And it is Friday. I’m typing my journal this morning since I filled up my last notebook. Remember that scene in Seven where they find those thousands of notebooks of a psychotic? That’s a shelf in my closet.
Ron is out for three days. Kitty is climbing the obelisk of boxes I’ve packed up for stuff to take to Brown Elephant (the local Goodwill-esque place that benefits the Howard Brown Health Center, our local LGBT-focused clinic). I have 2 boxes of books, a bunch of old hardware and a huge laundry bag of clothes.
Mild here today in the city. Mastermind call later on today.
My software project out of India has slowed down just a bit since I didn’t provide enough detail on what I wanted – sometimes I think you can never give developers enough detail. I did some HTML mockups and narratives of process flow. I think it is funny that I know how to do that.
Still tattoo shopping online. I’ve got a folder full of ideas and inspirations. I want something that blends some of the Polynesian styles (without appropriating) with celtic motifs (though without the ‘messy’ quality that some knotwork can have. I wish the neo-nazis hadn’t taken all the cool Teutonic symbols. Bastardes. I also want it to blend into my current solar icon on my left shoulder. I am also trying to decide coverage: left pectoral and/or shoulder and/or upper arm. I know some think that I’m probably too old to be getting tattoos or that it is such a declasse thing to do – that tattoos are for carnies and sailors. For me it is a further marking of my maturing. Not necessarily a warrior-mark but that idea but for more constructive pursuits. Plus, I think it is sexy and a way to adorn the body I work hard on developing. The reason to get it done now is because the Gay Holiday Season is upon us. It starts with the International Mister Leather weekend then Gay Pride weekend and then ties up with the Market Days street fair. Basically any event where you might have your shirt off. I want to get my ink by then so it can settle into my skin a bit.
Got leads on a couple gigs. Laundry building up as always. Construction a few houses down keeps me waking up early each morning.
Ron and I are flying home next weekend for dad’s birthday and we are also going to see my high school’s production of Miss Saigon. I haven’t been inside their new auditorium but I think it’ll be fun. Mom and dad had gone over to see the kids in rehearsal and they got all misty thinking of the hours my friends and I sweated on the stage (May, old gymnasium, full costumes, bright lights, no A/C – though the new place does have A/C). I am curious to see how they do the helicopter landing. If it was me directing I would drop all pretense of having any physical stage piece moving and make it a slide how ending with the famous pictures of the last helicopter leaving. I might even sprinkle in interviews with survivors of both sides of the conflict. Wrap the whole thing in a documentary. That is always the moving part of Miss Saigon for me. I don’t get into love stories. But the collapse of a country, the failure of leadership, the arrogance of empire – that I can dance to.
Ron’s mom sent me a package for him (since he is gone often I get sent stuff that might get stolen out of his lobby). She spells my last name with an ‘F’ that is so cute: Andy Wibbelf. I think it is because Ron is spelling my last name out on the phone and he says S and she hears F. He doesn’t lisp that bad.
The girl next door and I walked down the street together. She was off to the gym for yoga and I was off to Chipotle for a burrito bowl. She and her husban are actors from Pittsburgh. Sometimes I think I need to get back into the theatre stuff if only to get me out of the house. I dream of doing a staged reading of United States v Bush et al. If I ever produce stuff again it will be corrosive, scandalous and inflammatory – it is the only way to get the butts in the seats.
Karen and I used to joke that we should call our theatre company FOSAP – Free Oral Sex After Performance. I think if you promise fellatio and cunnilingus people would beat down the doors. And then you just have them all meet in one corner of the lobby afterwards for their free oral sex – you don’t have to facilitate that – you just let them figure it out.
Ron told me he loved me this week. He usually says it at least once a week. And usualy it is after we’ve laughed about something really hard. And often it is while watching the TV. We often talk about how we can’t imagine not laughing all the time with somebody and see couples on the street of all combinations and we wonder if they ever laugh – or what do they talk about. I think my parents modeled that for me. Sure, every couple has turbulence but mom and dad laughed often and heartily. As Ron says, ‘Your mom has such a healthy laugh.’ And dad’s sense of humor is almost as dark as mine (even if he likes Bob & Tom 😉 ). And my sister and her husband are the same way. I’m the serious one. My sister is the serious one. My dad is the serious one. I think. Well I mean mom is the lighter one but dad is the more jokey one. Mom doesn’t make many jokes – but she laughs a lot or says things like: "I almost called the kids little assholes today." (K-8 art class)
And evidently the new neighbors love my mom. See mom and my sister have this vibe with gay men. Mom visited the male couple next door (they are from Chicago) and they loved mom’s shoes and so she got a full tour of the house. I think the previous owner poor Miss Baker (now in a retirement home) would have a conniption if she knew there might be buggery under her old roof. Worse than buggery is they are tilling the yard to put in a garden and a pool or hot tub. I want to go visit them when we are home next weekend and let them know if they ever need anything, my parents are there for them. Cup of sugar, mow the lawn while you’re on vacation, etc., the Wibbels make great neighbors. Just as long as you don’t have some little yippy asshole dog that never shuts up and barks all night and oh isn’t it so damned cute and here let me throw his poo over on your side of the fence and later on say I don’t know how that got there what a rascal that dog is and… well you get the idea.
I’m not surprised about the Virginia Tech shootings. It is awful. It is terrible and it is a tragedy. But I’m not shocked or surprised. I don’t expect this thing to happen often but I’m not surprised when it does. And it is always a ‘quiet community where everybody knows one another’ that is rocked by murder. Bullshit. This was a school of 26,000 kids – you can’t know everybody. As for the roommates – everybody in college has a roommate that stays up all night and writes manifestos and never talks (ours was a film major – he’d pile Mountain Dew cans up the wall and build a fort around his Mac).
In college you just assume the quiet ones will snap at any time so you just stay out of their way (this guy wasn’t homicidal though – he looked like Jesus with long stringy hair and a goattee). We were four to a room in college – that’s enough to upgrade tensions. Four just out of high school guys in one small dorm room. One that talked in a perpetually non-confrontive voice, one that was always on the phone with his girlfriend, the one film major and then me (the one that was always gone at rehearsal).
It also pissed me off that the lady on AC360 drew a line from Cho’s plays with pedophiliac content to his supposed repressed homosexuality. She even qualified it as an old theory but still said it. Anderson contested that everything he writes about is about being with women and she still remained firm. Come on, if you are going to write about chainsaws and etc are you really going to repress much else? And now I feel sorry for all kids everywhere that happen to include violence imagery in their art – events like this stifle expression.
If anything this seems a lot less about sex or race and more about class. And all the talk that he was INSANE and CRAZY well not really. This was completely premeditated. And he isn’t evil. This ain’t evil. This is selfish delusion. Don’t elevate his act into theology. Those kids weren’t killed by evil – they were killed by a very ill individual.
Leave a Reply