First of all, Happy Thanksgiving. Now that's out of the way, I should say ... "Ow!" I have a bit of a hangover. Not a serious one, but enough to wish I hadn't stayed up fairly late last night and had three - or was it four - cocktails. The big problem with staying up late is that it makes no difference to my rising hour the next morning. Here I am, 6.00 a.m. Thanksgiving morning, hangover and all, but wide awake.

But I don't really regret going out last night, because I had a great time. It's so rare that I go out dancing and just enjoy myself like that; there's no doubt that it's very freeing. A guy I'd met last time when I was in D.C., Eric, was in town for Thanksgiving, visiting his family. He came over last night, and we drove to the Stud, which is a long-time institution in San Francisco. It was the first gay bar I ever went to here, way back when I was at the extremely tender age of 23 on my first visit to San Francisco. And a few years ago, Brett and I had the habit, for a while, of going there for Wednesday "Beer-Bust" every other week or so. But Brett has become even more of a homebody than me, and I can never persuade him, now, to come over the city from Berkeley for any other reason than to go the movies.

Anyway, the Stud is a small, run-down place, with a cramped, crowded dance floor, and, on Wednesday nights at least, the feeling of a small down bar in that it's without the "attitude" you find at many other places. It's always a big mix of people; the guy in the wheelchair who starts yelling at people "Take it off, take it off!", cute college boys, old guys like me (grin), and raucous lesbians, all pressed into that dance floor, all feeling the energy of the disco oldies they play. For somebody like me, who's a bit on the shy side, and still a little self-conscious of my height (despite a few decades of getting used to it), it felt particularly good to be able to free myself of my inhibitions and just enjoy moving to the music, and grinning and laughing with Eric.

Now. To say that I didn't grow up expecting to have a photo of my naked butt on British TV is a bit of an understatement. Yet that's exactly what happened last night, I'm told. A few months ago I was interviewed via videophone by a famed British journalist for a documentary series being made for BBC2. The first episode was shown last night, and it was the one which included a few minutes about me. I still haven't seen the show, but I've received a surprising amount of email both last night and this morning from people who saw it, and found my site that way. Since the subject of the documentary was public nudity, I half expected a string of venomous hate mail, but so far that hasn't happened. Just a bunch of regular British blokes who wanted to write and say they enjoyed my contribution to the show.

Me filming myself being interviewed way back earlier this year.

Work has continued to be a horrific bore. In the last journal, I wrote that I was about to get started on a project. But they STILL haven't signed the damned contract! So, the last three days, I had absolutely shit all to do, pardon my language. I didn't even go into the office on Tuesday or Wednesday, and nobody even noticed. So I stayed home and worked on my latest film projects. I'm planning on making a series of small, very personal movies and, hopefully, putting them up here on the free site. I really need to get a lot of practice in developing a script, framing the shots, figuring out cinematography and lighting, and that's the purpose of doing these movies. I don't expect any of them to be masterpieces, but it will free me up, I think, and I'll learn a lot in the process.

Unfortunately, it's so easy to get distracted. I did, in fact, spend a good deal of the day yesterday constructing home-made gel stands for my "studio lights". (Movie-making is so expensive - you need what's called "c-stands" to hold gels in front of lights. Gels are basically translucent sheets for correcting the color of your lights. But even simple things like c-stands, which are nothing more than stands with clamps on them, are hundreds of dollars!) Anyway, I was talking about getting distracted. I'd also decided to try my hand at computer-aided music making, so that I can do soundtracks for my mini-movies. I came across this amazing piece of software called FruityLoops, which allows you to use an almost limited catalog of sounds, beats, distortions, loops and so on to build pretty compelling, high quality music. I don't think I particularly have much of a talent for music-making, but I ended up spending half the day developing this weird piece which would be more at home in a horror movie, than a personal little film.

On Saturday, I had a crazy, hectic, fun day. It began at 8.00 a.m. in the morning chill, at Alamo Square, where I met up with some fellow film geeks from my class to help one of them, Dave, make his class project. There were two actors, one of whom, a skinny, eighty year old guy in a cowboy hat, cracked us up with his singing and dancing (all of which were in the script, but we didn't expect him to be so good!)

I spent the evening in Berkeley; the usual dinner and movie Saturday date with Brett. That night, of course, was the night of the spectacular meteor shower. But I think you'll forgive me for not having the energy to stay up for it.

And that's about it. This Saturday I'm going to Washington D.C. again, for a few days of fun, and a couple of days of work-training. See ya in the anthrax capital :)