Author: Mark Alexander

Because I’m so lazy, I work as hard and as fast as I can at work just so I can be lazy for as long as possible everyday.

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Anything that is more than 62 miles away from me is further away from me than space is.

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Musing the Parade, Youth, and Growing Older in the Castro
26 June 1999

Once again the highest of holy days in the gay community is upon us tomorrow: Parade Day. And tonight is the infamous “Pink Party” in the ‘stro. I will not be attending either event.

Having recently passed into my 40s and—for all intents in the Castro “community”—now invisible, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, pondering how to adapt to several important changes that this number brings, most notably the fact that I’m no longer turning even the few heads I used to. Almost overnight I went from being, even with a few extra pounds—if not good looking, at least downright respectable—to completely invisible, and I have no idea how to redefine myself in the wake of this change. I know I’m not alone when I say that those of us hitting this age have no one to look to, absolutely no gay role models to emulate, and that’s making the whole transition doubly difficult. AIDS decimated my generation, and those of us who remain are charting unexplored territory. What exactly does it mean to be 40- or 50-something and gay in San Francisco at the end of the 20th century?

At the risk of sounding overly sorry for myself (and I’m really not), I am slowly coming to the conclusion that—at least in this particular community in this particular city, no one I might be interested in is going to look at—much less date—a 225 pound 41 year old guy whose life is as excruciatingly non-cosmopolitan (i.e. boring) as mine. I don’t travel, I don’t do drugs, I don’t drink, I’m allergic to cats, I can’t stand Barbra Streisand, I find the “bear” movement just as off-putting and attitude-ridden as gym-bunny culture, I don’t live for White Days at Macy’s Cellar, I don’t work out 5 days a week, I look even more ridiculous than most guys with a goatee, my sex life is almost strictly vanilla, and I’m a borderline, if not a full-fledged geek. And you know—after careful consideration—that’s okay.

The hardest part of this whole aging process is that I don’t feel any different than I did in my 20s or 30s. Okay, so I have a few more battle scars and several more pounds, I’m hopefully a bit more world-wise and mature than fifteen years ago, I have no desire to stay out all night and watch the sun rise, I have less patience for pretense, attitude and stupidity, but other than that, I still see myself as that wide-eyed young man who arrived on the strange shores of San Francisco thirteen years ago, and can’t quite figure out why the guys 27, 28, even 34 or 35—who I still see myself as—aren’t interested in even making eye contact with me any more.

Somewhat painfully, what I’ve come to realize since my return to Oz last year after a five month haitus is that The Castro is very much a place for the 20- to 30-something buff, steroid-assisted, “I want to be a model” chemically-stimulated crowd. And I am not at all surprised that carrying around a few extra pounds (which in the 80s indicated that you were healthy and almost had guys flocking to my doorstep) is viewed with such disdain by a generation that has not lost half it’s population to AIDS and defines beauty only in terms of porn-star pecs and six-pack abs. I will readily admit that I am totally amazed at what incredible shape most of these “kids” are in; I mean, even when I was 25, neither I nor my peers had bodies that looked like they were sculpted by Michaelangelo.

Anyhow, I’m slowly coming to terms all this, accepting it and at the same time realizing that in general I’m simply just pretty much over the whole gay “thing”. Yeah, yeah, I still love men, and I’d jump Ben Browder in a heartbeat, but I just feel this whole rainbow-bedecked-naked-men-dancing-on-floats followed by copious amounts of drugs and sex is getting so…tired…especially in San Francisco where being gay or bi or transsexual or sleeping with your neighbor’s iguana is so accepted and so well integrated into the fabric of life here it isn’t even an issue. C’mon folks…there are more interesting things about us, about me—even with my admittedly mundane lifestyle—than what I choose to do with my genitals. At least I would hope so.

Lest I rise the ire of the politically correct among us, I do have to admit that the parade and ensuing pre- and post-Bacchalian events do serve some purpose, and that is they’re tremendously thrilling and reassuring and exciting and yes, even fun for the newly-minted or newly-arrived gay boys and girls in our community. That’s a fact I’ve been trying to stress with a couple friends who recently moved here from the east coast since they apparently feel “bad” that I’m choosing not to participate in this weekend’s festivities. I’m certainly not trying to be a pariah, but c’mon—for us older or maybe perhaps more jaded souls, the parade lost its appeal after the fifth or sixth year (if even that long), and that’s not just my opinion. Ask anyone who’s been here any length of time and you’ll hear the same sentiments. At least I was able to convince myself to attend for a couple years after that usual cutoff point by telling myself there would be plenty of opportunities for photographing future painting subjects. Or rather, plenty of opportunities for taking pretty pictures of half-naked men…but how many pictures of sunlight accentuating chemically-sculpted pectorals does one really need anyway? Personally, just from the photos I took over the seven or eight years I attended the parade, I’ll have enough subjects to paint for the rest of my life.

