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A Repost from 2016

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 Grievance Journal

What Horrible Companies Still Exist But Shouldn’t?

Meta-retailers treating their workers horribly. Cell phone companies locking you into ridiculous contracts. Health insurance companies that deny every claim because you’re a pre-existing condition. Unleash some fury on companies that need to go out of business NOW.

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Released 44 Years Ago Today

Sumeria: Golden Tears (1978)

This was one of the more…bizarre…releases from Alec Costandinos. It tells the story of an alien traveler who lives until he finds true love and then dies by crying gold tears.

Hey, it was disco. It was 1978.

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A Repost from 2017 (Since We Were Recently Discussing Groovy Houses…)

Dream Houses

Having spent half my working life in the architectural profession, it should come to no surprise to anyone that I’ve designed my fair share of personal “dream houses.” Dozens. What might be surprising to learn is that I’ve never actually been a home owner.

I guess it stems from the very real refusal to settle down when I was younger. I loved the ability to pack up and move every six months if the desire struck me, and as much as I would’ve loved to have actually designed and built a home of my own, it was just never in the cards.

I was living in San Francisco when I finally started to get that urge to settle, and while I wasn’t making bad money, there was still no way I was ever going to be able to get a down payment together in the amount needed to buy a place. Moving out of The City wasn’t an option; as my friend Kent was fond of saying, “Why would anyone want to live just outside the pearly gates?” I’d rather continue to rent in San Francisco itself than own in Pittsburg.

And that financial situation hasn’t changed simply because we’re now back in Arizona. But that doesn’t mean a boy can’t dream.

Some of my dreams rarely progressed beyond basic sketches:

This particular one was inspired by an advert for the American Plywood Council (or something similar) in one of my dad’s architectural magazines when I was a wee young thing. The magazine is long gone but the image was forever imprinted into my memory.

This one—a small beach house—grew out of a triplex apartment development I had the pleasure of working on shortly after I moved to Tucson in 1980.

I can’t tell you how many house plans I’ve actually designed for myself since the architectural bug first bit in middle school. As my skill level increased, if my ideas got beyond the basic sketch stage, they burned with such intensity that I had to at least start a set of construction documents—if only a handful of those projects actually ever came to fruition with a complete, ready-for-a-bidding set of drawings.

Some of my first truly personal (i.e. not copied from another designer, a local builder or a magazine) designs were a series of desert houses originally inspired by Obi Wan Kenobi’s bungalow in Star Wars and the lower floor of the tri-level house my family lived in during my high school and college years.

Buried four feet into the ground with massive concrete walls to keep out the heat, this design motif resonated with me for years, eventually coming up with several variations…


At one point I even went so far with this theme as to design an entire apartment complex (small scale floor plans and exteriors only, I’m not that driven) on the then-vacant land on the southeast corner of Grant Road and Wilmot Avenue in Tucson—but I never really developed a good way of integrating multiple bedrooms into this particular ouvre—which obviously limited its appeal.

My move to San Francisco in 1986 inspired a new design aesthetic. I loved the Victorian row houses with their multicolored gingerbread trim, but I was equally impressed by the modern, contemporary variations on the theme that many local architects were utilizing.

This 3-story house was the vehicle by which I actually taught myself AutoCAD. I became so engrossed that I was literally moving objects in my dreams by calling out their cartesian coordinates!

In the mid 90s, I returned to my desert house design, armed with a new aesthetic gleaned from living in a 1920s-era Victorian for several years. The massively thick concrete walls remained, but the barrel vault roofs were gone and much more wood was incorporated along with an almost steampunk feel for the interior details.

I don’t remember what prompted me to do it, but a couple years after I tired of that exercise and had started contemplating leaving San Francisco and returning to Tucson, I pulled out a plan for a small house I once dreamt of building in in the northeast part of the city, at some undetermined point along the Catalina Highway before it actually started up into the mountains. I’d completed a lot of work on this plan already before moving to San Francisco—back when I was still doing overlay drafting with ink on mylar, but since I was now comfortable working in the virtual realm of AutoCAD, I decided it was time to transpose it into bits and bytes.

