feather2pixels

Rachel was in town recently. As I was giving my mouse pad a much needed cleaning, the doorbell rang and she was suddenly standing on my stoop, unmistakably her. After a tour of the premises, we took off in her brother’s hard-clutched Subaru for my San Francisco Highlights tour on a blustery Thursday afternoon. Even though those events were more or less planned, it was one of the more notable visits of my time in Mission.

There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to describe exactly who Rachel is. My first girlfriend, who I met in the summer of eighth grade at YMCA camp in South Jersey has too many prepositional phrases. At the top of Twin Peaks, where she treaded close to the inner curb (“I don’t do well with heights”), the air tasted thin and the still bay in front of us felt like a memory of something that never happened to me. Really, she was my first great penpal and my first great obsession in a life that has basically been a series of penpals and obsessions. But the idea of a patterned existence seemed reassuring up there. For a year or two, her letters were the only things that made me happy. Today they are among my most treasured possessions. This summer I re-read them and they blew me away. Somehow, they are at once intelligent and well-written, hopeful and heartbreaking. They teem with what it is to be young. Somehow, they remind me of who I am today. And that is fucking crazy.

At one point at Land’s End, she stopped to sit on a rock. Here, the refuge of the bay gives way to the open ocean and today it looked cold and patient. I excused myself to take a piss on an old gnarled tree and then we sat around for a bit until the wind became unbearable. She’s been through a lot since then, Rachel. It was in her eyes. Is it in my eyes, too? Things feel fucked up with me and I can’t even explain to people why.

These days, Rachel is a writer (in the sense of being a writer that I truly respect: she writes). It’s deeply satisfying for me to recognize the passion of her old letters to me in the words she writes today. It’s deeply satisfying to stand on a rock and know something about the essence of someone I don’t really know anymore. I don’t explain much to her on the rock.

Who says unions aren’t good for anything?

The Castro Street Fair was on Sunday and I was on hand in a custom-made booth to sell my postcards for the very first time. The whole thing involved quite a bit of anticipation because I have been working on this series for three weeks and I really didn’t know what to expect from the fair or the booth or my collaborators.

The booth exceeded my expectations. We somehow acquired an easy-prop tent with folding tables and the premises looked passably professional. Adrienne and Tent (Tent is a person, not a shelter) stenciled a nice looking sign and our whole show had a pleasantly homemade aesthetic to it. Adrienne sold pillows and stuffed monkeys, Lili sold dress-me-up felt people cards, Tent sold stenciled sundries, and of course I had my postcards. The fair was packed and, for the most part, flaming. This makes for pretty good street fair atmosphere and by around 3PM Castro Street between Market and 19th was absolutely packed, despite the huge free bluegrass show going on in Golden Gate Park.

I didn’t really sell that many postcard sets. It’s not so surprising: screen prints of ugly houses in southern San Francisco don’t get in your face quite as much as sandblasted cock sculptures. If my determination as a salesman was more robust, I would have considered the venue in my design. Luckily, I have a day job. And it wasn’t all disappointment. At one point a guy bought a set and then came back for three more. So that’s nice, right?

I got this in my faculty mailbox the other day:

Questions:

1. Is it funny that they are distributing fliers for other jobs at my job?
2. Is it funny that the other job in question is a prison guard?
2a. …Peace officer, I mean?
3. Are these the only two women employed at the CA Department of Corrections?

The principal printing for my new series of San Francisco postcards is finally complete. I squeezed out the fourth layer of the 720th postcard just as some kind of Tango event was beginning at CellSpace, where I screen print. Then I biked up Nob Hill and drank alone in North Beach.

Screen printing is so good, it’s hard to contain myself. Tonight, Kristin joined me at Cellspace after a hard day working the dreaded Exploratorium summer camp. While an impossibly loud break dancing group practiced downstairs, we made a series of three postcards up in the silk screening loft. They came out really good. The gifs don’t do it justice. The images and words are (unmistakably) hers; I helped with the design.

Since I can’t stand failure (beyond the point of fault and to much unnecessary personal distress), I reprinted my jellies postcards. The results, which were mixed, don’t quite stand on their own since I got rid of the labels. Either that, or this is the best one yet. If you look carefully, you will notice it’s actually a three layer print, the third layer being a light halftone pattern over the jellies. Maybe I will send them.

How do I want you to feel about my life today?

Well, I finally started cranking out some silkscreened postcards. I am still cutting most of them out, but a limited run (of postcard no. 9, out of sequence only because they were the most plentiful) was dropped in the Mission and 24th mailbox on Friday. Prepare yourself.

