Pride of Lions

I've just come from the Castro and I've got George Michael on the head phones and that's facile and doesn't do justice to the plethora of pink boas freely floating on softly sloping and muscled and waxed shoulders across my fair city on this drizzling evening. Asses on parade, asses proudly on display.

Tonight is the eve of the thirtieth gay pride parade, birthed here, , in the heart of the Castro, where a few good men and women knew in their hearts that they were no deviants, no perverts, but that they loved and were loved in return and could take it out, and would, would take it out to the streets.

For myself I am grateful to my parents, who told me that lucky is the person who loves, regardless of the packaging. To the men and women I have known... oh whatever, I think I might gag on my saccharine sentiment. I was proud tonight, proud of my city and proud of my friends, proud of my mayor.

So even though I will be leaving the City tomorrow to play tennis with a gay boyfriend, and as much as I poke fun at lesbians I got a shiver and cheered the dykes on bikes tonight. I will stand and fight the good fight for your rights, to marry and to divorce, to bear chidren or to not, to hold hands and to sheath your selves in outrageous fortune, not just here or New York, but all across the land like some queer manifest destiny, and no one will ever mind, or lash you to a cattle brace in the middle of the Montana emptiness to wither and die beneath the absent moon. Sexuality would never again be an excuse, for hurt or power.

But I am wandering into to darker territories when I meant to be happy, just as pinking and as featherlight as a boa, and I meant to tell all of the fearfully ignorant to embrace their sons and daughters, good god, how could you not?

so to all of you brooked by your spires of intolerence, hiding under pews and waving versions of the new testament, to all of you churchgoing peoples whose sexual proclivities would make a libertine blush, in particular all of you conservative cross dressers who shame your long suffering wives into recalcitrant submission, but would condemn my boa wearing, prideful friends to a lifetime of furtive and fraught gropings in bathhouses.

fuck you.
fuck you.

fuck you and your assbackwards suitablepersituation, fuck you and your "christian" values , if I had half a chance at connection I would seize it in both fists and have, and have been burned for the the better for it. For all of you chasing the devil, take a good, hard look at the white house and ask yourselves which is more punishable, and if the scales of justice were to mete out justice... a man to marry another man or a man who has directly caused the deaths of over 1700 men and women. On which side would the scales tilt. Whose hands are bloodied. Ask, I only implore you take a good hard look around, and I will look too. Though I am girded and ready for the mother of all revolutions. Don't scoff, at some point in the culture wars, we are all going to have to choose a side and stand at arms.

I sense that I must shortly to bed, that is if I plan on whoopng my gay boyfriend B's cherry ass into submission on the court tomorrow, my backhand may be inconsistent, but it is fierce.

Marathon Motherlode

I just finished watching the much awaited 2046, that shamefully made it to DVD before hitting my neighborhood cinema. It occurs to me, that if a Saturday was gloomy enough it would be interesting to do a side by side comparison of trilogies. Kieslowski and Wong Kar Wai.

Proposed line up:
Blue, Days of Being Wild
White, In the Mood for Love
Red, 2046

Film students seeking theses, thank me later. Based on those six films from a Polish European and a Hong Kong Cantonese you could argue the universality of tone and palette, and how we all, regardless of language and pigment more often then not fuck up those dubious tendrils of love and spend the rest of our lives in atonement or disguised agression. Which category are you, internets? I atone, lord do I ever.

Dinner when your six feet under

And you've grown weary of feasting on mulch and worms. While you're rattling about in your casket and playing the xylophone on your ribs and find that despite all your molars having dropped through the hole in your skull you are feeling a bit peckish after all...

Two neiman ranch pork loins, so thick and so succulent that you'll sorely regret the loss of those molars.
Brown them over medium high heat, eight or so minutes on each side, if you can't tell if they are finished, cheat, I always do. Finish with a splash of madeira and try not to set the confines of the coffin alight.

In a bowl swirl equal parts sesame oil, tamari and rice wine vinegar. Finely slice and quarter a peeled cucumber and chop a fistful of mint. Combine.

