Random Rim Jobs

[Continued from "Just When It Was Perfect … (Part 4)."]

Another thing I learned well into our “relationship” was that Jules Verne was a Republican.  Ok, I can deal with that, maybe even have some lively discussions.  When I was growing up, my father was a Democrat and my step-mother was a Republican, so they agreed to not to discuss politics too much.  I was very happy when I learned that my step-mother switched to the Democratic Party when the brouhaha over Bill Clinton getting his cock sucked occurred.  My step-mother didn’t see why anyone gave a shit.  My step-mother, if she weren’t my step-mother, would be a pretty cool person.

So when Jules Verne reminded me that he was a Republican after I said something scathing about a member of the Party, I was hardly surprised or disturbed.  However, I was completely nonplussed when he told me that he was so much of a Republican that he worked for George W. Bush and that he thought George W. Bush was smart.  “Smart?  Really?  He’s smart?  Intelligent?  He couldn’t get into law school in Texas, where his family had significant influence.”

To which Jules Verne responded that W had a great memory, that he always remembered the names of everyone he encountered.  That is certainly a skill I don’t have, but I did get into law school in the state where I grew up, even if my family didn’t have any influence.  True, not the best law school …

I tried to forget these things when Jules Verne and I hung out.  We’d drink.  We’d fuck.  Usually pretty dirty.  We had a lot of fun, including one incident of road head on the Bay Bridge when he was driving me home from his parents’ place in Piedmont.

Then, when I was planning a trip to Chicago, he volunteered to take care of Isis.  I didn’t ask, he volunteered.  He had met her, and saw that she was a very sweet dog.  He also missed his own dog, the custody of which he shared with an ex-girlfriend who lived on the East Coast.  He took very good care of her, and was actually very happy to do so.  A guy who loves dogs gets a lot of points in my book.  Even if he does think George W. Bush is smart.

He bought me an especially nice birthday present, an njoy Eleven.  The store clerk asked me if I thought I could handle it.  I laughed and assured her that I could.  And I can.  The Eleven and I get along very well.  (I may write a post about that toy some day.)

The same day he bought a pussy pump.  To use with me (and other chicks I assumed).  Sure, I’m willing to have my pussy subjected to all sorts of things.  Jules Verne liked seeing pussies do various things, usually of the insertion variety, but if he wanted to see my pussy lips get all puffed up, I was game.  We eventually used it.  It felt interesting to me, but not necessarily all that exciting.  Maybe I’ll have to try again ….

Recently Jules Verne Moved to Manhattan.  He (his parents) have a place just off Central Park in what I’m told (by him) is a very exclusive building – celebrities with penthouses and shit.  So because he was moving and I was moving we had a last hurrah.  Then he came back to the Bay Area and I hadn’t yet moved, we did it again.  Then, because he was collecting his dog and visiting his family, and I still hadn’t moved, we did it again.

He has a nice, thick cock, and he’s interesting.  He says I’m a crazy chick, but in a good way.  Without asking too many questions, I took that as a compliment.  I think he meant that I liked fucking but my fucking isn’t a means to “snag” a guy.  I’ve no interest in being in a traditional relationship with a 25-year-old.  Or any other age for that matter.

To be continued ….  The Vet, Charles, and that guy for whom I don’t yet have a nickname to follow.

I swear.  True story.

This summer in San Francisco has supposedly been the coolest since before I was born.  The fog, which normally burns off by around noon, has stuck around well into the afternoons and evenings.  Having lived in San Francisco for ten years, I knew summer wouldn’t be an even where layers weren’t necessary.  Nonetheless, this summer has been especially un-summer-like.  There are rumors, which have been refuted, about Mark Twain mentioning a coldest winter he spent in San Francisco.  This year, it may be true.

I never noticed until this year that it gets very cool just after sundown, and then warms up again later in the evening.  That likely has something to do with the fog, air currents, etc.; I don’t know, I’m not a fucking meteorologist.

In my experience, the best time of year here in San Francisco tends to be in September and October.  And since it’s almost September, that’s good, right?  Well, sort of.  I’m not supposed to be in San Francisco anymore.  I was supposed to be gone by mid-August.

