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This is Brilliant

#DonaldTrump #statue #unionsquare #nyc #manhattan

A photo posted by Alfonso Quiroz (@quiroza) on

The revealing public art was the work of INDECLINE. Watch the video below to see the statues (which have also popped up in San Francisco, Cleveland, Seattle and Los Angeles) being made.

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Thirty Years Ago

Thirty years ago today I started my San Francisco adventure.

It had been a long time coming. While one of my dearest friends in the world moved there in 1979 and regaled me with stories of wonder and debauchery that simultaneously enticed and repulsed me, a little voice in the back of my head kept telling me that city was off limits until further notice. I’m glad I heeded that voice for once; there’s no telling if I would even be here today if I’d emigrated there any sooner than I did.

In May 1985, my partner at the time had some frequent flier miles that he needed to use or lose. He announced he was flying to San Francisco for the weekend. “Not without me you’re not!” And thus the seed was planted.

The following Christmas, we returned for an extended visit. By the time June the following year rolled around, my friend Lee had already secured employment there and our entire tribe was making preparations to leave Tucson, none of knew exactly when this was going to happen.

At the beginning of August, my supervisor called me into his office and announced they were laying me off. I started laughing. “That’s the oddest response I’ve ever gotten from anyone after being laid off,” he said. “That’s because the universe is telling me to move to San Francisco now.”

On August 15th, I threw a couple of well-packed suitcases in the back of my car, and along with a rather attractive boy named Jim Girard whom I’d met a few weeks earlier (my partner and I had split up earlier that summer), began the journey west to begin an adventure that was to leave an indelible mark on my life.

We didn’t take the quickest route to the City. Since we didn’t know if we’d “ever come this way again,” we eschewed I-5, overnighted in Santa Barbara, and took Route 1 up the coast.

We reached Monterey mid afternoon on August 16th. At the time, thinking that Monterey was only “a few minutes” south of San Francisco, I noted that the Aquarium was one place I definitely wanted to see after I got settled. Funny thing is, after all the years I lived there, I never did see it. It was always a case of “I’ll drive down next weekend.” Next weekend never came.

Late that afternoon, we finally arrived at our destination. Lee had been staying with friends of his in the Lower Haight. They were renting two units on a single floor of an old Victorian and had plenty of room for guests, opening their doors to yet another Arizona transplant.

811 Page Street, my first—albeit brief—San Francisco domicile

Not realizing that August weather in The City was decidedly different from June, I had neglected to pack appropriate outerwear, and I found myself shivering in the damp fog that rolled in like clockwork every night. Thankfully when Jim’s ex arrived a week later (talk of reconciliation was in the air) he brought my jacket and all was once again well in the world. Jim and Dave returned to Tucson about a week later, leaving Lee and I to wait for the arrival of the rest of our crew in the subsequent weeks while being told by Lee’s friends nearly every night over dinner that “The City will chew you up and spit you out.”

To be fair, the City was hard on us. Of the five of us who initially moved there, I was the only long-term survivor—and even then The City had the last word when I was forced to leave after the dot-com bust.

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From Your Mouth to the FSM’s Noodly Appendages

When Trump loses in a jaw-dropping landslide in November—virtually wiped out, outside the hatred-and-resentment-fueled Deep South—it will be a very personal defeat. No one will be able to blame conservative ideology or the Republican platform for the massive ass-whoopin’ that’s coming Trump’s way. He is going to be labeled the Ultimate Loser in American History and it’s all personal. What the voters are rejecting is Trump himself—his essence as a human being, his ugly, deformed personality, his unsuitable temperament, and his horrible nature/mental illnesses. By October, the battleground states are going to be Montana, Kansas, Arizona and Georgia, with Trump desperately trying to claw his way back towards a win in South Carolina and Kentucky. He’ll be lucky for every electoral vote over 150 he gets—and if he keeps provoking Ted Cruz, the election’s biggest surprise could come in the Texas suburbs of Houston, San Antonio, Dallas and Austin.” ~ Down With Tyranny

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This Looks Amazing

I just read Story of Your Life the other night after seeing a teaser for Arrival, the upcoming film that it’s based on. It’s not an especially easy read, concentrating as it does on language and how it influences our perception of the world, so I’m not exactly sure how this will translate onto the big screen. There were only two or three main characters in the work and it contained none of the ominous military excursions that are hinted at in the trailer.

