Hump!

My grandfather -- my mother's father -- passed away at the end of February. That's it for me: no more grandfathers. Nina and I flew out to San Francisco to help out with family things and to attend the funeral. I took Friday off work. On the plane, we played trivia with my sister on the little seatback computer, but then we just watched a lot of movies. Do the movie people know how much of their audience is using the movie to wait out something terrible? (Air travel; a visit with relatives; somebody dying) I watched This Is The End and laughed out loud at the part where Danny McBride yells that he's going to jizz everywhere. I also watched Hobbit! Part 2, which was a real snooze.

San Francisco is weird. Why do people want to live there? (I mean, I know why, but.) True, I guess I only visit in winter, when the city is damp and cold and the doorways and windows of the buildings are dark. But even in the summertime the place still has to seem a bit like a dingy bodega, dim around the edges like a David Fincher movie playing 24/7. It seems like a good place for hippies or junkies to run aground. So I guess I don't know what the draw is for young rich people. (I mean, I do.) I like riding the bus at night when we're there, though, because it's dirty and everybody on it looks like they're on the way to art school. Like being inside a Love and Rockets comic.

My mom and her brothers had arranged a little get-together and my grandparents' palatial apartment on Russian Hill overlooking the city. Like all old people, my grandparents have a piano and a bunch of dried plants and empty birdcages. We set out pretzels and things, and then I suggested that Nina and I go buy beers. It was a little weird, buying Pacifico for my family, but almost every adult likes beer and I wanted to get out of the house for a few minutes. It was easier after people started drinking. One of my uncles' ex-girlfriends talked to us about being a ham radio operator; his current girlfriend talked to us about being a park ranger in Yellowstone. My grandmother didn't seem to know who I was, but I didn't try very hard to make myself known to her, either. We left around 10 o'clock. It started raining hard on the way to Randy's house. We took the bus and then the muni and then Randy picked us up on Noriega St., pulling up alongside us in the dark on Noriega St. in his red Honda Civic or whatever it is.

The funeral was the next morning at the First Unitarian Church in Cathedral Hill. My mom and her brothers gave little speeches they'd prepared. My mom repeated his last words: "Take care, and have fun." My step-cousins from Mendocino spoke gratefully of how my grandfather had given a lot of his time to help them get into grad school, even though they weren't blood relatives. Some color on a guy I didn't know very well. Afterwards there was a small reception in an adjacent room. I stuffed my face with sandwiches and talked to some of my grandfather's co-workers from the engineering firm he founded. "The last time I saw him," one of them said, "was at the office Christmas party a few years ago. He wasn't working there any more but he wanted to stop by and say a few words to the company. He tried to tell them how important it was to support veterans returning from war and how important the VA system is, but his voice was so quiet that I don't think anyone could understand him." Another woman, upon hearing that I'm a professional computer guy, wanted to know what I thought of the wave of intense gentrification crashing against the Bay Area. (This was right around the time a protester had barfed on the Yahoo bus.) Did I support the behavior of these companies and their employees, she wanted to know. For the record, babies, I do not.

After the reception, Nina and I walked south down Franklin St. and eventually west to Mission Dolores Park. We stopped at a coffee shop in the Haight and drank cappucinos while leafing through a newspaper called Bay Woof, which was all about having a dog in San Francisco. Dog massage, dog therapists, dog psychics. Crazy! That evening, we had dinner with Randy and Danica at Pancho Villa in the Mission -- the only place in San Francisco where anyone seemed poor or unhappy -- and stood on line in front of the Roxie to see Hump!, the traveling amateur pornography film festival curated by Dan Savage. The performers are truly amateurs, and so there was a lot of process in place to protect their identities and privacy, and there's only one copy of each piece of footage. Dan Savage gave a somewhat sanctimonious explanation of what the theater staff would do to any cell phones they saw removed from their holsters. (They would take them away and break them!) Then they started the show. The movies with straight people were alright, I guess, but they were for the most part unimaginative and self-involved. I think my favorite short of the evening was "Tuff Titties," about a couple of auto mechanics that get it on in a junkyard, but it was pretty hard not to like the stop-motion animation short about centaur fucking, which was called "Mythical Proportions."

The movies were over at around midnight. We got back in the car and drove to San Mateo, where we got frozen yogurt from a flourescently lit place called Nubi in a mostly-shuttered strip mall. You squirt out the flavor you want from a row of casks and levers on the wall of the place, and then they put whatever toppings you want on it. We drove home and ate our froyos in front of the TV in Randy and Danica's apartment, watching Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. I fell asleep for most of it, but I managed to keep my eyes open for the part where Pee-Wee meets Large Marge: "And when they finally pulled the driver's body from the twisted, burning wreck, it looked like... this!" I've been covering my eyes for that bit since I was little, but this time I looked. It's bad, but it's not that bad.