On motivation.

I move way closer to the radio station I'm obsessed with. It costs a small fortune to live here, even though it's called the "University Ghetto" by faggots "in the know". I don't care, 'cause it's *far* less a real "ghetto" than living behind the Dairy Queen on Central, where drive-by shootings were considered "normal" summertime "events". The worst I've had to deal with here is the steady but predictable traffic, and all the solicitors posing as astroturf "organizers". ("Let me tell you a thing or two about Mr. Nader, who signed two of his first editions to me" usually served well enough to scare them off, if not the religious proselytizers, before I put up the "Please, No Solicitors" sign.)

So I move here and get terrified about my higher rent and decide I have to work more hours. But I can't *quite* motivate myself to do so. I work, but not as much as I should, because the equation is lopsided -- I'm dealing mostly with what I have to do to live here, and not enough with why I *want* to live here.

That changes when I volunteer a few measly hours for my radio station. It comes back to me, then. I'm shocked into my senses. I didn't agree to pay the rent here just because it is a house. (I wouldn't have agreed to pay this rent for *any* house on the westside.) I agreed *partly* because it is a house, but also because it's just four blocks from where I *need* to be, most of my waking hours, just to maintain my sanity.

Volunteered last night as a doorman for a KUNM special showing of "Before the Music Dies" at the Kimo Theatre. The film was about corporate consolidation in the music industry. It looked interesting, from what I saw of it. But I am not a music person, as much as I love music. I am a news person. Still -- it's part of the whole "public radio" mandate, and I'll do anything I need to that can keep any station on the air that's crazy enough to give a microphone to the likes of myself to stick into legislators' faces.

It was enjoyable. Mary Oishi put out PSAs weeks before saying that members needed to send in the confirmation envelopes if they wanted a free ticket, and that any seats not taken would be sold. Good strategy: give members something special, but don't totally cut out non-member listeners from attending, either. Fewer members who sent in the envelope than we'd like wound up actually attending, but that's nonprofits for ya.

The highlight of the night, though -- besides meeting a *lot* of people who knew me from here, there, and wherever -- was getting to know the manager of the Kimo.

Rick is his name. He's amazing. He gives a lot back. And he took me backstage, underground, after the show, to show me the shrine that was built to the theatre's ghost.

The Kimo is the old mixed-use, vaudeville/movie house that I used as my pretense to come up here from Texas the first time I had reason to come up here on a pretense. Long story I won't bore you with, but winds up the 16mm projector they had lined up to show the late silent Felix the Cat cartoon (which had sound added, post) broke down that very day, though somehow I never seemed to dwell on that too much.

Today attended a workshop led by John Bergund, who volunteers way the hell more tirelessly than myself or anyone else I know, in the Production Department at KUNM.

The subject was Adobe Audition -- the sound-editing software we use.

I got a *lot* out of it.

Foxes is closed.

At 2 AM last Thursday morning, 14 June 2007, the gay bar "Foxes Booze 'n' Cruise", located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, closed for business. At writing, it has not yet reopened.

George Piches, the owner, was apparently cited for building and/or fire code violations, and closed Foxes voluntarily in order to address those concerns before having the property condemned under the municipal "public nuisance" ordinance.

The closure of Foxes is thought to have had nothing to do with, at least directly, the various liquor code violations racked up at MG's Liquor, a separate package store business adjoining Foxes in the same building, but covered by the same liquor license as Foxes.

Speculation within the gay community as to possible outcomes run the gamut from "Foxes will reopen next week", to "Foxes will reopen without the liquor store attached", to "Foxes will never reopen".

No one who is talking knows, and no one who knows is talking.

If Foxes closes, Albuquerque will have precisely one gay bar remaining. A year ago, Albuquerque had three gay bars, not counting the Albuquerque Social Club, which as a private club, falls under a different regulatory framework, and also not counting Exhale, a lesbian bar in the North Valley.

The event which has since come to be known as "Albuquerque Pride" is widely rumoured to have begun at Foxes in 1976.

Last year, the New Mexico Department of Public Safety (DPS) officials, who oversee Liquor Code enforcement, raided Pride Gym, which is not a licensed premises in the weeks following the event known as "Pride". The gym was shut down for a week on fire code violations before being allowed to reopen.

In 2005, DPS officials, in a "sting" operation coordinated with Albuquerque Police Department, selectively shut down every gay bar in Albuquerque on a single night, with the single exception of Foxes.

Before it closed, Foxes Boooze 'n' Cruise was the oldest continuously operative gay bar in the southwestern United States, and the third oldest, nationwide.

Two stories.

Forgot: my latest stories are online now. Here are the links:

Parade Showcases Pride in Albuquerque
Sandia National Laboratories Doesn't Meet Emissions Standards

It's not just vanity, you know, to put them here. This is about the only way that I keep track of 'em.

R.B. Winnings.

Best coffeehouse on the planet.

The damn fools who bought up most of the block are tearing most it down for -- you guessed it -- overpriced condominia. They haven't got Winnings, yet, but it's decidedly "endangered". In the infinite wisdom of real-estate trash, the best thing to do with a neighbourhood people *want* to live in is demolish the reason people want to live there in order to build places nobody will live.

