Dept. of Men.

I emailed Z. to see if he wants to get together soon. I had told him a few weeks ago that I needed some time off from him so I could focus on getting a few particular things done: two screenplay contest applications, the first draft of the script I've been working on (working title is now "Public Sex"), and all the admissions and financial aid stuff for U.T.

All those things are done or moot. But I haven't missed Z. a bit, and that makes me wonder what I'm doing. I was talking with J. about this and came to the conclusion that I just don't have what's necessary to create new relationships right now -- desire, stamina, emotional generosity, I don't know? -- whether friends or lovers. That's probably a natural state at my age, since most people in their forties have already established the significant relationships in their lives.

But it always gets complicated doesn't it? No wonder men lie to get sex.

Last week I went out carousing a couple of nights. Nothing wrong with that. One night, I met two guys, good friends, we talked and laughed a lot, drank a lot. The three of us went back to the one guy's house and spent the night. I'll spare you the details, but it was a lot of fun. The guy whose house it was -- he has a boyfriend, open relationship, etc. -- and I have called and missed each other a couple times. I wouldn't mind seeing him, or him and his friend, again. Why not?

I'm very good at this first part, and I sometimes wonder why I can't just do this over and over. I guess because eventually I would run out of guys to dump. (When I was younger, I would just stop returning phone calls. What an awful thing to do to someone! I'm determined to do better.)

But another night, I met another guy. This guy's story is eerily like mine. Same age, songwriter, artist/academic, writer, filmmaker, has lived in many places. We talked for a couple hours at the bar, he gave me a ride home. We talked on the phone for quite some time over the weekend, and he said he would call me today, which I'm looking forward to.

One intriguing thing about this guy is that he's circumspect when our conversation turns to making plans to see each other. At first I was a little confused by it -- does he want to see me or not? -- but I realized that he was doing exactly what I often do with guys I meet. I avoid making plans. Instead, I make plans to call and make plans. I don't think it's a case of wanting to be free in case something better comes along; it's just a case of wanting to be free.

The bar that I go to won't be around much longer. It's sitting on some very valuable downtown real estate. The area has been sort of a no man's land for years because it floods regularly, but the city is planning a major flood control project which will open several city blocks for development. It's the only gay bar in town I've been to that I have any desire to hang out in.

Lizzie Borden.

Here's the New York Times review of that 1994 production. Not exactly a rave, but getting in the Times was cool. The comment about the story-telling was likely true. Traditional narrative was not a goal with the Tiny Mythic folks, and that was one of the reasons I loved working with them. The creative freedom. Still, we held ourselves to some standard of being responsible for creating an experience, a journey, for an audience, and we probably failed in some way with Lizzie Borden.

That's one reason it's so exciting to get to try again. I still don't know much about this new production, whether or not Tim will direct it, or to what extent I will be involved. But I do know that Tim and I will at least have a chance to revise, to improve the material. (The husband and wife team who have approached us about a production told us they think there are problems with the structure, which they would like us to fix.)

Tim wants me to write a couple, a few more songs. In its ALR incarnation, it was a one-act, about 45 minutes long, with I think 4 songs. The last song was an epilogue -- a post-acquittal socialite hostess Golden Age Lizzie -- a radical shift in mood and style that was fun but didn't really work, cut from the later production. For the 1994 production, I wrote 5 more songs and the whole thing got more Gothic, less campy. (Less campy, which is not to say not very campy.)

By the time of this later production, Y'all was very much underway. J. and I were touring a lot. I wrote the songs, recorded guitar and vocal demos, and dropped them off. I didn't spend much time with the cast or with Tim.

This was radically different from the first production, where Tim and I and the cast spent weeks poring over the court documents and biographical material, discussing, dramaturging the thing together before Tim and I even started writing. I was listening to a lot of Lita Ford, the Runaways, and Heart that summer, and the music reflects it. (In 1994 I was listening to more Loretta Lynn, and that probably shows in the later songs, though subtly I hope.)