And I hope to be gone before winter because it will take me some getting used to winter weather in Chicago – if that’s where we’re going.  The Viking said I needed to get used to the cold weather slowly, like a frog being boiled … only in the opposite fashion.  I will need to go from cool summer, to fall, to winter gradually; otherwise I’ll suffer miserably.

Or maybe from fall/winter to spring/summer ….

And then this week it was record breakingly hot in San Francisco.  What the fuck?  On at least one day it was hotter in San Francisco than in Chicago.  That doesn’t happen, dammit.  It was still more humid in Chicago, of course.

San Francisco isn’t really equipped for extreme heat.  We barely left home, but heard tell of power outages, BART delays, and other heat-related woes.  We tried to hold still.  The Viking was weary from the heat.  There was no cross ventilation.  Joaquin didn’t even try to lay on me, which he has been doing much more recently.

And then the weather dipped down much cooler than usual.  San Francisco weather has multiple personality disorder.

I swear.  True story.

[Continued from "Food Fail (Part 1)."]

We walked to St. Francis Fountain through more of the Street Food Festival crowd.  It was a warm Saturday with a street festival going on; the sidewalks were full.  Once in front of St. Francis Fountain it was obvious we wouldn’t be able to eat any time soon; there was a crowd of hipsters waiting out front.

When confronted by a bunch of people who are clearly cooler than I – or at least think they are – I get nervous.  I don’t have enough tattoos and I look horrible in skinny jeans so the hipsters intimidate me.  I’ve been rejected by enough hipsters to know that I’m definitely not hip enough to be in their company.

I should have known.  I first went to St. Francis Fountain with Ramona, who is most definitely cooler than I even wish I were.  She’s heavily tattooed and wears a lot of short skirts with fishnets and has dyed black hair.  I’m convinced that if we didn’t happen to like fucking the same guys (she’s referred several to me) that she would have trouble being my friend.  I’m just not fashionable enough for her.  She’s probably mostly embarrassed to be seen with me in public.

The Viking and I saw that there was a grip of hipsters in front of St. Francis Fountain waiting to eat.  Dammit.  By this time we were hungry and I was in no mood to feel inferior in my regular clothes with only a couple of tattoos showing.  I remember when the fact that I had tattoos at all was edgy ….

Finally, we decided to stop by our corner grocery for supplies so the Viking could make us food.  He made eggs with chipotles and other yummy stuff, and quesadillas using thick “homemade” corn tortillas.  Yum.

[To be continued ….]

I swear.  True story.

I’m ready to move.  READY.  I’ve lived in my apartment nearly seven years and in San Francisco for ten.  It is time to move the fuck on.

I look around my apartment and see things I’m tired of seeing.  I look around San Francisco and see things I’ve been seeing for ten years.  I like what I see for the most part, and it will be great to visit a city I know so well, but I’m ready to say I’m from San Francisco rather than I live in San Francisco.

I’m not “from” San Francisco, but that’s what I’ll say when people ask once I’ve moved.  It’s certainly easier to say I’m from San Francisco than that I’m from all over California, that I’ve lived in northern California, southern California, thankfully not central California.

I have senioritis.  You know that feeling, when you can see the light at the end of the tunnel and you want to get there already.  I want to move already.  Change will be very welcome in my life.  This year started off kind of shitty and has gotten better and better and better.  I feel like if I stay here things will only stagnate, and I want them to continue to get better.

The last time I had senioritis so badly I was a senior – in high school.  At the end of my sophomore year my guidance counselor sat down with my father and me and told me there was a chance I could graduate early if I wanted to do so.  Did I!

I had heard about people at my high school graduating a semester early, which is what I hoped for.  However, because my high school had very few requirements for graduation, including only three years of English, and because I had begun taking high school-level classes in junior high, I was told I could graduate a full year before my classmates.

Fuck yeah!  I would have to jump through a few hoops, but I could do it.  I had to get special permission to sign up for classes that were normally only open to seniors.  My guidance counselor took care of that.  And because there were only so many class periods in a day, I had to put in time to get additional units at the continuation high school in my district.

