I like to work up myself up to a hand-wring lather for abso-fucking-lutely no reason.

I went to bed last night restless, nervous. I was worried about my Mandarin class and the show I was doing tonight, for both of which I was unprepared. But, guess what, I made it to both, figured some stuff out right beforehand and no problems. I even started working out some new shit that went just fine.

I also worried about what M. would eat for dinner, because I was going straight to the place with the show. Guess what, he ate.

Whatever, right?

This all tells me I should relax and enjoy life. Will I? Probably not. But, for one brief infintesimally small minute I’ll consider the possibilities.

BlueRockFlyer

Here’s the deal, yo, I did straight up nothing for about the last month performance-wise. Nada, bubkis, ya dig? Tomorrow I’ll be up there with the mike doing the comedy thang, and my fantasy was I would walk through some new stuff that is unformed and bubbling in the otherwise echoey skull chamber.

Anyway, that was the plan and I would use tonight for two things — (1) Calming the rattley ideas in my head to something usuable on stage (least until I pussy out and fallback on the shit that works) and (2) Study me some Mandarin. (Man oh fucking man that Chiney is one hard language. I’m tone deaf and tone figures large among billions of the world’s people.)

By the way, the best reason to take a language class is to toss off a little workday stress by hating on your classmates. Every single fucking language I have ever studied (OK, all two of them, French and Russian) had to have two particular and striking types in the class: The studentka who pronounces everything in the same flat monotone squeezing out each letter and syllable with some kind of funked up American accent where all languages sound vaguely Brooklynesque and the hyper, over eager linguist who is all up in there learning and commenting on how “weird” everything is and asking question on what “they” do and what “they” say and how unique and weird and quaint “they” and “their language” are.

So far my fave example of the latter was about the Mandarin phrase “dianhua haoma,” which means telephone number. It’s two words, kind of like “telephone number.” Literally translated it means something like electric speaking number, kind of like telephone number, if you think about it. If English uses two words and one of the two words is also a clever hybrid of concepts, than why the fuck are we discussing how weird and hard and different and weird Chinese is? It’s the same goddamn thing. (Oh, and by the way linguist face, Mandarin is simpler and more logical than the shit we be speaking, and predates it by more than a few clicks of the sundial.)

If I were a language teacher, and thankfully for all involved I am not, I would be forever quoting Steve Martin, “They have a different word for everything…”

I’m totally off track of what this post is supposed to be about, namely thank god M. exists. Instead of studying or writing (because really why waste a night being useful to myself), I spent way to long perusing myspace.com . Specifically, I was looking at alumni from my high school and college, curious to see if I knew any one.

What I found was many sad-seeming divorced folk looking for the big myspace.com hookup. Perhaps I’m projecting and judging and all sorts of other bad karmic shit, but damn I hope to never appear that cyber-needy. For example, I hope to swallow a bullet before listing under life goals “finding a boyfriend this year,” and I have always wanted to end up living a distance greater than 1.5 miles from where I grew up.

So, damn, M. is my manna in the desert of post-40 dating.

Don’t let him know, but I’m secretly proud of the boy-o. He had so much fun running a half marathon, he’s now training for a full deal. Yesterday, as part of his training he ran just under 20 miles. Apart from the streaks of salt on his shirt, you wouldn’t have known it by looking at him. Cool and relaxed as always.

I mention keeping it quite about being a good thing and all, because he does have an ego. Not sure if there’s room enough in our place for him, me, my ego and his ego, if it expands any.

We went into the city to check out Comedy Dayat Golden Gate Park. I was more than a mite curious, but I’m not sure it’s something I aspire to do some day.

Basically, it’s an outdoor free area, in Boston imagine a concert on the Common or the Esplanade, with five hours of comedy. To paraphrase the comic Rita Rudner, I don’t like doing anything for that long. I can’t actually imagine five hours of comedy, but I think it would feel like having screws drilled into my ear canal.

We didn’t show up for all five hours.

For the bit of time we were there it was fun as an audience. I got to see Greg Proops, Todd Barry and Jackie Kashian. (Todd Barry will always be special to me, because last year when he performed in Cambridge, I was among people out for drinks with him after, when a fan bought the table around. After some showbiz ego hilarity, it was realized the fan was actually a fan of local boy, Chris Walsh. You gots to love the quasi-celeb moment.)

