My Face for the World to See (Part II):
The Diary of Sherilyn Connelly
a fiction


September 1 - 10, 2000

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Sunday, 10 September 2000 (cenotaph)
no stardate given

Evidently.

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Saturday, 9 September 2000 (locum tenens)
no stardate given

Okay, so I'm cheating. It's Sunday morning, and I didn't actually write anything on Saturday. sfgoth is down and probably will be until sometime early next week, and that resulted in me being very, very lazy. It's sad how when just the slightest bit of structure falters, whatever induces my meager since of disciplince collapses, I go into total sloth mode. Really, it's pathetic. Am I only doing this because I have an expectant audience?

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Friday, 8 September 2000 (the will to live)
11:05am

Danny called this morning, from Fresno; seems he'd been sent back earlier than anticipated, largely because of the company not being sure what to do with him once he'd gotten out here. Sounds familiar. Anyway, we wouldn't have been able to get together last night after all, so I don't feel quite so guilty.

The work crisis was solved easily enough, as I knew it would be. Just had to go digging for a bit of code; indeed, if I'd thought to access my work email from home I probably would have taken care of it from there. Alas.

Hearing them now, I wish I'd listened to more Siouxsie and the Banshees when I was in high school. No, that's not entirely accurate: I wish I'd listened to them at all. I was only marginally aware of their existance. I'd heard some Skinny Puppy by that point, but could never really get into it. At the time I was more into Neil Young, Pete Townshend, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed—stuff of which I'm still very fond, but which isn't quite as central to my life as it once was. It was enough to make me something of an social outcast, though.

One kid in particular seemed disgusted by my fondness for Pink Floyd, even though Momentary Lapse of Reason had been released and they were on a high-profile tour, thus making them a bit more acceptable. Nope. They were old and they sucked, and he expended a considerable amount of energy trying to talk me out of liking them. He wouldn't have even known that I did if he hadn't noticed that I'd taped an ad for their tour on the inside of my binder. If memory serves I'd also had one for Neil Young taped above it, but it didn't seem to offend his sensibilities quite as much. Perhaps as a final attempt to save my soul, in my yearbook he wrote, "Give up Pink Floyd!" I suppose that in his own way he was trying to help me.

Anyway, there were only two people at my high school who could have been considered goth, though I don't recall either of them ever using the term. I'm not saying this is because they considered themselves death-rockers or that they rejected the tyranny of labeling in all its forms; I simply don't remember the term coming up. But I suppose it may have.

The Ex and I, I should point out, weren't those people. We were geeks, certainly—we hung out in the same computer lab during lunch, which is how we got to know each other—and never anywhere close in the mainstream, but hardly goths, either. I'd always figured we were thought of as hippies, given our aesthetics (or arguable lack thereof; my personal style now is light-years beyond whatever it was then). It came as a surprise when I heard a rumor that we were crackheads. I still haven't figured that one out. Apparently whoever perpetuated that particular rumor was unaware of the effect of crack cocaine on the waistband.

One of them was Paul Caetano, whom I met through Jonco. (Indeed, his brother works with Jonco in the State Assembly in Sacramento, which I guess qualifies as respectable.) Pale and scrawny with perpetually big hair, he was heavily into industrial. We used to hide out during our P.E. class, neither of exactly being up to the physical or social challenge—our high school was primarily black, and being a pair of very unathletic white boys, we were a bit out of our element.

A few years later he had a show on KFSR, the local college radio station which my brother barefoot had helped start. It had some of the creepiest stuff this since of KPFA's Over the Edge, and I loved it. When I listened to it, anyway, which wasn't often enough. I've been fond of Over the Edge and Negativland since I bought a used tape of JamCon '84 sometime in the mid-eighties. It was another of those revelatory moments when I realized that music/sound didn't have to be linear. Perhaps not surprisingly, for many years I never came across anyone else familiar with Negativland until that night in Lee's bedroom in Bolinas when he pulled out the LP of Escape From Noise and played "Yellow Black and Rectangular." Summer and Terminal were severely unimpressed; I, in my own way, was very much in love.

One time when Paul and I were essentially ditching class, a science teacher asked him about t-shirt he was wearing. It might have been a Skinny Puppy shirt, I don't recall. Anyway, it fascinated the teacher from an anthropological viewpoint, as it showed many figures in what appeared to be an early stage of human evolution. Paul held his own fairly well.