It's still in the germination phase, but still I'm hoping like crazy that I'll get to spend some time in New York working on the show next year. The folks who want to do the production are talking about raising real money, so I could actually get paid. What a strange and wonderful idea.

History.

I have a neurotic need to explain myself, to give my every utterance the proper context so I'm not misunderstood. I'm better than I used to be, but ... this sentence is a perfect example of it, so I will abandon it right now. It slows me down in so many ways. I think my phone phobia is a symptom of this neurosis. I revise and rehearse every greeting to get the maximum context into the first few words.

I've been thinking a lot about the musical Lizzie Borden play my friend Tim and I wrote and staged together in New York, which may be produced again next year. As I began blogging about it last night, I found myself unable to express the simple thoughts I was having without also writing layers and layers of history, from my involvement with Tim and the Tiny Mythic Theatre Company in the late 80s and early 90s, how I met those people through my first long-term boyfriend, who got me started playing in bands and writing music, how those experiences in the theater awoke in me the notion that I wanted to change my life, which led me to leave that boyfriend.

Everything at this late stage of my life seems to be way too entangled with a longer story, with the long story, for the telling of any small segment of it to be simple. There's too much diversity -- of geographical location, creative medium, philosophy of life, haircut -- for any part to convey the whole. I want too badly for it to make sense.

The other thing I feel slightly neurotic about -- and this is related to the above because they are both parts of a larger need of mine to feel that I have done something important with my life -- is a need to state and confirm that I have participated in history, that I have not just swum in but have contributed to the cultural stream. Simply, that my work has been important. Maybe all artists feel this, but it is very much at odds with my overarching Buddhist philosophical view of the uncertainty of things. You can take the boy out of the Judeo-Christian narrative paradigm but you can't, etc.

The way this latter thing looks is that when I talk about the Lizzie Borden piece, I want to say that it was the final show in the first season of the American Living Room festival in 1990, which was the first summer theater festival in New York. Now there are lots of them, but there was no summer theater festival season in New York before the American Living Room. What we did that summer changed New York theater. (Just to be clear, I didn't create the ALR, but I participated in many ways throughout that first summer.)

Well, there's so much more to tell about Lizzie Borden, and about everything else as well. I'll get to it. In the meantime, that's Loren Kidd with the axe. She played Lizzie in the original ALR production as well, but this photo is from the longer version produced by HERE in 1994.

FADE OUT.

I did it.

I farted around the first half of the day and avoided it. But eventually I was bored with all the distractions I created for myself, and I hate being bored, so I sat down and made myself push through to the end. 111 pages.

Two scenes in particular I know are not right yet, and I'm sure to discover all kinds of other problems, but I'm going to let it sit now for at least a week before I look at it again, because I want it to feel slightly unfamiliar when I read it straight through.

Think I'll go out and get drunk tonight.

Scary Endings.

I told myself as I was going to sleep last night, "Tomorrow is the day." But now I'm feeling chicken. It would be much easier to just read my Alice Munro book or look at Internet porn all day instead of finishing the first draft of my screenplay.

I'm so close to the end of the story. Just a few short scenes. I'm not saying it'll be done -- it's a big hairy beast at this point and I know I'll be working on it for a long time -- but I will have written the story straight through from beginning to end. The first pass. It's a huge milestone.

The draft will be about 110-115 pages, a good length I think. I can trim the fat and still have a feature-length script. (A page equals a minute of screen time, so you want it be be at least 90 pages.)

But, endings are hard. Everyone knows that. Endings are the hardest part. So I'm shaking in my boots this morning.

When I was writing a synopsis for the Sundance lab program application, I came upon a new idea for an ending, which read well in the synopsis, but now I'm not so sure. It contains a surprise. Not a Sixth Sense-type surprise, just an unexpected turn in the characters' lives. And now, as I try to create the scene, it feels like too much is happening right there in the last few pages.

I love neat stories, but generally I'm a fan of the open-ended. The original ending was less an ending than just a point where we stop and walk away from these characters. The lead character was obviously changed by the events in the story, but subtly, and in a way that wouldn't have a big effect on his life except over time. The change was interior. Interior can be a problem for film, but stories where most of the action is emotional or psychological are the ones I find most interesting on screen.

