Slept like a fat baby, flipped the calendar from November to December, and dripped a little prune juice into the roach’s jar. Then I sat my flabby self down at the typewriter, started editing the last week of November, and five hours later the zine was ready. I’ll photocopy it next week, when I go back to work.

Reading through the November issue again, boy, it sure sucks. This issue’s gonna suck too. If you sent three bucks for a sample copy and you’re starting with this entry, let me say this before you figure it out yourself:

This guy lives alone, has maybe one friend, keeps a diary, but does nothing worth reading about. It’s as boring as it sounds, maybe more so.

As we begin a new month, I’m midway through a week’s vacation from a company I despise. The vacation is right here, though. Can’t afford to leave town, and I’m a homebody anyway, so I’ve been to fifteen movies so far this week — alone, of course. Today I went to four more.

I’ve seen the original Love Affair (1939), with Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer, and the remake, An Affair to Remember (1957), with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, and both were very pleasant romantic froth. Of course, I had to see the new remake, again called Love Affair, with Annette Bening and Warren Beatty. I like him and she’s a babe, but I left after twenty minutes.

The earlier versions, even when the plot got hokey, had class, but this version has been declassified. Twenty minutes is a quick walkout decision, but when a movie is rotten, there's a sinking feeling in my gut, and that feeling is never wrong. Whenever I’ve ignored it and stayed to the end, I’ve always regretted it, so I grabbed my jacket and headed for the door.

This was a discount double feature, and before Love Affair I’d already sat through the first movie, which gave me that same sinking feeling. I couldn’t leave, though, because I wanted to see the second feature.

What was the first film? Something so tedious I can’t even remember the title, and I’ve already thrown out today's newspaper, so I don’t know what it was — an unfunny romantic comedy with Marisa Tomei. She's usually likable, but in this one she’s playing a character so stupid that no matter how many times Robert Downey Jr lies to her, she keeps believing him. Gimme a Pepto Bismol.

That's why I go to old movies more often than new movies. Those two cinematic stinkbombs will play for a few weeks, and then a few months on cable and VHS, and then they’ll be gone and forgotten forever.

When an old movie plays in a theater, it’s because it’s remembered, and if it’s remembered it’s probably worth seeing, unlike Love Affair and Title Already Forgotten.

Case in point: Tonight’s double feature at the Castro.

Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964) is a moody, effective story about a loopy woman, her henpecked husband, and their crazy plot to kidnap a little girl. The kidnappers are obvious dolts, so there’s not much doubt that they’re going to be caught, but will the kid survive? It’s not the greatest movie ever made, but it’s clever, it’s a story you haven’t seen before, and it’s exponentially better than either of the movies from earlier today.

Don’t Look Now (1973) is about an upper-class couple trying to get on with their lives after their daughter’s drowning death. It’s mostly set in Venice, though, a city where you take boats to get across town, so the water is always there to remind them of the tragedy. The movie is immensely sad from the start, and soon becomes terrifying, too. It’s an E-ticket ride, though the conclusion — which scared me enormously — feels like a cop-out, when I think about it.

Neither of these movies was a perfect ‘10’, but they were made by people who were trying to make something special, and who inarguably succeeded. These films are twenty and thirty years old, but people will still be watching them in another twenty or thirty years — they're that good. People will also be watching the original Love Affair and An Affair to Remember, but the present remake with Beatty and Bening must never be spoken of again.

♦ ♦ ♦

“The movies are your mistress,” Margaret yelled at me, in one of her recent letters. She’s my ex-girlfriend, and yeah, she can yell by mail. It’s her talent.

She meant it as an insult, but it's true, if a mistress is where a man turns to get what he can’t find at home — emotions (even if they’re fake) or conversation (even if it’s scripted).

We’ve already agreed (see page 1) that my life is pathetic, but going to the movies is an affordable escape from all that. The cinema is were I finally feel connected to humanity, even though, of course, the connection is with artificial characters reciting a script, and with anonymous people sitting in the shadows. For as long as it takes to watch a movie, it doesn’t matter that everyone else in the theater is probably an asshole. We’re sharing the same visceral, manipulated experience, and we’re all in this together.

But wait, there's more. A movie's sound and musical score are usually far superior to the background noise of ordinary life. Characters in good movies have fictional lives that are more interesting than the factual life I’m stuck with. In most movies, something happens, unlike an ordinary day in my life and maybe yours.

The silver screen is the only place you’re allowed and encouraged to stare at a pretty woman’s face. I love staring at a pretty woman’s face, but on the sidewalk and subway or anywhere else it’s considered rude.

It’s an inexpensive way to travel — today I visited New York City, Rome, London, and Venice. Where tomorrow’s double feature might take me is as yet unknown, but it’ll be beautiful, and I won’t even need a passport.

So yeah, Maggie, the movies are my mistress. For a few lousy bucks, I get emotions, companionship, story time, and travel, all without risk of heartbreak or infectious disease.

Addendum, 2021: Courtesy of a few clicks at IMDB.com, I was able to ascertain that Only You was the movie I couldn't remember six hours later.

It was my last workday off for this grand vacation, and I sensed some sadness creeping toward me. Vanquished it with several peanut butter sandwiches, before running a few errands:

1. Needed to buy some new britches, as the ones I’ve been wearing are getting rather ratty. Can’t be just any britches, though. They have to be Ben Davis brand, because in pants from any other maker, the crotch will split the third or fourth time I bend over. There are only two stores in town that carry Ben Davis in my humongous size, but alas, both shops had empty shelves where my jeans should’ve been, so I get to keep my money and keep looking lousy.

2-5. Just more errands you couldn’t possibly care about and I barely do.

On errand #4, though, it was a challenge not laughing out loud when a man on Muni tapped his girlfriend or wife on the shoulder, pointed at a McDonald’s out the window, and suggested cheerfully — like he’s a commercial — “Let’s eat at McDonald’s!” She smiled enormously and rang the bus-bell, and they happily toddled off and ate McFood for McLunch.

It’s best not to judge, and I tried not to ... but didn't try very hard. I've eaten McD or Burger King thousands of times, and might tomorrow — they both have factories in my neighborhood, and sometimes I’m too lazy to make a sandwich at home. But it's something else again, something space-alien weird if you ask me, to be so gol-durn happy about it.

And we were on the 14 bus, rolling through San Francisco's Mission District, past at least a hundred terrific little burrito places, Chinese take-outs, and family-run burgeramas. With all that, I can't even half-understand the joy in that man’s voice when he said, “Let’s eat at McDonald’s!”

♦ ♦ ♦

I ate up a fine double feature at the Roxie tonight.

The Strip (1951) is hip to the beat on the music scene, daddy-O, along L.A.’s Sunset Strip. Louis Armstrong sings a song, but of course he’s just a background player in a band with such greats as Mickey Rooney and William Demerast (Uncle Charlie on My Three Sons). Rooney plays a drummer (yeah, right) who gets mixed up with the mob.

Noir it’s not, because Rooney is too cherubic to be believable with a dark side, but it’s fun. Take a look at that gorgeous Marilyn Monroe lookalike hatcheck girl, who keeps getting brushed off by Rooney all through the movie.

Sweet Smell of Success (1957) is as cynical as I am, with dazzling pricksmanship by Tony Curtis as a smart-and-sour PR man, and Burt Lancaster as a back-stabbing big-city newspaper columnist. This one has buckets of witty quips, lies, half-truths and more lies, setups, put-downs, and still more lies, in a world where everybody wants something and anybody will stop at nothing to get it, whatever it is — just like life, only life doesn’t have such a smartass script.

It’s a marvelous movie, the three-cherry slot machine winner of the week. With the possible exception of Ace in the Hole, I’ve never seen a movie so acerbic. Sweet Smell plays in Berkeley next month, and I already want to see it again.

The day started when I woke from a depressing dream that I was at work, working, and most of my laid-off ex-co-workers were working there still or again. It was hectic and hellish, much like a day at work.

This is a dream? Hello? Where are the dancing girls, the beach, the silly cocktails with umbrellas over them? Who wants to dream about a day at work? Besides, I’m on vacation here.

♦ ♦ ♦

I love a good breakfast at a good diner, but after a disappointing experience at Mrs Edwards’ Coffee Shop a few days ago, it's occurred to me that I don't yet have a breakfast place in San Francisco. In Seattle, I had a breakfast place (Beth's Cafe). I lived in Bakersfield for only a few months, but had a breakfast place there, too (Pappy's Coffee House). I've been in San Francisco for three years or so, and haven't yet found an affordable, reliably good breakfast.

The quest is on, then, and stupidly it began just around the corner from my rez hotel, at Tad’s Steaks. Look, I like Tad's. They make quite a good lunch or dinner at a reasonable price, but their breakfast is regret on a plate, and I never learn my lesson.

I ordered a cheese omelet, and it was fine, as was the coffee and service. The tab was $7.50, including tip, which is reasonable if the breakfast is good, but...

At Tad's, the hash browns always look and taste like what I’m certain they are — pulverized french fries left over from yesterday’s dinner service, or maybe the day before.

And as always, the toast was served naked and barely warm, with wrapped blocks of cold, solid butter on the side. At a well-run diner, toast may be served either pre-buttered, or with something spreadable if I’m supposed to butter it myself. Lukewarm, unbuttered toast with unspreadable butter shouldn't even be called toast. Call it whole wheat frustration.

I eat breakfast at Tad’s every few months, because that’s how long it takes me to forgive or forget the hash browns and toast. I'm hoping that writing about it will make me remember not to breakfast there again.

♦ ♦ ♦

I love an old-fashioned musical, all singing, all dancing, preferably with light comedy sprinkled between the songs, and the question is always: Who's better, Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire?

For me, there's no debate. Kelly was a fine dancer and light actor, certainly more handsome that the horsefaced Astaire, but Astaire somehow had the perfect touch, the ability to make master-class dancing appear effortless, and he was better as an actor, too.

Astaire was at his very best, of course, opposite the equally-talented Ginger Rogers, and tonight at the Elmwood, the Fred & Ginger double feature was Swing Time (1936) and Top Hat (1935). They made ten movies together, and these are two of their best. Swing Time, while excellent, needs Fred to dump his fiancée before he can fall for Ginger, and that's a sad element ain't it?

Top Hat, though, has no ingredients that are less than delightful. It’s a synchronized comedy of mistaken identities, with a funny gay subplot wherein a man and his butler (“Hardwick” and “Mr Bates”) quarrel over who has the better fashion sense.

There are so many great tunes by Irving Berlin, I might have been singing during the show, and definitely after. “Isn't This a Lovely Day To Be Caught in the Rain,” I danced in the downpour, waiting for the bus back to BART.

This morning, my ongoing search for a good omelet at a good price brought me through the doors of the O’Farrell Cafe, where the hash browns were not recycled french fries. As I watched, the cook grated a genuine potato onto the grill, and it sizzled. I wasn’t being Morley Safer from 60 Minutes, though; the layout of the place lets everyone see into the kitchen.

The coffee was excellent, and the omelet and my tongue liked each other. It was gooey cheesy yumminess. Unlike yesterday's breakfast at Tad’s, the hash browns were what they were supposed to be, and the toast was hot, with butter soft enough to spread. It was a dang tasty breakfast, with a slice of (homemade?) apple pie for dessert. With tax and a $2 tip, it rang me up for eight bucks total. If I’d skipped the pie (but why would I?) it would’ve been a $6 breakfast, and that’s borderline affordable.

I told the cook she’d be feeding my fat face again, and that's true, so is this the end of my quest for the perfect breakfast in San Francisco? Is this nirvana — not the band, but a transcendent state with neither suffering, desire, nor sense of self, free from the effects of karma and the cycle of death and rebirth?

Nah. It was just a good breakfast, but like a film noir husband, if another diner looks interesting I might be unfaithful to the O'Farrell Cafe.

♦ ♦ ♦

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) is considered a Christmas classic, and I’ve seen it several times. Who hasn’t? Like any good movie, though, it’s better in a darkened cinema, so for five bucks plus BART fare, I saw it again at the Paramount in Oakland, with about a thousand teary-eyed nose-honking strangers.

Jimmy Stewart is George Bailey, a small-town man with big-city dreams. Instead of following those dreams, though, he’s made all sorts of sacrifices, for his uncle and his brother and his wife and a family business he hates. After trying so hard to be the entire town’s Mr Nice Guy all his life, it’s no surprise that he needs a prescription for Prozac, but it hasn’t been invented yet so he’s ready to throw himself off a bridge. It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.

“I don’t want to get married, ever,” he cries to his girlfriend. “I want to do what I want to do!” End of scene, and quick cut to their wedding.

The newlyweds have a fine whitebread marriage, and she starts squirting out babies, but not far under the surface George grows edgy, unsatisfied, as day after month after year he never gets to, as he said, “do what I want to do!” The only surprise is that it’s taken him so long to start contemplating suicide.

This being a Hollywood movie, a guardian angel comes down from Heaven to convince George his life is worth living — if it's ‘living’ to spend your entire life doing good deeds for others and nothing for yourself.

It’s Frankly too Capra for me. I’m not a heartless bastard, and I can’t deny that it’s an effective movie, but its answers are simply wrong. If your life is an endless series of sacrifices for others and nothing for you, that's not a wonderful life.

The fictional George Bailey and the real me came to the same crossroads. There were things we wanted to do, but people were nudging us not to do what we wanted. Do this instead, everyone said.

George decided to do what everyone wanted him to do, and if it wasn’t a movie, his life would've ended in the cold, swirling waters under that bridge. I did what I wanted to do — and I’m still alive, having a fairly good time, with no intention of visiting a bridge unless I'm crossing it.

It's a Wonderful Life is a wonderful movie, but c'mon, don’t be a putz like George Bailey. Have some fun for yourself sometimes. Live your life for you, dang it, because you’re all you’ve got.

Peter said “Welcome back” to me, but it felt like a death sentence, and I replied, “Back to Hell.” Yes, my vacation is over and I returned to the office. Chains on my ankles, again.

Work is still frustrating, my employer still sucks, Carlotta is still stunning, and the photocopier is busted so the November issue isn’t in the mail yet.

Also, sixty people were laid off on Friday, including nine from our office. Nobody from my group, though.

Among the unemployed is everyone who didn’t want to leave their desks on the day of the fire (Nov. 16). For your hesitation to evacuate and dedication to the job, we present you with a pink slip.

The work those people used to do, Babs explained, will now be done at the merged super-company’s main office, two thousand miles away — though the merger, so far as I know, still hasn’t been approved by the Federal Trade Commission, or whatever bureaucracy is pretending to consider the matter.