On Wednesday nights my father drove me to the continuation high school.  For those not in the know, a “continuation” high school is for the pregnant girls, the behavior problems, and those with learning disabilities.  It’s a last step before dropping out for most of the students who go.  On Wednesday nights the local continuation high school had supervised study that allowed students to catch up on classwork.

I was to earn a few units on the Wednesday nights, and take a full course of classes during school days, and I could graduate a year early.  I could do that.  The first few Wednesday evenings, the supervising teacher had me read stories and answer comprehension questions.  She always seemed surprised when I finished, and usually let me go before the study period was over because I had completed all my work.

The work was mindless and silly, but I wanted to do whatever it took to graduate early.  After a few Wednesdays of attendance, the supervising teacher didn’t have any work left for me to do; I had done everything that was normally given to students who needed extra units.  The teacher asked me to act as a tutor and help any of the other students who needed it.  Whatever it took, I did.  Finally, the teacher made it clear that I was wasting my time, and set me free, with more units than I had requested or needed for the early graduation.  Thankyouverymuch.

With that cushion of units at my disposal I proceeded to purposefully fail a math class that I didn’t need to graduate and that was more work than I was willing to put in.  The last semester of high school I did the bare minimum of work.

I moved out of my parents’ (father and step-mother) house during my last semester of high school, in March of 1990, when I was 16.  Some time during that final semester my parents got a call indicating I was “in danger of not graduating.”  I heard through DJ that my parents got the call, as I had no interest in talking to them during that time.

I didn’t give a shit that I was in danger of not graduating, because even if I didn’t graduate then, a year early, I could take summer school, or attend another semester, and I still would have graduated early.  The teachers looked at me with a wise pity, like they had seen it all before – the formerly good student who was just done.

I still don’t know what my final grades were, but I did graduate from high school a year early.  Literally the day after I graduated I moved from the small suburban Sacramento town to the San Gabriel Valley in southern California.  DJ helped me with that.

I can’t say this bout of senioritis is as difficult at the one when I was 16 since I now have a bit more maturity.  Just a bit.

I swear.  True story.

Hey asshole, you are not better than me.  You are not entitled because you have children.

As a matter of fact, your children are a pain in my ass.  Why should that be?  I didn’t have kids.  Barring some fucking miracle, I’m not going to have kids.  Yet I live next door to a school for which I have to pay a special property tax assessment.  I don’t give a fuck about your children.

The children are our future?  I don’t think so.  Chances are, I’m going to die alone after a few years of being out of my fucking gourd with Alzheimer’s.  Why the fuck should your children care?  They won’t.  So why should I care about them now?

I don’t.  I get annoyed when I see children at events that are supposed to be for adults.  The Viking and I have memberships to the Exploratorium AfterDark.  Many museums around San Francisco have weekly or monthly evening events meant for adults.  I know they’re meant for adults because they have bars set up throughout the venue.  Bars with liquor.  And beer and wine.  Things that are not appropriate for children.

Times when adults are drinking when they don’t want children around.  Of course I understand that the Exploratorium is for children; I went there when I was a kid.  I loved it.  I love it now, which is why I got the membership.  For AfterDark.  The Viking and I began going to the AfterDark events in February.  We’ve gone every month since.

For the most part we had fun.  We had a lot of fun.  We’d take a couple of buses to the Marina, go to a restaurant in the area, and then walk to the Palace of Fine Arts, where the Exploratorium is located.  We’d have dinner and then go to the Exploratorium.  The Exploratorium, where I had been many, many times as a child.

When I lived in Santa Rosa as a child, I’d often go down to San Francisco – mostly with my mother and mostly on weekends – for adventures.  The adventures would often include the Exploratorium and Golden Gate Park, where people roller skated all the time when I was a kid.

So I understood that the Exploratorium was for children.  That’s why when I heard about AfterDark I was excited for the Viking and me to go for recreational purposes.

When we went in February, March, April, and May there were children, for sure, but few.  Mostly, the kids who were there were infants with their parents; it was relatively easy to avoid them.  Then in June there were quite a few kids.  But nothing like July.

When we went in July we were amazed by all the fucking kids.  Mind you, we were not there during the day, when children seem to run things; we were there at night, on the one night a month when the Exploratorium was not meant for children.  The Exploratorium even has day camp, which, if I had children, my children, if they existed, they would attend.