Slice and fan an avocado.

Halve a dozen or so sungold cherry tomatoes.

When the pork is well rested, slice against the grain, insert charred ends into waiting maw, chef's perogative.

Toss greens into bowl of cucs and sauce, plate.

Garnish with tomatoes, cooling loin and avocado, consume with cote du rhone blanc while watching your favorite family of morticians dabble ever closer to a tragedy Greek in scale. Wish you had opted for the double wide GV of caskets.

Flail at the television, want to smack Nate, want to smack Brenda, want to smack the red headed sister with the back of your boney hand, want to put Billy on his meds, want a composite boyfriend of David and Keith, want to weep for George.

Climb hill towards home, sit at laptop, compile recipe, take bath, what to do with all of that excess flesh, fall asleep, fitfully, plagued all night long by minty fresh mini-belches. Deep from underground am a lady afterall.

just like baseball and apple pie

P and I went to the stadium tonight, and it's become one of my favorite places, for the hum of the crowd and pleasant chord of leather on wood at a fantastic velocity. Tonight we had been invited to the luxury suites, an untofore unexplored privileged region of leather seats and private hot dog dispensers. And the late afternoon sky is parading it's best shade of palest azealea, within the red brick of the stadium we are gratefully sheltered from the juvenile wind playing with hemlines and unpinned locks. Tonight we were high enough for the flirty blue tailed swallows, high enough to gaze across the lapping bay and survey our domain like a pair of crownless queens, yet not high enough for a nosebleed, and that the Giants aren't doing so hot meant nothing to me but to be there as the full moon crested in the fifth inning bright orange and so edible, like James' giant peach needing to be plucked from the sky. I only love baseball for the atmospherics and sheboygans and I love both equally and without measure.

Later as I am walking home on the lookout for shooting stars I can hear the fireworks rumbling the very stadium I am now miles from. And it sends a chill and a thrill shimmying down my spine, the thrill of imminent danger and fire in the sky and chill running from the shrapnel in the sky and brick and glass melting like sand castles at high tide.

I have been doing a lot of thinking about bodies, about sturdiness and fragility, survival and resiliance and then the ease with which our flesh is ripped to ribbons. Specifically I have been thinking of the places that are far from here, and how easily those ribbons of flesh are neatly tied up into suitably non-horrifying digestable morsels. I keep asking myself how many police recruits can be blown up in Iraq, and how many people will wreath themselves in dynamite to blow up the police recruits and all I can come up with is the option of the dual many headed hydra, lop one off and another will rise it's stead, and so it goes, til the youngest son of the youngest son has blossomed to his own bright firework, exploding in a spray of metal and blood, pulling all of those struck dumb by the spectacle into deafening vortex of the red and the charred.

Elsewhere in America I heard a radio audience sing "Summertime" as I was driving through the gilt hills of California, and hawks were circling for carrion high above the freeway, your daddy's rich and your ma is good lookin'. I fell hard for that song, hard when I first heard my mother weeping over it when Janis sang it, but for me, when I heard honeyed Ella sing it with that melancholy orchestra and Louis Armstong's silver trumpet, and when he sings in his hesitant vibratto, one of these mornings you're gonna rise up singing, I thought I heard a long vanished god of a lesser pantheon whisper in my ear, one of these mornings you're gonna rise up singing, and I have been waiting ever since, but mostly I just wake up late and cranky, but I am still waiting. Like I am waiting for a pheonix, like I am waiting for the flood.

And now I have a few tasty morsels that I would like to share. The following snippets were gleaned after I had written under the influence of a semi lethal combination of vodka jello shots and margaritas which leads to a state I'd like to call extreme maudlin:

But I am tighter than the tightest clam. and also slightly swaying.

before night fell and the moon rose, and across the land and red threaded through my dreams a thousand blossoms bloomed, and a thousand gentle spoors spurred a velvet revolution.

