#rockabilly girlfriend

[rogersandclarke]

#rockabilly wife #rockabilly girlfriend #rockabilly gf #pinned #spiderweb tattoo #hot rod #babe the hot rod was totaled #our elvis and johnny cash cds were all destroyed #fav #favorite #my favorite #resources #car crashes

[bam-stroker]

Hands y'all a crumb from a little Rest Stop snippet I'm working on (hint it's the dove thing I talked about ages ago). I'm not normal about robots finding their own forms of comfort through touch and holding coffee cups because of it T-T

they give a final excited squeeze to his hands before letting him go, “You gonna stay for a little bit?” They rock back and forth on their heels and hold their hands behind them. Clearly an attempt to keep from pawing at him anymore. 

He gives a gentle nod, “Yeah. I can stay around for a little bit.” 

They let out a happy low buzz from their voice box, “Yay! You want a cup of coffee while you hangout then?” 

Now, neither of them could drink or eat. Let alone open their ever smiling mouths. But ever since they’d unlocked the ability to feel touch - Moon had very much enjoyed the way a fresh cup of coffee melted warmth in his hands. Something soothing to hold while he waited for his sunshine’s attention to come back his way. A small cozy comfort. 

He reaches out to run his hand along their arm and gives a little squeeze, “I’d love that…” 

#rest stop drabble #rest stop in the stars #crypt crumbs #celestial boyfriends #celestial girlfriends #I can't with these two #gonna let Sun have a little more of a butch look for this one #might have to draw the two of them in the looks from this one #something about two rockabilly masc's being sweet is hitting me

[girls-girl-since-2005]

collage by me :)

“rockstar girlfriends are cooler then rockstars”

#Spotify #rockstar gf #rockstar girlfriend #alternative rock #rock and roll #90s grunge #grunge aesthetic #rockstar #rockabilly

[havethetouch]

Young Blood

2024/02 (full view 1 - 2 - 3)

First I gotta say, both yellow and pink have been finished for a while, but I refused to upload them until teal is done too and since it was half done I figured, yo, not too complicated work with mono colour so fin it up.

Each of these are done with just one ink each. There is something deeply satisfying for me to just work with one ink colour it is my favorite way of doing stuff.

You might remember Alethea in the middle, my black swan rockabilly girl from this sketchpage or maybe from the pic with her lovely girlfriend. Anyway some time ago I was joking she needs a dance gang. Then I adopted the girl in pink, Odilia, formerly Melody, from @gammelgaedda because when I saw her i fell in love and she fits the rockabilly vibes for me so I had to nab her up and there we are. In yellow we have Leda, they are a nautilus I had a sketch lying around of from around 2022 because I love nautili and so did my late father so I designed this one but I had not yet figured out were they would go. Until I bought Odilia, and everything clicked into place just perfectly. There are like two jokes baked into this trio, because Ale is a waterbird but does not like swimming and her girls are like ocean folk. And both of them have swan related names because why not. I might design one more girl named Odette if I figure out what I want her to be lol.

#havethetouchart #artists of tumblr #my-ocs #personal-art #layyourhandsonme #traditional art #inks #anthro #anthroart #furry #furryart #drawing #illustration #art #havethetouch

[wastehound-voof]

Rockabilly Werewolves and Psycho Wolfmen!! Vol. 1 (A Compilation of Werewolf Music)

Download (82.3 MB)

I said I’d make a music compilation of songs about werewolves, so here it is. Rockabilly, Psychobilly, and Rock n Roll just seemed the natural choice.

Enjoy!

Track listing:

01. Klingonz - Werewolf Boogie

02. Radium Cats - Howling In The Swamp

03. The Kac-Ties - Mr. Werewolf

04. The Meteors - The Room

05. Bang Bang Bazooka - Werewolf On The Prowl

06. Guana Batz - Werewolf Blues

07. Chuck and the Hulas - Little Red Riding Hood

08. Round Robin - I’m the Wolfman

09. The Cramps - I Was a Teenage Werewolf

10. The Epileptic Hillbilly’s - Return of the Wolfman

11. The Kings of Outer Space - Sugar Muffin Is A Werewolf

12. The Neanderthals - Werewolf from Outer Space

13. The Speed Devils - Werewolf

14. The Jack O Bones - Do You Believe in Werewolves

15. Thee Gravemen - My Girlfriend is a Werewolf

16. Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs - Little Red Riding Hood

