Welcome to September. Here's the story so far:

On Wednesday, the city ordered us to stop selling Darwin fish, because they're not made by hand. The rest of our fish are street legal, but yeah, Darwin we buy and resell. We don't hammer Darwin stickers out of stone.

It's the world's most famous non-swimming fish, though, so we'd like to keep selling it. Stupid laws should be ignored, don't you think? Berkeley doesn't want you to know this, but I'll squeal the secret: Almost every stand on Telegraph Ave is in violation of the "must be hand-made" rule, and everyone inside the system knows it.

Some vendors ignore all the rules and regulations, though, and the city knows it, and doesn't do anything about it. They're the free speech vendors, who sell items making a political statement — anarchist bumper stickers, Buddhist buttons, pro-hemp t-shirts, etc, Legal precedent says they can't be prosecuted or shut down, because of the First Amendment.

So when the city said we couldn't sell Darwin fish, the solution was obvious. My boss Jay announced that we're now running an unlicensed free speech fish stand.

You want Darwin? We've got yer Darwin, right here, alongside all our hand-made sacrilegious fish, and Jay's lesbian poetry zine. We've also talked about eventually selling bumper stickers, baseball caps, t-shirts, whatever. We can do it, so long as every item makes a political or religious point, and so long as the US Constitution is still in effect.

The only drawback is, since we're unlicensed now, we can't participate in the morning draw for sidewalk space. We can only sell in empty spaces, and if a licensed vendor claims our space, we're supposed to yield.

It ain't quite fair, but anyone willing to endure the tedious and time-consuming lottery or sign-in procedure should get the spot they've signed for, so I'll yield. Umberto yields almost every day. I can get used to it too, but it is a pain in the arse.

♦ ♦ ♦

Which brings us to today, my second day selling without a license:

I was bumped thrice. Someone tapped me on the shoulder, said I was in his space, so I packed and relocated. Then a second someone complained, so I relocated again. When I was later told to move a third time, I said adios instead, because the afternoon was mostly over anyway. I simply packed up and wheeled the cart away.

It takes up to fifteen minutes, though, to clear and fold the table and bungee everything together. After that it can take another fifteen minutes, or longer, to find an empty space and settle into it.

♦ ♦ ♦

When I mentioned the wasted time to Jay in my post-day debriefing, she had an idea. She often has ideas, and good ones, too. She thought we could buy a new pushcart setup, something that would be ready to roll more quickly, in seconds instead of minutes. And off we went, to a hardware store.

For $50 or so, she bought a great big Rubbermaid cabinet. The plan was, I'd lash to the hand-truck tomorrow, instead of the folding table I've been using. The fish would be displayed on top of the cabinet, and then stashed inside when it was time to move the cart or wheel it away, allowing me to make a much quicker exit.

Well, that was the original plan, but…

Somewhere between buying the Rubbermaid thing and locking everything up for the night, Jay had a few more ideas, which I'm not sure will be workable.

Jay thinks the cabinet should be open on the Avenue, on top of the table, to display a variety of new things we'll be selling. This means the current table and bags will still be part of my setup and takedown, so it'll still take plenty of time — more time than it's taken in the past.

And I'm skeptical about the new merchandise. Umberto told me yesterday, and I told Jay, that on a free speech table, everything has to be outrageous. If it's ordinary stuff, the city will say it's commerce, not free speech, and hassle our asses off.

Well, Jay has brought in a supply of books and plastic knickknacks and such, and most of it's cute, but it's only merchandise. The books she wants me to sell are mostly science fiction, because Jay loves sci-fi, but I haven't read them, and wonder if they're political enough to clear the city's clipboard schmucks.

The knickknacks are silly things from a novelty supplier, and again, I'm skeptical. Plastic statuettes of Clara, the so-called patron saint of television? Priest and nun salt and pepper shakers? Kaleidoscopes with pictures of naked women inside, instead of purdy colors and geometry?

It's all amusing, but is it outrageous enough to keep the City of Berkeley at bay? Unsure. Jay isn't worried about it, though, so tomorrow I'll be selling Darwin fish, other fish, lesbian poetry, twenty different sci-fi books, and oodles of doodads.

I ain't wild about it.

I didn't want to get into a big argument over this. I hate big arguments, especially with someone I like, and I like Jay. And it's a stupid thing to get worked up about, maybe.

Now that we're a free speech stand, unregulated by city law, Jay wants to sell all sorts of stuff at the fish stand... stuff I'm not interested in selling.

First, my understanding of our legal standing is that commercial speech isn't protected by the First Amendment. Only political and/or religious speech is free, says the US Supreme Court.

There's no political statement in plastic glow-in-the-dark Virgin Marys for the dashboard. Or squawking skeletons. Or Saint Elvis of Presley prayer candles.

Jay wants me to sell a small selection of books at the fish stand, too, but they're books you can buy at Barnes & Noble or Books-R-Us. If we're a free speech stand, let's sell suppressed or self-published books — and zines, and DIY music and homemade movies. That would be kinda great.

But a slick, oversize paperback of The Book of the SubGenius, and Anne Rice's latest vampire novel? What's the point? You can buy those books in any bookstore.

Maybe it's corny, but I believe in the sacrilegious fish we're selling. They're a satirical push-back against blind faith, and religion needs a push-back. Blind faith in religion has caused nothing but trouble, ever since God didn't create the earth.

I believe in Telegraph Avenue, too. It has a cool vibe, and glow-in-the-dark Virgin Marys and squawking skeletons aren't what the Avenue is about. Selling bookstore books from a table on the street, fifty feet from a great bookstore like Shakespeare & Company? That ain't right, and I can't work up a philosophical reason why such stuff belongs on our pushcart on the Avenue.

I'd be a merchant, that's all. Nothing's wrong with that, but there is something wrong with being a merchant pretending not to be a merchant, pretending to be a free speech vendor, sidestepping the city's rules and regulations... to sell Saint Elvis of Presley candles and Interview with the Vampire.

If this was any other job, I'd shut up and do what the boss says to do, but this hasn't been like any other job. It's been better. I believe in it — the fish, and Telegraph Avenue, and the concept of free speech. Selling ordinary books and squawking skeletons pisses on all that.

When I said about 10% of this to Jay, she got furious and fired me.

♦ ♦ ♦

That's her prerogative. She owns the fish, and the fish stand. I only work there, or used to. She yelled more than I think I deserved, but I got mad and yelled too.

Jay is a friend of mine, and I don't have many. Been working for her for months, and we've never argued about anything, until today.

I hope we're still friends, but maybe you shouldn't work for your friends, so I'm reaching for my old "I'll do anything" posters, and going back to free-lance odd jobs.

♦ ♦ ♦

I stapled and glued up about fifty of my posters on a long walk around Berkeley, all the way to the UC Theater. The marquee called my name, so I bought a ticket and saw The Wild Bunch (1969), a bloody good western, with the emphasis on bloody.

In Sam Peckinpah's world, when a machine gun misfires and splatters bullets all over town, it's a comedic moment. When you see your woman with another man, why, of course you shoot her.

I'm of the old tradition, where maybe you shoot the other man, but not the woman you love.

Peckinpah's world is a crazy place. Lots of gunfire and action, and suicidal bravado that only dead men have in real life. Lots of male-bonding belly-laughs, even when nothing is at all funny, but macho men laugh and laugh anyway. I was in a male-bonding belly-laugh frame of mind, with only myself to bond to, so I enjoyed it.

♦ ♦ ♦

I was distracted, though, by the argument with Jay, by being suddenly unemployed, and as always by the UC's piss-poor projection. The film slipped out of focus twice, for ten minutes at a time.

The UC Theater, man. How can it still be in business? Something goes wrong half the time, like the focus problem tonight.

Rocky Horror plays there at midnight every Saturday, but hours before that show, there was still rice all over the carpet from last week's show, crunching as I walked to my seat.

I counted 16 chairs broken and covered, who knows when if ever to be repaired. Several other seats have been removed entirely, leaving holes in the rows like the gaps in my mouth where teeth used to be.

Even the popcorn_!_ It smelled great, and I saw it popping so I know it was fresh, but it felt stale and mushy in my mouth. How do they even do that?

♦ ♦ ♦

After the movie, I went home to brush up on my moping around and feeling sorry for myself, but Jay knows where I live and she found me. We hugged, and she took back the "You're fired." I feel better, she feels better, we're still pals, and she's still my boss.

She wants me to sell books and knickknacks at the fish stand, but not tomorrow. Tomorrow, only fish.

"We can talk about what we'll be selling, and we can wait until you're comfortable with it," she said, which is probably perfectly reasonable. More reasonable than most bosses.

I'll never be comfortable with it, though, so there's another argument coming.

Yesterday was the wrong day to take a day off for drama. Yacoob and Umberto both told me there'd been a women's rights protest yesterday, with numerous women marching down Telegraph topless (says Yacoob) or naked (says Umberto), demanding their right to practice nudity until they get it right.

I wholeheartedly support that cause, and not merely as a joke. Seriously, if I can take my shirt off on a hot sweaty day, it ain't fair that the ladies can't.

Other than the men talking about yesterday, nothing much happened on Telegraph today. When I packed everything up and came home, though, my grandma was waiting for me.

She's been dead for years, so "waiting for me" only means that she was unexpectedly on my mind. Now she'll be unexpectedly in my zine.

She was my father's mother, Grandma Holland we called her, or Grandma H. She lived with our family all the years I was growing up, and she was the most Christian person I've ever known. Which is not a compliment.

You've heard of hippie Christians, "high on God"? Grandma H overdosed on God, every damned day.

She read the Bible from cover to cover, constantly. Her only interests in life seemed to be prayer, Bible study, watching old westerns on TV, and occasionally baking sugar cookies. Darn good sugar cookies, too, but she only baked them when God told her to, which wasn't often.

Her daily prayers were never quiet, always shouted. Usually she prayed alone in her bedroom, sometimes for hours on end, and if I'd been a bad boy she'd drag me in to pray with her.

When there was a family crisis, she'd take it to the Lord with a method she called "praying through," which meant the same crying and screaming prayers as any other day, only it wouldn't end until she'd heard an answer in the voice of God. To "pray through" sometimes took hours, sometimes days, with her wailing and weeping stopped only overnight while she slept, or for rushed meals or bathroom breaks.

Only once was I deemed a bad enough boy to need to "pray through" with Grandma H, but I'll never forget it. I'd heard her come thundering down the stairs to my basement bedroom, and she blasted my door with three powerful knocks. I said, "Yeah?" and she burst into the room and accused me of masturbating, though of course she didn't use that word. It was "defiling your body, temple of the Lord."

Coincidentally, that's what I'd been in the middle of doing before hearing her loud footsteps approach, and the day before Clay had rebuked me for it, too. He must've told Grandma, because she demanded to "pray through" with me. And after a long afternoon "praying through" with Grandma H, I'd learned my lesson, believe me. I didn't masturbate again for hours.

My grandmother was God's stenographer, receiving direct messages from the great and powerful God, and relaying those messages to the rest of us. Like, Do not defile your temple.

Sometimes, though, God gave her good news, like when she said, "God has told me that your uncle will recover from his illness" — and he did.

Sometimes it was bad news, like, "God has told me that celebrating Christmas is an abomination, so I will not be participating." Usually she baked sugar cookies for Christmas, so that word from God was disappointing.

More often, her messages from God were simply strange. As she got older and her teeth began to chatter, she believed God was using Morse Code to telegraph His commands to her, so she bought a manual and began transcribing the dots and dashes from her mouth.

When the code was decoded to gibberish, she started studying Hebrew, because "That's the language of the Lord." Yeah, she thought God was sending her Morse Code in Hebrew.

In the summer of 1974, when Watergate had been in the headlines for months and months, the news said that President Nixon would resign the next day, but my grandma had a source that said otherwise.

"God has told me," she announced at a commercial in the Walter Cronkite show, "that Nixon will not resign. He will be completely exonerated, and will reveal that he is an archangel sent by God to live among us and lead the world to salvation."

Nobody called her on it when Nixon resigned the next day.

Grandma H never doubted the word of God, but even as a kid, I doubted Grandma H. Always figured either she was crazy, or Jehovah was a hell of a kidder. Growing up around her, I became less and less interested in anything involving faith.

My brother Clay, though, thought Grandma had a direct connection to God, and became more and more Christian as he got older. Now Clay's so Christian I can hardly talk to him, and Grandma H died a few years back.

I loved her, and remember her as a nice old lady, mildly insane, who made the world's finest sugar cookies. She wouldn't share the recipe, though. She said God had told her not to, and then later, as her delusions grew, she said God had told her she'd never die, so there was no need to share the recipe. She took the secret with her when she went, so no sugar cookies for me, ever again.

Got as far as the subway platform, ready to ride into San Francisco to check my mail and work at the magazine, before remembering that it's one of those holidays we celebrate without knowing why. There'll be no Post Office, and no work today.

Well, yippee, but I have nothing better to do.

Came back home, read some zines, did something my grandma wouldn't approve of, and started editing the August issue.

♦ ♦ ♦

Summer is fading now. This room, with the window always open, the fan eternally spinning and churning the air to imitate a breeze, is becoming comfortable. It's always been too hot, until the last few days, and at the moment it feels warm, instead of sticky and stenchy and stale with sweat.

In a few weeks, it'll be pleasantly cool. A few weeks after that I'll curse the coldness and plug in my space heater. Eventually comes the winter.

The seasons go 'round and 'round, the years accumulate, and I remain alone — by choice, I tell myself.

There's a woman in my life, sorta, but only via letters, and maybe someday in the flesh. She's far away for now, and we're friends, that's all. Maybe we'll be friends who move to New York City. Maybe not.

Even a friend via the mailbox is better than I've known for a long, long while. My old friends are far away. Everyone's far away, really.

Whatever happens, the one certainty is that feelings and friendships fade, the days grow colder, nights emptier, the wind blows harsh clouds and rain, autumn comes and then winter. At the end of the day and the end of it all, I'll be alone.

What with the holiday, this week I worked at Black Sheets on Tuesday instead of Monday. Nothing to report about that. Same as ever, I shredded junk mail, filed paperwork, filled orders, and enjoyed the porn.

Here's news, though: I rode Muni's marvelous new F train to the Castro and back, before and then again after work. Four rides. The F-line is a great idea — they've taken some of the oldest streetcars in the fleet, vehicles long since out of service, wiped off the rust, tuned up the engines, slapped a fresh coat of pain on 'em, and now the antiques roll up and down Market Street all day, every day.

The F-line's streetcars from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s will probably be the most reliable vehicles Muni has. Things built back then were built to last, and with proper maintenance you simply start the engine and the wheels on the trolley go round and round.

Meanwhile, according to an article in the newspaper a few days ago, Muni's brand newest buses are lemons. They're being towed off the street about once every 300 miles of drive time.

