Farm produce.

Our box from the CSA farm this week contained collards, chard, kohlrabi, cabbage, a bunch of parsley, beets, broccoli, lettuce, and asparagus.

Z. is going out of town for a week, so we had breakfast together this morning. We wanted to eat at Kerbey Lane, but there was an hour wait for a table, so we went to Whole Foods and got a muffin and scone and ate on the roof.

Since we were there, I picked up some lemons and bulgur, and, when I got home, I made tabbouli. I also braised the collards with garlic and chipotle peppers (spicy and smoky like the traditional way, but meatless). And finally cooked a couple of those sweet potatoes that we had bought to root and plant in the garden. They never did root. My new favorite way to prepare any sort of root vegetable is to cube them, toss them in olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper, and roast them on a sheet pan in a very hot oven. The roasting brings out the sweet in sweet potatoes which contrasts nicely with the garlic.

I found a great new way to make cole slaw too, in The Best Recipe, my favorite new cookbook. You shred the cabbage and salt it, put it in a colander over a big bowl, and let the salt pull out the moisture for several hours before you dress it. The cabbage wilts but it's still very crisp. It's easier to eat, absorbs more of the flavor of the dressing, and you don't end up with a pool of water at the bottom of the bowl.

Obsessed.

Reviews of Reign Over Me appeared in the Statesman and the Times this morning. The Statesman didn't hate it, which made me angry. The Times gave it a pretty bad review, which was only slightly satisfying.

I'm worried about how obsessed I am with this movie. It's out of proportion. Just thinking about it makes my heart race.

Yes, it was homophobic and misogynistic, but no more so than the average overheard conversation among straight men who don't think any women or homosexuals are listening. Maybe it's the fact that the hatefulness is wrapped up in what is supposed to pass for sensitivity. It's supposed to be a meditation on how difficult male friendships can be. Difficult because men are shallow assholes, is what the film says, I doubt intentionally.

The other issue, besides the politics, is the fact that the film is just bad. Bad writing, bad idea, bad, bad. Nothing in it rings true. This is where I get most frustrated. It's the same feeling I get about Clint Eastwood movies. Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby are two of the most get-in-your-face-and-make-you-want-to-throw-things bad movies I've ever seen. They are maudlin, heavy-handed, simple-minded, and just plain ridiculous. Not only is Clint Eastwood an awful director, he's the worst actor ever. And yet, people rave about his movies.

If these are not bad movies, then I'm an idiot. So all the talk about how great he is and how great these films are, makes me feel like I'm either insane, stupid and out of touch, or living in a nightmare upside-down universe.

Bad dreams.

A couple days ago, J. and I watched Stay, an intensely disturbing movie. Since ruining movies is on my short list of Deadly Sins, I won't write much about it, except to say that it's really, really good. I'm sure it accounted for my creepy dreams that night. But I can't blame it for the awful dreams I had this morning. Awful in the sense of upsetting, but also awful in the sense of "can't you do better than that?"

In one, I was moving out of a big, dark house. My parents were there; in the dream this was their house, but it wasn't their actual house. I and a group of friends were carrying boxes out to a car, which was parked on the other side of a strange, uneven landscape of lawn and pavement, trash and shrubs. As I was making my final trip to the car, ready to jump in with my friends and drive away, I saw that whoever had carried out a tray of seedlings for the garden had, instead of loading them into the car, planted them in a crack in the asphalt. I shouted to my friends in the car that they would have to wait until I dug up the plants and re-potted the.

Can you say heavy-handed?

In another -- this one woke me up -- I was in a big, dark house (many of my dreams take place in this big, dark house), doing something sedate and domestic like watching TV. J. was there. It was dusk (many of my dreams take place at dusk in a big, dark house), and someone knocked at the door. Through the screen door, I could see that it was some people we didn't want to deal with, so I discreetly pushed the latch closed -- in the dream, I thought I was being discreet, but, now that I think about it, these people were standing right there watching me do it -- and walked away. I looked out a window on the side of the house and saw that these people were rigging up a floodlight and two huge speakers aimed at the house. They looked like bikers, men and women in black jeans and cutoff t-shirts.

I'm struggling so hard with this screenplay lately, trying to tell a complex story with some subtlety. And I'm not getting it; it feels either completely obscure or, on the other hand, clunky and maudlin. So it's disheartening that not even my dreams are subtle or complex.

