I don't to reveal his identity and blow his cover because he does occupy a very important place in the social heirarchy careerwise, but let's just say my friend who I'll call "Raul" came to town. Raul is really into doing sculptures, and the reason he came to San Francisco is to present a proposal to the Burning Man organization, to get a grant from them. He did that last year, and the year before that as well. In each case, he made a gigantic outdoor sculpture, and this year is even more ambitious, the thing is going to be 300 feet long and 200 feet wide, and 16 feet tall, made with big poles and pivots and giant inflatable objects that hang from the poles.

Anyway, so we had a visit, and even though he seems to have fundamentally altered his personality in the last few years in a fairly dramatic way, we still can have a few laughs and eat some filthy punjabi food together at Shalimar, even though I vowed never to do that again the last time I went to Shalimar. When I say altered his personality, I don't mean he's changed in a bad way, necessarily. It's just that it seems his brain chemistry is different, as now he seems to be much more subdued, and have kind of big pauses in his speech as if he just stayed up all night. Which maybe he did. But he generally seems like he's kind of moving in slow motion. It sort of reminds me of what we used to call blunt affect in the days when I was throwing around psychodynamic terminology, as I was working in the Hudson River Psychiatric Center, back during my college days.

But anyway we had lunch and saw Ong Bak, which is an incredible Thai movie starring Tony Jaa, who is basically the next Jackie Chan, and I mean Jackie Chan when he was doing acrobatic stunts, not horrible comedies with Jennifer Love Hewitt. Catching up, Raul told me about the various grosteque undertakings that he has been pursuing in his leisure time, which I suppose is good, if you find middle class mores bad and something that needs to be transcended. Which I don't particularly. But he's definitely out there breaking down barriers in society which I consider good for him. And I'd can't really say how it's hurting anyone, apart from the people he is literally hurting for pleasure, which he assures me is something that all parties who participate enjoy. I don't pretend to be any kind of authority on the world of BDSM so I have to take his word for it, though when we went to a fetish shoe store, where he went to look at some shoes, I found the freaky hairless old guy who may or may not have been the owner to be the kind of person I freely pass judgement on. Not because he sells fetish shoes for a living, but because he was creepy as hell, and kind of staring at me without moving. Then he got up and went outside and picked up a cigar butt that was on a metal railing and smoked it.

I guess what I'm saying, even if it is irrational, is that I have no problem with that whole world of alternate tastes, but that doesn't mean I want to be around it. And even though I have no problem with vintage clothing shops, when he was telling me about a used latex fetish shop, somehow it seemed awful to me, to think of rubber clothes that someone else wore, despite the logic which would suggest you could clean rubber better than an absorbant fabric. But somehow the whole topic is just gross.

But the point is we had a lovely visit and ate chan and murgh and aloo paratha and so on.