The other, Joseph, I was bit closer to. We were in the same grade—Paul was at least a year ahead of me—and had more mutual friends. Looking back, I realize that a lot of those friends (the circle that The Ex and I belonged to) turned away from him, but I hung on. Probably because his weirdness was eternally fascinating, and on one level or another, I related.

We spent a lot of time together in our Junior and Senior years, in the classroom of our former English teacher. We were that most loathesome of creatures, the teacher's aid. The beauty part was, it was during the teacher's off-period, so ninety percent of the time we had the place to ourselves. Oh, there was work to do, papers to be graded and all, but for the most part we just hung out and talked. The teacher in question didn't really need us, but he also realized that Joe and I both needed somewhere to be, and he liked us both, so he granted us refuge. With graduation credit, to boot.

Now that I think about it, I believe Joseph had been in his German class. The guy taught both German and English, though I'd only had him for English (learning German seeming pointless in a town with three Spanish teevee channels). Although I never got good grades in English, I always got along well with the teachers. I couldn't diagram a sentence to save my life, but I could compose them well enough, and they respected me on that level. I also connected with this fellow on a pop-culture level; I read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles in his class, and never once went near The Grapes of Wrath. (Still haven't read it, though I know Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads by heart. Is that close enough?) He was very much a leftist, and not afraid to show it. I don't know he got away with it in the late eighties and early nineties; I'd imagine he's had to tone it down since then.

As for Joseph, he was sensitive. Terribly sensitive. How sensitive? Compared to him, I was butch. That's how sensitive. He habitually dressed in black (something I didn't do, partially because my mother was still trying to mandate my appearance), but on him, it didn't seem the slightest bit like an affectation. It was as natural as could be.

In spite of being a natural mope, he was always grinning and seemed a bit loopy. Sounds contradictory, but that's how he was. With a genuine smile he would talk about how he really didn't want to live anymore, and it sounded just as genuine. And no less scary.

Oh, and he worshipped The Smiths. I mentioned he was gay, right?

(No, worshipping The Smiths doesn't make you gay any more than being gay means you worship the Smiths. But, come on. Work with me on this one.)

The question of his sexuality never once crossed my mind back then. I didn't ask, he didn't tell, and I it probably never occurred to either of us to do so. In retrospect, though, there's little doubt in my mind, and not just because of his reverence of Morrissey as a godhead. (It helps, though.) No doubt it would have contributed to him feeling all the more alienated from the culture around him. I had a prety good idea of what was going on in my head at the time—I'd already done plenty of research into every transgender-related topic I could find, though my relationship with The Ex made it easier to assimilate. After all, nobody needed to know about that other business, did they? Of course not.

Confession time: I rewrote one of his stories. This is an unconscionable sin by the standards of most of my friends these days, and certainly they're correct. It's not something I'm proud of, nor is it something I'd do again, and I was 17 at the time, okay? It was for the school's "literary magazine," of which for some reason I was on the editorial staff. (The reason, actually, is simple enough. It was the traditionally put together by the students of the English AP (Advanced Placement) class, of which I was one. Technically you had to have a C-average to be an editor, and I was barely maintaining a D because I couldn't deconstruct Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury to her liking, but she let me remain an editor anyway, and also let me take the AP test so I could skip directly to English III in college. I got a lot of breaks from my English teachers.) It was a given that I would be the editor working with Joe, and they probably wouldn't have put him at all had they not wanted to create the illusion of the magazine being merely them and their friends—which is really all it was, with a few freaks thrown in to round things out.

Anyway, I didn't completely rewrite it. Just tightened it up a bit, that's all. Threw in a few things, took a few others out. You know. Constructive stuff. Nothing he'd get too upset about, I reckoned.

Ahem. I was wrong, and he let me know. Suffice it say I promise to never do it again.

sometime after midnight

Bolinas was the location of a dream again, at least the latter part, of the dream, the time focuing on the more xenophobic aspects of the town. I was cornered by somewhat stereotypical backwoods rednecks, and was able to get away by mentioning Burnout's name—in this reality, he lived there. I realized that the only way to get to him was to cross through this bad place, and that it had always been like this, and as such I'd best never try again because they might not be so kind. It ceased to feel like such a welcoming place anymore. Sooner or later, whatever I want to call home turns on me.