But now that Winnings is within walking distance, I'm *quickly* learning of its charms. I didn't work today (did yesterday), so went walking with my computer. Paid a deposit to UNM for an after-hours access card for the studio and then walked all around nob hill and the university district.

State Senator Ortiz y Pino is here. He's meeting, very casually, with an honest-to-god human being who's clearly a constituent and has some sort of issue involving zoning.

Just had a greek "wrap", which is basicaly a cold burrito. Spinach, tomato, onion, feta, and stuff like that. Was surprisingly delicious -- and filling -- and cheap.

Pride story airs.

Told Jim Williams I'd try and cover a union demonstration outside UNM Hopsitals 'cause it was important to me, but fell through on that 'cause it was MOVING DAY and I'd *way* undercalculated how long it would take me to actually move, let alone put the story together the same day I had to return the U-Haul (after having moved), at which point I was physically exhausted to the point of near-unconsciousness, and was both physically and mentally unfit to do anything more than transfer heavy objects in a hundred thousand trips from apartment to truck and from truck to house.

But I kept the recording kit I'd checked out 'cause I'd already promised to cover the Pride march, and no one else seemed to have shown any burning interest in that story. Mistake to keep it -- we *never* have enough kits ready to go at a moment's notice -- but with the Pride story I'd definitely *promised* I would cover it, so I *had* to keep my word, and *couldn't* let it get undermined by so much as a single bad connector.

Like the Iran story that got me into this whole "reporting" thing, I started out with grand, sweeping ideas -- "I'm gonna cover this like no one's ever covered it before" -- which is a recipe for ultimate failure in the "real" world of twice-daily newsroom deadlines. Yes, even in a public radio newsroom. (Once again, I gain a certain level of respect even for our commercial newsroom counterparts -- the main difference as far as I can tell is that we *listen* when people *do* complain, to such a point that unlike them, we *depend* on their feedback!)

Come the day of the march, I haven't heard back from anyone I'd *tried* to contact, and am reduced to running around Pride with a recording kit and grabbing who I can -- but with a short list of people in mind, which keeps me from interviewing just anyone and everyone who thinks they've got something airworthy to say (which is almost everyone present). I am thus spared repeating the embarassing media spectacle of "crazy drag queens standing in for everyone".

At the same time, even the best-meaning of my breeder newsroom colleagues don't quite "get" the role the "crazy drag queens" play, in Pride, specifically, when all the gay realtors and insurance agents who buy pricey booths at "Pridefest" find themselves embarassed and sidelined by the mere fact of the televisual prominence of those same people they despise who made their very existence possible in the first place.

The best thing I've got going for me is that listeners don't automatically know Don Shrader is, in fact, a perfectly scandalous nudist (among other things) which puts most of the drag queens to shame. They don't *see* the "outrageous" man on the street, they just hear his voice in conversation, which *I* happen to think is rather compelling, and *therein* lies a major difference which is unique to radio: the most deeply intimate of media. You get to *hear* the person speak *without* making the initial visual "first impression" of "freak" (however you might define "freak").

Danny Hernandez is there (on an *amazing* singlespeed fixed-gear bike, but sans recording kit -- for what reasons, I can not pretend to know) and he rightly asks me about the "National Security Agency" car between the counterprotestors (who bear signs reading "HOMO SEX IS A THREAT TO NATIONAL SECURITY", among others) and the crowds for the march.

I explain to him that "National Security Agency", as prominently emblazoned on their car, is *not* the *federal* NSA, but a local, private security contractor who works for Piches (pronounced "Peaches") who owns Foxes and who *owned* AMC (before they went out of business). He smiles and nods, but still, his face says "huh?" I don't wonder why. My own explanation of who they are leaves me reeling, a bit.

"They're on our side", I reply; and he goes off, admirably incredulous, but willing to take me at my word, for now, at least, when it comes to this marginally complex matter. God bless him but I don't wonder why he was a tiny bit confugled. I don't doubt most marchers were a bit confused, as well. Things like that you just do not "get" unless you've worked as the doorman at Foxes. The "National Security" guys and I recognized eachother and greeted eachother as warmly as can reasonably be expected under the circumstances (seeing as they were always clear across town whenever anyone actually pulled out a knife on me or what have you, while they despised me for not having some sort of readily recognizable "uniform" they understood).

So I interviewed Don Shrader and P.J. Sedillo, each of which (as interviewees) presented special challenges.

Sedillo has, for 18 years, stood at the head of the local "Pride" organization, but was interview-worthy in *my* mind *not* because of his titles or longstanding service, but because he's done more than *anyone* else to preserve the *history* of Pride in Albuquerque, going *way* back to where almost no one remembers anything first-hand. People might well forget who he is or what he did for "ABQ Pride" tomorrow; but because of him, and *only* because of him, they absolutely *won't* forget what happened in 1976, or 1984, or what have you. He's overseen the ballooning of Pride budgets from the days that he could put it all on his credit card and get paid afterwards from t-shirt sales, to these days when Pride is the second-largest grossing annual event at the state fairgrounds, following the State Fair, for which the fairgrounds were initially built. Meanwhile, regardless what he may think, that is *not* his most noteworthy legacy. His preservation of earlier Pride history *is*, and he's done as great a job of it as any single person ever could.

