Month: July 2018

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Twenty Years Ago

Journal

Friday, 24 July 1998

Thank god it's Friday. I've made it through another week.

I've no major plans for the weekend. The weather continues to be hot and humid, not exactly the kind of stuff you want to be out in.

Today's paycheck is the first one from which I'm going to be able to transfer a significant amount of into savings—$225. It's the first step in getting myself back to San Francisco.

I'm getting really tired of coming home every day to zero messages on the answering machine. I guess it just drives home the fact that most of my friends are in the Bay Area.

Derek  at work has grown a goatee. At first I didn't like it, but now it's all I can do not to go up and lock lips with him. Wouldn't that surprise his little wife? I wonder if it—the goatee, that is—tickles when he's snacking on her. (I'd pay to see that, if only for the chance to see Derek naked!)

As I write this, I'm listening to the second St. Tropez album, Belle de Jour. My favorite song has just started, a wonderful piece called, "Hold On To Love". It just plays me.

Eric, my boss, will be gone all next week. This is weighing heavily, and for the life of me I don't know why. He left a not-insurmountable list of things to do in his absence, and yet instead of really enjoying my Friday night relaxing, I find myself already worrying about what needs to be done next week.

I made the horrendous discovery around 11:30 last night that during my NT installation last week, with all the shuffling of directories across disks that I had inadvertently wiped out at least one, and possibly more, image directories. "Movies" was completely missing, and along with it, all the attendant sub-directories including Blade Runner, I Think I Do, Lost in Space and god knows what else. I was able to reconstruct a lot of it (everything before April was archived on a CD I burned) by the time I finally collapsed into bed at 1:30 a.m., but the rest remained to be gleaned off the web today at work.

I think I've restored most of what was in those directories, but since I don't honestly remember exactly what I had to begin with, it's kind of difficult to say for sure.

This loss prompted me to find a backup program—any backup program—that would work with NT. I'd remembered downloading a Win95 backup program off the Internet while at St. Mary's, and thought that they also had an NT version available as well. The hardest part was remembering what it was called!

A search via Infoseek turned it up—Novastor. And yes, there was a version available that worked with NT 4.0. It's now installed at home and works fine.

The rest of the NT setup is working fine as well. I finally got rid of the annoying error messages that were cropping up in the Event Log, and now all that remains is buying a new SCSI card for the scanner and installing the new software (ordered yesterday) to go along with it.

Oh…by the way…one of the users downstairs has a Jibber Jabber still in the original box that she's going to sell to me. I offered her $20, and she said, "Are you serious?" I told her I was, that I really wanted one of those dolls.

And here's one for the record books…a dream, that is:

Let's call it, "I fucked Lee Chaffee in hyperspace."

I had gone to see Lee. He had been distraught and despondent for weeks, and I decided to see what I could do about it. When I got there, his room was a disaster and he was almost in tears. I asked him what had been going on, and he said, "She's no better. You'd think after that surgery and the threat of cancer she's change, but she's still the same," referring to his mother. Apparently she had been making his life rather difficult.

"What about believing in the magic of life?" I asked. "What about your faith in all things unseen?"

"It's all bullshit!" he said. "What magic? I see no magic whatsoever."

He was standing there with his arms crossed. I walked up to him and said, "You need a hug." He shook his head no, and at first refused to uncross his arms. When he finally did, and returned the hug, it was if I'd opened a tap. He was sobbing uncontrollably.

ZAP! I was gone. I found myself standing in a dusty roadside café somewhere in the desert. I wasn't exactly sure where I was, other than I knew I wasn't on the plane we commonly call reality. There was a motley group of customers in attendance. I turned around to leave, and ran into Lee, who was coming in through the small foyer.

"Sorry I left so—abruptly," I said.

"That's okay," he said. "I didn't want you to see me like that anyway."

We both walked in and sat down at a table. About ten feet away, sitting in a booth, a guy who looked like a truck driver leaned over to us and asked, "You boys know where you are, right?"

"On the dream plane," I said, "or more precisely, the upper astral."

"Smart boy!" the guy replied, and went back to the conversation he was having with his friend.

Lee looked surprised, as if he hadn't known where we were. "Magic," I said to Lee as I looked at our surroundings. It may have looked like a dusty southwestern café, but the menu items were anything but southwestern. A large sign on the wall advertised, "Rigel Burgers," and other things that I don't precisely remember that were decidedly un-southwestern.

From there on, the dream got really strange, because Lee and I started making out—wrestling, more like—on a bed which had suddenly appeared in the middle of the café. We ended up having a definite exchange of energy albeit without any real "sex" involved. That seemed to finally cheer him up, and we went outside to leave.

At the adjacent filling station, Lee was busy putting gasoline into his sister's Bronco. (I was kind of surprised that he thought he needed gasoline, much less a truck, to get back home.) I walked out, wearing a bright red shirt. (I may have been wearing it all along, but I only noticed it out in the bright sunlight.) I had just gotten a pin made that I'd attached to the shirt, and wanted to show Lee before we left.

