doit, doit now!

So Pride was great. Before the weekend actually rolled around Kevin and I had seriously considered going out of town, to Napa or something. But then I decided that leaving town on Gay Pride Weekend was a bit jaded and cynical of me. And besides, my friend Alex Gray was coming up from LA/NYC for a visit, and I offered for him to stay with us, so I was Bound to the City.

I hadn’t seen Alex for anything longer than an instant in nearly 4 years, but the moment he got here it was like old times. Alex has a penchant for meeting new, slightly odd, surprisingly hot people, getting to know them, and then sitting back and kind of watching as bizarre stuff unfolds in front of his eyes. He also has a particular skill in not necessarily getting involved in the ruckus that ensues, and thus he generally keeps his hands clean. He reminds me of what my life used to be like in New York, and even here in San Francisco for awhile, and it’s terribly refreshing.

Anyway he drove up from LA with these two cute guys named Sean/Shaun/Shawn and Greg. Sean/Shaun/Shawn is like a typical Hermosa Beach dark-haired surfer type, and his boyfriend Greg is a wide-eyed 18-year-old (a surprisingly nice one, too, not a whiny annoying one). The LA Boys were staying with some friends at a cottage on Market Street, and we ended up hanging out at this place, thereafter dubbed “The Cottage,” for large amounts of time throughout the weekend, having nice conversations with the guys who lived there (amongst them Paul, Trent, and Demian).

Friday night we met up with my friend Shannon and his crew and just barhopped. Saturday I got some work done during the day before heading off to my client Jane Goldman’s barbecue. They were wrapping up as we got there to prepare to go to the Dyke March, which was good because we had tickets to go and see Tammy Faye: Death Defying, the new Tammy Faye Messner movie.

We had no idea that Tammy Faye was actually going to be at the premiere.

She was! Girl got standing ovations, and then got up on the stage and answered questions from the audience, including one from a guy who asked her about her lack of support for gay marriage. Even though this guy put her on the spot, her answer was right on the money: she basically said that she can’t support “marriage,” per se, but that she thinks that gay people should have all of the other rights and privileges that straight people do. To paraphrase, “Stop calling it ‘marriage,’ you idiots, and a lot more people will be behind you!” Note to the HRC: listen up! You would do well to heed her advice, for all of our sakes.

After that we went to our friend Matt’s house and threw condoms out the window at passersby, yelling “Happy Gay Pride!” In an unrelated event, at Alex’s prompting we started calling each other “Mary” all night, and then the saying somehow morphed into “Merry Gay Pride!” or rather “Mary Gay Pride!” It was at Matt’s house that I think I caught my first Real Life Glimpse of Chris Daigle, Chad Fox’s muse, though I can’t really be sure, as he was wrestling with someone much larger than him and was unable to get words out edgewise.

Then we just ran around the Pink Saturday mess for awhile until we go bored, and trekked back to The Cottage, where another cute-until-he-puked LA Boy named Ryan proceeded pass out.

Sunday was more of the same, though Kevin got sick and had to sit the day out at home. We saw 3rd Sum Mary 7 Eye 41 Matchbox Blink 20 182 Blind perform for two songs, and then saw En Vogue, who were great. We hung out with my clients Hot House at their booth for awhile, drank some more, and then decided to go back to the Catastro, though Alex made a solo detour to the Powerhouse and the Eagle, meeting more bizarre people along the way.

Meanwhile the LA Boys decided to leave San Francisco and drive back home, but the poor things got a flat tire on the 5 in the middle of nowhere. Apparently some cops stopped them and interrogated them, then left them on the freeway to fend for themselves. They had no clue where there were. Poor guys, must’ve sucked. The cops certainly didn’t help.

Finally we ended up back at Daddy’s and met some crazy Hawaiian guys, and finally just came home and went to bed. All in all a lovely weekend.

There are several good things about Invisalign that go beyond merely straightening your crooked-ass teeth. One of these things is that it is physically impossible to bite your nails with the aligners in. I have bitten my nails for something like 20 years, and I have tried a bunch of ways to stop, like getting weekly manicures, painting my nails with polish that tastes like hot-pepper chemical ass, and just qutting cold turkey. None of them have worked.

But now I am simply incapable of biting my nails. It is just Not An Option. Score one for Invisalign!

But fingernails and Invisalign have a deeper, darker relationship than it might appear at first. In order to remove the aligners when you want to eat, brush your teeth, etc, you have to use your fingernails. When I first got the aligners and realized that I couldn’t bite my nails off I decided that I had better just clip them like a normal person.

I then tried to remove my aligners to eat, and found that I was incapable of doing so. Well, I suppose I should qualify that: I was incapable of doing so without shoving the remarkably hard plastic of the aligners underneath my nail beds, which, as you can imagine, feels absolutely lovely.

