It merited a trip to the big ER at Union Memorial and the Curtis National Hand Center within. The big ugly (I mean Really ugly) bruise on the pad of the first segment of that finger made me afraid I’d broken the bone there. But x-rays showed no bone damage. I was diagnosed as having a blood blister under the skin.
Serves me right for working with a sledge hammer when I’m tired, I’m irritable, and my Parkinson’s addled left hand can’t hold anything steady.
I searched for him for 34 years. Before the Internet all I had was various blogs and USENET news groups where I would post the occasional message in a bottle. I got no replies. I paid money for CDs of all the national public white pages (the part of the phone book with just the names, addresses and phone numbers of people who hadn’t paid to have their numbers private) so I could search for him by name. But there were hundreds, if not thousands of people with his first and last names and I did not know his middle name, or that he was actually going by his high school nickname.
Then the AIDS crisis hit, and I walked between the panels during the Names Quilt’s first showing on the Washington Mall, and afterward I had recurring nightmares of walking among the panels and finding one with his name on it. Worse were the nightmares where I was walking in the halls of our old high school and seeing him walk by emaciated and covered in kaposi sarcoma lesions. I would wake up crying my eyes out.
Eventually, in desperation, I did a thing that finally, Finally, led me right to him. I had a phone number. Trembling, I called it. Thankfully I got his answering machine, not him, or I would have probably choked and squeaked out some pathetic hello, uh, hi, uhm, maybe you don’t remember me…but anyway…hello…hi…is this Tom…from back in Woodward…hello…hi…uhm…ah…how are you…hello… But the moment I heard his voice on that answering machine I knew it was him after all, I didn’t even need to hear the message, and I instantly became that awkward geek of a teenage boy I was back when I first laid eyes on him and my jaw dropped.
I hung up and carefully composed a message to leave on his answering machine. Then I called again, thankfully got the answering machine again, and trying hard to keep my voice steady, left the message.
Just so my friends know… I got a response to one of my messages in a bottle this afternoon. Finally. After so long…
You walk in an empty landscape under an endless sky. The earth under your feet is flat, hard, solid rock. Ahead of you is cliff, overlooking a great valley. There are mountains on the horizon. So far away. And…what looks like, perhaps, a city in the distance. Just at your feet is a pool of water, in a small hollow in the rock. Its surface is unnaturally calm.
Look down into it. You see your reflection. It is deceptively clear. You see yourself, here, now. As you are. Right this moment. You see every detail of your face, sharp and crystal clear, looking back at you. But unlike most people who come this way, to look into this pool, you know that this is not all there is to you. There is more. The rest of you is there, in the darkness below the surface. You know this.
Reach a hand into the water. Did you slack through most of your life? Did you walk it with your eyes closed? Your mind blissfully content with the moment? Never questioning. Never doubting. Never wondering? Then the pool is quite shallow. Your hand reaches the bottom soon, and encounters only the same hard smooth rock you have just walked across. But if you kept your eyes open, and your mind active, and your heart engaged, then it is quite deep. Your hand does not touch bottom no matter how far into it you reach. The water is cold. It is dark. It is deathly still.
Reach down as far as you can. Then stir the water. Just a little. Careful. The reflection of you, here, now, ripples away. Watch. Something else, something from deep down in the pool, shimmers up to take its place.
So for years now…34 years to be exact…I’ve been throwing these little messages in a bottle out into the world, where, hopefully, they would eventually find there way to a certain someone. So what happened between us back when we were both teenagers is pretty central to who I am today. So I finally got a reply. After 34 years of searching for him I finally found him. So we talked. For just over an hour we talked. You have to expect that 34 years is a lot of time for things to happen. And things did happen. Many things he told me about. And many things I can only guess at from what he would only allude to. He sounds just like he always did. It was like picking up the phone and talking to him back in 1972. It was eerie. It was wonderful. It was thrilling. It was disturbing. He’s the same guy he was back then. And he’s different. And things have happened in 34 years. Many things.
And I feel like…a gently whirling dust devil just suddenly smacked into me and threw parts of me that no one has ever touched or disturbed in 34 years reeling into the air, scattered across the sky, and now I’m just standing here becalmed, watching it all lazily settle back down, and I know it will still be me when it does, but different, and I don’t know what will happen next because those parts of me ran so old and so deep and so still…
“How do I get to Tucumcari?”