What I would not do, even if I had little brats, would attend adult events with my progeny.  That’s just rude.

The July AfterDark event was overrun with children.  Overrun!  Very shortly after entering, which, due to our membership, was thankfully “free,” we realized there were children everywhere.

The reason we went in the evenings was to avoid children, yet there they were – in spades.  Because we had the membership, and because we had been going monthly since February, we agreed that staying any longer would have been tortuous.

On our way out I saw that the exhibit which demonstrated soap and surface tension wasn’t manned, which was unusual.  I ran over.  I was able to to make a “screen” of soapy water.  I was very happy that there was no one else at the exhibit who would block me from figuring out how the science worked.

Happy until some kid decided to tell me what I was supposed to do.  Apparently I should have stuck my hand in the soapy water and touched the soapy “screen.”  I told the fucker that I had no interest in getting my hands dirty; he seemed confused.  My hands didn’t get dirty and that kid should have fucked off much sooner than he did.

Just before going to August’s AfterDark event we read that beginning in October no one under 18 will be allowed into AfterDark.  Apparently, many people had complained.  Good.  Too bad August was our last AfterDark before moving.

When we went in August there were still a bunch of children around, which was unfortunate.  Unfortunate, too, were the parents with their strollers and need to rest from the pain in the ass that is toting children around.  The Exploratorium has a cool bench that is wired so that when two people sit on it, each with one hand on a copper plate, they complete a circuit when they touch skin-to-skin.  It’s an exhibit, not just a bench, to people who aren’t burdened with children.  To the idiots with kids who sat on it without realizing it was an exhibit.

The Viking and I went to the bench later.  We each put a hand on the copper plate and then held hands.  The bench is wired so music plays when the circuit is complete.  The music gets faster and more intense the more contact there is between the bench occupants.  A fun thing we discovered was that if we completed the circuit with my mouth and the Viking’s finger that the music was entertaining, and it changed as I sucked.  If there weren’t so many damn kids around, we might have been able to do it with my mouth and his cock.

I swear.  True story.

[Continued from "Family:  July 31, 2010."]

We once again woke up to my sister’s voice.  And the sun.  Coffee for the Viking, breakfast for both of us.

We were leaving that day and knew we had to break down our camp.  We had already run out of fuel for the camp stove, so that was easy to put away.  The tent was a bigger job, because it was a bigger tent.

We loaded the car and then began taking the tent down.  Then I remembered why I don’t like camping.  It’s dirty.  It’s hot.  (Neither of these in a sexy way whatsoever.)  Well, it’s hot if you’re lucky.  If you’re not lucky it’s cold and wet.

When I was a kid, when I lived with my father and step-mother, the family went on a lot of camping trips.  At the time we had an old canvas tent for the kids, and a newfangled nylon tent for the parents.  Our parents always got the better of anything we had.  Better tent, better sleeping bags.  When we set the table for dinner, which we did nightly, the parents got butter and we got margarine.

So there four of us kids would be in a canvas tent.  Because there were four of us and the size and shape of the tent, at least two of us, even when lying down, were under the sagging walls of the sides of the tent, and could not help but touch the tent, even when lying down.  Sometimes it rained on our camping trips.  The canvas tent was waterproof so long as the canvas had not made contact with anything.  If it was raining it would remain dry inside only until something touched the canvas.  Once the canvas was touched, thereafter it leaked.

More times than I can count, I woke up wet.  At the time us kids were given cheap air mattresses to sleep on.  Given, the days of Aero products were far in the future, so we had few options.  Nonetheless, it was a pain in the ass to pump up our air mattresses via foot pump.  At some time during my childhood we graduated from the foot pump to a car battery-powered pump for the air mattresses.  When we used that at night I always felt bad for our fellow campers because it was so damn loud.

More times than I can count, I woke up with my ass touching the ground.  More times than I can count, I woke up with my wet ass touching the ground.  I moved out of my parents’ house when I was 16; I’ve not camped since.

Until now.  When I realized I hadn’t camped in about 20 years, it made me feel old.  And grateful.