Here's an idea: write two different endings. That could be less scary because I won't be committing to anything. I don't know -- two endings just feels twice as scary as one ending.

Peas and Dreams.

It's 7 a.m. I woke up at 6:30 and couldn't get back to sleep because suddenly I'm not sure if the sugar snap peas that I blanched and froze last Saturday are not actually English peas. Finally I just got out of bed. I almost always wake up at dawn, with the light and the birds, sometimes lie there as long as an hour, but I seldom have the energy to rouse myself, and eventually I go back to sleep and wake up again at 8:30 or so.

In my dream this morning I was at my dream hotel, the one with yellowish light and tangled sheets in the room I am always -- because these are dreams -- trying to get back to. I never do, I am always waylaid in elevator banks and long hallways.

It's All About the Cilantro Pesto.

J. is doing a cleansing fast and only consuming a concoction of lemon juice, maple syrup, sea salt, cayenne pepper, and water for three days. So I'm cooking for myself. I'm completely enamored with the cilantro pesto I made last week. I already went through the first half pint and took another one out of the freezer.

Last night for dinner, I lightly sauteed asparagus and spring onions (from our CSA box this week), added some cooked rice, cilantro pesto, and crumbled feta cheese and tossed it till everything was warmed through. Delicious. The feta is especially good. It's Armenian or Bulgarian or something, I can't remember, but it's creamy and rich and tasty, and it was not expensive.

Today for lunch I made a sandwich with a Quorn pattie (those meatless things that vaguely resemble chicken but they're made with some sort of cultured fungus or something -- they're very tasty) on toasted Italian bread with salad greens (from the CSA), roasted poblanos, feta, and .... cilantro pesto.

I harvested the cilantro just in time. I noticed today that it's beginning to bolt. In other garden news: we lost one of our tomato plants to a virus. It was the really big one, a yellow pear. But the other two look healthy, the watermelon vines are creeping quickly here and there, the cucumber plants have several pretty yellow blossoms on them, and I saw a few tiny, tiny green beans on the vines this morning.

Spooky Weird.

J. and I are watching the first season of Six Feet Under on DVD. I haven't had a TV for many years, so I missed it the first time around. When I was house-sitting for a rich friend in West Hollywood a few years ago, he had a couple episodes TiVoed, so I watched them, and I was seriously underwhelmed. This was around the fifth season, and it reminded me of thirtysomething, which I thought was the most boring show ever: a lot of middle class people sitting around complaining about their pseudo-problems.

But, because so many people said to me you can't come in on the middle of it and I should give it another chance, etc., I did. Well, of course it's amazing. It's a thrill. Real art on TV.

Clare is a dead ringer for a good friend of ours in Nashville who was around Clare's age when we were spending time with her and her family. Our friend even did one of those wilderness trek things, though she didn't get busted for pot as far as I know. Now she (our friend) is a student activist at a college near Seattle.

Here's what's weird. You know the scene in the art gallery, the opening of Brenda's brother's show of photographs? The exhibition is called Private/Public. The artist character in my screenplay is a photographer, and I have a scene which takes place at the opening of a show of his photographs, and the show is called Public/Private. No kidding. And, just like in Six Feet Under, the photographs are of people who are doing private things and have no idea they're being photographed. How fucked up is that?

I should say it was called Public/Private. It's not called that anymore.

WWF.

As I was waking up this morning, I dreamed I was at a convention in a huge hotel conference center. During some downtime in the activities, all the conventioneers were socializing and relaxing in the hotel lobby. Most of them were in the large main lobby where there were lots of big sofas and chairs, but there was also a smaller smoking lounge. I was in the smoking lounge talking with some friends, but the smoke was bothering me, so I went to the main lobby, where I saw my parents. I sat with them and chatted for a while.

I noticed that a couple people were smoking here too. My mom and dad grumbled a bit, but they didn't want to confront the smokers. I stood up -- by this time several people were smoking and the room was starting to fill with smoke -- and, trying to be very nice guy, smiling, non-confrontational, I don't want to judge you but just FYI, announced, "There's a smoking lounge right around the corner where you guys can smoke, because this is a no smoking area."

