It’s called a diary.
Author: Jinx
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Down the street from DS is the sad, ugly, single-storied brick complex where I worked more than a year ago, Asian American Recovery Services, a live-in rehab center for substance abusers. Perhaps the fact that I first came to this neighborhood to work at that way station for lost souls has poisoned my view of it. Perhaps under other cirumstances I would find it a welcome change from the slick, smug wealth of Cow Hollow. But I feel no energy there, no sense of it as a working class neighborhood where people have cheerfully settled in to make the place their own for a lifetime or two. Instead, I get a sense of doom. Any middle-class person still living in San Francisco, any teacher, nurse, mechanic, artist, even on that section of Hayes, has to know that their days in The City are numbered.
DS does actually have a sign, and an attractive little foyer that displays various tiles, marble, and woodwork, and hides the working office from passersby who might pause to look through the large front window. Its owner, Giacamo, is a bullet shaped, very densely built gay man with wire-rimmed glasses, a moustache, and a potato face. The first week, I’ve set up a filing system for him, and tomorrow I’ll begin trying to set up some spreadsheets and form documents. Giacamo is touchingly delighted with every effort of mine to impose order in his office, and that’s gratifying but puts me a bit on guard. People very easily delighted can, in some cases, also be very easily disappointed.
One thing I like about working at that end of Hayes is the bus ride, which is long and lurching but interesting. The neighborhood itself is bleak, but to reach it the bus moves through shady, peaceful looking areas where, at the end of the day, I glimpse weary black working folk walking up the steps of handsome old houses that Yuppies are bound to buy up in a few years. We pass Alamo Park, with dogs frolicking across the grass, tourists taking pictures of that famous row of painted houses that stand with their backs to the city. We go through the newly chic part of Hayes Valley, with its boutiques and coffee shops and I usually try, in vain, to locate the storefront where I used to go to get my hair cut and dyed. There is a corner store which I always notice called the Me Me Shop. Its windows are cluttered with blue glass and brass and someday I’ll go in and see what, exactly, it is they are selling there.
Part of Hayes Valley was “newly chic” because an overpass that cut through it had been taken down in the wake of the ’89 quake, which saw the demise of the elevated Embarcadero freeway and other such blights. Before then, the shadow of that overpass cast a pall and kept the neighborhood dark, the rents low. I used to go to Hayes Valley to have my hair cut and peroxided. I’d endure it looking through the storefront windows at the soul-food restaurant across the street and thinking about giving the food there a try. I never did, much to my regret.
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I understand it’s one of the biggest, most comprehensive tarot stores in the world.
I have collected tarot decks since college and still have the one I used back then (Crowley’s Thoth deck.) Decades of collecting have left me with fifty decks and a collector’s pickiness. No, no, not just any deck will do, not just some mass-produced deck on Amazon. I prefer privately published editions, or at least decks I haven’t seen a hundred times in bookstores.
Tarot collecting came into vogue a few years ago, the volume of published decks exploded, and I watched the value of my collection plunge, but I never bought them with an eye to selling them. I just like the pictures, and those haven’t changed. My reaction to a deck going from three figures to two (or even one) is a shrug.
The prices still rise and fall, however, and occasionaly I’ll check online and note the deck I paid $15 for in the early oughts is now worth several hundred dollars. Which is nice.
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It was a good day for mailing. One of those gorgeous spring days that make it unthinkable to be anywhere but outside. While we checked the issues at Locus, we listened to some records – Godley and Creme, Timbukthree, etc – and afterwards I loaded my car with Trevin and Shelly and took in the airmail. It was so beautiful outside that physical labor was no hardship. This time there were no hassles at the post office – in fact, they had someone to help us unload the cars.
Fritz called today, and asked me to read an excerpt from his book to him over the phone. He then said he would like either me or Shelly to read to him, since he’s having trouble reading his manuscript. I told him we would be delighted, and Shelly asked me to tell him she would be glad to do it, unaware that I already had. I guess he’ll get in touch when he needs someone to read for him.
Mailing always followed collating. We would drive to the Main West Oakland Post Office, the back of Charlie’s car loaded with canvas bags of labeled magazines. The main post office is a massive complex of square, blocky buildings in the concrete desert of auto shops, junkyards, overpasses and empty lots that is West Oakland. I usually saw it from a BART window overhead as I rode the line to and from the East Bay to San Francisco. On mailing days, we would pull the car over to the loading area and one of us would go in to hand over a postal money order. After that, it was a matter of tossing the heavy bags, bulky with bound squares of magazines, into a huge bin filled with other, similarly loaded bags. We were young and strong, and I remember liking the physical effort, the sense of satisfaction once it was all done and we could drive the empty car back to Charlie’s house in the Oakland Hills.
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Daily writing promptWhat is your middle name? Does it carry any special meaning/significance?
It’s nothing special in itself (aside from being my mother’s name), but when included with my full name there’s something weirdly elaborate and frilly about it. A high school English teacher once told me all three of my names strung together sounded like the name of a romance writer.