♦ ♦ ♦

Whoops, I forgot to put the cat out when I left for work this morning. She's not my cat, though she thinks she is, so it slipped my mind. Evidence suggests she's been scratching to get out of my bedroom all day – old newspapers that had been piled on the floor are now scattered all about. And she left a shit on my blankets.

This isn't the same cat I've mentioned before, notorious for shitting wherever it wants but never in its box. This cat's never shat anywhere but in her box before, but since there's no litter box in my room, only the other kind of litter, all is forgiven.

There are three cats here in the house of Judith:

• Dorothy is Judith's own cat, a black thing that's nice enough.

• Morpher is Joe's cat, and that's the cat that pees on shoes and shits on the carpet. Legend has it that Morpher once peed on Joe's head, though I can't quite picture how, and I haven't asked.

And then there's Elton, a black and white, very friendly feline that purrs like a tribble. I'm not sure which of my flatmates thinks he or she owns Elton, but Elton owns me. She sometimes claws at my door, craving affection, so I let her in and stroke behind her ears.

Not counting me, Elton is the only animal allowed in my room. Sometimes she curls up on my pillow, and unless she starts knocking trash off the table in the middle of the night, she's always welcome to sleep over. Maybe I'll even put a litter box in my room.

Today, she left a fresh mini-muffin on the corner of my bed, right where I'd usually sit to kick my shoes off. Glad I saw it before sitting and kicking.

♦ ♦ ♦

And then there came a high-pitched sound, like falsetto yodeling. When it didn't stop after half a minute, I listened to the fan — does it need WD-40? Nope. Tilting my ear all over the room, I've decided the sound is coming from up. There's a cricket on the roof, just outside the skylight, with a very loud, ceaseless chirp.

Can't see it, but can't stop hearing it. It's been chirp/yodeling up there for hours, and I could almost grow accustomed to it, except that it comes and goes. The cricket takes road trips? It's quiet for ten minutes, then loud for ten minutes, then two minutes of silence, fifteen minutes of chirp/yodeling.

Nature is a marvelous thing except when it isn't, and this isn't.

I've tried scaring it away with broom whacks on the skylight glass, but it keeps coming back. It's keeping me awake like a drippy faucet.

♦ ♦ ♦

OK, damn it. The cricket woke me at 1:30 Wednesday morning, but with earplugs and an extra fan roaring extra loud I was able to sleep until sunrise. I can even hear it down the hall, the sound coming from someone else's skylight. Several rooms have windows to the stars, which is usually nice, but with crickets chirping above every skylight, it's like a Roger Corman movie.

The way it works on Telegraph Ave, in theory, is that a city schmuck with a clipboard walks by every day, checking every vendor's license. There are only four bureaucrats overseeing more than a hundred vendors on four entire blocks of Telegraph, so of course they can't check every license every day. (That's sarcasm, if you're wondering.)

It had been a week since anyone from the city bureaucracy had scrutinized the fish cart, but one of the clipboard schmucks came 'round today, and it was the same inspector who'd ordered Darwin off the display. He noticed the Darwin fish immediately, maybe because there are now twenty of them, on a slightly raised shelf that says 'Banned in Berkeley', and the shelf has twinkling lights.

He frowned and looked at me, then back at the Darwin display, then me again. He opened his mouth, then closed it, couldn't think what to say, opened his mouth again, but remained silent. He looked sorta like a fish out of water, so I shrugged and explained it to him:

"We're a free speech table now. No license, lots of Darwin."

He looked like I must've looked trying to read Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. "Huh," he answered, and then ten seconds later he asked, "And what's 'free speech' about Darwin fish?"

"The fish is an ancient symbol of Christianity," I said politely, same as I've explained to customers hundreds of times. "We're poking fun at it."

"And that's free speech because…?"

Guess they don't hire clipboard schmucks for their smarts, so I said, "It's a statement against fundamentalism, and for freedom of religion, which includes freedom from religion. We're against the domination of American society and government by fundamentalist Christians, usually right-wing crazies. We're for the separation of church and state."

"Huh," he said again, still looking stupefied. Jay had announced that we're a free speech table, in person, at the city's Office of Vendor Control or whatever it's called, but obviously, this guy hadn't heard about it, so I broke the news.

"When you told us to stop selling Darwin fish, that was a suppression of our free speech," I said, and motioned toward where the license used to be taped to the table. "We've been a free speech vendor since then."

He looked at me for a moment that lasted longer than a moment, then looked where the license wasn't, and I couldn't guess what was on his mind. He didn't say anything, though, not even "Huh" again, until he finally pointed at the tree next to my stand.

"You aren't allowed to use city property for your display," he said.

Ah, I thought, so that's the way it's going to be.

Around the tree, there's a metal protective cage, and on the cage were several of our magnetic fish. There's a cage around every tree on Telegraph Ave, and vendors who've set up next to a tree often hang their handicrafts from the cage for better visibility. My neighbor vendor had several necklaces, priced $4 each, dangling from the other side of the same cage.

I apologized, though, and smiled as I took down the magnets. The man's job is to hassle people; that's what makes him 'The Man'.

He still seemed flummoxed, so I smiled bigger. Maybe we're the first vendor that's ever switched from licensed to unlicensed? He looked again at the corner of the table where our lack-of-license was, but there was only the outline of tape that had been there until a week ago.

He wasn't quite scowling, but I could almost see what he was thinking, as if a thought balloon was above his head: "Is this allowed?" said the cartoon lettering. "Isn't there a rule?"

Eventually he sighed and took a step away, but immediately he turned back toward me. "If you're going to sell without a license," he said, "you'll have to get an OK from the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission."

"Really," I said, dully, but still as kind and cooperative as I could pretend to be without puking.

"Yes, you'll need to see Frank LaRue."

"Frank LaRue," I said, "Transportation and Infrastructure Commission. Got it." It smelled like the first step in a very long runaround.

He walked away like he'd won a battle, and I asked the necklace vendor to keep an eye on my table.

At the opposite end of the block, I'd seen my pal Umberto working. He's another unlicensed vendor, and he was napping in his chair with a sombrero tilted over his head. I tapped his shoulder, said good morning, and asked if he'd ever been to the city's Transportation and Infrastructure Commission to get Frank LaRue's permission to nap here.

"Are you nuts?" said Umberto. "Never heard of Frank LaRue. Never heard of whatever his commission is. I come out every morning, set up my table, and never ask anyone's permission."

"Of course not," I said. "If you need permission, it's not free speech."

"That's the general idea," said Umberto with a laugh. Then he went back to his nap, and I went back to my stand, and put the magnets back onto the tree cage.

Like the good citizen she is, Jay traipsed to the city's Transportation and Infrastructure Commission this morning, to meet with Frank LaRue and get his blessing for our free speech booth on Telegraph Ave.

She invited me to come with her downtown, but Fuck no. My tolerance for jumping through bureaucratic hoops is about half a hoop. So I wasn't there to see any of this, but Jay's a reliable source, and here's what she says happened:

At Mr LaRue's office, she was told that he's on vacation and won't be back for three weeks. In his absence, nobody else is authorized to sign the forms and/or grant what's called a "Permit to Place Object on Sidewalk."

Mr LaRue's receptionist, though, says we'd only need that form if we were handing out free literature, and not selling anything. We're the opposite of that; no free literature, and everything's for sale, so she says we'd need a vendor's license instead.

A vendor's license, of course, is what the fish cart already has, and we don't want it. Having a license means the city can tell us what we can and can't sell, like they've told us we can't sell Darwin fish.

"We're free speech vendors," Jay says she told the lady, but the receptionist had never heard of vendors selling without a license, and didn't think it was legal. She simply gave Jay a copy of the pertinent ordinances, and sent her away.

Then Jay walked down a different hallway to see someone in the city's Department of Compliance with Asinine Rules, the bureaucracy that oversees street vendors. This was a mistake, Jay now agrees. She thought they'd be helpful, when we're trying to escape their petty rules?

As Jay describes it, the scene grew ugly, and quickly. One of the city staffers said we're merchants, not covered by free speech, and threatened to bring "the full force of Berkeley law" down on us if we continue to sell without a license. It's unclear what "the full force of Berkeley law" might entail, but such threats work best when they're vague.

Jay has studied the ordinances she brought home, with me half-heartedly reading along. Near as we can make any of it make sense, the city's threat is in Section 12, Subsection 2:

"Anything placed or permitted to remain upon any sidewalk or roadway in violation of Section 12.1… is hereby declared to constitute a nuisance and the Police Department is hereby authorized and empowered to abate such nuisance by removing same to the custodian of lost property in the Police Department or the Corporation Yard of the City of Berkeley."

So they'll haul our stuff away, and probably haul my ass away too, if I'm deemed a nuisance?

I'd be proud to be a nuisance, but it all seems so ridiculous I'm tempted to laugh, not holler.

Free speech means speaking freely. It's not something you ask permission for.

My recommendation to Jay — both before and after her trip downtown — is to ignore all of it. The city schmuck who said to get Frank LaRue's permission is full of shit. Also, fuck Frank LaRue.

Umberto and several other free speech vendors never filled out forms, never got an OK from Frank LaRue, and they sell their wares on Telegraph, with no interference from the city. I can do that, too. Send me out to sell fish, same as ever, but as a free speech vendor, ignoring all the rules and regs. The city wouldn't do anything, same as they don't do anything to Umberto.

But — it's not my merchandise they'd confiscate, it's Jay's. I won't be paying any fines, she will. She's the boss, so what we do next is her decision, not mine.

For now, she says, we yield. I'm supposed to put the license back on the cart, take Darwin off display, and become a legal vendor again, until she consults a lawyer and knows better what's going on.

Maybe that's wise. Maybe I care. Maybe.

I'm disgusted and bored by all of it, really. I'd like to sell fish on Telegraph, but as a job, not as a way of life, with all this daily drama that rules my waking hours. I am approaching total fish burnout, tired of wondering what the city will do next, what Jay will do next, and tired of typing the word 'fish' on these pages.

I am kicking myself for agreeing to do this, but I've spent two hours calling various offices at Berkeley City Hall, and talking to various people who didn't want to talk to me. Whatever department I called, all transfers led back to the desk of the same clipboard schmuck who visited my fish cart on Wednesday — not a fountainhead of fair and impartial information. I have no interest in anything he might say, and he has less interest in anything I might say.

Again I said to Jay, we're going about this all wrong. If we're operating a free speech cart, we should have nothing to do with the city bureaucracy. No phone calls, no forms. I should simply show up and sell our sacrilegious fish.

Again she said no, we'll do this cautiously, get the city's permission to sell without a permit. Like that's ever going to happen.

Well, at least I was on the clock and getting paid for these fruitless phone calls, but that didn't make it any less unpleasant.

As an infinite shot into infinite darkness, I looked up and called a similar office for the city of San Francisco, to inquire about their rules governing street vendors. If Jay would pay my BART fare, I'd be happy to commute under the bay and sell fish at Haight-Ashbury or in the Castro.

Bureaucracy is bureaucracy, though, same there as here. Each of the three times I called San Francisco's helpline, the switchboard connected me to the tax collector's office, which is almost definitely the wrong place to ask my questions, and anyway, nobody there picked up the phone. As it rang and rang on my third try, I walked away and used the toilet, flushed and fixed myself a sandwich and a cup of caffeine, and when I came back their phone was still ringing.

Dealing with any governmental agency always brings the same response: severe frustration. Then I called Berkeley for another dose of the eastside runaround.

♦ ♦ ♦

And maybe my fishmonger days are winding down.

Our daily profits have dwindled since school started again at U-Cal Berkeley, and dwindled further without Darwin fish, so Jay's come up with another change of strategy. She's told me to take a few weeks off from the cart while she continues fighting City Hall, a fight I still think is unwise and unwinnable.

Instead we're going national, she says. She's buying small ads in some big zines and small magazines, so clearly she still believes in the future of selling fish. Maybe more than I do.

When or if any orders come in from those ads, I'll be the fulfillment man mailing orders out, and if/when the City of Berkeley legalizes free speech, I'll be selling on Telegraph again, but on weekends only.

Of course, this is something between a reduction in hours and a layoff notice, so I'm glad I posted some work-wanted flyers a few days ago. I'll post more flyers this afternoon. Boy needs job, pronto. I'll do anything legal, for five bucks an hour, all over again.

It takes maybe twenty flyers to generate one phone inquiry, and only about one in three inquiries results in a day's work, so I gotta get crackin' with the flyers.

And what the hell, I'll post one right here:

♦ ♦ ♦

After an afternoon on my feet posting flyers on every corner of Berkeley, I came home hungry, so when Judith invited me to accompany her for and errand and a meal, I said yup.

She drove us into Oakland, and on her eight-track she played the soundtrack from Hair, and we both sang along.

Dinner was McDonald's, which barely qualifies as dinner or food, but it was free so I ate it up and had deep-fried fake apple pie for dessert.

Then she drove us to the home of a middle-aged and very Christian black couple — very Christian, judging by all the Jesus memorabilia scattered and framed everywhere in the house.

Judith bought some homemade art supplies from the Mrs, while I watched the evening news with the Mr. They were both nice enough, but sheesh the newscast was incredible. Even when I had a television I never watched TV news, so this was news to me. There's not much news on TV news.

All the reporters were pretty young women, so clearly being pretty and young and women were the job requirements, more than any grounding in journalism.

One of them performed a laughable report on a vegan food expo, explaining that vegans are vegetarians who — wide-eyed, as if it's shocking — don't eat cheese, and don't wear leather.

After this, the anchor and reporter did a scripted banter on the subject. "No meat," said the reporter, still shocked, as if she'd never heard of even vegetarians before.

"No good," joked the anchormale, and they both giggled.

Before we could enjoy such a hilarious moment, of course, we first had to sit through the evening's Hard News.

Our top story tonight: Feds are considering child porn charges against Calvin Klein, for the company's latest salacious and sleazy ads. To make sure viewers were enraged, the station showed footage of teen and maybe pre-teen models, complete with allegedly illegal zoom-in crotch shots. They ran this video first as a pre-commercial tease for what's coming next, and then again as part of the news story.

If the feds prosecute Calvin Klein, shouldn't they also prosecute Channel 5? It's the same footage.

Prosecute the pornographers, I say. Prosecute every magazine and TV station that ran the ads. Prosecute newsstands that sold the magazines, and stores that sold the TV sets. Prosecute the kids' parents. Prosecute the kids. Prosecute everyone who ever looked at a Calvin Klein ad without barfing. Certainly, prosecute everyone who owns Calvin Klein underwear, jeans, perfume, or whatever worthless garbage they make. And when everyone tangentially related to Calvin Klein has been prosecuted and jailed for life, prosecute the prosecutors, because they're obviously in possession of child pornography, right?

It's all bullshit, of course. Calvin Klein is a giant corporation, and no prosecutor has ever or will ever file charges against a giant corporation. Maybe CK will pay a small fine to settle the matter.