One of the smokers, a woman who looked to be in her mid-fifties wearing a denim pants suit and lots of make-up -- what they used to call a bottle blond -- stood up, and I don't remember exactly what she said but it meant, "We're not going anywhere, mister." I said, "If you and all the smokers will either put out your cigarettes or go to the smoking room, I'll wrestle you."

Suddenly three guys surrounded her and yanked her pants suit off in one sweeping gesture (it was attached with Velcro) to reveal a bright spandex superhero outfit. Her hair got bigger and across her chest was a sash that read "WWF World Champion." Everyone moved to the edge of the room, the three guys pushed all the furniture against the walls, and one of them started marking a big square on the carpet with masking tape. The lady wrestler was bouncing on the balls of her feet and punching the air. She looked serious.

I went up to the guy with the masking tape and said, with my hand at the side of my mouth so nobody else would hear, "Just for like 2 minutes, okay? "Cause she'll beat the hell out of me."

That was it. I woke up.

Statistics.

Wow, I think this is the most math I've done in one sitting since high school.

I'm writing this screenplay which is about sex and men, and, in particular, how men go about trying to get it and how that affects the way they see themselves and each other. I've had this opinion for a while that most men are very focused on body parts to the detriment of their ability to function sexually as whole people. I believe a common ailment for men is that we're unable to bring our whole selves into sex. Evidence of this is the way men will fetishize a body part to the extent that they fashion an identity around it ("ass man," "leg man," "cocksucker," etc.)

And I came to think that this phenomenon really stands out in online profiles on dating and sex hookup web sites, where men give limited, directed information about themselves and choose pictures of themselves with the object of attracting somebody for sex. So I decided to check my theory with a little scientific study. Well, maybe pseudo-scientific.

I looked at 150 profiles on Manhunt.net, one of the big gay hookup sites, and I compiled some information about the photos. I only looked at the main photo, the one that appears first to anyone browsing the site. There are often additional photos in a profile, including "private" photos that are only available when people "unlock" them for men they might be interested in. It seems to me that this main photo is where men put what they consider their best foot forward.

I've had the impression in browsing these types of sites over the years that a big percentage of the photos are of isolated body parts: an erect penis, a spread butt, leading to an I-am-my-cock syndrome (or my ass, or whatever.). So I wanted to see if the numbers match my impression.

I took the first 150 profiles of Austin men and divided the photos into 8 categories. Some were a little ambiguous, but most of them fell pretty neatly into one column or another. Here's what I found:

Face: 26%
Penis, naked: 10%
Penis, clothed: 3% (This might seem like a strange distinction, but there are quite a few photos of erect penises "hidden" by a wet shirt, or something else that clearly shows the attributes.)
Ass: 6% (I could break this down further, and I might if I decide to do a more detailed study. Some are just shots of a naked butt, but many of them could more accurately fall into a category of "asshole.")
Body, no face, clothed: 1%
Body, no face, naked: 26%
Body and face, naked: 12%
Body and face, clothed: 17%

I had expected much bigger numbers in the penis and ass categories. (Sometimes when I'm looking at profiles on these sites, it starts to feel like an endless parade of assholes and hard dicks, which just feels kind of heartbreaking sometimes, that that's what we're reduced to.) These numbers are probably lower in Austin than they would be in New York or San Francisco. People are more modest or conservative here.

It's heartwarming that over half of the men posted pictures of their faces, in one form or another. And I actually find it encouraging that 12% posted photos of their naked bodies with their faces showing. However, in probably half of these, their penises were hidden, and a large portion of the shots seemed clearly intended to show off a nice chest. Still more distinctions for further study.

Bachelor Dinner.

J. is out of town tonight, and I just made myself the most yummy dinner. One of those dinners that's so good you want to eat it again as soon as you finish even though you're stuffed.

Last night, late, I got a wild hair to make cilantro pesto. The cilantro in the garden is about ready to bolt, so I've been telling the neighbors to help themselves and I've been trying to think of ways to use it. J. suggested cilantro pesto last week.