Steamed.

I read the Austin daily, The Austin American-Statesman every morning. It's not a bad paper. Their editorial page leans ever so slightly leftward (in the current sense of "left," meaning any acknowledgment, however tepid, that there may be a point of view other than Tony Snow's). I miss the New York Times, but it's important to me to know about local issues. One thing I like is that I can read it in half the time I used to spend on the Times. (I scan nytimes.com and slate.com to fill in the gaps on national and international news, so maybe I'm not saving any time at all. Whatever.)

Another advantage to a smaller paper in a smaller city is that when I don't agree with their editorial decisions I can write a letter and stand some chance of it being printed. My most recent letter, though, they did not print, and I'm mad about it. My letter was about the way they covered the Ann Coulter "faggot" remark. There was no coverage of the actual incident, but they printed a small story a week later about Edwards' response to it.

Here's my letter:

Dear editor:

I am offended by your article on Senator Edwards' response to Ann Coulter's calling him a faggot.

First, Coulter made this remark a week ago. This was a well-known political commentator using an extremely offensive slur in front of an audience of applauding Republican presidential candidates. If she'd called Barak Obama a nigger or Hillary Clinton a bitch, would you have taken a week to report it?

Second, you won't print the word "nigger" (or "bitch") in the Statesman, but you will print "faggot," which is just as degrading to a whole class of people. Why the inconsistency?

Third, and worst, is the paragraph about Edwards' wife and children, as if to reassure us that Edwards is not a faggot. Do I really have to point out to you that the point of the story is not that Coulter was mistaken?!


Two weeks later, I wrote and said that, if they were not going to print the letter, I would at least appreciate a response to my question about the inconsistency regarding which slurs they print in their pages. An editor emailed me to say, "In a highly publicized remark about a presidential candidate or potential candidate, we would use those words you held out as an example. In fact, we have used those words when news judgment dictated that it best serves the reader to do so."

A search of the Statesman's web site returned no hits for "nigger" and one hit for "bitch."

I'm still mad that they get away with trotting out the wife and kids to verify Edwards' heterosexuality. It just feels so sadly backward. It reminds of my freshman year at Miami University (1979!), when I wrote a paper about the play, Tea and Sympathy, objecting to what seemed to me to be the message that the taunting of the boy -- I don't remember what names the other boys called him, but the essence of the teasing was to question his heterosexuality -- was reprehensible only because the boy was not gay, which was revealed by his having some kind of sexual encounter with the female teacher.

My professor told me I was overreacting. Twenty-five years later, I'm still overreacting.

Another year older and deeper in debt.

Today, I signed up to screen for another drug trial. This one is bigger, longer, and pays $7000. It'll tie me up on and off until the end of May, but $7000 should be enough for me to make a big payment on my credit cards to offset what I'll have to borrow for May rent and bills and have enough left to get me through the summer.

Today is my 46th birthday. J. made heart-shaped pancakes with strawberries for breakfast.

Spring blah.

I haven't felt like doing much of anything this week. Maybe I'm still wiped out from the film festival. I haven't worked on my screenplay, haven't even done much reading. I'm about 100 pages into Moby Dick. Great book. (Duh, you say. But for some reason I never read it before.)

I haven't been sleeping well. I toss and turn and by 6 o'clock, I'm wide awake. Sometimes I'll fall asleep again at 8 or so, but I've been making myself get up because I don't want to sleep all day. I've actually been getting bored sometimes during the day, which is rare for me. Usually I feel like there's too much to do. But, since I haven't been able to make myself write much and don't feel interested in reading, there's a lot of time to fill. The last few days, I've been filling it with either reading blogs or browsing the gay hookup posts on craigslist. I haven't been interested in meeting anyone, I just get mesmerized by the often very strange pictures.

Oh, and gardening. I've been doing that. And that's satisfying.

I got out of the routine of meditating during the film festival, and when I'm not doing that, everything becomes more difficult.

Yesterday I had an appointment at the STD clinic to get screened for everything. They have test results for HIV and syphilis is about 20 minutes, which was nice. HIV tests have previously caused me so much anxiety that I've avoided them, or even a couple times, when I've gone to have blood drawn, I haven't been able to bring myself to call for results. Anyway, my tests were all negative.