17. The Cramps - No Club Lone Wolf

18. The Spectres - Howlin’

19. Five Man Electrical Band - Werewolf

20. The Epileptic Hillbilly’s - Strange

#music #compilation #my compilation #werewolf #werewolf music #rockabilly #psychobilly #rock

[bitter69uk]

“After biker Reggie (Colin Campbell) and his hair-hopper girlfriend, Dot (Rita Tushingham), tie the knot, they head to a holiday camp for their honeymoon where things go sour in a flash. Yearning to escape the drudgery of his new married life, Reggie becomes fast friends with Pete (Dudley Sutton), a quick-talking fellow leather boy with whom he takes trips to the seaside, much to the chagrin of Dot, who struggles to make their house a home. When Reggie’s grandfather passes away unexpectedly, he asks Pete to join his grandmother (Gladys Henson) as a boarder and live-in companion in her spare room, where he also crashes after he and Dot have a row. Cohabitating with his new roommate, it soon becomes clear that Pete and Reggie have feelings for each other that go beyond mere friendship - feelings that neither of them may be willing or able to process.”

/ From Rocco T Thompson’s review of The Leather Boys for Slant website, 2021 /

Released on this day sixty years ago (8 March 1964): director Sidney J Furie’s gritty working-class British kitchen sink realist drama (and homoerotic biker classic) The Leather Boys (1964). (Tagline: “Three lives ripped savagely apart!”). Some scenes were filmed at London’s old-school transport café The Ace Café in Wembley; when I used to occasionally go to rockabilly gigs there years ago, it looked exactly the same. For the “leather jacket lover” crowd, Colin Campbell and Dudley Sutton resemble escapees from Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963) in their biker gear – and the great Rita Tushingham absolutely slays as the petulant Dot! Coronation Street fans will recognize a young Johnny Briggs (aka Mike Baldwin) in the supporting cast.

#lobotomy room #the leather boys #rita tushingham #sidney j. furie #kitchen sink drama #british cinema #homoerotic biker #leather jacket lover #working class drama #gay love triangle #the ace cafe #london #coronation street

[singeratlarge]

SATURDAY MUSIC VIDEO MATINEE: “Act Naturally”—Singer-songwriter and comedian Johnny Russell came up with the early 60s Bakersfield country music scene—famously with Buck Owens, who hit the big-time after recording Johnny’s song “Act Naturally.” In this video I tell the humorous and surprising “back story” of how that song wound its way through obstacles and objections before becoming a hit for Buck as well as Ringo Starr and The Beatles. It’s a lesson in sticking to your songwriting instincts even if it means breaking a hot date with your girlfriend! 

#JohnnyRussell #BuckOwens #TheBeatles #RingoStarr #ActNaturally #Bakersfield #countrymusic #rockabilly #twang #popmusic #singersongwriter #hotdate #DonRich #Buckaroos #VoniMorrison #johnnyjblair #singeratlarge

#johnny j blair #singer songwriter #music #singer at large #pop rock #san francisco #Johnny Russell #Buck Owens #Beatles #Ringo Starr #Bakersfield #rockabilly #twang #Don Rich #Youtube

[gatheringbones]

[“Tuck: Mm. Well, we have a tradition on this show that if someone self-describes as femme, we ask what femme means to them.

Leah: Ooh, I love that.

Tuck: Yeah, and I’d say you say “femme” on maybe every single page of Care Work alone [Leah laughs], sooo… what does it mean to you?

Leah: Yeah, I would say that femme is a multiverse. It’s always important for me to say like it’s one big, huge, ocean with a lot of different currents in it. It’s a lot of different kinds of queer, and I think there’s ways specifically for me, as I’ve been able to name myself as non-binary as a word in the last 5 or 6 years or so, or more than that even. It’s really taken me back to like, what’s my femme root? And it’s a thing that I think that is maybe not true for every femme who came up in the 90’s, but for me and a lot of people I know it is, I’m like, femme was never “girl”, and it was never “woman”. I wouldn’t have said oh it's a genderqueer identity, other people did, like Cyrée Jarelle Johnson has amazing early writing where he’s like, no femme is always non-binary, it’s always trans, and he makes some really amazing arguments that way.

