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The New World of Terror

Some times there are moments in life that live forever in your mind. No matter what, you recall ever detail of the moment. The temperature, smells in the air, your emotions and how they jostled you. They are moments when time stood still as you consciously realized your life was different, redefined from that point forward. The generation before me remembers when JFK was shot, when Elvis died.

I remember Mount St. Helens erupting (Okay, so not as global in scope, in the Pacific Northwest, it shook us out of bed just a few minutes after the Smurfs started), the Space Shuttle exploding, Bobby getting shot on Dallas, bombs dropping on Libya, and the Gulf War sending my peers overseas. Recently, I had another such moment - in the Business Class section of AirTran Airways, as I was returning home from a quick weekend getaway.

"Sir," said the flight attendant to my partner, Tony, "I have to check one of your bags."

Tony had one bag, and a small backpack that was serving as his briefcase, carrying his laptop computer. Of course, in the world we live in now, where you can’t be too cautious about how that can of hair spray and a match can be used, it’s important we adhere to the policies posted on signs printed by prison inmates.

Tony tried to remind the flight attendant of the policy: one bag and a “personal” bag, which is loosely defined as a briefcase, purse, laptop computer bag and such. The policy doesn’t define the size, shape or color of the bag or “personal” bag, other than it must all fit neatly in the overhead bin or under the seat in front of you.

We were on one of AirTran’s new jets in their Business Class – the Pontiac Grand Am of the skyways, so storage space was not an issue. After all, we had paid an extra $25 for two complimentary cocktails, extra wide seats, and a little bit more storage space. And it’s not like Tony was knitting an Afghan (sorry) that took up an entire department store shopping bag.

The flight attendant’s tone was, quite frankly, belligerent. His body language aggressive. Tony was getting a bit hot under the collar, being treated in this manner. After all, the same set of bags had passed numerous security checks, and the outbound flight to our secret weekend destination. The flight attendant didn’t seem to care. He just had to check one of Tony’s bags. Other passengers were boarding, all carrying a bag and a liberal interpretation of a “personal” bag.

Tony pointed out his briefcase is only shaped like a backpack. “It’s a backpack,” barked the flight attendant. The other two flight attendants had rushed to aide. They began waiving Tony off from behind the flight attendant, shaking their heads and mouthing, “Let him go. Let him do it. Go with it.”

Tony could make a choice: to stand up for himself demanding to be treated fairly, within the published policies and risk being ejected from the airplane for not cooperating with the flight crew, violating federal law, or he could sit down, shut up, and let this glorified, self-important cocktail waiter have his way and take his bag. (Apologies to those flight attendants who know the meaning of service.)

We. Were. Stewing. And at that moment, it occurred to me the world doesn’t work the way it did before September 11. Gone are the days of quality service, in exchange for inconvenience under the guise of improved safety. The harsh reality was sobering: today, we live in the constant terror of bad customer service.

The other flight attendants approached Tony and apologizing for the former’s rudeness as we steamed. It was a bittersweet moment of vindication, as both said the only reason they couldn’t jump to our aid is that they have to work with the jerk for two more days. Heroes, they are, those flight attendants. Fighting on the front line against horrible service.

As if this flight attendant created enough trauma. As if to purposely throw salt in our wounds, they had no vodka on board. However, we didn’t dare point it out.

Three Miracles For The Day

1. On-line chats can be so discombobulated. I feel good about where I am regarding a chat gone oh-so wrong. The truth is not so bad after all, significantly more powerful and less frightening than originally anticipated.
   
2. Setting the groundwork for tracking the volunteerism of HPCIA.
   
3. Raising the standard by which Sarrett Creative rolls out programs.

Chicago Highlights

Was in Chicago this weekend for Tony's Father's 60th Birthday. Highlights of the weekend:

• Getting smashed in a revolving door on Michigan Avenue.
  
• A blind man directing crowds at Hartsfield International
  
• Barnes Place.com preceeding us.
  
• Dinner, cocktails and intimate conversation with Dr. J.
  
• Meeting Tom and Bob.

