Daily writing prompt
You’re writing your autobiography. What’s your opening sentence?
was in town.
Author: Jinx
-
Tonight we collated.
The issue came earlier than we thought, at about 2:00 pm.
Tim came to collating for the first time, perhaps because Charlie wasn’t there and Tim’s office is in the process of moving to Alameda. When I went to pick him up, there were boxes all over the place, and he took he loaded his Mac and disks into the car. It was weird having him at collating. He helped me seal envelopes and stuff boxes, then I sat down to show him how to bundle issues, not an easy thing to do because Tim as impatient and didn’t like the chore. Eventually, he settled down to the task. We’ll know tomorrow if he knew what he was doing.
Russ was there, of course, and Carolyn, and Lisa.
Shelly prepared beef and chicken tacos.
The party broke up at about 10:00 pm. I gave Russ a ride home. All the states were finished.
A bare-bones entry, probably because I was tired. “Collating” was a monthly chore in which bound copies of the finished magazine arrived at Charlie’s house to be labelled and bundled by zip code so they could be carried to the bulk mailing center in West Oakland the following day. To complete this, Charlie would throw a party, inviting various “Locus people” (friends, writers, contributors and ex-employees if they’d remained in good standing). He’d prepare a meal, usually barbecue, and everyone would gather in his living rooom among stacks of magazines, most of us sitting on the floor. Various states in the forms of labels would be passed out, assigned to people based on their level of expertise. The largest, most demanding zip code was Portland.
Lisa Goldstein author of The Red Magician, was a collating regular, and Russ, a local fan who was slender, gay, sandy-haired, opinionated and entertaining. It became a regular thing for me to give Russ a ride home to the Castro afterwards.
-
Two, one of those notepads with attached pen I see at Patrick’s, for reading & writing stories.
Three, one of my Tarot decks, for telling myself stories.
-
The Museum of Sydney, unlike the other two I’d visited, is in its own, modern building. As is fitting for a city museum, it’s not especially large, but pleasant to walk through. One video exhibit in one small room dealt with daring Sydney Graffiti artists who specialized in painting slogans on dangerous, inaccessible spaces. In 2003 they’d painted “No War” in red paint on the peak of the Sydney Opera House, up where I’d seen those men creeping about (and some people say peace activists are cowards.)
Another, larger exhibit on the top floor was about Sydney during the Second World war. Lots of fascinating audio on earphones — the King and the Prime Minister announcing war, a funny song about a makeshift bomb shelter. And there was an explanation for one of the inscriptions I’d seen on the pavement along Darlinghurst Road. A good many American servicemen had been stationed in Sydney, and many Sydney residents got their first real taste of jazz at a club for American servicemen in King’s Cross on Darlinghurst. According to the museum literature, our boys had, among Australian women, the reputation for being well heeled, good-looking and courteous (That last is the first time I have ever heard such a claim about Americans.) This led to a good bit of friction between American and Australian troops, who complained that Yanks were, “Overpaid, oversexed, and over here.”
My favorite exhibit was an audio visual installation in which the viewer could choose one of ten characters from Sydney’s history (played by actors of course) and have them interact with one of the other characters. An aborigine woman in the late 18th century, a dissolute, slightly drunk young British clerk, an upper class19th century Englishwoman, an Irish servant. If I could, I would have stayed there and tried out every combination, but that would probably have kept me there until the museum closed.
***
-
I suppose it was a childhood spent in the south with very liberal, thoughtful parents.
One of the first things I learned, once I started attending school, was skepticism about crowds. Many of my classmates were from families where the “N word” was uttered as casually as “cat” or “dog.” Most had parents who were ardent supporters of Goldwater, then Nixon, then Reagan. Hippies were dirty commies, the Vietnam War a righteous cause, and Watergate the legal harassment of a great president. Grammar school history textbooks of Louisiana at that time taught students the Confederacy was grossly misunderstood by northerners who exaggerated the unfortunate-but-rare abuse of slaves. The Reconstruction era was depicted as a dark time when ignorant blacks and dishonest Yankee carpetbaggers were set loose on a helpless population.
By my teens, I’d figured out that moral and rational decisions were not best made by checking to see what most of the people around me thought.
This did not make me popular in certain online circles during the Satanic Panic, or in the months after the 2000 election, or in the wake of 9/11. It can cause me “problems” to this day.
-
Beautiful sunsets are practically the norm in San Francisco if your window faces west. We can’t see the Pacific from here, but we can see the mists and fogs over it, and sometimes those create blustery, Caravaggio-like effects of red and purple in the sky as the sun sinks. “Oh look. A ten,” either Michael or I will say, and we’ll both stand for a moment watching the colors blaze or fade.
