Saturday, May 11, 2002
Oatmeal at home for breakfast. Dropped Patrick at Jumpin Java so he could write. I got the car washed at Divisadero Car Wash. I got there early, so it went very quickly. I stopped at the gas station to fill my tires with air, but I didn't want to pay 50 cents for air, so I skipped it. Went to Tower Market for groceries for tonight. Vacuumed at home. Cleaned some 2-year-old gum from the trunk of my car (and I don't know how it got there). The computer was having problems ("VxD error in VMOUSE(03)") so I set up a separate mouse temporarily and made backups of both computers just to be safe. (I eventually resolved the problem by changing some setting in the BIOS—I can't remember what it was now.) I took trash and recycling out. We had dinner with Brian and Kelly in our new place: braised beef with garlic, baby bok choy with savoy cabbage in mustard shrimp sauce with pickled ginger, 1999 Notre Dame des Champs cahors, ice cream: peach Breyers, Haagen-Dazs chocolate sorbet, Haagen-Dazs cherry vanilla. There was no NextBus prediction for an L-train to take them home, so we all got in my car—Brian and Kelly's first ride since I got my car in December 1998. We had intended to only drop them off and return home, but as we approached their house, we saw a parking spot. Actually, Patrick saw it: "Hey, was that a parking space?" We were all surprised to see such a rare event in Brian and Kelly's popular Church Street neighborhood. I jokingly said, "Should I take it just because I can?" and everyone said "yeah" so I did. We settled in to their apartment for a few minutes and then went down the block to the Pilsner Inn, a neighborhood gay bar. I didn't want to sit in the back patio because of the cold and the smokers, so we sat near the door and got drinks. The place was more crowded than usual, Brian reported. They treat the Pilsner like a second living room. "At least there's stuff to look at here," Brian said. Patrick and I had been to the Pilsner a few times before, but we were still newbies. Brian taught us that Chow, a trendy home cookin' restaurant next door, frequently sent customers waiting for tables to the Pilsner because they have no waiting room of their own (and their own bar is frequently filled with diners). Chow's reputation as a fine place to eat has spread to all communities—not just the local gay ones, so it's not uncommon for straight people (frequently tourists) to have their first gay bar experience walking through the doors of the Pilsner having no forewarning of what to expect. Brian loves watching these people as they enter as the looks on their faces are priceless. I joked that one could set up a business taking Polaroids of them as they enter and then selling them back to them in the back of the bar like the photo scams at amusement parks on, say, the log ride.