Next on the news that isn't news, we went live to Los Angeles, where another pretty woman filed her report on today's developments in the ongoing and eternal trial of OJ Simpson. She didn't explain, though, what nobody's ever explained — why I should care.

For the most part, I don't. I've paid no attention to the trial beyond accidentally glancing at headlines. Sorry for the dead, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, but the court, not the news and not the audience, will decide whether OJ did it or didn't.

My prediction is that he'll be found not guilty — not necessarily because he's not guilty, but because he has so much money and fame on his side. Your average prosecutor can't possibly match wits with the lawyers a rich man can hire, and your average Joe on the jury would be very hesitant to convict the man famous for running through airports in his amusing ads for Hertz Rent-A-Car.

These last few days in the papers, though, Officer Mark Fuhrman has caught even my disinterested eye. He's perjured himself, possibly planted evidence, and he's on tape saying ghastly racist things, but let's be clear here: He certainly is not, as some have said, a "bad cop." He's simply a cop, like most cops — a swaggering bully with a badge and a gun, who knows who's guilty, evidence and facts be damned, and believes justice is whatever he can get away with, whatever he wants.

If there's anything good to come from OJ Simpson's trial, it's that it's painted cops in a bad light. Cops are usually hero-worshipped as if they're heroes, which they rarely are, so the bad light is deserved and refreshing.

There was a small blurb in yesterday's Oakland Tribune, where some self-claimed expert lawyer said that the real tragedy of all this is that in the future, jurors might be reluctant to believe the sworn testimony of police officers in other cases.

Hallelujah for that. Thank you, OJ. Thank you, Officer Fuhrman. Thank you, all of OJ's dozen or so celebrity lawyers. Anything that leads toward more disrespect for cops is a good thing.

I said that out loud to Mr Black Man during a commercial break, and he said, "Amen." Their family had lots of Jesus imagery on the walls, though, so I imagine he says amen all the time.

With the fish stand at least temporarily out of business, today was a day for doing nothing — reading zines, picking my nose, cursing the crickets outside the skylight, and taking illegal drugs to quell a toothache that wouldn't stop kicking my head.

Special offer: Any dentists, dental hygienists, or dental students are invited to trade an extraction for a lifetime subscription to Pathetic Life.

♦ ♦ ♦

Here's an article by Bevvy Messerantsky in the August issue of Lumpen, all about everything she hates to see in a zine: overpricing, album reviews, chatty but pointless introductions, and of course, poetry.

A few of her zine complaints seem petty to me, like "a bunch of 8½x11 sheets stapled together in the corner doesn't cut it," so next time I'll skip the staple on your copy, Bevvy.

She also dislikes zines that pretentiously dub themselves "Volume X, Issue Y" instead of simply an issue number, and I'm with her on that. C'mon, there aren't going to be "volumes" of anyone's zine. You'll find Bevvy's article in Lumpen, Volume 4, Number 3.

It's not a bad rant. She's more right than wrong, and I'll endorse most of her complaints, but Bevvy's article inspired me to add a few complaints she neglected to mention:

① Articles continued on anything but the following page. Ugh. Here's the August issue of an otherwise fine tabloid, The Haight/Ashbury Free Press, where on pages 4-5, you'll see what appear to be ten short articles, but only four of them are all there. The other six are continued like a treasure hunt, four to page 24, and two to page 30. Of the articles that resume on page 24, three conclude there, but one is continued again to page 30. Of the three articles that resume on page 30, two end there, but one jumps to page 37. Other features bounce from pages 5 to 24, 5 to 30, 6 to 30, 15 to 26, and two from 28 to 31. There's even an article on page 34 that says it's jumping backwards to page 29, but it isn't there; instead it's continued, still headed backwards, to page 31. There's no reason these articles couldn't have been laid out one after the other, so the zine could be read sequentially, which is the way people read.

② Illustrations plunked in the middle of the words. Instead of splitting the text into two columns with a picture in between, these zinesters force you to read right across the picture, find where the sentence continues, then jump back to the left, across the picture again for a few words, then jump over the picture again, over and over. Again, that's not the way people read. It's twenty interruptions per paragraph. I'd like to read what you've written, so please don't make it difficult.

③ Collages. Oh yes, collages were such fun in 4th grade arts & crafts, but after seeing approximately 265,000 collages in zines, it's the world's most weary art form. Won't you please put away your scissors and glue stick?

④ Illegibly handwritten zines. Sure, writing your text by hand makes a zine feel more personal, more intimate, and that can be a great stylistic choice, but only if your handwriting is legible, like Aaron at Cometbus. If your scribbles look like a doctor's prescription, please buy and use a damned typewriter or word processor.

⑤ Illegibly printed zines. There are nifty newfangled machines that let you plug in any bizarre font face you like, but that doesn't mean you should. Nobody wants to study frickin' hieroglyphics to read a zine.

⑥ 'Surprises'. A zine arrives in an envelope, so you rip it open, and the zinester has included a thousand punched-out paper holes, or some flower pedals, or glitter to brighten your day and get stuck in your carpet and never come out. Surprise! If you're sending such surprises with your zine, you are an asshole.

⑦ Unstapled zines.

⑧ Unwritten writing.

⑨ Poetry. Yeah, Bevvy mentioned her hatred of bad poetry in zines, but it can't be said enough. Zine publishers everywhere, please check your driver's licenses. It's highly unlikely that you're Charles Bukowski or Sylvia Plath.

⑩ Anything written by the ubiquitous and uninteresting author who calls himself White Boy, and sends his lame writing to every zine on the planet.

For God's sake and mine, and for zine readers everywhere, kindly cease and desist all the above.

I don't have a television, but being unemployed, I can do the couch potato as well as anybody.

It took twelve hours for me to waddle from the bed to the typewriter today, because first I had to answer some mail, and read another few chapters of a novel that's taking too long to get interesting.

Never really hungry but always happy to eat, I've also enjoyed a fabulous all-day meal. It's included half a bucket of prunes, three cheese sandwiches, 11 bags of past-their-expiration-date-so-they're-cheap chips, a tray of pickle dogs, three bowls of sugary cereal, and probably other junky food I've forgotten even eating.

The smorgasbord started with prunes, so most of my evening seems to be planning itself. I can feel it coming on. Here, let me grab that slow-going novel, as I'll be reading more from it now, on an uncomfortable chair, in a small room down the hall.

♦ ♦ ♦

Six months ago, I was doing semi-steady gig work for Jose, who runs a sound company. He sells sound, sort of. He schleps speakers and mikes to various venues, wiring them up and renting them out, usually along with his services as "sound guy."

For a while he was my boss, and then I didn't show up one night when he thought I should've, and I thought I had the night off. We had a low-key argument about it, and I haven't heard from him since — until today, when he called, said he'd seen my flyers, said I always did good work, and said he wants me to work for him again.

Shrug. Anything legal, five bucks an hour. That's how I make my lousy living, so I'll do it. Why not? Jose got on my nerves, but he always paid me, sometimes even tipped me.

What goes around comes around, and sometimes it comes so far around it leaves me spinning in circles.

♦ ♦ ♦

Just because I don't mention Sarah-Katherine in every day's entry, don't be thinking she's not on my mind. Pretty lady, smart and funny and she wants to live with me? Believe it, she's on my mind, and the thought of her makes me smile.

How the whole "moving to New York" thing is going to happen, I'm not sure. Whether it's wise to do it, I'm also not sure.

Probably it'll turn out to be a big mistake. Yeah, I'm pretty sure about that. Everything turns out to be a mistake in the end, doesn't it?

Maybe Sarah-Katherine will think I'm a big mistake. That seems likely, too.

If we're making a mistake, though, it's ours to make. Life is just a whole lot of mistakes, one after the other, and big mistakes are more interesting than little mistakes. I'm looking forward to this one.

BARTed into San Francisco to work for Black Sheets, my every Monday gig, and brought a backpack full of "I'll do anything" flyers to spread all around San Francisco afterwards.

After the afterwards, I BARTed back to Berkeley, stepped off the train, and it was impossible not to notice a pretty brunette in a very short, frilly skirt on the opposite platform.

Of course, on a subway platform, incoming trains always kick up a gust, so I loitered until a Fremont train blew in. It ruffled and raised her skirt, but not quite enough.

The escalator was broken, so I had to climb the stairs, and in doing so one tends to look upward. Another short-skirted woman was upward, standing at the edge of the mezzanine above, and this time without even hoping for a breeze, the view was unobstructed. All the way up. She was wearing pink panties, either or the thong design or all bunched up, leaving 95% of that woman's fine butt on display for everyone below.

As I reached the top of the stairs she walked away, which was of no matter to me. It's not like I was going to make a pass at her or anything. Maybe I might've said 'Hello', or 'Thanks'.

Wondering how she could not have known she was flashing a hundred people below her, I paused for a moment where she'd been leaning on a short safety bar, and looked down. What came into focus, looking down, was another woman's very low-cut blouse, as she stood on the platform, far below.

Yessir, today was my lucky day. Any one of these wouldn't be an uncommon sight, and I wouldn't bother writing about it, but a trifecta, three in a row in about three minutes, was a special treat indeed.

Disgusting, you say? Typical male behavior?

Yeah, and I came straight home and masturbated.

I'm a weirdo in many ways, but completely typical of my gender when it comes to long legs, butts, and boobies. Put a pretty woman in a short skirt, and show me any man who's not hoping for a breeze, and it's gotta be a gay man.

But c'mon, even most gay men would've been watching, hoping.

In the small print every month, it says I'll trade any issue of this zine for a meal or a movie. This afternoon and evening, someone took me up on that. I went to lunch and a movie with a gent named Josh Lentil, which earns him the the next issue and this one, in which I'm about to review the lunch, the movie, and Josh.

The meal was at Long Life Vegi House, a meat-free Chinese restaurant on University Avenue in Berkeley. The sauteed nuts and veggies were wonderful. I'd never had (or even imagined) vegetarian pot stickers before, and they were great, too. Doug says, even if you usually want meat, you want to do without at Long Life Vegi House.

After our fine dining experience, we walked to the UC Theater for a double feature, starting with Medium Cool (1969), which follows a local TV news crew in Chicago, in the days leading up to the famously tumultuous Democratic Party convention of 1968.

It's a drama, not a documentary, but the climax was filmed on location during the subsequent police riots, as cops beat down anyone within billy-club range. The violence served no purpose except batting practice, of course, and the cops got way with it, of course.

The reality of filming amidst such true chaos certainly gives the movie an extra jolt of urgency. Watching the TV cameras roll away as the tanks rolled in made me proud to be unAmerican.

Shall I ramble on, complimenting the director and cinematographer? Shall I laugh at Verna Bloom? She's supposed to be playing the single mother of a teenage boy, but in a perfect Hollywood wardrobe and makeup, she's the most glamorously gorgeous mom I've ever seen. Hubba hubba, mother.

The nightcap was Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974). It's a film everyone has seen (and like Medium Cool, if you haven't, you should) so I'll keep my comments brief. It's about a private spy (Gene Hackman) who's obsessed with his own privacy, and trying to figure out the meaning of a brief snippet of conversion he's surreptitiously recorded. I have quibbles about The Conversation, but they're tiny, and the film is quite good.

Surprisingly, despite being the UC Theater, both films were in focus, the projector didn't break down, the soundtrack didn't click in and out, and nothing else went wrong, either.

As for Josh, he's a friendly, smart guy. He reads my zine, so he's a man of high class and excellent taste. I was fairly comfortable with him by the time we'd ordered dinner. He's kinda talky, but it's a good talky — talky that knows to shut the hell up when the lights dim at the theater.

Talky is a requirement for Josh, cuz he hosts a show on the local pirate station, Radio Free Berkeley. No dead air on his show, probably, but I haven't heard it, because he's on in the middle of the night, and I'm asleep. He wants me to be a guest on his show a week from Thursday night, so I guess I'll be yawning a lot the day after.

Being the quiet guy I am, I wonder what I'll have to say on the radio, but Josh says he'll just ask a few questions about me and the zine. Those are my areas of expertise — me and the zine — so it might be fun.

And anyway, it's pirate radio, in the middle of the night. There might be a dozen people listening, not a big enough unseen crowd to trigger any stage fright. And Josh seems medium cool, so why not?

♦ ♦ ♦

My toothache comes and goes, and tonight it's keeping me awake. It's been gnawing at my face for weeks, but until tonight, it's been mostly a dull, forgettable pain, like President Clinton.

Tonight it's more like Newt Gingrich or Strom Thurmond — an agony that shouldn't be ignored. I may need a dentist soon, or better drugs.

If my tooth hurts like this tomorrow morning, I'd call in sick if I had a job.

Addendum, 2022: After that night, 'Josh Lentil' and I became fairly good friends, but I'm utterly unable to remember his real name. I believe in privacy, and not merely for me, so almost everyone's names were changed for the zine. I checked to be certain, and Google can find no human on Earth named Josh Lentil.
Wish I could check up on 'Josh', at least through the internet. He was a few years older than me, plump like me, and I vaguely remember that he had some health issues.
Hope you're alive and well, 'Josh', and wherever you are, whoever you are, thanks again for lunch and a flick, and the friendship that followed. If you read this, please drop me a note.
And true to its name, the web says Long Life Vegi House is still there on University Avenue. But unlike 1,408 weeks ago when I was there, it's now closed on Tuesdays.

"Today I did nothing much today, today I did nothing much." If this show had a theme song, those would be the only lyrics, repeated over and over again.

♦ ♦ ♦

My nothing-much today should've been BARTing into San Francisco and putting up a hundred "I'll do anything legal" flyers in the Mission, in the Castro. The voice-mail has had very little to say to me lately. Business isn't booming. Even when Jose and I talked a few days ago, we came to a general agreement that I'd work with him again, but not a specific when and where.

So definitely, gluing flyers to every telephone pole in the city is what I should've done, but the pants refused to go onto my legs. There were so many other things to not do, that I spent the entire morning and the first few hours of the afternoon not doing all of them, one by one. It was exhausting, so I took a nap.

♦ ♦ ♦

The big mistake was that when I finally crawled out of bed and did something, it was one last proofread of the 'next' issue of this zine. In the time warp reality of publishing one's diary, the next issue is last month, August.

The way it works is, first I write the zine, day by day.

Then, I go back and delete about half of it because it's the same as the other half, and tidy up the writing that remains, so it's a little less repetitive, boring, and repetitive.

Then I let it sit for a few days or a week, and look at it one last time before hitting the 'print' button. That wait lets me read it with a fresher eye, catching the last few typos, and noticing any especially badly broken writing so it can be repaired, if possible. That's what I was doing today — that final fix and read-through.

And wowsers, I'd thought August was at least of so-so interest, but it's worse than that. It's almost entirely uninvolving, unfunny, and… ungood. It's not something I'd particularly want to read, let alone have my name on the byline.

I don't enjoy writing, but I love having written something good. It's sure frustrating to read a month's worth of what I've written and realize that it's not very good.