…and then, of course, I had to deal with the consequences of doing the thing that brought me back to him. Four months later it was this:
Unforgettable…That’s What You Are… Unforgettable though near or far Like a song of love that clings to me How the thought of you does things to me Never before has someone been more
Nat King Cole is singing on my iPod and it’s drizzling freezing rain outside and I’m nursing a glass of Kahlua and there is a face and a name that I just can’t get out of my thoughts, and it’s been like that for days now and I’m sorry. I had a couple of cartoons I wanted to get finished before today and I just haven’t been able to put pen to paper for days now. This is why I stopped drawing, stopped painting, stopped working with my cameras, for over a decade…it’s why I’m a software engineer now, and not the graphic artist or photographer everyone from Woodward assumed I’d become someday…this bundle of feeling that I have to deal with every time I walk into that space inside of me where all my creativity comes from. There’s a piece missing from what should have been my life and before I can sit down and do anything in my art room I have to deal with that and sometimes I just can’t. There’s a bit of that loss, that quiet, waiting, life-on-hold emptiness, in Everything I’ve Ever Done since 1975 and by the late 1980s I just got so sick of seeing it staring back at me from my artwork that I just stopped doing anything…I took my easel down, put my oils, my pens and charcoal sticks, my drawing pads away, put my cameras away, and just plinked on a computer (just like I’m doing now) for creative release.
I want that part of me back. I really want it back. But it’s a struggle. I have my ups and downs now…and this week has just been particularly bad. I’m sorry. Nothing more for now. I just can’t. I guess this is why I’ll never be a professional cartoonist or artist. I’m sorry. I just can’t. I’m sorry.
I remember skies Mirrored in your eyes I wonder where you are I wonder if you Think about me Once upon a time In your wildest dreams
I started my semi autobiographical cartoon series, A Coming Out Story, as I said at the time, to try and make sense of what happened to me back in high school, back when I finally had to admit not only am I gay but I’m crushing madly on a classmate, and it’s 1971 and neither one of us have any hope of that magical first crush being anything but as confusing minefield of feelings and fear. I had no idea back then of where he’d gone or even if he was still alive.
And then I found him. And we started talking again. And it was wonderful again. And a minefield of feelings and fear again. For most of us of our generation, it will always be a time before Stonewall.
We talked and talked and talked. It was wonderful. A little tentative flirting happened, but it was impossible and we both knew it. But I still held out hope we could be friends, if long distance ones. Even that turned out not to be possible. I was out and proud and he needed me to be closeted, at least in public around him, and by then I’d stood my ground so often and had the life bruises to show for it that I wasn’t doing that for anyone, let alone the guy who made my heart sing when I was a teenage boy. Even if he never loved me back, even if we weren’t really all that compatible to begin with, I was never going to betray that moment when I discovered how wonderful it was to be in love, how wonderful life could be after all. But he had his comfort zone and he told me to my face that he was going to stay in it.
A few years later we had one last heart to heart where he told me things I could swear he’d got from a stint in ex-gay therapy. He told me there were times he’d look in a mirror and not know who it was looking back. This was the guy teenage me once thought hung the moon and the stars. I walked back to my hotel room thinking this must be what it’s like living in Nietzche’s abyss.
Ten years after I found him again he told me to go away.
I’ve struggled to bring my cartoon series to a proper end ever since. I tacked on an ending but it isn’t the one I’d planned, and there was so much more I wanted to tell. But I have no energy. That life-on-hold emptiness inside me never left. I’m only still alive now because I’m so used to it being there.
Marc Elias @marcelias.bsky.social
The Trump administration sent letters to all 58 California counties Friday, demanding that they segregate ballots from alleged noncitizens and threatening election officials with potential criminal charges if they fail to comply…
DOJ demands all California counties segregate ballots, threatening to prosecute election officials
By Zachary Roth October 24, 2026
The Trump administration sent letters to all 58 California counties Friday, demanding that they segregate ballots from alleged noncitizens and threatening election officials with potential criminal charges if they fail to comply, the New York Times reported.
