Author: Mark Alexander

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I rise today to say treason is not a laughing matter. It is a serious crime embedded in the Constitution, punishable by death. But since your Commander-in -Chief chose to raise it at a political rally, let’s have a discussion about treason… Is it treason for a presidential campaign to meet with a hostile foreign power to sell out our democracy and rig the election? Is it treason for a presidential campaign to meet with Russian spies who promise information that was negative about a political opponent and then fail to report that meeting to law enforcement officials? Is it treason for your former National Security Advisor to be a Russian asset sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin? How dare you lecture us about treason. This is not a dictatorship. It’s a democracy, and we do not have to stand for a reality show host masquerading as president of the United States.” ~ Hakeem Jeffries, Democratic Congressman from New York

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As most of my readers already know, I lived in San Francisco for approximately sixteen years, encompassing my late 20s through early 40s.

The other morning, while laying awake at 4 am, memories of San Francisco started bubbling up. I don’t know if it was my age/hormone level at the time I lived there, or whether it is something about The City itself, but going over my memories of San Francisco I came to the disturbing realization that the vast majority of those memories—okay, pretty much all my memories of life in San Francisco—revolved around getting laid or trying to get laid…under the guise of looking for true love, of course.

Naturally, during my time there I worked. I made friends. I went to movies and plays. I took photos, made art, read books, acquired new skills, spent way too much money on way too much stuff, and explored the natural beauty of the Bay Area. But it seems all that was nothing more than background noise amid the unrelenting need to connect.

I would like to think that I fell into that lifestyle over the course of several years, but if I’m being totally honest, I have to admit it started almost the minute boots were on the ground.

While I did date and had several serial boyfriends, the smorgasbord of carnal delights and availability of potential sexual partners literally anywhere in the City is no doubt why so many refer to those 49 square miles as “Disneyland for Adults” and none of those relationships actually lasted. “Cruisin’ the Streets” is more than just an old Boys Town Gang song. You could connect with someone on the subway, waiting for the bus, on your lunch hour downtown, walking home after work—and either go right to your/their place, make plans to meet up later, or duck into an empty stairwell for a quickie; literally anywhere. Buena Vista Park, North Baker Beach, “the whispering bushes” and the southern convenience station at the polo field at the western end of Golden Gate Park, the Hyatt Embarcadero, the 1808 Club, the Shaklee building, the 11th Floor of the Russ Building, The Playground, the Sir Francis Drake, Mike’s Night Gallery, the Sheraton Palace…

You get the idea. There was a lot of action going on in The City. All. The. Time.

Inspired to start keeping a record of my life in San Francisco after seeing Prick Up Your Ears about a year after my arrival there, my journals read like an embarrassing, depressing erotic novel, full of saucy but ultimately empty encounters, littered with the names of men of whom I now have no conscious memory. (Oh, to have had cell phone cameras back then!)

I can’t help but think that in the wake of 9/11 and the added security everywhere that followed, most of those locales have long since been locked down, but I know how industrious and creative horny men can be, and despite the authorities’ best efforts, trysts will still happen somewhere.

Before I moved to San Francisco, when my friend Kent (who had arrived about six years earlier) once related how he stopped to have sex with some guy he met while on the way to a date with another, I was appalled. I could not understand how such a thing could happen, much less that anyone would actually partake. Note I said before I moved there…

While that particular scenario never happened to me, it was apparently not that uncommon, and I had plenty of other equally lascivious encounters during that decade and a half to make up for it. To this day I’m still amazed that I made it out alive, somehow remained STD/AIDS free, and didn’t end up with a police record.

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…is how and why so many people of my generation—who were children in the free-love 60s, teenagers in the anti-war 70s, and came of age in the “Do What You Wanna Do” 80s—have turned into such ridiculous, conservative right-wing christian douchebags in adulthood.

That’s the reason I haven’t been to a single High School Reunion. With only two exceptions, (one a liberal gay I met in first grade and the other a slightly conservative-to-middle-of-the-road straight Jew who was one of my best friends in high school) I haven’t kept in touch with anyone I went to school with. What little I have gleaned from cursory social media searches over the years has told me all I need to know and confirmed that I want nothing to do with any of those people.

 

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I’m getting a colonoscopy and upper GI endoscopy today. This was prompted in part by anemia and some slightly-off norm blood tests last fall that had my doctor (who errs on the side of caution, bless her) sufficiently concerned to send me to a hematologist. The hematologist, in turn, referred me to a gastroenterologist, as even though I’ve had no indication of a GI bleed, this is the first thing they check when this sort of thing occurs.

It’s been ten years since the last one, so I was due for a colonoscopy this year anyway. The endoscopy was something my GI at the time of the first colonoscopy wanted to do in response to my decade-long history of recurring GERD. I never followed through with it because the GERD was controlled by Prilosec and quite frankly, I hated her guts. She had the bedside manner of a pit viper.

I’m not worried about results from the colonoscopy; the endoscopy has me more concerned. I’m fulling expecting a hiatal hernia diagnosis at the least.

Excuse me now while I run to the toilet—again—in response to the final prep solution I had to drink this morning.

