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2007 April 17th Tuesday 11:11PDT
we humanists try to behave as well as we can
April 11th the Alternative Bellingham group of gay men met for Wednesday Dinner at Speak E-Z's Memphis style BBQ in the Fountain District at the beginning of Meridian Street. It was pleasant to see about twenty other gay men as usual, some of whom i recognized from previous Wednesdays; and i met a very charming guy named Craig. My tasty meal began with cornbread muffins containing bits of peppers. I ordered an appetizer of House Okra: bite size pieces of okra, lightly breaded and deep fried, served with House Ranch dipping sauce. My entrée was Dennis' Smoked Plate: spare ribs, hand-pulled pork, tender beef brisket, and a quarter chicken (i selected dark meat), served with House BBQ sauce. It came with my choice of two side dishes, so i enjoyed hush puppies, and collard greens. The greens were overcooked in the traditional Southern style, and i would have preferred that they not be boiled thusly-- but they were nutritious so i ate them anyway. I found the pulled pork to be quite superbly tender; i doggy-bagged the other three meats to bring home and share with my roommate of five years and best friend of sixteen years, Tony.
Paraphrased from their website:
The meats and poultry were smoked with Hickory wood for hours over low heat to ensure tenderness and a unique flavor. After three hours of smoking, the pork ribs were smothered with the house BBQ sauce and put back into the smoker for another three hours. Spare ribs can be easily pulled from the bones. The beef brisket was smoked for seven hours before it was pulled out of the smoker. It was then trimmed of all its fat and the tender juicy brisket was infused with house BBQ sauce slice by slice. The pork was smoked for nine hours, then cooled just enough to be hand pulled. All that remained was lean, succulent, white pork meat to which house BBQ sauce was added. Chickens were halved and smoked for three hours. The low heat and smoke kept the chicken meat tender and moist. After smoking, the chicken was finished on the grill with house BBQ sauce.
Late Wednesday night (actually Thursday morning) i watched Tina Fey appear as a guest on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. I think she is one of the funniest women on NBC. We don't actually have an NBC station here in Bellingham, but i see some of their programs on CityTV CKVU-10 which is the CHUM affiliate in Vancouver, British Columbia, and other shows on CTV Vancouver CIVT-32.
A couple times during the week Tony and i saw an eagle flying over the Bay, and once we saw it joined by a second eagle. These enormous birds circled for a while, and we weren't sure what was drawing them to this particular area, although it's possible some fish might have been attracting their attention. I don't think they ever migrate, i assume they're very territorial and keep close to their eyries along the cliffsides. It's unusual to see them flying right here in the city, as they probably dislike the competition with all the seagulls, herons, and other flocks who live, eat, or travel by here.
While browsing the forums at Goats.com i learned that Kurt Vonnegut died. He was one of my favorite authors ever since i was introduced to his novels and short stories about twenty-five years ago, and i shed a few quiet tears when i thought about how much my perspectives had been influenced by this great thinker. As mentioned in several fora:
From Kurt Vonnegut's A Man Without A Country (2005):
I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We humanists... I succeeded Isaac Asimov as president, and we humanists try to behave as well as we can without any expectation of a reward or punishment in an after life. So since God is unknown to us, the highest abstraction to which we serve is our community. That's as high as we can go, and we have some understanding of that. Now at a memorial service for Isaac Asimov a few years ago on the West Coast I spoke and I said, "Isaac is in heaven now," to a crowd of humanists. It was quite awhile before order could be restored. Humanists were rolling in the aisles. Should I, God forbid, pass on some time, I hope that some of you will say that Kurt is up in heaven now." That's my favorite joke.
*sigh* Kurt is up in heaven now. *lump in throat*
Wednesday and Thursday in the afternoons there were people flying some very large kites at the waterfront below our street on the former Georgia-Pacific property which was acquired by the Port. Their arched shapes were possibly six meters wide and held by lines on each of the two short edges, looking a little bit like para-sails. They rose and dove in the updrafts that blew in off Bellingham Bay, and i think they reached altitudes of approximately twenty-five meters directly in front of our windows.