Overall, the clinic experience was top-notch here in Austin. Since I've been without insurance most of my life, I've relied on free and low-cost clinics for most of my health care. And I've been to some extremely unpleasant clinics. But yesterday, I was in and out in an hour, the place was clean and cheery, and the phlebotomist and nurse were both pleasant and efficient.

In the evening, Z. and I went for a walk around Town Lake then had dinner at Marakesh. (Finally a Middle Eastern restaurant that stands up to the high standard of my old Jersey City haunts.)

Gay Bi Gay Gay.

J. and I sang in an event yesterday called Gay Bi Gay Gay, in a backyard here in Austin. (There are lots of real and imaginary events riffing on the South By Southwest theme this time of year. My favorite is Fuck By Fuck Y'all.)

We sort of fell into it. A few weeks ago, J. was talking with a new friend who mentioned the event and J. I think mentioned that he used to perform; the next thing we knew we were on the bill. I didn't know what to expect, but what I did not expect was something so big and fun and great. We were early in the lineup -- I think we went on at about 3:30 -- but there were already dozens of people there. By the time we left (at about 8, halfway through a lineup of about 15-20 bands) there were at least a couple hundred people packed into that yard.

We sang very cheesy arrangements of old gospel songs: Are You Washed in the Blood?, When the Roll in Called Up Yonder, etc. Songs we love, and love to sing. But the arrangements were a little bizarre. J. just got a new keyboard, the kind that plays itself. But it sounds great. The piano and organ and drum sounds are actually fairly convincing. If you need it to (and we do), the keyboard will do the bass chords and rhythms, drums, fills, intros and endings. But you have to push the buttons at the right time. If you don't, you may just end the song after the first verse, for example. I like to think of the keyboard as a very enthusiastic but unpredictable new band member.

I wore a powder blue suit, and J. wore all black. I don't think the audience knew what to make of us, but for some reason that added to my enjoyment of the experience.

The revelation of the day was a solo performer called Dynasty Handbag. She was crazy-freaky and hysterically funny. Picture a cross between Laurie Anderson, Lucille Ball, and a schizophrenic homeless woman. She sang, danced, spoke and muttered to prerecorded tracks, often having otherworldly conversations with her own recorded voice. After her set, she emerged from the backstage area, just an unassuming, very sweet young woman selling her CDs, and for some reason that made it all the more remarkable. That it wasn't actually a crazy person but a real live artist. She's from New York and was here for SXSW.

There were a whole bunch of great bands and acts on the bill. It's been a long time since I've been in the midst of so much creativity and such a big supportive audience for it. This same crowd does a once-a-month open stage performance night called Camp Camp. I've never been, but J. and I plan to sing in the next one. I've heard that it's just as popular and just as wildly creative as Gay Bi Gay Gay.

Back to the Garden.

There's a critter visiting our garden at night, and it's starting to make my blood boil. I never saw myself as one of those people at war with the squirrels or whatever, in fact I always thought those people were a little ridiculous. I took the stance that it's humans who have created all the habitat problems so it's we who need to take it in stride when the animals wreak havoc in our yards.

But two out of three of my goddamn tomato seedlings and one of my chilies have been chewed off and left there. Whatever it is is not even eating them, just destroying them. And we have a three-foot fence around the garden, so it's something that can jump or climb pretty high.

My dad has some kind of a gun and he shoots and kills raccoons in my parents' backyard. And they poison the chipmunks. Dozens of them. It goes on all summer long. My mom and dad are not gun people, but they have no mercy when it comes to the garden. Now, to me that looks more like a massacre than gardening. But I'm starting to understand.

Two more days.

Both J. and I slowed down on the movie madness yesterday, probably mostly due to our bad experience with Reign Over Me, but just as much because we were plain weary. My eyes are throbbing. J. stayed home all day. I went to see 368 Ways to Kill Castro, which I liked very much.

Our garden grows.

Someone's been enjoying our garden produce a little early. When I went out to the porch this morning with my coffee and newspaper, I noticed that one of the tomato plants had been chomped off down to the root. Whatever chewed it off didn't even eat it, just left it there limp and dead. And the one, single peanut that sprouted was gone too. There were canine footprints in the bed where it was planted, but I think it's more likely a bird ate it.

