Facebook shock.

Since getting on Facebook like a month ago, I’ve really experienced a lot of shock.

First off, it’s amazing to me how many people just have lives with their kids and watch TV and football games and play video games and shit.

I feel all weird and intense, since I mostly post political shit, and otherwise go to cultural events (about which I’d never brag), or party (about which I’d never post).

It’s like I’m just way more into shit than people, to a degree that I don’t even notice and definitely can turn people off, since they’re just not on that wavelength.

I texted my one friend from high school who runs an integrated homelessness / domestic violence shelter, and she said that Facebook can f*ck with a person in many ways, but it’s important to remember that people show what they want to show, and that some of them are either going to perverted bars, or are wanting to and just not telling.

I still wonder, though, what would happen if I posted a radical feminist post about lady penis or something like that.

It’s like I’m in conversations that other people don’t know exist, and I’m off in ways that I don't realize.

That post-Madonna Monday night clubbing.

So, to pick up that last post, the club was fucking packed by the time I got up there – popped by a swanky club that had no cover on Mondays for industry night, to get in a new bar, before I realized my favorite trashy club had opened special that night for the Madonna after-party – and I honestly think it was over capacity.

One guy had on this jagged crown of gold shards at least 2-3 feet high on his head, and every inch of his showing skin was painted this very pale white and perhaps even blue, and he was sitting on the bar to the left of the entrance, every once in a while darting forward to lean forward and talk with some friend standing somewhere at the bar.

Right off the bat, I saw my one (Latina) tr*nny friend, who I had bumped into at the stadium venue before the concert started, and I asked her what she thought.

“It was great!”, she was like, and she said that she didn’t know what to expect, since she wasn’t “raised with her music” and she doesn’t “know it very well.”

Though the concert was long, she also said that she felt it was short, and that she wanted another 30 minutes.

 “You know,” I was like, “It’s two-and-half hours,” and as soon as I got to “…hours,” she started laughing and batting my chest.

“I thought you said two-and-a-half inches!”, she was like.

Later, when I was at the back bar in this interminable drink line, I was talking with this like (late 40s / early 50s) (short) (built like a brick) (short-haired) (Latina) lesbian, and it turns out that not only was she there with her girlfriend, but that she was a Madonna fan from like way back originally.

I asked her what she thought about Madonna’s world music breakdown, and she was like, “I didn’t mind it, but honestly, that’s stuff that my grandma wears!”.

Later, when I bumped into her in the drinkline at the front bar, where the freaky king guy was sitting, I told her that I loved how Madonna got eaten out twice in the concert, the second time to that spoken line from Hard Candy “my sugar is RAW / my sugar is RAW”.

She agreed, that she liked it, and by that time I was ordering 2-3 beers at a time, so I could chug one, move on to the next one, and keep one in my back pocket for when I needed it, so I didn’t have to wait in those lines for so f*cking long.

Later later, I was speaking with some (middle-aged) (white) people from the suburbs who were also Madonna fans from way back when, and it turns out that the one guy from the pair (a gay dude and his woman friend) had been to every single Madonna tour ever.

“Best since Blonde Ambition,” he was like, about the Rebel Heart tour.

I then asked him about the concert’s odd ending, where Madonna relatively explicitly threw it on the audience, that “I gave you a party, but at what cost?”.

“I don’t know,” he was like, and he knit his jaw, which could tell you that he was still thinking about it.

Overall, I found that a better response than some (drunk) woman’s response earlier in the night, “I LOVE IT, SHE CAN DO WHATEVER SHE WANTS, I LOVE HER SO MUCH.”

Later later, I was talking with a shiny young (Venezuelan), whose first Madonna concert it was, and who had been deeply moved by the choreography.

Fortunately we didn’t talk long enough for me to say how much I love Chavez and for him to get all reactionary like the Young Republican of Latin America that like all young Venezuelans in the U.S. tend to be if you talk with them for long enough, but then his young (dark-skinned) (trim-bearded) friend kept trying to catch my eye, so I sidled up to him and spoke Spanish to him, unsuccessfully, twice.

Turns out he’s Brazilian.

After two words of formality, he was like, “Look at you, you could have any man in the place."

Then, after I said something – hopefully, something like, “Why would I want that?” – we began talking about what we do etc., and then he segued into that he didn’t know what he wanted.

“I don’t know either,” I was like.

At that, he drew up, “But I’m only looking for a boyfriend!”, he was like.

It was some kind of inadequate jealousy trap, from what I can tell.

I’ve heard Brazilians are jealous, or at least some of them.

Outside afterwards was when my one Latina friend suggested a threesome, and said she likes a hairy ass.

I do believe she also said that she doesn’t get many gayboys since she’s a woman, which almost makes me wonder if she ends up f*cking the straight guys that pick her up.

Great Mondays.

Often, the next day when I’m home from that one trashy club and am getting up at like 1 or 2pm in the afternoon, I think to myself how I can’t believe that that reality was real, it’s almost like this world that only exists in the nighttime and you need your sleep to separate yourself from it and it can’t actually intrude into your daytime life like a segueing into it that way.

