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And This, Children…

…is why Phoenix doesn’t get rain. This is a perfect illustration of the heat bubble that rises over the city during the otherwise wet, monsoon months of summer. And why does this happen? Because the entire valley is paved over. The pavement absorbs the heat during the day, and then re-radiates it all night (which is also why we seldom drop below 90F in July/August). Storms approach, but dissipate or just split and go around this heat bubble, leaving the city dry.

Tucson to the south of us on the other hand, has retained its natural character and isn’t paved over nearly as much, allowing it to get those beautiful summer monsoon storms.

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Almost Complete!

Almost complete. Just missing MDNA, Who’s That Girl, and Evita. (MDNA is arriving next week.)

Madge (I’m two months older than she is)—along with Pet Shop Boys—has provided the soundtrack of my life, especially during the height of their influence in the 80s and 90s. I will forever associate Papa Don’t Preach and West End Girls with my arrival in San Francisco.

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Fuck You, Instagram!

Every time I log in through the web. EVERY GODDAMNED TIME!

The fucking app forced me to change my password six times yesterday, and as of 11 pm last night it was still giving me issues.

I guess I pissed off the algorithm by flagging too many ads as inappropriate or posting too much political bullshit. Yet there are “influencer” accounts that post nothing but soft core porn and they seem to be doing just fine.

I closed the account I had since 2009 in 2012 when Instagram was bought out by Facebook. I almost immediately regretted that and came back, but what Instagram has become over the past twelve years bears little resemblance to what it once was: a fun, lighthearted place where people posted photos of their food or pets, or just random shots they’d taken during the day. I know what I see is determined by who I follow, but it still seems like it’s now a feculent, toxic hellstew of brain-dead influencers, pathetic, validation-starved men showing their enormous bulges, guys whose self-worth seems to revolve around their abs and pits, and ads. Ads, ads, ads. Every third post is an ad for some stupid piece of crap or something advertised that “you can’t live without” that you wouldn’t buy even if you saw it in person.

I closed my Facebook account a decade or more ago because it too, had simply gotten too toxic. It wasn’t easy, fighting that urge to log back in and reactivate everything was a daily struggle for months. But eventually the need passed and I moved on with my life. I know Instagram has become the same unhealthy addiction that Facebook had become and that I need to walk away from it, but I’m not quite ready to give Meta the stiff middle finger it so richly deserves. At least not yet.

So what are my alternatives? In addition to this blog (which I do not want to share with everyone I know on Instagram) I also have an account on Tumblr; again, not exactly something I want to share with Insta for many of the same reasons. I suppose I could set up a second,  SFW Tumblr account and direct everyone who follows me on Instagram to go there?

Thoughts?

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“Picture It…San Francisco, October 1986…”

Don’t know what prompted me to post this on Instagram last night, but I figured why not do it here as well?

This was the first place in SF my ex and I shared after moving from Tucson.  It was a building that was being renovated by a friend of the architect I was working for at the time.

Bernie and I had already gone our separate ways by this time, but we decided to try living as roommates to see how it went. We were still friends after all, and the parting had been amicable.

There are lots of memories associated with this flat, but one that stands out above all the others was the night the owner (who lived on the third floor) decided to clean oil stains off the new garage floor with gasoline.  Seeing how this was a recipe for disaster, we called the fire department and upon arrival the fire captain screamed at him for the stupidity. “We have a half dozen homes go up every year because of this kind of stupidity!”

Needless to say our relationship with the landlord went downhill from then. The following June, when we put a pride flag on the front of the house he demanded it be taken down because we had “modified the exterior” by attaching the flagpole to the exterior of the building. We complied, and then hung the flag in the front window.

When it came time to renew the lease, he raised the rent an exorbitant amount (3-unit buildings did not fall under the maximum 4% annual increase clause in San Francisco), and after discussing everything that had happened since the gasoline night (including his continually yapping rat-dog that he would put out on the back fire escape) we decided it was time to move on.

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