Still, I’m excited to see this. More excited than about I was about seeing Star Trek Beyond—which we still haven’t made it to.

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Stolen from the Internet

Think of it like a movie. The Torah is the first one, and the New Testament is the sequel. Then the Qu’ran comes out and it retcons like the last one never happened. There’s still Jesus, but he’s not the main character anymore, and the Messiah hasn’t shown up yet.

Jews like the first movie, but ignore the sequels. Christians think you need to watch the first two but the third movie doesn’t count. Muslims think the third one was the best, and the Mormons liked the second one so much that they started writing fan faction that doesn’t fit with ANY of the series canon.

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Bringing Change?

I read this morning that people (at least in Florida) who intend to vote for Trump say they are doing it because he is the candidate most likely to bring change.

Granted, the kind change that the Mangled Apricot Hellbeast intends to bring is something that neither this country—or the planet—can afford, much less survive. But the question that keeps coming back to me is why do people want this so-called change thingie? Human beings are notoriously resistant to change, and only accept it when it is forced upon them by outside forces (see: Global Warming).

What exactly is the change they hope to see? It seems to be a return to the mythical Ozzie-and-Harriet Father-Knows-Best Leave-It-To-Beaver days of the 1950s—scenarios that never really existed to begin with—not anything that would actually improve this country and move it forwards.

What these racist, bigoted, misogynistic, homophobic (did I leave anyone out?) voters seem to be wanting is not change per se, but rather a return to “the way things were.” You know, back to an era when a woman’s place was in the home, minorities knew to bow before their masters, and those pesky HO-MOsexuals stayed in the goddamn closet.

They aren’t asking for change; they’re clamoring for change to stop and time to go backward in a fear-driven response to the rapid societal changes that are taking place around them. These changes are leaving them bewildered and fearful for loss of the way of life they came to accept as “right” and “proper” and “the way things have always been.”

And no one seems to see the irony in that.

Sorry folks, it doesn’t work like that. Civilization moves forward—unless it finds itself with the nuclear codes in the hand of a tiny-fingered Cheeto-faced ferret-wearing shitgibbon—and then all bets are off.

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You Call Me A Liberal?

Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Voting Rights Act, liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed every one of these programs. Every one. So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, ‘liberal’ as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won’t work. Because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor.” ~ Congressman Santos, The West Wing, 2005

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R.I.P.

2016 is turning out to be the suckiest year that ever sucked in terms of celebrity deaths.

Kenny Baker, the man who played R2-D2 in the Star Wars films has died at the age of 83, after battling a long illness.

Reported by The Guardian, Baker first became famous in 1977 for playing the lovable robot in Star Wars IV: A New Hope. Even though he was a robot, R2-D2 quickly became one of the most human characters in the films. Baker reprised the role in The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi and as well as the prequel films.

Baker returned for The Force Awakens as a consultant, despite his ailing health.

Baker is also known for his appearances in beloved 80s films like The Goonies, Time Bandits, and Flash Gordon.

All I can really say is….

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For Posterity, Warts and All

Inspired by seeing Joe Orton’s obsessive diary keeping as depicted in the film Prick Up Your Ears, I began to record my own life events—both mundane and salacious—from late 1987 until mid 2002.