The sweet potatoes that I'm trying to root in a bowl of water are not doing much. I may give up on them and just let the watermelon vines take over the space I planned for sweet potatoes. The lima beans have not sprouted, which is perplexing. Maybe they just take a while. The watermelons may get that space too.

Everything else is thriving. The beans and snap peas are growing inches every day, the watermelons, cucumbers, and soybeans have sprouted. The herbs are a little tentative. They all look healthy and happy, but no new growth yet, except for the cilantro and parsley. And the flowers are all starting to come up. And we planted a little meyer lemon tree!

Blech.

I can't wait to see another movie today to get the foul taste out of my mouth left by Reign Over Me, the Mike Binder film with Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle. We saw the premiere last night at the Paramount. Yuck! Not only was it a terrible movie, it was misogynistic and homophobic and stupid. What an ugly, ugly film. Every frame had the writer's smudgy, hamfisted fingerprints on it.

For the first 20 minutes or so, I was right there with it. I love Don Cheadle and I've liked Adam Sandler. The photography was beautiful. A lot of it is downtown New York exteriors, and the city looked great. But once the setup was established and characters introduced, there wasn't one moment that didn't feel forced and false. And a great deal of it was completely implausible, especially Liv Tyler as the psychotherapist. And why did they make Adam Sandler up to look like Bob Dylan?

What really put me over the edge was an exchange between the two main characters. Don Cheadle is feeling dominated by his wife who is a control freak. Adam Sandler calls him a "faggot." Cheadle tells him not to use that word, that it's offensive. Sandler says something like, "To a gay guy it's offensive, but to you it's just a funny word." And they both laugh, and Sandler says faggot two or three more times. And later, the Cheadler character refers to a comic book character's costume as "faggoty." I understand that they are characters speaking lines, but they are the central sympathetic characters in the story. We're obviously meant to identify with them.

I know there are people who agree with the Sandler character's linguistic analysis. But, and this seems so obvious that I feel silly having to point it out, the word faggot is hurtful even though the person you call faggot is not homosexual. Of course it's not hurtful to that person; it's hurtful to everyone who has been made to feel less than worthy because of his or her sexual orientation or gender identification. When you call someone faggot, you're saying, "You're no better than a homosexual." How do you think that makes us feel?

I was in a bad mood the rest of the night.

J. and I were hungry after the movie, so we went to Starseeds, an open-all-night hipster greasy spoon near us. The crowd is entertaining, the staff super-cool, but the food is marginal. If you order right and get lucky, you'll get something edible and satisfying. But it's risky. We did okay -- we only had to move a couple of things that were put on the wrong plate and wait for one pancake that the cook forgot.

I forgot to shut my bedroom door while I was brushing my teeth. Suddenly I got a strong whiff of poop. I looked over my shoulder to see if there was fresh pile in the litter box, but it was clean. I knew right away what was up. J. has adopted one of our neighbors cats, Timmy, because he wasn't getting along with the other cats in their house. He was shitting in their bed, so they put him outside. This was when it got very cold in February. So J. took him in. He's a great cat, very sweet and easy-going. But the few times I've forgotten to shut my bedroom door, he's left me a present.

I was steaming mad. After I cleaned up, instead of going to bed, I sat on the porch and drank a beer. Then I read a chapter of Moby Dick before I finally went to sleep.

Movie blur.

I've seen so many movies in the last two days I don't even remember what I've seen. I think we saw three on Monday, but the only one I can recall right now is Smiley Face, the new Gregg Araki film. J. and I both loved it. It's about a woman who accidentally eats a dozen marijuana cupcakes and how she gets through her day. Really, really funny. Especially if you get stoned first.

Oh yeah, also Monday we saw two programs of shorts. One narrative, one experimental. I'm a little confused about what exactly constitutes experimental in this day and age, but I enjoyed most of the films and some of them a lot. One standout in the experimental program was The Lonely Nights, The Color of Lemons, which told a sweet, touching story with a traditional narrative arc.

Yesterday we saw Billy the Kid, nearly impossible to describe but my favorite so far, Zoo, a documentary about a group of men in Seattle who had sexual relationships with horses. Very highly aestheticized, sort of like Erroll Morris. Interesting, disorienting, beautiful, not exactly edifying. Most of the scenes were reenactments, which was fairly obvious, but I still had questions throughout the film about what I was actually watching. I felt in the end that to create so much confusion was irresponsible. J. I think disagreed.

