randall (Nov. 15) is right about my precarious mental health.

♦ ♦ ♦

There were laughs at a non-comedy second-run discount double feature at the St Francis. Both movies were kinda dumb, but that's OK. That's what I was expecting, and the popcorn was good.

The Specialist has leading actors who rhyme — Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone. They're almost playing parodies of their movie star personae, but the movie isn't clever enough to be doing that on purpose. Things crackle to life briefly whenever the bad guys — Eric Roberts, Rod Steiger, and James Woods — are on screen, then everything's dull when we see the leads again.

I don't understand why Steiger is or was a big star; he’s always seemed meh to me. And it’s a mystery why Roberts isn’t a bigger name; he’s reliably interesting in everything he does, certainly moreso than his sister. Woods is Woods, an actor who's so good in creepy roles, you gotta suspect he’s creepy in real life, too.

Then it was Harrison Ford in Clear and Present Danger, which I can only guess must be science fiction. Posit an honest man in a government job, and OK, I’ll buy that. Say he’s an honest man in a high-ranking government job, well, that seems unlikely, but it’s a movie so let’s do the “suspension of disbelief” thing. But tell me there’s an honest man who’s Deputy Director at the CIA, and that his boss, the CIA Chief, is also an honest man? Well, clearly this story is set on some other, very different planet than ours.

I’ll give Clear and Present Danger points for hinting at the futility of the endless “war on drugs,” and it shows a fictitious President who's corrupt like every President undoubtedly is, but the blatant bullshit about integrity at the CIA is morally nauseating.

♦ ♦ ♦

Reaching for a zine I’d read and wanted to review, I shook a roach off it, then lifted my shoe to squish the bug on the floor. The roach, though, darted inside an empty plastic case that once held a cassette tape, and was lying nearby, slightly ajar. I gently tapped the case with my toes, it audibly snapped shut, and now I have a cockroach in captivity.

It's on the window sill at the moment. Hello, little buddy. Eventually it’s going into the microwave or the freezer, though, because I don’t like cockroaches so it’s gotta die.

♦ ♦ ♦

Yeah, sigh — I rewrote the Twisted Times piece … again. After reading and re-reading and editing and re-editing it for another hour, I printed it out for the third time. Re-reading the printout, I still wanted to remove or replace a few sentences that seemed awkward on the 44th readthrough, but at some point ya gotta say screw it, so I crammed the page into an envelope and mailed it to Stuart.

For all its reputation as a town full of great restaurants, San Francisco is full of great restaurants where you can’t afford to eat. For a good meal at a good price, it’s the Sincere Cafe for Chinese, Taqueria El Castillito for Mexican, and the cheap no-name diner inside the TransBay Terminal for anything else. Other than those three, there’s no such thing as an affordable, edible meal in Frisco. You’re better off eating cold SpaghettiOs from a can.

My neighborhood is mostly expensive shopping and tourist trinkets, so It's especially barren near here. There are a few places that look like cheap diners, but a glance at the menu proves they’re just using the “cheap diner” aesthetic to lure in suckers or sell miniature omelets at inflated prices to future failures (‘yuppies’, they’re called). A couple of these places sell two-egg omelets, standard.

No. Two-egg omelets will never be the standard, not in Doug Holland's America. Fake diners are an abomination. The ‘communist threat’? Bah. Even the Republican Party or nuclear armageddon are doo-doo dangers, compared to the proliferation of fake diners.

That was my mindset, as I peered in the window at Mrs Edwards’ Coffee Shop on Taylor Street. It looks right. The menu is handwritten, photocopied, then Crayola-colored, and taped to the window. A sign brags that the place has been run by the same Mrs Edwards since it opened in 1955. And they serve three-egg omelets.

It’s a real diner, in other words — a place where the waitress might have worked for thirty or forty years, pouring coffee refills and calling everyone ‘honey’. Gotta love a waitress calling you ‘honey’. And bearing in mind that downtown San Francisco doesn’t rent cheap, $5.25 for a cheese omelet isn’t bad.

Well, it isn’t bad on the menu, but on the plate it’s a tragedy. The cheese was Velveeta, or tasted like it. The hash browns were passable but nothing special, and only about five forkfulls. The toast was toast. The butter was margarine. The coffee was neither bad nor good, but at least it wasn’t served at 800° Fahrenheit like at most places, so I could sip it without adding ice or waiting ten minutes to avoid scalding. It would be better if it was better coffee, though.

