“The gay world then was somewhat brutalized–it was enormously sexualized. New York was absolutely wild. People were just [having sex] all over the place, literally. But nobody was actually free; it was all an illusion. The laws were terrible. I did not see a society that was progressing. It was extremely commercial; people were making a lot of money out of it. It was in its way not dissimilar, I thought, to what Germany was like in the Weimar era.”
-Martin Sherman, Playwright, author of “Bent”

“But nobody was actually free; it was all an illusion. The laws were terrible.”

Larry Kramer wrote a novel about that period in NYC, titled Faggots. It got a lot of static but he had a point, distilled down to this one line toward the novel’s end: “The fucking we’re getting is not worth the fucking we’re getting.”

Had you come of age back then, you could understand why the freedom to be our sexual selves was so important. The sodomy laws practically defined us as criminals, sexual deviants, perverts, queers, that needed to be isolated from the rest of society, for the good of society. If many of us fixated on sex it was because that’s what we were told was all that was all there was to us. But there was a necessary element of Yes We Are defiance to it. I can appreciate that too. Progress, as George Bernard Shaw once said, is made by the unreasonable man. Also the unreasonable woman.

But it was never just about sex. We needed wholeness. Getting the sodomy laws off our backs was a big fight, but not the only one. There was still the rest of it. Making that space for our sexual lives was important, but also the space for our love lives; Our whole lives. We couldn’t be neighbors so long as we were criminals. We couldn’t be people so long as we were sodomites.

I reckon I don’t really need to hide who it is I’m talking about in these remembrances anymore. He doesn’t read my blog (Hi!) and his comfort zone turned into the Berlin Wall a decade ago anyway. But I get these memories posts on Facebook now and then that remind me that it was real…

Some days I visit he’s being a jerk and doesn’t want to talk to me. Others, like last night, he’s all warm smiles and cheerful eyes and just can’t stop talking and we stay long past park closing time and I’m walking on air all the way back to my room. But then it’s always why can’t we spend some time together outside the park and his comfort zone won’t allow it.

So either way I have to struggle to get my vacation started back up again. If he’s grouchy then I’m miserable and just want to go home. I’ve called vacations off early when it’s been that. If he’s full of sunshine and smiles then I feel like I’ve hit the high point of my trip and why bother staying. There’s that back to the reality of things after the visit let-down to climb back out of somehow. I have to remind myself I need the break regardless.

This morning I’ll hit the grocery store for some perishables I couldn’t bring down with me, and more ice tea, and maybe something from the liquor store so I’m not always paying Disney prices for alcohol. Then spend the rest of the week chilling out, maybe working some more on A Coming Out Story (I brought my drawing things). But I’m in a state now I really have no words for, or at any rate words I’m willing to speak. He said something to me that lifted me out of myself in a way only someone who really gets you can. And it took a load off my psyche certain other gay someone’s I know weighed me down with for years.

It was all about how I don’t interact well with people. Too shy, too self absorbed, blah, blah, blah, your photography has no people in it, blah, blah, blah… Biergarten is “Octoberfest” seating, which means you get seated at a table with other random guests and you’re expected to talk and share a good time together. This time I was seated with a group that seemed really stand-offish. They just gave off chilly vibes. But after a while I got them talking about where they’re from and what they do, and of course when they found out I work at Space Telescope and on Hubble and James Webb they got all interested in that. And by the end of the night we were all chatting happily.

And after they left he and I were chatting and he noticed too how chilly that group was initially. He’s worked this line of business for so long now he can probably read a table the second he walks up to it. Then he said he’d always seen me open people up and that I was good at it and that I was always getting everyone talking and having a good time no matter how chilly the table seemed at first.

Well…yeah… One thing is you always know you’re with other Disney people here…so that’s something. It’s not like you’re in some random bar with bad mood people. We’re all Disney people here. And that Disney kid just comes out of me here. It’s a kind of freedom to be that kid I once was I never really appreciated I was missing before I started coming here. But I’m not the hopelessly detached single certain other people somehow managed to convince me I am either. I’m not that…so how did I get to thinking of myself like that? He just pulled that out of me with a few words and the look on his face when he said it.