♦ ♦ ♦

Why do I do this zine anyway? What kind of man puts every embarrassing ejaculation on paper, prints it up and offers it to the world for three bucks — and can't even make it amusing for more than a paragraph at a time here and again there? This isn't literature. It's just litter.

For that matter, why bother with my life at all, let alone writing about it? Down like a DC-10, this is my worst instant funk since my last round of the blues.

♦ ♦ ♦

After I'd typed the above, deep in ambivalence and not-quite self-hatred but certainly self-dislike, the house phone rang and I ignored it. Nobody calls me, and I hate the phone. Never give out the number, so it ain't for me, and I hate taking messages, too, so fuck off, whoever's calling.

Moments later my flatmate Cy knocked at the door and said the phone was for me. What the what? Who even has this number, I wondered. Sarah-Katherine has it, but by mutual agreement and because long distance is expensive, she never calls me and I never call her.

It was Jay on the phone. Guess I'd given her the number at some point.

"What do you want?" I asked, grumpy and itching to get back to my depression.

The plan is, we're going to sell fish via mail order, and Jay explained that she'd prepped rough drafts ads for the fish, and she wanted me to look at them, give her my opinions, and help her lay out the final fish ads.

"Sounds good," I said. "When do you want to do this?"

"Uh, now would be a good time," she said.

I looked at the clock, and it was 9:50. At night. Generally, that's bedtime for me, but, "Sounds good," I said again. Hell, I needed to get out of my room anyway, out of my head, so I got dressed and then waited outside. She drove up about ten minutes later, and we spent a few hours doing fishy arts and crafts.

Then we went to a midnight breakfast at JJ's, an all-night restaurant in Oakland. Jay was buying, so I couldn't refuse, and anyway I'd never refuse breakfast, even if I'd just eaten breakfast. Never been to JJ's before, and probably never again unless Jay's buying again — the food was good, but expensive.

There's a telephone at every table, which is something I've never seen in a restaurant. You don't even need to dial '9' to get an outside line. Jay and I wondered about it, and decided, judging by the borderline twitchy customers all around us, that the phones are for conveniently arranging drug deals while you eat.

Between our omelets and the phone on the table, we constructed the ads, and in my opinion they're not great but not bad. Of course, what I know about advertising is nothing, but Here's hoping they sell some fish, we toasted with our OJs. In my mind I added an ellipsis... s_o I can maybe have at least a part-time job filling and mailing fish orders._

Then we drove to Kinko's to shrink and print the ads, with me mostly helping Jay keep track of which fish we'd photocopied and which we hadn't. After that we dropped the finished proofs into the mail, addressed to half a dozen magazines and half a dozen 'big' zines. The ad campaign is now underway!

By the time Jay dropped me off at home, it was 3:30 Thursday morning, and I was ready to drop myself. I wrote about it instead, and now it's 5:00 AM.

I'm in the same place as seven hours ago, but it's a better place mentally — thanks to Jay. Despite the occasional arguments, I like working with her, and having her around.

♦ ♦ ♦

As for the shittiness of the zine I'll soon be printing and stamping and mailing, there's nothing much I can do about it, eh? Can't go back and re-live or re-write August, so this weekend it goes to the copy shop, and then to your mailbox, dear reader. Thanks for the three bucks.

Life goes on, and Pathetic Life goes on, and sometimes it sucks but what doesn't?

I dreamed that Sarah-Katherine and I were living in New York City, and my mom was coming to visit. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…

Mom was gonna be there soon, so I was hurrying to hide my zines, my porn, my condoms, and my life from her. She's judgmental, and the less she knows about me, the less she can shiv me with what she knows.

Hiding everything is wimpy, yeah, but it's Doug, and also it was a dream. In real life, I wouldn't hide everything, I simply wouldn't let her in the door.

Sarah-Katherine is not wimpy like me, so in the dream she had no interest in hiding anything, no intention of not being absolutely who she is. That's admirable, but easier when she's not your mother.

It was a good dream, though, because Mom was speechless throughout. Not speechless as in shocked, but speechless meaning, she never said a word. Not like real life at all.

She simply settled herself onto a ratty couch and read her Bible, while Sarah-K played music in her room, loudly, and then did dishes in the nude. Mom didn't even notice, just continued reading her Bible. Eventually she got up from the couch and made herself comfortable on a chair at the foot of my bed, while Sarah-Katherine and I screwed for hours in front of her.

I woke up, and — Paging Dr Freud — wondered what the hell that was all about. I beat off, of course, and then floated away for another dream of Sarah-Katherine. Mom had seen enough, I guess. She wasn't in the second dream.

This time, Sarah-K and I were in San Francisco, riding on BART, on our way to my place, here in Berkeley. She thought she knew the way, and got off the train, took a way-too-fast escalator up. She was too far ahead of me, I couldn't tap her shoulder, she didn't hear when I shouted her name, and she took another escalator, down to a Muni platform.

That's wrong, though. Muni doesn't go to Berkeley. I was still on the first escalator, trying to catch up with her, but the train doors closed and then she'd ridden away. She was lost. I was panicked.

Then the cat knocked something over, waking me up.

Well, you don't need Freud to decode *that dream. It's about Sarah-Katherine slipping away from me, doing her own thing without me — which I already know absolutely is how it'll end between us. I don't care, though. We can have some good times before she catches whatever train takes her away.

And anyway, back in reality, Sarah-Katherine is a grown woman. She wouldn't get lost on the subways, and if she did take the wrong train she could easily find her way back. If she wants to find her way back.

Woke up midday, when the sun came through the skylight and stabbed me in the eyeballs. With nothing much else to do, I read through the August issue again, and decided yeah, it's bad, but it's not absolute shit. I've gotten worse zines in the mail.

Like Unshaved Armpits, for example. It's 16 pages of bad poetry, worse prose, tedious collage art, a thousand misspelled words, and three pointless comics. It's poorly printed, with pages not even lined up on the photocopier, and two pages printed upside-down. It fairly announces that the zinester doesn't give a damn, and with zines I'll put up with any shortcoming but that.

My zine is the Mona Lisa by comparison, so all of my angst from a few days ago is hereby rescinded. And if you want to see a zine so shitty it makes this one look good, Unshaved Armpits costs $4 from Harry Pitt, █████████████, Phoenix AZ 85013.

♦ ♦ ♦

The local pirate station, Free Radio Berkeley, broadcasts with the power of two AA batteries, so the reception comes and goes when I listen in the living room.

That's not the room I live in, though, and the reception in my own room was non-existent, so a couple of days ago I borrowed a ladder from Judith, and chopped the ends off two extension cords to wire an old set of rabbit ears. With the antenna duct-taped upside down under the skylight, I can listen to FRB in my bedroom.

Overall, I love it. 60% of FRB is worth listening to, and there is nothing worth hearing anywhere else on the radio, so my fine Philco will remain tuned to 104.1 FM, a tiny wedge of IQ between the pop of KFOG and the pap of KKFI.

That other 40%, though...

Much of it is good, but not for me, and that's OK. There are people listening who aren't fat white guys, and not everything on RFB needs my squeal of approval. There's a knob to turn it off, and I do.

Pirate radio is like broadcast zines — amateur, but powered by passion. Sometimes it's interesting, sometimes it's crap. Maybe the music is amazing, maybe it's annoying. Whatever it is, even the parts I don't care for, they're doing it because they love it, which makes it great. How often do you turn on the radio and hear an intelligent voice talking intelligently about marijuana, in a context that doesn't include fear, arrest, incarceration, or medicinal uses?

At the moment, though, I'm listening to The Radical News Hour, a show I need and appreciate, and the host is having tech difficulties trying to reach Mumia Abu-Jamal's lawyers in Philadelphia. For several minutes while they've been messing with the phones, otherwise dead air has been filled with a rap song about naked women being kept in cages at a street fair, for spectators' amusement.

Two thoughts: 1. Why not do the interview in advance, and play the tape during the show? Nothing's gained from doing it live, except the possibility of technical difficulties like this.

And 2. It's hard to offend me, but the humor or satire of this gawdawful filler music eludes me entirely.

Also, the host doesn't understand how a microphone works — that you have to talk to the mike. He's talking to the wall or whatever, then swiveling back to the mike, then talking to his knees or the ceiling or the floor. You can hear the words, but they're way in the distance, and then he's talking to the mike again and you can hear, and then he's not and you can't. I don't demand professional standards at an amateur station, but you gotta at least talk to the microphone or nobody can hear you.

On one of the other FRB shows, they played a taped interview with a native activist, and it was interesting, but for mood or effect they added music in the background, music that kept jumping into the foreground. My ears don't work so swell, and the music was swamping the words, so I gave up and clicked it off for a while.

Those are tech issues, mostly, but here's a larger complaint. Several shows on FRB consist of people playing their favorite music, which is cool, unless the DJ's favorite music is the same rock and rap you hear on twenty other stations. Madonna, the BeeGees, the Bangles, Phil Collins. I've even heard "The Girl from Ipanema."

Simply by broadcasting, FRB is breaking the law, risking big fines, even imprisonment — to play the BeeGees and the Bangles?

Oh, wait. Now they're interviewing a man who got beat up by the cops, and if's fascinating and infuriating, so I'm gonna shut up with my complaining and listen to Free Radio Berkeley…

♦ ♦ ♦

Around dusk, I took a walk through the neighborhood and saw a young couple walking together, laughing, and briefly smooching. That's when I realized it's Friday night. Being unemployed, all the days merge together and I hadn't even noticed it was Friday and then the weekend, because why would I care?

A billion years ago I might've cared. Friday might have been a date night, if I was in luck. Millions of couples might be holding hands, kissing, snuggling, sexing each other if they're in the mood. I got the mood just fine, but no longer the luck.

Addendum, 2022: In the original text, I spelled Ipanema "Epanima." I hate typos and misspellings, and always checked anything I was unsure about against a dictionary, but Ipanema isn't in the dictionary, and there wasn't an internet to simply type the word and have Google correct your spelling.
Please accept my apologies 27 years later, and also, it's amazing, ain't it, the technology we have these days?

The St Francis Theater is an easy walk from ghettos in three directions, so it draws an odd clientele. I bought a big popcorn, and settled into a seat in the darkened upstairs cinema.

About fifty other men were there, most of them sitting by themselves, surrounded by hundreds of empty seats. A few teenagers were together up front, but they were well-behaved. There were rats scurrying in the shadows, but they didn't nibble at me or my popcorn, so they weren't the problem either.

The problem was that a few of the customers were especially psychotic, drunk, delusional, and loud. Or all the above.

There are always bums at the St Frank, but usually they're not screaming at the screen or themselves. Had to switch seats twice, but the theater is huge, so I eventually found a relatively quiet corner.

I'd arrived in a bad mood, and mostly missed the first fifteen minutes of Waterworld because of the loud talkers and seat switching, but then something wonderful happened. Two employees walked into the auditorium, and told the two loudest assholes to leave. Even better, the assholes left.

After that, the movie was silly and soggy and fun. What's not to like? Things blow up, there's testosterone-soaked violence, and the unnamed protagonist (Kevin Costner) is enjoyably anti-social like me. And I won't say what it was, but there's one moment in the movie so perfect it gave me goosebumps and watered my eyes.

Waterworld has gotten horrible reviews, and all of them mention the many millions it cost, but I only care what it costs to get in. $3.50, for two movies, and it was definitely worth the price.

Then again, I also liked The Last Action Hero, so what do I know?

Batman Forever was a disappointment. All the Batman movies are a disappointment. Now he's Val Kilmer. Nothing against Kilmer. Loved him in Top Secret. Loved him in Real Genius. Didn't love him so much today, though.

I was a fan of Batman in comic books when I was a kid, so I keep going to these movies, hoping to see that Batman. They never show the caped crusader I remember, though. The first movie came close, but they keep making him such a hi-tech wiz-bang dude, all glitz and glamor and getting these gorgeous women.

No, man. Batman is supposed to be brooding and troubled. Yeah, he's a millionaire playboy, but they make him into the richest and sexiest man in the world. That was never what made him Batman, not to me. More brooding, please. He saw his parents get murdered, remember? He's scarred for life. Show me some scars.

And in these movies, Batman keeps revealing his secret identity to every dame he wants to boink. Women talk, you know, just like men. Keep blabbing who you are, and all of Gotham City is gonna know that Batman is really ████████.

♦ ♦ ♦

The real disappointment, though, and my reason for riding into San Francisco, was that I'd been invited to breakfast by someone who's bought several issues of this zine. We'd agreed to meet at the O'Farrell Café at 11:00.

He was there, but wearing a suit, carrying a briefcase, standing by the restaurant's doorway. When he asked if I was Doug, it sure surprised me. Hadn't occurred to me that a man in a suit might be someone I was supposed to meet. On the phone he'd sounded odd, which is better than normal, but in that suit he looked normal indeed. He looked like he might try to sign me up with Amway.

Well, you shouldn't judge someone by his clothes, right? Maybe he was going to a wedding after breakfast, I thought, or meeting someone way more important than me.

So we shook hands, stepped inside, sat at a booth. He started talking about the weather, the city, and the neighborhood, and complaining about the traffic, and his difficulties finding a parking space, but — it was him who'd suggested the O'Farrell Café. If he needed light traffic and easy parking, we could've met at the Denny's in Daly City.

This guy was talking so much, so fast, and laughing at everything he said as if he'd said something funny, that my ordinary ill-at-ease was going up instead of down.

That's something that happens to me, a side effect of my reclusiveness. if I'm with someone who's especially extroverted, I shrink into myself. Whatever energy I have, a talkative person sucks it out of me, without even trying.

The waitress came by, handed each of us a menu, poured coffee, and said she'd be back shortly to take our order. Just the normal things a waitress does, but she wasn't white, and when she walked away, the man buying me breakfast whispered a mildly racist joke.

Maybe I haven't written this in the zine often enough, but racism pisses me off. There are a billion better reasons to hate people, so skin color seems like a cop-out. It took me too long to say something, though, and the man across the table was in the middle of some unrelated sentence when I interrupted.

"What— really, what— the hell— gives you the idea that I'd find that remark funny?"

"Hey, hey, I'm sorry," he said, and maybe he was, but I was past caring. "Guess that was kind of rude."

I should've stomped out already, but the whole restaurant was suddenly quiet, and I had to ask, "So what's up with the suit? Are you on your way to work, or to a funeral or something?"

"No," he said. "I dressed up to meet you."

And I looked into my coffee for a long while, wondering why I wasn't already gone.

The waitress came by to take our orders, and he mumbled what he wanted, and they both looked at me, and I said, "Nothing."

The man looked like he knew what was coming, and I said, "You have a nice breakfast, man, a nice weekend, a nice life." I left a buck for my coffee and another for a tip, walked out, and that's how I ended up at the movies a few blocks away.

♦ ♦ ♦

After today's non-breakfast, and that guy on Market Street a few months ago, and a few other odd moments, I've decided to remove the line in the back of every issue that says I'll trade Pathetic Life for a meal.

