Gay people are pretty cool. Gay guys are all preppy and neat, and they like to help straight slobs get on national TV and dress nicer and decorate their homes better so that they can then bag some straight poon tang. And lesbians are all hot with the making out with other gay women and making porn movies so that we can all enjoy their gayness. Wicked sweet.

Anyway, since I was heading to San Fran and Santa Rosa, California, for the Colonel's wedding, I thought it would be the perfect time to actually "go gay" and see how the other side lives (I was apparently an honorary gay back when the gang and I toured Provincetown, but I wasn't truly ready for the gay-experience then... It just kind of snuck up on me and gayly pinched me on the butt while I was looking the other gay way). It took a while for me to actually get gay; as you'll see I still look like a slob for the first day's pictures. So without any further ado, this is my gay San Fran story.

Day 1: Thursday, September 15th
I had made all of the plans and reservations that I thought I'd need months before my actual travel week. I then called up Carl and Robot Pedro and made them promise not to kill each other until after I got back (unfortunately that little bit of reverse psychology didn't really take). So, on Thursday, September 15th, 2005, I got up at the shitty hour of 3:30AM in order to leave my house by 4:30 to be at the airport in time for my 5:40 flight. Thank God I didn't have to drive into Atlanta for this trip. Instead I booked everything out of the tiny Athens, GA airport that is conveniently cheaper and even more conveniently NOT located in Hell's Kitchen (aka Atlanta). The plane I took to Charlotte, NC for my connection to SF was a dinky little prop plane like what those Hackett brothers on Wings flew -- only, unfortunately, there was no Lowell there making stupid/witty comments to make us laugh before flying away into the black-as-my-soul early morning sky... Just wondering, but how does a man go from Lowell on Wings, to Oscar nominee in Sideways, to uber-villain in Spider-Man 3? For that matter, how the hell does someone like Antonio the cab driver (also on Wings) make it big as the loveable-but-still-want-to-punch-him-in-the-face title character on TV's Monk? Life is strange.

All in all it was a decent little flight. I only started screaming "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!" three or four minutes before landing in Charlotte. That's way below normal. The plane from Charlotte to San Fran was another story all together though. Yeah, you could actually spread your legs out a bit on that jumbo jet and get some Mile-High Club action going on if you had a whore with you, but the in-flight movie was The Sisterhood of the Fat and Blood-Stained Pants, and there was no food on the flight at all... Well, that's not entirely true. You could apparently bribe the stewardess into giving you a can of Pringles (for six fucking dollars!) or a large Kit-Kat bar (for the ungodly price of $7!), but unfortunately I was already broke from booking my flight and didn't pass the application for the loan needed for sustenance. Seriously, I fucking paid over $350 for my round-trip ticket (relatively cheap for a coast to coast trip, but still ass-rapingly expensive for a man of such limited budgets such as I [pr0n and evil-robot traps are expensive and gut my paycheck every month before I even get it!]), and the airline can't afford to give me a shitty $5 meal? I remember when you'd at least get a really crappy Budget Gourmet frozen dinner for a 4 hour flight. Those things are like $1.50 at the supermarket, and if you buy them in bulk they've gotta be less than a dollar each. Are you telling me that it was that $1 per meal per customer per flight that was breaking your back, Mr. Airline? Is that why you filed for bankruptcy? Or maybe it was the fact that you need 73 flight attendants on each goddamn plane! That still boggles my mind. You have maybe a one-to-one ratio of flight attendants to passengers, but they're still pissed off when you call them to refill your ounce and a half soda that you unwisely sucked down thinking that the iceberg in the glass was just an optical illusion and that you had more than a gulp of liquid refreshment before getting your nose crushed by ice.

So anyway, I landed late in the morning at the old SFO airport, and was immediately wowed by the gayness of the giant letters that peppered the hill on the other side of the freeway. It said something like "Welcome to South San Francisco! Home of the Anal Plug!" in big, bold, white letters that looked like they were made of giant squares of wet toilet paper. It was like the Hollywood sign's retarded and broken cousin. San Fran is so totally teh gey... No wonder Seanbaby moved here.

I got my dinky little car at the airport and then hightailed it to the City on the Bay itself to start getting gay. The car was really compact and tiny, but holy goddamn did it move! I was whipping along traffic almost as fast as those suicidal motorcyclists that plague the town (I couldn't believe it when I was told that they were legally allowed to shoot down the road between two lanes of car traffic. It took everything within my power to NOT kick open the passenger door right before they zoomed up to me). The first really sucky part of SF that I encountered was the highway system. The 101 is nice and fast and flowing all the way down by the airport, but once it reaches the city itself, it turns into a regular city street. That completely sucks! It took me like 40 minutes from where I hit my first traffic light on the 101 till I got to the Golden Gate (what's that, like 5 miles?)... With absolutely no traffic, just horribly timed traffic lights. And I even blew past about half of the reds that I encountered.