He does that. It’s when someone shows you things about yourself you didn’t know, but should have known, that makes it serious. And…it’s been like that since we were teenagers. When he’s not in a touchy mood, it’s still like that.

But we never got the chance other kids did. And now he has his comfort zone, and I need to get on with my vacation. Somehow.

And speaking of those certain other gay someones…

Hi! I’ll be 73 in a few weeks, just a couple months after I got my Parkinson’s diagnosis. The search for someone to love and be loved by is in my rearview mirror now. I will die having been single all my adult life. You could have made a difference in one gay guy’s life. And…actually…you did! You and every other homophobic nutcase. Be proud!

A few weeks ago I received a glossy oversized flyer in the mail, advertising a silver and gold buy in Hunt Valley. BACK BY POPULAR I have some silver and gold I dug up during my downsizing adventures here at Casa del Garrett that I inherited from mom that I didn’t think was a good fit for the Greensburg Historical Society since it didn’t directly relate to mom or that part of Pennsylvania; not very much but enough I thought I could get a few hundred bucks for it maybe. So when I got a flyer in the mail advertising a gold and silver buying event…

BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND! GOLD BREAKS THE 4K MARK!
WE BUY NO MATTER THE CONDITION!

…I decided to go see what they’d offer for it.

It was a big oversized glossy flyer, so I was expecting some sort of large venue with tables and buyers to look over what was being offered. And a big line since it was BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND!

What I found when I got there was it was being held in a small office suite with nothing at all to suggest it was even being held at that address, other than the security guard in the lobby who knew it was happening and directed me to the right floor. There was nobody at the front desk to check me in.

So I wandered around for a bit and eventually a young lady appeared from the outer hallway. I’m guessing she’d just taken a bathroom break. I showed her the flyer I was mailed. She looked at me very seriously and told me there was only one buyer and I might have to wait as long as an hour and a half or two hours to see him.

I thanked her and walked away. I think I know what was going on…do you?

Big glossy advertisement. GOLD BREAKS THE 4K MARK! WE BUY NO MATTER THE CONDITION! Yeah. Yeah. There’s the bait. Someone willing to sit and wait for up to two hours to have their stuff appraised is probably desperate enough to take whatever they’re offered.

Or they’re bringing them stolen goods, and maybe this is a sting of some sort.

I don’t know, and I don’t care. Even if I was desperate for money I wouldn’t touch something like this because I’m either likely to be cheated or investigated. So it’s all back in my safe, all but the two 24 carat gold rings I found with the letters LBC on them and the date 1913. Those are mysterious enough I might let the Historical Society look them over. Near as I can research it, the rings either indicate they belonged to a Women’s Co-ed branch of the Independent Order of Foresters, a Fraternal society popular across Pennsylvania in 1913, or the Lackawanna Business College of Scranton. I cannot pin down who in the family would have been associated with either but it would be interesting to know more.

Last night around 1:30am I got an alarm from my home security system. It was a water detector I’d placed next to the hot water tank. Given that unit was close to twenty years old, I pretty much knew what happened, I just hoped it wasn’t flooding the back of my basement.

I ran naked down two flights of stairs to the basement, and was relieved to see it was just a small stream of water coming from under the tank, not a torrent. I turned off the water to the tank, turned off the tank heater, mopped up the water on the floor with some bath towels I’d staged next to the washing machine for cleaning, went back upstairs, got dressed, then went back down for a closer look and ponder. I am about to retire (again) and I was hoping to save a few grand to help me bridge the gap between paychecks and 401k withdrawals. Now it was looking like I’d be spending a few grand on a new hot water tank instead.

I put a bucket under the draincock and opened it, figuring I should start draining the tank before the leak gets any worse. Hardly anything came out, probably because sediment and/or corrosion was clogging it. I never did any of the usual preventive maintenance on the tank, which mostly involves periodically draining the tank and letting it refill to prevent sediment buildup. My bad. So now it’s looking like it might take me all day to drain the tank. But a little online research and I got a tip to open some of the hot water spigots to allow air into the tank as it drained. In retrospect I should have figured, but it’s the middle of the night and my brain isn’t at full steam. So that improved the drainage but only barely.

