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Love’s Supreme Desire Tabloid, June 1999 (enjoyable read by Agnes or Ralph in Simpletext)

 Why do I smoke those damn fool cigarettes? I just paid $7.25 for a pack along with a one pound-eight ounce can of Dinty Moore Beef Stew. That seems like a rip-off. $7.25 for a pack of fancy-schmansy “American Spirit” cigarettes and a smelly old can of beef stew. They had steak in the store and I stared at it for so long thinking “mmmmm, steak” that the man finally asked me if I needed some help. No, I’m just a libra. It takes me a while to decide these things. Steak or beef stew? Steak or hot dogs with chips? Steak or cigarettes? I know, I should’ve taken the steak. But if I hadn’t gotten the cigarettes I’d probably still be lying immobile on the bed trying to decide whether or not I should buy a pack of cigarettes or just quit smoking, which of course would have been the better choice but then I probably wouldn’t be writing this right now if I were crapped out in bed having a nicotine fit. I’ve never really considered myself a smoker, or I guess never really owned up to it, but now that I think of it I’ve been smoking on and off pretty much ever since high school. I’ve never been a terribly heavy smoker, at the most I’ve smoked like a pack a week, and for long stretches I hardly smoked at all, but I’ve never been able (never really wanted) to completely stop smoking. if I stopped smoking, I wouldn’t be able to go up on the roof and look at the view and be one of those smoking-type people, you know how there are smoking-type people? I don’t really know what I mean when I say that, but  I guess I’ve always been a smoking-type person. Don’t misunderstand that as an endorsement of smoking. Don’t do it! It’s stupid! It’s hard as hell to quit, especially because it’s so much fun. It’s fun flushing your money down the toilet! It’s fun reeking up the apartment! It’s fun coughing up Oysters Rockefeller!  I’m quitting again.
 Last week I saw a pile of shit with a napkin placed daintily on top of it on the sidewalk down the street from my place. It had an empty vodka bottle stabbed through it, sitting upright like a sculpture. The brazen vileness of the piece cracked me up like the time my friend Clay and I went out drinking at the Euclid Tavern in Cleveland and discovered some old guy’s dentures drowning in a urinal full of vomit. Which reminds me, I finally saw The Phantom Menace.
 The Phantom Menace wasn’t exactly a disappointment because I knew going into it that Star Wars movies are basically crappy light-weight sci-fi adventure flicks. They’re fun, fast, loud, and help to pass the time. This movie had all of those things going for it, but also had some incredibly long and tedious stretches of obvious pandering to the under ten crowd. The characters were for the most part flat and cartoonish; the character of the “future Darth Vader”  would have been more at home selling corn flakes on TV. Not a complex bone in his perky little blond-headed body. By now you’ve probably heard of the shuck-n-jive antics of the character named Jah-Jah Binks. He may as well have worn a T-shirt declaring “I am the comic relief. You will laugh at the dumb things that I do, and you WILL find me adorable.” It seems to me that George Lucas’ problem is that although he’s able (with the help of hundreds of other creative types) to envision fantastic material realities, amazing cities, cool spaceships and robots and lots of other neat toys, his characters and stories are so simplistic that the whole thing is hard to buy, and you really don’t care who lives or dies. The characters ALL seem like robots, fulfilling a function as programmed, easily replaceable. And the bad thing is that this film suffers from these faults more than any of his others. I sat there thinking, “this is such a huge, corporate, sanitized, SAFE movie.” But still my heart rushed with excitement at the times they intended it to race, and I left the theater not feeling ripped-off or disappointed exactly, yet still disappointed.
 The day I saw The Phantom Menace was a good day. Owen’s mother had been staying with us for the previous week in our teeny tiny little studio, bless her heart, so I had almost no time to myself. Although I liked her, and she told me that she liked me, I’m the kind of person who needs lots of personal free time to recharge, doodle, watch TV, make jewelry, lay on the bed, stare out into the air, do nothing. I get grouchy when I have to be “on” all of the time. Well, I guess everyone’s like that. Anyway, she left on Saturday, I had to work on Sunday, and Monday and Tuesday are my days off from General Bead (www.genbead.com). I decided to take myself out to lunch and go see The Phantom Menace, which I had been anticipating for years and years. It was a beautiful, bright sunny day, my favorite kind of San Francisco day, so I strolled on over to Polk Street and discovered Polk Street Station, at Polk and Pine. I’ve always been partial to unpretentious diners with sassy waitresses, large portions, wholesome food, and inexpensive prices. Polk Street Station has all of those things plus a little train on a track suspended from the ceiling. I had a full Thanksgiving dinner with turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, chicken rice soup, a roll, and coffee and left the place with a song in my heart.
