The Dawn of June

I have been working like a madman. June has arrived and with it, gorgeous weather. Living in the East Bay, the warm temperatures are warmer and the cooler temperatures are cooler. San Francisco stays consistently cool in the sixties most of the year with a couple spells of warmer weather. I was running last night at work, very little wind and it was a gorgeous clear night. The temperature and weather reminded me of when I used to live in Hawaii.

June is always a busy month. Most cities around the country celebrate Gay Pride and in San Francisco, it is a month long affair. Films are one of my passions and San Francisco hosts one of the biggest GLBT film festivals on the planet. The last weekend of the month is the big weekend with the parade and City Hall Plaza shut down with multiple music stages, acts, demonstrations, and more. Being gay in the Bay Area is a relatively easy experience compared with living elsewhere in the world. That being said, a lot of gay people here in the Bay Area shun Pride or have the been there, done that attitude. I love Gay Pride weekend. It is one of the few weekends that I just let go and party. Hundreds of thousands of people attend Pride and most of my straight friends join in as well. I run into such a wide cross section of people that I have known in many different capacities over my ten years of living here. The closest thing you can compare San Francisco Gay Pride to is Mardi Gras in Sydney. It is an all out mix of people having a good time together and the City goes all out. You cannot put a price on living in a city where diversity and differences are celebrated rather than berated.

I have been in a Bad Four state (as I like to call it) with my Netflix movies. Four movies in hand and no motivation to see any of them. You have two options when this occurs. Send a couple back or wait a month or so until one of them starts to sound interesting. I took the latter option and finally tackled a couple in the past few days. One of them, The Road to Guantanamo, is a docudrama about three British youths who are detained by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, interrogated, and then taken to Cuba. (The trio originally traveled to Pakistan, so one of them could be married. They made a fateful decision to take a tour to Afghanistan.) The film is brutal, shocking, and horrifying. My gut feeling and reaction that I take from the film is the Marie Antoinette story. We (American citizens) are the fat, spoiled queens sipping our Peets coffee, eating the finest meals, driving our SUVs, and ignoring the brutality and reality of U.S. policy that is keeping us the best fed hogs at the trough. There are over five hundred prisoners left at the detention facility in Cuba. They have been held without trial and without access to legal counsel for years and little hope on the horizon of them ever being given a chance to stand up and tell their stories. It is hard for me to proudly wave an American flag and sing patriotic songs about the freedoms afforded by the United States while we violate both the fourteenth amendment and due process of law so arrogantly and flagrantly. The values upon which we claim to hold dear and upon which our society was founded mean nothing if we do not abide by them. The conclusion of the book Animal Farm also springs to mind. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. Is the argument of the Bush Administration truly that because these people are not American citizens, they are not entitled to a trial? Luckily for the subjects of this film, they were British citizens and the British government lobbied successfully for their release. I pray that there will be a swift end to the detention of these subjects and a return to their native countries. Some of these subjects have been in U.S. custody since 2001. The Al Queda that they might have been associated with has ceased to exist and an entirely new organization is in place. I would encourage you all to see this film and see for yourself what our tax dollars are paying for.

I am celebrating a milestone at work on the 6th. After nine months of training and a year of probation, I will finally be a real (aka it is really hard to fire you unless you majorly fuck up) dispatcher. Some people from work are headed to an A's game this week to celebrate the end of our shift. I have not been to a baseball game in years and I could care less about actually paying attention to the game. It will be fun to hang with people outside of work though.

Hope you are all doing well and enjoying the beginning of a beautiful summer. Cuidate.