(no subject)
On archaica 's LJ today, I commented "I mean, I really only use my LJ to make brief Andy Rooney-style complaints or tell people what I did on my weekend..." Next weekend starts tomorrow evening, so I better get on the last one!
Friday: Frjtz's, then Koko, then my all-time favorite, Paul Weller, played a terrific show at the Regency Ballroom, and then Koko again for a nightcap or two. Big fun.
On the walk down to the Van Ness station to catch the N home, I passed some scrawny white kid, well-dressed as a cross between 1995 Beck and 2008 Kanye West, spray-painting some building wall. I could hear his tiny cat-eyeglasses-wearing, pink-haired fur-coat hipster girlfriend standing by a few cans of paint, whining "C'mon, Joshua [or something like that], I wanna head back now...." and I look at the wall and see it's just a bunch of squiggles and "6 6 6," a crummy attempt at a tag.
Well, this kinda chapped my ass, and I'd had a few, so I say out loud as we pass, "No one will ever forget you, maaan....dumbass..."
He freaks out, all yelling after me, "You're lucky I don't spray it in your face, man!" and some other stuff I barely heard as I kept walking away about me being "a 9 to 5" (well, he has me pegged there...I do have a job, and I generally do work somewhere around those hours. How wack!!1!) and being "fat" (this might've been true even pretty recently but not so now...I don't think, *sniff*). I in turn was yelling back at him to "keep it real back in Mill Valley" and "Whatever, cracker," etc. etc.
The whole thing was kinda embarrassing, and Ginnie was not happy with me ("He could've had a gun!"...please), but I get so annoyed when some kid comes on a bus or whatever with a marker and tags up the place with worthless crap, and no one says anything. We give these children way too much power. I can't stand the "What White People Like"-esque fetishizing of petty urban vandalism you get from people who think it's a badge of the gritty city lives they lead.
Art can of course be pretty subjective at times (if the kid was doing something halfway decent I probably wouldn't have said anything--I know, hypocritical), and there's no denying the energy and beauty of a lot of graffiti, but it's not quite as gray as people seem to want to believe--tagging, the most base form of graffiti, is just self-aggrandizing ugliness, usually by some bored little shits, and this was no different. Of course, nothing was gained--Captain Badass probably really thinks himself the rogue now.
(The fact that some obnoxious asshole kid scrawled some incomprehensible--to most, at least--shit across the glass of my building's entryway during summer '07 and our poor landlord still hasn't been able to get it off probably colors my anger here. I'm sick of looking at some kid's awful attempt to extend the size of his dick. Anyway...)
Saturday: We spent the afternoon poking around the Mission after going to get some stuff for dinner at Lucca Ravioli (our West Coast replacement for good ol' Bari Market back in Chicago), and spent the night watching some movies with some Tuttimelon, our favorite local Pinkberry ripoff, but the goodly chunk of my day was wasted watching a Star Wars marathon on cable. I caught sizeable amounts of five of the six movies.
At one point early in Episode IV (the original), there was a shot of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia standing together, and Ginnie walks by on her way out the door (she was doing something actually useful and non-pathetic with her day, you see) and asks, "How did their mother die again?" (OH NO, SPOILER ALERT!)
"She, uh...she lost her will to live," I answered, truthfully, and then I was really embarrassed with myself.
Sunday: Speaking of crackers, I got up and ran a 5K.
Before the race, I noticed that they were startingthe women and men separately, and they made a big deal about the USATF officials and rules being in play, and that's kinda when I realized I wasn't in the "fun run" I was hoping to race before next month's Bay to Breakers, so I got kinda nervous that I'd embarrass myself when I looked around and saw all the racing teams and super-skinny guys in singlets around me, but it was OK. I didn't do as well as I'd hoped--my time was disappointing and I finshed right behind some graybeard with bandaged knees (pretty fit-looking but probably AARP), but it wasn't too bad. My knees didn't bother me as much as I was worried they would, I'm still on track to reach my goals for B2B, and it was my first road-race in six years after all (and only my second in the 16 years since my freshman year of college, the last time I ran competitively!).
Anyway, it was hotter than the dickens on Sunday (and the next few days...high 80s, low 90s, which for SF... ). So when Ginnie came to meet me, we went home briefly to take care of a few things and finish watching the Brewers and then we spent the day in the park, in a little meadow nook near our apartment under a tree shade, drinking wine and listening to music and talking and reading and picknicking.
Since we've moved out to California, I've gotten over my pretensions about the occasional chilled rose...we drink the hell out of this Gundlach Bundschu Tempranillo Rose on warm days.
The guy in the background is always out here on weekends with his Golden, playing guitar, which seems kinda pleasant on paper, but his repertoire consists solely of 70s rock classics. Yes, "Stairway to Heaven" was played. Twice.
If you're going to San Francisco, make sure to wear flowers on your stems. Bottle #2, as you surmised. Everything's funnier then. Not now, though. Sorry.
Next: brief Andy Rooney-style complaints.