It’s not hard to imagine it in Edwardian font floating beneath the title of one of those mass-market 70s-era bodice-rippers inspired by Rosemary Rogers. An apprehensive-looking woman with blowing hair and a ruffly, low-cut dress wades through long grass, her mouth half open. Behind her, a glowering man in a big shirt smolders against the background of a distant harbor view with clipper ships. Loves Throbbing Call, by…
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Sydney has a Mechanics’ Institute on Pitt Street, not too far from Phillip, so I walked to the address I’d found online, 280 Pitt, and entered a very modern high-rise. I stepped out of the elevator a floor too early, and found myself in a small carpeted lobby with three closed double doors facing me. A man, apparently a volunteer, approached me, flyers in hand and asked quietly, “Which event are you attending?”
Three event rooms, I thought. They have at least three event rooms. And they were having three events at once.
I explained I was looking for administration, and he advised me to go another floor up.
Upstairs, when they learned I worked at another Mechanics’ Institute, they were very hospitable and eager to show me around. Their institute looked more modern but they’re an older institution by about 20 years, founded in 1833. (Their original building was just down the street and bore a striking resemblance to the SF Mechanics’ pre-06 building.) The Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts seems to have a slightly different emphasis than our’s, being more about providing long term and short term venues for non-profits than actually putting on events. The events spaces I saw, four meeting rooms and a theater, are apparently used mainly for rentals.
Actual SMSA sponsored literary and author events take place in the Tom Keneally center. The author of Schindler’s Ark, when he retired to Manly Beach, didn’t want to take his entire private library with him, so he donated it, with other personal memorabilia, to the SMSA. Hence the Tom Keneally Center. It’s a spacious, but intimate, brightly colored space, lined with Keneally’s books, with a sofa and chairs for gatherings and a small office for Keneally, with an old fashioned knee-hole desk. I signed the visitors’ book. “Enviable” was what I wrote in the comments section. After visiting their library, I left with email addresses and a bag of swag, a mug, some pens and leather bookmarks, and a couple of book bags.
I would not trade ours for theirs, but I must say the SMSA makes our Mechanics’ seem shabby-genteel. And we certainly have no writer in residence to compare with Mr. Keneally.
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This apparently happened occasionally during the Spanish Flu epidemic. It’s how Katherine Anne Porter, who almost died from the flu, got her signature, prematurely white hair.
I’d thought it was because physicians had dosed her with strychnine in a last-ditch attempt to save her, but a docu-drama I watched last night showed it happening to another patient and ascribed it to the fever.
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Protestors, some of them wearing MAGA hats and waving Confederate flags, have been defying stay at home orders in Ohio and Michigan to stage demonstrations. A news photo from Ohio by photojournalist Joshua Bickel shows a group of them crammed against the windowed, locked door of the Ohio statehouse, faces distorted, mouths agape, vividly illustrating why zombie films are as much about political and social satire as horror.
So, we watch from where we shelter as the call to “put on your big boy pants” gains momentum. Putting on “big boy pants” apparently means not being squeamish about all those vulnerable people who will die if the quarantine is lifted too soon. It’s especially infuriating when the “big boy pants” enthusiasts point out — accurately — that being poor and unemployed endangers human lives. The same powerful people who have made poverty lethal in this country now cite that deadliness as a reason to ignore science and lift the quarantine.
Is America on the road to another civil war? One of our two major political parties is confronting the fact that, unless they take drastic action, they are not only going to lose the presidency, but may end as a mainstream political force. The Wisconsin election, in which voters were forced to choose between voting and personal safety, illustrated how far the GOP is willing to go. Yes, they lost that election, but historically, the American right’s response to defeat has been to double down, not back off. Our Republican president is talking about wielding absolute authority. He’s threatened to adjourn congress. So far, the leaders in his own party seem unwilling to say “no” to him. It looks from here as if many Republicans are willing to dismantle our entire system if doing so can keep them in power.
Right now I’m suffering from low-grade anxiety, not about the virus, but about managing a big zoom event tonight at the library. We’ll see how it goes.
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I have no problem saying “I don’t know,” “Yes,” “No,” “Fine,” or “That’s none of your business.”
Questions are often regarded with suspicion in online conversations. “Sealioning” it’s called. The origin is a cartoon by David Malki in which a couple having a private conversation is accosted by a sea lion who follows them into their house and peppers them with questions even after they’ve retired for the night.
Ever since, the word “sealioning” has been used to derail any internet conversation a participant feels isn’t going well. It’s invoked in response to uncomfortable questions like, “Which historians back up your statement about the Weimar Republic ending in 1928?” or “What peer-reviewed study proves this bizarre claim of yours about vaccines causing Walter Keane syndrome in children?” or “Can you cite the direct quote in which (fill in public figure here) called for the murder of all vegetarians?”
“SEALIONING!” the other person shouts, which typically guarantees nothing on topic or sensible will be added to the thread.
Pam Troy 