Dream.

I had a dream about the library the library in my hometown the other night. All sorts of modernistic statues depicting shamans from Ghana as an educational exhibit, and then there was a small monkey in the back computer room who could sing and had a band with high school kids after hours. There was even this shelf that extended high across the length of the room back there; he was hiding in the corner when I came in, and then the high school kids came in and sang with him (the monkey sang in English, I found that only mildly surprising in my dream).

I e-mailed my mother for interpretations.

E-mail from my mother: A bird and my dad.

I got another e-mail from my mother this week:

Last Sunday, 7am, Dad went to [the local party store] to get the Sunday paper. One of the cashiers was trying to dislodge a bird from a niche in the breezway............she was poking at it with the barrell [sic] of one of the rifles that [the owner] has for sale. Only in [the very small town 5 min. south of our house].

More and more rot!

The other day when I went to get some vegetables from the little plastic bag in my bag, the celery there was rotten! I had to throw it out!

Then, I checked the tupperware, and the celery that was there was rotting too!!

Then, this weekend, when I was going to a bbq, right before going over I went to cut open a watermelon and cut up some big slices to take over for everyone, and the melon had huge rotten places in the middle!!!

I wonder if this is a sign? Or, am I out of it and buying rotten produce?

Guess what?: More silverfish.

The other night I had this horrible pain from a sinus headache - it woke me up like 4 times that night despite my taking some appropriate over-the-counter medicine - and like at 2:30am when I went to go boil some water so I could inhale the vapor and see if that unclogged me - for some reason, my neti pot wasn't giving me relief - I looked over to this built-in nook in my kitchen, and there was a small silverfish (less than an inch long).

I took off my sandal to crush it, but I got the angle wrong (it was difficult, it was sitting right next to the wall) and it ran away into a crack.

Also, the other day I picked up my IKEA lamp in the living room to sweep under it when I was talking on the phone and cleaning, and there too was sitting a small silverfish (less than an inch).

Sex doc last Tuesday.

So, the sex doc last Tuesday was on drag queens, and it was the best discussion ever.

There were 2 films, one on a drag bar in Portland, OR, interviewing performers audience members the owner etc., and another one a short film from England from the 1970s that was on a 16mm projector and was a 50-something transvestite talking about his life while he put on make-up (though the talking about his life was dubbed over and the words didn't match his mouth as it moved).

Anyhow, the big interesting part of the discussion was how the straight women who would do bachelorette parties at the drag bar would oftentimes fondle the performers like they were objects, so the conversation turned a lot towards whether the drag shows were productive in that they opened up space to new realities for people and were like some kind of activism, or whether they were forums for straight women to act like assholes.

The past few docs there's been this early 60s Mexican guy who grows his hair out long -- but, his hair is shoulder-length and kind of stringy, so he tends to look like a southwestern medicine man or something, only in a skirt -- and who is transitioning who's been coming to the films along with this older American-born Asian lesbian/2nd wave feminist, and this time they came again.

Interestingly, one of them mentioned that they were partners... I find it very interesting how many lesbians end up with people in a sex change-type situation; they seem very tolerant.

Anyhow, the guy said that back when he was a drag queen, no manager at the bar would tolerate behavior with someone touching a performer, but he guessed that times had changed.

Later, the one older (white) guy who used to be a thug in an Italian neighborhood but then became a male nurse and later a sexologist was saying that one time when he was doing a costume workshop, he was in a full body fishnet stocking and a woman went and reached behind him and played with his anus, then with his scrotum, and then with his balls, and finally his penis, and he was fine with it, but then she did that to a gay man, and he wasn't fine with it, so then they all sat around and talked for hours about their different reactions and how they felt.

Later later, the Mexican transvestite had a bunch of interesting comments that were off the main topic a bit:

1) When he worked at a porn bookstore, many young (black) guys would come in from the nearby Cabrini-Green projects as hustlers and pick up men "for the money", but that could only happen for so many years before you got to thinking that it wasn't for the money.

2) When he used to be a waiter - in drag? - back in the 1970s, so many men would come in as regulars and hit on him and be really indignant when he refused, like just because he was different sexually he had to sleep with them, and that that mindset was so out of touch with reality that it scared him.

After that, a lot of people at the series and nodded and said that being sexually deviant in a visible way and being out there made you the target for a lot of stuff - being hit on, but also just being a resource for people who have questions about shit like that and don't know where to turn (e.g. the owner of the drag bar in the film had a woman call him because she found out her husband liked to wear women's clothing).

Also, later the male nurse said that a friend once took him to an area support group for straight male transvestites, and that they were all really masculine guys like truck drivers and police men "who had a more limited range of gender roles available to them", and that many came in lingerie but they didn't shave their chests or try to act in any way feminine, and that he felt that it was a privilege to be there.

Pre-sex doc (2 of 2): Rot.

So, when I was downtown studying for an hour or two beforehand outside at a Starbucks, I went to pull my little plastic bag of vegetables I had with me in my backpack out to eat, only I noticed the broccoli, which had been kind of yellow in the fridge (it had been in there a week), was now yellow and smeary, so I smelled it and it smelled back, and I touched it and I got this awful shit on my finger, to the point where it was so bad even though it was not that much, that I had to go in to the restroom and go wash it off.

So, I chucked the whole bag, even though there were pieces of the cut-up stem I could have eaten, because they didn't look too spoiled.

Then, that night when I got home, I checked out the cut-up vegetables I had in a big tupperware thing in the fridge, and the broccoli on top too was spoiled and the florette pieces had dropped through the celery and carrots beneath, so I had to get out my spaghetti strainer and rinse off the other vegetables to save them after throwing out the broccoli.

The broccoli smelled so bad, too, that I went out to the curb in my boxers and wifebeater to throw out the trash, even though the bag was only half full.

Then, to top it off, the next morning, I noticed a piece of bread in my bread bag had some mold on it, so I chucked the whole bag, even though only like maybe a seventh of the pieces had mold starting to grow on them (I ate the 2 pieces that I pulled out before the fateful 3rd one and were fine).

I think I'm getting better at throwing things out.

Pre-sex doc (1 of 2): Biking.

On my way to the most recent sex doc on Tuesday I was stopped on my bike in the (black) neighborhood between me and downtown at a light, and this like 300-lb woman in a "Remember the King of Pop" t-shirt was passing by me in the crosswalk, so I was like, "Hey, how you doing?" and greeting her like blackfolk do, and so she was like, "Just fine, just fine, and you?", and when I said, "Good, after these cars pass," she laughed, and just walked on her way.

New karaoke grounds?

There's this hotel bar in my neighborhood that I never go to - it's a chain with overpriced food and drinks - but my one friend from my program who's originally from Mississippi and who I go to karaoke with found out that they have karaoke on Monday nights, and went last Monday with some kids in summer language class that he's teaching. He said the book was shit, but the crowd and book were mostly black, and everyone went nuts when one of his (white) students did some Prince.