I set a timer to periodically check on how the bucket was filling, went back upstairs to my den, started up one of my computers and went online to Blue Dot, the place that did my new central AC/furnace. They did a super job on the new unit and while they were here they offered to replace the hot water tank as well and give me a quote, which I passed up. I figured I’d ping them to do the job. I set up an appointment to have someone come out and give me an estimate. Then I began figuring out my new budget reality and how to work around not having hot water.

Luckily I’d already done a load of dishes and laundry. There’s a shower in one of our unisex bathrooms at work I can use if I have to, and a laundromat just down the street that I’ve used before when the washing machine that came with the house failed. Figured I could boil some water on the stove to do dishes; the first apartments I lived in had no dishwashers and when we moved into one that did I thought we’d hit the big time. And some things like my Disney mugs and classic Fiestaware aren’t dishwasher safe so I do those by hand anyway.

So I had a plan, went back to bed and tried to get some sleep. I had a presentation I had to make at work the next morning and having lost most my night’s sleep I wasn’t sure I could manage it. But I did, then went back home to wait for the guy who wasn’t from Blue Dot after all (they don’t do plumbing stuff it turns out) to come and give me an estimate, which I accepted. I’ll have (hopefully) a new hot water tank by this evening as I write this, and a few grand less in my savings. So it goes. Tell you how it went later.

This came across my Facebook feed the other day, from user Ty Garner…

If I could go back and tell my 12-year-old self one thing, it would be this:

Love is one of the strongest forces you’ll ever know. It will make you believe, endure, forgive, and wait longer than you should. But no matter how unstoppable your love feels, it can never carry the weight of two hearts alone.

The purest intentions, the deepest loyalty, and the kindest soul cannot make someone choose you. Love isn’t proven by how much you’re willing to suffer—it’s proven when two people keep choosing each other.

Never mistake the strength of your love for the promise of theirs.

Memo to my 12 year old self. Take this man’s advice. You’re a good kid, a beautiful kid. You deserve a boyfriend when you’re older, who will bring you coffee and road trips.

Also…you will need to learn to use a straightening iron…

This came across my Facebook stream yesterday. Another chapter in the old heartbreaking story of what bigotry has done to our lives…

Paul Bettany’s father came out at 63, fell in love with a man, and spent 20 happy years with him. Then his partner died – and what happened next is heartbreaking.

While most people know him as Vision, far fewer know about the story that shaped him. After his father Thane’s partner Andy Clark died in 2015, the elder Bettany – in his 80s and a lifelong Catholic – went back into the closet.

He told people it had all been “a big misunderstanding” because he was “concerned about getting past Peter through the pearly gates.”

Paul has spoken openly about how devastating that was to witness. “He was unable to mourn the person who I think was the love of his life,” he said.

It’s part of what drew Paul to star in “Uncle Frank”, playing a closeted gay professor – his very first film role had been in an adaptation of the gay play “Bent”.

“I want everybody to just live authentically as the person they are,” Paul has said. “However hard that is, it’s absolutely better than pretending to be something other than you are.”

I have witnessed people my age and younger going back into the closet after a period of outedness rather than stand up to the pressures of family, religion or career. I’ve stood up to those same pressures and I know it can be frightening and painful, but the alternative is, as C.S. Lewis said in a different context, damnation.

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.” -C. S. Lewis, “The Four Loves”.

My house is a mess now, but that’s because I’m downsizing in anticipation of second retirement in September. I pulled a bunch of stuff out from under the basement steps and began sorting through it a couple weeks ago, giving some to recycling, some to Goodwill, and some to the Greensburg Historical Society. I’m still going through it, and I’ll be distributing stuff around again and again over the coming weeks. But it left me with a lot of empty space…enough that today I was able to move stuff out of the storage room and close it. That’s a monthly rent off my back now.

I told the lady at the storage place why I was downsizing and with a smile she told me to enjoy my retirement “this time.”

