Month: January 2020

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Immensely Satisfying

I just finished binging the first season of Tell Me a Story on CBS All Access, and I have to say, it was one of the most satisfying bits of storytelling I've seen in quite some time.

When I initially read the premise of the show I didn't see how any of it would work, but somehow the writers pulled it off.

Highly recommended if you have CBS All Access.

Going to give it a short break and then jump into Season Two.

But next up, Star Trek: Discovery.

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Finally!

It took longer than expected, but I've managed to acquire another piece of Holy Grail vinyl I saw online a couple years ago. After seeing a photo of the red vinyl version of Kraftwerk's The Man Machine on Tumblr or some such, I subsequently tracked it down on Discogs late in 2018, but never thought I could justify buying a copy. (It typically sold for over $100 USD). I have a pristine copy on black vinyl that is one of the few records to survive from my original collection, bought new in 1978, but when I saw this I had to have it—sooner or later. I guess the analog gods were smiling upon me a month ago, becuase a copy came up for sale at a third of the typical asking price and I jumped on it. It seemed to take forever to get here from Germany, but it finally arrived yesterday and believe me, it was worth the wait.

The seller graded it very conservatively, assigning a VG (very good) rating to the sleeve and VG+ (very good plus) to the vinyl itself. After receiving it, however, I have to say the sleeve is mint, and the vinyl itself it NM (near mint).

The Man Machine is probably my favorite of all the recordings in Kraftwerk's extensive catalog.

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Men Will Be Men







You always hated it when your wife insisted on bringing you to a couples date so she could be with one of her girlfriends. Ugh, the guys were usually such losers. What did that say about her choice in friends?  10 minutes after being seated, while the girls were busy sipping wine and chatting non stop, you felt something brush your leg. At first you thought it was your wife but that angle was wrong. Then you looked across that table at Jim and his smirk said it all. While you tried to keep calm, his foot moved higher and higher up your leg. You struggled as it actually felt nice. You know you should stop him. Encouraged by your eye contact and not stopping him, his foot presses against your cock and he raises his eyebrow when he finds the solid lump. You reach under and grip his foot, taking his shoe off and then pressing his naked foot against your bulge. He begins to massage it with his foot and you are trying to keep cool while this is happening. Then holding his foot, you take your hand and unzip your pants pulling out your erection and then he realizes his foot is rubbing your exposed cock.  You let him do this for several minutes until you look at the wives who are unaware of everything.  You rub his foot and then say to your wife "Babe, gotta go hit the head." She rolls her eyes and as you put Jim's shoe back on his foot he says "Maybe I'll go too". The look you exchange says that in 5 minutes you're gonna have him in the stall bent over with your cock buried so far in him that he'll be feeling it next week.

Source.

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Fascinating

I am not now, nor have I ever really considered myself a "gamer" or "gaymer," if you insist. But for several months at the start of 1994, I was obsessed with a new game called Myst. Too many very late nights were spent attempting to solve those puzzles. I'd get drawn in, look up and realize it was 3 am. On a work night.

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Prime Time (Part Two)

While the drama had been brewing with Emmett, I'd been in touch with a my longtime friend Michael in San Francisco. He and I had met on an inbound MUNI train years earlier, and after a couple romps in the hay we both came to the realization that we both carried too much baggage that didn't match and we'd probably be better off as friends than lovers. When I'd made the decision it was time to return to Bagdad By The Bay, he suggested I move in with him until I found a place of my own. "I have big house all to myself. You'd have your own room downstairs and I'd be glad to have the company."

Your host and Mary, my ex's mom, who really didn't want me to leave Tucson.

Michael lived out in the Avenues. Not my first choice of where in the city I'd ever want to live, but his offer to crash there until I found work and got a place of my own was too good to pass up. So, the first weekend in December, Michael flew down (to drive my car while I drove the rental truck) to Tucson and helped me pack up, load the truck and get out of town.