(I *wanted* to interview Pat Baillee (sp?), but happened to miss her, repeatedly. The only times I saw her, she was more or less singlehandedly guiding monumentally heavy traffic down Central, or else addressing the crowds. It was a *crazy* day, and my omission of her voice from the story that ensued was, I assure you, purely circumstantial.)

Shrader (and my regular readers will know how I love him) is amazingly visible -- hardly a fortnight goes by when he does not get a letter to the editor published in some local paper or another. Yet those manifesti work out *very* poorly as far as radio broadcasts go -- where the goal is not to get *everyone* with carefully scripted words, but just to reach inbetween the ears of that *one* listener, who will suddenly, surprisingly, and without notice turn into *thousands* of people while you're not busy worrying about your "numbers".

Sedillo, in his interview, prefaced every other statement with "interestingly enough", to which, in editing, it was my job to think "I'll be the judge of that", and cut out everything I didn't find interesting enough to air. (He's very capable, but the fact is that 98% of listeners don't *care* about the line items in yearly budgets, past and present, of Pride events. They see the forest; he, by the role he's played for years, sees trees.)

Shrader was *far* less "professional" in his presentation (to his credit), but no less "careful" in his responses to my lines of questioning, and seemed a tiny bit "thrown back" by one or two of my questions to him, which he acknowledged and then endeavoured to answer honestly. He's *way* better accustomed (by circumstance, not by nature) to being given an open soapbox of his own and then openly mocked by the public, than to being questioned thoughtfully on the spot -- which isn't to say he expresses himself better when unchallenged. (No one does.) On the contrary: I happen to think he speaks his best when challenged -- gently, yes, but openly. He thinks -- both visibly and audibly -- before he speaks.

I got them both edited into airworthy clips in under two hours, this afternoon.

Then the purely technical stuff that listeners don't consciously care about came into play. I had *great* sounds from the mariachi band, and a great clip of self-proclaimed "Street Preacher" Ruben Israel preaching hate at the crowd in response to hearing the Village People's "Macho Man" playing off the back end of some float or other. (The "alien probe" clip didn't work out, for purely technical reasons, though I *can* prove he said what I say that he did.)

I knew, even when I was out in the field, that to do anything approaching justice to the total story I could *not* do it as a straight-ahead, single-track edit. I would *have to* learn how to edit multiple tracks and interweave them. This *wasn't* a simple "this legislator said this, then that legislator said that, such-and-such procedure ensued, a roll call/acclimation vote followed, and this happened half an hour before airtime" affair. Conveying the intricacies of the legislative process is *easy*. That *can* be done, completely "straight ahead", in editing. What I had to do in *this* story was give the listener a sense, however limited, that he or she is *there*, if they are to *connect* to the event's underlying *message*.

In this case, ambient sound *makes* the story.

Steve Shadley had told me months ago, when I had told him that I "didn't know how" to edit in multitrack mode in Audition, that "it's easier, in some ways" than editing single-track sound. Since at that time, I didn't have a clue how to edit in multitrack, and had no compelling reason to do so, I just figured "that's his way" and finished my single-track stories on deadline. Better that the story get out there, even if it sounded as though it were recorded and compiled using 1930s wire-recorder technology, than that it not get out at all, when actual law had just been made (or defeated).

With this story it was *inherently* different. There was no "on/off" binary at play. It wasn't "politician 'A' says this, politician 'B' says that, here's what ensued".

No laws were passed or defeated at Albuquerque Pride 2007. If the story was to stand, at all, listeners *had to* get at least a sense of *being* there, and understanding *why* it mattered. The atmosphere mattered as much as, almost more than, what actually got said. No rarified legislative airs, here. These are the sounds of Central Avenue. It matters, if for no other reason, because this is why your commute got interrupted.

Time to open the help files for Adobe Audition -- no minor feat, since at this point I'm running between the newsbooth computer where I've downloaded the sound, the newsroom computer where I'm doing initial edits and transcripts, and Studio C where I'm doing the final rewrites and edits -- which happens to have a *later* version of Audition on its hard drive. And now that Liz has explained it to me, I *truly* understand that I *must* edit *local* copies of the files if I don't want all sorts of unairable goopy glitches to result at the same time I unintentionally screw things up for all the music programmers. (All I know about networks, or need to know, is how not to cause problems for everyone else.) Between these three different computers, I get my story to where I can live with myself if it goes on air. Only thing is -- I don't know exactly how or where to "mix down" and save the finished file.

I figure it out -- except for that last, crucial step: the mix-down. Don't ask me how. I honestly couldn't tell you. I just kind of figure out "if I do this with the cursor, it does more or less what I want". I get it to where I want it to be and finally can't figure out how to "mix down" the final edit into a single track, half an hour before final deadline, which I *had* seen Renee Blake do months ago, very fast, on the newsroom computer, using the *older* version of Audition, before the whole network got radically reconfigured. But on this computer, in Studio C, I can not mix it down. I am stuck.

I ask Jim if he can spare a moment to show me how to "mix down" my story in studio C into a single track which can air. I honestly expect, when I ask, that he will click on a single menu item to do so. (He's got bigger stories under tighter deadlines than an annual "parade" story, that's for damn sure.)