There’s no reason that my work couldn’t have been relocated just as easily, and I’m sure that’s going to happen soon. Management resolutely denies it. Their denials are the confirmation.

Bullshit and layoffs, same old same old, and my, how I've missed the place.

♦ ♦ ♦

It was nice seeing Kallie again, though. She told me about her vacation, going camping. I told her about mine, going to the movies.

♦ ♦ ♦

Sorry, I gotta blow some steam about Jennifer. She's my ‘lead’ in the office, and I’ve never known why. There are five of us, and she’s the dumbest of the five, has no sense of humor, and scowls whenever any of us laugh. I’m uncomfortable saying this, because it sounds so sexist, but trust me, I’d say the same thing if she was a man: She’s the queen bitch of the office.

My first day at this job, it took me two minutes to realize Jennifer was going to be a problem. She has exactly the wrong demeanor for training new hires. She came at me full of arrogance and attitude, scolded me for asking questions, and gave long, rambling politician-style answers to the few questions I was allowed to ask — answers that said nothing, and left me quite confused.

I now know, it was nothing personal — just Jennifer being Jennifer. All of us know it. If we have a question that's even slightly complicated, we all turn to each other for answers, bypassing Jennifer. The prime directive is, never ask Jennifer your questions, because (1) she doesn’t like it when anyone asks questions, (2) her answers will be rushed even on a slow day, and (3) she’ll answer the question she thinks you’re asking, which probably isn’t the question you’re asking.

I'm venting about this because today, three new temps were brought in to do some of the semi-complicated work we used to do until July. Since then, that work has been done by a different department. That department was axed on Friday, so now we'll be doing that work again. It goes around, it comes around, and it always smells shitty.

Jennifer, as the ‘lead’, is responsible for training the new temps, and she told us all to "stay out of the way." She introduced the temps to the staff, but told them and us to avoid talking to each other this week. "We can be sociable next week, after the temps have been trained. For now, I want no distractions." I don't know if that's normal office behavior, but I don't like talking to people anyway. It doesn't need to be a rule.

They were close enough, I could hear everything anyway, and it was pretty bad. All day, Jennifer would give them a few sentences of curt and sometimes misleading guidance, and then leave them to do the work, until one by one they'd come to her with the simplest of questions — things she should’ve already explained — and her answers were all twisted and only more confusing.

And the scolding! Don't you want the new hires to ask questions, until they know what they're doing? I'd think, the more questions, the better, but Jenn wants the questions to be none.

“I already told you the answer to that,” she said — and walked away.

“If you would’ve been listening this morning, you’d know that already…”

At one point she was standing beside one of the newbies, badly explaining something, and she asked a perfectly logical question, and she replied, “No, no, no_! Stay awake!”_ Her favorite response to a rudimentary question is often, “You tell me. I’ve told you that already, so now you tell me.”

I didn't say anything. It's not allowed, so I simply sat there and simmered. If I said something to the temps, Jennifer would yell at me. If I said something to Darla, she'd say I’m making trouble. If I said something to Jennifer, she'd deep-freeze me and probably sabotage me somehow.

So I watched and listened and wished I was still on vacation. If it continues tomorrow, I might have to sigh loudly and find my balls and say something.

Probably not, though. I haven't seen my balls in ages.

"If it continues," I wrote yesterday, "I might have to find my balls." It continued, and I found my balls, with some help from Kallie and Carlotta.

Jennifer is snippy and unhelpful when she's training one person, but she’s three times worse now — training three people at the same time.

This morning she answered another question from one of the temps with an insult instead of an answer, and he got visibly flushed in the face. He has red hair and pale skin, so the blood shows when he's angry, and he's big, too — looks like his last job was lumberjacking, and he's not used to being treated like sawdust.

He didn’t say anything, though. Like all of us only more so, the temps are at the company’s mercy. If he’d said one cross word, that guy could’ve been sent home, and he'd be out of work until his next temp assignment.

Watching his face redden, Kallie and I made eye contact, I motioned toward the door, and we stepped into the hall. "He's gonna deck her," I said.

"I hope not, but it might be justifiable homicide," said Kallie, and we laughed but it wasn't funny.

Carlotta joined us, and we all agreed that Jennifer is horrible. It was starting to feel like a Norma Rae moment when Darla approached and said, “What’s up?”

The three of us gave her an overflowing earful, but I (stupidly) did most of the talking. My best line was, “Open your office door and listen while she’s ‘training’ these people.” We vented for a few minutes, and Darla nodded a lot but said nothing of value — just what you'd expect from management. Then she told us to go back to work, returned to her office, and closed the door.

This morning, we had another impromptu meeting in the hallway — me and Kallie and Carlotta, and this time Peter was with us — to talk about Jennifer and the temps. We decided to revolt.

Our instructions from Jennifer have been to let her handle training the temps, and to stay away from them all week. We’re allowed to say good morning and good night, but we're to make no chit-chat, keep away from the temps entirely, until their training is done. “No distractions,” Jennifer told us on Monday.

It seems ridiculous to me, but we've all kept quiet, as instructed. Easy for me; I don't want to talk to anyone, anyway. It's gotten extremely unpleasant, though. Jenn treats the temps like lesser beings, and she's a terrible teacher, so they're not learning squat.

Therefore, by unanimous vote of the four of us in the hallway, fuck that shit entirely. While Jennifer was on break, we approached the three temps, pulled up chairs, and after we’d all introduced ourselves, Peter did most of the talking:

“Jennifer can be harsh," he said, "and short-tempered. If anything doesn’t make sense, or you’re not happy with the answers she gives, you can come to any of us. We all know what’s what and how to do what we do here, and none of us will insult you or sidestep the questions.”

The lumberjack smiled so big, I thought he was gonna get out of his chair and give Peter a big hug. He looked extra lumberjacky today, because he was wearing a red plaid shirt.

Four days into their time here, the temps were finally given company e-mail addresses today, so we gave them ours. "Send an e-mail to any of us, or all of us, any time," Kallie said, and then we evaporated back to our desks, before Jennifer returned.

There will be consequences when Jennifer finds out, but if the four of us stick together — or the seven of us, counting the temps — we'll be OK. Solidarność, baby.

Carlotta is still semi-new at what we do, has occasional questions, and since she knows me best of the bunch, she asks me questions sometimes. That’s what people do, right?

Since I got back from vacation, though, she’s got a new trick. She's been snagging me.

At first, on Monday, she came over to my desk and hooked her pinky under my shirt sleeve, basically pulling me over to her desk so she could show me what the software on her screen was doing wrong. Tuesday and yesterday, she snagged me a few times as I was walking around the office, running mini-errands or zapping copies or whatever, by pinkying my shirt pocket. It seemed low-level playful, nothing more.

This morning she snagged me by my belt loop, and this gets my attention more effectively. Then, this afternoon, I was standing in a corner, flipping through a printout for some numbers, when Carlotta put her finger in my left butt pocket and lightly pulled. I turned around, saw this extremely attractive woman smiling at me, and she gently yanked at my pants a second time. I was immediately about half-engorged, and she must’ve seen the blood drain from my face.

Carlotta is not a fool. She knows she’s attractive, knows I’m a loser, and knows what happens when you yank on a man’s pants pocket.

I’m no fool, either. It has to be meaningless — she’s married, I’m a fat doofus, and this morning I forgot to brush my teeth.

Chalk it up to charity. I’m her ‘good deed’ for the day. I’ll take it as a compliment that she trusts me enough to play pinky-tug, and knows I won't freak out or file a complaint with HR.

I’m just wondering, if I don’t turn around the next time she tugs at my pants, what will she tug at next?

♦ ♦ ♦

Kallie and I are having dinner with some friend of hers tomorrow night, and then we’ll watch that Rolling Stones video she's been on about since before her vacation. I said yes, but I’m not that keen on meeting some stranger. Momma always said, never talk to strangers, and to this day I rarely do.

Her friend’s name is J B — just initials — and Kallie says it’s only 50/50 he’ll be there. “He said he’s coming, but he’s a guy who often ducks out of social engagements at the last moment.” If he doesn’t show up, that’s fine with me. If he does, we could talk about our shared interest in ducking out of social engagements.

♦ ♦ ♦

The Xerox machine has been broken all week, but today the repairman finally showed up, and got the machine humming. Which means, at the end of the day I said good night to everyone, went home, ate dinner, and came back to the office with the master copies in my backpack. Time to print the November issue of the zine, as a free fringe benefit of the job.

While the machine was cranking 'em out, I was sweating wet all over my forehead. Paranoid like every month, I was worried that one of the bosses might be working late, and would open the printer-room door, find me stealing a few hundred pages of paper and printing, and fire me.

The door did open, but it was George the janitor, a guy about my age but already almost half bald. We’d talked before, just briefly, on nights I’ve worked late, or nights like tonight, when I was pretending to work late.

“Hey, Doug," he said. "Working overtime again, huh?”

Our history had added up to maybe ten minutes of conversation over the past several months, but over that time I’ve semi-bonded with the guy. He wouldn't fink me out, I was sure. So what the hell. I told him the truth.

“No, I’m just here to steal some copies.”

He wanted to know what I was copying, so I told him, and explained the concept of zines. He asked for a copy, and I said, “Three dollars,” but he just raised his eyebrows.

Until tonight, I hadn’t shown the zine to anyone I know in real life except my ex-girlfriend Maggie, and even that became something of a problem. George has always seemed laid back and cool, though, so with his pledge not to show it to anyone else who works there, I handed him a copy, free of charge, fresh printed and stapled, and still warm.

He barely glanced at it, then walked away to empty the trash and vacuum the rest of the eighth floor. When he came back, we talked a little longer. He gave me his phone number, and said maybe we could get together some time.

“The thought doesn’t make me want to vomit,” I said, "but you ought to read some of the zine first. You might not want to hang out with me, after reading it.”

“Yeah?”

“You know, Pink Floyd says, everyone’s built a wall around themselves? I certainly have. But when I write the zine, I tear down the wall.”

George sorta shrugged. “A lot of us lead pathetic lives,” he said. “I’m 38 years old and I’m taking out trash for a living.”

A lot of us lead pathetic lives. I love that line. Like I said, George seems to be a cool dude. Showing the zine to Maggie worried me; I was afraid she wouldn’t ‘get it’, and indeed, she didn’t. I’m pretty sure George will, though.

There were already some Christmas decorations in the office, but to my surprise, Darla hung mistletoe over the department’s main door this morning.

I hate Christmas, but like the Christmas spirit. Mistletoe in the workplace, though, seems like a bad idea. I’m mildly opposed to kissing co-workers, at least on company time.

Sure, kissing Kallie or Carlotta or the Mexican babe who works on the other side of our floor is something I’d love to do, but I don’t want a slightly-racy-at-the-workplace peck on the cheek. I want long-lasting suckage with tongues.

And as for the rest of the people I work with — Jennifer, Peter, Darla, Babs — that’s all they are to me: people I work with. Please, let’s leave our lips out of it, even in December.

♦ ♦ ♦

Got a nice message on my machine from Seth Friedman of Factsheet Five, telling me he enjoys the zine, and that a good review is forthcoming in his next issue. He wanted to make sure I have enough back issues on hand to meet the demand, before writing a hot plug.

I was sort of speechless, both at the kind words and because that’s my natural state. “Yeah, long as there’s a free copier at work, my zine won’t be sold out,” I said when I called him back.

It’s flattering to hear that someone gets something out of this pathetic zine, especially someone like Seth, who must see twenty incoming zines in his box every day. I therefore and hereby recant all the times I’ve taken Seth's name in vain, after sending for something Factsheet Five made sound interesting, which I subsequently thought blew chunks.

Hey, now I get to be the zine people send for that blows chunks.

♦ ♦ ♦

I spent the evening with Kallie, but we're still just friends, so cool your jets, dear reader. Our eventual objective was watching the Rolling Stones Voodoo Lounge Tour tape at her place, but first we N’d out to the Haight for a cup of java and to meet her friend, J B.

She’s mentioned him several times, but I was surprised that he isn’t in our age bracket (mid-30s). He looks about twice that, and I told him he’s the first person I think I’ve ever met who goes by initials instead of a name. He said he tells no-one his legal name, and I respect that and said so.

Then the three of us took a crosstown bus to 27th & Church, which wasn’t where we were going, but Kallie and J B were headed for a restaurant they thought was worth the trip, and they got lost. From where we got off the bus, it was a long overlapping walk (three blocks this way, oops, six blocks the other way) before they found the Palace Family Steak House at 30th & Army Street.

It was fine, but for me, not worth the walk. I had a fish sandwich and fries, perfectly tasty and edible, but for six bucks it was nothing you couldn’t find in any of a dozen restaurants we’d walked past to get to that one. Kallie and J B’s meals smelled better than mine tasted, though, so don't judge the place by my fish sammich.

For an hour or so, the three of us had light conversation of exactly the kind I can’t do very well and don’t enjoy. It wasn’t J B’s fault, and he’s an easy, likable sort; I simply have no knack with strangers. I’m utterly introverted, til I know you and you know me. Gotta know somebody before I can really talk with them, but how do you get to know somebody without talking to them? Curse of the shy.

I apologized to J B for having almost nothing to say, and like I told Kallie beforehand, I am not socially skilled. Heck, she and I worked in the same office, fifteen feet apart for six months, before I said anything to her that wasn’t “good morning” or “good night.”

J B is a professional musician, so he had to leave after dinner to get to his gig for the night, and — sigh — I like the guy fine, but him leaving was a relief. After that, Kallie and I BARTed to her house, and our two-way conversation was easier, funnier, more personal, less generic, and just a pleasure, not a challenge.

When we got to her place, her flatmate, Janey or Jilly or something like that, said hello, but thankfully didn’t want to hang out with us. Interactions with yet another stranger — no, thanks.

Then Kallie popped the tape into the VCR, ostensibly the reason for the whole evening. It’s the Rolling Stones, on the same tour we saw a month ago in Oakland, only this performance was somewhere in New Jersey a week or two earlier.

I like the Stones but don’t worship them like Kallie does. It was good listening, just not much to look at. Here’s an excellent band on what’s perhaps their final tour, and it’s been turned into a slick, professional video, edited in the same nauseating quick-cut style as every concert video shot in the past ten years. You get two seconds of Jagger jumping around, three seconds of the drummer banging, one second of crowd reaction, a few seconds filmed from way in the back of the crowd, half a second of a man scratching his nuts, another one second of crowd reaction, and then an odd-angle shot of some woman holding a baby or a longhair dancing by himself or something equally irrelevant to the music, and the cuts continue. I expected the credits to say, Edited by an egg beater.