 The cool thing about the Tenderloin (as if impromptu feces sculptures were not enough) is that there are so many international restaurants and shops all around, not to mention easy access to several large movie theaters, malls, and museums like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (the first Tuesday of the month is free admission day). All I have to do is creep downstairs and wander aimlessly for a bit and sooner or later I’ll discover something wonderful in this neighborhood, even though it is considered one of the “worst” neighborhoods in the city. How could that be? Right down the street from me, at the corner of Taylor and Market, we have both the Fox Warfield and the Golden Gate Theater. Right now Rent is playing at the Golden Gate, and on any given night you can find a diverting band playing at the Warfield. I guess I’m guilty of being one of those gentrifying forces in this neighborhood, but then it’s hardly my fault, I’m merely living where I can afford to live. Is that so wrong?
 Speaking of  being able to afford things, I’m so happy and sincerely grateful to report that my life has returned to a happy, stable domesticity. Some of you out there might gag and gnash your teeth at the notion of  “stable domesticity” but I have never wanted chaos for the sake of chaos. Yes, it seems necessary to experience involuntary chaos from time to time for personal growth, but I sure as hell don’t enjoy it all that much, as you may recall from my recent reports of freaking-outage. Though we are not rich by any means, money is no longer as tight for us as it was, and Owen and I are very happy and compatible together. Yesterday marked the anniversary of our first meeting at the 1998 Thursday night Radical Faerie circle before the Pride Parade. Little did I know at the time that in a mere three months I would completely uproot my known life to start another, unknown one.
 More about my good day at the diner and the movies: right after seeing The Phantom Menace, I got a wild hair and snuck into the theater where The Matrix was just seating. Mind you, don’t take this as an endorsement for sneaking into movies. Or, go ahead and take it as an endorsement for sneaking into the movies, I don’t care. It’s better for your health than smoking, and it’s best to have at least a few vices in order to be well-rounded. This was the first time I ever snuck into a theater without paying, so I felt all bad and naughty like a teenager. I sat there freaking out a bit before the film started, paranoid that maybe there is some high-tech ultraviolet intracellular laser-guided gadget that they’d be able to use to track down theater sneaks like the mad dogs that we are, but nobody found me out.
 Now, The Matrix was an interesting movie! It was exciting as hell, a satirical, good, gooey dystopian science fiction thriller with great art direction and lots of expensive-looking stuff blowing up. Sure it’s violent, but my feeling about violence in movies is that it is cathartic rather than inspiring. I mean, I didn’t leave the theater thinking, “God, I’d love to blow ten or fifteen people off the face of the earth,”  whereas I usually do think that sort of thing after a long day at work. Maybe work should be outlawed instead of violent movies. Just kidding! That was a joke! Don’t be alarmed! I hardly ever think about blowing people off the face of the earth (in fact I’m a shameless, passive-aggressive nonviolent peacenik) and I think people should work, I mean be productive, anyway, at something, anything (ideally, something they love doing). I wouldn’t want to live in a world full of people who just sat picking their asses all day long. 
 Anyway, the plot of The Matrix is that the world that we know is actually an elaborate computer-programmed virtual reality designed to make us believe we are happy and comfy in our lives while in fact our actual bodies are being used as an energy source by disgusting alien beings in a dark and sticky mechanical hell universe. A group of people discover the truth and then set out to rebel against the whole illusion. I left the theater that night feeling like “Wow! what a great day of sunshiney lollygagging!”

Pride Parade Weekend, San Francisco 1999
 What a fabulous week leading up to and including the Gay Lesbian BisexuaL Transgendered etc etc blah blah blah Pride Parade! It started off on Monday with a perfect day at the beach with my friend Pete, who works at Rainbow, the worker’s cooperative green grocery store in the Mission. We spent the bus ride from the Tenderloin all the way down Geary Boulevard bitching about The Phantom Menace (see above) and feeling happy that we had both coincidentally followed up our somewhat disappointing but not entirely shitty Star Wars experience with the viewing of a better movie directly afterwards. His more satisfying movie was Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream,  which I have yet to see. He loved it.
 We hung out on the beach just south, but in full view of, Golden Gate Bridge. This is my favorite beach because it is physically beautiful, at the base of dramatic wildflower-covered cliffs. There are lots of shelters from the wind and lots of soft, open sandy space. It is also clothing optional and very gay, which helps to complement the view.