Getting people outside to watch, however, requires a rare combination of factors. The temperature drops as the sun goes down, and the wind rises, and most Northern California sunsets are best enjoyed from behind a window. Last night was not Caravaggio quality, but unusual in that there wasn’t much fog, so the Golden Gate Bridge was nicely etched against a clear pink sky. No fog means it’s not as cold and windy, so we could see the distant silhouettes of people who had gone up to their roof to enjoy it.
During that long pink dusk we began hearing, close by, a playful beat on something metal. Our cat, always alert for any strange noise, ran to the living room window and crouched, peering out, and I joined her, expecting to see someone walking down the street tapping a tin drum. The only pedestrians were a couple, a man and woman deep in conversation who had nothing in their hands, but along with the tapping I could also hear distant hoots and cheers. Something was plainly being celebrated. The sunset? The mild night? A sports event? How could there be a sports event?
Had Trump resigned? Alas, no.
It remains a mystery.
I cooked a chicken chili last night, an old favorite I’ve been making for over thirty years. Back when I was in my South-of-Market, black-leather-wearing, white buzz-cut twenties, the go-to cookbooks were the Silver Palate series, now the most battered, food encrusted books on my shelf. Their chicken chili is not only delicious, but a comforting taste from the normal past and a reminder that life can still be good.
-
Is time only perceived as linear? Are there different universes, with different timelines? Does my eight-year-old self still exist somewhere, my teenaged self? Has my death already happened? Is every instant of agony or joy eternal?
I find it hard to believe in our fates being “written” in a book somewhere by a divine hand, but perhaps all time is contained in one instant of unimagineably loud brightness, a single explosion. Maybe “destiny” is the word we use to describe what is incomprehensible.
-
The party was in the second floor space of some Mission retaurant, a ritzy joint that’s part of the upscale trand driving so many businesses and people out of the neighborhood. I got only a confused impression of the place, a broad concrete hall, a stairway decorated with foreign movie posters, a sort of foyer in whichg a projector had been set up and was soundlessly showing a movie against a far wall, and then the party, which was in a dark broad balcony overlooking the restaurant. It wasn’t too crowded, or too loud, and there were tables set with heaps of cheese and tortilla chips and salsa. We commandeered a long table set in a niche behind a column.
I sat across the table from the young dark-haired girl, Corrie. We talked politics for a while, happily damning everyone. She is studying film and working on her thesis, a pair of documenatires. One of them is about two very elderly women in a home for old Reds. The women, she told me, are the only lucid residents left in the home, and her documentary is about how they try to cope.
A couple of times I went over to the balcony and looked down at the empty dining room with its rows of round white tables, its cunningly stark decor. I wondered wistfully when management would kick us out.
The dark-haired girl was replaced by a small man in his twenties, his head shaven to a black fuzz. He talked briefly with me about Gladiator, then spent the rest of the time with Michael.
2:00 AM finally loomed and management in the form of a slender, good-looking man in a suit (Corrie had sworn she saw him speeding the last time she was at the restaurant) came upstairs to respectfully implore us all to leave. We trickled down to the wide, concrete corridor where we’d entered. Outside, Michale, Jon and I hailed a taxi.
Since Corrie was talking about the man inside the restaurant, I assume she meant he was strung out on speed rather than driving a car.
-
I did.
One evening, I walked down the hall outside my office. In the room to my right, Michio Kaku was lecturing. In the room to my left, a chess tournament was going on. Straight ahead, in the room next to the office, the Proust club was meeting.
I was in the right place.
-
Work wasn’t quite dreadful but almost. Charles veered between amiability and depression. In a rather weird fit of confidingness, he gave me his secret trove of tapes to label – the stuff he keeps in his bedside drawer so that nobody else can see it. Porn and Dr. Who.
The rest of the time he spent harassing Shelly and bemoaning the poor organization of the Dbase files. I struggled with Dbase for the second half of the day. The report readers kept fritzing out and I kept having to rebuild them.
One of the first things I did was drive to Chuck’s place. There was nobody either canine or human in sight when I drove up, and when I knocked on the door all I could see through the glass at first were the two wolf-dogs baying. Finally Chuck’s relative, in her bathrobe, showed up, put a hammerlock on the white dog, and told me Chuck was in the back.
Chuck looked dreadful. He’s always wizened, but now he was in his bedroom in pajamas. I got the subscription labels, commiserated with Chuck about his bug, and left, but only after the relative wrestled Akita (who was letting out territorial growls) out of my path.
We may collate tomorrow, but if the issue gets here it won’t be until about 7 pm. I hope it arrives Thursday instead. Charlie leaves Thursday at 6 am and it might be easier if he’s not here.
The girls downstairs are playing music and a while back one of them was singing. Soundproofed walls my ass! I don’t mind, though. They’re burning an incense that’s making the whole place smell sweet. It took me a while to figure out what it was. It’s the same stuff the high priest at a coven I attended used to burn.
Pam Troy 