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furniture fatigue
Saturday, October 10 1998
Kim and I went to Ocean Beach in the morning so Kim could get a professional haircut at a seedy punk place called The Electric Chair (it has a neon chair hanging in the window). Meanwhile I was off searching for a blue box in which to mail a letter and then buying some CDs at a record store called The Cow. (I hadn't bought any CDs for at least a year.) The two CDs I got were Nirvana's Incesticide and an obscure Sebadoh album called The Freed Weed. The latter had 40 songs on it, most of them acoustic low fi. It's actually fairly good, except for the first four songs. I didn't know this yet, though; I was sipping coffee, reading Kuhn and waiting for Kim at an outdoor café called Java Jungle. It's a colourful place built in an alley off Newport Street very near the beach. Kim got in on the CD buying mood and picked up a copy of Deconstruction, that one time Dave Navarro & Eric Avery rock & roll überproject.
In the afternoon Kim and I went out to Adams Avenue to visit antique stores in hopes of getting furniture for our new place in Ocean Beach (where we'll be moving on November 12th). On the way, though, we were sidetracked by a yard sale. It was being held by a tasteful British ex-patriot dude (like Rory, a writer of sorts, unlike Rory, in his mid-50s and not yet deported). I'm not especially interested in furniture or interior decoration. I use it, I appreciate it, it comes to be the setting for my life. But it's nothing I plan, it's nothing I think about. I'm a guy, and plywood and concrete blocks are usually adequate for me, if I think about furniture even that much. But Kim is a rather different animal, which (in this case) was a good thing. She negotiated with the elegant British dude and managed to secure a mid-November shipment of a whole suite of quality furniture and plants to our new place in Ocean Beach. The cost: $350.
But Kim wasn't done; she wanted to check out the Adams Avenue antique stores (as originally planned) if only to delight in the amount of money she'd just saved us. I was thoroughly saturated with furniture by now, so I elected to stay with Sophie in the car as Kim went into the last several places. She thought I was being grumpy about it but I wasn't. I could see the need for her to be this way, but I just didn't want to participate. It used to be the same for me back in Charlottesville when Jessika and Deya dragged me around to all their favourite places.
We continued to Hillcrest, intent on hitting the Bombay Express, but Kim was sidetracked by yet more antique stores. I went instead into a record store to look around. Amazingly, the place had almost no CDs in it; it had racks and racks of vinyl, much of it ancient disco that will never be translated to CD. I suppose it catered mostly to the club D.J. market. I was struck by an old Marvin Gaye album cover featuring all kinds of simultaneous natural disasters: floods, lightning, earthquakes, flying saucers and exploding cities (complete with a flying Statue of Liberty) but no Y2K difficulties.
Further down University Avenue we came upon a bunch of things stacked up on the sidewalk. An outgoing Phil Gininiesque punk rock dude (complete with wallet chain) was selling off all his worldly possessions so he could move back to the midwest to tend to his dying mother. There was a super-modern desk and matching bookshelf that caught our eye, and soon enough we'd negotiated to buy both for $65. Both came apart into little pieces and it all easily fit into the back of the Volvo. "Nice Volvo," said the punk rock dude, adding, "I have two of 'em." He was full of weird little disconnected comments of this kind. "Is she your girlfriend?" he asked me of Kim at one point. When I said yes, he said, "I wish I had a girlfriend so I could put on her clothes. It feels so good to put on a pair of panties!" He was trying to fuck with us, assuming we were some kind of ultra-normal upper middle class yuppie couple. When he finally admitted this, I shrugged and said, "You don't know the half of it." He ended up inviting us back tomorrow to smoke a joint with him and check out a bed he's selling.
Watching Marshall Law on the tube tonight, I was yet again bemused to see a portrayal of a "generic web browser" used to illustrate something in the drama happening on "the Internet." Instead of the familiar animated "e" or "N" in the upper right hand corner of the screen was a mysterious symbol whose identity I never quite resolved.
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