I was reared in the Methodist Church and joined the church at fourteen. At fifteen, during a lesson on the Last Supper, I asked why Jesus and the Apostles were drinking wine when this was against church doctrine. My teacher said, "It was just grape juice." This should have made sense to me since this was what we were offered at communion, but I wasn't entirely satisfied and asked another teacher, who told me that the water was bad in those days and they had to drink wine instead. This led to more thinking. About that time I also discovered hypocrisy in the adult world, and, not being sufficiently sophisticated to separate the church from its parishioners, lost my faith.

However, I continued to attend church services with my mother until I left home, as my loss of faith, like sex, was clearly a matter far too important to be discussed with my parents. (Now, forty-five years later, I sit around with my cousins trying to piece together less presentable parts of the family history that our parents did their best to conceal from us.)

As an undergraduate, I tried to regain my faith and attended church services of most of the available Christian denominations as well as non-sectarian study and prayer groups. Nothing worked.

I read voraciously, and what I got out of that was a clear understanding that while a good deal of good had been accomplished in the name of religion, so had an enormous amount of evil. For example, the millions of people all over the world slaughtered in the name of various gods, not to mention the countless more merely tortured until they saw the light. A fascinating irony here is that many of these atrocities seem to have occurred in conflicts between members of different sects of the same religion. For example, Christians seem to have killed more other Christians than they have members of other religions. And the Moslems sure are fond of warring against each other, just as Hindu sects squabble. Granted, political issues are also sometimes involved, but still, it wasn't a Moslem who killed Ghandi...or Indira Ghandi.

I also just looked around me, and what I saw was Christians grabbing every opportunity to pass legislation forcing the rules of their particular sect on all members of society, most particularly me. I was also broadminded enough to see that this behavior was by no means confined to Christians. Like that Israeli Orthodox rabbi who said, "This legislation does not prohibit the goyim from eating pork; all we're doing is prohibiting the sale of pork." Or more recently the Taliban's destruction of those splendid Buddhist cliff carvings.

Consequently, it would be fair to describe me as rather negative on organized religion.

And yet, when I lost my faith, I did not, alas, lose my 800 pound gorilla of a superego. So I still believe very strongly in sin and guilt. One of my favorite pastimes is reviewing my sins instead of sleeping, typically focusing on a decade, the sixties being an especially rich source, but there's plenty in every decade.

So do pray for me, you prayerful ones. I am very happy for you that you can. I have enough guilt to supply an entire congregation and yet I cannot pray in good conscience to a God I cannot honestly say I know exists.

But I do try to act rightly. Until November before last my mother could still walk and on my monthly visits I'd check her out of the nursing home and take her back to her house. During my visit, we'd run around seeing her friends and eating at her favorite places. And of course I'd harry her to get herself ready to go to church on Sundays. She was sufficiently deaf and senile that most of the service went right past her, but she still enjoyed going, and it was the least I could do. At least until that Sunday July before last when the minister spoke at length on a recent church conference he'd attended, a conference focusing on what the church might do to reverse the dwindling of its numbers, how the church might broaden its appeal. He ended this discussion by mentioning that, oh yes, there had been a vote on the ordination of homosexual ministry and he had given it the stout No it deserved, as he would on anything involving homos.

I thought, of course, of doing stuff like walking out or at least asking him afterwards whether he really thought Jesus discriminated against particular classes of sinners. But Mother chose to live in that town, and I needed all of them as parts of my support system for her. So I said nothing.

After that, though, I stopped harrying her to get ready for church, and she was sufficiently gaga that she never mentioned church again to me for the rest of her life.

She had been giving that church at first hundreds and later thousands of dollars per annum for thirty years, and I had continued her contributions at the same level when I started handling her finances. But after that day, I diverted those contributions to two churches willing to help everyone without regard to sexual persuasion: The Metropolitan Community Church and Glide Memorial Church, the latter, ironically enough, a Methodist church, unless the Methodists have kicked them out for being nice to the wrong people.

