An Effort Made 31 August 1998

Hmmmmm.

It bothers me that I say the same things over and over here. On the other hand, that's my life.

Who teaches girls to squeal like that? Don't tell me it's natural, nobody makes those kinds of noises without reason. I have known some teenage girls, and you just stop thinking those thoughts right now, they were Net friends. I asked a couple of them once why, since I had heard them complain about not being taken seriously by people, they behaved like spastic idiots when they saw each other. It wasn't a well-received question. Human greeting rituals have always puzzled me anyway.

Gaah! Here's an instant life lesson: never watch a Quark file load too closely when you don't know what's in it. You might find yourself staring straight into a photo of the inside of a man's ear, like I just did. Don't Let This Happen To You.

Food, not food, food, not food. It's not that I don't like eating, you know. I'm not untouchable by the pleasures of taste. It's just the every-goddamn-day part that gets to me. Which is kind of a joke, since I've always hated that gnostic, mystical, "this-flesh-is-a-prison" attitude that sets up the ethereal world of the spirit as infinitely superior to this dungheap of reality. I guess I don't want to reject the physical world, I just want a second home somewhere else.

Dorothy Parker lived in hotels as often as possible. That's the way to do it. No matter where you go, you're just visiting. Someone else cleans up, or not if you tell them not to, and if the food isn't always great at least you can get it brought to you at 4 AM. Lazy ass, ain't I? Ayup.

You can laugh at those illustrations on the covers of romance novels if you like, but they serve a useful purpose. They make it very clear that the book in hand is, in fact, a romance novel. I'm of a mind to make this mandatory, after reading Dark Paradise by Tami Hoag. I didn't want much, just another crime/thriller novel by the same author I'd been reading all weekend. What do I get instead? A book about a giant, massive, hard, arrogant, rude, utterly masculine cowboy and the tough-but-feisty little blonde woman who naturally can't stand him, and yet, there's something more to him than that, something deep inside... Et bejesus cetera. This book's Lesson For Boys: Be really obnoxious, tall and in great shape, and it can all be yours. I suppose that's true enough.

Maybe some kind of Federal Content Board. Or no, better make it voluntary. Get some group of Internet patsies to sponsor it. We could develop a series of icons that participating publishers would stamp on the covers of their books: Slasher, Bodice-Ripper, Courtroom, Guns, Spies, Weeper, Monster, RichPeopleSex. I sense a marketing opportunity here.

There's a very strange quote in most of the stories I've read today about the Big Plunge on Wall Street:

"The word capitulation comes to mind," said Philip Orlando, chief investment officer of Value Line Asset Management.

It does? Why? Capitulation to what? Or who? Or whom even? Is he thinking that his dominatrix will be mad at him because he just talked her into investing in his mutual fund? Does he think that the Turmoil In Russia means that the Commies are going to come over here and take away his tie collection?

You know, it's not that I want people to suffer - well, OK, but not all people - but I'm happy to see the Big Plunge come swooping in. It will probably keep me from ever seeing actual dollars for the stock options I own too, so I think that gives me a little cred on the topic. Which is, as has been discussed before in this space, Rich Fucks Go Home! Jesus Harley Davidson. The only hope that San Francisco has of remaining an even halfway liveable city is a moderate economic downturn. I know, that's not going to be fun for anybody. But the first thing that has to happen before we can begin to repair anything else is that these people who live here but don't live here have to go away. The people who want to shop in mall stores like World Wrapps and Starfucks. The people who buy overpriced "live/work" (uh, yah right) condos way the fuck out in the middle of nowhere, and don't care because they never go anywhere except in their cars anyway. They live here, but this is not their city.

And it's not really about being rich per se, or even - I concede - about being clueless middle-class white yuppies. Because there are plenty of both of those kinds of people for whom this is their city. They know their part of town, they make friends with the local shop owners, have favorite restaurants. They inhabit their part of town as much as I do mine. We may not like each other, that's fine. That's the point, really, of living here in the first place. A point that the Clueless People don't grasp, when they move onto a block with three nightclubs and then call the police because there's so much noise! Oh my!

When the money that's flowing through our politics, and to some extent the votes, is coming from people who think of San Francisco as maybe some kind of cute gay-Italian-Chinese theme park with good restaurants, then that's what they'll turn the place into. To keep it habitable, it's got to be controlled by inhabitants again. Earthquake, earthquake, earthquake...

Er, gosh. Not that I feel strongly about this or anything.

Willfully blind self-indulgent nebbish or amusingly quirky old coot? And how bout that local sports team? Discuss among yourselves.

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All names are fake, most places are real, the author is definitely unreliable but it's all in good fun. Yep. © 1998-1999 Lighthouse for the Deaf. All rights reserved and stuff. The motto at the top of the page is a graffito I saw on Brunswick Street in Melbourne.