It was like watching MTV, and like MTV it made me seasick. Song after song for the entire concert, there was never a shot filmed by one stable camera that lasted as long as five seconds. Wearing my film critic’s jock strap, may I briefly (continue to) rant about how weary I am of all this? I’d like to linger on one image for long enough to actually see it — ten seconds would be nice, and ten minutes would be better. It’s a Rolling Stones concert. Point a camera at the stage and press "record'. That’s what I want to see.

Several of the songs the band performed in Oakland were omitted, either edited out or maybe not played that night in New Jersey. The crowd didn’t seem as into it as our Coliseum crowd had been, Jagger somehow managed to muff the words to “Satisfaction” (which you’d think he'd have memorized by now), and most surprisingly, the seven-story inflatable Elvis we’d had in Oakland was nowhere to be seen.

A more urgent problem was that I had gas attacks all evening, and especially during the video. I held ‘em in when possible, and when I couldn’t inhale it back up my ass I tried hiding my farts behind Charlie Watts on drums. Eventually, though, I punctuated “Brown Sugar” with a few long, loud ripplers and pungent after-effects. Kallie said nothing about it, kept bopping her head, softly singing along, thankfully all ears and no nose.

It was a nice evening, and I think Kallie and I are coming together slowly. We’re friends. I haven’t had many of those, and none since moving to San Francisco.

Haven’t yet gotten the hang of this platonic thing, though. During the video, we sat on the couch about two feet apart, and when she reached toward me I know what I wanted, but she was just adjusting the lights — the switch was directly above my shoulder.

Two days of happiness, for five days of hell — that's a lousy trade, but it’s the best deal I’ve found. So far.

Lost myself in some zines and this week’s AVA, then went for the mail and discovered several more zines to be read. When it occurred to me I was hungry, I remembered last Sunday’s cheap cheese omelet, and returned to the O’Farrell Cafe. Cheese omelet rerun, with a double dose of hash browns. Still too expensive, but it’s a good breakfast.

Walking back home, though, my blood pressure shot skyward. It's only five blocks, but the crowds got more and more oppressive and annoying as I neared the rez hotel, because of what the rez hotel is near.

This will be my third Xmas working at the department store, so that insanity I know well enough or too well, but this is my first Christmas living here, in the city's central shopping district.

It's ain’t a strip mall. Within a few blocks of this rez hotel, there’s a Macy’s second only to their flagship store in New York City; ten stories of upscale retailer I Magnin; a three-story FAO Schwarz that’s not where Tom Hanks and Robert Loggia danced on a giant piano but might as well be; the city’s swanky Nieman-Marcus store, where (I am not kidding) they serve high tea in the rotunda; a Tiffany’s jeweler the size of a football stadium; a huge and iconic local store, The Emporium; a smaller but just as revered high-end shop called Gump’s (no relation to the famous moron) where (again, I shit you not) a giant Buddha statue overlooks the shoppers; and the biggest Nordstrom in that chain, where there’s nothing I could afford to buy, but riding their cool curving escalators is free.

There are also, of course, infinite smaller storefronts selling overpriced everything. Point is, there’s a lot of shopping, it’s all expensive shopping, and it surrounds my dumpy rez hotel.

It’s making me reconsider my move downtown, last spring. I love the easy access to BART and Muni under Market Street, and it’s a quick block and half walk to work, but other than that, this is the part of San Francisco where I’m least at home.

Always the streets are full of cars and the sidewalks are jammed with slow-walking feeble-minded tourists, but as Christmas approaches, the traffic and stupidity has tripled. Elbow to elbow and bag to bag, the crosswalks are so crowded with cretins it’s safer to jay. Horns honk and fingers are flipped and shoppers rush home with their treasures.

For six solid blocks I am surrounded by the meaning of Christmas, which is no meaning at all except buying and selling. I cannot see myself living through a second Christmas so close to Union Square, so I’ll soon be gone.

It went from a question to an idea to a decision as I was walking back to the rez hotel, bashing through the throngs, thumping people out of my way, and wishing for death — theirs, not mine.

Why the hell am I living in the city's Shopping Mecca? The Mission is where I belong. The Roxie is there, and the Sincere Cafe, and miles of cheap eateries and bakeries and bodegas.

Before moving downtown, the Mission was my home, first in one rez hotel and then another a block away. Yeah, the Mission. It has too many bums and beggars, street preachers and needles at the curbs, but unlike Union Square, there’s usually room to walk on the sidewalk.

♦ ♦ ♦

Back in this rez room, in this neighborhood I've decided to leave, I read and wrote until I heard myself yawning, looked at the clock and it was time for beddy-bye-bye.

Tomorrow, another day of weekend, another day of life, and then on Monday it’s back to the hated workplace. I should be seriously thinking about moving on from that job, too.

Yeah, the times, they are a-changin'. Soon.

Whenever I get excited about something, even just a little, I need to expel waste product. If I pick up a movie calendar and spot a good double feature next month, or if a moment of semi-inspiration comes and there’s finally something to write for the zine, or if I’m meeting someone somewhere in half an hour — I gotta take a dump, and now, and how.

Is this normal human physiology, I wonder, an involuntary tightening of the abdominal muscles? Or does this only happen with phenomenally fat people, like me?

This weekend has been extra problematic, too, as my poop cycle seems to be perfectly synched with everyone else in the hotel. The communal john down the hall has been occupied every dang time I’ve needed it. I’ve been using the toilet downstairs, or the toilet upstairs, but often someone’s sitting there, too.

Just now, I couldn’t wait any longer, spread out a Chronicle editorial page, and gave it what it deserved. El turdo, hot and stinky, right there on the floor. Then I folded it up, stuffed it into an old bread wrapper, and dropped it down the trash chute, just as a toilet flushing down the hall could finally be heard. For the homeless and hungry tomorrow, happy dumpster diving tomorrow.

♦ ♦ ♦

I’m finally getting around to glancing at Friday’s news in Saturday’s newspaper on Sunday afternoon, and the front-page story should be headlined, “Nation is run by idiots.”

President Clinton has fired the Surgeon General, Joycelyn Elders, because she gave a smart, honest answer to a question about masturbation. Can’t find a verbatim transcript of the unholy words, because the Chronicle won’t let Elders speak for herself — everything in the article is a summary, a paraphrase, or quoted semi-sentences sewn together by professional journalists.

Seems someone asked Elders if a more explicit discussion of beating off might help fight the spread of AIDS, and she answered that masturbation is “part of human sexuality,” but that “many of our parents have difficulty teaching certain things,” so the normalcy of fiddling with your own diddle is “a part of something that perhaps should be taught” in school.

Is that scandalous? The usual Republicans did their usual Republican thing, got all shocked and infuriated and 100% proved her point. And Clinton, a Democrat who seems about 1/3 Republican, issued a terse one-sentence announcement: “Dr Elders’ public statements reflecting differences with administration policy and my own convictions have made it necessary for her to tender her resignation.”

I hadn't been aware that Clinton had an “administration policy” on masturbation, or any “convictions” firm enough to get a grip on.

A sidebar to the article lists several of Elders’ previous “controversial statements,” but, of course, it’s journalism again — there are no direct quotes, only summaries and paraphrases. If what’s “controversial” is what she said, why won't the Chronicle let us read what she said?

The gist of all her “controversial” statements is that she thinks

• lesbians and gays shouldn’t be denied the legal and social standing everyone else takes for granted

• the government should study legalizing drugs

• drug and alcohol education should begin in kindergarten

• and now, gasp, that masturbation shouldn’t be a forbidden topic.

There's also a weird line about Medicaid, but it's so mangled and probably misconstrued I’m not even sure what she meant, but other than that, there’s nothing in the Chronicle’s list of Elders’ “controversial” statements that’s controversial. It's all "of course" to me. I wish she’d gone further. What’s to “study” about legalizing drugs? Just legalize drugs.

Until yesterday there was one intelligent, principled, thinking human in the Clinton administration, but now there’s none.

♦ ♦ ♦

Kallie and I met at the Roxie to see Gimme Shelter (1970), which I'd thought it would be a toe-tapping rockumentary of the Rolling Stones in concert, against a backdrop of the Altamont disaster. Instead it was a documentary of Altamont, with the music in the background. That’s not to say I was disappointed, though, not at all. It was excellent, and I was floored.

When the Stones finished their 1969 American tour, the last show was a free concert at the Altamont Speedway near San Francisco (neither Kallie nor I have any idea where Altamont is, or was), and the event was billed as “Woodstock West.” It was woefully under-planned, though, and whatever could go wrong, did go wrong.

According to the story as told by everyone who wasn't there, Mick Jagger kept singing, and even egged the crowd on, as a man was stabbed to death in full view of the band, by out-of-control Hell’s Angels who’d been hired as security. The reality is more ambiguous, as reality tends to be.

The concert’s logistics had been arranged by the band’s handlers and lawyer, Melvin Belli, and all the planning was just amazingly haphazard and don’t-give-a-damn. Hiring Hell’s Angels as the concert’s only security — and paying them in beer — wasn’t the only stupidity, either. In the movie’s sweeping views of 300,000 spectators, I couldn’t see any SaniCans, and there’s a public-address announcement asking if anyone in the crowd has some bandages. The movie shows Belli making plans for the concert well in advance, and it doesn’t take much brains to think people might need Band-Aids and porta-potties, or that Hell’s Angels might make questionable security. So I’m blaming Belli for this mess.

Did Jagger urge the crowd on? Absolutely not. That’s, I think, bullshit from the same right-wing bullshitters who make up bullshit about anything and anyone that’s not normal for the 1950s. The movie shows Jagger and bassist Keith Richards emphatically pleading over and over into the microphone for the crowd to stop fighting, and every time it was apparent there was trouble, the band stopped playing. Don’t know what more they could’ve done from the stage — if they’d packed their gear and ended the concert, it’s easy to imagine an already agitated crowd going angrier.

I also want to defend the Hell’s Angels, at least to some extent. They have a well-earned reputation as a bunch of bullies and thugs, and Belli was insane to hire them as security, but from what’s shown in the documentary, their behavior in a ‘police’ role wasn’t any worse than the way real police behave.

Most surprisingly, the filmmakers caught the stabbing on camera, the one incident that made the Altamont concert famous as “the day the sixties died,” and it’s not what the world has been told. Shown in slow-motion, frame by frame, this wasn't a random man being stabbed by Hell’s Angels — it’s a man with a gun. He’d pulled a gun, for whatever reason — maybe to settle an argument, to shoot into the crowd, perhaps to shoot at the Rolling Stones — and he was waving the gun around, so one of the Hell’s Angels stabbed him in the back.

By my definition, that’s at least arguably justifiable homicide. A man waving a gun in a crowd? You’ve got to take him down. They took him down and he never got up, but history shouldn’t much mourn the death of a man who pulled a gun in a crowd.

♦ ♦ ♦

After the show, I’d promised to take Kallie to lunch at the Sincere Cafe, but they’re closed for vacation until January 16 (a nice long vacation), so we went to El Castillito instead. We talked about the movie, and about how you can’t believe everything you read in the papers. Then we went shopping at the Rainbow Store, and took BART in opposite directions to our homes.

The movie gets a good review, the burrito gets a good review, and Kallie gets a good review, and here's something I hadn't noticed until tonight. The zine makes it easier to be a sparkling conversationalist. In a social setting when I’d usually wonder what to say, I can now come up with a spur-of-the-moment spiel on just about anything, and nobody knows I’m just recreating a rant that took half an hour to write.

Like, in the store, when Kallie pointed as the mistletoe for sale, I said some of what I’d written about mistletoe and kissing Friday (without, of course, mentioning who I’d like to kiss).

When the bells of St Someone’s Church down the street ring out with the Mamas & the Papas, Tony Bennett, or god forbid occasionally a hymn, I usually enjoy the music, and sometimes even sing along. But when the bells are playing “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” sweet Jesus, it brings me down.

I don’t do Christmas. No regrets about that. It’s a choice, and I’ve chosen.

Coming back to Christmas might be nice, some year — exchanging gifts, hugs, maybe love — but not this year. Probably not next year. The first prerequisite would be finding someone worth the bother of Christmas, and nobody is, at least nobody I’ve yet met.

Family? Heck, no. I love ‘em and I wish ‘em all a merry Christmas, but I’ll wish it quietly, and from a thousand miles away, thanks. Most of them don’t know me well, which is my own fault — I usually kept to myself, even when they were within easy driving distance. They have their lives, which don’t much interest me, and I have mine, which doesn’t involve them.

Friends? I have so few, it’s embarrassing to count. Even Bruno, my only friend from childhood and still probably the best friend I have, hasn’t answered the post card I sent several months ago. Perhaps he begrudges my leaving town, moving to Frisco, and never even calling. Cordially, tough. I invited him to come with me when I left, but he said no, so I came alone.

Strangers? William E Noland, someone I’ve never heard of, has apparently read about this zine somewhere. He sent me a ho-ho-ho Christmas card saying, “Just a note to wish you ‘happy holidays’. I hope to send off for your publication soon.” And there’s no return address, so it’s not even a scam to get a free copy (which might’ve worked!). Thank you for the gesture, William, whoever you are, but you might as well have written it in another language. Christmas is gibberish to me.

Please note: The above is not a plea for more cards and letters. Cripes, I don’t answer the ones I get already.

More unwanted holiday cheer: Darla took her staff to lunch today, and that's us. Jennifer begged off somehow, and Peter called in sick. If I’d known Darla was planning it, I would’ve called in sick, too.

As always when these company events can’t be avoided, we ended up at some Michelin-starred restaurant where I’d never eat in the real world, a gold-plated buffet with butler-class service to clear away our plates when we went back for seconds. I went back for seconds four times, so I won’t deny it was delicious, but I’m not comfortable in such elegant surroundings, or with people who are. I’d rather relax, maybe eat a cheeseburger at a greasy spoon, not a place where the silverware is actually made of silver.

It made the whole meal into a competition to see who’d dribble potato soup on their clothes first, who’d use the wrong fork, or who’d accidentally knock over the coffee. In order, it was Kallie dribbling the soup, Carlotta confused by the several forks, and me almost spilling the coffee jug, though I caught it before it toppled off the table.

The conversation was uncomfortable, too. She’s a nice enough lady, but I don’t have anything to say to Darla, and don’t want to pretend to. I can talk to Carlotta, but prefer the innocuous office setting where we know we’re acquaintances, not pretending to be friends. Kallie, of course, is a friend — we could talk like real people talk, somewhere else, but not in that restaurant. Sitting with the boss and a co-worker in the Cafe del Mucho Dinero, we’re not going to talk about things we’ve talked about, like her rude flatmates, her mammogram results, or my dreams of my dead dad.