This is a process I expect to take several months…I’ll be able to work on it more energetically when I don’t have days at the office…but at the end of it I want the house to be a lot lighter in weight than it’s been. Because I want my life to be lighter in weight going forward.

Lifted from the repost of a friend here…

It’s the hypocrisy, not the sexual orientation. And not the closetedness. Lots of basically decent people stay closeted for reasons of their own, ranging from family issues, and religious struggles to legitimate fears for their lives. I’ve known a few. Be careful who you judge for being closeted.

That said…these guys are creeps. It’s okay to judge someone for being a creep. And if they’re secretly enjoying the bodies of other men, let alone the hard work LGBT people have contributed to make this a better world, while actively supporting hate mongers, then they’re also thieves.

This is good, but let me add some detail specific to me at this point.

#1: Yes…all this. I thought it was just about having tremors. But no…there are entire subsystems that are affected by not having enough dopamine. I actually don’t have much trouble at all with tremors, and that almost exclusively on my left hand. Which is good because my right hand is my drawing hand and I’m not ready to lose that yet. It can be a challenge now though, when I need to steady something with Both hands. Like (sigh) a camera.

#2: The feedback I get now and then is mostly about random, slight, but noticeable speech difficulties. Sometimes brain and mouth don’t want to cooperate. As to the face, I think it’s mostly just resting grumpy old man face. When I’m talking to you it’s pretty lively.

#3: This is the big one. People I’ve only socialized with online don’t see any of this. Anyone who’s had my physical presence probably doesn’t notice much of this at all. Living with it is all this. Except for pain. I am in no pain. Thankfully. A little muscle stiffness is all, and so far that isn’t bad.

As far as anxiety and depression…I’m a gay man who came out to himself in 1971, but to be brutally honest I knew when I was 14, I just lived in denial until that moment in December 1971. Anxiety is something a gay guy just lives with. Also any kid, gay or straight, who was raised in a very religious household, or one with a lot of family drama. I grew up with a bunch of that too. Anxiety is an old friend.

I’ve no digestive issues except I notice lately I’m losing a little more of my appetite, which has always been slight anyway, as anyone who’s ever dined out with me and seen me not touch half of what’s on my plate can verify. But I could use losing a few inches off the waistline.

But the rest of that…yeah. Fatigue. It’s the worst. So far. Brain fog comes and goes, but focus, concentration, is harder to accomplish now. Which I need at work, and my drafting table…

…and for photography. I have taken a pretty well stocked camera kit with me on various road trips and not touched any of it, over and over and Over again. I did get something out of me on my recent trips to Sunbury, but I was hoping to get more out when I went to Greensburg last week and my cameras remained untouched the entire time. I had to apologize to them when I unpacked the car. It’s really starting to distress me.

I’ve had insomnia for decades, I’ve learned to work around it, so I really can’t say Parkinson’s is making it any worse. I don’t consider vivid dreams a problem. I have very few nightmares. Mostly they’re just strange and kinda fun. Sometimes they give me story ideas.

#4: Yes. Yes. Yes.

#5: My friends and co-workers are all good people who don’t need telling. I have wonderful neighbors on my little Baltimore rowhouse street. I feel at ease with all of you. As for the rest of humanity…I think Sartre was mostly right, but the exceptions make dealing with it worthwhile. I try to be patient and remember that I can be pretty annoying too.

I am not asking for understanding, but curiosity. Stay curious. If you have that mindset then you know how I’m dealing with this. It’s an interesting puzzle. I’m learning more about human neurology probably than I otherwise would have.

#6: Yeah…

…fatigue, brain fog, balance problems. But all that didn’t start until a few hours after I got up. In that little window of time I got some stuff done around the house, working off a long term project of downsizing, sorting, filing. I’m really not seeing the benefit from the new medication the neurologist was telling me I’d see. There is some, but it’s disappointing. I have a follow-up appointment with him first week in August. We’ll talk.