He comes into Studio C. He looks over my work and doesn't even listen to each single word I have recorded. I know his style just well enough to know this is no slight, but rather something of a compliment -- he doesn't doubt that I won't say anything *too* scandalous, but *knows* I still make "rough" edits, from time to time. He focuses on transitions -- the technically tricky parts. Part of me wants to scream "MY BABY!!!" and freak out, he works so fast. Instead, I sit down, shut up, and watch him *very* closely. Both hands. Both eyes. Both ears.

I tend to edit *very* "close". This is a fault, I admit, but it comes from understanding how precious airtime actually *is*. I'd almost always rather an edited-out "uhhhm" sound "clipped" than waste a quarter of a second that might be better spent giving weather reports when tornadoes unexpectedly threaten lives at the edge of our broadcast signal area.

On the other hand -- a bad edit can undermine credibility. We don't want to sound like the Clear Channel stations which, just to make space for their ads, routinely automate crucial edits out of broadcast because I get the "Walter Winchell attitude" (meaning I deliberately record voiceovers with a full bladder -- which I do). I haven't *quite* figured out yet out to finesse this one.

Editing "close" is a good thing, yes, but it *can* be taken too far, and I *know* that I *often* take it too far before I know how to "undo" it. In the interests of saving tenths (or even hundredths) of seconds, in my editing, I make honest mistakes that make speech sound completely, totally unnatural. Edit *too* close, and *everything* sounds "clipped". People wind up "popping" consonants that are really quite "unpoppable" when naturally spoken. All the more when I'm editing against ambient sound. Like unvoiced labiodental fricatives. Suddenly a word-initial "f" sounds like the speaker's spitting at you, when he is absolutely not, just because someone's giggling moronically in the echoey ambient background. That sort of thing can unintentionally change the speaker's intended meaning. But edit too little, and you waste a lot of priceless time on the public airwaves to accomodate moronic gigglers. It's a balancing game that I have yet to "hit" my stride on.

Without going back to the original "raw" files, Jim manages to judiciously "soften" these overzealous edits to where they sound "correct" -- making the whole story perhaps a total of two seconds longer. The speakers' actual statements aren't altered. But the *way* the speaker *seems* to say things is -- it sounds "natural". The speakers are no longer spitting venom at you. They're just talking. (Which really, they were doing in the first place, before I got all crazy over editing out every last vestige of the dreaded "uhm".) Just watching him work at this sort of thing is an education in itself.

*And*, after that's done, he manages to shave *nine* seconds off the story's total airtime in the process, just because I didn't know how to handle the mariachi musician's complex musical phrasing at the story's opening. I *wanted* to "come in" with *my* voice after four short bars but did not now how, without obliterating the underlying music. He hasn't lost a single word, nor even a single inflection; nor has he altered the musical phrasing by a singe demisemiquaver. He's just compressed it down, and "enveloped" the eight-bar musical opening to where I "envelope in" on the "narration" track to speaking over the last four bars of the initial "fanfare" opening, without "losing" the music -- which I had frankly been afraid to try to do -- mostly because I didn't know how to shift *everything* that followed the musical opening "left", which he showed me.

The musical instroduction is a dead-ass *perfect* mariachi band doing a fanfare before a song -- the last thing you'd expect to hear after the newsreader does an intro to a story about "Pride" -- which I trail off into a "clip envelope" (I've never used any such thing before) while saying "On Friday, Albuquerque's gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered communities celebrated the event called 'Pride'," and so forth. The opening musical phrase is eight bars, which I *know* is too much to play without words for a news broadcast, but I don't want to cut the musical phrase short. It adds eight seconds to the piece just because I don't know how to handle it. Meanwhile, he leaves a *lot* more of the song ("ay, que lindo") in the mix, although "clip enveloped" down to where you can *just* hear it undernearth the spoken voices, as though they're playing in the background, while I seem to be extemporising eloquently on the spot.

He says my transition's abrupt. I agree, but don't know how to fix it. He sees where I *want* to take it, and takes it there, and shows me *how*, in the process.

He fixes it all with a few adept keystrokes and mousedrags. Better yet: he layers the tracks so it sounds as if I'm standing there, complete with a sound engineer, in front of the mariachis, and just happen to say the right things and then get the exact words I want from PJ Sedillo, while the band plays on, before fading them out, *very* gradually, to go to the street preacher, preaching over (and responding to) the Village People's "Macho Man". But for the change of music, it would sound as though it were all recorded right on the spot, with zero edits.

The cut away from the "Macho Man" clip is still a bit abrupt because of how I cut and pasted it. Jim advises me I might do well to envelope it down while narrating my way into the next clip without going to the "raw" file to do so. We discuss why I cut the street preacher clip off where I did and move on without bringing up the original clip, complete with the street preacher mimicking faggots screaming in the outer fires of eternal perdition. It *could* be better, but we're working against a deadline, and by now I understand the concept. I can get the street preacher mimicking fags screaming in hell against the background music of the village people singing "Macho Man" and the crowds laughing at him without detracting from introductory narration for the following quote.

Then, finally, a few keystrokes later, the multitrack is edited down to an airable single-track and saved where it needs to be saved.