Three Miracles For The Day

1. It occured to me today, over the course of time, I've always been involved in the "Best Ever". In grade school, I was always in "the best class the teacher taught in her career." In college, the class of 1993 was considered by many professors as "the best" in a long time. Swim teams, always "the best group to come together as a team." And at work, again, "the best team." Coicidence, or Miracle?
   
2. Tony spoke of this job this weekend in a manner that his parents could not only understand, but embrace.
   
3. Dan sent me a great message at the exact moment I needed it.
   
4. And a forth - I know I'm only supposed to do three - connecting people together through Barnes Place.

Flash Flood Flashback

A rather horrifying moment today, when I realized why the crazy lady at the service bureau freaks me out so much. Not only is she dressed in a full-length sea foam terry-cloth dress that could easily be two bath towels sewn together, but also the entire ensemble can best be described as "Mountain Brook." She strikes me as the type of woman who would braid her pubic hair and incorporate beadwork, in a private celebration of individual beauty. And then, not so privately, she'd ask your opinion.

Standing there, trying to avoid eye contact, a flashback came to me like a flash flood. It was a warm September day, so typical of the Southern Oregon Coast. In fact, it was downright hot when I came in from after school. I was in first grade. Jeff, my brother, and the baby sitter were not around. I looked around, and finally, I heard the voice of the babysitter as she yelled through the house. Jeff and she were in the back yard - sunbathing. I thought that was a bit odd, but they wanted me to join them. So I went outside. Our babysitter, who was not the vision of beauty I liked my sitters to be, was standing there. "Do you like my bikini?" she asked. "I made it myself."

I could see that. The top was made of macramé, with wood beads incorporated. "I'm not finished yet," she said. I could see that. She stood there in her underpants, control-top maybe. "Go put your swim suit on and come join us." I rushed into the house, confused and scared. Why must we sunbathe? Why must we sunbathe with her? Why must she insist on making a bikini? And wearing it before it is done? As I put on my swimsuit, she entered my room - right at the moment I had my pants down. "You didn't say anything about my swimsuit. Don't you like my swim suit?"

From that point, I don't remember. I've obviously blocked the horrid homemade fashion from my mind. But it was at that moment, when I was trying to not look at Mountain Brook Girl, that the vision of Macramé Bikini Babysitter came flooding back, bringing with it all the uncertain emotions of fear.

Pothole Posse

Shirley Franklin's first accomplishment as Mayor of Atlanta: establishing the Pothole Posse to fill potholes within 48 hours of being reported. Now if that doesn't cast a redneck shadow on our international city, I don't know what does.

From the Mayor's State of the City Speech: "I've been challenged by the woman visiting Lenox Square Mall during the holidays a few weeks ago. She stopped me in mid-step at the top of the escalator, looked me straight in the eye, and said, before even saying hello … 'Young lady, if you want to really make me proud, you get started and filling those potholes. They’re tearing up my car!' "

A New Twist on an Old Theme

This past week, Bill Seay and I met with EDAW, the planning firm our community has hired to complete the Greater Home Park Master Plan. I had the chance to review the materials before they put on the finishing touches for the unveiling to the Community. It was an exciting moment to look over the plans and ideas—illustrations that literally map out how to address the many concerns we’ve all spoken of and heard throughout this process. A great deal of time and energy has been invested in this project, not just by paid consultants, but also countless volunteers.

Through this process, EDAW has done more than just put on paper which lots should be designated residential, commercial or mixed-use. They’ve gone beyond highlighting where we need to complete street grids and address streetscape issues. Rather, EDAW has listened and observed, and created an over-arching theme for our community: Diversity, Accessibility, and Identity. The theme is nothing new; rather it is a clear definition of what already exists within our borders. Reviewing the Plan, one can see how all design concepts have been derived from this theme, which in turn helps to reinforce and strengthen Diversity, Accessibility and Identity.

EDAW maps how a “community of communities”, as Mike Brandon has described Home Park, can not only co-exist with each other, but also support and build on the individual strengths. As each of you review the Plan, you will begin to see how it acknowledges and celebrates the diversity of uses and diversity of people in our community; how it works to build accessibility between those communities and the greater surrounding area; and, how it begins to clearly define “character districts” that celebrate our unique collection of community personalities.

