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Stories from a man who fails to meet media expectations of what it means to be gay:
white, frivolous, over sexed yet sexless, shrill, single, stylish, a clown, unimportant, et al.
Tuesday 10/28/2003
The politics of the possibilities of being the other woman and some other meaningless stories:
Wildfires have been burning through large swaths of different counties of Southern California. Turn on the TV, or listen to the radio and there are stories of thousands of homes and thousands of acres of forest disappearing into flame.
I don't live near any of the affected areas, but even so, every once in a while the smell of smoke hovers in the air, and every morning there is a fine layer of ash covering my car.
Driving through South Pasadena one night a few weeks ago, there was a cool wind blowing, leaves were rustling a few of the evening joggers had switched to long pants, and the tent to build the cities� entry float for the rose parade had been put up, all signs of autumn.
An autumn that only managed to last a couple of days. Days are still becoming shorter and shorter, deciduous trees are loosing their leaves, and folks are decorating their yards with goofy Halloween decorations, but other than that, it may as well be high summer.
There has been a heat wave and everything is hot and smothered and pressed and dry and consumed and baked and hazy, or at least I have been. My mind that is. One thing writing this silly journal has shown me about myself is that I spend far too much time feeling vaguely depressed. I had always assumed I was generally cheerful, but that seems to be a false self image. Melancholy man seems to be a more accurate description, which just fills me with oodles of joy.
Besides the haze of fires, life in the Southland has been colored by two strikes, both over issues including shifting the costs of medical insurance towards employees. The MTA strike has resulted in the near shut down of public transit, which means that traffic has been ridiculously slow and overwhelming as a half million or so people try to get around not using buses or rail. The Grocery Checkout workers strike has caused a common site of near empty parking lots in front of certain supermarket chains.
I have friends who are staunch union supporters and others who are more or less annoyed that they have worse benefits than the strikers, and so don't sympathize at all. Me, I'm a government employee (who has had one real raise in eleven years) in a state running a massive deficit. My union will be starting negations soon, and they have already been told that not only is there no money for raises, there will also be a need to shift the costs of medical insurance towards employees.
Maybe vague depression is not too unreasonable an attitude.
OK, enough of this, as usual the following is some storyettes from my life in a vague and unimportant order. As usual, it's mainly fluff as in addition to being grey and ashy, I am also a man of inconsequential fluff.
The entry proper:
one cat story:
As I've mentioned above, we have been having a heat wave where daytime highs at the house having been hovering in the nineties. Now John came home from work yesterday and found Spanky splayed out on the couch in the stomach baring way that hot cats trying to cool themselves off are prone to do. The odd thing was that the fan we have aimed at the couch was turned on and she was rolling back and forth obviously enjoying herself.
Spanky has been a handful in that she has learned how to open drawers and doors, but now it looks like she has discovered how to turn on the fan, or at the very least, she knows enough to take advantage of accidentally sitting on the fan�s remote control.
one movie:
I think I made a quick remark a couple of entries ago that I saw Lost in Translation, but I didn�t mention that I really enjoyed the film. The director did a very good job of recreating the off kilter feeling of jet lagged induced insomnia.
I saw it with Kristen, and afterwards, we spent time talking about the parts and sensations of Tokyo that we recognized. Sometimes the recognition/memories almost got in the way of the story for me. During a climatic final scene where a character is rushing through a crowd to have some melodrama, I�m focused on the background were young women are handing out tissues, and I am thinking �That�s right, the free ad tissue women!� It was almost enough for me to miss a part of the movie that annoyed some people. Other people that is, I was quite content with the ending.
As I mentioned in that previous entry, I was not wanting the protagonists to �consummate� their relationship. Sadly, it�s refreshing not having a creepy story about an older man doing the nasty with a woman young enough to be his daughter. There are way too many middle aged and older men in hollywood writing/directing/producing their fantasy life.
The politics of the possibilities of being the other woman:
I�ve complained and whined here that gay men rarely bother to look at me. This is not exactly true, sort of. The past month I�ve eaten a quick lunch at a fast food chain near the house a couple of times. Both times were on a Sunday, and both times I�ve noticed dads of young happy meal eating kids checking me out. Dads with wedding rings that is. So I guess I can add presumably closeted married fathers to the short list of folks who find me attractive.