And last night we saw Monkey Warfare, about a couple of former activists living underground, and a young radical they meet who shakes up their lives. I think it's what they would call a "small film." I liked it a lot.

What Would Jesus Buy?

We saw the premiere of What Would Jesus Buy?, a documentary produced by Morgan Spurlock (Supersize Me), directed by Rob VanAlkemade, about Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. We almost didn't.

I had suggested early on that we might pass on the big buzz films: why fight the crowds when those films will get distribution deals and we can see them when everyone else sees them? But we didn't get in to Little Bitty Titty Comittee at Alamo Downtown. We were near the front of the passholders line, but the badgeholders filled up the theater.

We drove over to Waterloo Icehouse for catfish, looked at the schedule, and decided that What Would Jesus Buy? was the only thing we really wanted to see in the 9:30-ish slot. When we got to the Paramount about an hour and half before the screening, the line was already fairly long, and we entertained ourselves with people-watching. Austin is always good for people-watching, but SXSW is a bonanza.

The documentary follows the tour of Rev. Billy and his choir, their performances in venues across the country as well as their guerrilla performances in malls, Wal-Marts, and Starbucks stores. The story counts down the shopping days to Christmas and climaxes with the holiday season. Along the way they have various setbacks, including getting rear-ended by an 18-wheeler. Their mission is to get people to think about what they're buying. To "Stop Shopping!" and they do it by means of full-on gospel preaching and singing. Rev. Billy in his bleach-blond pompadour and the choir in their red robes baptize a baby in a mall parking lot and perform an exorcism in front of Wal-Mart headquarters. Their guerrilla performances usually culminate with cops and security guards escorting them away, but they don't stop singing.

It was thrilling. I've never been so excited watching a movie. Seeing these talented performers doing political theater, often in front of surprised if not hostile audiences, with humor and total commitment was an inspiration.

Interspersed with the performances are talking head-style interviews with various experts and documentary footage illustrating factory conditions where American products are made, as well as interviews and footage of American families and their shopping habits. But this stuff is never dry. In fact it's very affecting, giving urgency to Rev. Billy's crusade.

Rev. Billy and the choir were in the house and, after the film and the long standing ovation, they performed their signature song, "Stop Shopping."

I hope this film is a huge hit. I can't think of a more urgent message, and this movie, just like Rev. Billy's performances, gets it across by disarming the audience with humor. People wonder what they can do to make a difference when there's so much suffering and injustice in the world, and this film says simply, "Stop shopping." Rampant, insane, American consumerism either causes or exacerbates all the big problems in the world.

I know it's impossible to be a completely clean consumer if you want to live in the modern world and interact with the culture. But that shouldn't be an excuse to ignore the whole thing. Be aware of what you buy, where it was made, who made it, and what it took to get it to you.

Earlier we saw Does Your Soul Have a Cold?, a documentary by the director of Thumbsucker. It was a verite-style doc about 5 Japanese people taking anti-depressants. I didn't feel like I ever got to know the people. It was beautifully shot, and I did get a very strong sense of the numbness of these people's lives, but the pace was slow and even throughout, not so much depressing as just dull.

Food!

Our box from Johnson's Farm contained two beautiful small heads of romaine lettuce, spinach, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, 3 big beets with their greens, chard, mustard greens, 3 sweet potatoes, daikon and various other radishes.

This morning I scrambled eggs with some of the spinach, one of my favorite breakfasts. I set out to make spring rolls for lunch, but I realized I had the wrong type of wrappers -- I had the thick wheat ones instead of the very thin rice paper. I thought I could use them anyway, but I couldn't work with them, so we ate the filling as a salad and it was delicious: lettuce, cilantro, ginger, garlic, grated carrots and radishes, sesame oil, tamari, peanut butter, chopped peanuts, lime juice, rice vinegar, Sambal chili paste.

3 Films.

Today we saw Fall from Grace (a documentary about Rev. Fred Phelps), Annabelle and Elvis (a new feature narrative with Mary Steenburgen, among others), and Manufacturing Dissent (a sort of expose on Michael Moore).

