Forgot - tranny story -

I forgot --

My one neighbor who has the hippie parents lives next door to this younger big-boned black woman who would play her music loud at night, and like the first time they met in the hallway, my friend said that they both profusely apologized to each other and were like, "Oh, I'm so sorry if my music is too much for you, just let me know if it is, we share a wall," though it was perfectly fine with my friend since she plays her music loud at night as well.

And, my friend said, from talking with her up close, she realized that she's at least a transvestite, if not more.

Anyhow, like last Saturday my friend had people gather at the black neighborhood bar for her birthday, and we ended up shutting the place down and I walked her home since with the warm weather out shit is starting to happen on side streets again, and I ended up going up to hang out a little bit more and have another beer and something to eat, and after talking for like an hour more, I left, and it was like 4am, and as soon as I get into the hallway I see this young big-boned black woman with a short skirt and this fierce slightly-bleached long hair ringing her face, and I'm like "Hello," and she's like "Hello" too, and behind her was this young black guy with baggy pants and a puffy coat and an earring and a baseball cap, just staring at the floor, but obviously going back to her an apartment - i.e., a tranny chaser, perhaps on the down-low.

So, I left, and they both went into her apartment, at 4am.

Bread / Toaster.

I had to throw out a third of a loaf of bread yesterday, since whenever I bit into the bottom crust of a piece of bread from that part of the bag, there was this moldy taste in the crust, though no mold was visible.

Also, the thing that keeps my toast depressed in my toaster and held down broke, so now I have to stand there and manually hold the button down if I want to get toast, which is a pain in the ass and I always get bored before my toast is ready, so I have condemned myself to eating half-toasted toast, saddly.

Drinks at the Board of Trade.

I got cheap tickets to the opera again last night, and beforehand I went to meet a friend at the bar in the Board of Trade building downtown since we would be dressed up and it was around after-work time and plus too I hear that the worse the economy gets, the stronger the drinks get.

(Which is true, one whiskey on the rocks for 45 was a tumbler-full with like two ice cubes, and I was only sobering up four hours later when the opera was ending; the bartender mixing a gin and tonic was dumping gin in a glass and then adding a few drops of tonic, it was incredible to watch).

Anyhow, my friend wasn't there yet, so I sat down at the bar next to this older black lady with a short haircut who was in a business suit ("Lydia"), and of course we started talking about the opera. As it turns out, she's wanted to go because she's always up for something new, but never has been, because she didn't realize that they had subtitles.

"And can you meet people there?", she was like.

"Not really," I was like, "Most everyone sticks to themselves and the people they come with."

"Well," she was like, "Is it a good place to work the room with your eyes?"

Somehow she had mentioned at astrology at some point, so I changed the subject, and she started saying that the last time Uranus was at this point in its cycle, it was in 1930, and that's when the stock market was at its worst.

Shortly after that, my friend showed up, and though I try not to ask people about their professions since that's an obvious conversation topic, that was the first thing he asked her.

"You know Bill Gates?", she was like.

"Yeah, of course," my friend was like.

"Well, I was married to a Bill Gates-type guy and got divorced, so I haven't had a job since 1988," she was like, and then she explained to us that she has a nice condo downtown and makes the rounds of bars every late afternoon/early evening.

Went to the local Walgreen's today.

Today I went to the local Walgreen's to pick up some flouride rinse (am close to running out) and get some cash back since I won't be near any ATM of my bank today and I need money and I'm too cheap to pay a minimum $1.50 ATM roaming fee, but when I was checking out, I used the plastic pointer-pen on the debit/credit card pad thing to pick the "cash back" option, and when I went to go hit "other amount" so I could get $30 back, and not the $20 or $40 options, for some reason I touched "other amount" with the pen, but the "no thanks" button above it clicked down on the screen, and when I went to hit "no" on the "Is this amount correct?" option, I touched "no", but the "yes" button next to it depressed, weirdly enough, even though the pointer pen was nowhere near touching it, so my transaction ended without me getting any cash back.

"Thank you," the (black) cashier woman was like.

"But I never got any cash back!", I was like, "and I pushed all the right buttons, but the thing gave me other options."