I keep thinking I'll go to services at one of these churches. I don't think that God would hold against me my abandonment of the First Methodist Church of Garrison, Texas; but on the other hand, since I know that the MCC and Glide would welcome me, I am beginning to feel that should He exist, He would expect me to give them a try.

Then again, considering the example His Christians, Confucians, Hindus, Moslems, Jews, and all the others have set, I may just try harder to do more good individually without participating in a religion.

My sister and I were recently back in the Piney Woods of East Texas for Mother's funeral. On US highway 59 on the northern outskirts of Nacogdoches, there's a nondescript warehousy-looking building, its finest feature being a very substantial, very tall flagpole. My sharp-eyed sister spotted a problem, though. Proudly displayed at the top was a gigantic Confederate flag and beneath that a middle-sized Texas flag. No US flag. The kind of place where you could go sit on sacks of ammonium nitrate and discuss problems with minorities. Makes me gag to remember that I volunteered for the Army in the early sixties to preserve these people's liberty.

This outrage reminded me of a spectacular quotation I recently ran across. Max Liebermann, on a fine Spring morning in 1933, as he looked out his apartment window at the Sturmabteilung parading down Unter den Linden, said:

"Ich kann nicht so viel fressen wie ich kotzen möchte."

This was translated in the Threepenny Review as "I can't eat enough to vomit as much as I would like." But this seems a bit roundabout and glosses over the difference between essen and fressen, the former reserved for humans and the latter for animals. How about "I can't gobble as much as I would like to vomit."

But this loses the emphasis on the sheer quantity of vomit (at least up to the tops of the jackboots) that one would want to spew forth. So I submit from my friend Jim (whose Turkish, incidentally, is even better than his German owing to an indiscretion of his youth) "There is no way I could ever eat enough to produce the vomit the sight required."

Oh well. This is practice for an increasingly likely month of May in Amsterdam. I need a break, and picking on a minor language somehow seems just right. What with the number of repetitions it takes to pound anything into my memory, I'm clearly not going to develop a large vocabulary, but I have high hopes of getting an acceptable pronunciation.

And yes, when the Aliens land and can speak only Dutch, won't you be happy that I'll be able to save us. The grateful populace will strew my path with rose petals as they acclaim me President for Life, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, and Protector of the Unilingual.

I really liked my former doctor and was much upset when he decided to leave town. However, my new doctor is proving even better. In the first place, she's just as delightful to talk to and, it turns out, is a Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market maven like me. I look for her every Saturday now at Mrs. Hoffman's booth.

But she's more than delightful. She's really on top of things. At my first appointment with her last month she signed my request for a handicap parking placard but sent me off for some more blood work, speculating that perhaps we could get me walking better so that I didn't need the placard, a possibility that in my despair I had not even considered.

Well, she's so overbooked that her next available appointment was not until next Tuesday, but yesterday afternoon I got a call from this pleasant guy who identified himself as her HIV pharmacist. They'd gone over my blood work and decided that my crushing fatigue is the result of a dire shortage of testosterone. I have just picked it up and shall smear myself with it and crouch in the shrubbery, pawing the ground and snorting softly while I await the appropriate passer-by.

Frankly, the testosterone experience has been far less dramatic than I projected. My lurking in the shrubbery was quite a lot premature, and all I got out of that was a few scratches and a slight sniffle.

I do have more energy now after a few days on it. And the last few nights I have had really vivid "action" dreams. Not "that" kind of action, but rather wild physical activity. E.g., in one of them I was brachiating in trees, like Tarzan but fully clothed. First we dream...

I entertained myself a couple of days ago by reading the medical literature enclosed with the testosterone gel, and to answer everyone's first question, the application site is the torso. Actually, they've done a good bit of testing with this stuff. In one test, "the couples engaged in daily 15-minute sessions of vigorous skin-to-skin contact so that the female partners gained maximum exposure to the application sites." (I get this image of the couples surrounded by white-smocked lab technicians with clipboards and stopwatches rating the vigor.) Unfortunately, all the female partners showed at least twice their baseline serum testosterone concentrations afterwards, which is not good at all. Further testing revealed that wearing a tee shirt to cover the application site would "completely prevent transfer", which is highly recommended unless you want your wives and/or girlfriends to gradually become more masculine.