I tossed a couple big handfuls of cilantro, a couple big handfuls of roasted peanuts -- I was going to use walnuts, but I burned them in the toaster oven; we got a new one, and the controls on it are still a bit of a mystery to me -- a few cloves of garlic, two big pinches of salt, a pinch of red pepper flakes, a splash of lime juice, and probably about 1/2 cup of olive oil in the blender. I had to add a little water to make the thing go, but no more liquid than you need, because you don't want it to be runny. You have to stop and start and poke at it every once in a while until it finally gets ground up smooth. You could do it in the food processor, and it would be less work, but it'll never grind it as fine as the blender.

I froze some of it in small containers and put the rest in the fridge.

So, tonight, I made pasta with a cilantro pesto smoked gouda cream sauce! The sauce is so easy. At the restaurant in Utah where I worked the last two summers, we made a quick mac and cheese for kids that is so quick and delicious, I have to be stern with myself not to make it more often. It's probably the main reason I weigh about 15 pounds more now than I did before I worked there. The sauce is just butter, cream, cheese (use some kind of melty cheese, like Monterey Jack or a young cheddar), and a pinch of salt and pepper.

After I cooked the pasta -- about 1/4 to 1/3 pound for one serving -- I rinsed it in the colander under hot water. Then I melted a tablespoon of butter in the pan and added about 1/3 cup of half and half (at the restaurant we used heavy cream!), and a pinch of salt and swirled it over medium heat until it was bubbling and steaming. I stirred in a big handful of grated smoked gouda. Stir it quickly over the heat, or whisk it; you don't want it to scorch. Lower the heat and stir in a big heaping tablespoon of cilantro pesto, and then the pasta. More salt if it needs it.

Can't beat it. I put it in a big bowl and ate it with a spoon on the porch with a beer and watched the thunderstorm.

Eighties Night.

J. and I did a dollar double-feature last night. U.T. does a free movie night (weekly? monthly? I can't remember) at the student union. Last night was Spike Lee's first film, She's Gotta Have It, which somehow I missed the first time around. From there we went to the Alamo for Music Monday, which is $2, but half price for Austin Film Society members (J.) and students (me, maybe, for now).

The professor who introduced She's Gotta Have It, with a personal anecdote about his friendship with Spike Lee, talked about the film like it was a recently unearthed prehistoric artifact, which felt appropriate since most of the audience were probably born after it was made. And it did look a little prehistoric, all grainy and streaked and out of focus. (I don't know if it was a bad print, or if the original film looked distressed.)

If I had chanced upon this film without knowing its history and cultural importance, I'm sure I would have thought it was just, well, bad. When J. and I were discussing it on the way out, I said that maybe, with our theater background, our expectations of acting and dialog in a film are different from those of the average film buff, or film student or academic. Acting and writing (as in the words that are spoken) are a starting point for me. If they're bad -- and I know these judgments are subjective, but I also think it would be hard to argue that the actors are not extremely self-conscious and awkward in this film, partly because of their lack of skill but also because the dialog is so stilted -- I have a hard time seeing much else.

I can intellectually know that this film was revolutionary at the time -- because it dealt with black people's lives and women's sexuality in a way that was new in American films, etc. -- but boy it doesn't seem to me that it has held up very well after only twenty years.

One thing about it that kept my interest was the Brooklyn setting. I lived with my first long-term boyfriend in a run-down, ramshackle floor-through apartment in Fort Greene at that time (from 1984 - 1989), so the scenes that were shot in Fort Greene Park and on the Fulton Mall made me flush with nostalgia. It looked in the film exactly like it looks in my memories.

Back then, Fort Greene was a very mixed bag: majestic, tree-lined blocks of single-family brownstones in which middle-class black families had lived for generations, next to some of the most severe urban blight I've ever seen. That neighborhood is now one of the most expensive and desirable urban neighborhoods in the country. (I'm one of those homosexual artists who move into neighborhoods before they're safe and can't afford to stay once they become safe.)

