More weird dreams...

So last night I dreamt I'd moved back to San Francisco , and was commenting that the reason I'd never bothered to get a Pennsylvania drivers' license was because I hated it, and never intended to stay long.

 

Hmmm.

 

First off, that's total bollocks as I've already been toiling in the city of brotherly love for over a year now, second, I just agreed to stick on at my paid gig for the long haul as a permanent employee. (Though I am staunchly attached to my NY documentation.)

 

Yep, it's true: I'm now very gainfully employed on a permanent basis. Not like I want to spread it around too much, or people will start hitting me up for loans, or spitting on me for selling out for some decent health insurance and a window, but I've done it. Damnit.

 

That, of course, doesn't mean I don't sometimes really miss the city by the bay, but more than the city I miss the life I had there, which is the polar opposite of the quasi-respectable one I currently inhabit.

 

I miss acting completely irresponsibly, sex drugs and rock and roll, tattoos and piercings, late nights in the studio, awesome burritos, getting wrecked in mosh pits, bad boys (and girls), and the stupidity of unbridled youth.

 

What I do not miss is being too poor to eat, mice everywhere, od'ing on sex, drugs and rock and roll, feeling like there was no future, not being able to go to the doctor when I was sick or injured, and the stupidity of unbridled youth.

 

Are there people out there like me? I can't help but wonder. So far I've met very bad, nice and rather dull, or just so different neither of us can comprehend.

 

I've an idea I should listen to Mags and Mike, and just get myself out there more than I already have.

 

Oh, just not to the Green Line Café, at least not the original one on Baltimore: dragged myself and stuff there yesterday a.m., only to be met by hordes of yuppie parents toting children. Christ all fucking mighty – do they not have places to go? Like, Chuck E. Cheese or Disney?!!? We non-breeders would like to drink our coffee and read the sex ads in the back of the City Paper in peace, thank you very much.

 

The Green Line should just fill its fenced in front yard area with brightly colored plastic balls and be done with it…

 

Allegedly if they're yours (the kids, not the balls) you don't mind them nearly as much. That's good to know, in case I someday decide to spawn, I won't be sitting there going, "Christ, would you shut the fuck up? Where are your parents? Oh, wait, shit, that's me…"

Some divine intervention wouldn't be so bad...

I have bizarre dreams. Sometimes I wake up and wonder whose brain I’ve been inhabiting, or, more likely, what pop-culture obsessed alien has entered my gray matter during the night simply to torture me.

But, then again, I am erratica, right?

Sometimes, though, the little grey (guessing here) fuckers are just plain cruel. Not like scary and bad and monstrous in the traditional satanic boogeyman sense, but more like the nonsensical sort that make me wake up and vow never to mix Benadryl and beer again...

The other night, I swear to you, I dreamt I was in love with Nicholas Cage. And not the Raising Arizona version, but the annoying nasally Scientology one. Eep. I am doomed.

Or perhaps it is simply another manifestation of my inability to commit. Although, could anyone really blame me in that particular situation?!!?

Thinking back at my tortured, er, storied romantic history, however, I’ve realized that while not every freak I’ve let into my life has been totally bad, for the most part they have been downright wrong — for me. And so I’m dreaming of the polar opposite type I’d ever consider getting nekkid with has me thinking — is that a sign I need to look beyond the usual broken boys?

Oh, but aren’t they fun?

Got sucked into the evil electric cable beast again this evening, and, left to my own devices (as all my roommates have lives…) wound up watching some random show on graffiti artists, which sorta’, in my kinetic brain, ties in with the conversation in my head, which goes something like:

“Was it necessarily a wise idea to invite a crew of taggers over to the SF Folsom Street flat many moons ago to help ‘paint’ the livingroom? Probably not, especially as I think the resulting flack induced a nervous twitch and ulcer in the landlord, who threatened to toss us onto the street if we didn’t paint over it.

"But damn it looked good and someday when I actually own something I’m going to bring my friends in to paint as many satanic cherubs, fuzzy pink bunnies, candy canes and assorted other images as I want.”

(And it’s the thought that some dot.com yuppies paying many thousands more than we were in 1998 occasionally get the fright of their lives as they lounge on their Ethan Allen furniture when the light is right and the spray paint pokes through the paint that makes me smile. And someday I’ll find the photos I took.)

Yet back then I was willing and able to spend inordinate amounts of time and energy dwelling on dudes who didn’t give a shit about me, or anything else except the spray paint, bike, paintbrush or drugs in hand. And I wonder if it ruined me.

Am I simply too old, tired and/or jaded to make an effort? Or will it all work out in the end? When even my mother turns to divine intervention to get me off the shelf I’m more than happy to lounge on I have to wonder if I’m doing it right.