And yes, the literature does mention increased libido as one of the effects. But seriously, there are layers of irony here since I have just now reached an age at which I can comfortably view no libido as a blessing. I mean, what would I do with a libido if I developed one again? Join a gay wrestling club to get some of that "vigorous skin-to-skin contact"? Actually, I suppose I'd become very popular at the wrestling club as all the guys gradually noticed that that the longer the match went on, the somehow...strangely...better they'd feel.

No, no, this wouldn't work at all because then there'd be the spectacle of those out of my weight class pleading, "Couldn't we at least hold hands?"

There's a new breakthrough on the testosterone front: zits. We're not talking blackheads here; I mean deep, exquisitely tender zits. Real, hormonal zits. They didn't tell me I'd be going through puberty again at sixty!

And the dreams! Dear Lord. Last night I went to bed kind of expecting something like Tarzan's Extended Adventures with the Fertility Goddess...or Whoever. And what did I get? Technicolor footage of my ripping great hunks of flesh off the bones of an indeterminate large vertebrate and gobbling them voraciously. I would like to say that this creature had been cooked, but I fear it was just greatly increased hand strength as I think we were both running. Oh please don't tell the Jungians, or worse yet, the Freudians.

And yes, my appetite, which has never been lacking, is now greater than it's been in oh, say, three decades.

Luckily, the pain in my feet and legs when I've walked half a block is still present, and this acts to some degree to keep all this new energy under control. However, I have advance word from my pharmacist that my doctor, whom I see tomorrow, is going to take me off the med they think responsible for this pain. So I may be running the streets by the weekend.

In the meantime, I remain thankful that I have, at least, been spared a resurgence of libido. Although, I did notice during this morning's news that President Bush is actually a very hot guy, even though he's a bit young for me.

The reference, for those who have forgot their nineteenth-century American literature, is to Hawthorne's short story "Rappaccini's Daughter," which is about a woman whose father had, in an attempt to protect her, made her poisonous to other creatures.

One of my straight male friends expressed concern after reading my recent account of the effects of my current medical treatment, most particularly the little fantasy riff in which I speculated that should I experience a return of libido I might track down and join a gay wrestling club and then expose innocent members of this club to a "transfer" of testosterone by failing to wear a tee shirt.

This made me realize that others might have the same concerns, so I want to reassure everyone that I am acutely aware I am Rappaccini's son and that I have taken every precaution to avoid transmitting anything to anyone.

Most particularly, after I learned that I was HIV+ in 1987 and before I stopped having sex, I started taking the Ultimate Precaution. My first criterion in selecting sex partners was the question, "Are you HIV+?" I never had sex (nor even wrestled, for that matter) with anyone who did not answer Yes to that question. I refused those who said they did not know, as well as that monster who waffled upon learning that his initial No had disqualified him. To further reassure everyone, it has been years now since I have had physical contact more extensive than a clean, dry handshake with anyone.

I failed to mention in my recent discussions of testosterone gel the significant danger that testosterone presents to the fetus, but I must assure you that I am very careful to wash the application hand thoroughly with soap and water after I have smeared the stuff on my torso. Actually, I go ahead and wash both hands just to be sure.

I described a study in which the female partners' serum testosterone levels more than doubled after extensive daily "vigorous skin-to-skin contact" that maximized their exposure to the application site. What I did not mention was that subsequent to the exposure period the female partners' testosterone levels returned to normal, and that no lasting effects were noted.

During my last appointment with my doctor, I asked her about the possible harm I might cause one of my hypothetical wrestling partners by failing to wear a tee shirt. She laughed, and then responded that the only way she could imagine a male being harmed by the stuff would be if he took one of the packets and, seeking a new high, ate or injected the contents.

Resumption of humor follows.

I've just reached a culinary summit so high that I need supplementary oxygen.

Then again, that lightheadedness may just be another manifestation of my increasing madness. You be the judge:

1. Place a perfect, vine ripened Brandywine tomato 4 1/2 to 5 inches in diameter into the small clear glass bowl that came with your Sunbeam Mixmaster, which I'm sure you're taking good care of now that there'll be no more of them since Sunbeam has been conglomerated, spun off, shredded, and its value applied to the golden parachutes.

