Chuck Tingle
Started: 2023-08-06 14:30:05
Submitted: 2023-08-06 18:54:56
Visibility: World-readable
Seeing the world's greatest author, name of Chuck Tingle
I know Chuck Tingle as the author of surrealistic gay erotica, in which characters have erotic encounters with dinosaurs and embodiments of abstract concepts like time or a social media ban for an insurrectionist president. (He got a Hugo Award nomination for one of his stories, in a year in which a vocal minority decided to make trouble in the awards ballot.) He has apparently decided to branch out from self-published erotica to traditionally-published horror, and was holding a book tour to promote his new book, including a visit to Booksmith in the Haight in San Francisco. This seemed sufficiently weird that I figured I should attend.
Santa Cruz is blessed with many things, but good transit to the other side of the mountain is not one of them. Instead of taking a maybe-more-straightforward route to the author event (scheduled for 19:00 on a Monday in July) I decided to spend the day working in San Francisco and then nip across town to the Haight in the evening. The easiest way to do that was to get a coworking desk somewhere in San Francisco for the day. It turned out there was a surplus of coworking spaces willing to sell me a day-pass, so I ended up going to WeWork at 3 Montgomery in the Financial District.
Instead of my normal commute (down the stairs and into my home office) I took a much longer morning commute, over the mountain and up the peninsula to Daly City BART, and from there into the Financial District. Because I was showing up on a weekday, I had to pay for parking at the BART station, and honor the reserved parking spaces closer to the station entrance. (The reserved parking was completely empty because BART's usage patterns have not recovered in whatever sort-of post-pandemic world we find ourselves in. It's like someone at BART made a monkey-paw wish to solve their parking problem, and now they find their parking lots empty most days.)
I camped out at a desk on the second floor, taking advantage of the coffee and seltzer water (included with the price of admission) while I worked on my laptop. I had only a small fraction of my normal screen space, but I managed to rearrange my windows to make the most of it.
Some of the WeWork office space was divided into semi-private glass-walled offices with four or eight desks set up inside. Some of these were occupied and had company logos on the door, providing a permanent work space for the company. Many were empty, suggesting that WeWork's capacity plan was running ahead of demand.
In the evening I nipped over to the Haight to eat supper and attend the author's signing at Booksmith.
I wasn't sure what to expect, because the author's public persona so far has been sufficiently obscured that it didn't seem entirely compatible with appearing in front of us in person. When Chuck Tingle emerged onto the makeshift stage at the front of the folding chairs set up for the event, he was wearing a pink bag over his head with cutouts for his eyes and mouth with "Love is Real" scrawled on the forehead, matching his appearance in the author photo at the end of the book. This was, he told us, not a persona or a performance, but a device that let him (as a neuro-atypical person on the autism spectrum) free himself from social anxieties about appearing in public as his authentic self.
Chuck Tingle launched into the first part of the event, a presentation combining the three most derided genres in fiction: romance, horror, and comedy; by presenting dating profiles for slasher movie villains. This was kind of weird but also completely hilarious. Then Charlie Jane Anders asked Chuck Tingle questions, and then Chuck Tingle answered questions from the audience. (Most of the audience had colored hair, multiple piercings, and colorful clothing or colorful masks; everyone seemed happy to see Chuck Tingle in his new role as a traditionally-published author.)
The audience queued for signatures of his book Camp Damascus, which included posed pictures with the author himself, still wearing the bag over his head. (I barely noticed the pink suit he was wearing, because the bag was so distinctive.)
I caught a MUNI bus back to Civic Center so I could take BART to my car, and as the bus merged onto Market Street I realized we were coming up to the site of the mid-Market office of the company formerly known as Twitter. Earlier that day the company had apparently tried to take down the "Twitter" sign on the front of the building, but neglected to clear it with their landlord (who, contractually, has to sign off on all external modifications to the building) or the city (who doesn't care about signs being removed, but does care about trucks blocking traffic lanes). I got out a stop early and walked an extra two blocks down Market Street so I could see the aftermath of the spectacle myself.
The sign that used to read "@twitter" followed by Twitter's bird logo was hung vertically above the sidewalk. On the side of the sign facing up Market Street (roughly south-west, because Market Street cuts diagonally across the compass grid, approximately perpendicular to the modern shoreline), most of the letters had been removed, leaving a shadow where the letters had been removed, plus the the "er" at the end. The side that faces across the street, and the side that faces down Market Street were both untouched.
This was one thing I could tangibly point and laugh at, a physical manifestation of the spectacle of the world's dumbest billionaire's disastrous takeover of the service that used to be my favorite social network. (I've switched to Mastodon mostly because TweetDeck is being deliberately sabotaged but I can't say I feel the same devotion to the new platform as I once felt to the bird site.)