Lately, or at least a time or two, I’ve thought about that kind of clubbing, when I’m staring off into space during the class I kind of TA for for the 3^rd year in a row and the professor is talking, and I see all these bright-eyed overwhelmed 19 year-olds, and I think how they have no idea how this (Latina) tr*nny I’m friends with tried to talk me into a threesome after the club shut down and everyone is smoking outside, and she’s eyeing a guy and telling me she likes a hairy ass.

(At which point I realized that she still had her manjunk down there.)

I really have no idea what the kids would think, if they knew I lived shit like that, or at least lived shit around shit like that.

Really, my first 3 Mondays of this term have been something else, and all on the days that I teach these bright-eyed nineteen year olds (if they’re even that old):

1)      At night a Madonna concert, followed by clubbing till 4am and that proposition, and not even in bed asleep till 5:05am (on a Monday!).

2)      Testifying before a city council committee, before class.

3)      Before class, going to go see the touring bones of this really-fucked up Catholic chastity saint, followed by a racism protest with a Donald Trump piñata, followed by the workshops that I have to lead.

So far from what I can see, life does get better as you age, and the young really have no idea.

Odd Mexican drinking ways.

I’ve noticed that Mexicans have a disproportionately smaller share of bars than non-Mexican Americans, and at least some of their drinking energy is skimmed off into this drinking-at-restaurants arrangement that non-Mexican Americans don’t quite have in the same way.

I remember years ago, for this one World Cup soccer match, me and a (Mexican) friend and my one lawyer friend from Missouri were at a restaurant on the business strip in a super (Mexican) part of town, and he ordered the cheesy dip thing with tortillas, and we all got beers to watch the game.

It was almost like everyone wanted to drink, but you had to go somewhere and order food too, to sit around in the restaurant and watch the game.

I was thinking of this the other Friday night when I was in the taqueria near my house, and there was this group of four (Mexican) guys who BYOBed and had an empty 12-pack cardboard case of Dos Equis or some shit like that on the floor and a bucket of the beer chilling on the table, who were getting hammered and eating before going out to go do something else.

It almost felt to me like they just wanted to go get hammered, but had been socialized into eating food at the same time.

A pleasant dream (not one of decay):

I open my mailbox, and there’s the envelope with a National Catholic Reporter, and a new issue of Rolling Stone, and this kind of a bit dirty and a bit thumbed thick book, that I pull out and realize is a Rolling Stone special edition about Madonna’s career, that a friend had read about and sent to me as a surprise gift.

. . .

(There actually is such a special edition that Rolling Stone recently published, but it’s magazine size, and I don’t particularly want it, though I guess my subconscious does?).

Scary shit with Intergenerational Wealth.

The other week, my mom told me not to worry about my recommended preventative periodontal surgeries, and asked me how much they would cost (answer; $1800 a year, for 2 years in a row, I think, from what I can make out of the insurance).

She said that she hoped that that would help me, since I then wouldn’t have to worry about that.

I told her that it was nice, but on the other hand it was disturbing to see our family cannibalizing its wealth like that.

“I mean honestly,” I was like, “For all the years that I’ve worked, I still have to worry about a few thousand a year?”

I then added that student loans hadn’t kicked in yet, and that other people I know had noticed this, that their parents or others of their parents’ generation had to keep anteing up money for stuff that they should be secure for by now, but simply aren’t, and won’t be for a while, and not only that, but probably won’t be able to do anything like that for their children when they get the same age.

“Though I know that you don’t want to hear that,” I was like.

My mom then confessed that she had noticed that, that her parents’ generation was able to save up a little, and her generation a lot, and now that process just isn’t happening any more.

She said her generation was a "peak".

RESOLUTION – Must – Show – More – Discipline.

I really need to show more discipline.

Since I got a smartphone and got me on Facebook and Twitter, I have a small compulsion to check news if I’m feeling even a bit of out-of-it, which really cuts down on my productivity.

For years and years I had self-limited so I wouldn’t have those distractions when I worked from home, but now I do.

On top of that, I really got like 3 levels of sh*t to deal with:

1)      How I make ends meet.

2)      Fun middle-term stuff (cute articles, unionization).

3)      Big projects (ideas behind diss., books).

Of the 3, I need to focus on the shit that gets me to #3 the most, b/c you’ll never know when you die.

I often think of Ernestine Rose, such a brilliant person and feminist, but she shot her (female) wad on letters-to-the-newspapers and lectures and essays in periodicals, and so for lack of a book has not gone down as the landmark feminist that she was.

Overall, it seems like it’s important to fight daily battles in the bubbling churning here-today-and-gone-tomorrow media, but you also got to make sure that shit gets in books, otherwise there’s no real real lasting effect of your thought, since it has no staying power.

From what I’ve read of Madonna interviews, she really prizes discipline, and credits it for what she’s been able to accomplish.

Similarly, when I read about someone like Cesar Franck, even though much of his shit was uncredited in his lifetime, he composed every morning, and it all worked out in the end.

It’s tough, though, b/c I work so much and am split between so many different jobs, to find time to concentrate and really *work*.

Plus, like Pope Francis said in his one Christmas-time address to the Curia, something that everyone should think about, is whether they become self-important and don’t allow themselves to rest.

I kind of recognize myself in those words.

On the one hand, I see that I don’t rest enough.

On the other hand, I look at my CV or resume and whatever-the-fuck-have-you, and I just don’t see enough.