The letters — the latest escalation in a sweeping and dangerous Department of Justice (DOJ) assault on California’s election system — include a “subset” list of names from the original 20,000 people from across the state that the DOJ flagged as suspected noncitizens for local election officials to review.
“This is NOT A DRILL: Donald Trump and Todd Blanche are trying to interfere in California elections,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said in a statement responding to the news.
…
The letters also ask the counties to send the administration sensitive personal information about the alleged noncitizens that would allow the federal government to determine their eligibility to vote. The requested information includes Social Security numbers and ID information.
Trump’s justice [sic] department has no constitutional authority to do this, and I’m pretty sure California is going to tell them, politely, to fuck off. But I don’t think they ever expected compliance when they sent the letter. This is Trump’s people, with the collusion of the Republican party, positioning themselves to declare after election day, if not that very day, that California’s election results are null and void and Mike Johnson can decline to seat all the democratic party representatives from California. Because of course the republicans who won their contests did it legitimately. And Johnson will do it too. Because he’s up to his neck in on it.
Maybe they think this keeps congress in the hands of the Republicans, but I don’t think even the Robert’s court is going to go along with it…Alito and Thomas notwithstanding. But that matters less than the absolute chaos that follows. With that action, Trump and Mike Johnson will light a powder keg.
I think that’s what we need to plan on after election day. Because they’re fine with blowing everything up. The America of democracy, of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, of liberty and justice for all, was never their country. They want it gone; replaced by a white “illiberal democracy”. or what Trump and those closest to him probably want which is the fascist dictatorship. It won’t matter which version wins.
The only saving grace of it I can see is they are so tightly wrapped in their self glorifying information cocoon that they don’t understand the rest of us At All. It’s the same exact mindset I have seen for decades during the fight for LGBT civil rights. They have this cheapshit bar stool stereotype of who the opposition is and it keeps surprising them when we don’t behave like that and we keep fighting even harder and keep winning battles they thought were done deals. They have the same mindset about liberals and democrats, just like the fascists of the second world war had about the allies, and themselves as the master race.
They think we’re weak, but we’re not weak, we’re decent. People like that are always mistaking decency for weakness.
We can eventually win this thing, but have no illusions. If enough of what’s left of the republican party doesn’t draw a line in the sand, what happens after Mike Johnson pulls the trigger is going to be ugly. Worse than anything this nation has endured.
I got my Parkinson’s diagnosis last July, after nearly two years of struggle with various doctors and ER staff about random dizzy spells and periods of almost debilitating fatigue. I got a new GP and she got me a brain scan (no anomalies detected) and a visit to a neurologist who gave me clarity.
So I’m on the standard med, carbidopa-levodopa (which I internally joke as takeadopa-leaveadopa, which I get at my local little free pharmacy…I should do a cartoon on that…) and it has improved things noticeably, mostly in the realm of physical symptoms.
But it’s a menu of five entries, and some side dishes, not all of which are getting better. Tremors are, until lately, minor, and mostly in my left hand. The others, balance, fatigue, stiffness, and brain fog, come and go. Every day is one or two different entries, of various portions.
When I was diagnosed, the neurologist said I was borderline late onset Parkinson’s, and that I had five, maybe as long as ten more years before I would be needing help. Which was good to know. Maybe my finicky heart will take me off the playing field first. As of now, this is my working cure for Parkinson’s.
That’s because my terror is the tremors start getting into my right hand, which is my drawing hand, and I can’t draw anymore. I’m already seeing how the left hand tremors are making it hard to type out things on the iPhone, because holding it, and a camera steady in both hands, is challenging when the left won’t stop shaking, even if it’s not very much (this is why having tremors mostly in my left hand is Not the blessing it might seem).
But it is the right hand that is always in control. So of course now it’s starting to get into my right hand. Not so it’s noticeable to anyone but me, because I am used to having precision in that hand. And this is really dragging me down because when the right had precision goes I’m done for.
I’m extremely right handed…a thing I discovered reading a paper about how some gay males who either have no brothers or are the first borns are more likely to be. There was an attached questionnaire you could take that asked you which hand you used for various tasks, and it was clever. Brushing your teeth, using a broom, dusting, wiping off a table, cleaning a window, that sort of thing. And the choices were left hand always, left hand mostly, either-or, right hand mostly, right hand always. There were about a dozen of these questions and I was ticking off right hand always on all of them. It surprised me to learn that even most right handed folks switch off from time to time on these task, while I never did.