Then there’s the whole other issue of the AIDS epidemic wiping out almost my entire generation of gay men. A month ago, while standing in line to buy tickets for The Phantom Menace, I realized that every one of my friends who might’ve been standing in line with me and interested in seeing this film were now dead. Everyone with whom I shared that special Star Wars magic from the very beginning was gone: Kent, Steve, Dennis—and no amount of big-budget special effects was going to bring them back. The same goes for my dance music collection. While I now certainly have friends who are familiar with a lot, if not most of the music I’ve managed to bring back into my life, they’re new friends who have totally different memories connected with the tunes; they aren’t shared memories, so the full depth of the music is somehow lost.

This has left me at times feeling very alone and very much out of place in the world, and this sudden “invisibility” in my own community hasn’t really helped things either. I thank God, or the Universe, or whatever you want to call the Is, for friends like Lei, who, after hearing essentially the same sentiments I’ve just voiced, have the uncanny ability to tell me exactly what I need to hear and put things in perspective.

From one of her recent e-mails:

“I like your lack of need to attend the damn parade to demonstrate—what? You know who you are and anyone who interests you will know who you are. Those in their 20 – 30’s are still growing into what they will be and need to make a lot of noise. That’s fine, too. It was something you went through in “old” San Francisco. We need to remember that we’ve been young before but young folk have never been old before. (Not that, from my vantage point, I consider 41 to be “old” by any means.)

“I am so glad that you realize you don’t like travel, drugs, booze, Barbra Streisand or Macy’s cellar. You can enjoy knowing folks who do, even if you consider them to be a bit nuts. Some of my best friends…

“Case in point: a friend of mine last Monday began rhapsodizing over his upcoming drive in a motor home to ALASKA where he will do his yearly fishing at some salmon spawning site. He recalls the year that he spent sixteen hours there, without eating or going to the bathroom, standing in one place wearing his waders in water up to his blue…. It was just SOOO wonderful. He caught his limit of three, weighing blank, blank and blank and then he got to clean and can them himself! Now how can you beat that for wonderful? (In my considered opinion, by going to Safeway and selecting a lovely pre-cut and boned fillet from the fish market.)

“I don’t feel the least bit sorry for you. I’m delighted you know yourself—as much as anyone ever can hope to—and in no way are you close to being a geek, so forget that! (I am in charge of the geek list.)

“What is sad to me is women/men who are so afraid of not being ‘with it’ that they torture themselves to look, act and think like those they consider to be the ideal. They try to replace their own pleasures with what they hope is the most current. Y’see, life is set to music. You find the music that fuels your soul. Why learn all the lyrics to the latest rap song that you don’t understand just to prove—what?”

“You can be sure that there are many men of your gentle age, who are going through the same wonderings you are. You’ll find him—or he will find you. ‘Just being you’ ain’t bad, y’know.”

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It’s amazing what you find when you go rummaging around in old hard drives…

August 2000, over a year before my cancer diagnosis and still thinking I understood how the world worked. Hell, I hadn’t even started going hoarse yet (that wouldn’t happen for another three or four months). Bill Clinton was closing out the last bit of his Presidency, the Twin Towers were still standing, things were relatively stable in the Middle East, and the world—or at least the United States—was still sane. And then everythting jumped the shark…

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Someday human eyes will see this directly. Not in our lifetimes, but someday. Until that time we’ll have to make due with seeing through the cameras of our robotic emissaries.

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To be honest, they weren’t that far off. On the details, yes. The themes, not so much.

(Be patient, it may take a while for the video to load.)

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1645 Folsom Street, #7. My first—non-shared—apartment in San Francisco. September/October 1987.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was one of those places I immediately think of when I hear the word “home.”