If you’d asked me in’ 96, is femme genderqueer, I would have been like mmmhhh, but what I did know was that, like my friend Amira made this really beautiful sculpture that just says “femme is for free” and I was like, yay it’s like a portal out of all the ways that being somebody who’s feminized is about pain and oppression and violence. And for me, it was always, again without using that word, a genderqueer identity, it was like, I’m not a girl. I’m not a woman. I kinda itch when I hear those things. And then later on, ironically as there was more organized femme community, I would go to the femme conferences that were happening that were amazing spaces, and that really, I’ve got to say never were like oh, no, no, this is just for the ladies, the cis ladies, but I was like oh there are a lot of femmes out there that are like cis women who really like a 1950’s rockabilly look, and that’s so not me. And I didn’t know it was gender feels, but I was like wow, I feel really ugly next to you. And I feel like I’m trying to do your look, and it’s just not working. And it makes me want to rip my skin off.

So for me, I had an experience in the early 2000’s where there were transmasculine people and femmes. And femmes were not assumed to be trans or non-binary at all. There were a few exceptions, like I had a few friends who were trans women or trans femmes who were partnered with trans guys, but that was pretty rare, and in a lot of kind of AFAB queer community, it was just like there’s trans guys and there’s femmes, and to be femme was to kind of be the girls auxiliary of this setup. There was just so few representations of, I don’t know, trans masculinity of color, you know, and a lot of the models out there that I knew of that I saw around being trans were really binaries. And that wasn’t the fault of any of us, I mean it was the fault of, we were still dealing with the Harry Benjamin system, where it was like, you’ve got to be a guy if you want to get T, and there’s no middle ground. And there was a lot of language then about like, yeah, your job is to kind of be the perfect girlfriend, the perfect support person, and there’s a lot of language of oh you know, transmasculine people are going through this second boyhood, this second teenager-hood, so you’ve gotta really be the girl to make them feel like the boy, and there were just so many ways that binary stuff, sexist stuff, gender stuff, was really not questioned at all in there. And there wasn’t room for me to be like, hey, I’m femme, but I’m not cis and I’m not this kind of perfect girlfriend who my gender is existing to kind of maximize your gender.

And so I think out of that kind of shmear of reality, a lot of femmes I know of different genders have come out about being non-binary or trans, or we’ve figured out different ways to inhabit our genders or explore gender in the past decade, you know, ish, definite in the past like 5 or 6 years, and I think a lot of it has to do with both the enormous work that as femmes we’ve done to create femme community where there��s a multiplicity of femmes speaking to each other, to the work of transfemmes to really unpack the misogyny and sexism in a lot of femme and trans communities. And also things like the beginnings of just harm reduction and openness, and doing away with the Harry Benjamin standard so that people can go and get, can try out microdosing hormones or be like I want this kind of surgery, this kind of gender-affirming care. I don’t just have to kinda get this thing that’s off the rack. I get to kinda design my own gender care. And I think that that’s all this together has created room for all femmes, and all people, but I want to say specifically a lot of femmes who are Generation X or older femmes, to be able to really explore our genders and come out as trans and non-binary and inhabit the world in our bodies and our genders the way we want them to be. Which we did not have room to do or even really think about 15, 20, 30 years ago.

Tuck: Right.

Leah: Yeah, I mean I guess the TLDR is like, femme is for free, and if it’s not about freedom, then it’s not femme. That’s my answer. That’s my story.”]

#femme #leah lakshmi piepzna samarasinha #gender stuff #wasteland radio #Spotify

[souryogurt64]

hello mrs souryogurt i'm thoroughly enjoying your blog today. idk, going through and reading all this interesting stuff about sampling is cool. 👍

Not related to sampling but related to the general convo happening and something I referenced lol—

One of the things that first dialed me in to the fact that Pete’s book was supposed to have a double meaning was the usage of the word “negroes” in it twice. I read it in 2013 and I was only like 14 and was a short-term, casual FOB fan so I wasn’t aware he was biracial. A couple other times he references specifically black people were really noticeable in the prose. 

It really caught me off guard because I figured he wouldn’t just be throwing that word around for no reason, and along with the Freudian stuff being clearly strange kind of kept me reading the book over and over and trying to figure it out. 