Until recently I figured that fate, karma and the universe would happily align once I’d spent my merry time wandering and wondering and figuring out stupid shit like which country I want to live in and what I’m willing to do to pay the rent, and when I’d worked through the bulk of the bullshit would deliver my own personal Mr. Darcy to my doorstep, and I’d live happily ever after, or at least no longer be forced to be miserable alone.

Unfortunately MoDo’s tossed that theory to the wolves with her latest tome, Are Men Necessary?

For those not familiar with Madame Dowd, she writes what she thinks, thinks a lot, has opinions, knows what’s going on in the world, and she’s hot. In short, she and I are practically twins. (Ooookay, I embellish. It’s my blog, I can do what I want.) According to CNN:

"There's a body of evidence now that the Y chromosome is rotting at such a fast rate that it will go out of business in about 100,000 years," she said on "American Morning."

"So now that women don't need men to reproduce and refinance, the question is, will we keep you around? And the answer is," she added puckishly, "you know we need you in the way we need ice cream, you'll be more ornamental." (A Times book reviewer has noted that other research indicates the Y chromosome has stabilized.)

She’s biting, looking for trouble, exceptionally well paid, attractive, high-positioned as one of a dearth of female news columnists, and, here’s the problem: single. And it’s a chronic condition for her.

Katie Roiphe writes in Slate:

In the most inflammatory and intriguing passages, she claims that men are put off by women in power, that they prefer the women who serve them—maids, masseuses, and secretaries—to their equals.

She attributes the fact that she is unmarried to her powerful position as an op-ed columnist at the New York Times. Then she notes her own family history of domestic service and concludes that "being a maid would have enhanced my chances with men."

Oh shit. I’m fucked.

Or am I? Is my doom my own doing? Or undoing?

Because, as badass as I can be, I’m also ridiculously backward in my silly Cinderella visions of the storybook ending. And yet I’ve read The Cinderella Complex, I know better.

Nonetheless, I’m the one sitting here waiting for fate: I don’t need to put myself out there, I don’t need to maybe get up in someone’s face I’m attracted to and force them to notice I exist, the right person will magically float, as if on fairy dust laden air, to my side, and Tinkerbelle will fly by and the heavens will open and drop candy-covered thousand dollar bills and marzipan pigs.

Right…

So I’m torn: Do I chase after those I’m interested in, or do I continue to trust that the universe and fate really are in cahoots, and someone great will just pop onto my radar? I really don’t know.

And it’s not like I’m miserable, or desperate. It’s just, well, the part that worries me is this: Did MoDo, and the women like her who’ve hit the trenches ahead of us, assume fate would take care of it all too?

erratica

i think i'm going to change my name to erratica ... seems to fit better with my random though-ridden mind!

somewhere in manhattan there is a livewrong bracelet that spontaneously leapt from my wrist when i wasn't paying attention. i think it's a sign.

anyone know how to cook a tofurkey? and yes, stick it inside a turkey has already been suggested!

The good, bad and very fat and ugly

Seems like I’ve been out of virtual touch for ages. I’m happy to report, however, that my aged body seems to be healing, albeit slowly. I told my male coworkers I’d take them out today if they kept pestering me, and I wasn’t talking about a lunch date, so I suppose I’m getting back to my own personal version of normal.

Out there in that big bad ol’ world, thought… sheesh! WTF? Where to begin?

It’s like an early Christmas with an orgasm on top, followed by the news that your dog has just been run over and you’ve got to pay to repair the bumper that off’ed him…

Although it was good to see Emperor Miers scurry back to the Death Star a few weeks back, seems Alito is far worse. When NPR makes mention that his nicknames include Scalito and Machine Gun Sammy, you know every last one of our civil liberties is at stake.

Course, Dumbass Dubya is still out there, whining like the dry drunk ill-mannered smirking spoiled baby he is:

"While it's perfectly legitimate to criticise my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began," President Bush told a largely military audience in Pennsylvania, in a speech to mark Veterans' Day.

Interesting, considering the fact that his very administration seems hell bent on doing just that every chance they get, no matter how absurd and downright stupid it may be. Seems ol’ Scott-tissue McClellan got himself into a heap of trouble for responding, “That’s accurate” to a reporter who stated, “…We know that Karl Rove, based on what he and his lawyer have said, did have a conversation about somebody who Patrick Fitzgerald said was a covert officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. We know that Scooter Libby also had conversations.”

The White House propagandists, however, have directed two external transcription agencies, Congressional Quarterly and Federal News Service, to change the quote to, “No, that’s not accurate.”

Watch the video (the fun starts at about 5:30); he’d have to be a fucking ventriloquist to have spat that line out in the timeframe he’s seen speaking in.

I can imagine the conversation behind the regime’s curtain of secrecy post-mortem:

“Scott, you idiot! You told the truth! What were you thinking! You know the punishment.”