And anyway, what’s ‘Christmas’ about eating a lunch that costs two hours wages? I’d rather have the two hours wages, and make myself a peanut butter sandwich. I said, “Thank you, Darla,” said it real nice and hope it sounded sincere, but inside I was just thankful it was over.

Carlotta’s desk phone rang, and this being the first day of her vacation, like a dipshit I went over and answered it. “Carlotta’s desk speaking.”

It was some suit from Inhuman Resources, calling for Lottie. I told him she’d be gone for two weeks, could I help you, and all that drivel, and he said, “When she returns, please direct her to come to Human Resources and pick up her severance check.”

“Excuse me? Her severance check?”

“Yes, that’s why I’m calling. We’ve received notification from the union that she’s in default on her dues, so we are contractually obligated to end her employment.” He was obviously reading from a script.

“Hey, Hamlet,” I said. “This is a non-union office. Nobody here is in a union. I don’t know anyone on this floor who’s in a union, or anyone in the building. We're fired if we say the word union. I'll probably be fired for saying 'union' to you. Maybe you should check such details before firing people over the phone while they’re on vacation.”

The voice — he never identified himself — said he was simply following procedures, and if our office isn’t unionized he’d need to see it in writing. I took his name and number, said I’d relay the message to Boss Darla, and didn’t say “Fuck off,” but sure wanted to.

The system says Carlotta’s stopped paying union dues, so she’s fired. Hell of a system, where the union can get you fired, same as management, even if you're not in a union, and nobody doublechecks. As soon as Lottie's back from vacation, she'll have to fight for her job. What a company.

♦ ♦ ♦

There’s a zit growing on the inside of my right nostril, which makes it painful picking. One of life’s simplest pleasures, reduced by half.

At least two loud drunks were hollering rude remarks at the screen from the back of the room, and some chattering Chihuahuaheads were blabbering in all directions. I hate loud talkers at the movies, and I’ve never heard so many at one screening. Welcome to tonight's Jackie Chan double feature at the UC Theater.

When I switched to the other side of the auditorium, someone was eating pizza in front of me, someone else had a cheeseburger behind me, the clashing odors were obnoxious, and both eaters were talking with their mouths full — rudeness in both sound and stink.

I moved again, but there was someone else eating what seemed to be a tuna melt, and with onions, judging from the scent. Most theaters don’t allow customers to bring food, but the UC doesn’t care, so the shows are usually in Odorama. I always bring food to the movies, too, but never hot food. "I am not an animal! I am a human being!"

So I moved to a fourth seat, against the wall, where a dozen empty chairs separated me from the classless crowd’s dinner entrees and colorless commentaries. From this remote vantage point, I tried to enjoy the show.

The first movie, Armour of God (1986), has a plot that makes minimal sense. Chan plays a mercenary treasure hunter, and for comic relief his partner is someone unwilling to fight, but the sidekick isn’t funny or interesting, and the movie sometimes stretches twenty minutes without any action. An action movie without action isn’t much, especially a subtitled action movie without action.

When things start happening, though, it gets good. Highlights include a kung fu duel pitting Chan against four high-heeled high-kicking busty black women, a heart-stopping slow-motion jump from a mountain cliff to a hot air balloon, a Jeep vs motorcycle chase that isn’t at all a movie cliché, and the opening action sequence (viewed through clouds of anchovies and mozzarella) that left me breathless (and gagging).

I’ll recommend the movie, but I can’t recommend seeing it at the UC. Or seeing anything at the UC. I love their calendar of old movies, but it seems most of the time when I come, something ain’t right.

Tonight, in addition to the unruly crowd, the projection was out-of-frame, amputating everyone’s scalps just above the eyeballs. I assumed that the projectionist was reading a good book or something, but maybe it was intentional? When the second reel started, the film was properly framed, and people had hair above them instead of below them — but only for a few seconds. It was quickly maladjusted, and the rest of the movie played with the top few feet of the image at the bottom.

Also, as always, the UC’s screen isn’t able to accommodate a wide-screen movies, or they’re too cheap to buy the right lens for the projector. The image was truncated by a yard on each side, and it was obvious, since even the subtitles were chopped off. Yessir, at the world-famous UC Theater, what they’re world-famous for is not giving a damn.

At intermission, four college kids took seats almost in front of me, and pulled two six-packs of beer from a bag. I left, and caught the next train home. I’ve seen the second feature before, Wheels on Meals, and it’s an excellent comedy, worth seeing again, but not worth enduring at that dump.

Jackie Chan was finally defeated tonight, not in a movie, but by a crowd, with help from a projectionist.

♦ ♦ ♦

On the BART ride home, I saw a very short man wearing a Giants jacket, which made me giggle. I’m 6’2’’ and weigh 300+ pounds, and I’d like a jacket that says, Dwarfs.

There was a garbage can on my chair when I got to the office. A small one, that’s usually under my desk. Inside, at the bottom of a clean liner were two books of short stories, and a note from George: “Doug — I found these in the trash, just like you did.”

George the janitor, if you haven’t guessed, is an OK guy and maybe something of a character.

♦ ♦ ♦

Yesterday, everyone received an e-mail announcing that there would be Christmas cookies for all employees in the cafeteria today. Yippee, I thought — stale Oreos in lieu of a living wage.

Today, just before noon, a guy I know from Advertising came up to me with a dazed expression on his face. He looked like he’d just seen naked Santa screwing a reindeer. “What’s wrong, dude?” I said.

“I can’t believe this,” he said. “I went to the employees’ cafeteria for a free cookie, and this woman was all ‘Merry Christmas’ and smiling, and then she said, ‘Are you store?’ and I said, ‘No, regional’ — and she snatched the cookie from my hand. ‘The cookies are for store personnel only!’ I thought she was kidding, and started to laugh, but she shooed me away from the cookie table!”

Let me explain: We work for the regional office of a giant department store chain, atop their downtown San Francisco store. In company lingo, there are two kinds of employees in the building: 'store' and 'regional'. The email said the cookies were for “all employees,” but now we know, they're for all 'store' employees, but not 'all' employees.

I had to see this for myself, though, so I walked to the cafeteria, put on my best phony Christmas smile, and sauntered up to the table where a big colorful sign said, “Merry Christmas from [company]!”

Before I could even reach for a cookie, a middle-aged woman (think Edie McClurg) behind the table asked, very pleasantly, “Are you 'store', or 'regional'?” When I said ‘regional’ her smile vanished, and she acted like she’d caught a shoplifter. Needless to say, no cookie for me.

It was all too funny to be angry about it, and I giggled and shook my head all the way back to the office. Then I wrote an e-mail to the company’s “suggestion e-box,” which was probably not a good idea. Well, if I’m fired for complaining about the Christmas cookies, I’ll go straight to Herb Caen.

♦ ♦ ♦

A warning to those who find my trips to the movies the dullest part of the zine: Prepare to be bored, or skip ahead to tomorrow’s entry.

As I was scanning the Chronicle on my break, I found what might be my favorite movie playing at the Elmwood, tonight and tomorrow only. I’ve never heard or read anyone else claiming Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) is anything more than an effective pop fantasy, but I loved it like no other movie. It was one of the first films I’d seen, and then immediately wanted to see it again.

And I saw it many, many times while it was in first release at a rundown cinema in downtown Seattle. I went on Monday-Friday nights after work, then went to the first matinee shows on Saturday and Sunday, and stayed for all five screenings both days. Then I was back at the theater Monday-Friday, and all day on Saturday. That’s 25 times in 13 days, and I remember being annoyed that a family commitment kept me from going on Sunday.

But why, Doug? Why go ape over this movie, instead of Star Wars or Gumball Rally? Not sure — who can explain an emotional reaction anyway?

Certainly, I identified with Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), the guy who’s obsessed with something indefinable, something nobody else understands, something even he doesn’t understand.

Other than the old Star Trek television show, Close Encounters was the first mega-media science-fiction I’d seen where beings from another world came to Earth not to enslave us or obliterate us or eat us, but to say hello and befriend us.

Mostly, though, it’s the movie’s ending that always made me giddy. If you don’t know the story, avert your eyes, because I’m about to give it all away: Roy is invited to leave this boring rock, climb aboard the aliens' ship, and leave the human herd behind. Man oh man, that resonated with me. Hey, space aliens, take me, too. This world is not my home. I don't speak the language, don't like the people, can't afford the rent.

All the above I wrote on my lunch half-hour, excited about a chance to see an old friend tonight — that’s what this movie is, to me. I’ve seen it on tape and on TV, but I hadn’t seen CE3K on a big screen in almost fifteen years.

Would it be less than I’d remembered? Maybe I’d be jaded and not so easily impressed. Nah, it was still magic for me. I have most of the movie memorized, from the opening line (“Are we the first?”) to the little kid's plaintive “G’bye” at the end, but my response hasn’t dimmed.

Sure, there are some scenes that are silly, but they seemed silly years ago, too. And I’ve always thought, hey Spielberg, if you’re spending millions on special effects, couldn’t the aliens make music with something more imaginative than a tuba?

I still love this movie, though, and I’m going again tomorrow.

(Before editing, I’d written twice as much about Close Encounters. You’re welcome.)

♦ ♦ ♦

There were certainly no picketers when I got to the Elmwood, but on my way out, half a dozen men were carrying placards. “Management unfair,” said the signs, so I spent a few minutes talking with one of them. Then I read the theater owner’s response, posted on the side of the ticket booth.

There’s no strike at the Elmwood, not even an employee-management dispute. It’s only an “informational picket.” The Elmwood has non-union projectionists, and the union naturally thinks that’s a problem.

Unions are a good thing. Wish we had a union where I work. At the Elmwood, though, labor and management seem to be getting along, and the films are shown in focus and frame, unlike at the (unionized) UC Theater. In the face of war and famine and pestilence and Pauly Shore, I’m not sure I give a damn whether the projectionists are in a union.

On the sidewalk, on my way to breakfast with George the janitor, I ran into a human I semi-know — a familiar face from down the hall at work. He said hi, and I said hi, and it should’ve ended there. Heck, I’d’ve been happy if we’d said nothing at all, not even made eye contact. We could’ve kept walking.

But no, this guy wanted to pretend we had something to talk about. All smiley, he said something about work, and I came up a boring response, but what I was thinking was, Is this over? Can I go now?

“Have you finished your Christmas shopping?” he asked.

“Yeah, I finished my Christmas shopping early — 1986, to be exact.” He looked bewildered, so I continued. “Christmas is for Christians and capitalists, and I’m neither, so I don’t do Christmas.”

He said, “Well, uh” a few times, and then hurried on, so I'd say that our exchange went splendidly.

♦ ♦ ♦

George and I had flapjacks and fake maple syrup at some restaurant out in the avenues. It was acceptable, not great, but it left me comfortably bloated. Then we “hung out” — that's what the kids call it these days. We sat around in his apartment, listening to his favorite rock’n’roll records, and talking about the music, and antique phones, unpleasant childhood memories, illegal immigration, women, politics, and our matching pessimistic outlooks.

The guy’s OK. I like him. It was the longest, most interesting time I’ve spent talking with anyone since coming to California in 1991, but I wasn’t too terribly disappointed when my alarm watch beeped and it was time to mosey to the movies.

George reads the zine, or at least he read the last issue, so maybe he’ll read this one, too. Writing about someone who’ll be reading what I’ve written ... that’s a new and odd element in my pathetic life & zine. I’m tempted to write only the nice things, but nope, I won’t do that. If George does something annoying or says something stupid, I’ll write about it. I'll mock him, insult him, critique him in detail, same as I would anyone else.

He hasn't done anything annoying or said anything stupid yet, though.

♦ ♦ ♦

I returned to the Elmwood for another dose of Close Encounters. There were no protests, coming or going, thankfully. I would've been uncomfortable crossing a picket line, even just an "informational picket."

The movie was as good tonight as it was yesterday, and if it was playing tomorrow I’d go again, but it’s not, so maybe I’ll have to wait another fifteen years.

Yeah, I know it's just me, but Close Encounters clobbers me, every time. Objectively speaking, it's probably not that great a movie. I'm not recommending that everyone rent it or buy it or watch it. I only recommend it for me.

At the St Francis for an early morning double feature, The Professional was plenty of fun, full of preposterous action like I like. When bad guys slaughter everyone in her family, young Mathilda turns for refuge to Leon, the nice man down the hall.

It turns out that the killer bad guys were corrupt DEA agents, and it further turns out that the nice neighbor is a contract killer for the mob, so eventually it’s Leon and Mathilda against the Drug Enforcement Agency.

Finally, a just war!

The Professional’s corrupt DEA agents are a redundancy, like PIN number or LCD display. I believe every adult ought to have the freedom to smoke, snort, or inject whatever he/she wants into his/her own body. It’s not your body if you don’t have that right, so whether corrupt or straight-arrow, DEA agents are the bad guys, period. I enjoyed watching some of them die in this movie.

I’m not sure, though, about the February-October romance between 12-year-old Mathilda and late-middle-aged Leon, the hit-man. It made me queasy, but it was tastefully done, nothing explicit, and didn’t detract too much from the sheer joy of watching drug agents die.

When the lights came up between shows, I tried reading a zine, but I could see my own breath. With the movie to distract me, I hadn’t realized it was cold enough to hang beef in the cinema. Brrr.

The St Frank is a discount theater, two bucks for two movies, and the audience is always lower class like me, with some bums sleeping in the seats. I suppose the place isn’t highly profitable, and turning on the heat costs money. It was about 45° outside, though, and it seemed colder inside. Is that possible?

Decided I’d rather have my health than shiver through the second feature, Fresh, so I came home, read some zines, napped, read some more zines, wrote, and then napped again. The napping was the best part.

When I awoke, it was only 5:30 in the afternoon but it looked like the middle of the night out my window. Those goofs in Congress have us messing with the clocks twice a year, for no reason I can figure.

I needed to go to a convenience store several blocks away, because they’re the only shop around here that sells La Tapatia tortillas, which are the best tortillas that exist and the only brand I'll buy.

When I bundled up and stepped into the cold night air, my legs hijacked me and started walking toward the O’Farrell Cafe for an evening breakfast. The O’Farrell was closed for the day, though, so instead I had my cheese omelet for dinner at The Original Perfect Hamburger, at Geary & Jones. It was pretty good, but a little stingy on the hash browns, and it came to six bucks with tip. Doug says maybe.