I dropped off a bunch of stuff with the Greensburg Historical Society last Thursday, but there is more I need to uncover here. Plus, I am gathering stuff to donate to Goodwill. The sad truth is selling, or even giving away stuff is difficult. There is a “Buy Nothing Hampden” page here I’ve had some success with in the past, but lately no bites. I took a bunch of things to recycling knowing that at least some of it can become something new and not just end up in a landfill. The stuff I take to Goodwill can find another home. But I need energy to do all this and Parkinson’s, plus old age too I’m sure, leaves me with very little.

I’ve been thinking it over and I suppose this diagnosis of Parkinson’s seems sudden to most of my friends. Pretty sure not to my brother in California, who has seen me struggling at his house with fatigue and balance and memory. My co-workers and project leads have seen me struggle to get words out when I suddenly can’t put a sentence together, because brain and mouth momentarily stop cooperating. More distressingly is a loss of mental focus that I was hoping the meds would improve. But since most of my socializing these days is online, most of my friends and classmates wouldn’t have seen any of this building for the past couple years. And it’s been a gradual thing, punctuated by a few sudden episodes of fail.

I’m really not in a bad way now, and probably won’t be for quite some time; just not the fully functional me I used to be, even accounting for age. It’s mostly subtle…until for a brief few moments it isn’t. If the diagnosis seems sudden to you, rest assured it is not to me, or to anyone who has had my physical presence for more then a day or two; something is a bit off with Bruce.

I am grateful for the diagnosis because it gave me clarity, Finally, as to what was happening to me, and something to take the measure of, and try to manage.

But there is so much more I need to do. I have artwork I want to get out. It’s going to be harder than I’d anticipated, and I’m not going to get everything done I want to.

Please Stand By…

…particularly, the girls.

Memories. Something that delights me no end is being able to share my photography with my classmates at reunions and online. Because my camera was a constant companion at school, I have tons of photographs of daily life at Woodward back in ’70-’72. It’s fun to reminisce with my classmates over them. But now and then I’ve had some unpleasant surprises.

I could be a clueless little dweeb at times. Probably most of the time at that age, but even now at age 72. I don’t think I was stupid, but it really keeps surprising me how much of what was going on around me back then kept going right past me or right over my head. Put it down to being a gay boy, plus being raised by a single divorced Baptist woman. Some subjects you just didn’t get anywhere near in that sort of household. Especially sex.

A Coming Out Story – Episode 12, “Dinner Table Danger Zone”

Now we’re all grown up, and I’ll be happily reviewing some of my Woodward photos with a classmate, and they’ll off-handedly tell me what was going on behind the scenes in this or that photo…and it throws me for a loop. Who was dating who. Who had sex with who. What? WhAT??? Laugh if you like, but I just assumed none of us were really having sex at our age, that it was just a lot of talk. I never took it seriously. I was clueless. Also gay. And a Baptist. So if there were signals a straight kid would have picked up on, little gay me was oblivious to them.

And to a lot more.

So…before one past reunion…not the most recent one… I’m arranging some of my photos with a couple of my female classmates here in the art room at Casa del Garrett. We’re selecting photos for a photo CD we want to sell to the classmates to support the costs of the reunion. We were looking at some photography I did of some of the teachers and students in the Activity Clubs for the yearbook, when I start hearing from them about which teachers in my photos were having sex with which of the other girls in my photos.

I was stunned. But it wasn’t just baseless gossip I was hearing then, because later on one of the teachers they were pointing to in my photographs was arrested and jailed for it. I never heard if the other one they kept pointing out in my photography ever did or not.

And even more than the accusations I was hearing, the casual offhanded way they told me about it stunned me even more; like it was some sort of common knowledge, among the girls back then. Because back then, among themselves, the girls talked to each about things they’d never feel comfortable talking to the boys about. I think in that moment they were comfortable talking about it to me because by then I was out to all my classmates. I don’t think they would have said anything to me about it if I was straight.