Breaking down the tent and packing it and its parts into the proper factory receptacles made me grateful I didn’t have to again set up the tent so it could be vacuumed.  That was definitely what my step-mother would do once the tent was back at their place in Reno.  It made me grateful I don’t have a tent of my own.  It made me grateful I don’t camp.

The fact that the Viking was also over camping – he said he hadn’t done so in ten years – also made me grateful.  We can not camp together whilst living in major cities.

We packed up the tent and vacated our site well before the noon deadline.  Thereafter, we had little to do.  I went around to all the family members saying goodbyes and thank yous.  The Viking said thank yous and nice to meet yous.  We talked to my sister and step-sister for a little bit, and then we were again bored.

We drove home.  Actually, the Viking did all the driving home.  I don’t like to drive, and he seemed to enjoy it from what I could tell when I was awake, which admittedly wasn’t for long.  I get very sleepy when in a car.  Add to that the fact that we were listening to David Sedaris’s When You Are Engulfed in Flames and I slept most of the way home.  I often fall asleep listening to podcasts, which are people talking, just like an audio book.

Isis was very good the entire way home, and when we got home she crashed.  She had a very stimulating weekend.

The Viking and I had a very boring weekend.  But it was over.  We were home.  I had visited my mother.  I had told my family that I was moving.  I didn’t have to deal – really deal – with any of them for a while.  I told them they could come visit us in Chicago, of course, but I’ll be very surprised if they ever take me up on the offer; my family is not particularly close.

Or maybe it’s just me.  I would kill myself before I lived in the suburbs again.  My step-brother and my parents live in Reno; my sister lives in Eureka; my step-sister lives in a ‘burb of Seattle.  I need to live in a city, with a lot of people and activity around.  Someone on the camping trip said I had “trained” myself to like cities.  No, I just like cities.

None of us talk to each other much.  But maybe they just don’t talk to me.  When I moved out of my parents’ house when I was 16 I didn’t feel particularly close to my family.  My father sat me down and said that if I was arrested before I turned 18, after which he would not be responsible for me, he would tell the police that I had run away, that he didn’t know where I was.  That he assumed I’d be arrested (I never was.), and some other things, didn’t make me feel particularly warm and fuzzy toward him.

When I graduated from high school – after I had moved out of my parents’ home – my step-mother claimed to be embarrassed by me at my graduation because I had shaved my head.  She was also a complete cunt at my law school graduation.  I’m sure if I had attended and invited her to my college graduation she would have had some reason to have the focus on her.  The negative focus.  That, and some other things, didn’t make me feel particularly warm and fuzzy toward her.

My mother doesn’t know up from down now.  I can’t hold much of a grudge against her since she can’t remember leaving me home alone when I was seven.  Or traipsing her “lovers” in and out of my life for years, making me think that all relationships were transitory at best.  That, and some other things, didn’t make me feel particularly warm and fuzzy toward her.

My siblings, I love, we just don’t seem to have that much to say to each other that often.  We update each other on the major events, and that seems to be it.  For sure, I have a lot to do with this; I’m guarded with them.

The Viking gets bit up by mosquitoes all the time when we’re home in San Francisco; he did not get bit at all when camping.  Also, there was poison-oak all over the camping area.  While the adults present knew enough not to touch it, Isis wasn’t so lucky.  I figured she’d rub on it, I’d pet her, and inevitably I’d get the fun, itchy rash that goes along with poison-oak’s oils, to which I’m particularly prone.  No such thing happened.  Overall, a successful camping trip.

There’s no poison-oak in the Midwest.

I swear.  True story.

My mother has Alzheimer’s Disease.  She was diagnosed with dementia when she was 58.  She is now 63.  She looks 75.  She is a sad woman who cries whenever anything makes her uncomfortable.  She has reverted to almost child status.

Which is very sad because she had a shitty childhood.  Her father was an asshole.  That is putting it mildly.  My mother was the oldest of 12 children, and in one way or another my grandfather sexually abused each one of his 12 children.  For years my mother thought he had only messed with the girls, which meant there were nine boys who had a chance to be normal.  However, after their father died, the adult kids swapped some stories.

