Sometimes I marvel at how professional people think I am during your average day job.
Then, someone important uses a phrase "seminal thinker," and I almost giggle. Ha ha. Semen.
Worse yet, it was about a semi-famouse neo-con.
Neo-con semen.
Yup, I should be fired by the thought police.
I just want to make sure everyone in the world (since, of course, that's the kind of readership I have) sees a certain hi-lar-i-ous video clip on New England Cable News.
Go to this here link, and click on "Brothers in comedy on the 'Globe at Home.'"
Just doi it, as the marketing line goes.
Didn't hear from any lawyers or any real estate folks today. I think that means that the paperwork is done.
Soon, this place will no longer be mine, I do believe.
And this neighborhood will be someone else's.
[image:1790:l]
I don't know what I'm doing. I can't use a browser. My computer skills have deteriorated.
Maybe it's the heat. Maybe it's global warming. Maybe it's my brain. Or the new quite zippy, quite warm Intel Duo Core processors. Did I even string those words together in the right order?
It's so goddam hot outside and the laptop adds another wide chunk of British Thermal Units, so I searched the web and my gray matter for some kind of laptop pad, cooling device. Easy to use, portable, capable of pulling some of the heat away and/or shielding my skimpely (or however the fuck it's spelled), naked-ish thighs.
Cooling pads exist. I even sought them out a bit. Ultimately, I decided to create something myself. Tonight, I invented the towel.
Unrelatedly, I know now why (and I suspect I knew 11 years ago when I bought my place) why the cliches and hating are consistently directed at real estate agents and lawyers. They're not bad people, I suppose. The problem is they know everything by rote. We, the dirty, unwashed, dazed buyers and sellers do not. We interpret unanswered calls or quick emails that say "no hurry" to mean, I guess, um, "no hurry."
Then, comes the call with code words like "Where's the P&S?"
You know, when I left the message saying that I hoped it wasn't a problem but my car was in the shop and I wouldn't have access to a full, wide array of office equipment, it meant the people I am paying huge piles of dollar bills to help me could rally. Fucking A.
Mostly in this thing M. and I call a relationship, I live a deprived and desperate condition. One in which my fitness-loving beau speaks out against one of my favorite things in the whole whide world. Tasty, rib-sticking, satifying, energy-providing carbohydrates. A meal for him is pork ribs and maybe a salad with a side of pork something else. Or maybe a 5 inch steak and a piece of lettuce.
He's gotten a bit mellower on the issue, since he stopped working with a, might I add chubby, army of Atkins and South Beach dieters.
But, this week, what with the SF Marathon coming up this weekend, when he plans to run the half-marathon >13-mile version, the carbo thang is first and foremost. Cake, bread, pasta, noodles, rice, did I mention bread? are all in the foreground.
Sadly, it's so fucking blisteringly hot all over the US map, I'm not feeling very scone-loving. I finally have my way in the quest for food joy, and all I fucking want is a glass of ice water.
Someone at Safeway either has a wicked imagination and sense of humor or completely blew the curve in Cynics 101 at some business school. This witty advert was glued to the glass of the ice cream freezer. Imagine. A woman, perhaps of a certain age, licking the wounds of broken heart and seeking the universal balm of frozen dairy treats. Wondering, where did she go wrong? She must fix her hair. Of course. End scene.
I’m writing this from the new ‘puter, bargain shopped with the help of a neighborhood Apple engineer. It’s like a giant, cuddly iPod, all shiny and white.
More importantly, this is our president. The fucking president of these United States.
How creeped out does Angela Merkel look?
So, let’s say you are a famously Christian dude (aka GW), and you meet a famously Christian grown-up woman, the leader of a developed nation and who hails from the turnaround region of your capitalistic, democratic wet dreams. What do you do?
Cop a feel. Of fucking course.
It’s 2006, buddy, read the Whitehouse/G8 Summit HR handbook on harrassment. For fuck’s sake.
We now rock two convertibles. (As M. points out — Double Income No Kids, might as well have fun.
That’s me on the right.
[newline] [image:4061:l]
Below, the inimitable Dot made a sound reference, and so we are here not to bury the Jetta but to praise it. Or something like that.
For me, the Jetta first came to be, be in my awareness, in a phone call that through cellular towers reached M. in a Macy’s somewhere in the state of Mass. We were a couple then, but the plan was M. was definitely moving to Cali and who knew what that would mean. In fact, on our first date he quite rigorously discussed that his future was in the golden West and his need for a relationship was minimal.
For my part, I thought, thank god. I wasn’t really in the mood to play nice and make a boy like me.
I think we may even have been shopping for something he would need here, when he left there. I don’t remember. But, the phone rang. His buddy Dan was making plans for his return out here. He was getting his old, still running and largely reliable blue 1986 Volkswagen Jetta ready to go as a loaner to a friend who might need a ride.
The first time I came out here to visit the long-distance boyfriend, this car is the one that picked me up at the airport.[newline] [image:4034:l][newline] [image:4035:l][newline] [image:4036:l][newline] [image:4037:l][newline]
In that magical first visit, the man with whom later I would live romantically scooped me off the sidewalk of the airport and whisked me away to the Berkeley Marina. He wanted to share with me one of the main objects of his interest in those days.
Sweetly, he said, “I want to show you where they found Lacie.”
He drove us along the shore, Scott Peterson’s shore, and he had hoped that we might take a ferry ride. (That would be the actual romantic part.)
Instead, we got a bit lost and then discovered the ferry wasn’t running that time of day. While driving around a desolate, remote, little stretch of highway, we were improbably tapped in the Jetta’s backside by a woman not paying attention to the rules of the road.
Imagine this, you have come 3K+ miles to see a guy that you dated a bit in Cambridge and were visiting a bit unsure to test the waters of a long-distance thang. The waters involved wisecracks about a spousal killer. And in this strange place, you’re pulling over in the middle of nowhere to check the damage as a strange woman gets out of her car and walks towards yours.
She looked nothing like Amber Frey.
Through a series of visits, the Jetta took me, took us, to Sonoma and Napa to look at grape vines and taste a bit of the local products. Redwood forests, mountains, the not-so Pacific, From San Jose to SF and back. Fisherman’s Wharf, the Presidio, Pacific Heights, Lombard, Golden Gate Park, the Golden Gate Bridge, fog, sun, rain and more fog. Sausalito, Berkeley, Gilroy, although not the Garlic Festival, and back to SF some more. A walk-on ferry ride, for reals, to “The Rock.”
Sure it had no AC, but it did have windows. While it lasted, it was a good little soldier.
It did what it had to do and like the little train that could, it kept going.
Lately, 20 years and lots and lots of thousands of miles had sucked the reliable into a VW kind of Parkinson’s. A little shaky, maybe with a touch of a leprosy, where parts were starting to drop off.
Better to rust out than fade away, or worse yet, end up in a firey ball of death with M. at the wheel. And, so it goes.
Out with the old and in with the new. For M., like with my selling my place in Cambridge, it’s a commencement. I prefer the glass half empty, the life lived, the moments noted. So to the Jetta and my condo, I will toast a goodbye for yeoman’s service and a job well done.
Indulgent GF that I try to be, here’s the photo gallery of New Car Day, July 16, 2006.
Of course not.