One of the times is referencing Charley Pride:  (This is from the dissertation)

There are many more of these little metaphors throughout Gray, and each of them have special meanings. Wentz’s self-insert mentions— in extra-special parentheses— that his girlfriend decided that if he were a book, he’d be “(The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music, 1970, featuring… Charley Pride, ‘the first Negroe Country star’);” Pete Wentz is biracial, with Jamaican heritage, and became more or less the face of the white-dominated genre of pop-punk and emo rock. 

But there’s another one too:

(This is from the book)

“I drop a quarter in the jukebox, summon the ghosts of ducktailed rockabilly cats and tousled-haired teen idols, sweet-voiced doo-wop singers and yelping young Negroes with wild pompadours. They were the kings of their era, the Imperials and the Belmonts, the Diamonds and the Del-Vikings. They were the savages of the decade, pounding the piano, and thumping the upright bass. Pulling pints of whiskey from their back pockets. Groping girls. Having wild times.”

I did talk about the Charley Pride thing obviously but not the Diamonds/Del Vikings one, there was a LOT I could not get into in the dissertation because of the sheer magnitude of it and I only noticed the Diamonds/Del-Vikings thing when it was essentially finished and didn’t know how to work it back in, which was probably a failure on my part haha. I also was struggling to parse out the exact specifics with the Belmonts and Imperials but it’s a similar gist I think

But anyway, the Del-Vikings were known for being a successfully mixed-race doo-wop group when that was really rare cause it was the 50s, and by contrast the Diamonds were super racist and met at a literal minstrel show, and performed a lot of covers by black artists who were being exploited by-and-large by the music industry which is what tangentially connects this back to the conversation happening on yogurt.edu currently 

Anyway for anyone who has not read my 40 page dissertation about Pete’s book no one but me likes (can’t blame you if you haven’t), I argue it has a secret double meaning as satire but is also meant to be partially authentic and he passed it off as bad on purpose to hide the double meaning and a lot of factual elements of the book. So like it could be interpreted as either a mockery /satire of the main character which is supposed to be like how people view him and “emo” guys / rock stars in general, or authentic and genuine and serious depending on how you look at it.

SO ANYWAY, I feel like by including that word twice and also invoking these two wistful and idolizing images of very different types of 50s acts, it’s playing into that double meaning thing by sort of ambiguously casting the narrator as someone who is biracial/black and is pointing out black people he sees because he is biracial/black, or someone who is not that and is not a good person. 

But on the 5D chess level the entire book operates on where the only people who would be able to recognize the entire subtext are either incredibly dedicated to figuring it out or are incredibly knowledgeable about rock music 

There were a lot of other references to bands and some other stuff that I felt like were probably saying something (Lynyrd Skynyrd in particular had some stuff to do with like death and planes and dying young) but I felt like some of it was kind of going over my head a bit and it was already 40 pages haha 

The amount of effort and skill that went into pulling this book off is truly mind boggling to me and I do strongly feel the interpretation I had of the Diamonds/Del-Vikings thing was intentional, but I didn’t want to write it badly and come across as insensitive or offensive, which may have been another failure on my part especially since it would have been awkward to put back in to the finished essay anyway 

[paperbagsandwich]

previous anon again!

Honestly what you said about toyhouse is a mood. I'm the same I thought oo this will be great and useful then I just forget to pot anything or any of my ocs on it!

Its still awesome that you have ocs with different fav foods! I give all my ocs fav foods because it gives a lil bit of extra life to a character! Plus its fun to see what fits!

im a sucker for cottagecore but if you are into a different aesthetic please share (only if you are comfortable to) what it is!!

Gosh i love seeing all those fun and cool monster designs!! They are so lovely and fun and I adore the shapes and how ypu draw the weight on the different styles of anatomy each monster form has!! (I adore big monsters, like i love it when they are gruff and intimidating but they look so soft and cuddly!! Im also a lil bit a fan of body horror monsters...but my top two are werewolves and harpies, harpies that arent just basic human body with wings but like Sophie's dream from howls moving castle like monsters and giant bird body with clawed thumbs on the end of the wings. I have my own werewolf oc and harpy ocs and they just make me v happy.)

Sorry this was so lengthy!!