Next, a documentary about the Smiths. Sometimes the crowd is sparse for Music Monday, but this one was sold out. I guess the Smiths are pretty hot with the kids.

When I worked as a waiter at Bandito, a Mexican restaurant on Second Avenue in the early eighties (this was when Tex-Mex and Margaritas were just starting to become sort of trendy in New York), the bartenders played great music, and that was often where I first heard new stuff. I remember once the bartender asking if I had heard REM (I hadn't) and he described them as "like the Smiths, but American." They seem so different now, but at the time I think there was a similarity in the sound, and certainly in the feyness of their lead singers.

The doc was good. It was made for the BBC, traditional talking head format (with some bizarre animation for the clips of Morrisey, I assume because he wouldn't allow his face to be included in the show). The doc itself was just an hour long, so they augmented it with some of the original music videos, which I think was unnecessary. The videos were cut into the film, interrupting the pace of the story in a way that made it seem overly long.

It was great to hear the songs again. I had their records, and my friends and I listened to them a lot back then, but I didn't replace them when I got rid of all my LPs. My favorite thing -- and I'm not sure it was a part of the original doc -- was a short film (a music video, really) by Derek Jarman of "The Queen is Dead."

I'm amazed by how much obviously gay pop music made it into the clueless mainstream back then. This stuff was not exactly coded. I guess it was a subject people at the time were still more or less terrified of, so they didn't even see it when it was right in front of their noses.

I saw Morrisey live once, at a big outdoor venue in New York, probably not long after the Smiths broke up. His opening act was Phranc, the lesbian folk comedy singer-songwriter. My friends and I all sort of liked Phranc, even though she was pretty hokey, because she looked like a Beach Boy and sang songs about crushes on girls in gym class. But Morrisey's audience didn't like her at all. She played her entire set, just her and her guitar, to boos and shouts of "get off the stage." I was horrified.

I expected Morrisey to say something about it when he came out for his set. I guess I wanted him to reprimand the audience or something, but he didn't acknowledge what had happened. After that, I lost interest in him.

Jesus Fucking Christ.

I guess this is what they mean by dire consequences.

I called the Selective Service, and of course they don't have any record of me. The woman I spoke with directed me to the form on the web I would need to fill out and send to them. They would then decide whether or not to issue some kind of letter regarding my status. In this form, I would have to tell them that I actually did register, and tell them where and when.

While apparently I was somewhat willing to prevaricate and mislead ("I don't understand how I could not be registered -- otherwise how could I have applied for and got federal aid 25 years ago?"), I'm not willing to fabricate such an elaborate written lie.

So...

I have the summer to investigate other means of funding, but I'm not optimistic. I would have to come up with about $8,000 a semester to cover tuition and fees and some portion of my living expenses. I could work full-time while I'm in school, but I don't know that I'm willing to do that. Part-time I could handle. There are private loans, but the interest rate on them is much higher than on federal student loans. And I don't think I want to borrow the whole amount. I was counting on at least a portion of the expense to be covered by grants. I already have $15,000 in credit card debt from Life in a Box.

My head's spinning. Once again, the future looks cloudy.

This afternoon I'm finishing up my application to the Sundance screenwriters lab program, which has to be postmarked tomorrow. If my script is chosen, I will need to spend a week in Utah in January. I'd been a little concerned about how that would work with me being in school. Now I guess that won't be an issue. What a relief.

Screenplays.

I mailed my screenplay to the Slamdance Festival screenplay contest on Friday, a couple weeks ahead of the deadline. (Slamdance is the "alternative" festival that runs concurrently with the Sundance Festival in Park City, Utah. I think it was founded by a group of filmmakers who felt left out of Sundance as it became more establishment.) The top prize for the contest is $7000, I think. This is the script called Room for Jerry, which I wrote over the last 2 years. It's good. I was going to write, "I think it's good," but I changed my mind. I know it's good, especially good for a first effort.