Lately I’ve been going through those old journals, attempting to convert them from  their original ancient Word and WordPerfect formats into something readable on today’s equipment. Word 2016 won’t open any native document prior to the 97-04 format, but Apple’s Preview application has no trouble (go figure), allowing a rather painless cut-and-paste into the new format. But nothing I own will open the old WordPerfect documents save for Apple’s own TextEdit—which unfortunately also displays all the garbage that WordPerfect threw into those documents in addition to the actual text. It’s a very time consuming process to weed that crap out and get it in a usable format. And the very few files that I for some reason password protected—even if was able to recall passwords from 20 years ago—are lost completely.

As I’ve written about before, the Mark who existed prior to the 2003 cancer diagnosis is very different from the one who came out of that ordeal, and nothing has brought that into sharper focus than going over those old entries.

It’s worth noting that while my own obsessive journaling started sputtering out a few months prior, it came to an abrupt end at the time of my diagnosis for two reasons. Firstly, I really didn’t want any written record of the thoughts and feelings I was experiencing at the time because I couldn’t come up with words to describe any of it without sounding full of self-pity, and I was just not that kind of person—knowing full well even then that I was going to come out of it okay. Secondly, only a few months after completing treatment and on my way to a full recovery, I discovered blogging, and while I couldn’t be quite as open and unfettered with my words being published for anyone to see as I could when writing only for myself, blogging did scratch the itch that journaling had ignited.

While I’m not proud of a lot of the things that are recorded in my journals (much of it is embarrassingly cringe-worthy at this point), they do accurately represent one gay man’s journey through his thirties while looking for love and living in San Francisco in the late 80s and 90s. In spite of the AIDS specter constantly looming, there was sex; lots of it. There are many names in those journals of men with whom I was obsessed but am now unable to conjure a face for. There were broken hearts and hearts broken.

San Francisco was even then an extremely expensive place to live, and while I generally made enough to get by (if only barely), angst about money was a recurrent theme. (Some things never change, even now.) But there were also reflections on the magic that existed in that city, whether it was catching sight of the fog spilling over Twin Peaks on an August afternoon, or the way the sun glinted off the bay, or the first evening after daylight savings kicked in and you found yourself walking home from work in the crisp dark air, or something as simple as a smile exchanged with a handsome stranger on the train.

My growing love for technology—and the horrific amount of time and money spent acquiring it—is spelled out in excruciating detail. Trips to computer fairs and installing hardware or software are so obsessively documented that I want to reach back in time and slap the shit out of that Mark, telling him to get the fuck away from that glowing screen and go to the beach!

There were also many a rumination about spirituality and attempting to find meaning and my place in the universe; pondering alien life and reincarnation—oftentimes punctuated in the same entry with a description of an unexpected orgasmic encounter with a total stranger in some public venue.

I knew even as I was recording those encounters for posterity that some day, with older and wiser eyes, I’d recoil in horror, and ask, “What were you thinking?! You were such a fucking asshole!” And sure enough, I now find myself doing exactly that. Really, Mark…you’re damn lucky you didn’t get yourself killed or arrested. ANY NUMBER OF TIMES.

Ah, the innocence of youth.

And yet I am reminded of two quotes from a onetime favorite book, Illusions, the Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, that I always kept in mind when recording my adventures:

“You are lead through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self. Don’t turn away from possible futures before you’re certain you don’t have anything to learn from them.”

and

“Live never to be ashamed of anything you do or say is published around the world—even if what is published is not true.”

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The Google Has Been of No Help

Sometime in the late 60s or early 70s, I remember looking at one of my mom’s architectural/decorating magazines and seeing an absolutely amazing home that was basically a glass cylinder laid on its side nestled among a wooded lot that overlooked an open field or stream. The glass part of the cylinder was a series of curved skylights between structural rings that stretched from floor level to slightly a bit past overhead where they butted against a solid structure.

I don’t know if it was House & Garden, or House Beautiful, or some other magazine, but numerous online word/image searches using any combination of tubular, glass, cylindrical, skylight, house, forest, stream, 60s, and 70s has come up with absolutely nothing. Since I can’t narrow the time frame down to anything more concrete than prior to 1972 but later than 1968 maybe—and even that may be in question—even locating the original magazine at a library may an endeavor.