Since 1955, eh? Well, a diner can't survive that long serving lousy breakfasts, so my experience was probably just bad luck. That said, the grand total, including tax and a modest tip, came to eight bucks. That's a fair price for a good breakfast, but more than I can afford for so-so, so I won’t be having a lasting relationship with Mrs Edwards.

♦ ♦ ♦

At the Castro tonight, a pair of psychobabbling thrillers from the 1940s, when America was first infatuated with Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis. I never have been — you ask me, a cigar is almost always just a cigar.

Dark Mirror (1946) is a semi-campy thing, with Lew Ayres as an alleged expert shrink, and Olivia de Havilland as identical twins, one of whom might be a killer, and the other might be the killer’s next victim. Dr Ayres is supposed to be the ultimate authority on twin psychosis, but since he’s trying to seduce both sisters maybe he’s not their ideal analyst. There aren’t many surprises here, but it’s harmless and done with verve.

The Locket (1947) is more effective, with half a dozen moments of genuine bone-chilling fright — not ‘movie fright’, where things jump out from the shadows and violins squeak, but an internal terror, knowing that if something like that happened to me, maybe I’d go crazy too.

There's a bleak darkness to The Locket, and it’s a delightful noir overload to have the entire movie constructed of flashbacks within other flashbacks. By my count, the movie goes four flashbacks deep, but it all unwinds nicely, and there’s a stirring rendition of “Hands, Knees, and Whoops-A-Daisy” which shouldn’t be missed.

♦ ♦ ♦

On the bus ride home from the movies, I stood in the aisle because, as usual, all the seats were taken. The driver, following Muni protocol, was alternating at random between the brakes and accelerator, so everyone standing was getting whipped around, and I staggered a bit.

Someone sitting nearby said to me, “Hey, hang on, buddy.”

“I’m hanging here,” said I.

“You gotta get home in one piece and sleep it off,” the stranger said, and I love it. Nobody’s mistaken me for a drunkard before. Chopping my beard down to a messy stubble probably did it. I’ll take it as a compliment.

Addendum, 2021 — I googled it: Mrs Edwards’ Coffee Shop has been gone for a long time, and Mrs Edwards herself has been gone since 2015.

Watching that roach trapped in a cassette tape box, I've been observing the wonder/horror of nature — the thorny spikes on its legs, pincher-things by its mouth, whatever sticky stuff lets it stay in the same spot when I turn the cassette box upside-down, and the way it feeds itself with its grotesque feeler/grabber. (Yeah, I've given it some tuna.)

And I've learned what roachshit looks like, as the see-through box now contains four tiny black wads of it.

Not ten minutes ago I splattered its brother roach on the wall when it climbed out from behind the typewriter, but that was an instant death — I saw it, picked up my Information Please Almanac, and boom, it was flattened. The slow, deliberate death of a captive cockroach, however, may be more cruel than I am, so amnesty is being considered. When my vacation is over, maybe I'll take the cartridge to work and shake the roach out onto my boss's desk. Those two were made for each other.

Meanwhile, I've transferred the prisoner to a new, more luxurious jail in an empty pickle jar. Washed the label off the front so I could see, and left some pickle bits and pickle juice inside, and it's eating it up.

♦ ♦ ♦

Slept late for the second day in a row, and the permanent bags under my eyes might be starting to fade. My mood is top of the world, Ma, even though Mom called this morning to invite me to come home for Christmas.

I am home for Christmas, Mom. This rez hotel is my home.

Last time I did Christmas with the family was 1986, and that will be the last time. My family is fine, really. I love 'em all, and they're not the kind of family that gets drunk and has screaming arguments and punches are thrown. It's just that I'm not a people person, and they're all people. I'd enjoy seeing any of them, but being around all of them all at once for a day or a week, oy. My head hurts just typing it.

They'd never understand that, though. Especially Mom, so when I call back I'll tell her I can't afford the trip, which is true, and that my job offers no paid vacation, which obviously isn't true. I'm on vacation right now. If I told my Mom that, though, she'd probably fly down and be here this evening, which — love you, Mom, but — isn't my idea of an enjoyable vacation.

♦ ♦ ♦

I took a pleasant walk among all the important people in the Financial District, belching loudly and scratching myself as thousands of suits walked by, each carrying a copy of The Wall Street Journal.

