On my way to work this morning, I detoured by The Dark Room, where I was happy to find the power cord for my laptop right where I accidentally left it last night. Or, more likely, it fell out of my new bag, which I'm still getting used to. I considered waiting until after work, but that would have meant only getting a few hours of use out of the laptop. It had a fairly highfalutin battery, but still, it sounded too horrible to contemplate. Whew.

So I drove Phoebe and eventually parked her on 13th between the Best Buy and the freeway overpass, not historically known as the safest place in town to park, but I the lack of obvious bling inside should help. And if something does happen, it happens. I'll deal with it when I walk back to Phoebe. Otherwise, I'll probably be going straight from there to Cassandra, where Jessie has organized a writing clambke. Ennui and I aren't entirely certain what a writing clambake entails, but we're intrigued.

I've spent a lot of my free and not-so-free time recently organizing and archiving a lot of my old writing (and by "old," I mean since 2002). This passage from Alan Shaprio's essay "Why Write?" in Best American Essays 2006 feels particularly relevant:

The more we refine our abilities, the more embarrassing our older work becomes. That is, if we're truly lucky, we'll despise our early work. If we're lucky, what we're writing now won't compare with what we'll write ten years from now. That's the price we pay for getting better. The problem is, the better we get at writing, the better we get at imagining getting ever better. So the discrepancy between the writer one is and the writer one wants to be only widens as one improves. To flourish as an artist requires a tolerance for frustration, inadequacy, and a deepening sense of failure.

After the movie this morning, I went to Sports Basement and got a new backpack. Laptop-friendly, of course. Then I went to Dolores Park. It's a beutiful day, and that's what you're supposed to do, right?

Rimma came to the show last night. Between her and Ennui, I suspect that's about it for friends of mine attending.

Been at The Dark Room for most of the day, working. It's as good a place to be as any. Not quite private, and there's occasionally people around me who I don't want to deal with, but that's a condition of existence.

Taking advantage of the fabulous T1 line, I bought and downloaded the FLAC version of the new Nine Inch Nails album, Ghosts. Like The Fragile in '99, this one feels like it's coming out at just the right time.

It already felt a little weird to not go to the gym—man, I reacclimate fast—but it was the best possible reason not to go. Ennui and I don't see each other much, and I want what we do to count. I don't want it to feel rote, or like an obligation to be fulfilled.

I did go to the gym on Wedesday night, after working for a few hours at the Three Dollar Bill Cafe. It was the first time I'd been since I last October, that weekend when everything started to spiral. As they would have eventually, and, really, they had been for a while.

At the gym, I read Kate Holden's In My Skin for about an hour until eleven, then switched over to the treadmills to watch The Daily Show. I'm liking In My Skin, quite a lot, and finding it more compelling reading than Colbert's book. I'd found it by browsing through the biography and nonfiction section the library, which is where I've found most of my favorite books lately. Pretty much anything with the words "a memoir" on the cover is going to grab me. It's how I discovered Janice Erlbaum (Girlbomb), Diablo Cody (Candy Girl, and I only just realized she wrote Juno), and Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors et al), and others. It's the area where I someday hope to see my name on the spine of books. It'll be nice to see it in, like, bookstores and stuff too, but for some reason I find being in libraries even more exciting.

A minor detail that I've found encouraging in both Running with Scissors and In My Skin (and probably others) is that not only do they both make references to compulsive journaling during the time periods they're writing about, and the details in their vivid physical and emotional accounts are obviously because of said journaling, occasionally they just quote directly from the journals. This is heartening because I've done it once or twice in Exchange and Descent, and I've worried that it was...I don't know. Cheating, maybe. But sometimes I just need to get as close to the source as I can, and there's no way to rewrite it into the book's voice (which is different) and retain the impact or meaning. So, it's nice to know others do it as well. I would regardless, of course, but still. If anyone ever A) reads it and then B) gives me shit about that part, I can be all but augusten burroughs did it first!

Meanwhile, from an SF Weekly writeup by Hiya Swanhuyser about a screening of the Turkish Star Wars:

It's not on the IMDb's "Bottom 100," like The Hottie and the Nottie, Baby Geniuses, and Who's Your Caddy. We're not sure if it's been featured at the Dark Room's "Bad Movie Night," where they recently polished off an Elvis series. But even without such accolades, the Turkish Star Wars, is a famously bad movie.