There are more on the way. I seriously underestimated the issues involved in screening 220 postcards (matching fronts and backs, successfully printing little letters, finding a good halftone but that’s vague but not too vague) but that’s what workshops are for. Joanna continued to crank out some pretty cool stuff too. I grabbed one of her test strips.

On Wednesday, Phanna and I won trivia night with an unprecedented two man team! It came down to a rare tiebreaker question: “what was the average weight, in lbs, of a knight’s armor in the middle ages?” We said forty-five. It’s fifty. Add one Pig Buck to the bank.

Work is so silly. I read about valves and programmable logic controllers and things like that, and the next day I show thirty-five college kids what I learned. Part of their training is licensing as a third engineer (on a ship) and this week Baby Bluehawk and her friend passed the exam requirement. She stopped by my office beaming to deliver the news and it was charming. So that’s a good part of my job, right?

The second Critical Mass of 2007 was much more successful than the first. This time I coralled the Bulldogger and Marella to join me, but we cut it too close and, again, I missed the beginning (do they really start at 6:30?). Luckily, we intercepted a fellow straggler who came prepared with a walkie-talkie and he led us to Fisherman’s Wharf, where somehow the mass had extended itself. After that (and besides a rare Pac Heights excursion) it was a pretty standard ride. The guy with the ridiculously loud speaker cart was there this time, which makes a big difference.

This week, after nine and a half years of post secondary education, Jill started her first job since the ol’ sandwich shop in high school. That’s the kind of irony grad school gets you. But suddenly she’s a development engineer at a fancy biotech company on the Peninsula and I am very proud of her. I still remember first meeting her in Dr. Stewart’s Physiscs class on virtually our first day at Pitt. We ended up choosing the same major (bioengineering) and working together on just about every group project, sometimes against our will. I caught up with her for a rushed Guinness (which she claims to only drink with me) on Wednesday night and asked her how it was going. “Lonely,” she said. She will be fine. Jill is always fine.

Oh Morgan Jameson, what the fuck are we doing? I wrote her a really heartfelt email a little while ago but it was utterly unsendable. So I didn’t send it, we didn’t speak for a while, and now, somehow, I am doing this thing where I write her about every little detail of my madness. And make no mistake, it is madness: we wrote 5,548 words to each other this weekend. It’s helped bring things to a conclusion but now she just thinks I am insane and self absorbed, which of course is kind of true, but I think I regret it. As it stands now, the plan is to not write each other for a month.
I went to an Oscar party at Louise’s tonight. I will say several things about Louise: (a) she throws a damn good Oscar party. Just like last year, it featured her baked potato bar, which is executed with such authority that it transcends the irony that would surely destroy any lesser baked potato bar. This brings up another good thing about Louise: (b) she’s groomed her irony into sincerity, which seems to me like your only viable option if you are going to stick with this type of disposition(At least without becoming an insufferable Mission jerkoff). Louise does karaoke and Stevie Nicks parties and sundae bars because she loves them. We also made buttons, which I realized is an awesome thing to do.

After another Sparky’s breakfast this week, Sadie took Nowell and I to the giant camera obscura at the Cliff House. It was closed (apparently because the day wasn’t “beautiful enough”) but at least it made for a good Polaroid.

Thursday. Trying to remember what I do on Thursday. Get up early, for one thing. Like, last semester early. And after an initial week of superhuman energy I have been sleepwalking through the rest of the month. It didn’t help that I started drinking on Monday this week.

Here are some uninteresting things about my life:

-Lost at trivia last night. Not just lost: last place! What the hell? Things better get back to normal quick.

-Burned up about a gallon of gasoline in 1988 Volvo, riding three miles across town to watch “An Inconvenient Truth” at the Independent movie night with Corinne and Rinne. Awesome awesome awesome.

-Won the lottery.

-And for now I am living up to my 2007 resolution of averaging one movie a week. I caught “Romantico” with the Valeri family on Tuesday after an all out suhsi orgy in the old neighborhood. Remember that I am tired? I embarrassingly nodded off and for a moment got to be the guy who was snoring at the movies.

-Speaking of the old neighborhood: SF changes so fast. I realized that on one block of Polk Street, 75% of the stores had been replaced from the time I moved there in 2003. Businesses that stay are the exception, not the norm.

-I finally have an idea for the fourth postcard. I am realize my dream of a three-stage print.

-My healthy relationship is going great and I think I may have won the upper hand in my unhealthy relationship. But did I fuck up my last emai?