— पांच हजार नौ सौ ग्यारह —
I hung out with Danielle yesterday, for several hours. It was really nice, especially since, to my shocked when I looked this up yesterday, we hadn't hung out properly since my Birth Week—May 2,
six months ago! Now, we did see each other, very briefly, on September 6—four months was still a rather long time; that was two months
ago now—at the
Waterfront Park Grand Opening Celebration. I even got
a photo of Danielle when we met up with her, Rylee, and Rylee's (I think) boyfriend Brett at the new public restroom down there. But, Shobhit and I got gone down there earlier, and they had arrived a couple hours later, and by the time we finally saw them, Shobhit and I were already headed back home. We said hi and goodbye in such short order that I didn't even give Danielle a Social Review point for it; and I only even registered just yesterday that as a result Danielle had
no presence on the Summer 2025 Social Review—and Gabriel
did, with
three points! (It remains to be seen whether he will on the Fall Social Review; the way things are going, he probably won't.)
My original plan for yesterday, when I took the day off to burn through PTO, was to have got drinks at The French Guys Bakery and then go to a movie, both with Laney. But, once I discovered the movie would not be playing at any AMC Theater and is only opening at a SIFF Cinema theater a week later, Laney took the opportunity to free up one of her weekdays and asked to cancel. So, relatively late on Saturday night, thinking about how it had been ages since I really hung out with Danielle, I took a shot in the dark and texted Danielle to see whether she was working on Monday. And she wasn't! She quite readily said she'd be interested in coming to Seattle and go to The French Guys with me. And that made me happy.
We never set a time. I had the whole day with no other plans, so I figured she could just come on her own time. I even texted her at 10:45 a.m. to basically say as much. And then, I just waited. She didn't even get back to me until 12:22, and she called me, clearly still in bed, sounding very sleepy. She told me she'd had a "very insomnicac night" and had only just woken up, even though she had hoped to come up a couple of hours earlier. At first I was afraid she was also going to cancel, but she said she was still interested in coming and would text me when she was on her way. She did that at around 1:30, and she arrived just after 2:00. I had moved our car to street parking right before texting her the first time, and so I went downstairs to let her in through our parking garage door so she could park in our spot.
We walked straight to The French Guys from there, a maybe 20-minute walk—the place is a solid mile from my place, at the north end of Broadway, actually just off Broadway, on Roy, right across the street from what used to be the Harvard Exit Theater and is now the Mexican Consulate of Seattle. Danielle recently got her temporary residence in Mexico, and she had done it in that location. Had she known we were going right there, she said, she'd have brought the paper from her car and posed for a photo in front of it. She did later get
a great photo of a woman walking into the door with a Day of the Dead skeleton, though, so that's maybe a close second. We were sitting in the balcony bar seating upstairs and she used her zoom to get that shot from our seats.
We spent a lot of time catching up. She has a new car, a hybrid that she replaced her janky but beloved van named "Felicia" about a year ago, so I must have seen it before, but I couldn't remember it. I was surprised to see her arrive in this new car, which she actually flew to Las Vegas to pick up in September of last year, and then she drove it home. As we walked to The French Guys, she regaled me with this whole adventure, which included using Google to find the shortest route from there to Seattle, not realizing that it meant no hotels to speak of the entire way—but, she said, the mountains she drove through, through the night, with bright stars in areas with no light pollution, were apparently really beautiful.
We caught up on some stuff with the girls; it sounds like Morgan is a challenge as always and Rylee had also been a challenge briefly but is basically cool again (for now? hopefully for good—but, unlike Morgan and her lifelong mental challenges, anything with Rylee sounded like pretty typical teenager stuff). I caught her up on a lot of stuff in my life, particularly travel plans that have been finalized for 2026, and also the exciting acting news with Shobhit. In fact, the short play he's in this month has its opening night this Friday, and Alexia and I already have tickets to see it.
I ordered a hot chocolate and Danielle had a coffee. I had brought my backpack so I could smuggle in three shots of rum. I had intended to pour two shots into my drink, and offer a shot to Danielle if she wanted one. She was all over it, and even asked to split the third shot, so we both had a shot and a half. We would have to have arrived there at roughly 2:30, and we stayed there until they closed at 4:00. It was fun to finally actually hang out inside that place, which has a very cool atmosphere and I kind of love that balcony seating.
But then we walked back, and Danielle was up for hanging out a while longer. She readily accepted another cocktail, so I made myself a Zevia Cherry Cola with rum; and she took Zevia Lemon Lime with vodka and a dash of mango lemonade. Shobhit was home, though he would be leaving for rehearsal a bit over an hour later. But that was probably the only reason he did not have a drink with us.