That man at the diner had been buying this zine every month. He said nice things about it in the mail, and again when we talked on the phone to arrange breakfast. And my assumption, stupidly I guess, has been that people who like the zine would like me, but what that man and I have in common is what I ordered for breakfast: Nothing.

That dude at the diner is everyone I can't stand. He's why I'm a hermit, so — trading strangers this zine for a meal? Nah, that offer expired this morning.

One day soon I'll be working again, yearning for just half an hour of the all-day free time I've been living these last few weeks. For now, though, next month's rent is ready and I have four dollars in my wallet. There's no hurry unless I'm a responsible adult, so there's no hurry.

While all this time is mine every day, what have I done with it? Nothing, baby. The emptiness of an unemployed man's agenda is underpowering. I lie in bed and eat chocolate frosting sandwiches. I lie in bed and read zines. I lie in bed and do things you'd rather I didn't describe.

♦ ♦ ♦

My plan for today was to go flyering in San Francisco again, "anything legal" and all that rot, but the best-laid plans remained lying in bed. Eventually I moved to the recliner in the living room and laid there for a while. After that I wandered into the bathroom to scrub yesterday's sweat off my face, and then, what the hell, pulled on my pants and took a leisurely walk around beautiful Berkeley. Even brought some of my flyers with me, to make the walk tax-deductible.

Force of habit took me toward Telegraph Ave, where I leaned on a wall, watched the college co-eds, and said howdy to both of the vendors I don't hate.

Then something interrupted my gloriously lazy day.

Two cops on bicycles came buzzing across the sidewalk, missing my shoes by inches. Gosh, I thought, ain't that reckless endangerment? They hadn't even rang their bike-bells in warning. What could be the emergency that requires two policemen on ten-speeds in such a rush?

Deciding to be an investigative reporter, I followed the blur of blue to where the cops got off their bikes, and saw them talking to a street kid. He'd been sitting on his backpack, bothering nobody far as I could tell. I was still too far behind them to hear what the cops were saying, but they must've demanded ID, because the kid reached for his wallet, and handed something to one of the cops.

Close enough to hear now, what I heard was a cop speaking copspeak into his radio/lapel, reading the kid's driver's license (or training permit; he was awfully young) to someone at Headquarters.

They frisked him, but found no weapons, and then the three of them, two cops and a kid, stood on the sidewalk, talking. The cops were telling each other that the kid was nothing but trouble, but the kid said nothing except to politely answer their occasional questions.

Their police radio/lapels squawked, and word came back that there was a warrant for the kid's arrest, for a number, but I don't know what the number means. All crimes are numbers, you know, but you know something else?

You can see trouble in some people's eyes, and I saw it in the cops' eyes, but not the kid's. He looked like Wally Cleaver. Looked like he might cry, as they roughly turned him toward the wall, handcuffed and arrested him.

A few minutes later a squad car pulled up, and the kid cooperatively climbed into the back seat, as a cop pushed his head down just like they do on TV.

Through all this, the kid said nothing much, and none of the bystanders said anything at all. I said nothing. There was nothing really to be said. The cops hadn't been especially brutal or even mean, and the kid they'd said was "nothing but trouble" hadn't given them any trouble.

The bike cops were laughing about it all, and I wanted to ask them what the kid's crime was, but didn't, and there's even an excuse for my silence. Not driving any more, I've let my license expire, so if I'd said anything but "Support your local police," they might've demanded my papers, and I'd have no papers to show except expired papers. Expired papers are probably worse than no papers at all, so might've pushed my head down too, and shoved me into the cop car. as an accessory to the kid.

And the kid — was he a killer, a rapist, even a burglar? Maybe, but I'm skeptical. From his demeanor, most likely he was wanted for vagrancy, or public urination, or possession of an open bottle of beer. Perhaps he'd had a pinch of pot in his pocket on a better day than today. Thank Christ the cops were there, to keep Berkeley safe from the Beaver's big brother.

♦ ♦ ♦

Yeah, I don't like cops. If I need to explain why, then you're hopelessly naïve, but I'll do it, briefly.

I have seen cops using unnecessary force, unnecessary threats, unnecessary intimidation; cops utterly infuriated because someone said "Hey" instead of "Sir" or "Officer"; cops who can't be reasoned with or even spoken to; cops speeding and fighting with other cops; cops beating the hell out of people; and cops simply interacting with people, but treating them like they're not.

You might think that those cops on Telegraph weren't such bad cops, but there were lots of witnesses on the Ave. Maybe those cops are bad cops when there aren't witnesses.

And absolutely, inarguably, those two cops know exactly who Berkeley's worst cops are. Yet even so-called good cops never rat on bad cops, which means they're aiding and abetting the bad cops, so say it with me: All cops are bad cops.

Even saying the word 'cops' is just a quicker way to say 'bad cops'.

♦ ♦ ♦

On my walk home, I posted seven flyers — four on telephone poles, two on newsboxes, and one on a bus's back bumper. At home, I ate two vanilla frosting sandwiches, typed all this, and now it's time to sleep. Tomorrow I'm gonna BART into San Francisco and put up a lot of "I'll do anything" flyers. Maybe.

Fish flash: Jay says I'm working on Telegraph Ave next weekend, as a free speech vendor if free speech is allowed, or as a licensed vendor if Darwin is still forbidden. From the state of free speech in Berkeley, m certain we won't be selling Darwin, and I still think we should go free speech all the way, but Jay is more cautious than me.

I am so tired of Berkeley politics, I can't even smell you, but I am looking forward to being on Telegraph again, selling fish. Also, I need the money.

♦ ♦ ♦

Had breakfast with Mark H at the Cove in the Castro. Easy conversation, good food, no racist wisecracks because he's not an idiot, and he paid. I had the cheese and spinach omelet, and it was fine, but when we left the restaurant I was still hungry. "If we breakfast again" I said, "let's meet at the the New Mission Café." That's a dirt cheap slum cafeteria, where the price is great and the food is, well, not so good as at the Cove in the Castro, but you can order more of it and it'll still be less expensive.

Not sure if I talked Mark into eating at the New Mission, but I talked me into it. After I'd posted flyers all around the Castro, I took a #33 there, and had a stack of flapjacks and a side of bacon.

♦ ♦ ♦

On the BART ride home to Berkeley, I fell asleep and woke up in Richmond, the end of the line. Maybe the pancakes done me in, or it was the exhaustion from all that walking around flyering.

Since I was there, what the heck, I walked around Richmond and put up more of my flyers. It's an ordinary town, though, full of ordinary people, unlikely to call some stranger to wash their dishes.

♦ ♦ ♦

There were two messages on my voice mail when I checked it from home. That's good news, right? So how come I wasn't happy to hear the computerized voice say, "You have... two... messages"?

The first call was from a man in Oakland wants me to help him clean out his rental house. He's evicted the tenants, and says they left a horrid mess of junk and garbage, rotten food and broken furniture all through the house. Sounds like home to me.

He wants me on the weekend, though, and this weekend I'll be selling fish. It's the same $5 an hour, whether I sit in the sunshine surrounded by pretty women on Telegraph Ave, or get all sweaty cleaning crap out of somebody's rental house. It's not a difficult choice.

The second call was from Juan, the sound man I've worked with before. He needs me for a gig on Thursday night, and surprisingly, I recognized the name of the band — not because they're famous or anything, but because a guy I worked with a few years ago plays bass for them, and invited me to come to their concerts. Being anti-social, I never showed up, but now I could finally hear how shitty they are.

The gig is Thursday night, though, and that's when I'm going to be a guest on Josh's Free Radio Berkeley show. It's actually on in the wee hours of Friday morning, but if I've worked on Thursday night, getting there by bus might be tricky, and I might be tired and yawn on the air.

So I called back both Juan and the guy in Oakland, and said sorry, I'm already booked.

That was damned dumb, right? Unemployment doesn't pay well, especially when I'm not even on Unemployment. Here I am, running low on money, and five bucks an hour isn't much. I need a steady supply of gigs at that wage, to keep surviving. And yet I just said no to two and a half days work, maybe more, plus tips.

Gotta trust your feelings, though, and my gut is telling me I need more time sitting on my fat lazy ass.

Got about 7½ hours of sleep, which is more than my normal six or so, but it sure wasn't "a good night's sleep." I kept waking up every fifteen or twenty minutes, and the dreams were like a festival of short films, or even shorter and stupider films, like commercials.

Ain't much that's dumber than commercials, but last night was.

It started at a party apparently hosted by the young Don Knotts, where the decor was all in a fish motif from his fish fantasy movie, The Incredible Mr Limpet.

Wait a minute, I said to myself in the dream. I don't go to parties. I don't know Don Knotts, so he became Jack Nicholson, who I also don't know, and then he became a guy I knew at Macy's named Jack but not Nicholson. This Jack was black.

Black Jack, I'd last heard, had a growth on his foot, and he was trying to find a better job with actual health benefits so they wouldn't have to amputate and he wouldn't be left bankrupt and with only one foot. That was reality, though — life in 1990s America. In the dream, he was limping.

Next, I was stapling together copies of this zine (except Bevvy's copy), when I slipped and shot several staples into my groin. The staples were all under the skin, and like Black Jack I have no health insurance, so I put a band-aid over the wounds and went back to the party.

I woke up just long enough to jot some notes about the dream, and then fell asleep again, and Mark called. I'd asked his opinion on the latest issue of Pathetic Life, so he told me it was fantastically awful, not merely uninteresting as usual but actually unintelligible, with whole pages of nothing but typos. He'd changed his mind, he said in the dream, and decided not to buy me breakfast yesterday, so could I please send him a check for the omelet I'd eaten?

Next I was at the airport, waiting for Sarah-Katherine. She was lifting her luggage off the whirling rack, and then she saw me, walked up and kissed me, and most of the problems from the night's other dreams disappeared.

In various other settings, that kissy-kiss moment was replayed several times during the long bonkers night, so she was making things better in dreams, same as I hope she will in reality.

In the next dream I'd cut myself shaving, which makes no sense. Haven't shaved in years; I have a long beard, scissored a bit only when it starts drooping into my soup. The razor cut was deep, though, and my blood was orange instead of red, and smelled like angel food cake.

I couldn't stop the bleeding and can't afford an ER visit, so of course I galloped over to Telegraph Ave, to see the guy in the med students' booth. For $2.50, he unfolded his portable homemade CAT scanner, slid me through it, and spotted those three staples in my dick and nutsack. He said he couldn't pull the staples out, I'd need to see a doctor for that, but he also said that because of the injury, my urine will be misdirected into my bloodstream, and I'll have Urine Leukemia, and be dead by Thursday.

No, man, I'm going to be on Josh's radio show on Thursday, don't want to miss that.

These are only the few parts of a restless sleep that I remember, but the whole night was fucked up. Between the dreams I'd wake and wonder about it, write myself a note for tomorrow and hope it might make sense, but then I'd fall asleep and have another crazy dream.

Even this morning, awake, I was still disoriented. I had to stop and truly concentrate to decide, nope, I've never met Don Knotts.

It was very reassuring to go down the hall and pee, find no staples in my nuts, and see that my urine was yellow, not red or orange.

Usually after a dream, good or bad, if I remember it at all, I'll try to figure out what it might mean, what my subconscious was trying to tell me. My only guess after last night is, my subconscious needs to see a shrink. Of course, I have no coverage for that, so — onward to Tuesday morning!

♦ ♦ ♦

Despite a night of bad dreams, life is almost always better in bed. There I sat, happily alone, clipping and contemplating my toenails, feeling more anti-social than usual if that's even possible, so of course that's the moment when Cy knocked on my door to tell me I had a phone call.

It was Jay, asking me to run some fish-related paperwork to City Hall tomorrow. I wanted to retch, wanted to say no, wanted to say again that we should have no further dealings with City Hall.

Look, If we're running a licensed fish stand, we already have the license. They've told us to stop selling Darwin, so we have to stop selling Darwin. No need to deal with City Hall.

If we're going to break the law by selling Darwin fish, then we're running an unlicensed fish stand, a/k/a a free speech stand, which also means No need to deal with City Hall.

So why is she sending me to deal with City Hall?

Way back in May, when Jay asked me to sell fish, she said I'd need to get a seller's permit, and I had misgivings about it. I'm probably not a full-fledged anarchist, but I do hate being numbered and indexed, photographed, filed, told what I can do, what I can't, what I must do, and what I mustn't.

Steady work sounded smarter than piecing together a living from "I'll do anything" gigs, though, so I got the plastic permit that's in my wallet, taped the license to the fist stand, and worked within the city's dumb rules (well, most of them).

Months later, it feels like that was the original mistake — dealing with the city, at all.

Jay makes fish, and wants me to sell them. I want to sell the fish. People want to buy the fish. What any of that has to do with the City of Berkeley — why fish must be regulated — is beyond my comprehension.

But I didn't say any of that, when Jay called, and asked me to go to City Hall tomorrow.

After a long moment of silence, I said I'd do it, because Jay promised that the forms would be filled out in advance. All I'm doing is dropping paperwork on some asshole's desk, and she's paying me to do it, and I won't have to converse with anyone at City Hall.

That last part is vital, because I cannot bear to again attempt dialogue with any city workers — not today, not tomorrow, not in this lifetime, or the next.

A pledge to myself, made right now: Never again will I take a job that requires bureaucratic butt-kissing like this. I'll do the shittiest work imaginable, literally shovel manure if I have to, but not if you need a special license to do it, or a permit, or you're subject to inspection by city workers at any time, any day.

Never again. Sworn this 19th day of September, in the 1,995th year since your lord and savior died and began decomposing in the dirt.

On my errand for Jay, when I got within a block of City Hall, my stomach began knotting itself. An ominous, sinking feeling engulfed me, as if marching toward a battle impossible to win.

Easy does it, Doug. You're only stepping inside the enemy's lair to drop off some forms, paperwork that some imbecile employed by the city might glance at, might not, before deciding that we have no right to sell Darwin fish from a table on Telegraph Avenue.

That's what I said to myself, but based on past interactions with city employees, where I've always tried to be polite while they've always been unyielding, the odds felt 50/50 that I'd be treated like a used, radioactive condom.

And I'd have to take whatever rudeness they dealt me, too, because I was there representing Jay and the fish stand. If I said anything even slightly smartass instead of kiss-ass, the could easily retaliate by finding a new rule to enforce against the fish.

"I'm looking for Frank LaRue's office," I said cordially to the receptionist.

"He's on vacation," she said, bored and monotonous, as if she was talking in her sleep. A smooth, east brush-off.

"I just need to leave some papers," I said quietly. I was trying, damn it. I was smiling, on the outside.

"He's *on vacation," she said again, looking up at me this time, and looking annoyed. "You'll *have to come back next week."

