Month: August 2021

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Raise Your Hand

…if you ran across this guy in the woods and without saying a word would just walk up to him, climb on his lap, and ride that pony?

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Happy Saturday

I can feel the cool breeze across my face.

We had a storm—well, several storms—move through last night. The light show was spectacular and we got a good drenching as well. It seems that this year the monsoon is making up for the past couple where it was nominally absent. I understand that Tucson (about an hour and a half to the southeast) has gotten more rain this year than they have as long as they've been recording it. Phoenix as well seems unusually wet this year, something I am definitely not complaining about—even if the humidity is insufferable the day after those storms move through.

 

More rain is predicted for this evening, followed by a good chance of more the middle of next week. Should I wash the car tomorrow to seal the deal on that?

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So I'm Listening to Our Local Classical FM Radio Station This Morning…

…and it's brought me almost to tears more than once. It's all well-known stuff of course but they're pieces I haven't heard in years. Right now Smetana's The Moldau is playing, and I can't help but envision the translucent yellow vinyl copy that I buried in my collection somewhere. So-called classical is the music that got me into music in High School. (The first rock album I bought was Elton John's Caribou and when my mom heard it playing in my room I thought she was going to have a stroke.)

My folks were big into music. Neither played an instrument, but I remember the house always being filled with music. Classical was their first choice, but this being the 60s and 70s, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, Barbra Streisand and even Ferrante & Teicher (?  ) would often make an appearance as well.

Well, well, well…look what I found lurking in the dark recesses of my collection.

I'd really like to know what's happened to that vinyl, however. It hasn't been that long since I last hauled this out (maybe four years tops), and at the time there was no black in that disc whatsoever. It was all translucent yellow, one of the mesmerizing things I remember about this from childhood is how the grooves appeared to swim back and forth while the disk was playing. Except for a few errant pops and clicks, it still sounds good, but this is sad.

Is it a glitch in the matrix?

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Especially As I Get Older

I started keeping a Journal in the late 80s, shortly after I moved to San Francisco. (I may have told this story before, so if it sounds familiar, forgive me.) I did this shortly after seeing Prick Up Your Ears, where the protagonist journaled incessantly. It inspired me to document my adventures in The City—both lascivious and otherwise—because I knew at some point memories were going to fade and what better way of pinpointing when events occurred than to have them recorded in real time?

(There are also diskettes hidden away in a wall of one of the apartments I lived in that contain the first few years of that Journal, although I'm sure they'll be unreadable if and when anyone discovers them in the future.)

I kept the Journals up for over twenty years. At one point I had most of them printed out and bound, but I eventually shredded them, keeping only the electronic copies. Little did I realize at the time that the electronic copies would become increasingly difficult to access as file formats evolved. (WordPerfect, anyone?)

I've spent a lot of free time converting these file formats into the 21st Century, although I'm sure at some point they will become as difficult to access as the originals were—a fact I just realized while writing this.

Two things stand out while I've been doing the conversions. The first was how—for lack of a better word—lost I was before my cancer diagnosis forced a much overdue examination of my life. I spent a great deal of time "looking for love in all the wrong places," and while the adventures were certainly fun, they were ultimately unable to fill the need that was driving me into these situations in the first place.

The second thing that stands out is how, despite recording the names and the details of my interactions with the men I dated, there are many—way too many, truth be told—names for whom I cannot conjure a face. Digital photography wasn't a thing like it is today, so even though I was a rather prolific photographer, I often never got photos of the men I was dating.

I bitched about work a lot, although looking back on it now I didn't realize how good I had it at the time. When you work at a small architectural firm with the same four people for nearly a decade, you become like a family—with all the positives and negatives that relationship confers.

My weight was another thing I obsessed over in my writings; something that didn't really disappear from my life until after the cancer diagnosis and I came to simply embrace—and love—my body for what it was.

I stopped Journaling when I got the cancer diagnosis. I didn't want my writing to turn into a pity-party as I was going through treatment (which it easily could have), and frankly, I was getting bored with it. I discovered blogging a couple years later and while it's not quite the same thing as Journaling (especially of late), it's fulfilled that need to express myself—even if it's not as easy to look up when stuff happened since I don't share everything.