So I thought I’d throw it out into the blogosphere and see if this jogs anyone’s memories (because I have such a huge readership) before I resign myself to spending a weekend at the library…

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Must See

But you’re a far bigger person than I if you can make it through the entire five and three quarter minutes. I lasted until about 3:30 and had to turn it off…

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Texas GOP Lifer Quits Party and BURNS Them With This Amazing FUCK YOU Letter

From democraticreview.com:

It’s no secret that the Republican Party is in self-destruct mode. No less prominent Republicans than former President George W. Bush (who almost looks honorable compared to Trump) have stated that he (Bush) is probably “the last Republican President.” Many within the party are disgusted that their party has become entirely co-opted by The Donald and is now effectively the Party of Trump.

One such person is Texas Republican Chris Ladd who runs the website goplifer.com, whose tagline is “Because leaving isn’t actually an option.” well, guess what? Chris Ladd, the “GOP Lifer,” just left. He just released this AWESOME resignation letter from the party. Check it out:

The Iraq War, the financial meltdown, the utter failure of supply-side theory, climate denial, and our strange pursuit of theocratic legislation have all been troubling. Yet it seemed that America’s party of commerce, trade, and pragmatism might still have time to sober up. Remaining engaged in the party implied a contribution to that renaissance, an investment in hope. Donald Trump has put an end to that hope.

From his fairy-tale wall to his schoolyard bullying and his flirtation with violent racists, Donald Trump offers America a singular narrative—a tale of cowards. Fearful people, convinced of our inadequacy, trembling before a world alight with imaginary threats, crave a demagogue. Neither party has ever elevated to this level a more toxic figure, one that calls forth the darkest elements of our national character.

With three decades invested in the Republican Party, there is a powerful temptation to shrug and soldier on. Despite the bold rhetoric, we all know Trump will lose. Why throw away a great personal investment over one bad nominee? Trump is not merely a poor candidate, but an indictment of our character. Preserving a party is not a morally defensible goal if that party has lost its legitimacy.

Ouch! Ladd wasn’t through. He continued:

Fast-forward to our present leadership and the nature of our dilemma is clear. I watched Paul Ryan speak at Donald Trump’s convention the way a young child watches his father march off to prison. Thousands of Republican figures that loathe Donald Trump, understand the danger he represents, and privately hope he loses, are publicly declaring their support for him. In Illinois our local and state GOP organizations, faced with a choice, have decided on complicity.

Our leaders’ compromise preserves their personal capital at our collective cost. Their refusal to dissent robs all Republicans of moral cover. Evasion and cowardice has prevailed over conscience. We are now, and shall indefinitely remain, the Party of Donald Trump.

I will not contribute my name, my work, or my character to an utterly indefensible cause. No sensible adult demands moral purity from a political party, but conscience is meaningless without constraints. A party willing to lend its collective capital to Donald Trump has entered a compromise beyond any credible threshold of legitimacy. There is no redemption in being one of the “good Nazis.”

I hereby resign my position as a York Township Republican committeeman. My thirty-year tenure as a Republican is over.

The rats are fleeing the sinking ship!

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Quote of the Day

“You will never win a fight savaging the parents of a dead soldier. So it’s a fight you simply don’t engage in. A smart terrible person would get this and say something along the lines of (assuming you wanted to maintain the policies blocking Muslim immigration): ‘I grieve for the Khans’ loss and I very much respect their opinion and their courage. But I believe the policy I have outlined is necessary for our national security for the following reasons …’ Trump doesn’t seem terribly bright. But this isn’t about intelligence as we test it with logic puzzles. Realizing that this would be the only way to respond requires a level of self-awareness a narcissist lacks and a degree of impulse control Trump simply does not have.” ~ Josh Marshall

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