Resisting a perfectly logical urge to strangle her, I gently placed the papers on her desk. If I'd said what I wanted to say, she would've shredded the documents as soon as I'd left, and it's certainly possible that she did so anyway, but I wasn't going to give her an easy justification for it. In my most obedient schoolboy's voice I said, I don't need to see Mr LaRue personally, but he needs to see these papers. Could you please see to it that they're in his in-box or whatever, when he returns?"

She nodded yes, and added my papers to a tall stack atop the filing cabinet behind her.

"Thank you kindly," I said, still all smiles as I whirled and left. Rode the elevator down in silence, stepped outside, leaned on a bench, and let out a soft scream.

It's not reasonable how much I hate those people, I know that. Not normal. Cripes, though. Every interaction with any of them — on the Avenue, on the phone, at their office — is like dealing with disinterested royalty.

Never again, not as a requirement at a job.

♦ ♦ ♦

Since I was in the neighborhood and needed a short walk to cool down, I strolled over to Barlow's Office Supply for a new not-necessities. There was nothing I particularly needed, but a well-run office supply store can be a joy. You go in, maybe looking for a stapler or a few pens, and you find them, but also find a cool rubber stamp, a wacky magnetic pen holder, a paper-clip-shaped tie clasp, and a plush velvet shelf set, all reasonably priced.

That's in a well-run office supply store. Barlow's, though, was locked. It was 2:30 in the afternoon, well within the posted business hours, and I saw people inside the store. A sign at the door said, "Please knock for service."

That's dang peculiar, I thought, but as instructed, I knocked and waited. Through the glass door I could see customers browsing the merchandise. A guy in an apron looked over at me, saw me, and waved as if to say, "Just a minute."

As with me and my response to City Hall, my response was probably unusual and wrong, but once again I was growing annoyed. Only in the worst slums have I seen businesses locked when they're open, and customers have to knock or buzz to get in. This was University Street, though, a commercial district safe as any, and it was broad daylight. Why the heck is the door locked?

I knocked on the glass again, and after a few seconds Mr Apron excused himself from the customers and walked toward me at the door. By the time he got there, though, I'd changed my mind. Shook my head no and walked away.

What that was all about I'm not sure, but I was in a "Never again" frame of mind already, and there are other places to buy office supplies. A few blocks down, I walked into Gordon's Office Equipment, and bought some typewriter ribbons, white-out, a ream of paper, and a combination whistle/kazoo, depending on which end you blow into.

♦ ♦ ♦

Quentin Tarantino's name has been on a couple of movies I've liked and none that I didn't, and Pulp Fiction opened, what, a year ago? Tuesdays and Wednesdays at the Elmwood, tickets are only $2.50, so tonight I finally saw the movie everyone's been talking about since way back when.

As with Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, and Natural Born Killers, Mr T has again delivered a fast-moving film full of vivid violence and snappy dialogue. It's audacious, gruesome, thrilling.

I have some quibbles, though, two tiny and one big:

Anyone who's ever been in a fight could see that Bruce Willis hadn't.

And the movie should've won a Reverse Oscar for Worst Makeup, for somehow making Uma Thurman look unattractive in several scenes.

Mostly, though, my complaint is about the movie's racism. I don't have many conversations in my hermit's life, so perhaps I'm isolated from reality, but it's been lots of years since the last time I heard a white person said the n-word. In my mostly-white world, being openly racist like that is not tolerated.

This movie has perhaps a dozen n-words, and it's jarring, every time. Maybe that's an artistic intent? Or maybe I don't hang out with as many assholes as Tarantino does.

The voice mail had a message for me, beep, and it was a looong message. I've played it several times, and chuckled while transcribing it:

"Hello, Doug. This is Pike, your old flatmate. Remember, you, uh, skedaddled on us?
"Well, uh, ever since you moved out we've been looking really really hard and, uh, we haven't found another flatmate yet, so, uh, we're a lot behind on the rent, and if we don't find someone to help pay the rent soon we'll be evicted.
"I don't know where we'll go or how we could get a new place, and uh, I don't want to move, so I'm really hoping you know somebody who needs a room?
"Uh, God, we've got to get someone to move in, like, immediately. We've had people tell us they were going to, but then they didn't, and it's screwed us over so many times, and then we, um. Three people have said they would, we waited for them and they didn't, and it was, um, another week that went by without us looking for a flatmate, so now, uh, it's an emergency here.
"Please, uh, if you know anyone looking for a room, you know what the room is like, and now it's $300 a month, $900 to move in, so, uh, and we need it, so please ask around, okay? God, we're screwed here, and un, so, God, you know, come on —
"And you are responsible for this, man. Without giving us any damn notice at all you disappeared on us like that, and, uh, that was really un-cool. That's, uh, the reason we're so messed up here. If we'd had some time when you moved in, um, I mean, moved out, if we'd had any, um, notice, we would've found someone by now, so, um, anyway, ask around, uh, okay? Thanks."

No, Pike, I won't ask around, and won't apologize for moving out without telling you. You never told me that your girlfriend was moving in, so I never told you I was moving out. The End.

♦ ♦ ♦

Like most days over the past few weeks without working, I wasted it vegetating in my room. Now it's 11:15 at night, and I should be asleep but instead I've just stepped out of the shower, and after typing this I'll be busing to the Free Radio Berkeley studio, where Josh's show starts at midnight. I hope he's prepared to do most of the talking.

♦ ♦ ♦

Free Radio Berkeley operates out of a still-functioning hippie house at an undisclosed address, where the walls are painted in many colors, the floors are covered with blankets, and the light bulb in the bathroom isn't there. There wasn't but should've been graffiti on the wall saying, "The Symbionese Liberation Army slept here."

That's a joke, but there really was intense smoldering in the living room, and two people were asleep on top of each other on the couch. The house seems like a completely cool place to live.

The radio station fills one bedroom, and it's what I'd envisioned — a ramshackle mess of creaky old chairs and electronics. FRB's statement of principles is thumb-tacked to the wall, and under it, handwritten rebuttals like "What a crock of shit" and "yeah, that would be nice." It's all very non-professional, laid back, the opposite of Geraldo or anything from mainstream broadcasting. Beautiful, in a word.

Josh told me to sit down and relax, pushed a surprisingly large microphone into my face, and The Black Hat Show started promptly at midnight. He asked me questions, I answered, and it was just two friends talking.

We talked for hours longer than I'd thought, though, because I was Josh's only guest for the night and his show runs until 4:00 AM. So much talking — about my zine, and then about old movies, old comics, anarchist idealism, why I left Seattle, fish and free speech in Berkeley, and then back to zines — how to start one, and what other zines I'd recommend.

Josh announced the station's phone number a dozen times, and three times the phone rang, and two out of three callers asked about things we'd already explained.

Three times, he played a record to give our throats a rest, but after the music we talked again. So much talking, four hours of it, which is maybe two hours more than I've talked so far in 1995.

I might have sounded coherent until about 3:00, but after that the grogginess set in. My last recollection is making an obscene joke (there are no FCC rules on FRB) but after that, everything is a blur until the next host came in, and we stepped out, and Josh drove me home.

He was a fine host, and he plugged the hell out of my zine, including giving my address. At least three people were listening, so maybe a few three-dollar orders will come in. I had a fine time for three out of four hours, thanks John, but after all that talking I'd like to take two weeks off from life.

I was in and out of sleep most of the morning, and did nothing most of the afternoon, but it's going to be a busy night.

♦ ♦ ♦

At Free Radio Berkeley yesterday, one of the announcements on the bulletin board said there's a meeting tonight about the hows and whys of pirate radio.

I'm definitely not interested in being a voice on the radio, or volunteering at the station, because I don't like talking and know nothing about electronics. I'm very interested, though, in seeing a bunch of people come together to do the right thing by breaking the law.

And make no mistake, it's absolutely doing the right thing when a small radio station broadcasts commercial-free news and music for a small, local audience. It's illegal, but stupid laws should be broken, it's a stupid law.

Tiny local stations like FRB help people feel connected, empowered, and part of their community. That's why it's illegal, or at least that's part of it.

The only broadcasting that's legal is big-money broadcasting, either for profit or from NPR, a non-profit that's a giant corporation itself. Small stations like FRB might siphon a few listeners from the big-money stations, and that's the main reason it's illegal.

Anyway, the meeting was in the basement of the Unitarian Church (hey Mom, I went to church!), and I usually hate meetings but this meeting kicked arse.

There were about 200 people, as many as could fit into the room without all of us mashing into a big blob of flesh. Five people spoke, followed by a lively question and answer session.

• Norman Solomon, columnist and author and presumably a pinko, commented on today's megamedia merger of Time-Warner and Turner. The corporations that decide what's newsworthy keep getting bigger, merging together and buying each other out, which means that the 'news' that makes the news is filtered more and more through corporate sensibilities. Nobody remotely like you or me is in that room, deciding what's news and what isn't. That's not news to me, but Solomon said it so well, that's when it occurred to me that I should start taking notes.

• Bruce Anderson, publisher of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, and soon to be hosting a show on the pirate station in Mendocino, said zines and rap are encouraging signs that not everybody's been hoodwinked into believing that the evening news is a fair summary of the day's events. In passing he mocked the 'P' in NPR, since there's nobody who's not a millionaire can have any influence at that place. Of the overrated MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, he said, "Corporations are not only killing us, they're boring us to death." He closed by saying, "Anything that monkeywrenches the system in any way should be supported," and I applauded.

• Kiilu Nyasha, a former Black Panther, spoke of the petty infernal politics that got her show canceled on the local and licensed 'public' radio station, and of the joy of continuing her show on Free Radio Berkeley instead. "Without FRB, I would be silenced," she said. "I have the good sense and good manners not to fill my whole show with angry cuss words, but I love the freedom to let one slip out now and then." I applauded again. Everyone did.

• Stephen Dunifer, the technogeek who started Free Radio Berkeley, confused me with the technical part of his talk, but he made great sense when he wasn't talking about boards and amps and heat sinks and harmonic filters. He said 'narrowcasting' tech now exists that could add 30 micro-power pirate stations in every American city, without the pirates interfering with each other or with the commercial or 'public' stations. He's also working on ways to broadcast TV on the UHF bands. "The possibilities are endless," he said, and we applauded again.

• Luke Hiken, the attorney who's (so far) successfully kept Dunifer out of prison and Free Radio Berkeley on the air, mentioned the $2,000+ fee just to file an application for an FCC broadcasting license. Of course, the intended effect of such fees is to keep the rabble quiet, and leave the airwaves only for the rich and powerful. "We do not want to beg millionaires for funding and permission to speak our minds," he said, and we clapped — for a lawyer!

During the Q-&-A, Hiken described the tedium of what happened in the courtroom case today, as the FCC continues trying to unplug FRB and imprison Dunifer. It sounds hopeless to me, but he's hopeful.

Some guy from San Francisco Libre Radio said that his station and Free Radio Berkeley are both swapping tapes with Free Radio Santa Cruz, which sounds great. Pirate radio is about local access and local community, but if a show could speak to a wider audience, yeah, let a wider audience listen.

A lady asked Dunifer what his long-term vision was, and he replied, "The complete overthrow of the world corporate state." More applause, of course.

And I clapped, but... Much as I admire the man's optimism, enthusiasm, and the work he's doing, pessimism is realism, and the complete overthrow of the world corporate state won't be happening. Money rules everything, and will, for as long as there's money — but people have to push back. That's vitally important, and these people are pushing, and that's heroic.

It was an upbeat meeting, lots of good people doing good things, and attending was the best thing I've done since my last protest march, years ago, during the lead-up to the Gulf War.

♦ ♦ ♦

The equipment to launch your own illegal radio station costs only about $500. That's about $450 more than I can afford, but like I said at the top, I don't like to talk, so broadcasting isn't for me.

If you have a hankering to break the law, let me know and I'll put you in touch with Stephen Dunifer. He sells "instant broadcasting kits," and you could be on the air in a week.

♦ ♦ ♦

When Dunifer's technical talk got too technical for me, I scanned the crowd to see if there were any familiar faces. I was hoping to see my anarchist vendor pal, Umberto, but he wasn't there.

Amazingly, though, in a room full of people presumably interested in freedom of speech, two rows behind me sat one of the vendors who'd tried to have Jay's book of poetry removed from the fish-stand. She's been weirdly waving at me, smiling at me on Telegraph ever since, like we're buddies.

The scent of her hypocrisy was too enticing to ignore, so after the meeting I approached her and asked, "Are you here representing the FCC?"

She made an astonished face and grunted and said, "Of course not."

"You asked the city to ban my boss's poetry, so you're sure not for free speech."

She made an angrier face and said, "That's a completely different issue, and I'm not going to talk about it here."

I cocked my head in mock confusion, same as I had the last time we'd spoken, but she was already walking toward the door. An argument with an idiot can't be won, so I walked the other way, toward the literature table.

Giving that lady every benefit of every doubt and more, maybe she likes some of the music on Free Radio Berkeley, or maybe her son has a show on the station. I still say fuck her, though. You can't be for free speech, and be complaining about the existence of lesbian poetry.

From that face she made, I'm guessing something good will come from tapping her shoulder tonight: I don't think she'll be smiling and waving at me on Telegraph any more.

Addendum, 2022: Free Radio Berkeley is still pushing back against the FCC, and they're still selling reasonably-priced kits and equipment for quick-starting your own pirate radio station. They're at FreeRadio.org.

Today was my grand return to Telegraph Avenue, and yet there was no "Welcome back!" banner across the intersection.

Far more disappointing, the upshot of all Jay's pleadings with City Hall is — absolute zero. We're displaying a city license again, and selling only items authorized for sale by the City of Berkeley, which means that the Darwin fish has been banned.

I'm disgusted, and planning to put up "I'll do anything" flyers next week. Not only because the censorship pisses me off, but because without the most famous fish, the fish stand isn't viable. This job won't exist for long. Jay says we'll sell fish by mail order, but there's not gonna be 40 hours a week in mail order, so — I'll do anything legal, again, for five bucks an hour.

♦ ♦ ♦

Today, though, I sold fish on Telegraph, and ended up working next to the vendor who'd complained when my stand was a quarter-inch into his space. Seeing him, I briefly considered putting the stand a smidgen into his space again for old time's sake, but when I started setting up he nodded at me and smiled, so bygones became bygones.

Maybe it was my imagination, because I was glad to be back, but a surprising number of the other vendors seemed glad to see me. "Hey, Doug, where've you been?" and all that. The surprising number was three, but that's three more than I would've thought.

And I'd forgotten perhaps the best perk of this job: so many gorgeous women, walking by all day.

♦ ♦ ♦

When the city's overlord of sidewalk vendors stopped at the stand, he looked it over and said with a smile, "No Darwins today, I see." Then he looked at the license taped to the table and said, "and your license is in order…"

Was it my imagination, or was he gloating?

We'd added something new to the fish display. Jay found an folding fireplace screen made of polished metal, perfect for showing all our fish magnets atop the table. The magnets clomp right to the metal, and it's an attractive, eye-catching display.