What you have to understand though is that I absolutely abhor inner-city driving. I even hate driving through downtown Atlanta when all I ever have to suffer there is maybe two blocks of actual city driving from any highway off-ramp (and highways in Atlanta actually ARE highways. What with the no stoplights and an 80MPH speed limit). I don't think I had a point beyond "driving inside city limits annoys me". But what annoys me even more is taking the wrong exit in an unfamiliar town and being forced to loop around 15 city blocks to get back to where I needed to be... Like what happened to me that very morning. I took the Highway 1 exit thinking it was the last exit before the bridge, and thus the parking lot for the tourists who wanted big, gay shots of the Golden Gate before being forced across the bay. Highway 1, however, takes one very South of the bridge and makes retards like me start to cry when we realize that we're not at the exit to take gay pictures of the Golden Gate, and instead are way down in gay Chinatown, just without Jack Burton as a guide.

My little mis-turn did allow me to circle around and check out the city though, and it allowed me to take one of the steepest roads I've ever driven on back down to the 101. That street was so fucking amazing! It was at a downward 45 degree angle almost the whole while, except when intercepted by horizontal roads which turned my down hill suicide run into a death-jump ramp every block or so. I'm pretty sure it was the same street that they always use for those San Fran car chases in movies like The Rock and... Well The Rock is the only one that comes to mind. You know the street. The one where if you go over 15 miles per hour and hit a dog you launch into the air and into a shop window, or a hotdog stand, or a street trolley; and then there's huge explosions and shit all around you, and you race away before the cops come and arrest you for killing six immigrants with your Cavalier. And the Chinese Triads start shooting at you 'cause you accidentally knocked the head off their boss when you first ramped over that baby carriage being pushed by the old lady with the limp... Wow. Seriously, they should make a movie about my life. Or at least a TV show on HBO..... Just without Sarah Jessica Parker and her foul-mouthed, new age, Golden Girls friends.

Beyond that, I made it back to the Golden Gate relatively unscathed. The car was pretty fucked up when I originally picked it up, so I figured that I could easily convince the rental place that all the blood and brains on the front grill were there when I got it. The bridge though... The Golden Gate Bridge was a site to behold, when I could see it through the low-lying clouds. And for some unknown reason I felt obligated to trek all the way across the steel and concrete abomination on my own two feet. It was like it meant something to do so... Like it was important. That and I had massive leg cramps from the flight and the 5 hours I was stuck in my car trying hard not to kill innocent pedestrians. The bridge itself is freezing and windy. I came from 90+ degree weather in Georgia to 60 some-odd degrees on the bay, and the wind felt like like flying icicles trying to push me over the edge of the railing if I stopped crawling and stood up more than three feet off the ground. The fucktard bikers didn't help things either. Those assholes would whip past bridge pedestrians, clip the shit out of them and laugh while they sped away. Well they laughed till I started throwing things into their gay spokes. It was just like that scene in Last Crusade. Those Nazi bike fucks went sailing!

The biggest problem with the Golden Gate though was in trying to get tourists who don't speak English to take some of my weird pictures. "No, look at me! Point the camera at me and I'm gonna make it look like I'm climbing over the edge of the bridge. NO! Don't run! Goddammit! Stand HERE. Point the camera AT ME. Me go over THERE. Take PICTURE. NO! Don't tell the fucking cop! Goddammit! I'm glad he can't understand your retarded language either."

After all that, I crawled back to the other side and had the best hotdog of my entire LIFE at the shitty tourist stand at the foot of the bridge... In hindsight, I'm sure it was a pretty gross dog, but after you escape a predicament in which you actually thought you were going to die a horrible, fearful death, whatever you eat will seem to be the greatest and best tasting piece of food ever. Like Eddie Murphy talked about after making it through the desert with no food for a month, and being handed a Ritz cracker. It's just a cracker, but you're all like "That is the best fucking cracker ever fucking MADE! That is one magic fucking cracker!" But despite the fact that I was still alive after almost getting knocked or blown off the Golden Gate, and still able to enjoy processed cow intestines in convenient wiener form, I still wasn't happy. I still wasn't all that gay since I gobbled up that foot-long before either performing fellatio on it or sticking it up my ass. Apparently going gay was going to take a bit more work.

After sucking down that dog I then hopped in my car and froze. I had just remembered something that made me feel like a total mongoloid distracted by shiny objects or porn... I had forgotten to pack a shirt and tie for the wedding. Goddamn it! I made a special note to pack my suit, my shiny, black shoes, and a pack of condoms (what can I say, I just saw Wedding Crashers a few weeks before and got my hopes up)... But forgot my shirt and tie. Fuck! So I drove up to the restaurant where I was going to meet the just arriving MegaPlayboy and Firecracker for dinner (in Daly City, South of the Frisco area), and then scoured the local shopping malls looking for a Macy's or even a (God forbid) Sears.