Then, onward to the store with the good tortillas. I started filling my basket with soups and such, working my way toward the tortillas, but sadly, tragically, outrageously, they’re not selling tortillas I want any more. They’re selling some other brand, but if I wanted some other brand I’d be in some other store. Sigh.

I tell ya, it’s not easy being a lazy fat white dude, with a job but almost no responsibilities, a roof over my head, reasonably good health, food on the shelf, maybe a few friends, and realistically nothing to complain about. But ‘nothing to complain about’, my ass. There’s always something to complain about, if you put your mind to it.

(first entry)
Addendum, 2021: Before dying, I’m on a mission to rewatch old movies I remember fondly, and a month or so ago The Professional was on that list. I wasn’t sure whether my perv receptors had been heightened over the years, or if I was watching perhaps a director’s recut that had amped up 12-year-old Natalie Portman’s precociousness.
With a little light Googling, I’ve learned that the perved-up version is actually the original edit (titled Leon: The Professional), but it tested poorly with American audiences in 1994, so it was shortened by 23-25 minutes (and retitled simply The Professional) for for its US release.
In this entry, I was definitely reviewing the shortened-for-America version.
The longer version has little-kid Portman drunk on champagne and demanding that Leon kiss her, insisting that they sleep in the same bed, pleading with him to be her "first time," and other obvious sexual situations. The degeneracy drowns out the movie's delightful violence, and convinces me there’s something seriously wrong-in-the-head with the movie's writer-director Luc Besson.

I thought I'd written today's entry, but San Francisco had other ideas, and there's more to be said.

♦ ♦ ♦

There’s been an avalanche of the Rolling Stones in my world lately — a concert, a video, a movie, even a few tapes on loan from Kallie, and I’ve enjoyed all of it so I guess I’m a fan. That said, I like the Beatles better, and the Moody Blues and Pink Floyd better yet, but I don’t own any music made by any of them. Life does not feel incomplete because of this lack.

Music is fine. I like music. I’m just not “into” music.

Blame it on commercial radio. I grew up listening to the radio almost whenever I was awake, but as a grownup I can’t stand the commercials and hate the disc jockeys’ silly banter, so I never listen to hear if I’d hate the music, too. I clicked top-40 radio off about the time Air Supply ruled the charts, so perhaps rock’n’roll has recovered, or perhaps it’s gotten even worse, if that’s possible. I wouldn't know.

Sometimes when the commercial-free talk radio in my ear at work gets boring, I’ll switch to KPOO, a local station that plays eclectic and commercial-free music. I like some of what KPOO plays, but not enough to buy it. And though that station is right here in the city, they transmit so weakly that reception fades in and out at work, and I can’t get the station at all here at the rez hotel.

Now and again I hear rap on a boombox on the bus. It’s pissed-off poetry with a backbeat, and I could learn to like it, but the rhymes are full of bitches and hoes and violence, so it’s not for me.

When I go to the Haight, usually I’ll stop at the International Cafe, and if there’s a band playing I'll enjoy it. If there’s not a band playing, though, I ain’t disappointed.

A few weeks ago, the guy from the zine Envy the Dead sent a few tapes in trade for my zine. Plugged ‘em in and gave the music a long listen, and maybe it’s my age or my tin ear, but it wasn't particularly enjoyable. I gave one of the tapes to Kallie, the other to George, and if either of them have anything to say about the music they haven’t said it to me.

Street music is what I hear and appreciate most often. There used to be a drum and fiddle duet that played various BART stations for spare change and always got some from me, but they never had tapes for sale, and now it occurs to me that I haven’t seen those guys in months.

Sometimes there’s a fat (fatter than me!) black guy at the cable car turnaround, who plays a keyboard and sings superbly. He doesn’t sell tapes either, so I just bop my head, stand and listen, and put a dollar or two in his can.

All this pops into my head and out through my fingers because I thought I’d taunt the tourists and talk with the homeless in Union Square, but instead I was waylaid by a fabulous drum trio at the southwest corner of the Square.

There was one guy with a fancy professional set, five drums and three cymbals all arrayed in front of him like he’s John Bonham; another guy with only a pair of bongos dangling from his neck, but he knew what to do with them; and a third guy sitting on a concrete ledge and banging some upside-down pickle buckets with a stick.

My guess, just from watching and listening, is that they were strangers having an impromptu jam, but dang, it sounded swell. Robin (11/21) would’ve orgasmed right there in the Square.

Oddly, there was an effort or talent inversion among the three. The guy with the elaborate setup provided a quiet tempo for the other two, when he played at all, but he spent a lot of time just listening to the other two. The guy with the bongos was very good, keeping a beat with one hand and improvising all over with the other. He would’ve been worth a paragraph in the zine all by himself, but …

The guy with the strictly homemade set was incredible. He was banging those buckets so beautifully my ears couldn’t comprehend it all and instead the sound reached right into my heart. With one foot hooked to the handle of a pickle barrel, when he tapped his toes the whole barrel lifted up, altering the echo. When the other two drummers let him fly solo, he went into orbit, twirling his sticks like a majorette, raising and hammering them, and sometimes juggling them several feet above his head. With a stick in the air, he drummed with his fingers until the last possible instant, then snapped his wrist just as the stick came down, hit the drum with it, and tossed the other stick into the air. Only once in all this trick drumming did he drop a stick, and even that didn’t interrupt the tune.

Yeah, the tune — he was playing a tune on four upside-down pickle buckets, often with no accompaniment. Is that legal under the laws of physics? Doesn’t matter. He did it.

If you’d asked me before this evening, I would’ve said I don’t particularly care for drum solos. They’re monotonous and self-important, fun for the drummer but not for me, and more an interruption of the music than a part of it.

Before tonight, though, I’m not sure I’d heard many drummers who weren’t professionals, and this guy was amateur. I gave him money, lots of people did, but by 'amateur' I mean, he did it for the love of it. He was having more fun than anyone has while they’re working.

And the fun was infectious. The crowd grew from dozens to hundreds, and for several minutes at a time the other two drummers were only watching and listening. I watched and listened for a long time, too, until I noticed that it was dang cold out, and came back home to write about the drummers, but especially about the third drummer — pickle barrel man.

Trying to write what I just finished listening to, I feel like I’m the first drummer, the one with the fancy set. Having the drums doesn’t mean having the chops, and me having this green-screen typing machine doesn’t mean I can translate such sight and sound into a story. My apologies, but I am not up to reporting what I saw and heard. Damn, though, it was sweet music.

Adding to the challenge, all of today’s entry was lost while I was editing it a few weeks later, when I hit the wrong button. Insert profanity here! Before reconstructing it, it was my best rant of the month, and I’ve tried to re-stitch it, but mostly failed.
“I will do backups. I will do backups. I will do backups. I will do backups. I will do backups. I will do backups. I will do backups.” —Doug Holland
(second entry)

I dreamed about Kallie, and woke up with a cast-iron erection, but the dream wasn’t even sexy. We were simply holding hands, taking a walk.

Realistically, there’s no romance between us, and no chance of romance. Maybe there’s a friendship, though. Nothing wrong with that.

♦ ♦ ♦

At some point during my Saturday afternoon with George, whose name isn’t George, I mentioned that when I’ve mentioned him in the zine, he’d become George. This morning he left a note on my desk, saying he thinks of himself as more of a Stanley, which is also not his name. This a problem easily solved. What was Istanbul is now Constantinople, and George is henceforth Stanley.

♦ ♦ ♦

Darla was working in one of the stores today, because everything is crazy in December. Absent the boss, I took a long lunch, raided Darla’s stash of gummy bears, and later snuck out of the office early. As Mondays go, it was better than most.

Kallie worked all day, unlike me, but she shouldn’t have. She’s approaching the peak of some vicious virus that’s having its way with her, and she looked and sounded miserable. There’s no sick leave, and she can’t afford time off without pay, so she’ll be at work no matter what. I’ve done it, too. The only sensible strategy is to cough toward management, and hope to spread it up the chain of command.

By the weekend, several people in the office will be hacking hoarsely, sniffling or completely wreaked, and of course they’ll all bring their sicknesses home for the holidays.

Why are jobs without sick leave even legal? Because despite unfounded rumors of liberty and justice for all, America's mission is to help the rich and powerful and giant corporations. Little people like Kallie and me? We just work here.

I don’t know who suggested it or why management listened, but instead of an office Christmas party and gift exchange (hypocrisy in wrapping paper) this year, everyone on the eighth floor chipped in, and we ‘adopted’ two needy families. The company matched all donations, which — all snark aside — was decent of them. Both families will be getting a big collection of gifts.

Babs will be Babs, though, so we had an office party anyway, to celebrate whatever’s being celebrated. It was smaller than last year’s party, and it wasn’t too awful by the standards of such events, at least not at first. There was holiday pizza, and even some cross-rank intermingling — senior execs, junior execs, workers, and temps were all sitting at the same tables, uncomfortably talking with each other.

Until, ten minutes into the awkward event, Babs’ boss came into the room, and all fake festivity ceased. Within minutes, only workers and temps were at our table, as one-by-one all the managers and executives had gotten up, ostensibly to get more pizza or pop or whatever ... but they all ended up crowded around the big boss at the other table, the better to suck up.

At our table, only Kallie and I and three temps remained, which allowed us to freely make fun of all the Xmas ass-smooching at the other table.

A noteworthy or perhaps ominous event: For the first time, Babs’ boss made eye contact with me, and even said a few words to me. Always before, on the rare occasions when we’ve been in the same room for quarterly counterproductivity meetings or his stupid birthday party (8/24), he’s had X-ray vision and looked right through me. Today, though, the man who’ll decide when my unemployment begins actually gazed upon me, and said, “Merry Christmas, Dan.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Meanwhile, all day long the sick got sicker and some of yesterday’s un-sick started coughing. One of the temps said she was hot and sweaty but stayed, one of the junior executives went home sick, Peter was sneezing every few minutes, and since Peter is sleeping with Anne she’ll be the next to start showing symptoms. Kallie said she’s feeling better, though she sounded awful.

I’ve tried to construct a protective wall of Ascorbic Acid around me, by taking another 500mg Vitamin C tablet every time anyone sneezes or coughs.

♦ ♦ ♦

If anyone should be on nobody's list for Christmas cards, it’s me, since discarding every friend and all the family a few years back. The cards keep coming, though. I've received several from family, and old friends I didn't know knew my address, and from people behind zines I like, and from readers of this zine.

Whatever compels anyone to send such season’s bleatings, I’ll say thank you, for lack of anything better to say. If it’s not too late, though, let me also say, please don’t.

Among today's cards was one from Margaret, a woman I’ve maybe loved, and definitely cared for, slept with, and wanted near me — but please note the use of past tense. After her visit in June, I slowly and numbly came to realize that she’s too crazy even for me. She has brains and a sense of humor, but also oceanic mood swings, violent tendencies, and sometimes suicidal urges.

The card says, “Not a day goes by without a thought of you,” and that’s true here, too, but it’s usually along the lines of, Breaking up with her was the best thing for both of us.

“Are you happy?”, she asks. As I'm gonna be, yeah.

“Would you be happier if you were living with me?” No, dear. If we were living together we’d both be suicidal.

When she visited, and when we shared a house all those years ago, and whenever we’ve seen each other for even a cup of coffee, it’s never been what a couple should be. That’s why we’re not a couple.

Her daughter is growing up in the bay area, so Maggie and I will probably see each other once in a great while when she flies down to visit the kid. That might be nice. Other than that and for the foreseeable future, it’s best that we’re a thousand miles apart.

Merry Christmas, though, Maggie, and thanks for the card.

Behind the rez hotel's very thin walls, my neighbors might think I have a wild sex life. It’s just me, though, alone and lying on my side, wriggling my spine up and down and sideways to limber my bones in the morning, that makes the bed squeak so.

♦ ♦ ♦

Today was your basic day at the office, but after work and dinner I went back, to use the copier to reprint some back issues.

Me and Stanley chatted, sometimes shouting across the room as he emptied trash buckets. He’s easy to like, easy to talk to, and a bit of a gold mine — ever since reading the zine he’s been leaving great stuff at my desk. It’s becoming a habit to check the top drawer of my filing cabinet in the morning, to see what else Stanley’s left.

So far I've gotten two books of short stories, tapes by Janis Joplin and the Beach Boys, and a very plush chair (more like a throne) which Stanley sorta swiped from Security, and which I’ve stashed in the break room until I can roll it home. Tonight there was a used copy of The Filmgoer’s Companion, a movie guide that would be my perfect Christmas present if I believed in Christmas.

Of course, I’m not nearly so nice to Stanley as he’s been to me, but it’s good to have someone willing to hang around. Maybe a friend, and a friend who’s a scavenger is even better.

♦ ♦ ♦

Sick call: Peter and Anne were out today, as were two execs, including the one Kallie deals with most often. She’s feeling better, she says, but the temp who sits nearest her is feeling worse. There’s a cacophony of coughing all day in the office, but I can’t see who’s coughing without being there and I prefer to keep my distance.

If whoever’s in charge of this company could see what “no sick leave for workers” really costs, there might be sick leave. A day off with pay can’t be as expensive as all these people working at half-speed, zoning out at their desks, probably making mistakes, and spreading misery to everyone else, including executives who do have paid sick leave.

Nope. As with everything else, the people in charge only see how much sick leave might cost, never what it might save. It's looking at the bottom line through a blind eye, and that's life in America.

Now, ‘scuse me, I godda blow my node.

I'd like a little privacy, if you don't mind. What happened today is none of your business.

The obnoxious Xmas spirit reached a crescendo at work today, as even the most arrogant and unthinking idiots from the buyers’ offices came by with brownies and chocolate whiskeys and big dumb grins on their stupid faces. “Merry Christmas!” they shouted. One of them said, “Ho ho ho.”

You’ve never seen me so stone-faced. These are the dumbest people in the building, brainless boobs who do everything wrong, and depend on Kallie and Carlotta, Jennifer, Peter, and me to fix their mistakes, all year round. They never say please. They never say thank you. I’m not even sure they’re half-aware how often we save their asses from getting scorched. They’re never nice, or even indifferent like me. They’re demanding, and they’re rude about it, and the brownies don’t subtract any of that.

Come Monday, Xmas will be over, and they’ll be their ordinary asshole selves. Thank Christ Christmas only comes once a year.

♦ ♦ ♦

I’d told her I don’t do Christmas, but still Kallie had a gift for me — a genuine bootleg copy of the Rolling Stones Voodoo Lounge album. Sigh, thank you.