From a non-audience member, comic perspective, though, it seemed like the hellish of hell gigs. An outdoors crowd of about 2,000 maybe less, sitting on blankets lacks a certain intimacy or really ability to pay attention at all. Not to mention that the Blue Angels were in town and their flight path was occassionally directly overhead.

Jets and comedy, a winning combination.

Maybe the funnest part was strolling around the Haight and Golden Gate Park. Much of hippiedom is alive and well and unaware that the clock has ticked through decades, probably because the drumming circle is so damn hypnotic.

Later, dinner at a dinky Thai place that actually is pretty good and M. really likes was in the seedy, filthy, cracky Tenderloin. The beauty of that part of the day was determining how long it takes for a crack addict named Nadine to panhandle a buck off of M. He hung in there, but she hung in there tougher, relentless in wearing him down.

Here are a couple of pics from here bearing evidence that M. is cute regardless of surroundings:

AND San Francisco is just so San Francisco-y:

We just got in from seeing the flick Capote. Interesting and pretty intense. I was expecting more cocktail party witty barbs and less Jesus life is fucked up moments of reflection.

Given that it’s a couple of degrees removed from reality, like any biography about dead people, where one of the deceased was writing about dead people, it got me thinking about the nature of writing. Unfortunately, it got me thinking about some of the reasons I have been far too lazy and not the least bit hard core.

Sometimes I wonder what it takes to really succeed in such a lonely, self-involved task as writing. Capote threw himself into and was pretty consumed by the whole murder story of which he wrote in In Cold Blood. And, as M. pointed out afterwards he was simultaneously incredibly empathetic to the murderers and the law enforcement with whom he connected and completely manipulative.

I don’t know that I would ever or will ever have the singularity of purpose shown in that empathetic/manipulative seesaw.

Kind of reminded me of one of the saddest times in my life when I personally witnessed the cliche of a journalist asking someone after a tragedy “How do you feel?” That moment was high among defining reasons for my never becoming a reporter myself.

Yah, man, my peeps is living in Delaware. Or at least, I’m digging
the Supreme Court there.

In a defamation case involving an anonymous blogger and a thin-skinned
Smyrna Town Councilman, it was decided that what with free speech and
all, the ISP didn’t have to expose who the blogger is. Come on,
Councilman Patrick Cahill, how do you figure mental defective and
“Gahill” (as in he’s so gay) was defamation and not just fucking goofy
name-calling?

I particularly love the Gahill thing, because it kind of begs the
question when is being called a homo going to cease being defamatory?
Plus it’s so wicked junior high.

My favorite part of the story, though, is this quote from one of the judges:

“Blogs and chat rooms tend to be vehicles for the expression of
opinions; by their very nature, they are not a source of facts or data
upon which a reasonable person would rely,” wrote Chief Justice
Steele.

I only wish he had said that before I had the circular Human Resources
conversation involving my repetition of “I’m a writer; It’s not real;
It’s comedy; I’m a writer…” ad nauseam (well at least my nauseam).

The other notable point was the thing about the fun, fun, fun part of
publishing on the web is the do-it-yourself element. Someone slagging
off on you in his weblog, publish one of your own and call him a
cock-sucking liar, if you must.

Which reminds me, my buddy at hbeeinc.com wrote something about the
Fuck Bush T-shirt crowd. It hit close to home, because I weep and
lament for the fact I lost my very own Berkeley-purchased “Fuck Bush”
T-shirt in the big move west. (Sadly, I haven’t seen that vendor
again on Telegraph Hill.)

Basically, Hbee is stating why he doesn’t like that kind of shirt
himself as a parent and a liberal who fantasizes about a free and just
society. If my current IP address wasn’t blocked on his weblog I
would be commenting back:

Hey, I wear it to piss off people just like you. That’s the fun part.
Seriously, though, when I wore it I realized the language was
offensive, and to me that’s part of the activism of it. I also fully
accepted that some people would be completely turned off by it.

