— पांच हजार दो सौ सत्तर —
I guess you could say Shobhit and I went out for drinks last night. More accurately, he did, and I was just there tagging along. We were at BrewLab on Pike Street and that place focuses on beer. Blech.
It was only for maybe twenty or thirty minutes, and we joined a table where Sachin was sitting with five other guys from a Meetup group he organizes. It's possible Sachin has other longtime friends besides Shobhit (it was noted last night that they have now known each other for twenty years), but he has never spoken of any; I'm getting the sense that, outside of Shobhit and the occasional girlfriend,
these Meetup groups Sachin is a part of (he's seen seated second from far left in that photo) constitute the bulk of his social activity.
I suppose this approach makes for an easy way to find people to hang out with when you are new to an area and looking to make friends; it could even have been useful for me at certain points in my past. That said, there's something about this context that, depending on the group dynamic I suppose, encourages really superficial discussion. I'm really grateful I have multiple friends I'm really close with whom I have known for decades, and thus can have conversations of genuine depth.
Shobhit and I got into discussion with one guy last night, who seemed strikingly impossible to please with restaurant recommendations. He genuinely shit on Artichoke Pizza in New York City, a place Shobhit and I have always regarded as the best pizza anywhere; he also declared that all of his friends don't like Saffron Grill and he himself thinks of it as "okay." What the shit? I tell people all the time it's the best Indian restaurant in Seattle.
It did seem notable to me that I was the only person at this table who was not a person of color. A majority of them were clearly South Asian, including Shobhit, Sachin, the aforementioned guy with whom we talked about restaurants, and another guy at the other end of the table from us. The two other guys there were Asian Americans, though I wouldn't have a clue how to further clarify ethnicity beyond that, except that their heritage was clearly not of the subcontinent. (I am eternally annoyed by the way East Asians and South Asians are lumped together as "Asians" when there is a clear difference between them, much greater than the vast array of difference also among each of the two groups. If I just told an average American that my husband is "Asian," I guarantee you no one would immediately imagine a dark skinned man from the Indian subcontinent. And on tons of demographics questions on questionnaires and forms, it's the only box he has to check.)
There was a lot of talk about jobs and working in tech and whatnot, stuff I had nothing to contribute to. Only when restaurants came up could I really contribute to the conversation. And, shortly after Shobhit finished his beer, he declared we were leaving, and I had been ready to go for a few minutes anyway.
Shobhit decided he wanted to walk across the street to Doghouse Leathers and just browse for a minute. Prominently displayed in the middle of the store was a sex sling, into which had been placed a giant teddy bear, itself in leather fetish gear. I was dying to take a picture of it, but had no idea how much that might have been looked down on, and the store was otherwise empty and the two employees (one of which was wearing a pup mask) had nothing to do but stand around, and thus easily see me trying to take a photo. So, I didn't take one. But, wait! The teddy bear is at least partially visible in
this Pride Month post (safe for work, somewhat impressively) from their Instagram account.
The other thing that struck me about this visit to that store was the inventory they had, in a back corner, of adult onesies and adult diapers. This was the first I had seen such things in a store, although I don't find it surprising at all. It has never done anything for me (not that I would share it here if it did), but I have encountered this kind of stuff on porn sites, and it is surprisingly prolific—much like the proliferation of "pup play" in the past few years, another thing I have a hard time wrapping my brain around. But, new sorts of fetishes will keep coming along until the end of time, I suppose. No judgment! Just . . . you know, not for me.
— पांच हजार दो सौ सत्तर —
— पांच हजार दो सौ सत्तर —
Shobhit loves to get waffle cones from Salt & Straw, which is also on that same block, and he purchased two before we walked back home, so he could have an ice cream cone filled with coffee ice cream he had left at home for dessert. We watched a couple of episodes of
What We Do In the Shadows. I totally spaced that the new
Ring of Power series on Amazon Prime Video was actually available later last night. There are two episodes released this week, so we'll have to get those watched before the third episode of
House of the Dragon on HBO Sunday night.