Approximating the ‘Christmas spirit’ I’ve heard so much about, I went home at lunch and brought back a cool t-shirt someone had sent in trade for the zine. I like the shirt — a cartoon picture of a riot grrrl rioting — but it’s only XL, which is not nearly enough X's for me. It’ll probably fit Kallie.

Also got another Stones tape, Their Satanic Majesties Request, from Stanley. It's not a Christmas present, though. Just another of the things he finds in the trash, and stashes in my file cabinet. With two Stones tapes, my headphones were rockin’ today.

♦ ♦ ♦

The sickness continues, with employees dropping like DC-10s. Babs Almighty was out sick today, blow-drying petrified puke chunks out of her long blonde tresses, I hope. More execs were missing than present, but they might have been working in the stores.

Among the workers and temps, everyone was present, but it was obvious that Peter and at least two of the temps were miserable. Me? Why, how nice of you to ask. I felt a touch of a fever, but a fever’s been coming and going since last month’s tooth extractions, and the subsequent infection that got locked inside of me.

♦ ♦ ♦

Since I’m disgusting, I've probably mentioned that there’s a gorgeous Hispanic woman who works on the other side of the eighth floor. I snap to attention every time I see her in the hallway — especially on ‘Casual Fridays’, when clothing standards and sometimes the clothes get a little looser.

Today was her best outfit ever: red slacks, white t-shirt, red vest, big smile, and a red Santa cap with a white fluffball on top. If Playboy did a “Girls of the North Pole” spread, she’d be on the cover.

Always this woman makes my motor rev, but today she looked so heartstoppingly beautiful I literally tripped over my own feet as I walked by. And for this, she smiled at me. For one brief moment I was glad to be alive, and then she was gone, and everything sucked again.

I don’t even know her name. What would be the point of asking?

♦ ♦ ♦

It's the day before Christmas Eve, which means shoppers, shoppers, everywhere, but like a fool I left the building to run an errand at lunch (getting that t-shirt for Kallie). The sidewalks were jammed like 1950s teenagers into a phone booth, but for blocks and blocks.

Wish I had the courage to stand at the corner like one of the street preachers, shouting good tidings of bah-humbug to all. To all the shoppers I’d say, if you need a big phony holiday and a credit card to say ‘love’, the love is probably as fake as the holiday.

I’d like to sit on Santa’s lap and leave a long loose bowel movement. Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, whatever — I defecate on all your holy days.

I lack the gonads to say any of this out loud, of course. Some Christian would kill me.

I was brave enough to talk back to some Republicans, though. After my errand, I jostled through the throngs in the store, waited for an elevator up, and rode with a family of three — Mom, Dad, and a little girl who looked about 9 or 10, and wore a mink or mock-mink jacket. I hated them all before the door whooshed shut, and they were talking, of course, so I knew they were going to see Santa on the seventh floor.

Then Mr and Mrs Wealth started talking about how awful it was to see all the beggars on the sidewalk. Not, how awful that there are beggars, only how awful it was to see the beggars. Mr Wealth said firmly, “That’s all going to change, now that Newt Gingrich is in charge in Congress,” and I couldn’t stand it any more.

To Mr Wealth I said, with my best imitation-drunk slobber, “Why don’t you shut up before I barf on your daughter’s mink?”

And cripes, saying that was stupid. He could’ve punched me. I’m a wimp, unlikely to win a fight with anyone, but I’d correctly assessed him as even wimpier than me.

He pulled his wife and kid close, more to protect him than to protect them, I think, and when the elevator dinged at ‘7’ and the doors opened on Santa’s workshop, they hurried off without another word.

Store employees have to wear name tags, but regional employees aren’t. I’m regional, so they’ll never know I work there. The elevator ride thoroughly brightened my spirits, and I was chuckling by the time I got back to my desk.

♦ ♦ ♦

After work, I went to the mailbox, and among several zines and a few envelopes with three dollars cash, there was also a small package from Jeff Koyen of Crank, in Philly.

Can you imagine my joy when I opened it on my walk back to the rez hotel, and discovered a live cockroach crawling in an otherwise empty cassette tape box? This was clearly an homage to the roach I captured in a cassette box (11/28), and it’s just what I needed. No, not the roach; I have a room full of roaches already. What I needed was reassurance that there are people out there even sicker than me. Thanks for that, Jeff!

This last Sunday, I spied the enclosed bug making a beeline for my Chinese food. I quickly flattened him w/ a clear plastic ‘glass’. Upon looking in the glass, to see the guts, I saw our friend here. The glass bottom was recessed. Please let me know if he survived.” —Jeff

I wouldn’t go so far as to say “he,” but it survived. Thought it might mate with the roach I’ve had in a jar for a month, so I could start an entirely inbred roach colony on the window sill, but instead of introducing them to each other, I found November’s roach dead. It was lying roach-tits-up in a puddle of pickle juice at the bottom of its jar. Cause of death: Who knows? Who cares? It’s a roach, fer cripes sake.

Shook the newcomer from Pennsylvania into the same jar, where it can feed on the rigor mortissed corpse of its California cousin for all I care. I don’t like roaches, but now I have a pet roach, again.

♦ ♦ ♦

With mittens, a light blanket, and a ski mask in my backpack, I returned to the St Francis Walk-In Refrigerated Theater for Star Trek Generations.

This is the film where TV's Next Generation cast is supposed to take over the franchise from the wrinkled and withered original cast, but William Shatner as Captain Kirk owns this movie. It shines while he’s on screen at the beginning for some ordinary Kirk heroics, then nothing interesting happens for an hour, then Kirk’s back and the movie briefly sputters to life.

It’s Shatner's best performance ever, but I’m not a Shatnerd so that’s fairly faint praise. He's usually a bad actor; here he's passable. Captain Kirk, as promised, dies, and his death is rather ordinary, but his last words are fitting and appropriate. Not as good as Spock's last words, though, when he fake-died in Star Trek II.

Other than the Kirk bits, the movie plays like a bad “very special” episode of a TV show. When Data trades in his brain for an “emotion chip,” it has to be the sorriest Star Trek subplot since anything involving Q.

Is it worth your time to see the movie? Meh. You could do worse. Is it worth my time to rip into it a little more? No, but I’ll do it anyway, because what could be a more pathetic life than some fat lonely schmuck critiquing a damned Star Trek movie at length in his diary?

My main problem with Generations is, I've always loved Star Trek but I don’t care much about the Next Generation characters. Most of them aren’t characters at all. I’ve warmed up to Worf, Data, and Picard, but the rest of the cast is interchangeably bland. Mom Crusher could say Troi’s lines, Riker could say Geordy’s lines, and vice versa all around. Even as the Enterprise crashed onto the planet of cheesy special effects, twice, I was literally twiddling my mittened thumbs.

Trivia question, not specifically about this movie but about the Next Generation series: Why would any parents want to raise their children on a war ship? Answer: They wouldn’t. Every time I see kids on the Enterprise, I think of those bumper stickers that said, “Baby on board.” Slap a sticker on the hull, and that’ll keep the Borg from firing.

Another question: How many ships in this fleet are named Enterprise? Answer: I dunno, but lots. Let’s see, there are two Enterprises in this movie alone, Kirk has piloted three others, and this new cast manages to wreck their Enterprise by the end of the movie. That’s five Enterprises so far. What do you suppose their sixth ship will be called in the next movie?

For a couple of years in the late 1980s, I lived in my van. It was all black, inside and outside, and I'd clumsily rigged it with lighting and sound, power, and a toilet that held poop in a plastic bag. There was a futon in the back. It was all pretty damned humble, but there's no place like home.

Later, I divested myself of almost everything I owned, filled that van with what little was left, and drove it to California, sleeping in it on the way.

When I settled in San Francisco, though, the van became unnecessary. Buses, streetcars, cable cars, BART, and CalTrain go everywhere I need to go, without any bills for insurance or repairs, and without any worries about parking.

So after I'd moved into a rez hotel, I drove to a sleepy east Bay suburb called Fremont, at the end of the BART line, where I rented long-term parking for the van. That was almost three years ago, and since then I haven’t visited the van, or even much remembered that I own it. I never even got a California driver's license.

As Stanley (nee George) and I were having breakfast last Saturday, we exchanged bits of our life stories, and when I mentioned my van, he asked what ever happened to it. I told him it was parked, probably forever. After a few more questions, Stanley inquired about buying it.

Well, why not? The old van had been good to me, but it was from the past, not for the present or the future.

Dickering price was an odd experience, new to me. Younger, skinnier, yuppier Doug had bought it new in 1986, when money mattered, but in selling it I didn’t even bother looking up what it might be worth. We agreed on $200, which is 25-grand less than I paid 105,000 miles ago.

This morning we BARTed to Fremont, and I saw my old Black Beauty one last time. Then Stanley called a tow truck, because you can’t park a van for years unattended and expect the engine to start. It rolled away behind a purple tow truck, but the van always treated me right when I treated it right, so I think Stanley will get plenty of miles out of it once it has a new battery and whatever else it needs.

It felt good to lose all that weight, and the biggest thing I’ve ever owned. At thirty bucks a month, I’ve paid more than $1,000 just to park it, so now I'll be ahead by a dollar a day.

Selling the van should feel like something momentous, maybe? Today’s the first day in fifteen years that I don’t own a car, but it’s odd how little it matters to me. Feels like I never owned the van anyway. Like, some other guy bought it, drove it, lived in it — some guy who’s not me any more.

♦ ♦ ♦

To be sure I’d have enough food and soup and nuts to make it through tomorrow without Walgreens, I braved the sidewalks and then Walgreens today. If I’d had a camera with me, this issue of the zine might have had a cover photo to sum up Christmas in America. Picture this:

In front of the store, a street waif was selling mistletoe, and next to her an old beggar was selling misery. Beside them was an empty SFPD patrol car, its officers no doubt eating donuts nearby, or arresting a drunk or a shoplifter. Behind the cop car was a shiny beige Brink’s armored truck, ready to take a few hours worth of holiday greed from the store to the bank.

Framed and focused right, a snapshot of that would’ve been Norman Rockwell for the modern era.

♦ ♦ ♦

After Stanley ran some errands and got his van into a repair shop, we met again at my hotel. He was armed with dinner, prepped yesterday I think, but fresh microwaved in my room today.

“Holidays should be about doing what you want to do with people you want to be with, not doing things you have to do with people you don't want to see.” With that benediction, dinner was served, and it was better than anything from Julia Child or The Galloping Gourmet. Wild rice, with Brussels sprouts, shallot, potatoes and sweet potatoes, all served with a hot dead bird.

I excused myself from the bird, as I’m still mostly a vegetarian, but feasted on everything else, and it was maybe the best meal I’ve had in ages. Can’t call it Christmas dinner since there was nobody there I hate, but it was a fine Christmas Eve with a friend, with deep conversations about nose picking techniques and women who don't wear brassieres.

♦ ♦ ♦

After Stanley had left, I clinked some coins into the phone booth in front of the rez hotel, and called my mom to wish her a happy Christmas. I only got her answering machine, but when it beeped I sang “Jingle Bells” and told her I love her, and I do.

That said, making that obligatory holiday call without having to answer questions about my life, without hearing about Jesus, without any urgent invitations to visit and/or move back to Seattle, was in itself a wonderful Christmas present.

Addendum, 2021: My primitive word processor in 1994 had a spellchecker function, but it had a tiny vocabulary, and of course the internet didn't exist for me back then. Many times I remember thumbing through a well-worn paperback dictionary, but not enough times, apparently.
To my great shame, knickknacks was spelled 'nicknacks' in the original text of this old zine. Typos and misspellings make me mental, so please accept my sincere apologies.

Sincerely, I hope you had a marvelous Christmas.

Chances are, though, you spent this holy day revisiting all the traditional family arguments, adding a few new ones, trying and perhaps failing to keep your temper in check.

I’ve been there and done that enough to last a lifetime, so instead I stayed in my room and reveled in the solitude. I read and wrote, ate some prunes and two microwaved egg sandwiches, read some more, listened to the Rolling Stones, washed the dishes, took out some trash that was smelling funky, killed a roach on the wall, fed the roach in a jar, dropped a massive prune-lubricated dump, blew soap bubbles out the window, read more, wrote a little, listened to Aaron Copeland, and thought about doing the laundry but didn’t.

Other things I didn’t do include calling my family, or thinking much about Christmas, or going anywhere, doing anything, seeing anyone, wrapping anything, unwrapping anything, or making chit-chat with anyone. It occurs to me now that I haven't said a word to anyone all day except myself.

Now there’s one more paragraph in me, and after that I’m going to sleep.

And so this is Christmas, but it was just a typical day in my room at the rez hotel. Let there be no misunderstanding, though: This was the best of all possible Xmases, at least for me. I gave myself a marvelous gift — the gift of giving up on going home for the holidays.

Regardless of what the calendar says, holidays never fall on a weekend. The day off work is the holiday, and that’s today, so today was Xmas (observed).

Ever since 1987, the year I quit Christmassing and saw Broadcast News instead, my only holiday tradition has been seeing a first-run movie with all the trimmings — popcorn, Raisinets, a huge Diet Coke from the fountain, and in years past usually a hot dog or three. This year I'm mostly vegetarian, so I traded the hot dogs for a few extra boxes of Raisinets.

There was nothing good playing first-run, though, so I CalTrained to San Jose for a double feature of schmaltz at the Towne. I had to bring a bus map to get there. Never been to the Towne before. It's a nice old theater, a little musty and run down, which is great — adds to the time travel factor, of watching old movies in an old theater.

The Yearling (1946) is a tearjerker about a boy and his fawn, growing up together amid Florida scenery. It’s quaint, cuz it was filmed in an era when kids were kids, at least in the movies, and utterly unlike any real kids I ever knew or was.

It has death and violence enough to keep me entertained, though, especially a fierce battle between a bear and two dogs, which I’m guessing was not filmed under SPCA guidelines. There’s also a cool tree house, and an oddly dark performance by Jane Wyman as the kid’s mom. And yeah, I cried at the end. Cried at the middle, too.

The second feature, Little Women (1933), is based on Louisa May Alcott's book, which I've never read, but the movie was tiresome. It’s the story of four sisters, all spunky as sin, but without any sin. They’re supposed to be adolescents but they all look like they’re in their mid-20s, and they have a perfect mother who’s also spunky and sinless. So it’s five grown women being spunky, while Daddy’s off fighting the war. (I’m not sure which war. There’ve been so many.)

It all struck me as trite and smarmy, like an old Osmond Brothers TV show done up in drag. And, Christopher Columbus! I like Katherine Hepburn, but how many times in this movie does she say “Christopher Columbus!” as it it’s a cuss word? Spunky!