I think the more interesting point is now people have T-shirts (or
whatever) that say offensive or strong or political or whatever things
(or, I dunno, carry placards with oozing aborted embryos) and get all
shocked and surprised when someone finds them offensive. If you do
something intentionally to piss people off, you have to suck up the
consequences of pissing somebody off. That’s not about free speech,
it’s about your right to be an asshole and having to hear about it.

Some of us revel in our assholic behavior. I think if I were tossed
off a plane for wearing a “Fuck Bush” T-shirt, assuming I’d be that
fucktarded to wear it in that setting, I’d have to embrace the story.

By the way, after buying that T-shirt here and then going to the
Folsom Street Fair, I gotta report that the Bay Area is magnificently
and crazily more liberal than even the imagination of the wildest
Massachusetts liberal. Nothing, nothing, nothing in Boston comes
close to Nancy Pelosi’s city.

Also, by the way, if ever you want to boost traffic to your website,
publish pictures from the Folsom Street Fair. Them fetish and leather
loving rascals do love the photos, I have found. The hit rate of a
leather-clad ass grab is off the charts.

Don’t have much to write. Better, don’t want to write much.

Lately, a little whisper of homesickness has crawled in. Not really, though, because much is comfortable here. It’s still a work in progress this moving your life thang. Still something I haven’t quite mastered. Still a bit rough around the edges.

For years, I worked at making myself comfortable with myself. Some of that involved walking away from people who I just didn’t like much. Life being short and all, and so many reminders in the form of mortality cropping up, I just wanted to stop wasting time. Why sit and listen and be chatty and try to accommodate shit that made you unhappy or uncomfortable or nervous or angry or whatever fucking negative energy could crop up, right? Life = short, so assholes must not be tolerated.

It’s a great theory, anyway. Cut back on wasting time and spend time with folks you like. Bring positive shit to yourself, you know, by seeking out the ones who understand. I tried comedy and writing publicly to try to find those folks. Mostly it worked.

Now, those people are there and I’m here.

I knew when I moved making friends might be one of the hurdles. Mostly, I understand. On occasion, though, it just gives you the old kosmic blues.

When I thunk out the grand plan, though, the one in which I grabbed some gusto and eschewed idiots, it was kind of a solo vision. The natural course being the natural course, I met a cool guy, probably and precisely because I deliberately changed my path.

(A friend once warned me, on the occasion of her wedding, no less, the minute you decide–that’s it, fuck it, bad boyfriends and all, I’m taking charge here and now and living my life alone and on my own, no terms, not prisoners, not regrets, the capital THE man would show up. At the time I scoffed.)

Anyway, in the great grand plan, it was easy to figure out what I wanted (relatively) and what (and who) I’d avoid. Yeah, easy. If you don’t like peas, just don’t buy them, eat them, cook with them or look at them. Same with racists, for example. But, fucking hell, what do you do if your man, your guy, the person you like hanging with the most really likes peas? Or racists?

Maybe my future feels bright, or maybe I’m just giddy from the teensiest weensiest bit of hope a judicial nominee who once wrote a check to the DNC gives me.

I don’t know. Or maybe it’s just sunshine and jelly beans. (Did you know the clever elves of marketing at Jelly Belly have now come out with “energy beans?” Fucking brilliant, I say. For us candy folks who see through the yuppified health chocolate of energy bars and like chewy, fruity sugar better.)

Anyway, let’s not get off tangent. I’m living in bright world. I came home to the boy-o deciding to saute up some shrimp and pasta after a marathon session with the new boss lady. I swear this job takes place in Bizarro land. They like me, they really like me, dig? OR at least, no one seems to want to send me to the principal’s office for my sharp wit and tongue. Nope, they be looking for me to take on some more reading and writing.

Funnier still, I even threatened to stab someone at work today. But, for christsakes, man, she fucking deserved it. I mean a native New Yorker bragging to the likes of me that she spent the weekend cheering on the Cleveland Indians. What kind of bullshit provocation is that?

It’s actually pretty fun to be a native of the land of the 2004 World Series Champeens, whilst living 3,000 miles away. But, them Yankee fans, some of them done moved out here too.