I then set about to isolating audio clips from the old talk-tapes with my brother, Christopher, that I recently digitized. I have to tell you, if there is any easier way to do this in GarageBand than the way I managed to figure it out, it is not intuitive. I wonder if there is another, easier audio editing software out there that might work better. Whatever; I now have clips taken from the first five tapes I recorded with him, between 1990 and 1994, which I called The "M.C." Brothers (a dual reference to rappers of the time often having "MC" in their names, and our last name, which is McQuilkin). I've already digitized more tapes than I really needed to specifically for this purpose; we were also part of other tapes I called "Pretty Human," in which we sang (very, very bad) songs of our own composition; and others that were typically recorded on holidays and involved other family members like Mom, Katina and Dawn that I called "Mikes" because they used external microphones rather than internal mics on my boom box. But, my aim is to use only one audio clip and/or only one video clip from any given year for which I have either. Granted, that covers only 19 specific calendar years and the aim here is to represent all 50 of the years Christopher has been alive; I intend to make up for that discrepancy by overlaying audio clips on still photos from the other 31 years.
Isolating the audio clips from those first five tapes was relatively easy, because I already had a composition recording with the "best of" clips from them, thus already isolating the audio from all five of those tapes to the best of those. (Granted, that's based on how I came to those conclusions in 1994 and my opinion would likely be largely different now, but whatever.) I did not record another "M.C." Brothers tape until 1996, and there is one each from that year, 1997 and 1998. I'm needing to listen to a lot more of those in order to find clips that are amusing enough to include. I am in the middle of Side A of the 1996 tape, which I called The "M.C." Brothers /
happy crappy. It's a fascinating listen, over 25 years later, for multiple reasons, not least of which is it's the first one recorded in which both of us are legal adults, and we both have less of a penchant for acting silly. I felt that made it more "boring" at the time, but now, listening back to even simple things like our discussions of the goings-on in the lives of our friends and family, it's a surprisingly compelling snapshot of a moment in our histories. Also, that 1996 tape was recorded the year I came out, but in January, and thus a good seven months before I came out. I still talked like the fairly conservative Christian person I thought I was.
Incidentally, I have no video, audio
or photos of Christopher from four different years of our adult lives: 2002, 2005, 2012 and 2015. 2005 is the only one that is a mystery to me; the only thing I can say is that when Shobhit and I went to visit Mom and Bill in Idaho in September of that year, we spent one night in Pullman and I suppose that precluded seeing Christopher and his kids in Spokane. I did have my then-annual visits in Seattle with both Nikki and Becca, though.
The other three years are far less of a mystery. I never traveled outside the Puget Sound area in 2002 because I was so financially strapped after the
Seattle Gay Standard folded at the end of 2001; I ran out of my inheritance money from 1998 around the same time; I was unemployed between December 2001 and April 2002; and I spent the rest of the year catching up on financial losses.
I visited Mom and Bill in Wallace, Idaho twice in 2012, once for Mom's 60th birthday party in June, and once for my then-annual Christmastime visit in December. By then these trips were always straight to Wallace and back, though, and Christopher did not come to Wallace either of those times. I'm not sure why, except to assume it was likely a lack of both time and gas money. 2015, on the other hand, was in the middle of a three-year period in which I was quite convinced I would never even speak to my brother again, something I surprisingly quickly just made peace with, after he declared the kids could not visit me anymore because of Shobhit and me getting married in 2013. (This in spite of the fact that he was fine with having the kids visit us, while we lived as two openly gay men in a relationship together, for the previous eight years. Make that make sense.) As such, we had virtually no contact between 2013 and 2016; I only barely have
a single photo of him from 2013, in which he is almost entirely obscured by branches of a tree outside my Spokane hotel room window. That had been a particularly awkward visit because I was there with Dad and Sherri, who spent Easter Sunday with Christopher and his family in Spokane, whereas that day I drove for the day to spend Easter Sunday with Mom and Bill in Wallace. (Dad and I took a bike ride the day before, that being the day Christopher and the kids came to the hotel for a bit, but I spent most of that time in my own separate hotel room, recuperating from an exhausting bike ride.) Anyway, if it were not for Christopher having a change of heart and literally messaging me an apology in 2016, I would probably still not be in touch with him and this tribute tape would not be happening.
As you may have surmised, there is some fraught history between my brother and me. But, we are on good enough terms now; he currently lives in the house Mom and Bill lived in until they died; and I still think he deserves just as much acknowledgment for his 50th birthday as I gave to both Angel and Gina. Hence this project.
— पांच हजार दो सौ सत्तर —
[posted 12:26 pm]