Yesterday I noticed, because it was hard not to, the tremors were becoming evident in my right hand.
Behold, Franklin Graham, righteously lying about his fellow Americans for votes.
In the Baptist Church I was raised in we were taught that a camel could pass through the eye of a needle easier than a rich man could enter the Kingdom of Heaven, that the pursuit of worldly status separates us from God, that it was the Roman police state that killed Christ, and the sin of the pharisees was their collusion with that state. But then we were Yankee, not Southern Baptists.
Today began with much dizziness. Then, as I tried to prep the backyard deck for the coming winter, fatigue. So much fatigue I thought I was going to collapse on the deck, and was grateful my neighbor across the alley was also working in his backyard and could see if I wasn’t moving.
Something else I noticed is the tremors in my left hand are worse today, and I’m starting to see a small beginnings of it in the right hand. That’s my drawing hand. I know I have to expect that to get worse, but if the day comes that I can’t draw anymore I don’t know how much longer I’m going to want to keep living.
I took this photo of George back in the early 1970s when we were both teenage boys and I was getting deep into photography as both a photojournalist and an artist. George was one of those rare friends who could give the camera a completely natural straight-on look, and enjoyed letting my camera give him some love. This one was taken somewhere along one of our hikes at Great Falls.
He was beautiful, which was another reason why he was a favorite to take with me on a camera hike. In retrospect I think he had a crush on me, but I was crushing on another classmate and was oblivious. He paid my way into a drag race at a track deep in PG County and also for a pit pass. His favorite drag racer was competing. But it was during the Saudi led gasoline shortage and though heavy gas rationing was no longer in place it was still a time of shortages, and I got afraid I would run out on the way back and asked if we could leave the track early before the gas stations closed.
He sadly agreed and I can still hear his wistful voice saying as we drove off, that his favorite was probably making his run about then. I wrote about it here back in 2013, long before I knew what had happened to him. This photo is from our last camera hike, a few weeks after the race. He never took another with me and we drifted apart. It’s my favorite photo of him. I made him a print of it and he told me afterward that even his dad thought it was a good one.
The memory of that moment and the sound in his voice as we drove away from the track stuck with me, and I began to feel more and more like I’d betrayed his trust. It has persisted painfully all these years.
I began trying to search for him online, first on the various blogs where I thought he, or a mutual friend, might be, then as the Internet became a thing. I tried all the people search websites I could find, but I could never remember how to spell his last name so the searches came up blank. It went on for decades. Then on Facebook someone posted some pages of his high school yearbook and I saw his picture in it and got the correct spelling. I immediately found him: he was living in Florida, got his address and sent him a letter. It came back as no longer living there, forwarding address unknown.
The more I dug the more it began to appear to me that he was in a bad way, maybe even homeless. I became alarmed and contacted a private detective agency and gave them what I knew. If he was homeless or on the edge of it I wanted to help. I felt I owed him. I’ve had other friends who have gone through periods of homelessness here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, and I’ve seen how they can convince themselves that their situation is hopeless and they just give up. I came near enough to that myself. With effort mutual friends and I got them the help they needed and back on their feet. I would have done that for George if I could have.
The agency found him right away. But it was bad news. Yes he was still alive, something I was worried about because we are both old men now. But sometime between when we were teenagers and the old men we are now, he had become schizophrenic.
He was being cared for in a place I thought was sketchy, but that was none of my business. I sent him some letters and postcards but never heard back. I don’t even know if he got any of them or if his caretakers simply trashcanned them.
So now I know, and I have to let it go. Or at least try to make peace with it. Somehow.
We were young and he was beautiful and fun to be with. I should have paid more attention…and maybe been a little less self absorbed. He didn’t deserve what happened to him, but then I suppose none of us do, for better or worse. Things just happen and you do you best to navigate the wreckage to the other side.
Never ask me why I am an atheist. I might just shrug and give you whatever answer I think you want. Or you might get an earful about every knife in my heart and all the good hearts I’ve ever known that happened to us for no reason. There is no God. All we have in this life is each other.
