sf part 1: the coldest winter

multipartite for easier read/write/execute

there's an old saying: "the coldest winter i ever spent was summer in san francisco." this is attributed to mark twain, but one of the first things i learned during this trip was that the quote is apocryphal: twain never said it. who did? who cares?

i left indy on sunday afternoon, 8/1/4. IND airport was crazy busy for some reason. but everything was pretty routine once i got through the ticket line. luckily i had scored the only nonstop flight from indy to SFO, so i just listened to mp3s on my new mp3cd player and started to read cryptonomicon (the first actual novel i've tried to read in at least a year, & a 900+page monster to boot.) my precious connie met me at SFO and we took the bart back to the mission. later in the evening, after some cuddling and relaxing, connie cooked dinner (i don't remember exactly what; sorry honey. i'm pretty sure it was some kind of chicken... hey, how many of you remember exactly what you had for dinner more than a week ago?). and mac and cheese.

monday we slept late and left the house even later (this is pretty much the routine every day). we went to the castro, allegedly the gayest place on earth (maybe i should say "most gay-friendly"). a great place to go if you're looking for gay bars, gay porn, or gay greeting cards. i wasn't really looking for the former two, but we stopped in a few shops and i did pick up a couple greeting cards (for collage-type use): one of a beefcake with a "smiley-face" superimposed over his face (inside is a [cheap] smiley-face whooppee cushion), and the other with a penis, dressed up like a face, wearing army clothes. it's the cutest penis card ever. at some point we went to "lunch" at a nice thai place. it was good.

on the way home we stopped by good vibrations (another "adult" store) and aquarius records, which is a pretty good but tiny record store in the mission, not too far from connie's house. (the same shop where connie once left fliers for unszene's button-making business, & one ended up in the hands of drew daniels from matmos.) i tried not to buy too much because i knew we would go to amoeba later in the week, but i got a couple cds, the doormouse i [heart] rap 12" (oops, originally i wrote "hate" there), a scorn 12" (which i wasn't sure if i had already... turns out it was the one scorn record on hymen that i didn't already have), and a few old dhr records... i found a lot of used dhr records last week for some reason... at aquarius i picked up we punk einheit! (nintendo teenage robots), and shizuo vs shizor, so i was excited about that.

on tuesday, we had a delicious curry for "lunch" at a halal indian/pakistani place, then took the bus up to "the haight" to stop by amoeba. if you've never heard of it, amoeba is an enormous place, the size of a department store, but it's all records & cds (they also have a dvd room). truly amazing, and easily the coolest record store i've ever seen... no question. but with its enormous size, it does give you that disorienting, dehumanizing feeling common in such large, crowded stores: let's call it "the best buy effect" (actual dept stores defuse this somewhat by having cash registers scattered throughout the store; at amoeba you wander around, pick your records, and queue up to enter the checkout farm by the entrance when you're done... quite different from the relatively friendly & hospitable air of a shop like aquarius). i won't even begin to list all the stuff i got there: big bunches of stuff, much of it used, on sale, or just all-around cheap. suffice to say that i learned on my first amoeba visit (in december, at the slightly-smaller-yet-still-enormous berkeley location) that you get a free tote bag/dj bag with the purchase of $200 or more, and i got my second free dj bag that day.

later that night, at home, we made beef stroganoff and brownies (i think that was tuesday, but it might've been monday.) and when did we watch adaptation? i'm not sure; we watched my adaptation dvd one of those nights... it's much easier to recall going somewhere than to remember whether we listened to cds or watched a video while we laid in bed... come to think of it, we listened to cds monday night & watched adaptation on tuesday. but i'm still not totally certain of that.

up next: part ii (i need to sort through my photos & post some before i get to thursday... right now, i have some comics to catch up on, since we never made it to a comic shop)