Thanks, Jack!

So it was a Jack T. kind of day. Jack is one of my Dad's best friends and has been around my whole life. He went to school at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, when I was growing up in the late 60s, and he brought back a lot of west coast culture to us in the Midwest. He definitely made an impact on who I am today!

Jack worked in a bike shop for many years and has been giving me bike advice and training tips for the upcoming AIDS LifeCycle. I had been planning to ride my Gary Fisher dual-sport Utopia on the ride to L.A., but I've gotten a lot of feedback that I was just asking for a whole lot of extra suffering on the trip. So I took the cash from my garage sale today and went out to the Presidio Sports Basement and picked myself up a Jamis Ventura Elite road bike. It was a 2006 model on sale, and with my LifeCycle 15% discount, I got a great deal... under $800.

Then tonight I went down to Magnet in the Castro and watched a documentary of the 1975 San Francisco Freedom Day Parade. The film was made by friends that Jack had introduced me, too. It was great talking to Ray Reiss and his wife Jane, both about Kansas and SF back in the 70s. Wow, from watching the footage of the parade and the festival afterward, I really got a sense of how innocent those times were. People out just be crazy and wild and free, some for the first time in their lives.

Nowadays the atmosphere of gay pride--and many other events in the gay and lesbian community--feels much more commercialized. We've become quite a market niche to be exploited. Which reminds me of a great book I read several years ago, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture by Daniel Harris.

For a great day... thanks, Jack!