There were several times during the week when i was horny and decided to play with my big dildos. I douched my rectum meticulously with my shower-shot plumbing equipment, and used Slam Dunk lubricant to facilitate the insertion of my great rubber friends. Although i was hoping to engulf some of the hugest, and did enjoy a few minutes riding on The World's Largest Vibrating Rubber Dong (#59 which is almost identical to #10), i found myself devoting most of my energy to some serious action with Bam (#4). My 'favorites' change from time to time, but i guess Bam has been the most awesome for me during the past four years. I can't say why exactly, but there is something just so exquisitely pleasurable, so exactly right, about the way he fits inside my ass. When i get him all the way in, twenty-five centimeters deep and seven centimeters wide, he makes me feel so good-- it takes a lot of effort to refrain from suddenly reaching orgasm, and i try to bounce and stuff him frenziedly as long as possible. With Bam inside me, i always feel like my life is complete, the universe is as it should be, and everything is perfect.
On Friday Tony and i took his 1994 Toyota pickup truck to Louis Auto Glass (just down the street from our home) for installation of a new windshield, after driving around with a long crack across the bottom of the glass for almost seven years. There are still less than thirty thousand miles on the odometer because we don't go out much; and the vehicle is in excellent condition despite being almost thirteen years old. The glass replacement process would be brief but a couple hours were needed for the glue to dry, so we chose to get some exercise walking around downtown Bellingham.
There is a music store at the corner of Railroad Avenue and Magnolia Street. Years ago it was called Cellophane Square, and i had purchased many new CDs there whenever i came out to Bellingham visiting Tony on my vacations. Then it was transformed into Djangos, which i believe was a regional chain in Western Washington with a half-dozen locations. Their selection of good electronic and ambient music seemed to diminish a little bit, but i still found quite a few excellent items in the bins of Used Discs for sale. Recently the store changed ownership again, so it's now called Everyday Music; but i must say, in my not so humble opinion: it's terrible! The selection of music which interests me has shrunk to almost nil. On the store's stereo system they were loudly playing Nirvana's album Nevermind; i thought it was a boring and unenjoyable album when it was released fifteen years, and i continued to think that it was awful when i heard it again at high volume Friday. I tried to look through the racks of discs and records in their store, but the horrible music drove us away after a few minutes. I don't think i'll ever return to that place again. I haven't actually purchased any music from a 'brick-and-mortar' business for several years; i usually buy online from GEMM.com, sometimes from Amazon.com, and as often as possible from websites operated directly by the artists and independent labels themselves (e.g., System 7, Eat Static, Dubtribe Sound System, WaveForm Records, etc).
Our next stop was adjacent to the dismal music store: we went into the International Newsstand and browsed their selection of magazines and publications. They're a cool little shop, and i'm glad they were able to survive the ridiculous legal brouhaha over censorship in which they were embroiled. We purchased nothing there (really i'd rather read most things electronically instead of on dead trees.) Then we crossed the street to the cool head shop known as Zephyr Etc. I bought their last two little boxes of Shin Mainichiko patchouli joss sticks, as they are my favorite brand of incense. [These were added to my collection of Shin Mainichiko musk, vanilla, lavender, green tea, jasmin, cedarwood, pine, rose, aloes wood, amber, sandal wood, and cherry.]
We strolled down Holly Street to Rocket Donuts to check them out for the first time. They are a relatively new bakery with high quality pastries. But i found the selection to be rather limited, and i was tremendously disappointed that they had no jelly cremes, no berry-filled, no eclairs, and only one kind of custard-filled. We purchased four donuts to bring home, and they were sold as "Bavarian Creme" but personally i say they should have been called "Boston Creme" because they had chocolate icing on top instead of finely-powdered confectionary sugar. I worked at Dunkin' Donuts in South Burlington, Vermont, many years ago, and i know my donuts! Oddly enough, Bellingham, Washington, is the only place in America which i have ever found to be lacking a Dunkin' Donuts restaurant (they're ubiquitous in nearly all other cities of the United States). This is tragic! They made my favorite dessert and breakfast pastries, and i always preferred their fare over any other bakeries' including Krispy Kreme, Tim Horton's, and Monsieur Donut (the latter was my favorite place in Montreal to eat at 5am after a long night in the gay clubs during the late 1980s and 1990s). It would be heavenly if someone would open a Dunkin' Donuts franchise here in Whatcom County, and i would promise to be their most faithful customer! I haven't had a good Maple Creme or Jelly Vanilla Creme-filled donut for almost six years, and i do miss them sorely.
