Echium

I have meant for awhile to tidy up the far back corner of my yard.  When R Man and I bought this house 15 years ago, I cleared out all the invasive crap that covered the yard and, faced with a big blank dirt slate and little experience with gardening in California, I started sticking in plants randomly.  My plan: "it'll either live or it won't."  In that particular spot of the garden, I tucked in a couple of shrubby plants, native to Madeira, called Echium.  They've turned into one of the most successful (if you want to call it that) specimens in my erratic efforts.

The original crop.

Cross bred into this.

Maybe a little too successful.  Bear in mind one of its common names is Patterson's Curse because of its aggressive and invasive nature.  But I still like it because it has beautiful  tiny sapphire blue and purple flowers that mass together to make huge clusters up to six feet long on spikes that can be twelve feet tall.  It is a "say something" plant.

And what it says in my yard is "Get out the way, bitch" because those two modest ones I put in all those years ago have cross pollinated with sluttish echiums from all over San Francisco (bees love them) to found a dynasty of shaggy monsters the size of Madonna's ego that have covered a quarter of my open space.  I still appreciate their beautiful big blue blossoms, but enough is enough and I decided to clear them back.  I'm not terribly worried about losing them, I've cleared them out a two or three times in the past and my experience is they will be back flourishing in a couple of years.

Pretty, but trouble.  Isn't that always the way?

So I armed myself with lopers, pruners, a saw and a hatchet I call "The Punisher" and headed off for the back.  This is not dainty Jane Austen lady's gardening, this is more like  Sherman's March to the Sea.  As I was whacking my way through the brush a piece of debris flew up to hit me in the eye and knocked my contact lens right out.  The nerve!

On one of my previous assaults on the echium stronghold, four or five years ago, friends took this little snap which they still think is just the height of hilarity.

"Oh no, you DID NOT just attack me back.  Behold I am peenee, destroyer of Echium fastuosum.  Hear the tread of my boot and know your death, shrubby motherfucker."

And believe me, destroy them I did, having replaced my contacts with my glasses and a resolve to take that patch of Edenic paradise down to the ground.  Which I did.  Take that, bitches.

Namaste, Bitches

Now that all that election foolishness is past, can we get back to discussing more important and amusing things, things like me?  Just for instance.

And what's up in the peenee world?  Our dear friend Secret Agent Fred has taken to forwarding me artistic images he finds whilst out and about on the internet.

God bless Fred.

Also, I have resumed yoga (and can I reiterate how annoying yoga is in that no verb actually relates to it?  I'm "doing" yoga.  I'm "practicing" yoga.  I'm "performing" yoga.  Yuck.  Sounds more like I'm contemplating taking up porn.)   Anyway, I'm back on the yoga train.  I purposely did not say anything about this because there is nothing worse than announcing your plans for improvement and then you sort of drift off, but your friends remember and somebody asks "So how's the (fill in the blank: yoga, meditation, jogging, porn, whatever) going?" and you have to come up with some lame answer that doesn't reveal you failed to last three days on the path to enlightenment.

When R Man got sick and I started seriously taking care of him, I blew off yoga.  I wasn't in the mood for much of anything, spinal twisty flexy things included.  But that's been almost two years and I was stiff and achy so last month: Yoga-time!

Why yoga? Because I was one of the sissy girly boys who could neither throw nor catch anything and couldn't sprint to the end of this sentence, I was always uninterested in physical activities until I stumbled on yoga.  I was thrilled to find out that, sincee I'm double jointed, all those bizarre looking poses are a snap for me.  Hoo hoo, take that, homphobic, moronic junior high coaches of my past.

And when does the meditation thing start?  I never have any of that higher minded crap in my yoga.  I'm too busy trying to get the poses down right so that I don't tear my hamstring (again) and then I'm thinking "I wonder if there's any Butterfingers left?" so not much meditation.

The only thing I refuse to indulge in is yoga classes.  I get in there and the teacher says "So now put your right hand on your left knee...." and I freeze and think "Which one is my left?  Which one is my hand?"  Plus you're always surrounded by these skinny bitches in their Lulu Lemmon yoga togs and their tidy-ass ponytails doing all the poses just a tiny bit better than the teacher.  I know you're not supposed to be worrying about how well anyone else is doing, but get real.  I wind up spending all my energy on refraining myself from slapping them.