He still chatted with us plenty, though, and talked a lot with Danielle about education and what kinds of options Rylee might have. He's really focused on pushing for higher quality education, but Danielle is pretty adamant about not putting any pressure on Rylee, who is currently a Junior in high school, at all. Given their family history of no one yet going to and completing college right out of high school (both Gail and Danielle went back to school later in adulthood), Danielle's just happy Rylee is interested in going straight to college at all. I totally understand that.
— पांच हजार नौ सौ ग्यारह —
— पांच हजार नौ सौ ग्यारह —
And now I have to tell you the part of our conversation that deeply embarrassed me. Danielle mentioned at one point that Rylee and a friend of hers had been going through Danielle's CDs, and they found one that I had made. I'm paraphrasing here because I can't remember verbatim, but apparently Rylee had asked Danielle after finding this: "What's this CD with a song on it called 'Fuck Me In the Ass'?"
Oh. My god. As soon as Danielle said that, I about died, of an even mixture of laughter and embarrassment.
This CD was something I made as a Christmas gift for friends in 2008, and it was the last time I made any collection of songs, which I had done yearly between 1990 and 2001 prior to that. Between 1990 and 1995, I created cassette "albums" where I called myself "Emenemenem"; this was five albums and then a best-of collection. I did another five albums, under the name "Fruitcake," between 1996 and 2000, with a best-of collection, functionally a "best-of volume 2," in 2001.
I have screen shots of
the inlay card uploaded to Flickr, of this collection featuring tracks from
all of the aforementioned years, and a few "unreleased tracks," and even a couple new tracks I recorded in 2008. For this collection, I renamed myself yet again, to Machu Picchu, something I used to think would be my "stage name" going forward—never mind that, presumably, there would be some trademark issue there were I ever try to use that professionally in any way. (Side note: I have never stopped putting "Fruitcake Enterprises" on my artistic creations, which would be why I still went with fruitcakeenterprises.com for the domain name of the website on which you are reading this very blog.) Once upon a time, I had ambitions to record more collections of songs under the name Machu Picchu, but after putting that final collection together in 2008, I never did go back to that again. I just don't have the singing talent to justify it, and I get far more out of the time I spent going to movies and reviewing them—again, for
another feed on this very blog, that being the actual landing page for FruitcakeEnterprises.com.
Anyway, a look at
the liner notes for this 2008 collection, which I had called Machu Picchu /
I Enjoy Being Gay, reveals that I had originally recorded "Fuck Me In the Ass" (in my defense, this fits the theme of the album title!) around 2005. This was track 27
out of 32 in the collection. Incidentally, track 28 is then my 1999 track "Cock So Good," a parody of Amii Stewart's disco song "Knock On Wood," and I always felt that was one of my better parodies. It should be noted, also, that when I recorded "Fuck Me In the Ass" in 2005(ish), that was only one year after I had lost my virginity, and I had written
the lyrics in 2003—a year and a half
before I lost my virginity, and at a time I had no inkling of getting a boyfriend any time soon. You can probably image I was pretty horny at the time though. (I am now too, for the record.)
Rylee, who is now 17 years old, just thought this was pretty funny. I clearly wasn't thinking about any long-term future implications of giving this CD as a gift to friends who were also parents. I mean, shit, Rylee was just
born in 2008—she'd have been about two months old that Christmas. Morgan turned 4 that year.
I even posted a
quite detailed LiveJournal entry on Christmas Day in 2008, with further notes on every single track of the
I Enjoy Being Gay collection. In the notes on "Fuck Me In the Ass" here, I reveal that I did later confirm the recording was done in 2003—May 8, in fact; the first and only track I ever recorded with the intention of an all-original collection of songs called
I Enjoy Being Gay. I gave up on the project when I could not get suitable sound quality out of the audio recording program I was using on my computer at the time. I'd probably have a much easier time with such issues now, but whatever. Amusingly enough, the rest of the notes on this track, in that post, indicate that I was actually pretty happy with the final result of this recording, looking back on it five years later. Once upon a time I had audio links to all the recordings, but they don't work anymore. I do have them loaded to my Apple Music account, which means I can probably share it to other Apple users. The tracks won't play on my phone right now, though, so I may have to try and re-sync them when I get home.
I hadn't thought about any of this in years and years. It certainly never occurred to me that one day a 17-year-old child of one of my friends would suddenly be like, "What's this CD with a song called 'Fuck Me In the Ass'?" I'm not often easily embarrassed, but with this one I'm pretty sure I went beet red as soon as that question was posed.
Anyway, Shobhit went to his rehearsal, and because Shobhit and I already had plans to make a pizza for the two of us at home, I just went with Danielle over to Bombay Burger so she could get something to eat as she was hungry. I felt kind of bad that I couldn't offer her food, but I had no idea she'd be hanging out until dinner time. To be fair, I don't think she did either. She was really hoping she'd get a better night's sleep last night. I hope she did too! And maybe we can just move on as though any conversations with teens about ass fucking never happened.
— पांच हजार नौ सौ ग्यारह —
[posted 12:32pm]