Yeah, I procrastinate HARD when I have to write information for my characters even though I LOVE sharing stuff about them with my friends.

I don't know why that's the case? Like my brain completely forgets what I had of them. And there's also the fear of not getting to every character/every version of a character.

Plus there's the fact that I don't really have a concrete story about them because I have so many AUs I've come with them!! 😭😭

There's so much HFKSHSKSGS

Yeah, I really love those type of details because it really does bring so much out of a character and it makes them feel real.

I love to give my characters small facts, like Darnell is good at playing the trumpet, Roslyn [and also Darnell] is good at singing, Roslyn was the one that got Darnell to be affectionate because in the beginning of their relationship, he wasn't really a touching type, he was more of action, but now he loves to hug and kiss his girlfriend and being extra sappy!!

Things like that is what I get too attached to with my characters!!! 😭😭💕💕💕💕

My type of aesthetic is more of time period. Mostly things from 50s-80s. Those type of stuff are very pleasing because the style and color, they're just so fun looking and there's so much you can do with a setting that takes place there.

Like I made a Rockabilly AU about monsters vs Greasers and I had so much fun writing that with my friends and I should really get back to that.

I also love the Western aesthetic too. It's that Texan in me, I can not help it... plus you can do so much with that concept... for adding fucking monsters in it, bapy, WWWOOOOO--

Also, AAAAHHH, THANK YOU!!!

But yey, I LOVE big hulking monsters so much, they're so much fun to draw!!!

And, AAAAAAAAAAHHH, I LOVE HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE SO MUCH!!! It inspired Darnell's bird form design!!!

and while the other two doodles of him aren't really harpies [I called it his centaur form], I really do love the vibe of harpies too!!!

Also, I would LOVE to hear about your werewolf and harpy OCs if that's okay with you, of course!!!

#Anon #Nonfat ask #Nonfat Art #new tag I guess #You're my life support Anon I love these questions!!!!

[csny]

Does anyone remember the rockabilly girlfriend post where she cheers up her sad boyfriend or something please god someone please

[t-tex-edwards]

THE STASH DAUBER

RANTS OF AN UNRECONSTRUCTED MUSIC GEEK WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 12, 2022

https://stashdauber.blogspot.com/2022/01/the-nervebreakers-face-up-to-reality.html

The Nervebreakers' "Face Up to Reality"

[This time it's personal. My second most anticipated release of the millennium (after the Peter Laughner box) is here. I'm not going to review it, because I wrote the liner notes, which are reproduced in full below, including the part that wouldn't fit on the jacket. To say these guys are important to me would be an understatement. If my drummer from college hadn't seen them open for the Sex Pistols, I might not have moved from New York to Texas. Between 1978 and 1981, I saw them more times than any other band besides the Juke Jumpers. Mike Haskins remains my guitar hero, and Barry Kooda my human being hero. Bob Childress once surprised me with a message on the RadioShack corporate net after I'd written something about them online. My wife and I once made a pilgrimage to Austin to see Tex Edwards play a bar gig. And I'm proud to say that Carl Giesecke once played sleighbells on "I Wanna Be Your Dog" with Stoogeaphilia. But enough about me. I've got to go listen to this again.

]Think of this record as a follow-up that took a while to emerge.

It was 1980, 40 years ago as I write this, when the Nervebreakers -- who’d bossed the nascent Dallas punk scene from its inception, opened for every punk/”new wave” touring act that passed through Big D (Ramones, Sex Pistols, Clash, Police, Boomtown Rats), and made the pages of Rolling Stone via the image of guitarist Barry Kooda with a fish in his mouth onstage at the Pistols show – recorded their sole long player, We Want Everything!, which then took 14 years to make it onto vinyl.

The Nervebreakers coalesced in 1975 when Kooda, a junior college theater major back from Army service in Korea, managed to insinuate himself into the “arty rock band” Mr. Nervous Breakdown, formed by his high school best friend, guitarist Mike Haskins, with fellow record store employee Thom “Tex” Edwards. Haskins and Edwards bonded over their mutual appreciation for the Raspberries’ combination of tuneful songcraft and rock crunch. Drummer Carl Giesecke was a moonlighting symphony percussionist, while bassist Bob Childress, who’d joined after the Ramones show, held the distinction of having seen both the Stooges and the New York Dolls every night for a week at Richard’s in Atlanta while attending Georgia Tech.

