feather2pixels

Joe and Ana are still in SF, freewheeling through the remaining days of their honeymoon. Four nights in a row of hanging out and I practically feel like a normal person again. I like the concept of friendship. I like the feeling of stopping by a friend’s house on my way back from the ocean to drink beer and to watch baseball. I like this idea that friends sometimes hang out in groups larger than two. I’d almost forgotten that once upon a time having fun with other people didn’t require planning weeks ahead.

The ride home from Cole Valley is a series of zigzags and wiggles, all downhill through a maze of SF Victorians. At night, the streets are awake and the city sweeps past me at eight miles per hour. Right. This is how I am supposed to feel. This is where I belong. This is a particular kind of heaven.

Has there ever been a fifther wheel than me?

Who says unions aren’t good for anything?

At one point the city was my best friend. We spent a lot time alone, made each other feel good, and I have many memories of being intoxicated with her beauty. (I think I almost got her pregnant back in the spring of 2004). Now I wake up at five to spend my days in Vallejo and there is the sense that SF and I have drifted apart a little. But it was a sunny weekend of wandering around town around and it felt good to remember that old, mischievous spark.

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And then, while I was wading along Ocean Beach, two tall guys from Amsterdam asked permission to photograph me for their Dutch design magazine. “We take pictures of people in the park,” they said. They had bad teeth. For fifteen minutes I posed.

And then we surprised A-kik-o (trivia team: general knowledge, handicrafts, geography).

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And then Joe and Ana arrived in town for the final leg of their honeymoon.

And then I skipped my open studio show completely because who cares about a bunch of postcards?

Holy shit, isn’t this how The Toxic Avenger got his big start?

In the continued spirit of me making shitty little things, Adrienne sent me pictures of our Castro Street Fair booth and I did a collage:

Why is To-Shi-O dragging a keg?

For our third party is why! We had what I guess was technically a kegger on Saturday night and it was reasonably successful. That is to say people showed up to our apartment, drank, and eventually left. The only casualties were a shower curtain and a scrappy rug—just a shower curtain if you don’t mind the rotting smell of old trendy pilsner.

Speaking of people who don’t mind the smell of rotting beer, Danny humored me while I told him all about the weekend. Afterwards, he added, “Yeah we usually have a couple of kegs at every party.” A couple?! How often does Danny’s house have parties, anyways? “You know, a couple of times a month.” Lesson: never try and amuse a Big Ten student with your keg-obtaining exploits.

The SF postcard video project is done! Nowell posted it last week and now I’ve followed suite (that only took six hours). Check it out.

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?

If you don’t have anything nice to say, then password-protect your blog.

So the only viable solution for editing this blog for public consumption was to retroactively privitize half the posts. This sucks. This makes me think: what’s the point. Anyway, email me if you want the password.

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?

Which one would you rather teach this spring?

EPO 235   Steam Plant Watch Team Management
EPO 321   Diesel Plant Simulator
ET 232     Statics
ET 332     Strength of Materials
ET 342     Refrigeration and Air Conditioning
ET 452     Electrical Distribution and Transmission

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.