Wanted everyone to be as happy as me, so I de-ticketed two cars illegally parked on Ellis Street, on my way back home.

Here at the rez hotel, I wrote all the above, and masturbated twice by noon. Life is more leisurely and lots more pleasant while the cancerous tumor of work has been temporarily sliced away.

♦ ♦ ♦

At the Roxie, they screened three movies by Tod Browning, all without Lon Chaney.

The Mystic (1925) is about con artists holding fake seances to fleece the recently bereaved, and what happens when one of the suckers sees a ghost the con-men didn't conjure up. The first half of the flick, about how they work the con, is very effective and entertaining, but after that it sorta drags.

A massive mood swing might've colored my judgment, though. I was all smiles as I bought my ticket and sat down, but midway through the movie some idiot started (and never stopped) crinkling something in a loud plastic bag.

He was two rows behind me so I couldn't see it, but it sounded like a family-sized sack of potato chips — loud. Maybe I should add, if he was reaching into the bag for a few chips every few minutes, I'd tolerate that and say nothing, but he was feeling up that bag like it was Claudia Schiffer. Thirty seconds of crinkling, five seconds of silence, then another thirty seconds of loud crinkling, on and on and on.

If you want to provoke my homicidal side, make noise during a movie — that'll do it, even at a silent movie. First I turned around and glared, to no effect. Then I shushed him, loudly. Then I turned around and shushed him again, louder and with eye contact. Finally I turned around and said, louder than Mr Vaughn playing the organ, "Whatever's in the bag, do you almost have it out?" And for that, two or three people in the auditorium shushed me.

The crinkler stopped crinkling for a few minutes, but then he started again, and I gave up. I resolved to corner him and make an embarrassing scene between the movies, not during the movie, so hell if I know whether The Mystic was any good.

Never got to yell at him, though. He left during the movie's last scene. I heard him crinkling up the aisle and into the lobby. Maybe he came back and found a different seat, but he made no further crinkles. Guess he'd eaten all his potato chips.

Do I need to make a public service announcement? In a theater, when the lights dim, shut the hell up or you're a bleeding hemorrhoid on the butthole of humanity.

Freaks (1932) is one of a kind, an uncomfortable melodrama of doublecross and vengeance backstage at a carnival. With a cast of midgets, pinheads, bearded ladies, Siamese twins, the deformed, the just plain funny-looking, and a hermaphrodite I found attractive, there's plenty to see here. It's the second time I'd seen it, and I'd see it again.

Maybe you're thinking: Is Freaks insulting to the handicapped? Yeah, I suppose it is, but not nearly as insulting as old westerns always were to the natives, or Hollywood movies usually have been to blacks. The story has the circus freaks demanding some dignity, and the movie is sympathetic to that, so I'd say Freaks is amazingly progressive for the 1930s.

The Show (1928) is also set in a carnival, but it's not so appealingly appalling. Here, all the attractions are illusions — the mermaid, the spider/woman, and the daily headchoppings are all fakes. The story is about an arrogant young man who's adored by two women, and as often happens in real life I can't imagine why — he's just a jerk. And it's not even subtle; the character's name is Cock. "Starring John Gilbert as Cock."

It's neither boring nor memorable, with a notable exception only an old-movie enthusiast could care about: I'd thought "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn" in Gone with the Wind was the first profanity in the movies, but in The Show, Gilbert shouts, "Christ!" (via intertitles, of course) in a non-worshipful context.

♦ ♦ ♦

On my way home I bought egg nog, one of the few true pleasures of the Christmas season. Lemme tell you, egg nog and popcorn is an explosive combination.

♦ ♦ ♦

But enough about me. Let's talk about you!

Addendum, 2021 — In the original, on-paper zine, retards were included between midgets and pinheads in Freaks, but I've removed the retards. In the '90s it was just a word, and I've already used 'retard' twice in these re-typed entries, but these days it's considered rude and I'm uncomfortable with it. All future retards from Pathetic Life will be mentally challenged instead.
Also, I grew curious and spent ten minutes Googling to find the earliest profanity on film. Most people still say it's "Damn" in Gone with the Wind, but that's bogus. I'm now pretty sure it's The Big Parade (1925), where the internet tells me that John Gilbert — today's pottymouth again — said "Bitches!" and "God damn it!" during a fierce battle scene.