Onstage, they had a formidable presence, honed over years of four-set gigs, with frontman Edwards draped rakishly over the mic stand, Kooda in his Army helmet and pistol belt, Haskins looking like Donnie Osmond’s axe-slinging twin, Childress bouncing around like the Uberfan who got to join his favorite band, and Giesecke pounding out a solid pulse. Their repertoire included covers as diverse as We Five’s “You Were On My Mind,” George Jones’ “The Race Is On,” and the Troggs’ “Strange Movies.” More to the point, they penned potent originals: “Hijack the Radio,” “Girls Girls Girls Girls Girls,” “My Girlfriend Is a Rock.” Haskins and Edwards were the main writers, with occasional contributions from Kooda, but drummer Giesecke claims credit for their best known song.

When the sessions for We Want Everything! were complete, Haskins and Childress left to form Bag O’ Wire, while the Nervebreakers recruited replacements for an East Coast tour, after which the band folded. Edwards and Kooda followed different musical directions, while Giesecke toured with Roky Erickson (whom the Nervebreakers had backed in 1979).

Fast forward to 2008, when the Nervebreakers reconvened in Haskins’ home studio to record some songs they’d never gotten around to documenting back when. The energy and excitement of the band in its heyday were still in ample supply, along with tunefulness, crunch, and sardonic wit. Highlights include the title track’s snaky rifferama, the leg-twitching rockabilly of “Just Yawn,” the splenetic snarl of “Don’t Wanna Be Used,” and the sprightly punk-country of “I Don’t Wanna Hold Your Hand.” Kooda penned the ennui anthem “Wake Me Up,” and co-wrote the dance-craze theme “They Were Doing the Pogo.” The closing triptych of “It’s Obvious,” “Breaking Down,” and “I’d Rather Die” provides a rousing conclusion to a rockin’ set of tunes that’s long overdue, but right on time.

POSTED BY STASHDAUBER AT 1:30 PM

[bunnybananasims]

Donald Tillman

A kind and gentle soul, Donald is what every mother and father wish their child would be. Even at a young age, he’s already imagining forming a loving home with his girlfriend Titania. Years later, his dream came true.

Zodiac sign: Pisces Favorites: Pink, Porcini Risotto, Rockabilly music Lifetime wish: Bottomless Nectar Cellar Traits: Easily Impressed, Excitable, Green Thumb, Neat, Nurturing, Party Animal

#The Sims 3 #The Sims #TS3 #Sims 3 #Roaring Heights #Donald Tillman #TS3 portraits #Sims 3 portraits #moodboard #sims moodboard #character moodboard #bunnybananasims

[rogersandclarke]

does anyone remember the rockabilly girlfriend post! can anyone help us find it!

[eddieschick]

I wish I was a hot rockabilly alternative rock goth in the 80s and early 90s. And I wish I was a fictional character in stranger things I would be eddies girlfriend.

#dark egirls fashion #eddie munson #stranger things

[ashtrayfloors]

There is so much going on, but all my real-writing energy is going elsewhere, so I’ll do what I always do when I want to get it down, fast. I’ll make a list:

1. The last day of May was my Inferno-versary. 19 years ago that day was the first time I ever saw my beloved W/IFS live, and it’s no lie to say that I wouldn’t be who I am today had that never happened. So I dressed up: put silver glitter on my eyelids, a fake flower in my hair.

2. The first of June, me and P. took the kiddos to the beach in Kenosha, then for burgers & fries & rootbeer floats at The Spot, a drive-in restaurant which has been there since 1945. I flirted with a gorgeous guy who looked like a bad boy from an ‘80s movie, that beautiful & stoned & dangerous type. We drove home on Highway 32. The roadsides were lush with purple, pink, and white flowers. In downtown Racine, I spotted a hot fat femme, they had pink hair and pink leopard-print hot pants. And oh, happy Pride; I am just a midwestern queer who loves femmes and bad boys, who loves roadside flowers and rootbeer floats.