 The next day I got together with Owen and Scooterpie, the new head of Nomenus. Nomenus is the caretaking organization of the Wolf Creek, Oregon radical faerie sanctuary and an official “organized religion” for income tax purposes, primarily. We worked on the radical faerie float for the Pride Parade, which was burning police car made out of cardboard. The reason we made a burning police car was to recall the White Night Riots, which happened 20 years ago in San Francisco. There were riots following the verdict in the case of the Harvey Milk (http://www.turnleft.com/out/milk.html) and George Moscone assassination by Dan White. White, a somewhat conservative politcal rival, successfully argued that he went on a killing spree of his opponents because he had eaten too many Twinkies. That sounds like a joke, but it’s true. As I said before, I’m a total peacenik/nonviolent type so I do not advocate the burning of police cars, nor do I recommend doing it unless absolutely necessary, but still I worked on the float, mostly because I thought it would be fun.
 We made our float in Pier 26 down at the Embarcadero, near the cool, unpretentious little dive restaurant called Red’s Java. First we tried putting the thing together with a chicken wire base and a paper-mache coating, then realized what a hellish job it would be, especially since it was only the three of us making the damn thing, just a few days before the parade. Owen suggested we make it out of cardboard, which turned out to be a good idea. The best part of the whole afternoon was when we opened up a huge garage door on one side of the pier and wandered outside by the bay. There were small piles of rusting anchors, tins cans and dead refrigerators. Weeds grew from cracks in the cement. The sun was just beginning to set so the sky was orange sherbet. We were standing in the wind right next to the base of the Bay Bridge. We could see the towers of the financial district off to our left and the gentle hills across the water to our right. The fog was gently rolling in, there was a lazy blimp drifting overhead and a pirate sailboat floating by. We were in seagull turf out there where humans rarely tread, and the ground was covered with feathers and bits of crabs, clams, and guano. Seagulls hollered at us from overhead: “Hey you! Get the hell outta here. Can’t we get a moment of privacy from you people?!”
 Heading into the Pride celebration this year, I found myself asking, why would I be “proud” to be gay? Technically, I would call myself 85% attracted to men, and 15% attracted to women. Does this make me bisexual? In day-to-day practice, I am 100% gay. But mentally, spiritually, and asthetically, I guess I am bisexual. But I consider myself queer, or a freak geek anyway. If Iwere straight, I wouldn’t feel the need to go around saying, “I’m proud to be straight.” I wouldn’t have to say that because if you are straight, you are not raised to feel like you have something integral to your very nature that is shameful. You would have no reason to feel less than almost everyone else, because although things are changing for the better, the default position is all too often that it’s normal and therefore good to be straight, and abnormal and therefore bad to be gay. Of course there are other challenges of this kind that are distinct to heterosexuals, I mean we as human beings seemingly have a million dumb little reasons to hate each other without even considering sexual orientation. However, if you are straight, a poisonous feeling of being inherently sick and sinful would not placed into your head by politicians and clergy members, friends and family, from the first days of your awareness of sexuality. A straight person does not have to struggle against this sort of opposition in regards to their basic identity, this potentially fatal, toxic sense of self, that they must overcome in order to simply survive and function positively and productively in the world, though they may very well have other obstacles equally formidable.
 So why should I be proud of being gay? First of all, I am proud that I was courageous enough to follow my heart and be who I was meant to be despite the fear that I felt regarding being open and  honest with those around me. I started coming out in the 1980’s, amid a new wave of conservativism, during the first years of AIDS hysteria. I struggled for years and years before I accepted my homosexuality, and the reason I struggled is because of the messages I received from society. I had an intense fear of losing everyone in my family and circle of friends if I showed them who I really was, so for years I hid away from them, put up walls, swallowed my desires, and let them out only when I got drunk enough. I’m proud that I got through it all alive (more or less), and that I’m a much more honest, open and healthy person than I was when I was closeted. I survived the pressure to conform, to hide, to suppress and negate myself just so nobody would beat me up or reject me. That takes courage, that takes balls, and every person, regardless of their orientation, who lives honestly and follows their heart despite the outside pressures to conform, to negate themselves in subservience to another, or to a self-generated fear or delusion, has reason to be proud.