"What are you hiding there?" he asked as I walked up to him. I took my hand away and "I fucked Lee Chaffee in hyperspace!" was written. The attendant got a good laugh out of it, although Lee was decidedly unamused. "Where'd you get that?" he demanded. "Inside," I said. "You know, you can get anything here." The whole situation was so funny (mainly because Lee, who had always been my "teacher" in all things metaphysical was being so slow on the uptake, but also at the absurdity of the situation) I started laughing out loud—both there and back here in three-dimensional reality—so much so that I woke myself up.

I guess that's about it for now. I suppose there's more, but I'm already all over the map and getting tired.

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Smokin' Hot

Over the years, many of you have left comments such as, "Ewww!" or "He'd be cute…without the cigarette," when I've posted pictures of men smoking. Okay, I get it. I agree it's a vile habit that more often than not leads to cancer and a host of other inevitably terminal health ailments—not to mention the stink it leaves on your clothing. But there's also something I find undeniably erotic about it as well.

I've never smoked—probably in defiance of my mother, who when I announced as a child I had no intention of ever smoking she quipped, "You say that now, but wait until you get older. Everyone smokes," (it was the 60s after all)—but when I first came out, I was smoking-neutral. I'd have sex with smokers and non-smokers alike.

I don't know what prompted it, but somewhere around the mid 80s, smoking became an automatic disqualifier for me. Just as if you had no hair on your upper lip—which I readily admit now was incredibly shallow—if I spotted a cigarette in your hand I wouldn't give you a second glance.

But several years later, that changed. Seeing some hot guy smoking went from being an absolute turn-off to a guaranteed head-turner. I still wouldn't date anyone who smoked because of that stink, but from a distance and for a brief sexual encounter, it would immediately get my attention.

Maybe it was the Marlboro Man era in which my hormones came into full bloom, or maybe it's simply an obvious oral fixation (as if you hadn't noticed I also like pictures of men sucking cock), but whatever the root cause, I find certain photos of men smoking incredibly erotic.

The more you know…

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You Know How to Beat Trump and the Republican Co-conspirators Who Enable Him?

From Politicalprof:

Lots and lots and lots more people who oppose Trump and his enablers need to show up and vote in November. And guess what? If enough show up, then all the gerrymandering and vote suppression and Citizens United shenanigans in the world won't be enough to stop the blue wave.

To paraphrase General Ulysses Grant when troops under his command first met troops under Robert E. Lee's command in the US Civil War, "You need to stop worrying about what Lee is going to do to us, and start thinking about what we are going to do to him."

Power isn't given. It's taken. Trump and his conspirators and apologists aren't going to be embarrassed into quitting. They're not going to skulk away when their obvious hypocrisy is exposed. They're not going to change their minds when they see a funny meme mocking Trump and his Trumpettes.

They have to be beaten. And we have to beat them. That's the way it works.

Trump and his minions know this is coming. That's why The Orange Shit Stain is already floating the false narrative that Russia is going to interfere in November…for the Democrats!

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Shower Thoughts

In as little as 5-10 years we're going to have people running for office whose every teenage mistake has been meticulously preserved on social media.

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Quote Of The Day

Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future."– David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

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This Pleases Me

As you've no doubt heard by now (if you follow tech news at all), last week Apple surprised nearly everyone by releasing new versions of the 13- and 15-inch  Touchbar MacBook Pro. Amid the other upgrades and improvements was the addition of the Third Generation Butterfly Keyboard "to decrease the noise level" of the previous generation. Not as Apple was quick to point out, to increase the reliability of the keyboard itself. Because you know, the problem with the previous generation of keyboards was reported by only a very small number of users. That's why they're replacing even out-of-warranty keyboards free of charge now and refunding the folks who've forked out money to get them repaired in the past.

It has nothing to do with all the bad press and multiple class-action lawsuits. Um. Yeah. Whatever, Apple.

As the folks at iFixit quickly discovered, Apple's redesign includes what I call a keyboard condom; a extremely thin layer of silicone polymer between the key mechanism and key cap that not only cuts down on the sound of the keyboards, but also does it's best to keep out the detritus that can render the previous keyboards inoperable.

While this will affect me in no way whatsoever because Apple has categorically stated these new parts will not be used to repair the previous generations, ("We're going to replace pieces that break with more pieces that will break!") it at least it restores my faith enough that I wouldn't hesitate to buy a new machine if/when the need arises.

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Quote of the Day

My demons are not remotely tackled. They're just mildly concussed." ~ Camille Preaker (Amy Adams) on HBO's Sharp Objects

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Update

I need to keep this in mind as I head into week four of unemployment, because yes…this has forced me to admit that I really was very unhappy where I was. It was beyond time to move on, and as I've said many times in the past, "If you know it's time to make a change in your life and you don't, the Universe tends to do it for you."

I had two good in-person interviews and one relatively decent phone interview last week. I haven't heard anything back on any of them. I know I won't hear anything about the phone interview until late this week at the earliest; the next step will be an interview in person, and the hiring manager is out of town at the moment. I should hear about the other two today or tomorrow.

Tomorrow I have to attend a mandatory "Employment Reorientation" meeting at AZDES in order to continue receiving my meager $240/week unemployment benefit. (Colorado paid more than twice that.) When the notice arrived the other day, Ben quipped, "'You've been selected…' Because you're OLD and don't know how to use the internet to find a job."