[When i was an employee of Dunkin' Donuts in 1990, i worked from midnight to 4 or 5am on five nights per week as a "finisher". My job was to take all of the plain pastries created by the baker, and "finish" them by stuffing them with jellies and/or pastry creme (and my goodness, that's a lot of fucking work when you have to deal with fluted pastry bags), coating some of them with sugar or glazing, and spreading frosting and candy sprinkles across others. I also helped in the baking of brownies, cookies, croissants (plain and buttery, or filled with almond paste or chocolate chips), the proofing of some doughs, and the careful arrangement of the products on display in the showcases at the front counter.
That's where i met my friend (and roommate for a number of months) Tara Foote. She worked the graveyard shift at the front counter, serving coffee and snacks to the few customers who appeared during the wee hours of the morning before sunrise; they were mostly uniformed police officers (exactly according to stereotype!) because we were located almost equi-distant from the Police departments of South Burlington, Burlington, Colchester, Winooski, Williston, and the University of Vermont. In the daytime i worked at ShowTime Video, and nights at the bakery. She and i rented an apartment in Burlington; but after half a year i kicked her out as she had become sadly abusive and dysfunctional as a result of her struggles with chronic depression (aggravated by her feelings of being in love with a young gay man with HIV who did not entirely reciprocate her physical desires). So i sent her back to live with her family in Duxbury. She apparently felt better during the years thereafter and tried to contact me a couple times, but i chose not to rekindle any interactions because i didn't want to risk involvement with further potential dysfunction. She mentioned in an e-mail to me years later that she had moved on with her life and had a long-term boyfriend in some other state.
I've only had two relationships with women during my adult life (whereas i've had many intimate male friends, and more than a couple hundred male sex partners); but i wouldn't consider myself to be bisexual, i feel that i have always been homosexual and those two instances were simply attempts at exploration. The relationship with Tara ended in sadness; however, the other relationship was much more casual and quite happy with my good friend Pam Walker whom i knew since our days together in high school. Pam and i continued to be close friends (and even co-workers for a while at BellAtlantic/Verizon) over the years, although we never had sex again since our late teens.]
Gadzooks, i do so often ramble off at a tangent.
Tony and i stopped in the GreenHouse (whose façade was being renovated) to peruse their housewares and rugs, but found nothing to our particular liking. We checked many restaurants downtown and finally decided that we would dine at House Of Orient ("Jimmy's Thai"), where we arrived just before they finished serving lunch at 3pm. Our selections from their delicious menu of Thai food were spicy, satisfying, and filled with healthy vegetables, tofu, herbs, and zesty garlic sauce. We also had tall glasses of Thai Iced Tea with lots of sweetened creme and a good kick of caffeine. The staff were all gorgeously handsome young men, particularly the tall thin blond who served us our food (he made my gaydar go "beep beep beep!"), and the short dark southeast Asian guy with the dazzling smile working behind the front counter. Then it was finally time to head back to Louis Auto Glass where the truck was ready for us. The new windshield seems quite lovely; i'd been accustomed to driving around with the old cracked one for so many years, it was nice to finally get that fixed.
We drove out to the Cordata neighborhood to shop at Bed Bath & Beyond where we found exactly the new cutlery we desired to replace the dilapidated old set in our kitchen, and a marble mortar-and-pestle. After a long day of shopping and walking, we returned home very satisfied and lounged in front of the television while eating our donuts. I viewed a new episode of Law & Order which was sort of dull, but less insulting (i.e., less homophobic and/or sex-phobic) than most of Dick Wolf's usual fare. Exhausted from all our exercise, we fell asleep soon thereafter.
Saturday morning when we awoke and brewed our coffee i saw the Lilli Anne fishing vessel heading away from the international pier, while the enormous Horizon Fairbanks cargo ship remained at the mouth of the Whatcom Waterway. An unfamiliar object was on the rocks not too far from the docks, so i checked with binoculars and realized that it was a sailboat (without any sails) which had been beached and was leaning over almost sideways. This seemed a little strange, because i've never seen pleasure craft at these piers during my years here; all the ships at the moorings in this neighborhood are commercial, scientific, or military. Occasionally some of the sailboats and kayakers who come and go from Squalicum Harbor (a mile to the north) or Fairhaven harbor (a mile to the south) pass near the South Hill shoreline here, but i'd never actually seen anyone leave a small craft unattended along this stretch of the rocky coast. People arrived in several cars during the mid-afternoon, and they climbed down the rocks and into the boat which looked precariously close to taking on water as the tide was coming in, perhaps to retrieve some belongings. It was a mystery to me how they'd managed to strand it on the steep stones there. On a nearby section of the piers the driver training school was having its usual weekend lessons for a dozen people on motorcycles. Some days i see them teaching people how to drive tractor trailers and buses.