And I was stunned listening to all that. And even more…at the offhanded way they were telling me, as they looked at my photos of a couple of our teachers, the one who later got arrested and the one that, to my knowledge did not, surrounded by the other kids in one of the Activity Clubs, and they’re pointing and telling me He had sex with that girl…and that one…and that one…

Why am I bringing this up now? Oh…no particular reason…

The smoke from those Canadian wildfires is reaching down here to Greensburg, and so I’m told, back home in Baltimore. If anything it’s worse today than yesterday. Oh and I’m going home now to temperatures in a high 90s. It was like this a few years ago, during first retirement, when I bopped out to California and the heat past the Rockies was brutal. I don’t remember it being like this when I was a kid. Hot during the summer, yes, and disgustingly humid. But not like this.

I’m in Greensburg Pennsylvania presently, the ancestral home of my mom’s side of my gene threads. I used to post these travelogs often here on my blog in real time, but I don’t anymore because thieves and burglars might be listening in and see an opportunity to break into my house and steal things; and never mind I always have neighbors and security cameras watching and my alarms set. It’s the world we live in now. But I’m getting tired of that, and I think I’m going to post about my travels here more often.

I’m here in Greensburg to drop some family history I inherited after mom passed away. Family bibles with birthdates, death dates, and marriages recorded in them, and lots and Lots of old family photos and random artifacts. I’ve given it all to the Greensburg Historical Society. I still have family living in the area I suppose, but I’m completely estranged from them because of how mean they were to my mom. The only person I’m still close to on that side is mom’s cousin, who stood by her all throughout her life and whatever the family drama was. But like mom, she doesn’t live here anymore, and hasn’t for decades.

As I type these words I suddenly realize that, like mom, and her mom, mom’s cousin never had any interest in returning to Greensburg after they left, long, long ago. Mom took me here often when I was a kid for visits, but in retrospect that was mostly for her mom’s benefit, to visit old friends and the one son she still had living nearby. We would stay with a distant relative, whose relationship to mom’s family I’m still uncertain of. I still have fond memories of those visits, but that was before the family drama really started touching me.

When I came to the Greensburg Historical Society the other day to drop things off, they gave me the tour of their collection so far. The people working here are very nice folks, history nerds, and so friendly it did my heart good because my feelings toward this place are mixed now at best. I’m writing this to my blog just to put this one more little message in a bottle out here for you because the collection of German artifacts they have surprised me, and then made my heart ache in a different way from the ache I expected to have being here. I always knew in the back of my mind the German influence here in central Pennsylvania, but seeing it all collected together and representing a significant part of the history of this place startled me.

There was a magnificent old bible, one of those big heavy embossed leather bibles with heavy metal clasps to close it, well preserved in a glass display case, and it was in German. There were school books in German, travel books, written histories of Pennsylvania and Westmoreland County. Stories of the people who came here, made a life here, in the language of their homeland. The folks who work here said they’d brought a translator in to help with cataloging all that. And I immediately  thought of you, and wished you were there with me just then, because you could have looked all that over and told them things about it that maybe they didn’t know. And I began aching for a life I never had a chance to have, and which probably one you wouldn’t have wanted with me anyway.  The old dream that will never completely die, but that becomes something to just acknowledge, like getting old.

I’m letting go of all that family history now because the Parkinson’s diagnosis leaves me with a new perspective. You always kept telling me toward the end of it, that I needed to let go of the past. Live in the present you said, using the word as a double entendre.  I wouldn’t exactly call Parkinson’s a present, but it works well enough as a mile marker. I can let go of a lot of stuff I’ve carried with me since mom died, because I was never much a part of it anyway, and I am going to need to carefully manage the energy I have left to me. I’m sure at some point the people in my family here became aware that mom’s son by the father they all despised is gay, but they’d have kept me at arms length anyway because I was his son and the sins of the father will always convey to the son if he’s the only convenient target.

Mom loved me, I’ve never doubted that, but she’s gone now and my connection to the others was tenuous at best because that was how they wanted it ultimately, and I came to accept it. The life of the only child teaches him how to rely on himself. The only one who took an interest in me was the one who left Greensburg for California and he never went back either. How I’ve wished I could have grown up closer to him. But then I would never have met you.

The trick in letting go of things is knowing what parts of that life you lived made you the person you are, what you need to honor and respect, for better or worse, and what was just the back story, not your story.