♦ ♦ ♦

I fell asleep on the long train ride home, until some woman and her toddler daughter got on at Menlo Park. From the moment they stepped on, the kid was singing the theme from Barney. “I love you, you love me, we’re just like a family…” She'd sometimes stop for a minute or two, but then she'd sing it again for five minutes, ten minutes.

Over and over, that endless ode to the AntiChrist, as I glared at my reflection in the window. Christopher Columbus! I wanted to slap her around — not the kid, I’m not cruel, but her mother — because letting a child watch Barney is child abuse, and letting the kid sing that song over and over was simply, I dunno, everybody abuse.

They were on the top shelf of seats at one end of the train car, and I was at the bottom on the other end, so all I could see was the kid’s shoes. At every station I glances up at those shoes, hoping they’d be walking down the stairs and off the train, but she kept singing and not leaving.

By Hilldale I couldn’t stand it any more, so I said slowly and very loudly, “Barney … is … dead,” and the kid was suddenly quiet for several seconds. Then she started crying.

The crying was better than the singing, though. Pretty soon I was back to my napping, but I caught a mean scowl from an old woman across the aisle before drifting away.

♦ ♦ ♦

Walking back to the rez hotel, I stopped to watch a wondrous ritual. Some guy inside a store was carrying an armload of mutilated red and green cardboard, a Christmas sale display of some kind, out to the dumpster. He tossed the Xmas rubbish in, hit a button, and the dumpster whined and whirred and compacted that Christmas crap to nearly nothing.

There was some symbolic truth in that moment, certainly more than in any Jesus-Mary-and-Joseph nativity.

♦ ♦ ♦

Perhaps even more religiously moving for me, I stepped into Walgreens for one more box of Raisinets, and noticed that they’ve taken all those repulsive battery-powered talking/singing Xmas knickknacks off the shelves for another year.

Why would anyone, even someone who’s enthusiastic about Christmas, want plastic season’s greetings repeated ad nauseam by a recorded voice, for $9.95 yet? Christopher Columbus!

Good morning, and that was a wacky dream. Real life is usually pretty boring, so let me type up this bizarre dream while it’s fresh:

Someone gave me a Chia kangaroo for Christmas, “just what I always wanted” — not, because I already have a Chia pet, in real life.

In the dream, though, one of the Chia's legs was missing, so I took it to the store and politely asked the salesman to trade it in on another, or please supply a matching Chia wheelchair. He refused to even talk to me, just spoke in Spanish to another employee and ignored me.

Next I went to the store manager and explained the situation, and he said he had work to do and shooed me away.

Then I went to the Chia factory — a fascinating place, where Chia grass was growing on the walls and phones and furniture — and asked to speak with the plant manager (accidental pun). He listened impatiently for a moment, then interrupted and told me to go away.

Everybody was cold-shouldering me, nobody gave a damn, and I was ready to chalk up another win for the idiots, give up, go home.

Then I noticed, it wasn’t only my Chia kangaroo that was missing a leg. Every Chia at the factory was defective, so why was I the only person complaining?

Picking up one of the many Chias that was missing its head, I said, “What about this?” Someone in a Chia factory uniform (grass growing on her shirt) shrugged and told me that having no head just adds to the charm of a Chia dog.

I couldn’t walk away with my busted Chia kangaroo and pretend nothing was wrong, so I walked to the end of the Chia assembly line, and one-by-one grabbed all the malformed Chia Pets as they came down the conveyor belt, and threw them, hard, at the Chia wall, and at the salesman, at the store manager, at the plant manager, everyone who’d been ignoring the Chia Problem.

When I’d made a hell of a mess, and it was beautiful, I wanted to throw more Chia Pets at everyone in the world, which is way better than buying the world a Coke. I wanted to throw and shatter Chia Pets forever, until someone somewhere acknowledged the problem and made it right, not just for me, but for everyone.

And that was my dream. As Roy Neary said in Close Encounters, “This is important. This means something.” But I have no idea what.

A few weeks ago, Kallie and I went 50/50 and bought a Chia hippo for the office, but it’s kinda cute and not defective. And before any lawyers send me a cease-and-desist letter, I’ve never even heard of a defective Chia Pet, and I’m sure when one’s defective they’ll politely replace or repair it.

♦ ♦ ♦

I’ll admit to some trepidation opening it, since the last package that came in the mail was a living cockroach, but today’s package wasn't disgusting, it was sweet. The people behind Our Two Cents zine sent me a coffee can, painted Christmas colors red and green, and filled with cookies and candies.

Wait a minute, let me doublecheck something … yeah, that was definitely a good review I gave their zine last month, so they'd have no motive to poison me. I’m chewing on a fine chocolate-chip-in-chocolate cookie as I type this, mmm, but if it's poison the cops will find my rotund corpse under this typewritten page and know exactly who to arrest.

Mmm. Our Two Cents, I have no soft spot for Christmas, and I’m the living embodiment of bah humbug, but I do like cookies, jawbreakers, and peppermints, so — thank you.

♦ ♦ ♦

OK, duh. I’m sitting here, finishing off this can of cookies and candies and re-reading today’s crappy entry, and now the riddle of this morning’s dream seems obvious.

It wasn’t about Chia, really. Chia was just symbolizing everything else that sucks in the world — Christmas, my job, the church, the U S of A, etc. Every aspect of everything around us is either defective, broken, or a lie, and nobody does anything about it except pretend there’s no problem. We need to throw things, hard, against our defective reality.

Well, that was a boring little sermon, eh? Especially considering that this particular preacher, me, hasn’t engaged in anything at all political since the Rodney King protests.

Carlotta came back to work today, but before she could tell us any stories of her vacation, Kallie told her she’d been fired. It's all about that crazy phone call from HR (12/14), so Lottie got to spend half of her first morning back on the phone with those nitwits in HR. And the upshot is…

She still works here, and like most people, she does not have to pay union dues when she’s not in a union. But she did have to go to HR and sign some stupid forms, handed to her by the same person who thought she was too stupid to do this job in the first place (11/14).

There are workplaces more evil, maybe more mean, but there can be no workplace more stupid than our workplace.

♦ ♦ ♦

I think of myself as a feminist. I strongly believe in equal rights for everyone, regardless of all the usual things that should be disregarded, and one of those is gender. Lottie should be able to come to work, and be respected for doing the job, and her gender and appearance should have nothing to do with anything and should never be an issue in the workplace. So there.

But holy crap she’s pretty. I’m a straight man, and when she’s standing next to me I’m even straighter. When Carlotta is talking about work, talking about anything, and by good manners I’m supposed to be looking at her, it’s impossible not to notice that she looks great, even smells great, and what a smile, and ... well, my mind is not always on price changes, shipping dates, and merchandise transfers.

I’ll never say anything, though.

♦ ♦ ♦

Because whenever I say anything, there's a good chance I'll botch it up. Like this:

I’m fat, plain, not too bright, and way too socially ill at ease, so I’m in the habit of defusing all that with self-deprecating humor, because, you know, there’s a lot of me to self-deprecate.

Well, today one of the junior executives (actually, my favorite junior exec, because she’s clever, chubby, plain, socially ill at ease like me, and writing a novel) brought her children to the office and introduced them around. For some reason, Pathetic Doug said something pathetic.

This lady introduced me to her two chubby 8- or 10-year-old kids, and I said to them, “Pleased to meet you, I’m the fat, plain, not-too-bright jackass your mom may have mentioned.”

Why the hell did I say that? I knew it was idiotic even as I said what I said, but once the first few words were out, it couldn’t be stopped.

As if she’d mention me to her family at home.

Really dumb, dumb, dumb.

It’s yet another rerun of a lesson I should’ve learned thirty years ago: Shut the heck up. You usually say the wrong thing if you say anything at all, Doug, so just shut the heck up.

As I was wondering what I could possibly write about on such an empty day — nine hours at work, a crappy supper, and I'm already sleepy — there came a quiet knock on my apartment door.

When anyone knocks, I peek out the peephole, and unless it’s the mumbling man I ignore it, because hey, I’m a hermit. If I’m not expecting you then you’re an intruder.

But it was Cam. He’s not the rez hotel’s biggest dingbat, not even close, but he's our nicest dingbat. He talks slowly, and usually says something nuts. I knew if I opened the door I'd have something to write about, so I put on pants and opened the door.

Cam pointed sadly at a note I’d taped outside my door, that said, No maid svc please. Slowly he explained the problem. Very slowly. It took him maybe 30 seconds to say, “Can you imagine how sad that note makes the maid? Being the maid is her job. It may not seem like much to you, but I bet she takes pride in doing it, and your note is just like telling her to go to hell…”

If I’d never met him before I would’ve slammed the door in his face, but we’ve talked a few times and Cam is Cam. He’s not retarded but he’s certainly not bright, and when he has something to say you’d best just listen. If you interrupt or ask questions he’ll start over, so I waited and listened closely, or at least stood there and posed like I was listening closely. When he was done talking, I waited another five or ten seconds, to make sure he was done talking, because I’ve made the mistake of interrupting him before.

Then I said, “I’d never thought of it that way, Cam. Thank you.” He kept looking at me, so more words were needed. “To me, when there’s a little less work to do, that’s good news and it makes me happy. And my sign does say 'please', so I hope her feelings won’t be hurt.”

Cam stuck out his lower lip, very, very deep in thought, and said, “Well, okay.” Then he stood there. And stood there, so I pulled the note off the door. He said “Thank you,” and left. I waited until I heard the elevator ding, and then I taped the note onto the door again.

It’s not much of a story, but it’s something to write about, and today that’s all I had.

♦ ♦ ♦

Bonus! Some words of wisdom from Milan, from his zine Give a Hoot. Pollute:

“I like to watch hockey and baseball whenever those sports are on TV. It’s pretty hilarious to watch audience members get beaned in the head by foul balls or deflected pucks! These folks have paid up to $30 to get nailed in the head! It’s always so much more interesting than the game itself. Nailing morons upside their heads with objects traveling at 100+ mph should become a sport! Hey, I’d pay good money to watch that in person.”

Well, yeah, that does sound like fun, but if you're there in person to watch people get nailed in the head, you might get nailed in the head.

This is only an estimate, but today was about the 694th time I’ve gone to work in that building, and each of those days has been more boring than the other 693. I enjoyed the last twenty minutes or so today, though.

Everyone else had left, so just Jennifer and I remained. She wasn’t getting ready to go, but she seemed in an odd hurry to say good night to me, like maybe she wanted me gone for some reason. She is often up to something, and it's always something skunky.

Being my contrarian self, I lollygagged around a little longer — went to the john, came back to my desk, said “Happy New Year, Jenn,” then briefly visited a guy I know in Advertising, came back to my desk, said “Happy New Year, Jenn,” then walked down the hall for no reason at all, came back to my desk, and said “Happy New Year, Jenn.” She was getting agitated, and I was finally getting some holiday cheer.

Then I said good night, walked down the hall, and hid out in the men's room for five minutes, and then I went around to a different door, so I could come up behind her and holler, “Happy New Year, Jenn,” again. When I did she shot out of her chair like a moon launch.

“Didn’t mean to startle you,” I lied. “I forgot to log off my terminal.” Haven’t seen her scowl at me that fiercely in, oh, a week or so, and it was great. Then I logged in on my terminal, just so I could log off, and then I actually came home.

I enjoy annoying Jenn, and she deserves it more often than I do it.

♦ ♦ ♦

Spent the evening cranking out a letter to the editor of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, jumping into a six-way argument among readers and writers that’s been flaring in the AVA’s letters section since last month’s newspaper strike.

Just before licking and sealing the envelope, I foolishly decided to enclose a copy of last month’s zine. Foolish, I say, because the _AVA’_s head dude, Bruce Anderson, is never shy about heaping abuse on people and things he doesn’t approve of. Quite likely he won’t approve of me or my zine, but what the hell. I’ve enjoyed his writing for several years, maybe he’ll endure mine.

The AVA is better than any newspaper you've ever seen. They do local and some national news, all reported with sarcasm and impatience and honesty. The honesty is why I love 'em, so even if Bruce hates my zine, it’ll be fun reading why.

You know, the AVA is so good, I’ll guarantee it. Send them two dollars for a sample issue (PO Box 459, Boonville CA 95415), and if you’re not orgasmically satisfied, let me know and I’ll send you two bucks out of my billfold.

♦ ♦ ♦

Which reminds me, it’s time to review everything — zines, books, a tape, whatever. Grab a beer or a bong or both, cuz this will take a while.

Apple Maggot Quarantine Area, Anne Fleck, █████████, Redwood City CA 94061. Price: $1. Reviewed: “The religion issue.” A quick study of the world’s major, minor, and some silly religions, with a “start your own religion” contest. It’s fun, but all the religious stuff pales next to Anne’s hard-hitting diary, where she ponders suicide but decides she’s too scared to go through with it. My zine has triggered a few stupid letters telling me not to kill myself, so I won’t toss that at Anne, but things are never that bleak if you still have your health, and I hope she sends another issue soon.

Assorted Stuff #9, Psyche, ██████████, Staten Island NY 10303. Price: $1. Music reviews, zine reviews, and many short, bad poems. It’s editorially uncertain, full of apologies — for lateness, typos, misplaced manuscripts, and the general lack of any theme. Also plenty of pleading for your submissions. The layout faces in every direction, so the zine rotates like a clock as you read it. Not sure this qualifies as a ‘highlight’, but there’s even a poem about poems that suck, and that poem sucks, too. I’d say, lose the apologies, buck up and be what you want to be and say what you want to say, maybe make all the text point in the same direction, and you’d have something pretty good here.

Budzine #16, Bud Banks, ███████████████, Tucson AZ 85713. Price: $1. Month after month, Bud’s zine, cleverly called Budzine, brings Bud’s outlook and personality into my mailbox. I always enjoy it, but I extra enjoyed this one. The whole issue is a calendar for 1995, and its theme is the life and times of Bud Banks & family. We all know July 4 is Independence Day, but now I know January 5 is Sarah & Boe’s anniversary. There are also photos of Bud through the years, and even a picture of Bud’s butt. Say cheese!

CAPRA #111, Matthew Kiernan, ██████████, Madison NJ 07940. Price: $3. This is the enormous (157 pages) reader-written open forum of the Cinema Amateur Press Association, a sort of movie maniacs’ club that meets by mail. There’s plenty of thoughtful film-related commentary, and since it’s unedited and open to all, some that’s not so thoughtful. You’re supposed to promise to write, and I’ve promised, but I’m on a waiting list until a few others drop out.