Some of EDAW’s concepts are groundbreaking in that they fly directly in the face of how our community has historically thought of and defined itself. But times have changed, our community is changing, and WE MUST change the way in which we think of and define Home Park. Does this change our spirit? Does this change our core values as a community? Certainly not. Diversity, Accessibility and Identity have always been recurring themes throughout the history of our community. Our Plan, acknowledging economic forces of today, just has a new twist.

Our Plan challenges us to a higher level of thinking, and a higher level of consciousness about our surroundings. It identifies some of our greatest challenges by defining them as opportunities—rich ones at that. As we move forward, our test will be in our ability to shed dated concepts from the past, and look to a new, bright future which we define and work to control in an aggressive, pro-active manner. If we can accomplish this as a Community, then I’m convinced there is little to stand in our way and our Community of Communities will achieve Diversity, Accessibility and Identity.

Mid-Week Blahs

It's the middle of a busy week. Not much time to write, and not much going on to write about. Highlights:

• Zach in town on Monday; great conversation and dinner at an unknown low-thrills Italian restaurant.
  
• Normally High-Maintenance Client who is in town is not-so high-maintenance.
  
• Normally casual, professional stylists is high-maintenance.
  
• Dinner at pretensious Nava, with a server who comes around three times in two hours.
  
• Started new 401(k). I guess I could write about that.

The New 401(k)

Okay, so we've switched from the Simple IRA to a standard 401(k) for reasons I'm still having a hard time understanding. But today, we had to pick out the funds we wanted to invest in. I don't get it. While reviewing the information, it occurred to me that I could work half the amount of time I do now, making half the amount of money I do, while spending more time researching investment opportunities, and end up even farther along than my current course, which is reviewing funds based on 5- and 10-year returns and basing my decisions on that.

Bring On The Stud Buds

I've got three geeks lined up to work on projects over the next week. I keep having to come up with more projects for the straight men in my life. It's odd how this has happened. Most gay men have Fag Hags who help them through life. I'm afraid to say we have not a one. Instead, we have Stud Buds, straight men who envy our fabulousness. They used to guzzle beer, but now they sip Cape Cods. They used to listen to the Dead, but now they listen to Donna Summer.

A few weeks ago, Tony and I had the Stud Buds over for dinner. We asked them to bring their wives. I had been in the basement for 15 minutes with my three Stud Buds showing them the next audio-visual cable we must install to bring on new levels of ambiance, when I realized, we had left the wives upstairs, standing and staring at each other, with out a drink or hors d'vores.

Gym Boy

That blond-haired boy with chuncky boots, flaired denim pants, a skin-tight t-shirt and black leather jacket with fringe I saw on Friday came into the gym today and bought a membership. I almost fell of the treadmill.

Revelations at the Gym

Where are the blond-haired, blue-eyed actors and actresses portraying terrorists? They're missing from the Made-For-TV Genre.

Gym Whippin'

You know your ass has been kicked by the gym when the drinking fountain provides too much resistance.

A Great Day

It's a great day when you realize the world does not understand. The world does not experience what you experience or see what you see. And that's okay, because it's a great day when you understand there is a purpose and not only do you define it, but you guide others to it. And now, the challenge becomes gathering others and leading them to it. It's a great day, because you're no longer held back by the short-sightedness of others, rather you are holding out for a better place and a better time. And the challenge is to overcome this temporary hurdle. That is a great day.

Swapping Tab-Delimitated Recipes With The Geek Neighbors

I know it’s cliché to say your neighborhood is different. Everyone likes to think their neighborhood is unlike any other. Not just in the city, but in the state. It’s sort of American to think you are like no other. I guess it’s a way of feeling like you’ve arrived where you belong, by convincing yourself you could find no other place in the world like your neighborhood. But my neighborhood is not like others.