As you can tell, I tend toward smaller houses. Even this multi-structure design isn’t really that big. And this one’s builder-ready. Not only did I do the usual floor plan and exterior elevations that I do with all my projects, this was one of those instances when I did it all: foundation, roof framing, electrical, mechanical, and interior elevations. It was designed for a lot that gently sloped away from the street with an unobstructed view of the Catalina and Rincon Mountains. Sadly, while the land in that area was mostly untouched when I first envisioned this house in 1985, it isn’t any longer. My last visit to Tucson confirmed my fear that the area is now completely built-up and there are no more unobstructed views of anything except your next door neighbor.

And that brings us to my latest bit of mental masturbation:

This is the house we’re currently renting—with several changes. It’s the first time I’ve created a dream house based on a remodel, and I’m liking how it’s progressing. It started out as an innocent “what if” between Ben and I, but now it’s developed a life of its own and has morphed into a full-scale architectural exercise. As I’ve written before, it’s been an interesting excursion into the deep recesses of memory, pulling obscure AutoCAD commands from the dusty crevices of my head and continually surprising myself that I still know how to do this stuff. It’s also become my go-to “happy place” when I’m laying in bed awake and trying to fall back asleep at 4 in the morning…

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A Repost from 2018

A Disturbing Realization

As most of my readers already know, I lived in San Francisco for approximately sixteen years, encompassing my late 20s through early 40s.

The other morning, while laying awake at 4 am, memories of San Francisco started bubbling up. I don’t know if it was my age/hormone level at the time I lived there, or whether it is something about The City itself, but going over my memories of San Francisco I came to the disturbing realization that the vast majority of those memories—okay, pretty much all my memories of life in San Francisco—revolved around getting laid or trying to get laid…under the guise of looking for true love, of course.

Naturally, during my time there I worked. I made friends. I went to movies and plays. I took photos, made art, read books, acquired new skills, spent way too much money on way too much stuff, and explored the natural beauty of the Bay Area. But it seems all that was nothing more than background noise amid the unrelenting need to connect.

I would like to think that I fell into that lifestyle over the course of several years, but if I’m being totally honest, I have to admit it started almost the minute boots were on the ground.

While I did date and had several serial boyfriends, the smorgasbord of carnal delights and availability of potential sexual partners literally anywhere in the City is no doubt why so many refer to those 49 square miles as “Disneyland for Adults” and none of those relationships actually lasted. “Cruisin’ the Streets” is more than just an old Boys Town Gang song. You could connect with someone on the subway, waiting for the bus, on your lunch hour downtown, walking home after work—and either go right to your/their place, make plans to meet up later, or duck into an empty stairwell for a quickie; literally anywhere. Buena Vista Park, North Baker Beach, “the whispering bushes” and the southern convenience station at the polo field at the western end of Golden Gate Park, the Hyatt Embarcadero, the 1808 Club, the Shaklee building, the 11th Floor of the Russ Building, The Playground, the Sir Francis Drake, Mike’s Night Gallery, the Sheraton Palace…

You get the idea. There was a lot of action going on in The City. All. The. Time.

Inspired to start keeping a record of my life in San Francisco after seeing Prick Up Your Ears about a year after my arrival there, my journals read like an embarrassing, depressing erotic novel, full of saucy but ultimately empty encounters, littered with the names of men of whom I now have no conscious memory. (Oh, to have had cell phone cameras back then!)

I can’t help but think that in the wake of 9/11 and the added security everywhere that followed, most of those locales have long since been locked down, but I know how industrious and creative horny men can be, and despite the authorities’ best efforts, trysts will still happen somewhere.

Before I moved to San Francisco, when my friend Kent (who had arrived about six years earlier) once related how he stopped to have sex with some guy he met while on the way to a date with another, I was appalled. I could not understand how such a thing could happen, much less that anyone would actually partake. Note I said before I moved there…

While that particular scenario never happened to me, it was apparently not that uncommon, and I had plenty of other equally lascivious encounters during that decade and a half to make up for it. To this day I’m still amazed that I made it out alive, somehow remained STD/AIDS free, and didn’t end up with a police record.