“No! Oh no! You don’t mean hauling away the dead carcasses of the everyday citizens Cheney’s sucked the life out of in his eternal, endless and, ultimately fruitless search for a soul?!!?”

“That’s right Scottie boy, but stop being such an optimist. He sold his soul long ago —it’s listed on the stock market just under KBR. It’s their life force. When the pacemakers stopped working, we had to find another way to keep Leader alive. Thanks to secret technology developed in an secure, undisclosed location years ago in Germany, we were able to fuse soft, innocent bunnies, poor minority fetuses, solid gold bars from his Haliburton payout and a few grams of coke from W’s stash and reanimate him. Unfortunately, he requires a constant source of humanity to keep his flesh from falling off and exposing him for the demonic zombie he is.”

“But, maybe we can tell them they just heard it wrong! We’ve spoon fed them for years, why wouldn’t they believe us now?”

“What a good idea! They haven’t tossed more than a few cotton balls at us in the past four-plus years. They’re like a press corps of Mikeys: they’ll believe anything!”

Unfortunately, as our man’s man and sexpert extraordinaire Steve Savage points out in this week’s Savage Love, this sort of behavior is hardly below Republicans. Thanks to modern medicine there is a readily-available vaccine that will prevent cervical cancer. As you may or may not know, it’s a sexually transmitted disease, and the more partners a woman has, the higher the chances she’ll get it. Pretty standard STD stuff, but there’s also the fact that, like many diseases, there’s no clear reason why one woman will get it, and another won’t. Either way, no one should have to die for having sex. Period.

But, that’s not the way the abstinence-only right sees it. According to Savage:

So what the right is saying is this: We're willing to kill American women in order to avoid "sabotaging" our ineffectual abstinence-only message. Nice.

Unfortunately, it’s not just a bunch of experimental teens who are getting fucked in relation to this issue, as the Washington Post reports:

The jockeying reflects the growing influence that social conservatives, who had long felt overlooked by Washington, have gained on a broad spectrum of policy issues under the Bush administration. In this case, a former member of the conservative group Focus on the Family serves on the federal panel that is playing a pivotal role in deciding how the vaccine is used.

"What the Bush administration has done has taken this coterie of people and put them into very influential positions in Washington," said James A. Morone Jr., a professor of political science at Brown University. "And it's having an effect in debates like this."

Demonic first-lady possesion?

"Pardon me, Laura, are those lightning bolts shooting out of your eyeballs, or are you just happy to see me?"

Either that or Chuckles has some, ahem, hidden agenda...

proof

it's true, i played Frogger and lost... and i'm sick enough to take pics of the damage! ha ha! please forgive the scariness of the leg. i swear i'm not one of those scary fat ladies who have to ride a motorized cart in WalMart!

Pre-Halloween hit and run, chapter two…

Or, the case of the post-halloween bike girl (black and) blues.

In my situation, it involves a Volkswagen, a bike, a girl and a lot of bruises.

One week to the day after my run in with the satanic sedan, I was minding my own business, in the bike lane, rolling along to run errands downtown, when a Golf (helloooo, isn’t there a special Golf-owners’ respect or something out there?!!?) pulls out in front of me, causing me to swerve, brake a gaaaaaah! Go flying over the handlebars.

So, somebody please explain to me how, in over 30 years of riding a bike, I can have two face-plants in one week…

It’s embarrassing.

It’s mortifying.

And, this week, it’s painful as hell. It’s a mess. It’s a swollen, non-bendy where legs should bend, ripped up flesh torn up muscles and ligaments mess.

Although, I can say that, after I got done yelling at him, not only could I guarantee the Golf driver would never pull out anywhere without looking in his mirror first, I could also pretty certainly assume he made a beeline home for a new clean pair of underwear tout de suite.

So, my conclusion is thus regarding the trinity of bike ickness (if you count the stick that stuck a few weeks back): I blame it all on Jason.

He was the last one to work on my bikes, and he sucks. So, from now on, no matter how implausible it may seem, anything bad that happens regarding bikes is Jason’s fault.

Kinda’ like many moons back, back, back in the day when a certain other tall, skinny boy found himself on the other end of my like list after taking up with some scary chick who later turned out to be psycho, thus making me feel better and spawning the phrase “bad idea Jen” to explain away a truly dumb move that probably should never have been made in the first place, I hereby coin, “Bad idea Jason” to describe things I never should have tried.

I meme, therefore I am?

Okey dokey Mags, here we go:

 

"But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend."

 

1. Go into your archives.
2. Find your 23rd post.
3. Post the fifth sentence (or closest to it).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.
5. Tag five other people to do the same thing.

 

Hardly the most entertaining post I could have selected, but, alas, No. 23 as instructed by the Meme gods.....

 

And, sadly, seeing as i have no blog-friends other than those Mags has already tagged, I shall leave it at that.