First thing I wanted to do this morning was contact the money manager of my 401k and start the process of withdrawing my Required Minimum Distribution and establishing a recurring monthly withdrawal. Supposedly the paperwork involved in that could be uploaded to them via their app, so I am hopeful there is no major delay in getting that sorted out and I start to receive my money. But we shall see. When I called their number I was presented with the usual notices and a voice menu asking me to tell the computer what I was calling about. Instead of giving me a list of choices it just said I could say my reason for calling in my own words, but the more words I used the better. So I described my situation. It then told me it would connect me with the appropriate customer service. Then it told me I had been verified by voice print.
???
!!!
Ooookay. That was a little creepy and I sincerely hope they’re using more than just my voice because any crook could record me and get into my account otherwise.
So I got that process started and I am more at ease now that at least some of it will come through soon enough that it will cover the missing paycheck/vacation payout I thought I was getting from the Institute when I retired.
So I was feeling a Lot calmer today, and decided to take another hike on a different part of the NCR rail-trail. Then I went to White Rose in York for food and a margarita. While I was there I hit the boutique soap shop where a lady has a corner of the store she sells her custom made tie-dye t-shirts and found two good ones. I will need to give them a quick wash to get the smell of boutique soap out of them.
This blog post represents a change of bloggy work flow. From now on I do the first draft here and if I want, I’ll repost to my Facebook friends. They’re either going to have to start following me here more regularly or wonder at some point where I went. There’s apparently a new push by “Meta” to claim all the artwork you’ve posted to your facebook page, And The Links To Your Private Websites, as fair game for “training” their AI monster. That’s “training” as in stealing your work. I’m not having it so once again I am about to take all my artwork and photography off my Facebook page and I do regret that somewhat because it gave all that more of an audience then it gets here. But the reason blogs don’t get the traffic they used to is Facebook set out to throttle blogs, the way the casinos in Atlantic City throttled that big beautiful boardwalk that used to be there. They don’t want anyone straying outside their cocoons because then you’re not spending money inside them.
Evolution And Homosexuality…Not Incompatible At All Actually
This video touches on things I’ve written about here before in this blog post. But it adds some details I hadn’t known about too, which is always good.
I’m really coming to love all the new science videos coming out lately! There’s a complaint making the rounds…a perfectly legitimate complaint…that the Internet began as a library and now it’s degenerated into a shopping mall. It’s true enough, and the big commercial social media companies are largely to blame. I remember a time when the question everyone was asking about the Internet was how is anyone going to make money on this thing. Well now we know and it’s a tragedy. But websites and blogs like this one are still out there, and if you dig and are persistent you can find your way back to the library.
I have transitioned back into retirement, and I should be feeling great about it. A couple days ago I was. I’d made plans to visit the ancestral Garrett homelands in California, and hang out with my brother in Oceano. I’d bought train tickets from Baltimore to Los Angeles because I didn’t want to be driving cross country during snow and ice season, and also across red America after election day. I figured I’d decide how to get up the coast to Oceano when I got to LA, since the train schedules going north don’t always sync well with the Southwest Chief. Then I realized I had time left on my Disneyland annual pass and I could take a MetroLink to Anaheim and spend a few days in California Adventure and then take the Surfliner north to the Grover Beach station, which is walking distance to my brother’s house in Oceano.
So I was in a great frame of mind. Then. Later that afternoon I took an ad-hoc hike along the NCR rail trail north of Baltimore and it was a sunny pleasant sky blue day. Got a nice BLT at a local shop next to the trailhead. I was feeling wonderful. There was however, a problem I was waiting to get resolved the next business day. I have been in a state of despair ever since. I’m typing this now after waking up from a bad nightmare.
When I got what I thought was going to be my final paycheck plus all the vacation time I’d accrued, it was massively less than I’d thought. So I asked HR to look into it, and naturally it’s my fault, or so they say. And the tax man’s. This is going to make things difficult for me for the rest of this year, and it’s too late to cancel my train tickets and Disney hotel reservations without taking another big hit.