Or it was, until the inspector general pulled a tape measure from his pocket. The new magnetic display is two and a half feet tall, but it rests on the table, which is three feet tall, and the inspector schmuck explained that among the countless rules for street vending, there's a height limit. The display stand can't exceed four feet, six inches in height. It's the law. I moved the new display from atop the table, where everyone could see it, to beneath the table, where only toddlers can see it.

Also, I looked around Telegraph, and noticed that several of the vendors selling clothes had their merch hanging from racks clearly about five feet tall.

I said nothing about this, because I'm not a tattletale, and because I knew the schmuck wouldn't change his mind and allow our magnet display atop the table. If he did anything at all, he'd just go around making life miserable for the vendors selling clothes on five-foot racks.

It irritates me, though, and it would've infuriated me, if I hadn't borrowed two hits off the joint Umberto was smoking.

Jay tells me what to do, within reason, because she's my boss by mutual agreement. Sarah-Katherine can tell me what to do, too, because I'm shamelessly pussy-whipped. But the city schmucks are people I wouldn't trust to ring up rice right in a grocery store, and I'm compelled to obey every picayune rule they come up with, or we're out of business.

Got up, got dressed, and trudged to Telegraph Ave. I did not bring the illegal Darwin fish, and did not bring the illegal fish display, because I am a law-abiding vendor, and I wondered what might be illegal today.

Perhaps the city inspector will decide there's more than the allowable amount of lint between my toes?

♦ ♦ ♦

The city's inspector schmuck never came 'round, but Andrea happened by the fisherama, and said hello, and loitered and checked out some of our new fish designs.

She's the nice woman I almost met on the subway, the day I couldn't find the words to introduce myself. Today I found the words, said "I'm Doug," and we talked, and I did not make a fool of myself.

She's a school teacher, she told me, twice divorced, and she says she'll never marry again. She has a 9-year-old kid who wasn't with her today, but she told me about the kid, and about teaching, and even a little about her second husband, though I hadn't asked. She asked questions about me, too, and it was like a conversation ordinary people might have.

She stayed at the fish stand for twenty minutes, talking with me. Nobody talks to me that long, and when they do I hate it, but... I didn't hate it.

Andrea is attractive and black — ablacktive — and she likes me, though of course she hardly knows me. She may have been flirting with me, but nah, I only imagined it, right? She was only being friendly, I'm sure. She couldn't be interested in me. Could she?

I'm so introverted it takes me two tries on two days to even say, "I'm Doug," so nothing's going to happen. Phone numbers were not asked for. A get-together was not arranged. We'll probably never see each other again, but I'm hoping we do.

A few hours later, the question in the back of my mind and the front of my pants is, would I sleep with Andrea if the opportunity arose? It absolutely won't, and even if it did my penis probably wouldn't, but yeah, I'd love to at least try.

♦ ♦ ♦

When I'm thinking of the astronomically unlikely impossibility of sex with another woman, Sarah-Katherine isn't part of the daydream. She wants an open relationship, so she'd be more concerned if I didn't boink other women.

'Friends with benefits', Sarah-Kath calls this. It's supposed to keep things uncomplicated, she says, but in my head it makes things more complicated.

Usually there are no women in my life, but there have been a few unlucky ladies. It's always been just one at a time, though. One woman takes a great deal of effort, so one is enough.

Boinking one woman one night and then another woman the next night? That's not a turn-on for me. It just sounds like so much work.

Gotta find some woman I'm willing to spend time with, which eliminates 99% of female humanity. And she's gotta be willing to spend time with someone fat smell and ugly like me. Long odds already.

Then I gotta ask her out, and she needs to say yes.

We gotta get all gussied up and go places and do things, and you know, I hate going places and doing things.

Then I have to be nice enough that this hypothetical lady might consider kissing me, even though I have rotten teeth that give me perpetually bad breath.

Then there's all the additional effort needed to make her maybe want to do more than kissing.

After all that, if she somehow does want to get horizontal and knock knees with me, that's the greatest thing in the gosh darn universe. Why would I want to go through all that again, almost immediately, with another woman?

I don't. I want to do it again with that hypothetical woman who just hypothetically fucked me. It's made me happy, and I want to make her happy too, and keep making her happy, so's we can keep fucking.

See, in that sense I'm a very traditional fella, but Sarah-Katherine's idea of happiness is sex with me on Tuesday, and sex with someone else on Wednesday.

That's what she wants so I'd never try to stop it, but I'm not sure it's what I want. Maybe that means I'm not sure about things with Sarah-Katherine. And maybe she's not sure about me.

She's still in Seattle, and we still exchange letters, talking about our maybe-move to New York together, but the lag between letters used to be two or three days, and now it's a week. Our letters are shorter, too. Perhaps winter is approaching, meaning more than the weather.

Ah, pthth. Such doubts are probably all in my mind, probably. Where else would doubts be? Things are a mess in there, and thinking about things like this just makes the mental mess messier.

Heck, I should be ecstatic at the possibility of boinking a beautiful woman on Tuesdays, without all the work boinking usually entails. I've spend a great many Tuesdays alone, you know, and every other night of the week.

♦ ♦ ♦

Sometimes after thinking something far enough through to write it, I understand myself better. That's is a big part of why I write the zine. It helps me figure things out.

But now it's bedtime, and I'm tired of all this thinking and honesty and crap. I'm too tired to think any more, let alone write.

Maybe tomorrow I'll edit all of this away.

This is my diary, and I write something every day. What's easiest is writing about dumb things like poop and boners, or the zit that keeps coming back in my eyebrow, or my recurring jock itch.

It's more difficult, a much greater challenge as a writer, to dig into myself psychologically, and write honestly about my insecurities, my fears, worries, loneliness, and anger at the world.

When I've gone into topics like that, sometimes I'm proud of what I've written, sometimes it's even helped me understand myself better. Yesterday's entry, for example. Jeez, that took a lot of time and effort to write. Can't say whether it's any good, but where it went still scares and saddens me. This would be a better zine if I wrote more entries like yesterday's, and fewer like today's. Today I'm going shallow.

My farts have been really juicy for the past several weeks. I'm not just full of hot air. After most of my farts, there's moisture on the back of my underpants. When I fart without underpants, there are drips on the chair, or on the floor.

I've put off writing about this, because it's too easy and ever-so-slightly icky, but it's become nuisance enough that it's gotta be mentioned.

Is it a dietary thing? I am eating a little more fruit than I used to, because there's always apples and bananas and satsumas and such in Jay's kitchen and she's said I can help myself, and you never have to say something like that to me twice. I've been living here for months, though, eating one or two of Jay's oranges and peaches just about every day, so how come the farts didn't start getting leaky until earlier this month?

I went a few days without eating any of Jay's fruit, but noticed no change. And I've tried skipping my ordinary can of baked beans for breakfast, but still, my farts have fluidity.

What convinced me to write about it today is, I was lying naked in bed filling orders, shoving sample copies of the zine into envelopes, when I felt a fart on its way.

So I tried an experiment: I pulled my cheeks far apart as they could go, and cupped one of my zine-size envelopes, bent in the shape of the St Louis Arch over my anus, and passed an ordinary slobbering fart. When I pulled the envelope out and looked at it, it was modern art — splatters of brown all over the manila. I'll have to clip it onto a clothesline and let it bake in tomorrow's sun before I can use that envelope to mail someone a sample copy.

Why this is happening? Are moist farts an ordinary side-effect of my advancing age? I'm in my late 30s, which is mathematically middle-aged, if I'm hoping to live to 75.

I'd be eager to hear advice from anyone who knows anything about this wet fart phenomenon, but please, don't tell me to see a doctor unless you enclose a couple of hundred dollars, because that's what it costs to see a doctor and it's money I don't have.

And that's just the doctor. If an MD says "We'll need to run some tests," make it $400 please.

♦ ♦ ♦

Today was my weekly shift at Black Sheets, which was fortunately free of any gas attacks. On my way back to BART, I stopped at my maildrop, and on the train I opened a big envelope from Interview magazine.

They'd interviewed me a while back, so the magazine includes some Pathetic Life excerpts, and I'd like to thank their reporter, Tony Moxham, for writing a notice that seems fair and favorable.

He sent three copies of the magazine, too, which was certainly unexpected, but I'm not so in love with myself that I need three copies. If anyone's interested in reading my brief interview in Interview, send $1.24 (that's the postage) and I'll mail you one of my spare copies.

They printed four Pathetic Life vignettes, from late March and early April. Three of the entries survived editing more or less intact, while one was wounded and reads worse than I'd written it, if that's possible.

But I should complain? Nah, usually my words are just typed and photocopied, so it's exhilarating to see them on glossy paper, surrounded by color and opposite an ad for Gucci boots.

Now I'm running calculations in my head. I don't know how many people read Interview, but it's a big magazine. If 1% of 1% of its readers read the page of Pathetic Life excerpts, and if 1% of 1% of those people order a copy of the zine, that might be... twenty orders? Ah, dream big — maybe 25 orders. Clearly, I've made the big time.

They'll be ignorant orders, though. I asked them to include my mailing address and the zine's price, but there's no mention of what the zine costs, and they listed my address just slightly wrong, but wrong enough that any inquiries will end up at the dead letter office.

They spelled my name right, though, so thanks again, Tony Moxham and Interview magazine.

Today there was a double feature of H-G Clouzot's best or at least best-known pictures at the UC, but "at the UC" almost talked me out of it. I'd seen the second feature, The Wages of Fear, at the UC Theater a few years ago, and it's an excellent film but it was one of the most frustrating experiences I've ever had in a movie theater.

Maybe some people don't know that movies are on 11-minute reels. They're spooled on two projectors, and the man in the booth (sorry, but I've never seen it not be a man) switches the reels and rewinds them in between, so the audience never thinks about reels and projectors.

Well, the first time I saw The Wages of Fear at the UC Theater, they only had one projector. The other was broken, and they had no spare, so that night's crowd waited in darkness after each reel, while the next reel was threaded.

Worse, nobody from the UC had explained the problem before 200 people bought their tickets, so as one of the most suspenseful films ever made was interrupted every eleven minutes, I and others began complaining — and the theater's management refused to issue refunds!

"You can leave if you want to," said a college-age kid who seemed to be the manager, "but I'm not authorized to give anyone their money back."

So don't ask why I dislike the UC Theater, ask why I've ever gone back. The answer is, if you're in Berkeley and you love old movies, sometimes you have to gamble on that poorly-run rep house barn.

Tonight I gambled… and there were no problems. There were also no problems when Josh and I saw Medium Cool at the UC a couple of weeks ago, so maybe the place has a new manager, or just one employee who gives a damn? That would be one more than they've ever had before.

Fingers crossed, maybe someday they'll repair the broken seats and sweep up Rocky Horror's rice.

♦ ♦ ♦

The first flick was Diabolique (1955). which if you're not fluent is French for 'diabolical'. It's an exquisite thriller set in a French boarding school for boys, about two women plotting the murder of a man who deserves to die. It's as good, maybe better than anything from Alfred Hitchcock, with suspense that keeps ratcheting up up and away until its ingenious, breathtaking end.

I didn't enjoy it as much as I should've, though, and it wasn't the theater's fault. Fifteen years ago, a friend eagerly recommended Diabolique to me, told me I'd love it, and he also told me most of the plot, so the intricate twists were familiar to me, even though I'd never seen the movie before. Thanks for the recommendation, Brian, and also, fuck you.

The Wages of Fear (1952) — tonight with two projectors! — is the story of decent but desperate men in an impoverished un-named Latin American country. When an American oil company offers $2,000 to any man who can successfully drive a truck loaded with nitroglycerin across many miles of bumpy roads, they know they shouldn't do it, but people gotta eat, so they take the world's most dangerous job. Wet-your-pants tension ensues.

I try to avoid superlatives, but the most suspenseful film that's ever been made is The Wages of Fear, and the maybe the second most is Diabolique.

♦ ♦ ♦

Tim Ereneta, the guy who writes the zine Oatmeal, joined me for the second feature, and then we strolled Shattuck and had drinks (coffee and root beer) at a nameless café. I love his zine and like Tim, but in person we never got past the awkward stage. My fault more than his, I'm sure.

For an hour or so, we were a couple of nice guys talking about this and that, trying to think of what else to talk about and what to say next. So tonight was actually a triple feature of tension and suspense, two movies and then what am I supposed to say to Tim?

That's the way it is for me, meeting almost anyone. I'd love to have the life of a beer commercial, all friends and laughs and punch my shoulder but not too hard please, but that isn't me and never will be. I have very few friends and see them very rarely because my brain, my gut, and my sense of humor all work better when I'm alone.

Don't accuse me of being optimistic or anything, but it feels like my immediate money worries are over.

Jay is still arguing or 'negotiating' with City Hall to get Darwin fish back on the fish stand, and I told her that'll never happen. You can't win an argument with those schmucks.

Darwin or no Darwin, though, she wants me to sell fish on Telegraph every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday through the winter. She asked me to sell fish on Mondays too, but on Mondays I work at the smut magazine, which might eventually blossom into more than one day's work a week.

So just with steady gigs, I'll be working four days, 25 or so hours weekly. If the phone rings for "anything legal" work just a few times a month, that ought to be money enough to keep me eating unhealthy food.

♦ ♦ ♦

Sometimes it's nice to look at life through the windows of a bus, so I packed three sandwiches and six Twinkies, then walked to the bus stop and rode off into the sunrise.

In San Francisco I rode Muni everywhere, and got to know those buses, but this is Alameda County, a different system I haven't ridden much. Time for an excursion.

Alameda's #6 bus took me on a round trip to Oakland, and there were side trips on the #14 to Brookdale and the #33 to Webster. With no destination except looking out the window, I was already there, and stayed there, while the world out the window whizzed past.

That's the way of life. We're all looking out our eyeball windows, occasionally ringing the bell, stepping off and wandering around. Fat boy gets philosophical!

The buses took me through some of the neighborhoods Oakland is famous for — tough places, with boarded up businesses, cars up on blocks, big barking pit bulls, and hoodlums wearing hoods huddled with other hoodlums in hoods to transact hoodlum business. I walked around for a while, and it was blacker than my old neighborhood in San Francisco, but not tougher.

Oakland also has neighborhoods with fine old homes and upscale shops and all the amenities that make me feel unwelcome. In that part of town, I shivered and stayed in my seat.

Saw some restaurants and bakeries that look cheap and good. Hey, put a sign in your window telling me about dollar tacos on Tuesdays, chances are you'll see me next Tuesday.

Saw thousands and thousands of houses, and some were nicely painted, and some needed a coat like the bums in winter. Some had slightly tilted porches, some were in ruins, some were newish. Some looked warm and homey, some said trespassers would be shot.

I don't know anyone in Oakland, really, but knowing humans, it's fair to predict that almost everyone who lives in any of those houses, poor, rich, or in between, black or white or other, they're all assholes. Same as anywhere else.