I shift in my seat angry and ribald, and a week and a day passes like heaven in an old car, and all the words that were sure things get bent out of context

all of the good songs fall like leaves, and everybody leaves, in burnt auburns and dead summer greens, spring colors begging an operatic exit, choking on thoatfuls of grass and begging for October.

the meridien blue in the distant east

soft as a mellon, conch shell pink

crossing bridges at top speed, unafraid of the inevitable crash.

past 2, closing on three

and the liquor stores are closed and I'm thirsty and water is a poor subsitute for the vodka that I have been plying my system with, that is between bouts of dancing on runways with gayboys with my phone on vibrate in my cleavage waiting in vain for the the red headed youth with the faux hawk to ring with the promise of a party in my bed. But the bar is small and I am practically the only real girl, it's K's 40th, and we dance and sweat beads on the brow, and I think that I might short out my phone, but it doesn't ring.

What happens. I bump into an old flame who tells me I am the prettiest girl in the room, this is at Tosca pre-scene of my tentative ventures towards degeneracy, easy to practice when your facing the mirror.

What happens later, we pile into the rare cab on this night of the bridge and tunnel black and white ball to a club I used to dance when I was young and misguided, and now I am older and equally misguided but the club is now a very, very gay bar in the lower Haight, and if you would have known the pink projects on the corner 10 years ago, white girls didn't walk there, but it was fun to dance there in the stiffling heat, redolent of dope and spilt beer.

And oh what a decade can do, gone is the terror of the pink boxes and gun shots, the gays have invaded, it's all beards and lithesome bodies, except the almost tragic tranny with the mismatched implants singing la vie en rose, her tits were seriously askance and on the sidewalks the crack addled are praying on the drunken and the high for nickels and cigarettes.

Which brings me to me, yes me, wide eyed and swathed in smoke at three in the morning, and my jaw is working, and just how much do I love to dance. It's the best kind of exhibition, because I am cloaked in a beat and I am not responsible for my hips, and I can clasp my sweet gayboy in my arms and lead and twirl, and the fake smoke might clog my nostrils but no more so than the drugs that K gave me and I sucked down in the toilet, which is why I had the cab deposit me at cala foods even though it was too late and they were out of camel lights, which is why I am smoking marlboro 100's and feeling very much like a denny's waitress, which is why I am wide awake and not asleep, and I am this close to walking out to patrol the neighborhood and peek in windows for the cool of the night on my face or if I were really feeling crazy I could take the car and drive fast on vacant streets and wake on a forlorn curb on a desolate corner of Daly City, but that might result in an accident or arrest, and I am just not that high, or not high enough, or high enough but tempered with reason.

Or just really awake, and how I love to be awake when all the rest of the world is dreaming, flauting dreamland for songs and cigarettes and if weren't too late, alcohol.

And then there is my friend M, who doesn't seem to realize how lucky he is. If I had the good fortune to find a P, knowing that we are desperately human and imperfect, then again, what is a good friend for, but to remind, and to graciously scold, there is a large part of me that would gladly surrender a limb to sleep with my best conversationalist, it's a little sad that I'll gladly undress the first willing body that expresses the slightest interest.

Am I still making sense, have I made any sense at all, if I had any sense I would sing myself a lullaby and try and get some sleep, smoking these ridiculously long cigarettes with the white tipped butts that I have always found tacky, meant for acrylic nails and hair spray. God help me, but I am wide awake and ready to run, I have done practice runs before, back when I was married and falling into million little pieces I got in the car when D was asleep and made it all the way to Monterrey before reason intervened. It's my papa's fault, the best or the worst piece of advice he gave me is that you can always disappear. Take the car, empty the account, drive as far as you can get out and walk away, that's pretty fucking powerful when you stop to consider how fantastically simple and life altering it is. Sadly, I am Taurus, and I will dig my heels and I will resist the yoke, and my back may be bloodied but I will remain fiercely loyal to that goddamned buttercup and besided if I were to disappear it would take decades to build the friendships that I have here, who would accept me foibles and all, besides I would miss my crazy family.