At the time, the area was still very much industrial/commercial in nature. The building was a half block from Hamburger Mary’s and just around the corner from the SF Eagle. At $745 a month, this one bedroom plus den stretched my budget but I loved it. #7 overlooked the extremely shallow paved back yard (that was never used by anyone). It had a good southern exposure, even though the equally tall buildings completely surrounding the yard sometimes made it feel like it was at the bottom of a light well. It also had an easily accessible roof deck where you could throw a lounge chair and catch some rays or the wonderful views at night.

About eighteen months after I moved in, #9 opened up on the top floor, and I jumped on it. It wasn’t quite as big as #7 (no separate den), but it was bright and airy, had a charming—if non working—fireplace, and a decent view of Twin Peaks if you stood in either of the bay windows.

The biggest adjustment moving upstairs to the opposite side of the building was the noise. Sleep was impossible with the windows open for the first few nights I was there because I was now facing Folsom, and even then it was a busy thoroughfare. But when the winter rains started sound of drops hitting the pavement and the woosh-woosh of cars passing on those wet nights more than made up for it. Parking (or lack thereof) continued to be a problem; I can’t even begin to tell you how many hundreds of dollars in $10 overnight street-cleaning parking tickets I racked up. But this was still home, and after I struck an arrangement with one of the business owners a few doors down to rent a parking space in their lot for $25 a month, the parking problem all but disappeared.

Then there was the stove in #9. It apparently hadn’t received a proper cleaning since it was originally put in place from the looks of it. I made the mistake one night of lifting up the range top, thinking I’d only have to wipe up a few spills under the burners, but I ended up spending the entire evening—with a putty knife—scarping off god knows how many years of accumulated gunk. But it shined thereafter!

This is where I was living when the Loma Prieta quake hit in 1989. The building came through with nary a scratch, but it pointed out the disadvantage of living in that particular area; probably because of its zoning and demographics, it was one of the last areas of The City to regain power. Even so, if I hadn’t made a very poor decision some months earlier and asked an even poorer decision of a romantic partner to move in with me, I might’ve stayed much longer. As it was, we transferred the lease into his name and I moved out in 1990.

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For the moment I am really very, very tired of everything—more than tired.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

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Equifax’s hackers weren’t the first to steal my info; Equifax itself took it without my permission a long time ago.

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After reading this article today, I decided to follow its suggestions and fortify my online presence a bit…because y’know I’m so famous and all I’m gonna get hacked.

Yeah, right.

Well, actually I did it because so much of my online life—like the article’s author—is tied to my Twitter login. I’d hate to have to go through what that poor guy did if it was ever compromised.

So I enabled two-factor authentication and downloaded my archive. I opened the archive and started looking my tweets from when I joined the service in 2009. Much like reading my Journals from twenty-five years ago, all I can say is:

For the first few months I constantly referred to myself in the third person (because apparently that’s what all the cool kids were doing), as in, “Mark Alexander…had a tasty piece of cherry pie.” “Mark Alexander…is wondering if this day is ever going to end.” “Mark Alexander…thinks having basic computer skills should be a requirement for employment in healthcare.”

Well yeah that last one is still spot on, but seriously…

One other thing that stands out (besides my supreme social media naiveté at the time) is how innocent the service used to be. Like I posted yesterday, “It has mutated from a simple way to express pithy thoughts with your friends into a vehicle for psychic violence and unending hostility.”

What’s equally disheartening is realizing how many folks whom I once had vibrant online relationships with have simply disappeared from the system. And don’t even get me started on the number of broken links in all those tweets.

That is something that’s bothered me long before seeing it played out on Twitter. As I’ve mentioned previously, on this here blog thingie, broken YouTube links have been an ongoing thorn in my side. What good is recording your life and sharing cool stuff with the world if half of it is inaccessible after a year or two, and what does it say about us as a society that we’re putting all our trust into recording our history now in zeroes and ones, only to risk having it all disappear in the blink of an eye?

At least the ancient Egyptians had the good sense to carve everything into stone.

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Cute little place on Meade Street in Denver.

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Using a phone case is like wearing a condom, sure it feels a lot more satisfying without it, but without it you run the risk of having an expensive accident.

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A Break From Twitter Showed Me How Broken It Is

By Daniel Cooper, Engadget

In J.G. Ballard’s novel High Rise, the residents of an opulent apartment block abandon the outside world. The building offers every possible amenity, from a supermarket to a bank; work aside, there’s little reason to leave. A series of incidents turns the block’s occupants into savages who spend their days raping and murdering each other. And yet, although the front door is right there, nobody wants to walk through it and escape to civilization.