Now, back to work on my second script, working title Anonymous Sex. I'm waiting for a better title to suggest itself. The story is about, among many things, anonymous sex, but it makes a bland title. Either that or needlessly provocative, I'm not sure which. I'm more than halfway finished with a first draft. It's turning into kind of a sprawling story, which is exciting. I'll have a lot to work with when it comes time to rewrite.

I'm submitting this one to the Sundance screenwriters lab program. The deadline is Tuesday, but I only have to submit the first five pages, a 2-page synopsis, and a cover letter, so I think I can get it together. The first five pages are all pretty much sex, so maybe it'll grab their attention.

They choose a very small number of writers to come to Utah for a week or so in January to shape and workshop their scripts with a group of industry folks. It's the first phase, and the only one with open submissions, in the Sundance process. Projects in the screenplay lab program that they think have potential are shepherded through the Sundance Institute's various programs and sometimes go on to become full productions supported by the Institute. (I submitted Room for Jerry last year and it was turned down.)

Now What?

It looks unlikely that I'll be going to school in the fall now. Because I didn't register for the draft when I was 18, I'm not eligible for financial aid, and I can't pay for it without help.

There were several questions about selective service registration on the financial aid form, which I paused over when I was filling it out, but I understood, from the way I read it, that I was safe because of my age. I must have misunderstood.

Strange that this is an issue now, when I'm way past the age that I could be drafted. I went to college for 3-1/2 years when I was college-age, to three different schools, and got plenty of financial aid. I think this requirement must have been instituted later. The man I spoke with at the financial aid office today, who gave me the bad news, told me that it's always been a requirement, but I know that's not true. If my not registering would have jeopardized my college plans, I would have swallowed my moral stance in a minute. At eighteen, I felt strongly about the military, but I'm sure I felt more strongly about going to college.

Garden Update.

We just about lost the cucumbers. That's the loss I feel most acutely. Before the freeze there were 4 clusters of three plants each, with fuzzy green leaves getting bigger every day. Now there are about 6 plants total and the leaves are mostly gone. But they're coming back, starting over.

The soybeans are fine. Though one of them still looks a little yellow, they're not as prone to insect damage and mildew as the other plants. There are three peanut plants, and a bird or something keeps pulling them apart, so I put little chicken wire cages around them.

Apparently, the bell pepper plants are very tasty for some kind of insect. The center leaves and buds were almost entirely eaten away. But they're recovering -- lots of new growth which the bugs have not discovered yet. One of the poblano plants has two tiny fruit getting bigger every day. And the Thai chile is full of little green peppers. The jalapeños look healthy, though there are no buds or fruit on them yet.

The watermelons vines are growing fast. And the tomato plants are getting very big. They've had a lot of blossoms but no fruit yet.

The basil didn't survive the freeze, but the cilantro and parsley are huge. They're about to bolt, so I've been telling the neighbors to please help themselves. The chives and sage are also healthy. And the lemon grass is making itself at home, sending up lots of big leaves.

All the flowers are thriving. Some of the sunflowers are 4 feet tall already, and the zinnias have lots of buds soon to bloom.

The green beans and sweet peas and growing fast. I love watching the bean vines grow -- about a foot a day it seems -- and, when they get to the top of the poles, keep reaching farther and farther out into the air for something to cling to. I'm sorry but that looks like yearning to me. It doesn't seem one bit less volitional than the snail slowly oozing across a leaf.

Storm. Pot. School.

Tonight, J. and I watched the third hour of the Spike Lee documentary, When the Levees Failed. We sobbed through the first two last week, and the third was no less affecting. See it if you haven't. It's a fairly traditional documentary about New Orleans and Katrina, but it's, I don't know, astounding? is that the word? I'm not sure how to describe it. It's devastating.

We have some dear friends who lived in the Lower Ninth Ward. They were on tour in Florida when the storm hit, so they were safe, but they lost their home. We had stayed with them several times when we were on the road. We recorded our last CD in their house, and lived in our camper in their yard for 3 weeks while we were recording. A good chunk of our documentary takes place in that neighborhood which really doesn't exist anymore.

