01 July 2003 - Road Trip Day 32
02 July 2003 - Road Trip Day 33
03 July 2003 - Road Trip Day 34
04 July 2003 - Road Trip Day 35
05 July 2003 - Road Trip Day 36

10 July 2003 - (Link to this entry) (Comment)

I enjoy the notes sent from all over the country from people who "rode along" on Road Trip 2003 via the Internet.  It is interesting to see how this mysterious collection of wires and silicon tie me to people I've never - and may never - see. 

Returning to work after 37 days means returning to a pile of mail, messages, tasks and projects.  I managed to excavate my desk and locate most of my office utensils.  Now I must return to that task of earning money to pay the bills.

If you missed bits of the cross country road trip called Road Trip 2003, you can find photo highlights in the new photo gallery by clicking here.  You can also start at the beginning and browse through the entire journey by clicking here. 

Now, before I run off to figure out which clients owe me money, three small notes:

First, I am ever so flattered the Russian River Sisters are copying Ba-da-Bingo by starting their own Bingo game at the Russian River!  Opening night is Saturday, July 19th, which is also smack in the middle of Lazy Bear Weekend.  I will be heading to Guerneville for opening night and you can click here for details.  [Sister Betty will be organizing a bus to the River for Russian River Bingo in September.  Check back for details!]

Second, I will shortly be unveiling Sister Betty's newest and latest web creation.  More details to follow.

Finally, a big thanks to Joe Gallagher of Joe the Barber and Leatherpage.com fame for promoting Road Trip 2003 while I was driving around the country.  Joe is Sister Betty's personal grooming specialist and I highly recommend his affordable services to residents and visitors alike.  You can find his contact information on JoeTheBarber.com.

12 July 2003 - (Link to this entry) (Comment)

Karen Oliveto of Bethany United Methodist Church rang and asked if I would deliver the sermon tomorrow.  The scheduled topic is "The Day the Music Died" based on the Biblical story of the beheading of John the Baptist.  A lovely topic for a summer day, eh?  The last time I did a round of sermonizing I was promoting an anti-violence campaign.  If I were in Saudi Arabia, I might have been able to work a good beheading story into THAT speech. 

I grew up in the most fundamentalist of Baptist churches where sermons lasted nearly an hour.  I vividly recall many Sundays spent staring at my watch and wishing the preacher would finish.  I recall almost nothing of the content of the endless Baptist droning.  Thankfully the Methodists are much more pragmatic.  It is summer, the weather is fine and the sports teams are filling the afternoon television schedule.  Therefore, I'm told sermons should be five to seven minutes.

Five to seven minutes is not a lot of time to fill except, of course, when you have no idea of what you are going to say, which is precisely where I find myself at this moment.  After rifling through three books and finding only marginal inspiration, I went so far as to search the Internet for a good John the Baptist sermon.  What I found was something for children using potato chips to illustrate sin.  ("Sins are like potato chips, you can't have just one, you always want another."  Profound stuff, yes?)

The cats are roaming the balcony in the warm afternoon sun, the giant tree next door sways in the wind and the clock slowly counts the minutes before I take the pulpit and say:  "Shit, it must really suck to have your head cut off."

And all the people said:  "Amen!"

14 July 2003 - (Link to this entry) (Comment)

I only now finished excavating the electronic mail accumulated during Road Trip 2003.  Whew. 

My big news for today:  One of the largest defense contractors in the United States licensed from me the use of Radiationworks for an Air Force training program.  Should I tell them now or later that it was created by a queer nun?

You'll find a new "Who is Sister Betty" page complete with odd photographs by clicking here. 

You can see Sister Betty in person this weekend at the debut of the Russian River Sisters' Bingo or the Lazy Bear Weekend Cher Bear Party. 

Now, I am off to bed.