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Thursday, 7 September 2000 (anaesthetics)
9:54am

Ugh. Day two. Hopefully also the last day.

2:25pm

I must be less ill than yesterday, since I'm not sleeping as much. As a result, I'm awake with no idea what to do with myself. Not exactly an improvement.

9:14pm

Either way, I'm going back tomorrow. Brian actually called me at home earlier today, the first time that particular phenomenon has occurred. He wasn't angry or as suspicious as Maddy's boss tends to be when she misses work—indeed, he sounded genuinely concerned—but it's also clear that enough pieces of the sky have fallen in my absence to necessitate my speedy return. I'm still sweaty and uncomfortable, and there's no telling how I'll feel tomorrow, but I guess it doesn't matter.

Christ, but I'm a whiner at times.

My biggest regret is having missed seeing Danny. He emailed me yesterday and I responded, but never heard back. I hope he saw the mail. I could have called, but didn't. I prefer writing. This isn't always a good thing.

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Wednesday, 6 September 2000 (smoke rings)
9:15am

What can make me feel even guiltier than usual about missing a day of work? When it's the second day in the week I've missed. Okay, strictly speaking Monday didn't count because it was Labor Day, but I still feel like a sloth for not going today.

Can't do it, though. I know the way my body works, and the first day of being sick is always the worst. The fever and brain-fuzziness as the body smokes out the bad things. I'm still trying my best to do the telecommute thang, but I need to have my bed nearby in which to collapse if necessary.

Even though I knew as soon as I woke up that I wouldn't be going to work, I still showered just in case. You never know, the shower might get my energy level up. It didn't, but it allowed me to focus and figure out how many plans would be thrown off by me staying home today. Besides actual work, Danny and I were going to be having dinner tonight. Hopefully he can make it tomorrow night. Lord knows I'd feel even more guilty about cancelling on him than I would for simply missing work.

After I showered I collapsed back into bed and slept for a little while. I dreamt that my mother had found that I wasn't going to work (she'd become an admin there, horror of horrors) and was upset with me about it. I think my subconscious is taking advantage of the slightly raised temperature; what's a fever without a fever dream, after all?

4:40pm

I've slept for most of the day. By my standards, that's proof something's wrong.

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Tuesday, 5 September 2000 (nuages)
8:43am

There doesn't seem to have been any damage (i.e. tanning) from our unusually long exposure to sunlight this weekend. Indeed, Madeline and I probably did more walking around in the sun this weekend than we have all year long. Which is good because we both needed the exercise, especially considering how we ate, and bad because it goes to show that we just don't walk enough as it is.

I've yet to figure out why, when the sun shines, it seems brighter in the Bay Area than in the middle of the friggin' Nevada desert. The light wasn't nearly as obnoxious there as it is here. Go figure.

At least we had a better go of it weather-wise than our fellow travellers at Burning Man. Before the Goldthwait/Chong show at the Top of the Riv (which is just that, at the top of the Riviera), we could see fireworks off in the distance. We're thinking it might have been the fireworks set off during the actual burning of the man, but we're not sure. If so, it's about as close as we cared to get.

10:10am

First flesh-eating robots, now robots that reproduce. I'm so proud to belong to a species bent on its own destruction.

12:57pm

Danny is in town. We just spoke on the phone, and are planning on getting together Wednesday or Thursday night. This should be interesting. If nothing else, it'll give me the impetus I've been lacking lately to get into full battle gear. Maybe it's just that I'd gotten out of the habit over the last couple months as I've been getting zapped, and now that I'm able to, inertia has taken hold. This weekend I didn't want to risk getting made up because of the heat and the fact of where I was. Las Vegas is only so tolerant of freaks, so it's best not to push it.

(We were still clocked, though. Madeline and I were walking down the Strip, minding our own damn business, and we passed a guy handing out brochures. No biggie, they're all over the place. As soon as he spotted us, he started his spiel: "Free buffet! Free slots! Free show!" The moment I hear the word "free" I tend to tune out anyway, and as a general rule I hate having ads forced on me. So we kept walking. What's worse than a solicitor? A solicitor who takes it personally when you don't allow yourself to be solicited. "Hey!" he shouted as we walked by. "Come back! Marilyn Manson is up there!" Nice try, buddy, nice try.)

