March 1, 1997, Saturday

Thing to say today: God is the unknown athropomorphized.

I went to Comet a whole hour early and chatted a long time about office politics here at our place of employment. It was lots of fun. Work is a whole new sphere for gossip that I've been completely ignoring. Unlike most spheres of gossip, though, I can't really talk much about it. My web pages are hosted here, after all.

The Webmaster at Comet told me today that Dan Reitman had sent a complaining e-mail. Here's the text of it:

From: Daniel R. Reitman [dreitman@teleport.com] To: webmaster@comet.net Cc: dreitman@teleport.com; rap@virginia.edu Subject: Complaint Date: Wednesday, February 26, 1997 12:53 AM I have reason to believe that one of your users, account gus@spies.com, has created a forged home page in my name, containing defamatory statements, at www.geocities.com/Broadway/5067/. I have informed Geocities of this occurrence. Evidence of the identity of the culprit can be obtained by reading atlas.comet.net/~bigfun/c-e.htm, atlas.comet.net/~bigfun/me/, and atlas/comet/net/~gus. Unfortunately, this is a repeat offense. In August 1996, the offender created a similar page at the University of Virginia.  Richard A Patterson, rap@virginia.edu, handled this prior incident. Please take appropriate action.  Thank you very much. Daniel R. Reitman

I was sad to see that the Geocities page had been taken down. I'd liked that page; it was hysterically funny. Whoever made it is a fucking genius. An evil, immature genius forever stuck in some primitive Freudian phase, but a genius nonetheless. I'd especially liked the bedroom-scene animated GIF of Dan and his one-time girlfriend going at it. Maybe some day I'll track that down and put it in here somewhere. Anyway, here is my response:

To: dreitman@teleport.com Subject: enshrined i have NO IDEA who created that geocities web page and am very sorry that anyone would do such a dastardly deed. i discovered it using altavista (and i have a backup copy somewhere: it's only about 100 K). it was probably created by my malevolent friends (sara poiron comes to mind), some of whom have considerably more HTML knowledge than me. they tried to call you to invite you out numerous times, to no avail. while it is true that you did figure in big fun culture as a sort of third-hand icon (an all expense paid vacation to big fun was planned for you) things were too disorganized to result in much coming from it. but you are enshrined for all eternity in the big fun glossary, which gets 12000 hits a month. you should be proud to be so a part of punk.

Sure enough, in February the Big Fun Glossary had 12,000 hits. That's 20% more than the usual figure of 10,000 that it received in each month starting in November. I do not know why the figure jumped so dramatically this month. Maybe all those new AOL people are finally managing to get something other than a busy signal!

I went off to take a nap at about 6pm and didn't wake up until almost 1am, when I had a call from Deya. She'd been to a hip-hop concert and now she was drinking gin and juice. I talked some with Elizabeth and John in his room and then learned that both Brazilian Girls were out in front. I ran downstairs and hailed them, and we sat in the living room, hanging out. We were joined by Elizabeth and John, who want to paint Cecelia tomorrow. They offered to give her vino and/or tussin in exchange for her posing for them. Housemate Penley also wants to join in on the "Cecelia painting party" tomorrow. I too may do some painting for the first time in a long time.

We hung out for a long time, joined occasionally by others. We drank from three bottles of bourbon that had been left anomalously unfinished with most of an inch of the good stuff in each bottle...who can comprehend the drinking habits of housemate John? Elizabeth and Cecelia had a long interesting discussion about the goth "style" both here and in Brazil. I noticed that Cecelia used the word "visual" to mean "dress style." Cecelia contended that punk is a movement whereas goth is a style. Or something like that.

The cultures are separated by a chasm. They watch different teevee shows, listen to different music, live in separate neighborhoods and hold different jobs.

We also discussed racism in Charlottesville. I hadn't been aware of this, but Elizabeth told me that up until rather recently (and continuing on unofficially long since laws against such things were passed) there had been racial zoning in the city. And, from what I've seen, this seems to indeed be the case. The neighborhoods near the University are almost strictly white, as are all the neighborhoods to the north and west, but at 10th Street the demographics change dramatically and almost everyone from there east to the Downtown Mall and for several blocks south is black. The neighborhood south of the Mall and in a wide salient along 5th Street for many blocks has a mostly black population. North of the mall and east starting with Avon Street the demographics turn almost completely white again and continues that way to the city limits. To the north the white population is mostly yuppy, whereas to the East it is mostly working-class whites. Being a southern town, there is apparently a long legacy of racism, even in the behaviours of whites regarded as liberal and progressive. A friend of mine in bozART, for example, once told me that her 16 year old daughter found it necessary to break up with a black boyfriend due to the ridicule of her mostly middle class white friends. Tensions between blacks and whites rise and fall based mostly on incidents such as the one where housemates John and Ches were attacked by black juvenile delinquents on Wertland or in parking lot fights instigated by drunken rednecks (or, when there were a couple of them, nazi skinheads). All of my friends take pains to manifest symptoms of racial tolerance (by awkwardly avoiding the mention of an individual's race when a trans-racial incident occurs, for example), but I have almost no black friends. The cultures are separated by a chasm. They watch different teevee shows, listen to different music, live in separate neighborhoods and hold different jobs. In Charlottesville, there are no black punks and no black goths and those few white raver guys who dress "urban" (black) or the Frat boys who drive around playing hip hop are routinely dismissed as posers or "whiggers." Cecelia says that an entirely different situation exists in Brazil, where black goths, punks and heshers are common, as are inter-racial relationships. There is some class-stratification along racial lines, but for the most part integration is viewed as natural condition.

Later in the conversation, when it was just me, Elizabeth and the Brazilian Girls, I got those adults present stoned with my almost thoroughly depeleted pot reserves. Once Elizabeth had gone to bed, the Brazilian Girls and I discussed different English and Portuguese accents. From my demonstrations of each, the girls said they dislike a Chicago accent but like a Canadian accent. They gave me examples of Curitiba (south Brazil) and northern Brazilian accents, and I have to say there is a distinct difference very apparent to me.

Cecelia also told me the not entirely pleasant details of menstruation that I'd never been told by any girl before.

The Brazilian Girls spared me an account of what exactly I did last night, saying "You don't want to know" when I said I couldn't recall much of it. They did occasionally drop hints of what had happened, however.

Leticia called her parents at about 5 in the morning to tell them to come pick her and Cecelia up. The Brazilian Girls' parents may not have like getting such a call at such an hour, but they are adamant that no one drive their daughters home ever since they heard of the boy Jesse's wreck on Carter's Mountain.

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