Sunday April 15th the sailboat was still abandoned on the rocks. Late at night another huge ship arrived at the international pier next to the Horizon Fairbanks (formerly known as the Horizon Expedition); this new arrival was the Horizon Pacific, which is an even larger ship than the others we've seen here for maintenance during the past couple years. These cargo vessels are the maximum width permissible for passage through the Panama Canal (maybe thirteen meters?); their lengths are perhaps ninety to one hundred meters, while their bridge and upper decks appear to be almost twenty-five meters above the waterline. Tony and i videotaped and later watched episodes of Saturday Night Live, the Simpsons, and American Dad.
All weekend and on Monday April 16th i spent time using the Sound Studio software on my iMac (G5 PowerPC) to capture some old analogue hi-fi tapes to AIFF, then i compressed those to high-quality MP3 files for permanent archival in my digital collection of music. These tapes contained recordings of many old vinyl records (and a few cassettes) i'd owned during the 1980s and early 1990s. It was a treat to re-listen to some of these gems which had been lurking on the back of a shelf for so many years, and i rather enjoyed a bit of nostalgia for that whole era of my youth when i was first exploring realms of music and developing my tastes.... It seems slightly odd (and makes me feel old, in a way which is not unpleasant) when i look back half my lifetime ago to when i was a big fan of groups such as Eurythmics (whom i saw live in concert at the Forum in Montréal, Québec), and then to when i started to realize that my preferences were leading me away from popular acts to the more obscure, such as Laurie Anderson (whom i saw twice at the Flynn Theater in Burlingont, Vermont). About a decade ago, my friend Travis and i went to Montréal to see the Chemical Brothers; Tiga was the opening act, and Carl Craig was third in the line-up. By that point in my life my focus was moving beyond the dance/ trance/ house/ big beat styles, and into various realms of downtempo, chill-out, gentler psychedelic ambience, and fusions of styles which defied easy categorization. Nowadays when people ask me what kind of music i enjoy, i am unable to simply state a genre; so i just repeat the words from Playing Around With Sound on one of the most fabulous albums of all time, It's Tomorrow Already: "I'm into what's weird... I always have been... I don't distinguish between music and noise... I'm interested in all sounds..."
Tuesday morning April 17th i was unable to sleep very long, as symptoms of AIDS-related opportunistic infections caused discomfort. I've only had around one hundred T-cells for most of the past decade (and i've been walking around with HIV since i was a teenager, now almost eighteen years since seroconversion) so i'm accustomed to constant nigglings which interfere with my functionality. Blastocystosis was contributing to nausea and an upset stomach. An ugly little appearance of Folliculitis in an eyelash was irritating my right eyeball, but i couldn't say for certain whether it was bacterial or fungal; and either way, the edge of one's eye is not a good place to be applying my prescription Mupirocin ointment which is normally useful on other parts of the skin. I did what i almost always do during instances of non-life-threatening aggravations: i decided to simply monitor closely for a few days to see whether my body's own immune system could deal with the problems, and if anything worsened then i would call one of my trusted nurses for advice. Usually these situations lead to a trip to the pharmacist, and then a week or two of extra nausea as antibiotics or antifungals do the trick. I already have my regular monthly appointment for Pentamadine inhalation coming up soon at the Respiratory Therapy department, and i'm supposed to contact one of my doctors this month anyway in regards to upcoming lab-work and office visits; so i'm hoping i might get lucky and my current symptoms could be gone by then anyway. (yeah, right.)
Raindrops splattered frequently against the northwest windows. Despite a lack of proper rest, i decided to go about my regular habits. I tried to drink my usual Arabica coffee with Tony, but queasiness prevented me from finishing. This may have been for the best, as extra napping would be a good objective for the day.
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