Bone Tired

Bone tired. Two weeks and three days now from press day ... I send the book to press before I go to sleep on August 5.

I feel guilty that I have not blogged. I skipped out a little early today and will work more here at home once I scratch this little post out. My ex, RB, is coming over to make dinner and hang out. He'll probably fall asleep watching TV and I can work a little more then. Looks like we are going to add 16 pages this year to the catalog, up to 744 pages. That means one 24-page signature which wastes paper. I would be a lot happier to keep it to 736 pages.

Dodge, my good friend from days past in Vancouver has been busy scanning slides from our times together in the 70s. She calls the collection "Banffshire Days" because we lived in a great old apartment building below Burrard called the Banffshire. Very evocative. Those have to be the best days of my life ... you don't know it at the time, but the innocence and the conviction give you a sense of sureness and purpose that will be hard to reproduce again. Besides, I was young and vibrant and having a wail of a time.
The sad part is that many of the folks in the pix are gone. Maurice Flood is gone, and Michael Merrill, and Laurine Harrison about whom I have written earlier. And Robin Simpson, and Glen Hillson. All gone. And of course my lover of the time, the incomparable Gary Gaetano Bandiera is gone. This is an image of an unguarded Gary ... I am on the left.
Welcome Home, a Castro street greasy spoon at which I have been eating since my first visit here in the 70s, has closed. My friend Michael Merrill, mentioned above, and I used to eat there a lot. Michael for a while preferred the jelly omelette which I always found obscene. How many hours we sat there and argued and planned and consulted. It was a warm place, no window on the street with upholstered chairs and plants. It had a real hippie feel. Alas, the only picture I have is of the closed forever sign ... never thought to photograph the place when it was alive ... it just seemed like it would never go away.

A lot of changes in the Castro these days. I think we were a little immune to the dot com demographic wave, and equally immune for a long time to the effects of the obscene price of real estate in San Francisco. Gay guys just stuck it out. But it is changing. The child-bearing SUV and monster truck crowd is edging in ... you see it all the time all over the place. Some gay couples with kids, and sometimes hard to tell. But seems like a lot of new liberal couples, the baby wrapped papoose-style to Dad while Mom gabs on the cell phone and leads the way. There seems to be no end of the cell phone girls blocking the sidewalk or almost running you over with their tanks. Guys too, but maybe at most a third as many cell phone guys as cell phone girls. Of course, today I got buzzed by some idiot middle-aged guy in a titanic white Ford who had ear buds blocking his ability to hear my protests. Hard to generalize, but the feel feels to be a-changing.

Am I just a cranky old fag? ... well, yes. But I'd hate to see the old neighborhood turn into another vapid, self-absorbed Chestnut Street. Nothing to do but wait and watch. In the meanwhile, people should turn off their cellphones and pay attention to the life around them. Fat chance.

Anyway, life is like that. Things close, even greasy spoons that have been around for over 30 years.

So there are some rambles ... back to work. Two weeks and three days till press time.

Photos by Dodge.