Cinema Revue #6, ████████, Memphis TN 38174. Price: $2. It’s about movies, so I was pretty sure I’d like it, but surprise, it sucks. The zine takes a wrong turn after the author’s folksy introduction, as he starts writing short stories about “Willy Hate,” a very uninteresting guy who goes to the movies. Speaking as an uninteresting guy who goes to the movies, I was uninterested. Then halfway through the zine, the format switches to standard film reviews, sans Willy, but they’re the kind of reviews I don’t care for, wherein the entire plot is listed point by point, and critical insight is coincidental, and minimal.

Dishwasher #12, Pete, ████████, Arcata CA 95221. Price: 50¢. Always absolutely sparkling, this ongoing ode to washing dishes as a career is nothing but great writing front to back, and great philosophy. If you’re satisfied at the bottom rung of the employment ladder, there’s never any worry about falling off, so screw getting ahead, and quit any time you feel like it. There are always dishes to be washed somewhere else. Also, the asking price is ridiculous, and won’t even cover postage. Dig deep and send three bucks or so; it’s easily worth it, or more.

Feedback #17, Angela Hatcher, ████████, Lincoln NE 68501. Price: $1. Earnest teen angst by a self-described non-smoking, non-drinking, drug-free and virginal white girl at a boarding school in Nebraska. Does it sound boring as hell? Sorry, but … it is. She really cares about her apathy, but the zine is painfully serious, too serious to be taken seriously. If you call your zine Feedback, you should expect some feedback, so I'll say: You don’t have to buy a pack of cigarettes, get drunk, smoke dope, or get laid, but you gotta laugh once in a while.

Fly Your Eggs Right Down Their Stacks #1, Max R., ███████████, Lawrence KS 66044. Price: $1. Handwritten and unstapled, this didn’t make much of a first impression out of the envelope, and then it unfairly got buried under the next stack of zines that arrived. When I finally got to it, though, hey, it’s really quite good. Nah, bump that up — it’s terrific. It’s all one long, revealing rant about the women Max has known and the jobs he’s had, and it’s painfully personal and funny, with buckets o’ angst and agony.

Martina & Kay’s Big Secrets and Things To Do, Martina Eddy, ████████, Philadelphia PA 19127 Price: $1. Reviewed: “The breast issue.” Quite a delight, this is a joint effort by two librarians, with a little help from their hubbins and friends, and it’s mostly about the strange relationship between women and their breasts. Also, the contents of their purses, bizarre pick-up lines that didn’t work, sexual politics in pop music, a long list of films with libraries and/or librarians in them, and the proverbial much, much more. A double-barreled, well-rounded debut.

The Match #89, Fred Woodworth, PO Box 3012, Tucson AZ 85702. Price: $2.75. I’ve seen so many political publications preaching to the converted with insider lingo and doctrinaire dogma, I have little patience left for anything political, but The Match isn’t political. It’s anti-political. Openly anarchist, The Match strikes back at every institution that’s turning the world into shit. It’s too good to call it a zine, too forthright to call it a magazine, and far too thought-provoking for most people to handle. Can you handle it? Courageous, intelligent, funny, angry, and recommended by me.

Milan’s Zine, Milan, ███████, Tecumseh, Ontario Canada N8N 4G3. Price: “The value of this is completely subjective. What you got out of it is what it’s worth to you.” Milan’s search for something good in this silly world makes an intriguing philosophical adventure. The zine has some bits by someone else, which bounced off my brain like typical zine stuffings, but Milan writes most of it and he’s the main attraction. He’s got insight, wit, and a good touch for language. More Milan please, and less of the rest.

My Cat Patches #4, Nathan Eahen, ██████████████, Tecumseh, Ontario Canada N8N 4C2. Price: Free, it says, but send a dollar, OK? Another zine from Tecumseh, Ontario — must be the Canadian San Francisco. Nathan, his sister Rachel, and his friend Milan put pieces of their personalities on paper, and the end product is worthwhile: The cat gets a comic strip with feline feelings, Rachel goes to her very first rock concert, and someone’s been writing obnoxious letters to a local pastor — sure do hope it’s Nathan et al. A likable zine.

My Letter to the World #11, ███████, Berkeley CA 94704. Price: $2? An engrossing diary of Lily’s visit to her relatives in Taiwan, full of breezy observations on the culture of capitalism, racism, sexism, and funny Monopoly money. There are no boring parts to skim through, so I read every word and then went back and read some of the words a second time. I enjoyed it much more than Lily seems to have enjoyed being in Taiwan. Includes Dysfunctional Family Circus, and some short book reports.

The Neon Bible, a novel by John Kennedy Toole. A few months back, a reader recommended Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, but it was checked out already, so I settled for this, the author’s other novel. It’s almost excellent, an engrossing memoir of growing up in a redneck rural town after World War II. Unlike so many novels that get less and less interesting as you get further and further along, this one gets better and better. Almost amazingly, the author was just 16 years old when he wrote it, which means I ought to throw my typewriter out the window.

The New Free Press, ██████████████, San Francisco CA 94102. Price: 50¢ on the street, maybe $1 by mail? During last month’s newspaper strike, the union published a weak weekly called Free Press, and after the strike was settled they shut it down. John Bryan, a feisty worker in the Examiner’s composing room, seized the banner and began printing his own Free Press. It’s a much more muckraking, radical paper, full of angry, opinionated journalism that’s gotten him fired by the Examiner, and possibly sued. Read his paper while you can. I suspect the courts will shut it down soon.

Obscure #28, Jim Romenesko, ███████, Milwaukee WI 53201. This issue of Obscure is a collection of zinesters whining about Factsheet Five. Are Seth’s reviews fair? Does he actually read or just skim incoming zines? Bitching and moaning is what it is, and that’s the zine’s description of itself, not mine. Zinesters have been complaining about Factsheet Five since it was four photocopied pages from Mike Gunderloy’s basement, but the gripes here are pretty petty, and frickin’ funny. Does Seth skim the zines instead of really reading them like a literature assignment? Hell, I hope so. How else could he possibly review 1,400 zines every few months?

Pasty, Sarah-Katherine, ██████████████, Seattle WA 98112. Price: $1? Good graphics and fine writing in this very personable, proud fat grrrl’s zine. Particularly memorable was “Meat,” a furious rant about the aftereffects of rape, not for the victim, but for a friend of the victim. That’s hard-hitting and powerful stuff. Another highlight was “Pussy Galore,” about an all-grrrls sex party where the author couldn’t get laid. Sounds like my luck too, except the grrrls wouldn’t even invite me, and the boyyys party wouldn’t interest me.

Prehensile Tales #5 and #6, John Styn, ███████, San Diego CA 92122. Price: $1? On almost every brightly-colored page are lighthearted articles and snippets, most of which made me smile. Join John on the job as a scabies incubator and sperm donor, eat the psilocybin mushrooms sprouting in his back yard, learn from the “Dick Knows” advice column, and imbibe in some legal disclaimers. Not great, but not bad.

Punk Planet #4, ███████, Hoboken NJ 07030. Price: $2. The only thing I know about punk rock is that I mostly don’t like it, but that said, it’s surprising how much I enjoyed reading this big all-about-punk zine. It has some columnists with something to say, riveting short stories, and even the inescapable interviews with people I’ve never heard of are generally worth the time and trouble. Also, scene reports and music reviews, which meant little or basically nothing to me, but I am not the target audience.

Rediscoveries #14, Mark Harris, █████████████, Chicago IL 60613. Price: $2. This is sort of like CAPRA, where the subscribers write the zine, but it’s all about books instead of movies. The recommendations are all over the place, but none of them made me want to dart down to the library and check ‘em out. It’s a novel concept (get it?), and if I wasn’t so dang picky about what I want to read I’d probably be pretty excited by this zine.

Rice Dreams, erich dewald, █████████████, San Francisco CA 94110. Price: $3. A very personal collection of prose and poetry, on being beaten up for being gay, and on erich’s dysfunctional family. I don’t have much to say about it, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t like it. I did. It’s a kick in the groin, in a good way.

Rick News, Richard Hollander, ███████, Boca Raton FL 33481. Price: $2, and that’s a ripoff. It’s two pages of Macintosh mini-rants, which delivered one brief semi-smile in the middle of an extended yawn. Even if this was the Mona Lisa of words — and it’s not — it’s crazy overpriced.

Rough Draft #100, ███████████, San Francisco CA 94142. Price: Sase? Everyone is invited to mingle with madness, as Frisco’s strangest people plot their next events. This centennial issue came with a great write-up of last month’s Santa Fest, when 30 Santas went wild on the streets of the city. It’s a hoot to read, but I always feel I’m not quite the right kind of 'strange' to participate, so I won’t be there on January 9, when dozens of people unite to tap each other’s heads and say “Avi.”

Scam, Iggy, █████████████████████, San Francisco CA 94103. Price: $1.50. Reviewed: “The mutiny in Miami issue.” Huge handwritten tome about living the low life, squatting in Miami, and squeezing out a life in America without money. It’s fascinating, even inspirational, but I haven’t finished reading it yet. I’m working my way through it very slowly, since I haven’t seen so much tiny hand-scribbled text in one place since Cometbus, and Iggy’s penmanship isn’t as neat as Aaron’s so it’s making my eyeballs itch.

Slam, a novel by Lewis Shiner. Lots of laughs and a few ideas to mull over in this story of a guy on parole who lands a dream job as caretaker for a dead lady’s seaside house full of cats. A long list of loonies parade through the plot, and it becomes literally a book I couldn’t put down. Started reading at 7:30, and finished a little after midnight. The ending is too perfectly pat, but until my own great American novel is written, which will be never, I can’t complain if real writers tend to tie things up too neatly.

So What? #1, ███████, Richmond VA 23203. Price: Sase. The title describes my reaction to this, yet another zine about Bob, slack, and the Church of the SubGenius. It’s an old joke, and it made me smile when I first heard all about the satirical religion. I think everyone should be exposed to Bob and the Church. I just don’t quite understand the long-term dedication to telling the same joke over and over again.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, soundtrack by Leonard Rosenman. Price: $2.95, used. The funniest and funnest film in the series had the cheeriest music, and it’s been lifting my spirits since Xmas had me down. Even the dark parts of the score have hints of optimism waiting to push through. Great music. My only complaint is that the album doesn’t include the mock punk song that the jerk played on the bus, “I hate you, I berate you,” until Spock pinched his neck.

Teenage Finger Fuck, Lee Reiherzer, █████████████, Oshkosh WI 54901. Price: $1. An adventure in unfulfilled teen lust, written in a delightfully lurid voice that brings back some of my own adolescent memories and makes them funny instead of tragic. Wish the story hadn’t ended so soon, but I’m hoping this is only chapter one in a sweeping anti-novel.

The Thief and the Lyre #3, Laars, ███████, Daytona FL 32122. Price: $1. This is the grrrl issue, all about feminism and riot grrrls, with a decidedly non-doctrinaire outlook. Laars is a fine writer, and I loved his article on why he loves women. This time he’s got some quality contributors too, and a good interview with Kimberly Bright. (Hey, Laars, I never answer your letters, sorry, but I really really like your zine.)

Transcendence #6, Soozee Stack, ██████████████, Glenwood MD 21738. Price: $1. The dreams and stories are the high points here, especially one about the author’s underwear, and another where kid sister is learning to drive. Lots of quite strong writing, with amusing cut-and-paste graphics. The poetry is lame, but poetry almost always is.

♦ ♦ ♦

I’ll review at least one issue of any and all zines received, but be forewarned, I’m genetically predisposed to hate pretentious poetry, political or spiritual or rant zines, intentionally obtuse crap, and anything done with half effort. Also, never never never send checks for a zine. Send cash only. I swear, the next nitwit who mails me a check, “pay to the order of Pathetic Life,” is going to get it back as soiled toilet tissue, since that’s all I can use it for.

Addendum, 2021: I still subscribe to the AVA, still love it, and my guarantee still stands.

Had another of those bizarre dreams that can’t possibly make sense if you tell it, so I won’t, but it woke me widely at two in the morning. Then I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I spent a few hours editing out some of the dullest bits from this month’s entries. And you thought what’s left was boring? Hah!

Snored some after that, and after a second awakening the entire day was spent reading zines, looking out the window, and occasionally farting. Yes, it certainly was a busy day. Nothing much to say about it, though. No amusing anecdotes about reading zines. The view out the window remains the same. My ass-vapors are delightful, and should be bottled and sold as French parfum.

Along about dusk I got dressed, walked a few blocks one-way to get the mail, and a few blocks the other to the O’Farrell Cafe for a cheese omelet. It was cheesy and eggy, hot and good.

After the omelet I sat at home, started prepping and printing the November issue of this zine, dripped some prune juice into the roach’s jar, and tossed the old calendar and pinned up a new one for 1995.

And that was my New Year’s Eve. It’s another holiday that’s not for me, as I’m not much for boozing and carousing. I went to bed well before midnight, where I lay awake now, waiting for sleep and then tomorrow.

(first entry)

And now, one last piece of prickly attitude for December, before beginning a new year of prickly prickishness. It's time to chop the chump:

Phillip Stone from Kansas City has paid for and received every issue so far, but he just doesn’t get it. He keeps sending cash for the next issue, and letters. I like the cash, but not enough to tolerate the letters.

Six letters he’s sent, all offering the wrong advice. Not “Quit your job, because…” or “Don’t quit your job, because…” — those are suggestions I’d consider.

No, Mr Stone’s advice is Dale Carnegie crap like, “Smile at strangers,” “Give co-workers, even the ones you like least, a ‘good morning’ greeting every day,” “You could make friends by joining a club dedicated to old movies, or starting a club if it doesn’t exist,” and then this from his latest letter: “Maybe you’d meet more interesting people if you got active in a local church…”

Gag me with the scriptures. Why do you pay for this zine if you’re not even reading it, or reading it but not comprehending it? I am obviously, devoutly non-religious. I am not a sociable man. I don’t smile warmly at strangers, don’t say ‘good morning’ to people I hate, and I’m not looking for a club unless it’s to bang on your empty head.

This is something I’ve said before, plainly enough to be understood unless you're simply a simpleton: I’m not yearning to know more people who aren’t worth knowing. I’ll occasionally hang out with Stanley or Kallie or someone who’s worth the time, but when they’re not around I am quite content to be alone. When I’m alone, this world full of assholes (like Phillip Stone of Kansas City) becomes bearable.

Keep your three dollars. The management of this zine reserves the right to refuse service to anyone who proves himself a complete and verifiable wanker as many times as you have, so this is the last issue you’ll see.

(second entry)