As I recall, a job arrived pretty quickly, even though I wasn't able to return to the firm I'd worked for the previous eight years. I still wasn't able to transition into PC support, but a job's a job and since I had the architectural and AutoCAD skillz, any port in a storm, y'know?

Unfortunately, instead of staying put at that prestigious national firm, when the opportunity arose for me to go elsewhere  and actually get my foot in the door doing computer support work, I jumped on it.

While I prided myself on my PC knowledge, I soon found out I was in over my head. I knew the ins-and-outs of Microsoft Word, but not to the degree required by a Law Firm. Additionally it was a whole new world for me to be dealing with end users, many of whom were difficult at best and—being a Law Firm—hellspawn at worst. I got minimal support from the two other people on the Help Desk and next to none from my supervisor. I was miserable.

In one of those odd twists of fate, however, one day while returning from lunch, I ran into a guy I'd worked with in Phoenix twelve years earlier. I knew Fred had relocated to San Francisco, but lost touch with him shortly after he left the firm where we both worked.

Fred now had his own business. We chatted briefly and I told him of my employment woes. "I'm looking for people," he said. "Here's my card. Come by next week and we'll see if we can come to a mutually beneficial agreement."

And thus began two years of employment hell that was to send me back to Arizona again.

(To be continued…)

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Invoking the Prop Master

Ben had training on Saturday.

Early that afternoon I got a text from him telling me he'd lost the brand new Pro AirPods that I'd got him for our non-denominational winter holiday.

My heart sank. Probably as much as his. As you know, these things are not inexpensive, and even with a piecemeal AppleCare replacement, they'd cost more to replace than the original purchase. I was not happy.

He tore his bag apart. He cleaned out his car. I tore the sofa apart and looked underneath both it and the coffee table. I went through the laundry I'd just finished up. They were nowhere to be found.

As he was about to leave training, he asked if I wanted to run out to his school to look in his office and grab dinner on the way back. I said I did, although to be honest I wasn't at all hungry at that point.

They weren't at his office. Further, we temporarily locked ourselves into the parking lot at the school because the normal exit gate wasn't remotely triggered to open; it was locked with padlocks. I waited in the car while Ben let himself out the pedestrian gate and went back into the school to try and find the key. The keys he found didn't work. Thankfully there was another teacher on campus, and she was able to trigger the entrance gate allowing us to get out of the labyrinth.

We drove past the lunch spot where the Pods last appeared on Ben's "Find My" app. Nothing.

Hey Apple, what good is the Find My app when attempting to locate lost AirPods if it will only locate their last known location unless they're actually paired to something and broadcasting?

There were a couple other places he thought they might be: two classrooms where he'd been coaching teachers Friday afternoon. He didn't have access at those particular schools, and didn't have the teachers' phone numbers, so he resolved to email them when we got back home.

We didn't stop for dinner. Neither one of us was in the mood at that point.

More rifling through the sofa cushions. More going through pants and jacket pockets.

I was in the laundry room when I heard "ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!" from the dining room.

I walked in and found Ben with the Pods in his hand.

"I SWEAR I went though every damned pocket in my backpack and it was totally empty!"

I started giggling. Then laughing.

"It works every time," I said. "Every damn time."

While I'd been sitting in the school parking lot waiting for Ben to get the keys I remembered something from many years ago: when something is lost, you need to chew out the Prop Master for fucking up.

"Prop Master, you've fucked up! We need this prop for this scene in Ben's life!"

This never fails. Never. I don't know how or why it works, but I guarantee that the object in question will magically appear within hours—if not minutes after you do this. Is it magic? Does it confirm the existence of an intelligence beyond the physical? Does it point out another hole in the fabric of what we call reality?

I honestly don't know. All I know is that it works.

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If I Had the Down Payment Handy…

…I'd be all over this. It's exactly what I want. I'd even be willing to pay the $100 to have Carmax ship it from Henderson down to Phoenix.








2016, low mileage (should easily get another ten years out of it without the major problems starting), and very reasonable payments on a 5-year loan.