And while it’s true I have enough in my 401k to retire comfortably, the problem for me at this point is the current managers of my 401k have much more stringent rules for making sure you are not and never have been married that the other one I was previously on did not. Which is (hahaha) why the Institute dropped them and pushed us all onto the current one. So the buffer I thought I had to tide me through the paper are you or are you not or have you ever been married chase isn’t there and I’m going to be struggle to make ends meet until this new 401k manager decides I’ve satisfied requirements. And they have fucked me over dragging their feet on other matters before.
Saving grace of all this might be that at 73 I am subject to the Required Minimum DIstribution now and this current 401k manager has already informed me that I have a chunk out of my 401k I now I have to withdraw. Hopefully this means they will get serious about letting me do that.
Here’s the thing many of my friends and practically all my classmates don’t really get about me. I was raised by a single divorced mother and didn’t get a chance to finish college because the money ran out and what great granddad Garrett had put aside for me and my brother got disappeared somehow. I knocked around this and that low paying job for half my working life. And even when I started making a good living as a software developer it was contract work at first with zero benefits.
Mom didn’t have any tangible property when she died, let alone a house in Montgomery county that could be sold for a big profit, and I just don’t have the foundational wealth most of the rest of my classmates and co-workers have. It’s not like they’re rich by any means, just comfortably middle class. I on the other hand, am literally a kid from the other side of the railroad tracks.
If it wasn’t for the benefits I had at STScI I wouldn’t have anything but social security to retire on at all. The 401k and b have enough in them to let me have a comfortable, if not fabulous retirement, but I can’t tolerate sudden complexities very well at all. Like having to go through a paper chase just to prove I’ve never been married before I can access my retirement funds.
Most working people in this land of the free and home of the brave can’t tolerate surprises either. We have lived hand to mouth for most of our lives, if not all of it. I’m also excessively lucky I can still keep my employee health plan, even accounting for how that and Medicate part B increases are likely to eat all of the coming SS COLA increase and then some. You’ve no idea the panic that sets in whenever I hear republicans talking about cutting social security.
I’m just anxious and sick to my stomach right now. I just want to stay in bed for the rest of the week. Maybe the rest of my life.
I was out and about a couple nights ago, just wandering around my little corner of Baltimore, and chatting with a friend in DC via cellphone. The kid who grew up with telephones wired into the wall, and local long distance charges through the roof, is loving how all that changed in the 21st century. I carry my phone with me in my pocket and it is also my music library, weather radar, encyclopedia, and all around handheld computer. I was feeling great since my short afternoon hike on the NCR rail trail north of Baltimore. Despair was to come the next day but just then I didn’t know that. It was a lovely blue sky day and the evening was cool and but not so cold yet that I couldn’t be out and about in a flannel shirt and no jacket.
I decided to stop for a drink at one of my favorite restaurants, I won’t say which because of what I saw going down and what I did about it.
This particular restaurant served a specialty drink that they smoked in front of the customer before serving it. I discovered this delightful thing about smoking a drink at the upscale Basque restaurant across I-83 from me. They call it a Blue Velvet and it is decadently good. But that restaurant had a fire and it’s been closed since last January, although they say they’re opening back up this December. So when this other place started serving a smoked old fashion I tried it out and it was excellent. If pricey.
So I go inside and sit at the bar. A new bartender is there…a young woman I’d never seen before. She asked me what I wanted and I asked if she could make me that smoked old fashion and she said yes.
So I’m chilling out at the bar while she’s making it. Eventually one of the regular bartenders comes back and starts working the little glass washer at the end of the bar. He sees me and asks me if I want my usual food and I say no, just a drink tonight. I don’t really know this bartender, but he seems to know me. There are other regulars behind the bar I see often, but this is late Sunday night and so I suppose these are the off hours staff. He’s tall, thin and bearded and he seems okay. But his interactions with the young woman really put me off.
She starts walking over to me with my drink and the guy grabs he by the arm as she passes by him and says something to her. It wasn’t a rough grab but it was a grab, and the first thing I’m thinking is no, you don’t touch your staff like that. He says something to her and she nods and walks over to me and puts my drink down.