"Well, I don't know," she was like.

"Man," I was like, "It's like those voting machines they have!", and she laughed, and to no one in particular was like, "He said, 'It's like those voting machines they have,'" and laughed again to herself.

Rat / 10 / Cardinal.

When I was walking home last night from hanging out with friends, I looked up the street and I could see a rat running across it in the streetlight.

Before that, I was taking the elevator down in my one friend's building from the 10th floor, and the numbers went 10 - 9 - 8 - 10 - 7 - 6 - etc., and so I started to flip out a bit if something was wrong with the elevator and it was going to crash down through the shaft, and every creak I heard made me really nervous.

Before that, my one friend was telling me about this conference he was at that brought together clergy/professors interested in Catholic social thought with economists, and how the conversation turned to "externalities", e.g. where a factory is built in New York and pollutes and that goes down the Hudson but people around the factory aren't really affected...

Anyhow, the cardinal was there, and he asked if it was possible for there to be a universal theory of externalities, and all of the economists said that they had never thought of that before.

Performance / Nice Day.

On Sat. night I went with my one Dutch friend to go see a Kuwaiti friend's sister's performance (or, more accurately, the projection of a drawing of hers onto a backdrop while other people did shit in front of it), but we got there late and we couldn't get in for the first half -- it was this weird small performance space up on the 2nd floor, and you had to go up a narrow stairwell, and when we got in it was this long room with dirty drywall and a couple rows of chairs set up in back near some projection equipment -- so we ended up talking with the hipster girl who was house manager/managing the desk at the top of the stairwell, and looking through the program guide, where the description of our one friend's sister as "Kuwait-born artist" made it sound like she was 40 and jaded and would sweep around the room in some revealing Westernized dress.

Anyhow, when I made fun of that, the hipster girl was like, "I'm Arab too, my family is Lebanese."

"That doesn't count," I was like, "They're all Christian, they're not violent enough to really be Arab."

"That's not true," my one Dutch friend was like. "In the civil war Maronite Christians were cutting off people's ears," and that both took me aback as well as the hipster girl, who was already taken aback, but then I was like, "Oh, well that must in the gospels as a footnote to 'Turn the other cheek,'" which hit my friend as funny but not the hipster girl

On another note, Saturday was a beautiful day, and I walked down to the lake to sit in the sun and do a crossword. There was a lot of people out, including this black couple and their little girl who was on a bike with training wheels, and she got a little ahead of them on the sidewalks, and so the dad was like, "Hey, Cashmir, wait up for us babe, wait up."

Walking back to my house, I looked down an alley and saw some late 20s threatening-looking (black) men sitting on milk-crates around a hibachi.

Also, I went into the dollar store to buy an eraser, and when the (Arab) owner greeted this (black) guy who walked in and asked him how he was doing, he responded, "Oh, everything is everything."

Since I also didn't want to buy a four-pack of erasers for a dollar, the owner sold me a loose one in the cash register drawer for a quarter.

Also also, a bbq place near me was also closed because of the mayor's dumpster task force. The restaurant had put up a sign, though, saying they'd reopen as soon as they bought a dumpster, so I guess the mayor is trying to balance the city budget by making people buy dumpsters.

New experience.

Saturday morning I woke up, made some coffee, had a sip of it, and went to the bathroom, where this watery shit just blew out of my ass. When I stood up, I just slightly felt something run down my right inside leg, and I looked in the mirror, and I could see like three small drops of what looked like cloudy Coca-Cola perched there, with little droplet trails behind them leading up to my ass.

Interesting factoid, if it's true...

So, I was reading Paul F. Bradshaw's "The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of Early Liturgy", 2nd ed., the other day, and he summarized the findings from this big new book everyone's trumpeting that reanalyzes evidence and suggests among other things that a lot of early Christians seems to have used water with their Eucharist, not wine...

The interesting part is that the proposal points out that a lot of Early Christians also abstained from meat, so perhaps in the first couple sentences there was this ascetic strain where the group was counter-cultural and abstained from foodstuffs associated with non-Christian sacrifice (wine for libations, meat for altar sacrifice).