 Why else am I proud? Because gay people as a whole are fabulous and fun, beautiful, creative, productive, smart, magickal and loving. We have nothing to be ashamed of. This is not to say that straight people are any less wonderful than gays, lesbians, bisexuals, or trangendered. We are family. Saturday night I went to the Pink Saturday street party in the Castro and had an excellent time. My friend Raymond had a party and his downstairs neighbors were cranking techno/house music out of the windows with full light show onto Castro street for all to enjoy. I spent my time that night wandering through thousands of happy people, stopping for extended periods to dance in front of the building. Danced with a cute European tourist couple. Made me remember how much I love to go dancing. When I was upsatirs at the party I spent my time with my smiling head lolling out the window, watching the toilet-paper streamers launch from the crowd below me, cross the overhead electrical wires, and tent the street below. I helped to break up a fistfight in front of the house between two drunk lovers. Went to bed at 4:00 in the morning, didn’t have to work the next day: Pride Sunday!
 The day of the parade was brilliantly sunny and warm, in fact a record-breaker. Scooterpie and Owen bodypainted some of us as dancing flames, others came as fabulous glittery little faeries, and we walked right behind the Grand Marshall of the parade, Harry Hay. He was the founder of the Mattachine Society in 1951, the first gay organization in the United States. After exploring an interest in Native American Spirituality, Hay founded the Radical Faeries in 1979. Harry’s lover of 36 years, John Burnside, rode beside him in the Grand Marshall car. I carried one-fourth of the police car for part of the parade but then wanted to go run off and frolic so I passed it on to one of the guys who was in the fistfight the night before. The whole afternoon was spent wandering around, dancing, and sitting on the grass with friends and hundreds and thousands of other people. So what’s not to like?

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Tabloid Tarot
 I am using the Aleister Crowley Thoth deck of tarot cards, and refer to a text entitled “The tarot handbook: practical applications of ancient visual symbols,” by Angeles Arrien, Arcus Publishing Company,  1987. I will do a three-card spread representing past, present, and future. The reading is as follows:
 Past:  MInor Arcana, Eight of Wands: swiftness. This card deals with directness in communication and action. I had subconsciously carried this question into my reading: Are things going well for me at General Bead in particular (and employment/abundance in general)? I guess I’ve been feeling a little selfconscious at work, mostly because I still have a fungal infection on my face that is taking an excruciaingly long to time to piss off and go away. Dealing with the public everyday, as vain as I am, feeling quite unappetizing, can be wearing on my self-esteem, making me wonder if I’m doing a good job, if my coworkers think I’m doing a good job. I wonder if i seem boring and square in comparison to my fabulous coworkers. Am I not expressing something that I need to express at, or about, work? Maybe I just need to hear it from my coworkers: “We like you. You’re doing a good job. Calm down, relax, you’re home among family.” Part of me feels like family, and part of me feels under-appreciated. We don’t communicate this type of thing enough at work, that we think the other is or is not doing a good job. Maybe they think it goes unspoken, but I’d still like to hear it from time to time. Maybe I should tell them that I’d like to know what they think about my performance (so I can stop worrying what they think). I need to tell them to let me know if Gob forbid I should start losing my faculties for whatever reason. I don’t want them to think I’m simply doing a poor job, if there comes a day when I have medical problems which affect my performance. I want them to be understanding, not kick me out the door. I need to trust them all more. Which leads to:
 Present: Minor Arcana, Five of Disks: worry. Yeah, it’s about me worrying again, and my worrying mind creating the fear of problems at work, though in fact things are going well there. Why do I have to worry so much? Why nitpick? Why not relax and roll with what comes in the present instead of worrying about changing or hanging onto the past, and trying to control the future. The worrying creates problems! Stop worrying! Stop over-analyzing! Be more trusting!
 Future:  Minor Arcana, Ten of Disks: wealth. Funny, because earlier tonight I was researching about investing more money. Lots of people are getting wealthy that way, and I invest with Citizens Funds (http://www.citizensfunds.com/), which uses a series of social-responsibility screens to choose the companies they support through investment. I can be a capitalist pig and still have some scruples. Of course in response to my subconscious worrying and over-analyzing about employment issues, the card seems to be saying, don’t worry! Wealth is coming your way, things are going to be all right in that regard. The text suggests that through my communication and my organizational skills, I could be starting to move in a more abundant direction in the sprectrum of prosperity, which would be nice for a change.
 No room for links or poetry submissions or anything this month, I’ve rambled for four pages of small text in Appleworks already. Thank you all who responded to my question last month, “why do you read the Love’s Supreme Desire Tabloid?” Special thanks go to Miss Mary Jane, both the herb and the woman who lives in New York City.

Peace, Blue

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