We live on the edge of Georgia Tech, in Home Park, an in-town neighborhood of older homes with an eclectic university feel. We have no tour of homes. Potlucks turn out 12 people. Community meetings are filled with people requesting more events to get to know our neighbors better. We have no troupe of old ladies that bake casseroles when a neighbor is sick or tragedy strikes. But, we have a strong sense of community and who we are.

How is it that a strong sense of community pride and kinship can come from a community that can’t even organize itself for the occasional get-together?

The answer, I’m afraid, is in our palm pilots, on our desktops, and contained in our databases. The Geek Factory for the entire Southeast, Georgia Tech, like most college campuses, radiates a powerful influence, which permeates into our community. Tech influences our property values, the neighborhood’s businesses and traffic. What most people don’t realize though, is Tech even impacts our collective social skills.

As an institution, it cranks out an amazing number of engineers, researchers and technicians, all of which are known for their expertise, but not their social skills. And a disproportionate number of them end up living in my neighborhood. I live next door to micro systems engineers, designers of cloverleaf intersections, and experts in the ways of city planning. In fact, until the fear of terrorists arrived on the radar screen, we had our own nuclear reactor in the neighborhood just to train local nuclear physicists

I once crashed a campus party at the Geek Factory, and I quickly found myself involved in a discussion on the merits of the HVAC system. Later in the evening, I came running through the crowd with two strands of toilet paper, mocking a performance dance routine. Judging by the crowd’s reaction, however, you would have never guessed I was not a performance dancer.

One of the neighborhood association’s board members may not recognize a face, but she never forgets an e-mail address. In fact, she knows all three-hundred-plus addresses on our community mailing list. Doesn’t matter if she’s met them or not, she could tell you all about them—where they live, what they do for a living, their operating system and even when the graduated from Tech. The e-mail list-serve (for non-geeks, this is a fancy technical term for e-mail newsletter) is better known for its hard, cold facts, and the unique use of e-mail to curb crime than it’s bubbly, cheerleading personality.

At one passionate community planning session last year, someone suggested we create a database. Eyes lit up. The room burst into conversation. This database could be the end-all, be-all, people said. We could merge tax records, zoning and variance ordinances, and it would be great. “If we could just get good, clean data,” a voice from the back said. I was confused. How does a database move our community forward? How does good, clean data solve our problems? “I don’t know for sure. The first step is getting it. But if we have it, then we can figure something out,” said the voice.

Data is important in our community. Good, clean data. In a quest for more data, my community approached the Atlanta Police Department and asked them to provide crime reports on a floppy disk in a tab-delimitated format so we could merge, purge, chart and sort our own crime statistics. The Police Department said they didn’t know how to save to a floppy disk. Our neighborhood sent a technician. Now we have the statistics on a floppy disk, only we have to return the disk when we’re done.

Tonight, I came from a meeting where we brainstormed the coming year’s program agendas. Bar crawls, potlucks, movies in the park, and a quintet with wine were all ideas that came forward. The ideas were great, but no one was volunteering to implement them into action. No one had any idea where to begin. We adjourned the meeting as the ideas slowed down, just before someone was about to suggest a database of social preferences to be merged and purged with the tax database.

Afterwards, a neighbor who asked why my weather monitoring equipment was not uploading data live to a web site approached me. I know it’s a bit geeky to have a weather monitoring system, but we’re all products of our society, so I explained I was having a connection problem. He asked me a few pointed questions, for which I turned for answers to another neighbor who helped me install the system. After, the two clucked like chickens, they turned to me and said in unison, “You need to check the bios.” “What?” I said. “The software in your router.” Umm-Kay.

In my neighborhood, we don’t have a garden club. We don’t have a neighborhood festival. Instead, we talk tech-talk. We swap tab-delimitated files rather than recipes. We hop on-line and gather in chat rooms. We give each other e-mail aliases rather than our house keys. So, my neighborhood is just a little different.

Sunday Night Dinner and TV

Growing up, Marlin Perkins and Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and Wonderful World of Disney were the highlights of Sunday night. Not just because, as kids, we thought they were great shows, but because it was the one night of the week Mom allowed us to eat dinner in front of the TV. Last night was the premiere of HBO's Sex and the City and Showtime's Queer As Folk. We had several of the boys over for a potluck dinner, wine, and a little Sunday night television. Funny - I'm 30 years old, and still eating dinner with my family in front of the TV.