2. Fill the bowl to within 3/4 inch of the top with filtered and lightly chlorinated Hetch Hetchy water or a reasonable substitute.

3. Remove the tomato, put salad plates beneath and atop the bowl, place this assembly in the microwave, and punch in 8 minutes.

4. Peel a medium Haas or Gwen avocado (or if you must, a Reed) and cut it in small bites into a soup bowl.

5. When the water is boiling vigorously (less than 8 minutes unless you have a really wimpy microwave), remove the plate and bowl assembly by the still cool lower plate and place it on the counter. Gently lower the tomato into the boiling water and recover the bowl. Let stand thirty seconds. Remove the tomato (I prefer using a slotted spoon, but Julia, who has told us to just get used to burning ourselves in the kitchen, would probably snatch it out with her bare hands), re-cover the Sunbeam bowl, skin the tomato, and chop it into bites atop the avocado.

6. Drizzle just the right amounts of balsamic vinegar, chipotle chile oil, and salt into the bowl and mix well.

7. Enjoy.

8. Use the still-hot water in the Sunbeam bowl to rinse the soup bowl and flatware before placing them in the dishwasher. You re-covered the Sunbeam bowl to keep the water hotter longer.

You ask, "Why the microwave?"

My rental unit is heated by an antique gravity flow gas furnace, which I just love. Having no fan, it requires only enough electricity to operate the thermostat. Its only downside is that since it lacks that noisy and intrusive fan, the floor is always cold. Not a problem for those who don't need to run around barefoot.

Well, actually, it has another downside. It has a non-adjustable pilot light that is a wide tongue of flame... a big wide tongue of flame that is during warm weather a grotesque waste of energy and, OK, PG&E bill dollars. But I had solved this problem by turning the pilot off during the summer months when the baseline allotment is miniscule. And yes, during our fog season in July and August, there were sometimes days when I needed to relight the pilot, but I would go for weeks and weeks at a time without relighting it.

Compulsive behavior, actually, and in any case I had to give it up, being informed that it was harmful to the furnace.

So now I have a gas bills that prove beyond doubt that a good deal of precious natural gas is being squandered in the basement. I really did perform the ludicrous microwave experiment described above. I had to find some way to hysterically conserve gas to compensate, even for a day, for all that senseless waste.

I'm currently reading with great difficulty Stephen Pinker's newest, Words and Rules. My intellectual capacity is actually no longer quite up to the challenge, but even partial understanding is great fun. Fun, of course, is relative. I can understand that there are persons for whom three hundred copiously footnoted, closely packed pages explicating current theory on the formation of English regular vs. irregular verbs would be less than entertaining. Those persons might not obtain the aha experience I enjoyed upon reading: "English phonology doesn't allow a long vowel to precede a consonant cluster at the end of a syllable unless all the consonants are produced with the tip of the tongue". Pinker throws this in for the benefit of those who might have questioned his earlier statement that "toask", unlike "toast," is not a possible word in English. But he's far from all work and no play, as the book is larded with delightful lines that keep me reading despite only partial understanding. E.g. "Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien; beloved from coast to coast for mangling the two national languages with equal proficiency...."

And now, the pop quiz: When was "oink" first used in print as a verb? Pinker would, of course, have got his answer from the newest release of the OED, which I don't have. Ooooh. I see that I've at least partly given myself away, so I might as well give the answer now. It's later than you'd think. It's 1969, this being one of the few exceptions I've seen to the general rule that word usages are always far older than I'd have thought possible.

And oh yes, for those who wish to cut to the chase, Pinker's thesis, for which he uses those three hundred pages to make a seemingly airtight case, is that when you need a past tense verb, you first check your memory for an irregular form. These have to be memorized since there are no good rules for the generation of irregular past tense forms. If you do not get a hit in memory, then you apply the past tense generation rule to get the correct form. All this, of course, takes place in a fraction of a second.

