Welcome To 2006

Our old pal Chalmers has gone and written an 8-page article for British GQ, full of half-truths and old material transcribed as conversation. I rather enjoy reading Chalmers journalistic pieces, as much so in how he can cut corners and cheat his paymaster into thinking he's done quite a bit of work when he was really just abroad on their dime and drinking away his guilt. We will get him to the Party and steal his notebooks only to find he's already written most of what will happen in the days to come. British GQ article - DOWNLOAD NOW

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Driving out of Vegas is never with an easy stomach. Although we were up - way up thanks to Bingo's Hail Mary royal flush, it was three a.m. and I was on three hours sleep. Her family was congregated and waiting for us 10 hours away in the East Bay. Late Christmas, have to go. I hung my head out the window in the cold air for stretches to keep myself awake. When that didn't take, I let Bingo drive. I woke up a short time later to find her careening downhill at 80 miles per hour through the smokescreen of a nearby brushfire, sitting Indian-style and letting the cruise control do the thinking. I drove the rest of the way.

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Danville, CA is a high-dollar, featureless sprawl, storage for the financially rich and culturally frightened where everything looks so exactly the same as to render a compliment moot. It's an up-to-code community full of all the ugly convenience of modern life without the niggers and poetry. They allow McDonalds but not the arches. The Starbucks is dressed like the dry cleaners dressed the Johnson's house. Like the owners, all forced to wear suits with only slight variations of color. These people don't worry about getting fucked up and confusing their own house for the Chevron.

We pull up to the gates of "Blackhawk" - and these cocksuckers aren't hockey fans - and tell the private police chump that I am here to find the Dollar Store on Martin Luther King Blvd. Bingo goes past his blank stare and gives the name and address of her family and the gate is raised. A backstage pass to the most boring show on Earth. Bingo's family isn't the gated community types. It takes a while to figure it out. They certainly look the part. Two of their three daughters are reluctant queers, the reluctance more than the queerdom is easily to blame on the way they were raised. There is underlying Jesus in the house although I don't know that I'd have noticed if I hadn't been forewarned. There are grandparents and place settings on the dining room table and the house is immaculate. On paper, this could go poorly.

 I am far too old to have any "meet the parents" unease. But I do have a general discomfort meeting people outside of my usual playing field and especially in a case where being myself could cause such distress to one of my own.

"Don't worry about it. Just be yourself." So when Grandma asks me how the holidays were, I should tell her that we tore out our gourds three times in a week on mushrooms and barely got the coke off the table before the police arrived, that you were soft-raped by the 67-year old dealer on his farm and that Mother's inevitable suicide seems just around the hairpin?

No, don't be yourself at all now that you mention it.

Bingo's family is not the gated community types. They are good people with good hearts and a warm and open home. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't probably take off your shoes.

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New Years Eve was like a trailer to the desert party. The VIPs were there as well as some new folks that we hope will be mainstays, especially Bingo's commander-n-chief, J-Rob (www.jrobmusic.com) who, with his band, ripped holes into the night so well that even the neighbors had to wait till near 5am to call the cops.

We like to call it a compound but when you try to put 25 people in it, it becomes just a small house on a quiet street pretty quickly. But it all works out when you have friends like this. All things added up, these people are my only source of wealth.

Thanks for making the long journey down. Remember, we have plenty of road ahead to top ourselves.

~Stanhope