Best damn sounding story I have *ever* done. Not *perfect*, maybe, but downright *professional*. Wish I could take the credit for it sounding so good. More realistically: wish I'd signed off with at least a "special thanks to Jim Williams". Would have, if by the time we'd gotten that far I'd had the time. But I guess that's how community radio works. I could say it on air and it would already be gone. I'll say it here, instead, and it will stand forever.

Pride MMVII.

As always: started off at the corner of Central and Girard.

As always: every article of clothing had specific layers of meaning paying tribute to generations of queers long dead. Red tie for the Vaudevillians. Arrow shirt for the openly gay fashion model they put in the pages of mainstream publications in the '20s, when such things were utterly unheard of. Farah slacks for where I came from: El Paso, which was economically devastated when the clothing factory shut down. Dressed totally in black except for the red tie with double white pinstripes at an angle, made by (who else?) Armani, which I bought (where else?) at a thrift store. Italian straw "boater" hat for my political involvement, and to give me the chance to exercise the complex and largely forgotten visual language of hat etiquette.

Almost no one "got it", but I got a lot of compliments. If there were any politically active, geriatric gay vaudevillians in the crowd, I obviously missed them; but a bunch of people complimented me in general terms. It was, of course, insanely hot.

I added one new item to my get-up: a recording kit, complete with "KUNM 89.9 FM" cube on the mic, just in case it got any camera time.

No TV camera time, like when I did the story on Sandia's air emissions. But people were snapping pictures of me all along the route. Yes, lots in which I just happened to be there, in the shot, but lots also where it was the camera aimed at *me*, and no one else. And then after the march, of course, lots of people saying "I saw you in the parade, you rule" and stuff like that. Makes me feel great.

The best part was that I got at least two dozen people applauding not me, but KUNM.

As always: I start out and Central and Girard, between the marchers and the counterprotestors with their bullhorns (and limited understanding of the bible -- in translation, naturally). Years ago -- but not *so* many years ago -- the marchers routinely got pelted with eggs by these counterprotestors, who seem these days to follow the teachings of a certain Rev. D.L. Moody. Now it's down to a moving battle of bullhorns and car horns and shouted insults no one hears and drag queens blowing kisses and young twinks wiggling and waggling their drop-dead gorgeous young asses (which I suspect might be the *real* reason the Moody people *do* this). Same bunch as last year, mostly. I like to stand there because I am an outsider, a marginal character, even to the local gay scenes, but also because this point of conflict is one of the oldest historical "constants" in this march.

If the counterprotestors disappeared, then the march would be totally stripped of its political and social meaning. I would lose interest and might not even bother to attend the dance tent and realtors'-and-insurance-brokers' show that takes over most of the fairgrounds. It would mean we *had* been accepted into mainstream society, and the *need* for the march would evaporate into thin air. We *depend* on this tension. We thrive on it.

We *exist* because in 1870, Westphal *invented* "the homosexual" as "a species". (Foucault, The History of Sexuality, V. I, p. 43) We're not "people". In Foucault's famous words on Wesstphal's article: "the sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species." Since Westphal's "famous article" on "contrary sexual sensations", at least, we are considered a wholly separate species from homo sapiens. And "people" (homo sapiens, that is -- for which I read "breeders") *hate* us -- I guess 'cause we don't breed, even at the same time they'd hate to see us ever do so. By "hate" I mean that even while on biological grounds they object to us not breeding, they object all the more stridently when we pair up and adopt kids, much less raise 'em, still less have 'em by means contrived by man (e.g., artificial insemination). They're positively *terrified* of us. I honestly do not know why.

They hate us, still. Therefore, we march. If academia would -- or could -- "uninvent" homosexuality as easily as it *invented* it, *if* we had equal human rights under the law (e.g., to marry, or even to go to bars where our own kind congregate without being specially targeted by police), we wouldn't need to march. Period. We'd blend in, lead our lives, and eventually die, just like everyone else.

We're not there yet and I doubt we will be in my lifetime. Therefore, we march.

My deepest thanks, therefore, go out to these "street preacher" people for continuing to make these endeavours both *interesting* and *worthwhile*, when otherwise what we now call "Pride" has largely ceased to be a solemn commemoration of the Christopher Street Rebellion and has become an increasingly commercialised, scaled-down version of the State Fair. These street preacher people have a website: www.officialstreetpreachers.com, if you'd care to express your own gratitude to them in person. The bearded gentleman behind the sign saying "GOD ABHORS YOU" on the main page was, of course, present. (He's rather sexy, really, in a bearded biker chub sort of way. I'm guessing he's a "total sub bottom".) Other signs read "HOMO SEX IS A THREAT TO NATIONAL SECURITY" and of course "HOMO SEX IS SIN". No signs saying "GOD HATES FAGS" this time around -- I think maybe those have gotten a bad rap, but who can say.

I thought of interviewing one or two of them, but decided not to -- they got their stuff recorded *very* amply. (Though they would be well advised to take a sound engineer into their ranks. They had some *serious* feedback problems.) If I use any of their sounds, I may use the one (assuming I can find it) of them saying (roughly) "you like New Mexico because you heard about the aliens and came out here to get their anal probes". They really said that, and I have the tape to prove it.

But that's not what's interesting about them. What they say in the heat of the moment is least interesting of all. What's *really* interesting is what they say when they have time to think about it, and measure their words. That's when their underlying logic comes into display.