Fall from Grace was engaging, if only because of a lot of mesmerizingly horrific footage, of Phelps and his congregation (which apparently is made up mostly of his family). But it was repetitive, maudlin, and shallow. The two phases of Phelps career are 1) picketing of the funerals of people who died from AIDS (the "God Hates Fags" phase), and 2) picketing of military funerals ("God Bless IEDs"). The more recent military funerals phase was given much greater emotional weight in the film (a good ten minutes of a sobbing teen bride of a soldier who was killed in Iraq), while the AIDS funeral protests were barely mentioned. It's a student film, which could explain its shortcomings. The film failed to connect Rev. Phelps with a larger cultural context, instead making it seem like Phelps and his family were just a bunch of lunatics on the side of the road holding signs.

Elvis and Annabelle was disappointing. The film was made partly by Burnt Orange Productions, which is the hybrid company in which U.T. film students work on professional indie films. It was beautifully photographed right here in Austin and central Texas. And the acting was good considering what they had to work with. I like Max Minghella (Art School Confidential), and he's appealing in this film. Joe Mantegna was wonderful, in a very moving and funny performance as a brain-damaged, hunchback mortician, a role that very easily could have been awful.

But the story was forced, obvious, dumb. I was giving it the benefit of the doubt (because it really was gorgeous to watch, and it was supposed to be sort of a fable, so I was forgiving the super-neat plot) till about the last 15 minutes when it all just started to fall apart. One of those films where you can see the writer at his desk saying, "Oh, and then this can happen!"

Manufacturing Dissent made up for any letdown we were experiencing from the previous two films. Both J. and I wondered if it was a bit long, but decided we probably felt that way because it was our third film in one day. I've never liked Michael Moore much, always thought he was smarmy and untrustworthy, and now I feel vindicated. I often agree with the stances he takes on issues, but he's a manipulative celebrity-hound who is willing to lie to make his point, and he's the wrong spokesperson for progressive causes because he is so easily discredited.

The film laid out point by point the instances in which Moore has either misrepresented context or chronology in his "documentary" films or, in at least one case, completely fabricated an event. And cases in which he's lied about past events in his own life. An eye-opener.

SXSW.

I realized that I haven't mentioned that J. and I got film passes for SXSW. They cost $65, which, by our math, is a bargain if we see more than 8 films. J. made out a prospective schedule incorporating most of the films we want to see, and it includes about 4 or 5 films a day through next weekend.

Last night, we also saw Third Ward TX, a documentary about Project Rowhouses, where a group of artists rescued an urban neighborhood. It did the best thing a documentary can do: let you know about something you had no idea existed. Besides which, it was moving, funny, beautiful to watch, inspiring.

Sisters.

We saw a remake of Sisters, a 1973 Brian DePalma film, last night. The original starred Margot Kidder and, though I saw it probably 25 years ago late at night on TV, it was so creepy that images from it still make me shudder. The remake was pretty creepy too, with Chloe Sevigny.

A trio of chatty girls sat near us. They weren't enjoying the film and wanted everyone around them to know it. Actually, they were enjoying laughing at it. Not that the movie was not funny at times. The tone was somewhere in that disorienting world where campy parody and reverence meet, sometimes seeming to spoof bad 70s psychological horror movies (children's voices la-la-la-ing a minor key nursery rhyme) and other times actually being that bad movie. Anyway, I knew these girls weren't getting it and I didn't want them to ruin it for me. I shushed them about halfway through, which worked until the end credits started and then they let loose. "Somebody must have thought this was a good idea!"

I like seeing a movie with a crowd. It intensifies the emotional ride. But the risk is high. I don't like seeing a movie with a dumb crowd.

Garden nightmare.

I just need three tomato plants and two poblano chile plants, and I was waiting to get them at the Sunshine Community Garden plant sale today. I pictured it as a little neighborhood event, urban gardeners selling seedlings, sort of like a yard sale with plants.

Our first film today is at 4, and I have to pick up our first box of produce from the CSA farm this afternoon, so J. and I got going early to get to the plant sale shortly after it started at 9. The street approaching the garden was already lined with cars, so J. dropped me off and went looking for a space to park. On my way in the gate, a smiling teenager handed me several stapled pages of legal-size paper which listed what looked like hundreds of exotic heirloom vegetable varieties. The place was bustling. A brass band was playing, people were scurrying everywhere, and two long lines snaked through the lot. I realized that these folks were waiting in line just to get into two small greenhouses to look at the tomato and pepper plants. And the lines were not moving.