This came across my Facebook news stream yesterday, from user Alex Bernard in the “Dune” group…

J.R.R. Tolkien famously disliked Frank Herbert’s Dune “with some intensity”. He never wrote a detailed critique, but literary historians and scholars attribute his feelings to fundamental clashes in their worldviews, moral frameworks, and storytelling philosophies.

I’ll just leave this with two of his bullet points, because they’re really all that needs to be said:

• Moral Ambiguity vs. Objective Good: Tolkien championed stories where characters fought for objective, uncompromised good—even when faced with impossible odds, like Frodo’s quest. In contrast, Dune operates in gray areas. Its protagonist, Paul Atreides, embraces a consequentialist mindset, choosing “lesser evils” to secure power, which Tolkien would have found deeply troubling.

• Pessimism and Power: Tolkien’s concept of “consolation” involved a eucatastrophe (a miraculous, happy ending) and hope. Dune is a bleak, tragic universe where absolute power corrupts, and the ultimate outcome is inherently dystopian and complex.

That last is basically Herbert the man right there. Let me add Herbert was also a homophobe. But of course these things tend to be bundled together, springing from the core of a rotten soul. And where you really see it isn’t in the Dune novels, but in Soul Catcher; a book I have hated passionately ever since I finished it, threw it across the room and tore it to bits. When I learned later that Herbert had a gay son it occurred to me that the book was an exercise in vicariously tormenting and murdering Bruce. (Herbert detested his gay activist son Bruce, who struggled with drugs his adult life…which wouldn’t have had anything to do with how Herbert would, among other things, hook his sons up to a lie detector when they misbehaved) But it can also be seen as a purer horror story than the Dune novels. Herbert is on record as saying the character of Paul Atreides was meant to be a warning, not a hero, and you can suppose the character of Charles Hobuhet is also in that vein; a warning about men who assume they are favored by the gods. But Herbert is too cute by half here. See how many people miss what Herbert claims is is point about Paul. He knew what he was doing. He wasn’t calling out his god’s right hands; he’s admiring them from afar. And like your usual moral runt, he dresses it up in various disguises and self serving excuses, so he doesn’t have to see the creep in the bathroom mirror.

I’ve read there is some sort of effort towards turning the book into a movie, but the people working on it, with the support of Herbert’s family it seems, were trying to rewrite the end to be more “politically correct” (their own words). I can appreciate why, since the book is so thoroughly disgusting in its total indifference to child murder. But the essential problem with the book isn’t that the thirteen year old boy is murdered at the very end, only moments from when he might have been rescued. The core problem is it is yet another crazy murdering Injun Joe figure created by a white man with zero understanding and sympathy for native Americans, a moral indifference for cultural appropriation, and bitter resentment over having a gay son. Native Americans just don’t need more of that sort of thing dumped on them, and I’ll bet Bruce didn’t much like seeing himself vicariously tormented and killed by his own father. I don’t see how you make that “politically correct”. So I hear, Herbert lost his only native American friend when he showed him a draft of the story. Of course it didn’t discourage him from getting it published.

Decency versus vulgarity.

Tolkien almost certainly disliked Dune “with some intensity” because he had Herbert’s number. They could not have been more different men.

I really needed to get some more cat food, in case Walter comes for a visit (he didn’t last night). And cookies. But talking even a short walk is risky in this heat, and especially for someone my age. I decided to wait until after sundown and the temperature dropped to at least 95. One of the perks of living where I do is there is a really good Giant Food store that’s not more than a 10-15 minute walk from my front door.

Out on the front porch it was still like an oven but not so intense that I didn’t think I could manage it. So I grabbed a small canvas shopping bag and headed out. All I needed was a few cans of cat food to tide me over until I could drive out to Cockeysville and the Pet Smart there. So I wouldn’t be carrying a lot back home.

What I hadn’t figured into this was that the intense heat of the last couple days had really baked the pavements and everything else in my environment, such that even if the sun wasn’t bearing down on me and the sky was getting dark, the heat was rising up at me from the ground all around me.

But I made it. I have food (and cookies). Probably not venturing out again until Monday when this heat wave is supposedly scheduled to end.