Some of the houses had 'for sale or rent' signs, but I'm not looking. Looking out the window is all I'm doing, but I'm happy where I'm at, living with Judith and her menagerie of misfits.

Amazingly, none of them seem to be assholes. Couple of days ago I talked to my flatmate down the hall, Cy, for maybe two whole minutes, and never once wanted to slug him, so it's the happiest home I've known in years.

Riding back to that house in Berkeley, one last detour. I rang the bell to get off, and walked into Jonah's. I'd noticed the place on my outbound ride, because it has a big poster in the window that says, "You won't believe how good, how fast, how cheap." The sign doesn't say what's going to be so good, so fast, so cheap, but there's a picture of a hamburger. Sold.

They wanted $2.50 for a good-sized burger in a bag with french fries, which they pretend is a meal. Ha! I bought three bags of burgers and fries and brought them home, said hi to Judith and Cy, then microwaved the bags all hot again and ate alone in my room, while one of the cats watched.

Sadly I must report that the sign at Jonah's is a blatant lie. The burgers are good, fast, and cheap, absolutely, but I was there and ate 'em so I believe it.

♦ ♦ ♦

As you can guess from reading this, I didn't feel like writing today. My rule, though, is that I have to write something every day, so maybe it sucks but my work here is done.

On my way to the john at about 2:30 AM, I stumbled on somebody's bike that's been beside my bedroom door for a month, and stepped on a brontosaurus bone the dog had left in the hallway.

Fumbling to find the light switch in the bathroom, I slipped on a glossy mail-order catalog someone had left on the floor, and would've tumbled if I hadn't reached for the towel rack, which I didn't quite pull out of the wall but definitely loosened.

"Mother fucker!" I said, intentionally loud enough to wake my flatmates. Then I peed like a fountain in Paris, so long and strong you would've been tempted to toss coins into the toilet.

Flushed, left the light on for whoever's next, and walked back to my room, pausing at the typewriter to bang these paragraphs before floating back to sleep.

♦ ♦ ♦

More genuinely awake a few hours later, another excursion like yesterday was the thing to do, but this time on foot. After zipping up the same britches I've been wearing since Sunday, I strolled the streets of Berkeley. You've never seen so many Volvos outside of a showroom floor.

First I walked to the library, to borrow a book they didn't have, and walked out with only a Bay Guardian from the rack at the door. It was an overcast morning, fine for reading the paper on the bleachers at the ball park down the street, but kids were playing baseball on the baseball diamond. Damned kids. So I continued walking.

Half a block further on, a wiener-dog came bouncing down someone's steps and started yip-yip-yip-yip-yipping at me. As a kid and younger man I've had and loved several dogs, but they've always been, well, dog-size dogs. I have no experience with a cat-size dogs like this one, a satire of real dogs, so I stood and smiled as it yip-yip-yipped at my ankles.

Guess I should've expected this but I didn't, and when it nipped at my pant cuffs I gently kicked the mini-dog back toward its porch. It came back at me again, still yip-yip-yipping, but now they were happy yips, like we were suddenly friends playing, and it wanted me to reach down and pet it. Sorry, little fella, but you nipped at my pants, so I'm not putting my fingers anywhere near your mouth.

Onward across the street, a sign announced in all-caps, "BEWARE POLICE." I certainly agree with that, or did until I ambled close enough to read the small print. "Buyers and dealers BEWARE," the sign actually said, "Your license plate numbers are being reported to the POLICE."

Oh my, that sign must strike terror into the hearts of hardened criminal drug kingpins and heroin addicts all across Berkeley. Being on foot and with no license plate on my butt, I should've waited for a dealer to drop by and made as purchase, as apparently this was a key corner for East Bay drug sales.

The clouds had blown away, though, and I'd become a fat sweaty guy in the sun. Fat people sweat like a sponge being squeezed, so it doesn't take much sunshine to be too much for me.

Straightaway home I came, into this shady room, where I've opened the window, turned the fan on, and dropped my britches on the floor until tomorrow.

Addendum, 2022: I do miss that Parisian fountain. These days it's a leisurely drip from a leaky faucet.

Jay says that the city says that they're "reconsidering" the legality of Darwin fish. Yeah, she's still fighting that battle, and it's my job in the balance but I'm mostly disinterested.

I have nothing against rules, unless the rules make no sense, and of the billions and billions of rules about selling on Telegraph Ave, about three of the rules make sense. All the rest should be burned, along with the rule-makers.

No word on when to expect the city's decision. My guess? 1999, and the answer will be no. Meanwhile, Darwin fish remain contraband in Berkeley. If you ask, though, there's a stash under my table.

Black market fish? Only in Berkeley.

♦ ♦ ♦

Corby's in town, and staying in the guest room. He's been subscribing to the zine you're reading for a year or so, and he's sent me lots of letters and a few packages of cool stuff, and I've written back to him and said thanks, twice, so clearly he's one of my best friends in the world.

He lives in Oregon but frequently comes to Seattle, and we met when I was visiting Sarah-Katherine and my family in Seattle a few months back.

He's also responsible for a lot of the zine's tiny circulation, because he buys extra copies and sends them to his friends, some of whom then subscribe, too. I guess Corby is my Marketing Department. There are probably twenty people on the mailing list who are either friends of Corby, or friends of Corby's friends.

One of the people he introduced my zine to is Judith, who bought a few copies, then subscribed, then call me up to meet, and now she's my flatmate and landlord.

Corby and Judith have been friends all their lives, and tonight the three of us sat in the living room making obnoxious jokes and laughing. Then after yukking it up for a while, they invited me to dinner with them and a few of their friends.

I'd never turn down dinner when someone else is paying, but I turned it down. Corby and Judith's friends are my strangers, and smiling and pretending to be sociable with strangers is exactly my idea of a bad time. I'd rather stay home and type, so I did.

Same story as a year ago, or twenty years ago: I'm lying in bed, half reading zines and half simply staring at the skylight, thinking whatever I'm thinking, perhaps touching myself in an unwholesome manner, and all this nothingness is sweet indeed, but now it must end. My watch is nagging at me, telling time, and the time tells me to get dressed and get ready for work.

Twenty years ago I was frying burgers at a greasepit. A year ago I was data entry boy in an office. Today I gotta go sell fish. And as far as jobs go, selling fish is OK, but it's a job.

Gotta work. The arguments with the City of Berkeley cost me two weeks pay while the fish stand was shut down, and I haven't been working too hard at finding other work with "I'll do anything" flyers. Supposedly Sarah-Katherine and I are moving to New York City, and that won't be cheap. Staying here isn't cheap either.

Gotta work, so there I was, pushing the fish cart toward Telegraph Ave. Crossing a street, I was pushing the cart beside a homeless guy, thin and grimy. Sometimes I talk to street people, sometimes I don't, depending on their demeanor and mine. This guy was talking to himself, which everyone says is a sign of nuttiness but I disagree. I talk to myself all the time.

Anyway, I've seen him around, so I knew he was OK. He was saying something about money, something like, "... and I need five dollars to pay Palmeretti back, and enough money for a pack of smokes, but what the fuck is money anyway? I have a better way—"

"What's your better way?" I asked him.

He answered instantly but it took a few minutes, because he had a lot to say about money. His name is Danny, and I think he's a homeless genius. Get this: He wants to establish a Berkeley monetary system, which he envisions as a coin or a piece of paper that's worth an hour's time. "To buy a cup of coffee," he explained, "might cost 15 minutes, so you'd hand over a silver hour or an hour's certificate, and they're give you 45 minutes back."

"So you come back later and work for the coffee shop for 15 minutes?"

"No, see, that's the beauty of it," he said. "The wouldn't expect me to work. They'd give my 15 minutes as change to people who bought lunch, and the people buying lunch wouldn't expect me to work either, and the coffee shop wouldn't expect them to work, expect anyone to work. The promises get circulated, the same as dollar bill is just a promise of a dollar's worth of gold, but nobody actually redeems a dollar bill for gold, do they?"

"What about doctors and lawyers and such?" I asked. "Their hours would be worth more than my hours."

"Then they'd pay more," he said. "Everyone pays 15 minutes for a cup of coffee, and it's all the same. The doctor earns more, so his coffee costs more, but to the coffee shop it's just another 15 minutes."

"And everyone would be circulating your promises to work, but you'd never have to do the actual work?"

"Well," Danny said, "I'd have to make the coins. That's work."

"So you'd be the Federal Reserve," I said, and he laughed and said yeah.

When we got close to Telegraph Ave, he showed me the Berkeley Hour coin he'd designed, made of wood and with the mayor's face drawn on it for heads, and the mayor's butt for tails.

"Good work, man," I said. "How long did it take you to make that?"

"An hour, of course," he said. "It says right on it."

When I started looking around for the vendor sign-in sheets, Danny said, "Gotta go," and faded away. It was like riding in a carpool, without the car.

♦ ♦ ♦

Jay stopped by the fish stand in the afternoon, to tell me to bring the too-tall magnet display tomorrow, and set it up even though it's illegal. Remember, it's about a foot and a half taller than city code allows. Jay told me what I'd told her the day the city schmuck tape-measured the display, that several other stands are about the same height and get away with it.

I don't really see the strategy here, though. Jay has told me that she's in the midst of delicate negotiations with the city over whether they'll allow us to sell Darwin fish, so is this really the time to open a new offensive against them, by fighting for a taller display? I love breaking the rules, but this seems like the wrong moment.

As always, though, I only sell the fish. Jay makes the fish and owns the fish, so she's the boss, and she says to set up the illegally tall display tomorrow, so I will.

I did tell her, though, that if a city worker comes by with a ruler and gives me a ticket, or a warning, or tells me to disassemble the stand, I'll have to kill him. Insert theme from Psycho — stab stab stab, blood everywhere, and a city employee's tongue in my back pocket as a trophy.

I am not kidding, although of course I'm kidding, but I told Jay I can't stand any more of Berkeley's bureaucratic bullshit. It's making me cuckoo, can't you tell?

She said that if anyone gives me any crap, I should play dumb, pretend I've never heard of any height limit for vendors' displays. She promised to bail me out of jail if I murder an inspector, so tomorrow our fish stand will stand tall.

♦ ♦ ♦

Well, hell. The new issue of Lumpen has a review of Pathetic Life written by Steven Svymbersky, and it's not a complete dismissal, he likes the zine, but he badmouths the layout. "8½ x 11 inches just stapled together," is what he says. That's the lazy man's format I've used since the first issue. 30 or so pages, stapled together in the upper left corner.

Lots of zines come in the mail with pages in a half-size format, folded and stapled in the middle like TV Guide, and as a reader that's easier. Steven is right, damn it, so despite my public education, I'll try to figure out how to paste up pages that way, and I'll reset my typewriter's margins, and buy a long-arm stapler, and then maybe I'll raise the price for all my extra trouble.

Addendum, 2022: From that day to this I don't remember giving Danny's currency scheme any thought, but today it occurs to me that I've seen and participated in similar systems over the years since then. I wonder if all of them trace back to Danny's idea?

Letters to Pathetic Life...

Why you would even think of leaving San Francisco to move to that stinking cesspool known as New York City is beyond me. Why you'd move there with a woman who won't give you any commitment other than friendship is incomprehensible. Doug, if you're that desperate for a friend get a teddy bear.
Before you finish packing, I suggest you give a good listen to Elton John singing "Someone Saved My Life Tonight." Play it until you have the lyrics memorized, before you make the biggest mistake of your life.

—Tom Granat, Boston

I'm a butterfly, and butterflies are free to fly. Watch me fly away!

♦ ♦ ♦

This really bites. I send you a long letter, you answer with a post card. I send a second letter and you never answer at all. I correspond with other people who write zines and they're nice enough to answer my letters. Some of them have answered enough letters that they feel like friends. Writing to you I might as well be writing to Reader's Digest_._

—LeRoy Leighton, Toronto

The other zinesters you correspond with are nice people and I'm not.

A lot of them work on their zines a few hours a week or month, and send out an issue 2-3 times a year. I bust my literary hump, jerking off into my typewriter like this before work every morning when I work, every night when I get home, every weekend, every day I'm not working, and photocopy and mail it out every damned month.

I don't do it to make new friends or pen pals. I do it because I have to do it, have to write or I'd go crazy. But I have to write the zine; I don't have to write letters.

It takes me five minutes to write a post card, half an hour to write a letter that's worth signing, and there are always chatty letters in my mailbox. Most of them, I don't have the time or interest to answer, so I don't.

♦ ♦ ♦

Only one very small complaint about your July issue: You forgot to mention my huge (38DD), perky-nippled, milky white breasts! What are your readers going to think? I mean, sheesh — if I can't have them in real life, at least I can have them in your zine, right? But I guess fair's fair, because I didn't mention your huge (13'') throbbing erection in my zine, either…

—Sarah-Katherine, Pasty

♦ ♦ ♦

I read about you in Interview_. Your pathetic life sems similar to mine. I think we should meet in San Francisco to combine and entwine our similarities together and let hell break loose._
I live in New Jersey as my envelope says, but in the summer of '96 I am going to San Francisco. I'm sick of just sitting home on Saturday nights and watching MTV. Weed and beer are getting old, and I want to burn like fabulous Roman candles that pop, and when people see me they will say "Wow!" I'm sick of hackneyed days and I want you and me to take life by the neck. Write to me soon so we can plan our escape.

—Laura Keyes, New Jersey

Thanks for your marvelous letter, on hand-painted stationery yet. Most people just scribble a few words, like "Please send your zine." Lots of them don't even say please.

As for planning our escape together, well, I'd never want to discourage a lady, but read the zine first. That'll do the discouraging. I'm either a stone wall or obnoxious in person, haven't brushed my teeth in a week, didn't shower yesterday and probably won't today. Still interested?

Well, I'm moving to New York with a woman I like more than I ought to say, to you or to her. Unless everything goes wrong, we'll be eastbound months before you're westbound, sorry. If she dumps me, though, please take a number to ensure prompt service.

I rarely do correspondence, and this is already longer than the letters I send to anyone but my sweetie. That's partly because you're female or pretending to be, which gets my attention, but mostly I answered because your letter was like a fabulous yellow Roman candle that popped and burned in my mailbag. When I saw it I said "Wow!"

Here's the zine.

♦ ♦ ♦

I read about your fanzine in Factsheet Five and I am very interested in your publication. I am conducting research on the subject of fanzines and their editors for a possible future book project.
In this regard could you please send us one or several different issues of your fanzine as well as contact information. If you have any questions please feel free to call me at ████████.

—Christopher Trela
Communications Director
RE/SEARCH PUBLICATIONS

If they ask nice, I'll send Pathetic Life free to prisoners, or to others even worse off than me, but yuppies who write on corporate letterhead can obviously afford three bucks. Send the money and I'll send the zines, or "direct" your "communications" elsewhere.

Free advice: Before writing your book, learn what a fanzine is and isn't. My zine isn't.