At times, it's hard to imagine these guys are serious, and aren't just having their own kind of fun being out there, but it would be foolhardy to impute motivation to them. Their dependable presence absolutely *is* their own unique form of "camp". Just like Nazi propaganda art was often *intensely* homoerotic at the same time they were rounding us up for extermination, there may be more than a touch of self-loathing in what they do. They obviously enjoy going around the country and looking at faggots, even if the only way they can justify doing so morally is to preach the word of God (as they understand it) to the faggots.

No mere doorman at Foxes gets that many booties shook in his face, that's for sure.

Come to think of it, they probably get to see more fags than I do, living here, and just going to this one march every year. Hmm. Maybe it's time I got a calling. A booty calling.

But in their own terms, what follows comes from the front page of their website. This screed comes from the pen (or more likely, the keyboard) of one Mr. Ruben Israel:

. . . when you have a bunch of girly men abusing, polluting and corrupting themselves with each other in sexually perverted ways, compounding and exacerbating their wickedness with the consumption of alcohol and a wide variety of mind altering drugs, that they inevitably ALTER their own brain chemistry by their sinful behavior! Their brain chemistry changes as they continue in SIN. Their neural pathways mutate resulting in a reverse polarization of those pathways and then they no longer desire God's gift to them...a.k.a WOMEN!

Mr. Israel denotes this condition as "Gay Related Neural Pathway Disorder" (GRNPD). I can not help but wonder as to Mr. Israel's background in neuropathology. Perhaps he is, in fact, a highly respected brain surgeon. I honestly don't know. What specific neural pathways, transmitters, and receptors are involved in this "disorder"? I honestly don't know, and can't pretend to. I am *extremely* ignorant. (I just know how to dress.) But it is surely nothing new to hear moral invective cloaked in broadly pseudoscientific terms. After all, if a man's nose has certain proportions, then he they *must* be a Jew, or at least a mischling, even if he's not circumcised -- right? Right. (It isn't *all* about the cock, you know.)

Line up the cattle cars, folks.

This particular line of reasoning, if "reasoning" it can be called, is, well, at least a little interesting. See, I was Gay *long* before I started deliberately altering my brain chemistry, and would even go so far as to assert that my doing so was largely an attempt to deal with the socially proscripted desires I had which lots of religious people just didn't "get" and absolutely wouldn't tolerate, let alone accept.

As to whether sexuality exists in a strictly binaristic, hierarchical "polar" opposition, let's just say I have my doubts, as they might too, if they ever cruised craigslist and saw *hundreds* of otherwise "happily" married "straight" men "curious" about their own kind, or God help us all, the infinite variety of transsexuals at Foxes (and elsewhere). I continue:

Instead of a using the plumbing that God gave them for its NATURAL and OBVIOUS end-use application (to please a wife and produce a NATURAL FAMILY) they employ the use of their God given plumbing for EVIL and WICKED end-use purposes! They corrupt not only their minds but their bodies as well!

So the greatest of all of God's creations (from a creationist's point of view, the one creation of which God said, ". . . let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." -- Gen. 1:26) is nothing but a matter of "plumbing".

This strikes me not as laughable so much as *deeply* presumptuous. According to the way they seem to see things, God might have done better to have placed dominion over the rest of creation in the hands of a mechanical clock, as in a system devised to carry water by no more than gravity, pressure, and flow. They do not *question* God, they *challenge* him, by saying that God's greatest creation, made in God's own image, and after God's own likeness, is no more than a system -- and a crude one, at that -- plumbing -- which *mankind* has devised for his own convenience.

This strikes me as a peculiarly (and crudely) Cartesian point of view for those who outwardly eschew science and the scientific method in favour of the "miracle" of "creation". I would personally imagine that the human body, and within the human body, the human mind, wherein sexual desire is conceived, are among the greatest miracles God has ever made. But no. They claim to know all about God's greatest creation, moreso even than its creator, and to relegate its most complex and least understood workings to a matter of "plumbing".

At the same time, they choose their translations selectively. Quoting the King James Version of the bible earlier in the page, they claim their mandate to protest Stonewalll marches comes from II Tim. 4:2, which they say reads:

…….GO…….GO……. CHARGE…….RUN……..RUSH THE ENEMY…….CONFRONT THE DARKNESS WITH LIGHT…….ATTACK GOD’S FOE WITH BOLDNESS AND TRUTH

Sound just a teensy-weensy bit Jihadist?

Leaving aside which (unspecified) translation of the bible contains ALL CAPS and so many grossly ungrammatical ellipses -- my Authorized King James version says II Timothy 4:2 reads:

Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine.

Call me ignorant, but I fail to see how misquoting the inerrant work of God constitues either a reprobation, a rebuke, or an exhortation.

If what they say is true, given when Genesis was written, and assuming Genesis to be the one true and inerrant word of God, God is no more than an acequia -- an irrigation ditch.

Some people might call that "blasphemy".

Are these fellows Christians adhering to the concept of biblical inerrancy, or are they scientists? I can not help but doubt they're fully either. They have their ideas, and that is that, and they won't change their minds, regardless what arguments might be made from either perspective. When they want to say that God is the Omniscient, Omnipotent, and Omnipresent Creator of the Universe, they do so. That's their right, and I applaud them for going out into the streets to preach what they take to be truth to those they take to be apostates.