3. Speaking of midwestern queers—I’ve been getting to know more of my neighbors, and more of them are LGBTQ+ than I’d even previously realized. The folks across the street are a Black lesbian couple—I’ve talked to them both separately but never knew enough about them to realize they were a couple. This is the first year they’ve hung a Pride flag and it makes me wish I could, too, but since we rent I’m wary of it. Last week when we were grilling our Memphis BBQ ribs, L. (one-half of said couple) came by. We were listening to Otis Redding and other Stax Records artists; she said she heard the music and decided to come say hi, and then said the food smelled so good she was jealous. We had plenty of extra, so we made up two plates of ribs and sides for her to take home for herself and her wife. The other neighbor I’ve gotten to know is an elderly gay man. He’s in his eighties and uses a walker, and needs help with his garbage and recycling bins sometimes. A couple weeks ago, the neighbor who normally takes his trash and recycling out approached me, and asked if I could do it that week while they were out of town. Of course I said yes. When I went to do it, I took him a slice of the strawberry galette I’d made. He invited me in, and made us tea, and we sat and drank it and talked while listening to Billie Holiday, and he is just the most wonderful person. I want to know all his stories.

3.5. I did have a sorta shitty encounter with a different neighbor. He was walking by one evening when P. and C. and I were out in the front yard. C. was doing his usual stream-of-consciousness talk, and said something about his boyfriend. Now, he’s five; he calls girls he’s friends with his girlfriends and boys he’s friends with his boyfriends. He absolutely does not understand platonic vs. romantic relationships, nor should he at this age. But anyway, there he was, saying: “And I was with my boyfriend, Luke,” and the neighbor said: “Your boyfriend? Nope, nope, not allowed. I’ve got my eye on you.” And I wanted to be like hey, excuse me, what the fuck, do not place your homophobic opinions on my fucking five year old son who is just innocently talking about his friend, but my neighbor had kept walking so I couldn’t even say anything. I had a talk with C. later, to let him know it’s okay with me and his dad if he has a boyfriend when he’s older, and to not listen to our neighbor and he was sorta confused—fortunately, I don’t think he even really registered what our neighbor was saying or what it meant.

4. Other queer/Pride related stuff: I’ve been dressing however the hell I want on any given day, not worrying about what gender I ‘read’ as, not worrying about being ‘too old.’ Because if you can’t dress how you want during Pride month, when can you? So yeah, I’ve been rocking the short shorts, the crop tops, the big earrings and pseudo-rockabilly hairdos. I’ve been getting my flirt on with gorgeous queer babes, both online and off. I watched the online OFMD panel discussion on June 2. I heard from T. They apologized for using the wrong pronouns when introducing me at the last Vista 59 event. Turns out they had read an old bio of mine, when I was still using she/her pronouns, and didn’t realize I no longer did; also turns out I was using the wrong pronouns for him. (T. uses they/he pronouns.) And they asked me to be one of the featured performers at a Pride Month poetry event they’re hosting on the last day of June. My dad sent me a Pride Month thing from the Peninsula Pulse, and I realized that’s his way of telling me he knows I’m queer and he’s okay with it, all these years later.

5. Other things: P. and I celebrated our anniversary weeks with good food and good drink and great sex. As much as I may like to flirt with others, or fantasize about them, P.’s my person, and I feel lucky every day that we found each other and we’re still together. I’ve been spending a lot of time in the garden. As of this week, we’ve finally had some rain, and the things that were getting dried and dead are greening up again. The other week, I attended a Students Against Gun Violence rally that was being held downtown. I’ve been going to the library a lot. I found out one of my poems was selected for the Wall Poems project, so at some point later this year a beautiful mural with an excerpt from one of my poems is going up on a wall at the old Horlick Malted Milk factory. We canceled cable and switched Internet providers; because of the Affordable Connectivity program, our Internet will now be completely free, and between that and canceling cable, I’ll be saving like $100+ a month. I’ve been reading a lot, and writing so so so much, and I know I mentioned it in my last entry but I can’t tell you how good it is to write fiction again. I’ve been so focused on poetry, with a side of non-fiction prose, for so long, that I’d forgotten how fun and freeing fiction can be. There have been some hard and sad things mixed in, too, of course—there always are. But I don’t feel like writing about them right now, not here. So for now, I’ll leave it at that.

#ashtrayfloors #dear livejournal #i don't feel like tagging this all obsessively like i normally do #so #read at yr own risk