My previous reading of any note was the last half of Wallace Stegner's Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, subtitled John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. The first half, that dealing with Powell's running of the Colorado River, I had read a couple of years ago and for some reason set the book aside, leaving Stegner's treatment of the remainder of this astonishing man's life for later.

It seems that I postponed a treat. Powell is just fascinating, and Stegner writes entertainingly. Case in point: On page 263, which I selected more or less at random, are two eminently quotable lines. Stegner is discussing James Constantine Pilling, the man who, devoted to Powell, devoted twenty years to the compilation of the first bibliography of American Indian tribes by linguistic affinity, a "vast tome...which grew as Pilling's sight weakened." Another of Powell's associates said Pilling "reminded him of George Hurst, who in Tucson was bitten on the privates by a scorpion, which fell dead."

I am more and more frequently nowadays brought up short by the discovery of the error of my ways. Case in point: since September 11, I have been reading voraciously in an attempt to avoid thinking about, and more importantly to overlay in my memory, the horrific images I saw on television immediately after the terrorist attacks.

But what did I turn to? Well, the catch of the day consisted of those books I'd bought but not yet got around to reading, and I've made a serious dent in the stack. Unfortunately, the great bulk of them were either nonfiction detailing various outrages upon society or novels written by persons who wished to share their depression with me. Hardly upbeat material.

But then yesterday my eye alit on a slim paperback volume titled Frisco Pigeon Mambo by C.D. Payne. It was a continual delight, and I cannot too highly recommend it to persons capable of some suspension of disbelief who'd like a little break from bombings, vanishing civil liberties, and anthrax.

Just suppose that in a laboratory in Berkeley there is a group of pigeons employed as laboratory animals. They were all born in captivity and think of themselves as human, doing things like falling madly in love with lab technicians, being unaware that they can fly, and exhibiting other humanoid behavior. In their cages are the Drag-o-Matic, which allows them to smoke as much as they like, and the sherry tube, at which they can refresh themselves whenever they want.

Then suppose that this group of alcoholic nicotine addicts is seized by an animal rights activist, taken to San Francisco, and liberated.

Their adventures will take your mind off all that other stuff.

And now, in response to popular demand, if one correspondent's mere admission of unfamiliarity with a tale be construed as popular demand, The Tale of the Mouas.

Over the past year I have found myself buying more and more stuff from the Mouas at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, as their quality is just outstanding. They're a little standoffish, even faced with (or perhaps especially faced with) a shopper who chats up his vendors. As a socially-challenged buddy remarked after I'd taken him to the FPFM, "You don't give anybody a chance to give you attitude. You just swarm all over 'em."

But the Mouas yielded to the swarming during the boiled peanut season, and they've become much more outgoing. And since we're practically friends now, it occurred to me to wonder about their ethnicity. I mean, to me, "Moua" does not ring an ethnic bell like, say, "Cohen", "Schickelgruber," or "Cabeza de Vaca." They look sort of generic Pacific area dweller, but not Hawaiian, not "round" enough to be Samoan, and certainly not Chinese or Japanese or Korean or Thai or Vietnamese...just tantalizingly unidentifiable Asian.

So I plugged "Moua" into Google (an Internet search engine). Of the eighty gazillion hits, a few seemed to be out there somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, but overwhelmingly the hits were on Vietnamese text, which I can't read even though I can recognize it. But, see, these folks don't look Vietnamese.

So I swallowed my pride last Saturday and asked one of them. He said they were Vietnamese. I told him about doing the search and getting all the Vietnamese hits but being confused because they didn't look Vietnamese to me. He allowed himself a small smile, and said, "Actually, we're Hmong." I think I deserve a discount for being able to tell the difference, but I'm terribly embarrassed for not thinking of the Hmong as I certainly knew but had temporarily forgot that large numbers of them immigrated here after The War and that they tended to go into farming.

Good grief. My succulent vendor at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market just sent me Dr. Barad's astonishing Stapeliad site.