Four decades later, and the world that Ballard predicted is here — it just doesn’t take place in a tower block. Instead, 328 million people across the world spend their days plugged into Twitter, which becomes more of a nightmare every day. It has mutated from a simple way to express pithy thoughts with your friends into a vehicle for psychic violence and unending hostility. Which may explain why more than a million Americans have quit the service in the last three months.

I am (probably) Engadget’s most prolific Twitterer, spending hours on the site each day and tweeting incessantly. I justify my overuse because it is the “people’s news network,” and we need to remain informed right now because there is a lot going on. After all, the US, UK, Russia, North Korea and China are ruled by despots who are actively leading us toward global war. Companies are destroying the fabric of our society, our civil rights and our planet in service of a fatter quarterly profit. Not to mention the annual game of avoiding Game of Thrones spoilers and shit-talking live sporting events with everyone else.

Cold, Blue Turkey

I decided to take a weeklong break from the platform to see if, like all those other quitters, life is happier on the other side. The day before had been a fruitful one, with a handful of my digital bon mots earning a flurry of likes and retweets. I don’t doubt that every time I see Twitter validate my work, a minuscule hit of dopamine floods my brain. The delivery method may differ, but social media can be as addictive as hell.

It’s a lesson that I’d learn just 10 minutes after making my resolution as, without thinking, my mouse hand-clicked the desktop shortcut for Twitter. I am such an obsessive user of the site that even the process for accessing it had been consigned to muscle memory. It took real self-control, and some degree of itchiness, to get past the initial stages of withdrawal the first day. It was only because I had the crutch that is Facebook, my least-favorite social network, that I could get on at all.

I normally have Twitter’s web client open during work, both for newsgathering and as a necessary reward during the day. Then, I’ll check the site during bathroom breaks and while I’m trying to put my baby girl to sleep in the late evening. Losing it suddenly meant I had to concentrate on the human interactions around me, as well as get things done around the house. The first thing I found was that I had a lot more free time in my day.

Not the people’s news network

For a site that professes to keep you connected to what’s going on, Twitter does a terrible job of keeping you informed. It’s easy to trick yourself into believing that you’re getting the best version of the news, with experts in their field sharing things you’d never see in a newspaper. And there are plenty of smart, erudite folks whose opinions I trust because I know they are legitimately clever people.

But, equally, I’m not above nodding along with a 100-tweet thread written by someone who describes themselves as a national-security expert. It’s all too easy to assume that whoever retweeted him or her into my feed has made the effort to ensure that what they’re sharing is legitimate. Because I’m certainly not looking too hard at the author of these tweets, even though we should all be actively guarding our media consumption.

And here’s the thing: My media consumption has gone up by an order of magnitude when I’ve been away from Twitter. It’s just that I’m getting the facts from The Guardian, The New York (and London) Times, The Telegraph, FiveThirtyEight and Vox. The measured and even tone of those publications is a breath of fresh air if you’ve been listening to the neurotic commentary that rolls past in Twitter’s bottomless feed.

Twitter is the enemy of calm

As much as we like to deny it, humans are herd animals with a herd mentality that can be sent into hysteria far easier than we think. The day I returned to the site, it was full of folks panicking that we were about to die in a nuclear holocaust. It could happen, for sure, but pissing and moaning about it on the internet won’t do much about it beyond making everyone unnecessarily stressed. Rather than indulge, I closed the site and went about my day.

We know that social media has an uncomfortable relationship with our mental health, with addictive loops keeping us glued to our screens. But addiction is not the only issue we face, as Instagram has also been lambasted for being harmful to people’s mental health. Services like this amplify anxieties about body image, lifestyle, wealth and the many other facets of our lives that we choose to broadcast.

Then there’s the paralytic effect of this constant barrage of stress that means you feel as if you are incapable of doing anything. Twitter and Facebook have, perhaps unwittingly, become agents of the status quo — you spend your days flapping online instead of changing things. If I were an evil billionaire looking to suppress dissent against my adopted political cause, I’d write the social-media companies a big check.

Spending any time away from that Ballardian madness, however, and you start to notice changes in your own psyche. I was more effective, more decisive and I had more time in my day — because Twitter is designed to suck away the minutes in your hand. My head was clearer, my sleep seemed to be sweeter and frankly, I could swear that I was happier without its nagging presence in my psyche.