And, from the blog of a guy who lookes like a young Leonard Cohen:

But reading a local paper the other day I noticed a 'permanent' festival of sorts: The weekly Bad Movie Night, with a changing theme every month. March is the "Lead and Testosterone Poisoning Reagan-Era Hyper-Violence", with movies starring Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charles Bronson, Chuck Norris and Patrick Swayze (WTF?). Even if you can't make it to the movie, the website is pretty entertaining in itself, specially their two-line movie summaries.

The second weekend of the The Ten Commandments starts tonight. It's weird not to have rehearsed or anything since last Saturday, but at least I remember my lines.

So I went back home, gathered up my stuff, and drove to the Gold's in the Castro. Got there around ten. The underground parking has about twenty spots, which isn't too shabby as these things go, especially late at night. When I signed up they gave me a decal for Phoebe's back window so she won't get towed, though the garage is so awkward and cramped I'm not sure how a tow truck would fit in there. There's no direct route from the garage to the gym, which is kinda sucky, but a reasonable tradeoff for free parking in this town.

As I'd been told, the place was largely deserted. There was nobody in the women's locker room, which was mostly a non-issue since I'd come from home and was going straight back afterward. No locker needed. There was a scale, and I did something which I intend to do only once a month: I weighed myself. I really need to not obsess over that number. How I look and feel and how things fit is what matters, right? Right. 198, for the record. I've capped out there for a while now. It's forty pounds over where I'd really like to be, where I was as recently as...um...six years ago. This was back when I was unemployed, lived three minutes away from a gym (as opposed to an empty building which still has the faded awning of the gym), and wasn't serious about writing yet. Nor was I doing plays or Bad Movie Night or dating. (I was living with Maddy, and while she definitely wanted my time, she was employed and I was not.) So, yeah. My life, and what I could fit into my schedule, was a bit different then. But does that necessarily mean I can't head that direction again? Can I start pulling myself out of bed at a quarter to four in the morning like I did a decade ago? Heck, sometimes I would get up around that time last year because Vash went to super-early classes at her gym. So I know it can be done.

Wondering these things, I made my way up to the cardio stuff, which is where I've always headed in the past and will continue to. I'm supposed to get a first-hit's-free session with a personal trainer so they can tell me which of the scary weight machines will help me attempt the impossible things I want to do with my body (so very very tired of my stomach, I want it to go away so much), but I haven't made the appointment. And I do still have the notes from two years ago. Two years? Already? Jesus.

I got back into the groove of the cardio stuff pretty easily. I brought along my trusty magazine rack and my own reading material (Steven Colbert's I Am America (and So Can You!). As I've bitched about on more than one occasion, I haven't seen a magazine rack in a gym for a very long time, but at least it makes sense considering that there's no magazines to put on them. Not that I could find, anyway. I suppose they figured it didn't matter, given the ubiquitousness of teevees. There were several widescreens near the ceiling in front of the crosstrainers, and each of the treadmills has their own teevee screens. I initially turned up my nose at this, until it began to dawn on me: basic cable. Individual screens. Open until midnight. Good heavens, I can watch The Daily Show on the treadmill! Which is exactly what I did, after spending some time reading on the crosstrainer. (While, you know, crosstraining.) They're open until midnight, which means that I can also fit in The Colbert Report before I have to leave. Usually I watch them the next day online, but this is so much better. Get there at ten (or earlier) use the crosstrainers or weight machines or whatever, then spend the final hour on the treadmill watching my stories. I do believe I've found my carrot.

Due a month later are my taxes (and yours, too). Got mine filed today. Wheee.

Ran into a friend of Vash's today. Actually, it was someone I'd known before I met Vash, but they'd known Vash longer than they'd known me. That sorta thing. Anyway, it was quite pleasant. I haven't really encountered any of the sort of snubbing which occurred after I broke up with Maddy. Vash's friends—even the ones whom I met via Vash—have all been unfailingly civil, and don't seem to hold anything against me, at least not outwardly. It's a nice change of pace, considering there are people who still won't talk to me because I broke up with Maddy and/or Collette.

6:55pm

I've been going through a lot of old chatlogs as research for the aforementioned article, and while it's about breaking up with Maddy, I keep getting sidetracked by stuff about Vash when we first started dating. There was so much love there. I meant so much to her, and her to me.