So I do my yoga alone at home and just wearing a tee shirt.  I know I'm leaving myself open to a bunch of low-minded comments here, but I hate wearing pants for yoga.  There is absolutely no sweatpants in the world loose enough to be comfortable when one is trying to see how far one can bend over backwards.  Fortunately, I  have no mirrors in there so I'm spared what is probably pretty close to this:

I swiped this from MJ over at Infomaniac.  It was attached to Mitzi's recipe, but I suspect it is actually a snap of MJ.

Goddam paparazzi.

à choix multiple

Ask yourself: "Was this my Halloween?"

 A bowl of leftover candy because no little urchins showed up to extort Butterfingers and peanut M&Ms out of your unwilling grasp?

Or was it this:

Don't you wish it was?

Also, in loading the picture of the candy bowl, I stumbled across this little treat in our files.  Apparently it is one of R Man's old fans from back in the day.  R Man was very popular.

Life in San Francisco

The recent Folsom Street Fair, featuring public bondage, gays dressed up like pandas, and my favorite thrift store, Out of the Closet.

Stormy Weather

No snark from me about mrpeenee readers who are riding out Hurricane Sandy.  Eeks.  It sounds astonishingly bad, even, as the youth of today would have it, srsly bad.  I had planned to make a public service announcement reminding everyone buying emergency supplies that when the power goes out, even the cheapest bourbon tastes better without ice than any gin, but events sort of overtook me, so here's hoping the best for all you Mid-Atlantic types.

Bracing for the surge.

I supported our sisters in peril by going out for a massage at the spa this afternoon.  I snagged one of my favorite massage guys; he does this thing where he pinches your Achilles tendon HARD.  It is both excruciating and exquisite at the same time.  Fabulous.  I only hoped that help.

mrpeenee Explains Baseball

Baseball is not the one with the pointy brown ball, that's football (but not the football all the rest of the world calls football,) it's the one with the small white ball, but not the really small ball cause that's golf.  There are a whole bunch of rules, the point of which are to make the whole fucking thing take longer than it needs to.  The last time mrpeenee was dragged to a game he was caught reading a book by his long suffering father.  I was bored, what did he expect?  As Aunt Ida in Female Trouble reports "The world of heterosexual is a sick and boring life."

So the World Series apparently is this baseball thing, much like Project Runway's Season Finale, and San Francisco is in the series hoo hoo, and seems to be winning, more hoo hoo.  Even as a sportsphobic gayboy, I have to admit it is sort of thrilling to have the home team doing so well.  You go girls!

Just this evening, a particularly pleasant, warm l'heure bleue, Secret Agent Fred and I were making our way through the Castro and the queer bars were yelling and high fiving like a Hooters after too much cheap speed with all the TVs tuned into the game.  I'm pretty sure most of these poofters have no firmer athletic insights than does mrpeenee, but they were not allowing that to slow down their sloe-gin-fizz-fueled mayhem.

Baseball.  Yay.

Define "Gay"

Everybody knows I like the porn, right?  I have an archivist knowledge of the subject as well as an aficionado's fondness of it.  So when the topic of Resse Rideout, porn person, and his being straight while professionally having sex with other men came up (on some really unfortunate VH1 show,) I was less than impressed.  Plenty of guys doing the nasty in gay porn and other rent-type boys insist they are straight.  Maybe they really are just interested in easy money, maybe they gots issues.  Either way, I don't particularly care.

What struck me more in this instance was the substantial gap in appearance between the mister and his missus:

Reese, the kind of muscley smoothness and pretty face I'm so darn fond of.

Mme. Rideout, who looks like she would be someone you could turn to if you were interested in finding out the current price of crystal meth.

Also, as a side note, there was a period when Reese Rideout's face looked sort of odd.  I thought he had had cheap work done, but now seeing his charming wife, I wonder if, instead, it was recreational chemicals.

Cause he's not gay.  Heavens no.