I have never seen such horticultural obscenity. Satan himself designed these flowers. Even though they smell like rotting meat to better attract their preferred pollinators, they don't need a scent. Any small flying creature that caught a glimpse of one of these out of the corner(s) of its eye(s) would immediately buzz right into the middle of it and wallow orgasticly until it fell to the ground spent. It was all I could do to keep from licking the screen.

www.cactus-mall.freeserve.co.uk/stapelia/picturef.html

This link is to the Stapelia, but there are equal or greater obscenities in many of the other genera. Do go ahead and click on them to blow them up full size. We're talking one sick doctor here, eyes dilated as he zooms in for another close-up.

Well folks, pride has taken a pratfall. I suppose if I'd thought about it I could have predicted yesterday evening's occurrence, as all my life I've heard people talk about experiencing this sort of thing without it ever dawning on me that it could happen here.

But first, as is my wont, a little background. I was expecting the arrival of my ex Bob, the boyfriend featured in "Gay at Oracle", as we have recently been seeing each other (in a non-Biblical sense, that part being taken care of by his current boyfriend) and I had made reservations for dinner at JohnFrank, this trendy new place occupying the triangular building at the westsouthwest corner of Church and Market and 14th.

That building and I go way back. One afternoon in the summer of 1974, when we were all young and beautiful and ripped for days, I got a frantic call from a friend telling me to draw on something tight and meet him at The Truck Stop, which was the name of the twenty-four hour gay restaurant occupying the building at that time. It seems that the bartenders at the attached bar, appropriately enough called The Rear End, had simultaneously tendered their resignations, and there was an immediate need for some people to take that night's shift.

Scab work suited me, and after closing time I accepted Management's offer of work a couple of nights a week. Tips were lousy, as this was far from a hot bar, but it was fairly entertaining and I learned a few things. Like don't ever cross drag queens, as wearing those uncomfortable shoes makes them really sharp tongued and they will just flay you alive.

At the end of the summer, when I told Management I was going to return to Texas, neglecting to mention that I was on the faculty at a community college, they offered me a full-time job. Even now, I wonder whether I made the right decision to return to Midland College for a final year. Who knows? If I had stayed, I might have parlayed that position into a job at one of the really hot bars and amassed enough of a down payment to get into the real estate boom that was just beginning. I could have been rich, rich, rich. Of course I'd probably also have got AIDS really early and been long since dead, so maybe it was just as well that I declined.

Flash forward twenty-seven years.

JohnFrank makes better use of the property than the various restaurants that had occupied it in the interim. The kitchen and storage areas have been shifted back into the area where the bar was, leaving a large, open isosceles triangle for the restaurant seating. The top (damn, I've forgot the term from geometry) of the triangle is at Church Street, and the windows face 14th Street and Market Street. This intersection is jumping. The J Church, with its massive, sleek Breda cars, rumbles right past after a brief stop at Market Street. The F Market, which by now exclusively runs cute little restored historic streetcars from all over the world, clangs along Market Street and stops at Church. Muni Metro is underground and has escalators coming up for inbound and outbound lines on either side of Market Street. The corner is also a major bus transfer point, and numerous popular bars and restaurants are within a half-block of the intersection, so the streets are thronged day and night. It's hopping, just hopping. Among the restaurants are the see-and-be-seen Mecca, the ever-popular Chow, Miyabi sushi, the flagship Just Desserts, etc. and of course, the best of the lot, JohnFrank.

And you sit there in serene luxury watching this 3-D movie all around you as top-of-the-food-chain delicacies are served you by impeccable waitpersons, low-key charming and sleek.

But I've got ahead of myself. I was cleaning up and getting dressed in anticipation of Bob's arrival. From what I'd heard about the place, it was extremely comfortable but not at all formal, so a tie would be out of place. Then again, I didn't feel quite right about the baggy levis and tee shirt attire that I'd been wearing exclusively since my return from Amsterdam last May. So I went to my selection of Dockers, which was what I had been wearing to Texas for the past few years, and grabbed the nicest-looking pair.

I couldn't button the waist.

I went through the entire damn closet and found two pairs that I could just barely button, but the discomfort after a few seconds made it clear that there was no way I could get through a dinner wearing them. How could this have happened?

