05 Tuesday Jul 2011
Yesterday was the Fourth of July, which, if you haven’t heard of it, is kind of important considering it’s the day we declared independence from those evil Brits. Apparently, a whole lot of young people have no idea what I’m talking about.
Shocking, ain’t it?
28 Tuesday Jun 2011
Tags
Almaden, cheap wine, gay parade, LGBT, New York City, NYC Pride 2011, photos
In case you didn’t hear about it, New York legalized gay marriage last Friday. It was kind of a big deal. It also coincided with the NYC Pride weekend, which culminates every year in a huge parade through Manhattan. Having been to São Paulo’s last year, which is the biggest on Earth and a massive shitshow, I figured it’d be worth checking out. My girlfriend was also quite interested in attending, but she said we needed to bring booze.
Which is how I ended up waving a camera around like an idiot in the middle of a rib-crushing crowd with a five-liter bag of Almaden chablis in my backpack.
28 Monday Mar 2011
Tags
19th century cemetery, california history, headstones, newville ca cemetery, prostitutes, zombies
I recently heard a story about a late 19th century hunting cottage deep in rural Northern California that doubled as an upscale brothel for the adventurous rich of Sacramento and San Francisco. According to my storyteller, many of the staff were young Native American women who, upon succumbing to the generally untimely deaths of prostitutes in that time period, were interred in a small cemetery in the town of Newville. According to the internet, Newville’s post office shut its doors in 1918 and just about everything else followed suit soon thereafter. Really, anytime someone mentions a hooker cemetery I’m going to have to check it out.
After driving deeper and deeper into country resembling less the working ranches I’d grown up around and more a forgotten set from Deliverance, my friend Matt (whose immediate decision to join me might raise a red flag for a normal person) and I found the cemetery a mile down the road from a ramshackle old house with a cluttered, stained set of stables straight out of a horror movie. The cemetery itself was a tiny fenced-in portion of a massive plot of grazing land, but it seemed relatively well-groomed for being more than a century old.
