Affluent Canyons 2

On Christmas Eve, I decided to see if there was a shortcut of a hike to Tahquitz Canyon along the wash from Tahquitz Creek.



After startling hundreds of birds on various phone lines...



...and surprising a hobo couple who were having sex in the bushes...



...I came across a new, gated development called "The Canyons"



...complete with artful landscaping around its large walls.



The place gave me the creeps for some reason, and I continued toward Tahquitz Canyon...



...but after being frightened by what sounded like a rattlesnake along the pathway...



...I headed back towards the Indian Canyons and their affluent developments for safety.

Have Yourself a Gay Little Christmas

The incessant catchphrase among all things design and architectural in Palm Springs is "Mid-Century Modern," and the house above in the mostly gay Warm Sands neighborhood is a perfect example.



The Neptune statue in front with the skimpy Santa outfit, however, is what you'd call more Late-Century Gay. Have a merry christmas, everyone.

We Paved Paradise

As regular readers know, I'm not a big fan of car culture, so I was dreading the 500-mile drive from San Francisco to Palm Springs on Saturday.



If there was a high-speed train to Los Angeles and then another train to Palm Springs, I would be one of its first and happiest travelers, but we don't live in that world right now.



Still, the skies and the countryside were so beautiful Saturday morning as we drove through the Livermore valley...



...and onto Interstate 5, that I uttered the foolish words, "This is going to be a really beautiful drive."



Unfortunately, we picked the wrong day for travel where three million SUVs packed with families were going to visit grandma...



...and at one point the traffic stopped altogether for an hour or so after a minor fender bender between a couple of vehicles.



What was even worse is that the San Joaquin Valley feels like being on a poisoned planet, with the air getting grungier and more polluted the further south you travel. The Grapevine pass above was invisible until we were a couple of miles away from it.



The air in the San Joaquin Valley is so bad that the Los Angeles basin looked like a pristine natural environment in comparison.



That is, until one runs into the Interstate 5 traffic around Magic Mountain where the traffic crawls in a stop-and-start manner for miles at a time.



Though the 210 highway wasn't much quicker when we turned east, the combination of mountains, light and a nearly full moon was fairly breathtaking.



Plus, you get to drive through towns with strange names like Azusa.



We're all complicit in this natural disaster...



...and I only pray that we change course during my lifetime.

Winter Solstice at The Eagle

The Eagle bar at 12th and Harrison has been a gay leather bar with a large backyard since the 1970s.



Even when I was of an age where it was fun hanging out at bars looking for possible love, friendship and adventure, the Eagle was never my favorite though I always did love their outdoor fire pit which reminded me of the fire pit I grew up with at a Taco Bell in Isla Vista near UC Santa Barbara.



The Eagle always struck me as a bit too "leather" and mannered and brutal to be a place where I wanted to be a familiar face, but when I received an email out of the ether last week to join them for a "Winter Solstice" party on the evening of December 21st with a live band, I figured why not.



The band included one of the owners of the bar along with six or seven other young male musicians who were having a blast playing together with electronic pulsers, drums, and various electronic guitars. They were being listened to by a small crowd of old gay leather queens, old gay hippies, and young boyfriends and girlfriends of members of the band.



Outside in the patio, there were about 30 young gays accompanied by their fag hag friends, and then closer to the firepit was a whole other subscrulture who were quite amazing. They were extremely butch lesbians dressed in black leather vests with cropped haircuts who looked exactly like the guys who used to hang out in this bar's backyard in the 1970s. Plus, they were joined by a couple of female-to-male transgenders which really gave the mix a distinct flavor of confusion, plus a few slutty, fat females who were caressing these butch women/men in extremely suggestive fashion.



I walked back home to the Civic Center thanking the gods that I was not only living in such a cool, strange place as San Francisco, but that we were at a moment in time where the witches in different tribes were starting to feel comfortable with each other.