Not that I am complaining. Weirdness of the being married and scooping out other male customers while supervising your children thing aside, I�m hardly one to complain about having hunky guys look at me. For probable closet cases, they were good looking. The first guy was a mid-twenties aged sports dad looking Latino guy with two elementary school aged boys in futball (soccer) gear; the other was a somewhat tired looking white man ca little bit older than me with that slight belly/balding/stubbly look that I find so appealing, who was eating hamburgers with his two preschool aged daughters.
I want to say something like �Now if only I could get attractive, available men to look at me,� but as I am neither attractive, nor more importantly available that would be very bad of me, so I won�t.
Two Movie:
Despite the good word about it, I couldn�t get anyone to go see The Station Agent with me, so it I went by myself. It�s interesting how many people find my growing habit of solo movie going to be weird. I tend to respond that if I don�t go alone I�d miss most of what I want to see, which generally gets a response to the effect that I need better taste in movies, because I�d never have any problems finding someone to go see something like the texas Chainsaw massacre remake with.
Um, Anyway, The Station Agent is a good movie, very calm and quiet. Very likable, very much concerned with characterization and not with a racing, wild plot. In other words, no blood, no violence, and very much not a summer action flick.
I saw it in Pasadena, at the Paseo Colorado complex in a fairly crowded theater. Not too difficult an accomplishment, since management had stuck it into a teeny weenie little screen. I guess they are expecting to make more money with the latest scary comedy, or hours of nonstop kill bill violence than they would off of a story of people connecting and creating relationships with one another despite the barriers they erect to isolate and protect themselves in.
Baby book of evil names:
I was having dinner with a (teacher) friend listening to him go on at length with annoying work stories. I interrupted when he mentioned the name of a student, not believing that someone would actually burden their child with Precious as a first name, but apparently someone has.
There are jokes about how the name someone chooses for their children determines the child�s destiny. As an example, naming your daughter Chastity will doom her to a life of prostitution. It seems that naming your daughter Precious guarantees she�ll turn out to be an obnoxious brat.
This started a round of recalling people who we�ve dealt with who have also been cursed by a poor decision on their parents part, everything from Perfecto (who is anything but) to Inocencia (a very um, �easy� young woman) to Beauty (a gamble that did not pay off).
Three Movie:
A couple of Saturdays ago involved yet another trip out to Hollywood to meet up with Alex and friend to watch a flick that was showing only a couple of miles away from home. Which was an attitude that I told myself to loose as John and I headed out that night, because there was no reason to be negative and the point of the evening was the company not location.
So we went out to Hollywood, had a quickie dinner at the Baja Fresh on Sunset, and saw Girls Will be Girls at the Sunset Laemmles. Pseudo healthy Mexican fast food while surrounded by gay men checking each other out, and a flick where men in drag play the major female roles. Um, can�t get too much gayer than that.
The movie was fun and largely brainless, which was all I was capable of handling anyway. A few of the jokes were Los Angeles�centric, including a quick one liner about guys cruising each other in the men�s room at the Virgin Mega Store, that was funny mainly because the rest room in question was only a feet away from the theater.
Scary men with flowers:
I�m not even sure were the bad mood I had at the beginning of that evening came from anyway. The rest of the day went fine. I met up with Kristen for lunch in little Tokyo (�tofo katsu� curry and scallops curry at Curry House), and even though neither of us had realized that there was an orchid festival thing being held that day, the crowds weren�t too bad.
I�m not too big on orchids, but even so, the festival was interesting in a way. Prices jumped around wildly, from under $10 for a small stumpy flowerless clump of leaves, to well over $150 for large things with crazily ugly, yet beautiful flowers.
At one point I found myself standing behind a somewhat scary looking gay couple. Not scary because they were threatening looking, but instead scary because they looked so much alike they could have been twins.
They were both white, late thirtyish, muscle heavy gym queens, with shaved heads and identical goatees. They even wore nearly identical outfits of cargo shorts, timberland sandals, and too small t-shirts cut to show off massive arms. The only appreciable difference between the two was that one guy�s t-shirt was black, while the other wore white.
I amused myself looking at them for a little bit, because even though appearance wise they may have well have been the same person, action wise, they did display some individuality. Mr. black shirt was acting out the role of dutiful husband/pack animal. He was loaded down with bags and plants and seemed to be in a blank daze. Mr. white shirt was playing the role of shopper extraordinare, working though the vendors and frowning at prices that were evidently too high. Or maybe he was too cheap, I don�t know enough about orchids to fairly judge. After a few minutes of watching the twins play at being a married fifties sitcom Het couple, I got bored and wandered away.
More later,
nico
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