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Prime Time (Part One)

I still find it hard to believe that 1990 was thirty years ago.

As the calendar turned over from 1989 to 1990, I was a little over a year into my thirties, a time in life that my dad often told me would be my best.

Unfortunately it wasn't.

If the specter of AIDS and friends dropping dead almost weekly weren't enough of a "prime time" buzzkill, I wasted a good portion of the decade pining over a man who would never—who could never—be the man I so desperately wanted him to be.

From the moment our eyes first locked on the outbound L-train at the Montgomery MUNI station, I knew he was going to be trouble. That did not, however, prevent me from bounding off the train after he turned and winked at me when he got off at the Civic Center station—even though it wasn't my stop and getting a seat on the next outbound train was going to be a bitch.

To this day I still don't know what lesson the Rory Hansen affair was meant to teach me. While he admitted shortly after we met to once having a problem with crystal meth, he assured me that he was clean and everything was under control. Nothing in his behavior indicated otherwise, so I took him at his word. It wasn't until a year or so later that his behavior changed, no doubt prompted in no small part by my own manic behavior in trying to get him to commit to something more than just casual dating. There was a lot going on behind the scenes (his bisexuality, his continuing deep emotional attachment to his tweeker ex) as well, and it was obvious it was not under control. When we finally split up it was not pretty.

Over the course of the next year we tried several times to reconcile, but each time it never got beyond a single dinner together. It was obvious that we were never going to find a resolution to our differences in this life, and finally we both moved on.

Shortly thereafter, and before I moved out of the building where Rory and I had separate apartments, I ended up becoming infatuated with the ex of my next door neighbor. Ron and I actually became friends. But a year later I finally confessed that I loved him and—after him all but laughing in my face by saying, "How could I fall in love with you?" We parted company.

At this point—a little more than halfway through the decade—I'd had enough of San Francisco. Additionally I'd reached the point after eight and a half years with the same architectural office I'd worked at since shortly after arriving in the City, that I'd stopped caring whether public toilets needed to be spaced at 2'-6" or 2'-8" on center—and knew I needed to make a change. After an early abortive attempt to leave The City at the start of 1995 failed, I successfully cut my ties returned to Tucson that summer.

Tucson was the wonderful change I needed. I moved back into the apartment complex I'd lived in right before relocating to San Francisco ten years earlier, and it genuinely felt good to be back. The first thunderstorm that rumbled through in August gave me chills and the smell of creosote in the air afterward was a slice of heaven.

Employment, however was a struggle, I'd hoped to get my foot in the door somewhere doing PC tech support, but it was obvious that wasn't going to happen because there was just no demand in Tucson at the time. So, after first working as an 1099 contractor creating production documents for a small, one-man builder, when the opportunity presented itself to work for one of Tucson's premier residential architects, I jumped on it. Hell, if I was going to be stuck in architecture for a while longer I might as well work somewhere interesting. But even that had issues. As I recall the pay was decent and I had full benefits, but the narcissism that went along with working for such a personality was wearing and I was summarily ignored when I offered suggestions based on my own experience on how to improve workflow or customize AutoCAD.

Along the same time another mess came knocking at my door in the form of Emmett Higgin. People warned me about Emmett, but did I listen?

Of course not.

In a nutshell, after dating for about three months, I learned Emmett was dating at least two other men on the downlow—while still living with and involved with his supposed ex. By the time this came to a head, I realized the old adage, "No matter where you go, there you are," was more truth than fiction. Even though I'd changed geographic locations, my relationship drama, the ongoing emotional fallout from Rory, had come right along with me.

I remember meeting one of the other guys Emmett was dating (a friend of my ex—for whom Emmett's behavior also came as a shock) one evening, and after comparing notes, the next time Mr. Higgin and I got together I told him I knew about everything that was going on and demanded that he get the fuck out of my life. Thankfully, he obliged.

This, combined with the ongoing narcissism of my employer, this was the straw that broke the camel's back. It was time to go home; to return to San Francisco and face my demons head-on.

(to be continued…)