(Later that same morning, we were in the buffet at Circus Circus, getting well more than our RDA of sugar and saturated fat. A member of the janitorial staff was eyeing us oddly; nothing new there. To make a long story short, it turns out she thought Madeline worked upstairs as a trapeze artist. I, for one, would take that as a compliment. I've never cared for circuses, but I respect circus folk. Go figure.)

I have no idea how long this period is going to last, though. I'll be damned if the hair around my mouth isn't coming in full force. There's a temptation to call Phil and see if I can't reschedule my appointment for next Monday, and instruct him (firmly) to do my goatee area first. Regardless of how much EMLA he has, or how much he's afraid of hurting me. I don't care for the idea of being in Dana's wedding like this.

2:43pm

Aaargh. As the borgification of the web continues, Yahoo! has bought out the clunky, yet...well, charmingly clunky WebRing system, and as a result the default background color for the webring home page is white. The kind the makes me want to screech and claw my eyeballs out. Okay, it's not that bad, but it still sucks. The instructions for "transitioning" (loaded word, guys) from the old system to the new one are just confusing enough to be useless, so I guess it's stuck that way for a while. Wouldn't be surprised if you can't even customize the colors anymore. Bastards.

sometime after midnight

Remember, apple cider vinegar from Safeway is "ideal for food!" Even if, like me, you primarily use it for gargling at 3am to combat a sore throat. I'll be eternally grateful to Brigid for that trick.

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Monday, 4 September 2000 (pure phase)
1:56pm

During the first earthquake in the Bay Area since Maddy's lived here, we just happen to be 400 miles away. Figures. As near as we can tell, while it happened we were at the Hilton in the "Spacequest Casino" adjacent to Star Trek: The Experience. (The attraction itself had long since closed, but the surrounding casino is still very cool, done in a quasi-Trek style. And you can't go wrong with a huge model of the Enterprise habing overhead.) I was playing video poker and drinking a margarita, the first I've had in years and the only one I had on this trip. Maybe that's why the earth shook; certain things are simply not meant to be.

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Sunday, 3 September 2000 (shine a light)
sometime after midnight

Things learned this weekend.

  1. There is such a thing as dumb, stupid luck, which is how we ended up in the First Class section of a nonstop flight from San Francisco to Las Vegas, after our original flight (in coach with a layover) was delayed. Considering how many people around us were being told their flights were cancelled entirely, we were in the right place at the right time. If I believed in karma (I don't, yet, but give me time), I'd say it had something to do with the fact that we weren't bitching out the airline employees and acting as though everything was their fault, and that we were rewarded for being cool about everything.

  2. Shrimp cocktails are harder to find than they used to be.

  3. Bobcat Goldthwait is God. Tommy Chong's stoner act is getting a little old, but it was nice to see him performing. (He and Bobcat were sharing a bill at The Riviera, you see. Bobcat's been a hero of mine for a long time, and he was worth the price of admission alone.) And his bit on Ricky Martin was just random enough to work.

  4. It's Star Trek: The Experience, not The Star Trek Experience as I'd previously thought. Whatever it's called, however, it fucking rocked, and was the high point of a trip with very few lows. Most of the lows involved food, except for the dinner at Quark's, which was the best meal we had there. I'll forever think of quesadillas as "The Saucer Section." The guy dressed as a Ferengi had atrocious breath, though. Verisimilitude, perhaps?

  5. Sometimes it's okay to give into impulse buys; I'm still regreting having talked myself out of a Borg Bear. I suppose I'll have to order it online. I should point out that the picture in the link is inaccurate; the bear's fur is gray, not brown. How cool is that?

  6. I feel sorry for the employees of the Star Trek store, who have to deal with a lot of fanboys. I think it's unreasonable to expect them to be aware that Kes and Seven of Nine were in a few episodes together before Jennifer Lien left the show. Yes, okay, I was aware of that. I've also gotten laid. Think about it, won't you?

  7. Quite possibly the best advice I've ever taken was from a This Modern World: "Whatever you do in Las Vegas, don't miss the Liberace Museum. Trust us." Truer words have never been spoken, and I'm never going to be the same.
  8. The hotel we stayed at, The Blair House Suites, was completely adequate. We weren't looking for luxury, and what time we did spend there was very comfortable. Someday if we can afford it I'd love to stay at the Luxor 'cuz it's so fuckin' GAF, but for now the neatly-named Blair House will do.