Coming back

My seven-day absence from Twitter has ended, yet I’m not back to using it anywhere near as frequently as I used to. When you’ve been away from something long enough you’re suddenly able to see the flaws in a way you couldn’t up close. I don’t feel as constantly panicked as I did before, and I feel more effective in the time that I have each day.

If there’s an easy way to explain this, it’s like the ex-smoker visiting his office’s smoking room to catch up with the daily gossip. The fug, to which you were immune before, now chokes your throat and blinds your eyes, and you resolve not to visit too frequently. You can go back every now and again, much like you can do many things in moderation, but not as your one source of connection with your coworkers. Because whatever benefit you get, the amount of poison you need to inhale to justify it is simply too damn much.

(Source)

I tried a week-long absence from Twitter myself, and I have to agree with everything this particular author wrote. I’ve returned, but I only scroll down about a dozen tweets or so, close the application, and go back to whatever else I was doing.

I quit Facebook cold turkey many years ago, and it was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. The addiction to social media is real. I had to fight the urge on a daily basis to reactivate my account until it had been permanently deleted, and even then, for years afterward, I had to ignore the siren call to to return to the network. And I now realize that I had been using Twitter as my methadone to Facebook’s heroin, and stepping away from that was much easier.

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Condensed/edited from a thread I saw on the Tumblr:

There’s something really terrifying about the concept of being pursued by something that can only walk slowly after you. Just slowly following. You can chill for a while if you get far enough away but it’s still coming and won’t. give. up.

That’s called “persistence hunting” and it’s how humans hunted all sorts of megafauna to extinction, as well as what let our species become so disperse and so numerous. Our existence is a horror story told from the monster’s perspective.

Basically our hunting super power is that we are really smart, good at tools and can walk/run forever. 

My roommate Kait runs 20 miles 4 times a week.
Horses can only travel about 32 miles a day.

If my roommate ran 20 miles twice in one day (possible if she does one in the morning and one in the afternoon) she would out travel a horse.

She is not FASTER than a horse, but if a horse was walking away from her for 8 solid hours,  Kait could catch up to it.  She could probably also walk after it for an additional 5-10 miles after the run and then stab it when it got too tired to go on.

But Kait’s athletic.

I, on the other hand, am a fatty fat who weighs 210 and never exercises ever.

I once—completely spontaneously because i had no money for the train—walked 17 miles in the winter from one end of Chicago to the other. I had also not eaten and was wearing a backpack. It took me 3 hours, but I accomplished it with ease. If I wasn’t a chub goddess, had eaten, and it was summer and not wearing a backpack with a laptop in it, imagine how far and fast I could have gone.

Horses can only sustain a run for about 15 miles (at 8-10mph it takes them a little over an hour).

If my fat ass was walking towards a horse for 3 hours and it was literally running away from me. It would become exhausted after 15 miles and unless it can recover completely in 2 hours for another lengthy sprint, I can reasonably catch up to it and stab it. (not that i would ever stab a horse. horses are terrifying and should be regarded with suspicion, respect and fear)

The longest run ever was 350 miles over 80 hours without sleep.

We are endurance monsters.

Humans terrify me.

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In two to three days you will die. Luckily, that timer resets every time you drink a glass of water.

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Labor Day marks the unofficial end of summer across most of the United States, although you’d never know it from the horrific temperatures gripping most of the western states. Here in Phoenix, even without taking the abnormally warm conditions into account, autumn really doesn’t arrive until you reach the point that the air conditioning can be turned off for the season—historically coinciding with the end of Daylight Savings Time in the rest of the country.

The day after Labor Day was also traditionally the first day of school for those of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s. That’s now shifted; Ben’s school district has been back in session for nearly a month, and they now have a week-long “Fall Break” in October, something totally unheard of when I was in school.

Our Labor Day holiday this year was uneventful. Ben had to conduct CPI training on Saturday. Sunday morning I got out before it was too hot and mowed our seemingly-quarter-acre of back yard (tracking app on my phone indicated I walked 1.5 miles during the process) that hadn’t been touched in nearly two months, wiping me out for the rest of the day (afternoon naps are good—when the dogs let you actually sleep). And today we simply did a variation of our normal Sunday routine. Ben made breakfast, mowed the front yard, and we did our grocery shopping in the afternoon. We didn’t even throw a traditional holiday pot luck like we have in years past.

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