It's nearly four in the morning and I am busy having a one sided chat with myself, and I would just about give my eye teeth for one of those tasty vodka collins I had much, much earlier at Vesuvio's, before the sun set so perfect on a mild evening in North Beach, with the children of the bridge and tunnel in postage stamp skirts and bright jerseys of far away teams, P and I gorged on fried olives and calamari and pizza, fried, fried and melted, so we could pour copious amounts of liquor into our gullets. Enricos, long standing memories, a long time.

All my windows are open and I am feeling the pre-dawn chill, the day is coming, sunday is nigh. It's the Haight street fair, and I will be fleeing the neighborhood for the safe haven of San Rafael, and I am charged with driving and I am likely to be wreck, all sleepy-eyed and smoky voiced (oh but what would I be doing now had that call come through, I might be worn out and drowsing under the comforter, I might be giggling, I might be up to the best part of no good) rather than heartlessly, ravenously awake, humming the litany of just one more cigarette. Just one more cigarette.

sexus

And the body is aflame, and the toes spasm, and the fist clenches and an arm curls inward and arm reaches outward from the middle of a stranger's bed. And wantoness has blinded you so that the body sprawled across your skin has no face and no name. If you could say you were anywhere you would be square in your middle, or some chakra or some such had you been paying attention, but from the middle you radiate. And limbs and lips follow their own accord and crouched in your middle your neck lenghthens and your spine arches.

The charming deference to these foreign hands, all the while following the rote course to coarse pleasure, spark a nerve, deft of touch. And from the middle it's so easy to watch, watch and judge, as the body proffers and the mind tenders, all towards the nexus, all towards the confluence of pulse and flesh, bone and duvet. To wake confused in someone else's tatoos, with his imprimatur on your inner thigh, and days later muscles still happily groaning under his cooling weight.

And then.

To care and to care not. To sing soft lullabies to the ravenous body, to quell the insatiable ego with the numerous and probable reasons as to why we have heard naught from the 28 year old we like to sport fuck until rosy cheeked dawn, to check teeth and nails and armor, to never hunger again, to chase the dawn, like the raven said, evermore.

Loosed

Just how tenuous are those silvan spider silks that keep my arms bound to my sides, and what sort of dulcet spider spins so sweetly, like a perfect poisoned red apple, like a girl singing to her reflection in a well.

I traversed the river this morning as the swallows were singing, water to my knees, water to my waist, water to my neck. The farthest channel deceptively swift, flying the last of Spring's detritus past the headlands to the sea. Four more steps, six more steps, slick green moss threading through my toes and the current will take me. To the channel, where the water churns, and the ocean beckons. Six more steps to be swept away.

Instead I watched birds, instead I ate bacon and eggs, instead I went to a rodeo. And then I drove home and discussed the space/time continuum with a trio of eight year old boys.

And all the while the sun is on my face and the river is at my back, cold and strong. The current pulls, a song as fine as silt, loosed, we are loosed.

Loosed towards the sea and worn trajectory, loosed from rivulets and streams, loosed of torrents and swollen creeks, bled from roots and blades of grass, stricken from petals and wet dogs and sewage. All of that water pooled from snowy peaks and puddles on rooftops, called home again to crash upon the shore.

Whoops!

There are a number of very sound reasons why one should not bed the bartender at one's favorite watering hole. It could be considered poor form, a breach of the chinese wall. It could make ordering drinks, well, fraught with tension. That is if one of the parties involved takes issue with the other party.

This party would like to chalk up to two consenting adults and a rather large quantity of wine which leads this party to quote from the Book of Wisdom by Brittany Spears, "whoops, I did it again". Wherein good judgement was disregarded in favor of a very pleasurable tumble.

This party is willing to negotiate further tumblings with the other party.

But first this party has got to get some sleep, because there is nothing quite so humbling than the 6AM walk of shame on two hours of sleep.

I guess this party has been shorn of her restituted virginity. Hallefuckinglujia.