We got a swell writeup in the SF Weekly, though:

Gimme a "G!"
By Silke Tudor
There's a little disagreement over the organization of the Ethical Decalogue in the Old Testament. (Is coveting your neighbors' wife and house one sin or two?) In any case, Anglicans, Jews, Catholics, and Lutherans alike seem to agree that a big bush spoke to Moses and laid down the law. How Moses got in the headspace to accept heavenly horticulture is a long, complicated story. There was the slaying of firstborn sons by union buster Pharaoh Seti and bobbing for babies in the Nile with Princess Bithia, not to mention that big Red Sea spectacular and sheep's milk in the Sahara with the Bedouins. So many characters, so many years, so much sand. Almost makes you want to reach for The Bible for Dummies. Leave it to Impossible Productions to come up with something better, a comedic staging of The Ten Commandments: Live! Sit back and relax as the cast brings clarity to some big questions: How long must the chosen people wander through the desert asking, "Are we there yet?" The Voice of God will be played by Mikl-em, Patrick Sims, John Hell, and Sean Owens: It's a very big part.

Ironically enough, we had a bigger turnout for Bad Movie Night. Of course, it's developed its own audience over the past couple of years. Still, as Jim pointed out, maybe we should just show Cobra all the time instead of staging plays. Naaaah.

Sunday morning, I went to a matinee showing of There Will Be Blood, which I really dug. Sunday mornings are the perfect time to see movies, especially movies which have dropped out of the top ten are are going to disappear soon, since the theaters are largely empty. I'm going to try to do it on a regular basis, and see No Country for Old Men next Sunday morning. If nothing else, considering that I see at least one bad movie a week, it's good to balance it out. Especially because the Sunday morning matinees are only six bucks, and I'm a cheapskate.

After the movie, I went to Fluevog in the Haight to get the insoles replaced. The insoles are the part your feet actually touch, right? They'd pretty much disintegrated from daily wear over the past year and a half. I was afraid I'd have to spend fifty bucks and go without the boots for a couple weeks, but instead they gave me a new pair to slip in for five bucks, which made me happy. Not making me quite as happy is the fact that they're discontinuing my boots, the awfully named Lucky Stud (which replaced the even more discontinued and more beloved Lucky Angel boots). Maybe they'll bring out a new similar line which is as comfy and looks as good on me, and maybe they won't.

The other suggestion I made to Ennui about her Vegas trip was to indulge in my favorite ritual: drinking a maragarita while playing video poker underneath the model of the Enterprise outside of Star Trek: The Experience at the Hilton. She obliged, and sent a picture to prove it. She rocks so much.

8:41pm

Tonight's excuse for not going to the gym is exhaustion, plain and simple. Obviously Friday and Saturday night were the play, and last night was Bad Movie Night, and they close relatively early on weekend nights anyway. I stayed at The Dark Room way too late last night after the show, mostly just hanging out and talking with Jim, and as usual I was wired when I got home. That's the tricky part for me: my apparent inability to go straight to bed when I get home. Anyway, I only got a few hours of sleep last night, and I've been paying for it today. So I'm in bed, Perdita attacking the blanketmonster (which is coincidentally where my feet are), about to watch a movie on my laptop until I fall asleep. Once upon a time I was one of those read-til-you-fall-asleep people, but not so much anymore. There are practical issues with the lighting in my bedroom. And, really, I do plenty of reading otherwise. Really.

I've been missing Vash a lot today. Sometimes I think I feel like I got most of the grieving out of my system during our relationship's slow disintegration last year, and by the time the cord was truly cut I was prepared for it emotionally. And while I think that's true for the most part, there's still a lot of pain and sadness, and the sense that there'll always be a pang, that she's the one that I'll never really quite get over. It doesn't mean that I'll never be able to fully love anyone else. It just means that there'll always be a place for her in my heart.

I woke up this morning from a dream in which I was having an affair with one of my castmates. Not the one I have the crush on, either. Thanks, brain! Later on in the dream I had something resembling sex with someone I've never met in real life or otherwise, and I'm not thrilled about that having been the first time I had sex in a dream, but there it is. Again, brain: thanks. No, really. You're too good to me.

Ennui's flight to Las Vegas should be landing right about now. She'll be there for a few days with her family. I hope she takes me up on my suggestion to see the Liberace Museum.

At some point late on Thursday night as we were falling asleep, Ennui nudged and asked if I could roll onto my side so she could spoon from behind. I assured her that I will never say no to that.

Today's my first Saturday in a while in which I don't have to be at The Dark Room at noon for rehearsal, and my weeknights have reopened as well. Yay for the return of writing time!