My grandfather sexually abused each one of his children.  And because they had been raised in an environment of disgusting, dirty, bad, shameful incest, some of those children abused some of their siblings.  It is horrible and shameful and the thought of what it must have been like to grow up as one of many military brats moving around often and finally settling in rural northern California all while their father had “special time” with each of them makes me alternately nauseous and weepy.

So it’s extra sad that my mother thinks both my sister and I are her sister because that means she sometimes thinks she’s still a kid, when things were shitty.  Really shitty.  Horrible.

My mother was disowned and shunned by her family when she came out as a lesbian.  That was when my mother and father were divorcing when I was four and my sister was eight.  My father didn’t take the news too well.  He drank a lot.  I get my alcoholism from my father.  He got it from his Native American grandmother. He stopped drinking for the most part when he became a born again Christian.

My dad and step-mother planned a family get-together at Whiskeytown Lake.  The plans began back in December 2009 when my step-mother reserved the multiple camp sites.  My step-sister had requested that the family camp at Wiskeytown, where we had gone camping numerous times when we were kids, living in Redding.  I lived in Redding, California, roughly from the time I was eleven until I was fourteen.  We did a lot of camping during that time.

When we were kids, my step-sister and I went “cruising for boys” when we went camping.  She was infinitely more comfortable and flirtatious than I.  I always went along for the ride, talking to whomever she had lured into talking to us.

I realized that it would be a good idea if I visited my mother, and then my father and his family planned the camping family reunion.  I could visit both parts of my family on one trip; two birds, one stone, and all that.  I would drive up to Humboldt County, where my sister and my mother lived, and then over to Whiskeytown, in Shasta County, to camp, before driving down the 5 to get home to San Francisco.   I figured I could visit my mother and my father and his family, along the way announcing  to everyone that I was moving.  Moving far away.  Moving to Chicago.

It was also on that trip when I’d introduce everyone to the Viking.  The Viking was nice enough to go with me on the trip despite all the stories I’d told him about my family.

On Thursday morning I picked up the rental car.  We loaded the trunk with our gear.  Our gear consisted of a small ice chest we bought for the trip filled with food we had prepared for the family pot luck dinner on Saturday night, clothes, and some sheets and blankets.  The Viking and I do not camp.  We have no camping equipment, and we like it that way.  We justified the ice chest purchase because it’s small enough to use for picnicking, which we do do.  My parents, who camp all the time, had everything else we’d need, including a huge tent, sleeping bags, a camp stove, and folding chairs.

We put Isis, along with her two beds, in the back seat of the car and we were off.  After a stop for ice and coffee we were off.  The Viking had never been across the Golden Gate Bridge so after a very foggy drive where most of the bridge couldn’t be seen at all he had to trust me when I told him that the Golden Gate Bridge was, in fact, behind us.

Up the 101 we went.  It got a lot warmer, and then cooled down again by the time we reached Humboldt County.  We found my sister’s house, no thanks to Google Maps which directed us off the 101 via a road that doesn’t exist.  My sister and her girlfriend showed us their cute little house complete with two dogs and garden.

We had a quick snack of local oysters.  The Viking doesn’t like oysters, but he was nice enough to do all of the shucking for us.  Then we went to visit my mother.  We picked her and her dog up and went to a park.

My mom can barely walk.  She’s often confused.  When I told her about the move to Chicago she burst into tears.  She was very happy to see Isis.  Isis used to be my mother’s dog; I got her when my mother’s partner abandoned her and kicked her out of the house the two of them owned together.

It may not seem like much.  It probably seems like nothing, me taking care of a dog that used to be my mother’s rather than taking care of my mother.  But it’s what I can do.

After a tearful goodbye with my mother, we went back to my sister’s place where there was a pot luck dinner already in progress.  We drank wine, ate, and socialized.  My sister has lived in Eureka for over ten years and has a group of loyal friends.

Eureka is too small a town for me, and the weather is a tad depressing, but my sister loves it.  She went to college in Humboldt County, too.  Coincidentally, the same college our parents attended when they met.  She lives in the same town both she and I were born.  She’s gone back to her beginnings, while I’m making a break for it.

To be continued.

I swear.  True story.