Here in Austin, for days now a big storm has been headed our way. It's been humid and cloudy and warm. I was counting on a thunderstorm to watch from the safety of our front porch this evening, but it's almost midnight and still no storm. Maybe it'll hit just as I get in bed. I'll leave my door open just in case.

Yesterday we went to see Vacancy. I wouldn't recommend it. Tonight J. and I went to a lecture at U.T. by Bob Jensen called "Pornography and the Threat to Intimacy." I thought it would be interesting for me, since one of the big themes of the story in my screenplay is the question of how people make decisions about their sex lives against a backdrop of routine public sex. Not really about pornography, but related.

The lecture was more or less a recruiting session for a new group he and some other men on campus are forming called "A Call to Men," whose mission is to engage men in an effort to stop violence against women, using a radical feminist critique of pornography, particularly Andrea Dworkin's critique of pornography.

I had trouble with what I saw as Bob Jensen's simplistic view of pornography, and his tendency to make broad assumptions based on his own limited experience. And as always I had trouble with Andrea Dworkin's critique, which always feels authoritarian and anti-creative. On the other hand, it was hard not to sympathize with these men struggling to understand themselves, grappling with the same question -- "how do I find real intimacy in sex?" -- that I grapple with every goddamn day.

I always get a little tripped up in these academic feminist discussions of heterosexual sex and the subjugation and objectification of women. I've never really heard anyone in that camp address the fact that sex is always always at least to some extent if not essentially and inherently about objectification, about control and surrender, and about compulsion. As human beings it's what we do. If we want to create a more just society, where women are respected, do we try to work with that fact, or do we try to get around it?

And both J. and I felt a little out of place. It was not really a discussion that included queer people, and maybe that was appropriate.

I stopped smoking pot last Monday or Tuesday, because before too long I need to do one of these drug trials to get some money, and in order to sign up for a trial I need to pass a drug test. I like to wait at least a couple weeks after the last time I've smoked, since I've heard that marijuana can linger in your urine for weeks. The lengths I'll go to to make a living.

I held out for the first day of my friend M's visit -- she arrived on Friday and I told myself that I would refrain even if she and J. wanted to smoke, since it is her vacation after all -- but eventually on Saturday I broke down. Once I'd relented, I kept at it all weekend. Till today.

What else? I got accepted to U.T.! I heard yesterday.

Breakfast and Dinner.

We went to Casa de Luz for a late breakfast. I'd never been there before. It's in a big sort of complex of yoga studios and such, with palm-shaded walkways. The food is all vegan, a buffet. I was a little intimidated at first. None of the food was labeled. I think someone said later that there was a menu somewhere, but I never saw it.

The food was what you'd expect: very fresh, simply prepared. Mustard greens with a choice of two sauces (garlicky tofu "cheese," and a walnut sauce -- both were tasty), a curry-flavored stir-fry with tempeh, a big salad, various herbal hot and cold teas. Whole wheat pancakes with fruit compote.

The place, at first, felt a little Stepford hippie. Though it didn't look like it at all, it put me in mind of the place where Julianne Moore goes to be treated in the Todd Haynes film, Safe. I felt more comfortable after J. ran into a friend and we sat down to eat with her and a friend.

We went to Whole Foods for a few groceries for dinner. We didn't need much, since mostly I planned to cook with the produce we got in our farm box yesterday. But we wanted M. to see the Austin Whole Foods, which is sort of the Mall of America of organic food. It's Earth Day, so it was even crazier than a normal crazy Sunday there.

Dinner was pasta with chard, roasted garlic, white beans, Gaeta olives, and Parmesan cheese. A Greens recipe, modified. It was delicious, kind of soupy, salty from the olives, a little crunch from the chard stems and roasted onions. Mm. And I made focaccia again, from my mother's recipe, with rosemary and olive oil.

After the pasta, we had a salad very similar with the beet salad I made last week, with sliced apples and pecans, but with goat cheese instead of feta, red scallions in the vinaigrette, and tossed with red leaf lettuce.

Good food.

J. went to a birthday party for a good friend of his, and M. and I watched Plenty. I'd seen it when it came out 22 years ago, remembered liking it, but not much about it. It was very good, very sad.