So a warning to those of you who are getting or have just gotten Invisalign: don’t clip your fingernails entirely off, or you will go through days and days of pain.

Section 2257 of Title 18, U.S.C., which is more often referred to as just “2257,” probably means very little to you unless you work in the porn business. Which I do, at least tangentally. Think and/or say what you want, my porn clients are businesses just like any other, with the notable exception that they are some of the most honest, easy-to-deal with clients I have—they pay on time (well, mostly… hint hint, COLT), they treat their employees, contractors, and customers extremely well, and they don’t bitch about how much it really costs to get good, non-Craigslist “I-will-design-your-lame-website-for-$300″ web application development. A lot of people think it must be heaven (or hell) to work in porn, but as far as I am concerned I can take it or leave it—I think naked people are much more exciting when they are real. And if you have a problem with naked people you can take it and shove it where the Puritanical sun don’t shine. But I digress.

Section 2257 basically says that producers of adult content must keep verifiable records of the age of their models. Fair enough. However, the Bush Administration, apparently under pressure from the Religious Rong, has changed the code to read in such a way that essentially anyone who has anything sexually explicit on any web site needs to have several (note that this is not “one of several” but in fact “several”) forms of verifiable proof of the age of the people in the content.

If you have ever put a picture of yourself on a chat room profile, or on your own web site, even, this applies to you. It also applies to most personals sites, including Yahoo!, Gay.com, Big Muscle, ManHunt, etc. They are going to have to prove the age of the people in the shots, even if they are gray-haired shag-carpeted 50-year-old bears. Of course this will be impossible to do, so they will have to shut down until a legal challenge is fully mounted. Do you ever look at message boards where people post porn? There’s a good chance those will get shut down, too.

The Free Speech Coalition has thankfully mounted a legal defense against the new rules. We shall see how it turns out.

The new regulations go into effect tomorrow, June 23rd, 2005.

Please don’t confuse 2257 with 227, the sitcom from the 80’s. 2257 is obnoxious and probably unconstitutional, whereas anything that involves Jackee Harry is by definition fabulous (well, probably by definition obnoxious, as well, but the point remains).

So the Invisalign Cleaning System is the Officially Invisalign Sanctionedâ„¢ method of cleaning your Invisalign aligners. The Invisalign Cleaning System consists of a plastic container that you plug in for some reason (probably for agitation, as Invisalign recommends strongly against mixing hot liquids and aligners) and some Invisalign Cleaning Crystals, which are apparently very different from other effervescent orthodontic cleaning dentifrices.

It retails for $95USD. That is not a typo.

Furthermore, in the elegant 4-page “Invisalign User Manual” they give you to completely and totally describe every facet of how these plastic things are going to utterly reshape your mouth, they outline explicit instructions to not use denture cleaners (like Efferdent, etc) on your aligners:

3. DO NOT use denture cleaners to clean aligners or soak them in mouthwash. These products can damage the surface of the aligner, causing it to become dull and more visible.

I call bullshit.

One should note that Efferdent costs something like $6 for approximately 10,000 tablets, and Efferdent Plus with Listerine is about a dollar more. Explicitly because I was warned against the usage of both denture cleansers and mouthwash I decided that I would get a product that has each substance in it.

I have been using Efferdent Plus with Listerine on my aligners for about two weeks now and have noticed no such damaged, dull surface. I have noticed a lot more money in the bank, which I promptly spent on Conundrum instead of on Invisalign Cleaning Crystals.

But to really settle this matter I am going to attempt a little experiment. I am switching to my new set of aligners tonight before bed, and I will document, in gripping photojournalistic style, just how damaged and dull these aligners do not become as a result of the usage of good old Efferdent Plus. Watch here for time-lapse CGI-assisted blockbuster action photos of the process.

So I got Invisalign two weeks ago and in general have been loving it. The whole process is pretty cool. They first put you into one of these new 3D x-ray machines that spins around your entire head and gives realtime results. Then they take impressions of your teeth using some gag-inducing plastic putty. All of this data is then fed to a bunch of Costa Rican programmers, who magically transform it into sets of plastic aligners that you wear for two weeks each.

I am the sort of fellow who eats about six times a day, though, and this causes some complications with Invisalign, because you cannot eat while you have your aligners in. You have to brush your teeth after every meal, as well, which means that I am now brushing my teeth about 8 times a day. You also cannot drink anything that is hot or is not clear when you have them in, so that rules out mid-afternoon coffee.

In general I have to say the experience has been positive, but I’m only two weeks into a yearlong ordeal. Tomorrow I start my Invisalign vs. Efferdent Battle. To the victor goes the spoils, and the implied endorsement of Martha Raye, denture wearer.

I put WordPress up to play with it and will eventually put a full blog up. For the time being it is Almost Doneâ„¢.