Trapped with the Stars of Yesterday

I had to go down to the Civic Center today to snag several more of R Man's certified death certificates for our lawyer, for the bank, for the mutual fund. I'm not even sure what they all are for any more. Everyone I deal with demands one; I expect to need one to get on the bus soon. After he was cremated, the funeral home ask me "How many death certificates you want?" I think I said "Uhm... five?" Should anyone ever ask you that, tell them you want a fucking ream of them. Believe me, they'll come in handy. And why didn't the funeral guy suggest something along those lines to me? Surely he's run into this before.

So anyway, I was in the Civic Center, an odd nexus of San Francisco. Museums and the library and homeless guys and a farmer's market and city hall and the Bill Graham Auditorium, which was surrounded by fancy ass tour buses and big rigs, one of which just said "drums" on its side. A flotilla of trucks, an armada of buses. Literally dozens of each. Traffic had just ground down to a complete halt. Complicating the picture was Larkin Street, the main way out of there, being closed by the cops at the federal building a block away. Why? Nobody was saying and even if they had been, you couldn't hear them over all the horns honking.

But why where all tour stuff swarming the auditorium? Darling, BRET MICHAELS. Wowzah. Did you even know he was still alive? Did you care? Indeed, but yes, on tour with his rockin' "We're Still not Dead" or something like that tour.

I took my death certificates (and wouldn't that be a fine, fine band name?) and fled.

SO very not Bret Michaels.

More Dreamy Dreams

I'm reluctant to discuss the dream I had Friday night for two reasons. For one thing, it's very difficult to describe, very slippery, and two, it's embarrassingly shcmaltzy. But I'm going to to try, because the impression it left behind was so amazingly strong.

I'll finish with some beefcake muscle pussy, just to even things out,

So, the dream, or more specifically the waking up, since I have no idea what the dream itself was. Stay with me. When I woke up I understood I had been dreaming about R Man and it seemed like the whole thing had no story or visual impression or memory, just an immersion in R Man himself. I came to with a vivid sense of how sweet he always had been. Not that he was a girl scout or suffered fools gladly, but he always had a deep lovability and kindness that was never syrupy. And when I woke up, it seemed like I had been swimming in his very sweet nature. It had been all around me like light is on a bright day.

Crap. I absolutely am failing at this. There is just no way to explain what the sensation was. It was totally different from any dream I've ever had. Of course, trying to describe a dream never works, but still, even among dreams, this was unique to me. It was wonderful. I laid in bed wrapped up in the emotion of it, reveling in it. If there was one brief moment of my life I could relive, it would be that one. That's how profound it was.

Oh, never mind. I knew, planning this post, it would never work. It's like describing color to a blind man, frustrating to me and boring to the reader. Let's move on, shall we?

Ask the Cool Cookie, over at I’m a Filthy Fucker (and who am I to doubt his assertion?) posted this charming image earlier this week:

I was very impressed by it.

My encyclopedic memory of smarm is so vast I was actually able to remember that the original was this:

Both have their charms, but I am always impressed by artisans and whoever ran this through Photoshop so successfully deserves our wholehearted admiration, don't you think? Yes, the beard may be a trifle plush (although that's probably part of its appeal,) but the chest hairs would seem to have been placed individually, each one nudged into place by somebody as devoted to his art as a medieval monk illuminating a manuscript of the Gospel. I say right on, girl.

Porn. Accidents. Porn Accidents.

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Dreamy Dreams

It's 6:50 in the morning and I'm up to write about my dream I just had.

It was set in a laundromat, the shabby kind that has mismatched equipment. Some friends and I were in this town for its film festival because they wanted to get the film they had made in the festival. Slowly, I came to realize the film their kids had put together was better and was actually going to make it and theirs wasn't and heartache lay ahead.

Also, some cute guy was there and took all his clothes off to wash them. This really happened in a New Orleans once while I was dong my laundry and the cops took him away even though he kept protesting his pants were wet. Nothing so untoward happened in my dream so I was able to chat up the cute guy. Now that I remember it he was wearing bright blue underwear.

There was tension that one of the few working dryers was going to be available before my friends' load had finished washing. An evil gypsy-looking guy was eyeing it. I found out another dryer that was marked Out of Order really worked if you leaned against the door to keep it closed. We told the kids that was going to be thier job and they weren't feeling it, but isn't that why you have children?

Because I wasn't washing clothes and had a bunch of quarters , I was very popular. Then my friends started telling me I should only give them my quarters. I started singing You Don't Own Me and everyone in the place joined in. Except, maybe the evil gypsy guy. Definitely the cute underwear guy

I can now fit youtube videos here in mrpeenee cause Mitzi from Clutter from the Gutter told me how. Yay for Mitzi.

Domino Porn

I am such a nerd, such a gormless nerd, I truly find this thrilling.

Something to give my life meaning.

Red Scare

When one is a middle aged homogay, there are times when the decorating sickness falls on one. There is nothing to be done, one must resign oneself to swatches. So let me tell you about my own particular Designing Women madness.

R Man and I had longed planned curtains for our poppy yellow dining room. He was holding out for hot pink and white stripes. Considering his very staid disposition, his occasional fondness for clown college style decor was always surprising when it reared its bizarre little head. I was actually all for it, but R's all-too untimely demise sort of derailed the project.

Since he died, I had periodically and with no great enthusiasm, hunted for fabric for the curtains. No dice. All I could ever find was excessively tasteful stripes and insipid flowers. One store where I described the chintz of my dreams, with monkeys and palm trees in pink and orange all but pushed me out the door.

Finally, though, I accidentally ran across a beautiful chinese style embroidered fake silk, with gold dragons and red thorn trees on a scarlet background.

I had our curtain lady (the amusingly appropriate Mrs. Draper. I'm not making that up) run them up, with a matching pair for the flanking windows in solid crimson silk.

Once that train had left the station, I found myself on a red roll. A coppery red mirror to offset the charming plum branches hand painted for us by the immensely talented Super Agent Fred.

A tiny tangerine glass vase.

And a beautiful oxblood lamp.

Lastly, at the store where I snagged the lamp and the vase, an enormous asian armoire in red lacquer waylaid me. I certainly did not need it. We had a perfectly good china cabinet that matched the rest of the mahogany furniture in the room. But you know, I never really liked that stupid hutch, and the armoire was on sale and it was red and all of a sudden I saw my hand passing over my credit card. The next thing I knew....

before

after

Saki scopes out the defensive possibilities of the new cabinet.

It's not my fault. It's The Sickness.

Sure, It's Easy to Mock the Elderly

For the last two days, I have forgotten the phone number to call in to listen to my voice mail on my landline. It's not listed in directory assistance (does that make sense?), I was always too lazy to program it in to speed dial and I did not have it written down anywhere; I had always relied on my hand remembering how to dial it, but on Tuesday night suddenly my hand rebelled. Stupid hand. I knew it had something to do with a 3, a 4, and a bunch zeroes so I kept trying different combinations. Turns out the receptionist at some law firm with a number very close to Voicemail Central was very nice; certainly nicer than I would have been when I stumbled across her three times in ten minutes. Eventually, I would give up and sullenly go back to looking at pictures of attractive young men. Sample provided.

And then, a few minutes ago, the fog lifted and suddenly I remembered the number, effortlessly. I called in and found out I had four messages waiting, only one of which I was actually interested in. I don't even know why I have a phone.