But when they want to reduce God to the status of an irrigation ditch, a crude contrivance made for man's convenience in cooperation with the laws of physics, just to prove that homosexuals aren't people, they do that too. Strikes me as a trifle opportunistic. There's a word for that. I think -- correct me if I'm wrong, please -- it is "bullshit".

Just like last year, there was a loooooong stretch around San Mateo where I *was* the whole parade. It seems to get "split" there -- I think the cops do that to let the traffic keep flowing. Like last year, that's when I got some small taste what it was like 31 years ago. Just little old me out there, completely vulnerable, and hoping to entertain bystanders before they turned against me.

Got two good interviews I will use for a story to air Monday. Not what I'd hoped for but it will work. Talked a good 20 minutes or so with Don Shraeder inside the Archives exhibit. And maybe three or four with P.J. Sedillo, who has, say whatever else you like of him, put together the archives in the first place, and keeps expanding them. It's a little "thinner" than I wanted for an airable story, but it beats what I could have gotten in one tenth of the time, which would otherwise "do".

At long last I am home.

Moving day was exhausting. Thought I'd be done in four hours, but that's how long it took -- with Edison's help -- just to move out the heaviest stuff. Every time that damn piano moves an inch without disintegrating, it's a miracle. It was a backbreaking battle one inch at a time through gravel, mud, over rough pavement, past tricky corners, up a ramp, down a ramp, and over two thresholds. Laurel and Hardy all the way.

The house is about half-unpacked at this point but it feels damn good, already. Fourteen straight hours to move it all on Friday -- three trips in the U-Haul, two more in the car. Spent something like 15 more hours yesterday unpacking, which was a JOY in comparison. Every single little thing I *did* was a concrete accomplishment moving me closer to living the way I want to live. Spent a few more hours today unpacking, organizing, and generally doing the same, then went out to explore so I don't get to feeling "trapped" inside the house. When I left the apartment, that horrible time of summer was just starting up that *always* ends in the Dairy Queen getting robbed at gunpoint. (Talk about public nuisances.) It was *just* starting to get hot enough that I don't want to move a fingertip. The move comes at a perfect time in far more ways than one.

I can't quite accept that Jerry may actually be a good landlord. Signed a one-year lease, and now I'm worried that's because he's going to tear the place down in one year. There's got to be some catch, no? While he was letting me move things in before I signed the lease I was worried sick that he'd come out with a lease saying he owns everything in the building or something like that. This is madness. But that's more what I'm used to from people in Albuquerque. Especially that lowly life form known as realtors, brokers, and property "managers" who do *nothing* for tenants. Maybe not everyone who owns and rents housing is scum.

One contrasting incident, which I'll call "lightbulbs", will tell you something about the kind of person Jerry is, as opposed to the gay broker JS from whom I rented the apartment.

When I rented the apartment, JS showed it to me after dark. There were no lightbulbs in the place. Not one. I rented on the basis of the sign in the window and my glances through it and the price. When I finally moved in, again, after dark, there were no light bulbs, so having just driven up from El Paso with a car full of stuff, the first thing I had to do -- before I could even unload -- was drive clear across town to Target to get lightbulbs and the cheapest 3-way lamp they had because there was also no ceiling fixture in the living room.

Jerry, on the other hand, in addition to keeping water and gas on and letting me use things (like washer and dryer) before I even moved in, saw those two special CFL bulbs I promised myself I'd test out *somewhere* sitting on the counter and brought me a package of eight as a housewarming gift, saying use them anywhere and everywhere you want. He absolutely didn't need to do that. He's not paying for my electricity. Maybe he's just a nice person. Maybe nice people *do* exist. Even in Albuquerque. I don't know. I feel like I'm lapsing into magical realism here, but I honestly don't know. It might be possible. Really.

The battle of the lightbulbs is raging on now in my living space on a scale I never thought plausible. I've replaced four conventional bulbs with CFLs: two in the basement, one in the laundry room, and one in the hallway. All are lights I might have reason to leave on for a period of time. The one in the hallway also allows me to test its properties, in terms of living with the light, without breaking too radically from my beloved clear bulbs in places where nothing else casts the light I really, truly want.

I'm still not "done" unpacking and organizing, by any means. But every day I am insanely productive simply because I have a place to live where I *can* be productive. GONE are the days when I go months without doing laundry and keep buying new used clothes because I find the laundromat so odious. Or when I sit in the living room doing nothing -- not for the pleasure of doing nothing, but because it's stacked high with turntables and typewriters for which I have no better place and can't put in a yard sale because the only things people in that neighbourhood look for in yard sales are brand-name clothes and stolen DVDs.

Yesterday had to drive back clear across town to U-Haul to get my deposit back and it was an ordeal: every stoplight, every giant intersection a reminder that when I came here, I moved *closer* to the place I fell in love with, without moving close *enough* to *be* an everyday part of it. No point in walking everywhere you want to on a daily basis if you have to drive clear across town to do it, now is there? In the gradual process of becoming an everyday driver, I forgot that I actually fell in love with Albuquerque once, and only learned to hate it from behind my steering wheel.