UPDATE: I worried unnecessarily, both about the procedure itself and the outcome. I was literally asleep two seconds after they inserted the bite guard and don’t remember a thing (other than it was the most restful sleep I’ve had in ages) until I woke up in the recovery room. Esophagus and Colon were unremarkable. The doc removed 7 benign polyps from my stomach lining, all of which were bleeding to some degree. Source of the blood loss located and taken care of! As I told Ben afterward, “You’re stuck with me. No cashing out my life insurance just yet!”

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Can. Not. Wait!

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Plays an adorable pocket cub on the rebooted Will & Grace.

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After a delay of over a year from its original scheduled release, the third and final installment of the Maze Runner trilogy finally hit the theaters last week. I saw it today and all I can say is…well…that was $7.50 and a little more than two hours of my life I’ll never get back.

Okay, I will admit it’s been a few years since I read the book, and I’m a little hazy on the small details. But c’mon. This was one of those films “based on” a book that the script writer obviously never actually read; the “based on” part being the title of the book, a few of the characters, and precious little else. I suppose I should have expected it; the previous film was just as off-script as this one,

It’s kind of sad because the first film was faithful to the source material and it was a genuinely interesting story. I guess subsequent marketing surveys convinced the filmmakers that there just wasn’t enough blowing shit up in the two subsequent books to attract their desired demographic. and changes needed to be made.

And oh…was there ever a lot of blowing shit up in this last film.

As I read in a review,”By the time the villainous scientist played by Aidan Gillen sighs in the middle of a fight scene, ‘Okay, that’s enough,’ you’ll have long since come to share his weariness.”

That about sums it up.

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The desert radio tower in Pahrump, Nevada that beamed Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell across the continent for a generation.

I miss the golden days of the face on Mars, Open Lines, whatever looney outer space conspiracy Richard C Hoagland was cooking up, Linda Moulton Howe and the UFO nonsense, and of course the C Crane radio because Y2K.

That was when late night conspiracy radio was at its finest, before it descended into paranoid racism.

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Insomnia is an evil, evil thing.,

It’s 3 a.m. I woke up about 90 minutes ago and haven’t been able to get back to sleep. I tried all the usual tricks: clearing my head, consciously staring into the black void, counting my breaths, counting backward from 1000, and going to my virtual “happy place.” I even took a goddamned Benadryl as a last resort and nothing. I reached the point where I couldn’t get comfortable (one dog was planted firmly at shoulder level between Ben and I and refused to move), and was just tossing and turning. I didn’t want to disturb Ben any more than I already had, so I decided to follow some advice I’d read once upon a time and just get up for a bit.

I’m hoping it works. Otherwise I’m  facing having to function tomorrow on 3 hours sleep.

Among the many thoughts that poured into my head while I lay there in the dark was something I’d wanted to do for some time: pass on some history.

If you aren’t the first owner/occupant of your current house, how cool would it be to receive an envelope in the mail from a previous occupant, chock full of photos of the house in years gone by—or even better, when it was new—along with a letter passing on some stories of things that happened while they lived there? I know I’d think it was the coolest thing ever.

I realized that one of the gifts of age is my ability to now do that for someone else. Actually, four someones. Two of the homes my family owned while I was growing up were brand new when we moved in. A third (a 1930s era bungalow now in a much sought-after historic district in central Phoenix) was only about thirty years old when we lived there. And finally, while I obviously have no “new” photos of the 200-plus year old farmhouse my grandparents owned in upstate Massachusetts from the 1950s to the 1970s, I do have many photos from that period as well as a few from the early 20th century that they’d acquired while living there.

All these photos are already scanned; all I have to do is print them out, write some letters, and mail them off.

People always say, “If these walls could talk.” Well, I have in my power in at least four cases to compel that.

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I am not generally one to cast aspersions on a fellow blogger (there are so few of us left after all), but I just can’t any more.

There is one blogger who I’ve been following for quite some time. He’s  gay, well-read, and at times a hilariously funny and spot-on reviewer of film and television. But lately, every other post has been about Call Me By Your Name. It’s like he orgasms at the mere mention of it. He’s admitted to thirteen screenings (and counting), and every newly discovered muscle twitch or sideways glance in a screening immediately generates a blog post.

Don’t get me wrong: I’d been eagerly looking forward to seeing this film based on his recommendations for months. I saw the film (which I might not have heard of at all had I not been following him) in December. I liked it. I’d like to see it again. (Ben was not as impressed.) I bought the soundtrack on limited-edition numbered blue vinyl for chrissake! God knows I have impure thoughts about Armie Hammer. But enough is enough, dude.

I understand it’s his blog and he’s free to write whatever the fuck he wants, just as I am. And furthermore I understand from his writings on the subject that this obsession stems in part from his own coming out story; like the young character in the film, this blogger’s first male-on-male sexual experience was with an older man while he was still in his teens, so I get how it reaches deep down inside him and tugs at his heart-strings. And if it takes him to his happy place, fine. But dude—please stop shoving this movie in our face on a daily basis! You’re starting to turn me off to it completely and I can’t be the only one who’s feeling that way. Or, better yet—as I suggested to him in a comment I left on the site which seems to have immediately been deleted—create a new blog that is nothing but Call Me By Your Name.

I like reading his other reviews, but frankly I’m at the point where I’m simply about to drop him from my feed for six months to see any sort of balance returns.

Oh scratch that…six months will be about the same time the BluRay of the film comes out. Let’s call it a year.

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