  9. If you look different from them, people think it's okay to stare at you. Apparently we look different from a lot of people, including one very annoying woman and her son on the last flight back. It's a bitter pill to be looked down upon by someone wearing a tiger-print outfit. She was unlikely to tell her son to stop staring, since that must have been what we wanted. If we didn't want to be objects of curiousity, we'd look normal.

  10. There's never a good time to get sick, but some times are worse than others. While walking from the hotel to the Strip on Saturday morning, I got nauseous. Very nauseous, and for no apparent reason. I spit several times, huge gelatinous loogies, and we walked back to the hotel, not sure if I was going to make it and picturing the rest of the weekend wasted with me in bed. Thankfully, it passed after ten minutes or so of relaxing. We headed out again, and I pushed my luck many times during the day, including at the Circus Circus buffet (where I ate many things which I shouldn't have, and I'm afraid my body wants to revert to its pre-Meridia state) and some very bumpy IMAX ridefilms, including the Star Trek one. (For the record, it blows Star Tours out of the water. Then again, that's an unfair comparison since Star Tours is over ten years old, and was amazing for its time. I suppose it still is.) I suspect it may have been caused by the weird olive-based snack we had on the plane in the First Class section the night before. Next time I travel that way, I'm going to ask for whatever the people in the cheap seats are having.

  11. I needed it. We needed it.

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Friday, 1 September 2000 (take your time)
7:17am

As though Madeline's delayful trip west a year ago today wasn't warning enough about travelling on this particular holiday, sfgate is now running their standard scary article about how much it's going to suck trying to fly. The really icky part is the speculation that the long-term parking might fill up by this afternoon. We'll be using the long-term parking rather than the Super Shuttle mainly because of the distance involved, and the fact that Maddy's boss has been an incorrigible prick about the notion of letting her leave early on the Friday before a three-day weekend; indeed, he's been holding her recent back troubles and illnesses against her. For example, he'll only let her leave early the day of Dana's wedding if she doesn't miss any days between now and then. So, at a time when it seems half the company is down the the Mongolian Death Flu, she has to remain perfectly healthy or else she might not be able to make it to the wedding on time. Oh, yeah, that's perfectly fair. As a result, I'm not holding my breath on him letting her go any earlier than 4:30pm today; it's common for the company CEO to announce on these days that people can leave in the early afternoon, but a boss with an axe to grind can supercede that...

Oh well. Que sera and all that. We'll be able to park or not, we'll catch our flight or not, it'll be delayed or not. Ain't much I can do about any of it.

11:10am

It's raining outside, at long last. Not necessarily the best thing when you're about to travel, but it's beautiful nonetheless. At least if we end up having to stay in town (the long-term parking being full, for example), the weather will be nice. Makes me wish I had some hallucinogens to enhance the experience—in either location—but no such luck.

Which for some reason reminds me, Lee was in my dreams against last night. The poor little guy, he really deserves better than to be whatever symbol it is my subconscious wants to make him. In any event, I'll probably next see him at Dana's wedding. He'd once expressed interest in getting me into a dress similar to Jennifer Connelly's in Labyrinth. That didn't happen, but I'd daresay this'll be the next best thing, even if it did take a year and half.

1:53pm

Flight Number 1790
Departing
City Scheduled Actual
San Francisco
07:25pm 08:45pm

Only an hour and twenty minutes late? In a lot of ways, that's no so bad.

Except that's just to Los Angeles. According to the current estimates, we'll arrive there at 10:23pm. Problem is, the connecting flight is still scheduled to leave at 10:00pm. This may be problematic.

2:55pm

So I'm going to be away from my computer, or any computer, until Sunday evening.

This'll be the first time that's happened in a couple years. And certainly since I've been doing this silly diary; even in Fresno or Kansas, I had internet access. I've even updated my journal from Lee's computer in Bolinas. Not tomorrow, though. I'll be on vacation, damnit. No email, no journal, none of that stuff. (Unless I can get ten minutes with a telnet window, but I don't see that happening.) I'm sure I can handle it. After all, I have my Palm, right?

Gotta pick up Maddy and head out.

The start of a very long weekend...

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