I ambled over to a couple less crowded tables of herbs and flowers. People darted past me on either side, snatching plants from the tables. It was like a going out of business sale in a bad sitcom. I made my way back to the entrance just as J. was coming in. He had parked blocks away in the Unitarian church parking lot. I said, "I don't think I can do this," and we turned around and came home.

I just want to get the plants into the ground so we can eat the produce this summer. For me, having a garden is about the grocery bill and it's about the environment. It's not about a brass band and fighting a crowd for heirloom tomato seedlings. If I can't get tomatoes and poblanoes by Monday, I'm going to just put in more sweet potatoes and lima beans.

A beautiful moment.

I'm finally making some headway on this screenplay chaos. It was, as I knew, just a matter of jumping in and getting dirty. Later today I will have a big pile of paper that will tell me what I've got, what I need to do, what's right, what's wrong. Anyway, I hope so.

When I was in the mess of it yesterday, J. told me he was going to do some laundry and asked if I wanted to join him. Since I only have about 8 days' worth of clothes, I almost always need to do laundry. And one of our favorite restaurants, Mother's Cafe, which is across the street from the laundromat, had burned down the night before, and I wanted to take a look.

J. wanted to stop on the way at the Guitar Center for ukulele strings. We have a gig -- surprise! -- in a show called Gay Bi Gay Gay (one of the glut of events riding on the coattails of SXSW next week). J. had a general sense of where the Guitar Center was, and we drove around for a long time looking. There's a highway in Austin called the Mo-Pac Expressway, and it's some kind of vortex of confusion. Whenever we're trying to find anything on or near Mo-Pac, we're guaranteed to get lost. I remember this from as far back as our first visits to Austin many years ago when we were touring. Mo-Pac = lost.

While we were searching, we got hungry, so we stopped at ZuZu, a Mexican fast food place for lunch. Cheap and delicious. Next door to the restaurant was a Hollywood Video, where J. asked for directions to the Guitar Center. The one on Mo-Pace is no longer there, so they sent us to the one in the Northcross Mall, which is the site of a very controversial future Wal-Mart. The Guitar Center doesn't carry ukulele strings, but J. found a Yahama keyboard he liked, on sale, and he bought it. Fuck the ukulele.

Then we did laundry. The whole expedition lasted about 4 hours.

On the way home, we were listening to KOOP, one of the surviving listener-owned, free-form stations where deejays talk about things that are happening around the corner and play whatever the hell they feel like playing. While the deejay was on the air, another deejay called in sick, and they chatted on the air for a good while. It was International Women's Day, and the sick deejay wasn't happy about it. ("Women get their own day every four weeks. Why don't we get an International Men's Day?")

The on-air deejay asked the sick deejay how we was going to spend his sick day, and he said that he was going to stay home and read a good book. He was reading To Kill a Mockingbird. He'd read it several times already, and he spoke admiringly of Harper Lee "because he really nails the characters and the story," or something like that.

The on-air guy said, "I hate to have to be the one to tell you, but your favorite author Harper Lee is a woman."

"No way! There's no way that could be a chick. He gets all the characters perfectly: Atticus Finch, the little boy Scout...."

"Um. I've got some news for you, man. Scout is a girl."

"No!!"

How often do you get to witness the exact moment when someone's consciousness is changed?

Spring things.

The garden is almost all in. We still need to put in the tomatoes. There's a plant sale at one of the community gardens on Saturday and I'm hoping they'll have some there. I also want poblanos, but I haven't seen any plants at the nurseries. Maybe they'll have those too on Saturday. And the sweet potatoes haven't rooted yet, so I haven't planted them. But everything else is in the ground, either seeds or seedlings: 3 different kinds of chilies and bell peppers, cucumbers, lima beans, watermelons, pole beans and snap peas, climbing spinach, and peanuts. And in the herb garden: basil (Italian and holy basil), sage, cilantro, parsley, and chives. And I'm rooting some lemongrass to plant in the herb garden, too.

I got an email from a local CSA farm this morning letting me know there's a share available for us. (All the CSA farms I contacted last month were booked up -- things start early in Texas!) So we'll start getting a box of produce every other week now through July from the Johnson Farm.

The weather could not be more gorgeous. It's in the 70s and sunny during the day and gets down to about 50 at night. I'm soaking it up, hoping it lasts for a good while before the heat comes.