23 July 2003 - (Link to this entry) (Comment)

The tunnel smells of oil, water and electricity.  Swollen eyed Chinese woman falls asleep with a finger still pointing to the last word she read in the book.  Aging, grey bearded man glances around hoping a young man will smile and confirm he is not so very old.  Lawyer woman guards her briefcase with a knee while grasping the bar far above her head.  Pin stripes, cheap shirts, high heels, disheveled afternoon hair.  Pressed together, each person attempts as best they can to pretend they are alone in this rattling car.  No one smiles.  No one looks at another person long enough to cause discomfort.  Silence fills the space between the screeching of wheels on rails.  We live a dream and wake up wondering how it is we ended up here.

If this were a musical, we would spill out in neat lines along the platform singing in unison while busty females dance up the escalator waving neatly manicured hands. 

Swollen eyed Chinese woman picks at a bit nail polish and closes her eyes again.

24 July 2003 - (Link to this entry) (Comment)

MUNI Guy and I ate lunch together today on the corner of a busy downtown intersection.  Endless ribbons of people wove their way around the cafe, disappearing around corners, into doorways, up stairways.  I looked upward at the high rise buildings with offices stacked one above another like shoe boxes in a cheap outlet store. 

What do all these thousands of people do?  What are the Very Important Things which fill the hours of so many Very Important Jobs?  What attracts giant gobs of humanity to spend years in six foot square bits of territory marked with old Happy Meal toys, sports posters and photos in $1.99 frames from the corner drugstore?

I often wonder why the world doesn't come to a crashing, screeching, grinding halt.  It seems the filament that holds it all together is so very thin and only our silent agreement keeps it from snapping, sending us  tumbling to the streets.  Sitting on the pavement would we stare at each other and say:  "Who are you?  Who am I?  How did I get HERE?"

I suspect I will someday find myself sitting next to Swollen Eyed Chinese Woman, we will look at each other and fall from our seats with laughter. 

27 July 2003 - (Link to this entry) (Comment)

Dore Alley Street Fair was today.  I spent most of the day supervising donation collection at a busy gate.  Despite realizing the novelty of seeing roaming herds of scantily clad people has worn off over the years, the weather was outstanding and it is always fun to play with people at the gates.

I spent some time wandering through the crowd and if you click here you will find a full gallery of images from today. 

If I disregard the various ships and bases where I was stationed during my time in the Navy, I've lived in thirteen different apartments since leaving my Arizona hometown.  That means I move about every fourteen months.  I've lived in my current apartment longer than I've ever lived anywhere else and I'm sensing it is time to move.  This time, however, it may be much further than across town.  I'm considering somewhere...oh...about...three thousand miles away.  Maybe in springtime... 

29 July 2003 - (Link to this entry) (Comment)

There are more projects circling my head than flies in an Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom Africa special.  I have a new business to launch, two books to write, a marketing facelift for my current business needs to be implemented, two - no three - web sites to fix or remodel and an insurance company is banging on the door for financial documents from years past.  I'll need Linda Blair's makeup artist if my head is to spin any faster.

I've completed one project and set it free:  The Great Russian River Bingo Bus Adventure.  The quick summary:  Nuns, a luxury bus, 45 bingo players, swimming pools, canoeing and a crazy day in a resort town.  If you live in San Francisco, you should click here and join us.  If you don't live in San Francisco you can still click here and see the details.

Ba-da-Bingo is next week and I've found the most wonderful door prize:  talking George Bush dolls.  When you squeeze the head, the dolls spout all the famous quips George Bush is famous for.  I thought the manufacturer might spare the programming and borrow the chip from Barbie:  "Math is hard."

I ran into Drew this morning as I was leaving MUNI and he was headed into the station.  It seems my excellent conflict resolution skills have fixed the long standing animosity between himself and Jeff Glover.  I am pleased I could be of service. 

If you are keeping score, this makes the fifth journal entry in as many months which is composed entirely of fluff and nothingness and is better read while sitting on the toilet.

