Cocolaco / Fox Woods

In SF, I met up with Peggy, who I’ve been internet-pen-pals with for years & years. We toured her neighbourhood and talked and talked and talked. Then we met up with Michelle and went shopping the next day, first visiting the Benefit brow bar and then experiencing the joys of H&M and Sephora, which we don’t have in Australia. If we did, they’d be successful. I bought red lip gloss from Sephora, and a cornflower-blue bag and jacket. The bag and jacket were from different stores and I didn’t realise at first that I’d chosen the same colour both times. Cornflower-blue must be my colour for 2010. I’ll find another Sephora in another state and buy cornflower-blue lip gloss.

I digress. We dined with Peggy and her beau Hai in North Beach and gave a cat some cream. The next day, Michelle disappeared while Peggy and I found a telephone number for me to buy. 415 359 5556. Nice number. Peggy led me to Samovar, the tea house near the Yerba Buena, where we had fabulous tea and savouries and sweets. We raced to SFMOMA, half an hour to closing time. I was delighted by the almost monochromatic interpretations of Luc Tuymans, particularly his cornflower-blue rhinoceros with foliage on a similarly coloured canvas. Peggy and I bought matching resin rings from the MOMA shop. In the evening, we attended an Oscar party in the Noe Valley. I like San Francisco. I like Peggy.

Yesterday, we began our road trip to Las Vegas.

Last two lines of 2012:

“No more Pull-Ups®!”

“Nice.”

Note to self: People on this plane are reading books like The Power of Now and Cycling Home from Sibera.

The most annoying part was him knowing how to press the teleal nerve in the lower leg to temporarily trigger that paralysing mix of pain and weirdness. You couldn’t fight back unless you could block it out, rise above it, and retaliate with something like an open palm to his ear. Even then, he might not let go, so you had to rise above it again to fight back again. The Chester sisters weren’t fazed. They needed to keep him occupied while the fourth Chester sister was breaking into the house to join them. She was the strongest.

I’m waiting for the media to dub this recent spate of knife violence “The Cutlery Killings”.

In local news: For a while now, the Australian government has been trying to censor the internet. For reals. Like China. I’ve been ignoring it all, hoping it’ll go away. They plan on using an ISP level filter to block sites - an unknown list of sites on some secret blacklist - that, for all we know, could contain the pirate bay, xkcd and anything to do with unicorns.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the government also wants to control sites like Facebook so that people can’t post messages that might hurt other people’s feelings. Again: For reals. It’s like a bad dream. It reminds me of the time when Bush was voted in and Americans were considering Canada. I’m considering space.

Note to self: In our booth there’s a couple dressed in black and a couple dressed in white but they’re both as polite as each other.

You take Radiohead for granted after a while. You forget how brilliant they are. Then you go to a show where the performer gives their last encore; climbs up beside statues of angels, up high in the theatre, near the ceiling. Armed with a red ukelele, they sing Creep, and everyone sings along, quietly. Then you remember.