Albuquerque is the only place I've ever moved to because I loved the place. No wonder I stuck with it through all the dramas and upheavals of these last 3½ years.

I took the shortest route possible to the U-Haul place, which was the closest to my old apartment, and realised for the first time: this is an hour out of my life. I'd been driving back and forth like that almost every single day, and very often several times a day, for the last 3½ years. It never reallly dawned on me until after I'd done it four or more times every single day just moving all my crap for days on end. Fifteen to thirty or more minutes in bad traffic each way, almost exclusively to buy things I don't need (sometimes don't even want), at places I don't enjoy. It seeped into my consciousness slowly and incrementally, like water dripping in a sink adds up to gallons add up to seas, until my one sure-fire creed and answer to every problem became, over years, "there's nothing do do buy drive somewhere and buy something".

Any wonder I smoked? Any wonder I drank? Tobacco and liquor were *always* the shortest drive away of any place I might drive to buy "something" without regard to what I was buying. The people who sold them were dependably pleasant and it got me out of the apartment while being the minimum-length trip I would have to spend *in* the car going anywhere to fulfill the minimum diktat of America's consumptive culture. It's probably that way for most people in this country. The civilization of manufactured needs turns us all into drunk drivers reeking of tobacco smoke in one degree or other, or something equally unpleasant.

Today I drove nowhere. I visited a library, ate a wonderful, cheap meal in a pleasant coffeeshop/restaurant I enjoy, bought tooth floss and vegetables and potato chips and am at peace with the world. I get to sleep on clean sheets in a bedroom where crickets are the most prominent sound outside the windows.

Winds up for the last 3½ years, I was simply living in the wrong place. Even if it did "save money" on the monthly balance sheet, its costs to me are incalculable. No place I ever *really* wanted to be more than maybe once a year was in walking distance. Not one. Architectural landmarks? Plenty. Charming streetscapes? More than a few. Public transit? Practically outside my front door. But anything I *needed*? Nope. Any place I actually *enjoyed* being? Hell no. Seedy transient marginalia, with the Pueblo Smoke Shop and Walgreens being the closest outposts of anything approaching civilization. Part of me starts to think I had my little run-in with the law just so I could avail myself of my old apartment's walkable proximity to the courts. I was perfectly positioned to go through what I went through for that, and for *nothing* else that's happened in all the time I have lived here.

My new neighbourhood is *infinitely* more supportive of pedestrian culture than the one I landed in when I finally moved to Albuquerque. KUNM's five blocks from here. The Ernie Pyle library's about seven blocks the other way. The nearest grocer is five blocks the other way, and the nearest supermarket is two blocks beyond the grocer. My bank is one block west on Central, and Central Avenue's three blocks away -- I can drop in on Central any time I want without having to live there. I'm inbetween two major one-way streets which are heavily trafficked -- but because they have *timed* lights and go clear across town, cross-town traffic is relatively orderly and predictable.

I've six blocks from the Hi-Way House Motel and the whole neighbourhood that was my first experience with Albuquerque in the first place, back in the day when queers in Texas came up here to be themselves on flimsy pretexts (e.g., "they're showing a Felix the Cat cartoon at the Kimo") one weekend at a time. (It probably still happens.) I'm closer to the epicenter of my personal Albuquerque. The city that has meant more to me and my personal development than probably any other place on earth. Places in town that *should* be no more in my life than outlyers and footnotes are, appropriately, simply too far to bother walking to, and usually not good enough to justify a bus ride or a drive.

There are some downsides to living here that I'm sure I'll get around to ranting about, in time. Rent is the biggest one, at least right off the bat. More of my paycheck with go to rent than has since I lived in California. But it's so amazingly wonderful to have this space, this privacy, this relative peace and quiet, this darkness at night, these necessities all within easy walking distance -- everything except work, and that will change sooner rather than later, even if I have to work at Frontier -- that I've spent most of these last two days just starting to fit into it. Today I went out walking for the first time just so I don't fall into the trap I did at the last place of hunkering down and making it a fortress against the encroaching madness of Central, which along with traffic and an unpleasant drive, stood forever between me and the place that I loved. Last night was Saturday night and I stayed awake, unfamiliar with the Saturday night sounds here. People laughing hysterically about a block away at one AM, then tapering off. As opposed to drug dealers and idling trucks and roaring motorcycles *every* night. It's almost *too* quiet!

This place is so turn-of-the-century it's not even funny. The apartment was better designed in terms of discrete "spaces" -- the breakfast nook within the kitchen, for instance -- "turn a corner, and surprise, a whole new space opens up". It had great floor planning. This place, well, think turn-of-the-century. Incredible straightforward, wooden house built around a central chimney. The floorplan kinda has two halves: one for the visiting public, and one for the family. There even used to be a door between the two halves of the house, but it was removed -- I think sanely, assuming anyone who visits may be allowed to use the bathroom. Half the house goes straight to back (more or less): Living room, kitchen, and then the laundry patio that was added on top of the storm cellar foundation years ago. The other half, with no front entrance, consists of two bedrooms and a bathroom and a short hall connecting the three.

This is a long way of saying the cats are enjoying being able to gallop through the house. They've never had the space to break into a full gallop in their entire lives and now they find they have this whole new capability they never even dreamed of.

I feel the same way.