BDSM friend was back in town.

My one (straight) friend who’s into BDSM was back in town the other weekend for a conference that his new job in the Bay Area sent him to.

On the Sunday evening of that weekend, he gathered whoever was around to catch up around drinks at a craft cocktail place, and people floated in and out the entire evening, and then finally left there at the cocktail place were me, him, and this 3^rd guy, who is quite short and has some major physical disabilities that result in slow and halting movements and speech.

“You know,” my one (straight) friend who's into BDSM was like, “The thing about San Francisco is that everyone’s poly, and women will want you to be their secondary, but they’ve already got a primary.  And I wonder, where do these women come from, since they must have been looking for a primary at some point?  Why can't I catch them at that part of their lives!”

“BUT, YOU SAID, THE SAME THING, WHEN YOU LIVED HERE,” the disabled guy was like.

The conversation then shifted more towards BDSM, and the disabled guy tangentially brought up that he liked pain and humiliation, likely from the rejection he suffered in high school from hot girls b/c of his disabilities, and although he now used those life experiences in play, BDSM had also left him with “mental scars”.

The hostess of the sex doc series has also gotten more and more out of BDSM, it seems.

She had been in a sporting accident and had to go through a lot of physical therapy, and now it’s just too mentally painful for her to think of her body in the same way as she used to, as a plaything.

“It’s almost like you can’t play with something you’re living,” my one (straight) friend who's into BDSM was like.  “It’s like it’s too close to home, and you can put that in a box and maybe pull it out later and play with it when that time of your life is past, but certainly not then, when you're going through it.”

Volunteering (2 of 2): Rumor.

At lunch during the conference, a local law student whose boyfriend works for the city police told me that he had said that cops had taken pot away from the crime scene where a teenage girl was tragically killed over a year ago, an event that got a lot of attention in the national media.

According to what her boyfriend had said, the city's mayor was looking for a case to draw attention and possibly more state and national resources to the high rate of gunfire deaths in the city, and that weekend the decision went down to make that death the attention-getting case...

Supposedly, the girl wasn’t with her friends when she was killed, but had broken away from them to go over to her dealer when she was shot.

Then, the cops cleaned up the scene and took away any signs of a drug deal.

. . .

I find that rumor implausible:  

How could the mayor really have that done without any trace of a communication, let alone find out about the situation and relay back his decision for the pot to be removed before all the details of the crime scene had been recorded by the police in their reports?

Overall, I wonder if this isn’t just a rumor among racist white cops, to justify the death of a black high school student by making her seem less sympathetic and somehow responsible for bringing her death onto herself.

Also, reading this back over, the rumor makes the city's mayor all-seeing and darkly cunning, almost like the Mayor in 3rd season Buffy.

Volunteering (1 of 2): Flashback.

A few weekends I volunteered a conference on local youth homelessness, since I feel strongly that the issue should be addressed more than it currently is.

The volunteer coordinator was this kind (middle-aged) (black) lesbian, and after lunch hour as we were breaking down tables in the cafeteria in the university building where the conference was held, I was like, “Now this is a flashback, I haven’t done this shit since I was in Catholic school.”

Then, I added, “You see, I really am a nice Catholic boy at heart.”

Then, at the end of the day, after me and everyone was cleaning out rooms and re-arranging chairs and taking things out to cars, I started saying bye to everyone, but a few people broke off to go take care of one more thing that they had forgotten about.

“Have a good night!”, I yelled down the hallway after them.

They didn’t hear, though, so I yelled out “Have a good night!” down the hallway one more time, but they still didn’t hear.

“Well,” I was like, to the remaining people, “At least you guys can testify that I wasn’t being rude.”

“Of course not!”, the (middle-aged) (black) lesbian was like.  “You’re a good Catholic boy!”

Faculty meeting at the art school.

A few weeks ago there was an all-staff meeting at the art school: the president presented the next 4-year plan, then someone gave a faculty update, and then someone gave a presentation on a new minor degree program.

After that was over, the last presenter was like, “And now I’d like to read a poem, since poetry should be everywhere, and should be fully integrated into our lives.”

Then, he read a poem, and the entire audience nodded their heads while he read it, and then burst into applause when it was over.

At that point, the meeting ended, and the reception began.

Dream of decay.

The other week I dreamt that I was in this dank concrete basement of my hometown library doing some volunteering, and there were folding tables full of troughs of rotting food that had been left there and meant for a compost heap but had never been taken out.

I was in despair, since I didn’t know if moldy food was still compostable and if the mold would poison any soil that came from it, and I wondered what the people who left the troughs out were thinking.

(I wonder if this links to my recent volunteering, where I set up tables for lunch and then helped the caterers take metal trays of Italian food in.)

Tire problems.

One part of my front bike tire has split down along the treadline and formed this oval through which the inner tube is working its way through, in this broad, flat protrusion about the size of a quarter or even up towards a half dollar.

It almost looks like a boil, and I wonder when it’s going to burst.

Addendum.

He said that no-one he knew went to World Youth Day, except for one kid he knew in elementary school who had gotten sent away to boarding school in Spain since he was always in trouble and ended up getting hyper-Catholic; that kid had posted a few pictures on Facebook, saying it was the best experience of his life.

“I wonder if he says that now,” I was like.  “That was before the Pope spoke out against capitalism.”

My one Brazilian student didn’t know anything about how that affected things, though, or who ran the boarding school in Spain (Opus Dei? the Legionnaires?).

He also said that most of his friends in high school were atheists.

I wonder what it means to be an atheist in Brazil.  I'll have to ask him about that.  I wonder if it's more Marx and less Richard Dawkins crap.