Elvis Lives

Tony made dinner on Saturday night to celebrate Elvis' 67th Birthday. He selected dishes from the annals of Graceland, so you know it was good shit: Chicken Ala King, Corn Pudding, Mashed Potatoes, and Fried Zuchinni. A perfectly wonderful evening.

The Boys Are Home. Safe.

Homecoming

The boys will be home soon. Dakota doesn't know it yet. But, I'm about as excited as she is when she pees across the floor.

A Painful Truth

The City of Atlanta's new fire trucks can't navigate Barnes Street when cars are parked on both sides.

The matriarch of the inbreeds had a medical emergency just before dinner. An Ambulance from Grady Memorial and Atlanta Fire Department Engine Number 15 responded.

Of course, the minute flashing lights turned down the street, Long John had to go for a walk, despite the fact he’d been out twenty minutes earlier. Long John didn’t seem to mind the flashing lights; he was more interested in the new smells revealed by the melting snow.

When Engine Number 15 turned down the street, it stopped in front of Barnes Place, unable to go any further. The paramedics hopped out and walked down the street to greet the Grady paramedics, where they were putting the inbreed matriarch on a stretcher attached to oxygen into the back of the ambulance.

Fire trucks can park in front of my house any day, if they’d like. But I’d prefer B-Shift when all the fire fighters are blond and blue-eyed. Something about their uniforms that just goes well with blond hair and blue eyes. That’s the painful truth.

Extra Secure

With the nation on a hightened state of alert, Fort McPherson is closed until 10 a.m. because of winter weather.

Snow Day

I had been getting out of bed fairly early on my days off, but something about it being extra cold, and dark made the bed that much warmer and more comfortable. It was 7:30 and oh so difficult to get out of bed. Dakota Dog and Long John were ready for breakfast, and seemed relatively unaffected by the low pressure system which had moved over our heads in the night, bringing with it the threat of snow and ice. By 8:15 snow was drifting from the sky. My car battery was dead, and I was standing in a snow flurry with jumper cables. This was not a way to start the work week, no matter how short it might be.

The day drudged on. 611 calories on the fancy machine at the gym. An attempt to organize chaos, but really results in more chaos. And by 3:30, everyone had fled the office in fear of horrible traffic. Now, with a half-an-inch of snow on the ground, the temperature dropping, and dark winter clouds overhead, there is no question winter is here.

New Year's Eve Straight Up

New Year's Eve exists primarily for straight people. Counting down the final hours of the year is a good excuse for straight people to gather the company of others into the wee hours for enjoying good food, drinking fine wine, and sharing gossip about parties gone past. For gaggles of gay men, however, we celebrate every weekend.

As is the usual agenda, we shared bloating amounts of food, really good wine and cavorting conversation with friends. It was just extra special food and extra special wine, being the end of 2001 and all, when the entertainment budget is tossed aside. A usual evening turned a bit unusual when we headed off to the Four Seasons Hotel to meet straight couple friends for cocktails and dancing in a conservative upscale world trying to cut loose for the New Year.

But instead, we encounter a highly-competitive fashion competition with fair musical entertainment. The rows of bad fashion were like a Marshalls after a sale. Black leather pants with a frilly sweater. A taupe naugahyde jacket and rimless square wrap-around sunglasses, probably Ray-Ban. A zebra faux fur jacket that was so Fall 2000. Middle-aged couples wearing their best suits and simply waiting for the social-appropriate bed time.

With three minutes left to go, we encountered The Count-Down Panic. The bar filled with fashion errors, people scrambled for cocktails, and the party was crashed by a boy-band wanna-be group of seven dressed ghetto-chic, and a tempermental poodle belonging to a woman whose fashion gimmicks failed to draw the attention she was looking for.

There we sat, wading in pretension. Counting down with a room of straight people who count down simply because that is what you do when you dress poorly, purchase over-priced cocktails and call it a party. We found fun at our table, though, where we carved out our own time zone that welcomed the new year.