The live camera in my office capture this view of San Francisco today.  The camera is always on.  Click here if you'd like to inspect the live view for yourself.
 

29 July 2003 - later - (Link to this entry) (Comment)

Goodbye, Mister Sharp.  If Saint Peter has a gift shop, send postcards. 

30 July 2003 -  (Link to this entry) (Comment)

Christopher from Alaska sent this photo from Japan where he just finished installing an art park in the middle of a rice paddy.  (Nope, not making this up). 

For anyone working at the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness Unit, that gun looks mighty real to me.  You might want to send some thugs to Alaska...

30 July 2003 - (Link to this entry) (Comment)

The leader of the most powerful, wealthiest and best darn looking nation in the world took a break today from his continual search for evildoers, terrorists and anyone else pro-tax or anti-business to announce he has lawyers looking for a way to legally outlaw gay marriage.  Gay marriage presents a threat so real, well, gosh, it is as scary as someone blowing up the Gateway Arch or bringing down the Golden Gate Bridge.  (Well, come to think of it, perhaps bringing down the Bridge would keep those fairies from contaminating the rest of the country...)

George Bush don't hate gays, no sirree.  He loves the sinners and hates the sin, he do, he do, he do. 

Gay love, you see, well, it is just icky.  All those penises in places where there aren't any Fallopian Tubes to celebrate the arrival of fresh sperm are just, well, out of place.  And if you can't have kids, you can't be married.

What is that you say?  Forty five percent of married people in the United States don't have children?  Well, they COULD and that is the essential fact.  With gay people - no children.  See, the plumbing doesn't match.

Gay marriage, you see, weakens American families.  Not like the WTO or NAFTA weaken families by exporting jobs and reducing middle-class wage earners to service sector employees.  Nor is it the same as taking money from schools to build big, shiny prisons.  Nope, it isn't like repealing air, water or food safety standards which were designed to help those kids grow into big, prosperous child-bearing machines in their own right. 

Gay marriage presents a bigger threat than big-hearted Republicans like Tim Hutchins who dump their wives of 29 years to marry their senate staffers. 

Gay marriage really threatens marriages for people like the Bushes, especially George the Senior who raised a coke-head son who in turn raised an alcoholic daughter.  You don't see Hillary's child getting arrested now do you?  I bet her village has some very nice queers.

A lot of people used to think interracial marriage was a really bad thing.  For just about 100 and some years, most states banned such a practice.  Wasn't the right thing, nope it wasn't. South Carolina thought so until 1998 when so many damn people were marrying half-breeds and mulattos that they just couldn't be completely thick headed about it any longer.  Besides, with Jeb Bush married to a Mex-ee-can, Phil Gramm married to a Cor-ee-an and Clarence Thomas married to (gasp!) a white woman, it makes defending such laws a little difficult. 

President Bush is a man on a mission.  His priority is to protect us from terrorists and queers, no matter where they are or who they love.  He's built a lovely, remote, little camp in Guantanamo where he keeps "unlawful combatants" locked up without lawyers, trials or public access.  (Treblinka was nice and remote, the public was banned from approaching and look what happened there...)  Perhaps we can fix this little gay marriage problem by plunking a camp down next to Kabul and let the bent boys play "Queer Eye for the Desert Sky" out in the sand, eh?

See, old President Bush comes on like a slow minded, dim witted, faux-cattle ranching fuck, but he really isn't.  While all the country gets worked up in a tizzy over the dangers posed by men who like sleeping with men, Bush and his friends are robbing the country blind.  That big deficit?  That be money going to somebody somewhere - and it ain't you.  Those bombs?  They fallin' on somebody somewhere (someone who is probably brown, so no need to take notice).  Those Medicare checks?  'Dey in the mail.  Worried about your job?  Well, it will all trickle ...down... to... you... eventually. 

Cover your buttocks, dear, I think that man just glanced at your posterior.