And then I realized that I've been slowing down all year, and after I learned in the summer that my walking problem was pretty much incurable, willpower to continue exercise failed and despair set in. My appetite remained as voracious as ever. So it was a simple combination of gluttony and lipodystrophy in the absence of that calorie-burning exercise. I can wear the baggy levis because they fit lower on the waist and allow the belly to expand freely above them.

Whadda we do now, Lieutenant? Well, for supper I'm having seven sugar snap peas from the Mouas blanched in distilled water. That and a tablespoon of rice.

Of course for lunch I had one of May's fabulous hot pastrami sandwiches and then, upon my return home, still not satisfied, a chocolate milkshake done in the blender with a pint of Dreyer's French Vanilla ice cream, a couple of good slugs of my chocolate sauce, an abstemious little dribble of lowfat milk, and a banana. But I topped it off with a Pravachol. Note: The following January, the owners of JohnFrank decided that there was simply not enough local demand to support a fine restaurant, so they redecorated the place, packed in lots more tables, renamed it to Home, started serving a menu of down-home American food, and cut the prices in half. The atmosphere is entirely changed, of course, but the views are the same and the food is very good. So good that at the new prices it's a bargain like Chow. The down side is that it's now as busy as Chow.

I forwarded to a number of folks the entertaining list of Australian Christmas mishaps sent me by a traitorous Aussie friend. The list concluded with the item, "8 Australians cracked their skulls after passing out while throwing up in the toilet." However, what sparked the most interest in my readers, as evidenced by their getting back to me on it, was the item, "3 Australians die each year testing if a 9V battery works on their tongue."

Frankly, I was a little disappointed, as not a single reader admitted to having performed this experiment himself. I say "himself" because no woman would engage in such, to put the nicest spin on it, guy-type behavior. I had rather expected many of my readers to be, or at least to have been in their youths, a bit more, well, guy-like. Of course I've always made a effort to be as guy-like as possible, and this has led me into adventures which I now view with some regret, although not nearly as much regret as that with which I viewed them immediately afterwards and all too often, during. Like, for example, that encounter as a four-year-old with the repeatedly forbidden open Christmas tree light socket.

Not to mention others in subsequent years too numerous to detail.

So, for those wanting more information on this highly charged subject, the first time I licked a battery was also the last time I'll lick a battery. I didn't even lose consciousness although this experiment may well have been the source, rather than AIDS, of my brain damage. Then again, it may be just a symptom.

At any rate, I can make the following recommendation: For persons (males of all ages) who wish to mess around with batteries, I suggest starting with one whose discharge has been announced by your smoke detector. It's not really completely discharged, but most guys find that little taste of the lash sufficient.

My Christmas this year was anything but traditional. I had planned to do a trip to southern California...one of my "freeform road adventures" in which I simply throw some clothes in the trunk, set out driving, and let the vacation take whatever form occurs, but I kept getting invitations locally that I didn't want to refuse and these finally just closed the vacation window. The strange part was that I had, in anticipation of my trip, earlier refused a Christmas Day invitation and then had not got another, so I spent most of my Christmas Day writing material for NoeHill. Very non-traditional.

However, in mid-morning I had a brilliant idea, and followed through by grabbing an armload of my jellies and driving around to all the shops that I frequent to see if they were open. For those that were, I took jars of jelly in for everyone who was working.

Actually, of all the places I drove past (and I didn't get that far out of the neighborhood), the only ones that were open were the two corner groceries that I use (where in both cases it was the owner himself who was working because in both cases they were fairly new and struggling to make a go of it), the 24-hour 7-11 down at 18th and Noe, and the gas station at 17th and Castro (where in both cases the lowliest employee was working because the long-term owner was so consumed with greed that he wouldn't shut down for an instant but would not even consider working himself to give one of his miserable employees a holiday).

I got so much fun out of this that on Boxing Day, I again ventured laden with jelly and hit my bookstore, my gym (which my doctor has convinced me that I really must return to because of yet another problem too tedious to get into), my video store, and A.G. Ferrari.

The surprise and delight registered by all these workers was a great joy to me, and to a significant degree relieved the depression that typically accompanies the holiday season.

I look forward to 2002. It's bound to be better than 2001.