The process at this restaurant involves putting a smoker over the glass. They apparently get them from one of their suppliers and it has that company’s name on it. It’s a wooden thing that fits over the glass and has that company’s logo carved onto it. On the top of the smoker is a small bowl the bartender fills with some wood like hickory, mesquite, or red oak. Once the bowl is filled a torch lighter is used to burn the wood, and smoke drifts down from the bowl and covers the top of the drink. At the Basque restaurant the bartender would bring a small bottle prefilled with smoke and pour the smoke from the bottle over your drink while you watched. It’s all very theatrical in a way but that’s part of the enjoyment.
So this new young bartender starts trying to smoke my drink using their smoke top device, but it isn’t getting the smoke down onto the drink. I’ve seen this happen before and suggest to her that the smoker is clogged. She agrees. But then the other bartender comes over and sees the problem with the smoker and basically takes over the process from the young woman. He brings over a new smoker, fills it’s bowl with wood chips and starts torching it himself, saying in front of her and me that he needs to show her how it’s done so she doesn’t screw it up. And I’m thinking no, this is not how you train your staff. This is how you make them want to quit.
I can appreciate there are customers who will get all ornery when they’re being served by inexperienced staff, but that’s on them. I’m fine with being part of the process of teaching someone their job, especially when I can see they really want to learn. And this young woman was, before the other guy came along, pleasant, cheerful and wanting to make my time there good. It wasn’t her fault that the damn smoker she picked up was clogged. The other thing is you give staff the tools they need to do the job, and don’t be putting it on them when the tools fail them. Get them better tools.
So now there is discord behind the bar. The young woman is upset and she goes off to work the tables in the seating area; a task I think she was mostly there for and only did behind the bar while the other bartender was away or on his break. Periodically she comes back to the bar to take the drink orders from the tables, and goes into the kitchen to bring out their food. But a definite chill is in the air and I am completely sympathetic with the young woman.
I hear another staff member, also young woman, just casually say to the guy “She’s pretty angry at you.” He seemed to shrug it off. I saw him talk to her semi privately a couple of times but what was said or what it was about I had no idea. Whatever it was it didn’t clear the air.
I am loath to insert myself into other people’s drama, but there are limits. I kept an eye on the movements of the young woman until I saw an opportunity to catch her eye away from the others, and motioned her over to a spot where we could talk without being seen.
I told her 1) I saw him grab your arm. That was way out of line. 2) you do not criticise staff in front of the customers, that is completely unprofessional. 3) the crapped up smoker was not your fault.
She thanked me but the look on her face was thanks enough. I went back to finish my drink. At some point someone, or some someones (there were other young women working there) must have said something to the guy because he came over and apologised to me for putting all that in front of me.
Okay…I’m a gay male and the dynamics of straight male/female interaction is a foreign land to me. Fine. But I think I get workplace dynamics pretty well. You keep your hands off your co-workers. Train your staff with a measure of patience and humility: you had to be trained once yourself. Keep your criticisms private. Keep it away from the customers. Whatever it is.
I first heard of this child’s skull and the explosive argument about the human emergence from reading Robert Ardrey’s book African Genesis. It was a pivotal time in my life when I was hungry for spiritual guidance, having basically walked away, mostly, from the Baptist religion of my youth.
I would remain an agnostic for decades until finally becoming an atheist in my middle fifties. I dipped into this and that 60s/70s spiritual fad, read about Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan, sorted through the detritus of various gurus and spiritual cults, glanced at the pamphlets I was handed while photographing protest marches in DC. None of it moved me much. I was a science geek from an early age, took a class in logic and semantics in college, and could not seriously abide plain nonsense no matter how enchanting it seemed to me as a work of art.
So I wandered through my early 1970s, dazed and confused…
I discovered Ardrey’s book at age twenty while working at Industrial Photo in Silver Spring, in a corner of the basement where it had been tossed by some prior worker among random open boxes of inventory. I picked it up and read…(I understand the sexism of the text I am about to quote…sorry…but it’s how he wrote it in 1961)
Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was [mankind] born. The home of our [fathers] was that of the African highland reaching north from the Cape to the Lakes of the Nile. Here we came about – slowly, ever so slowly – on a sky-swept savannah glowing with menace.
In neither bankruptcy nor bastardy did we face out long beginnings. [Man’s] line is legitimate. Our ancestry is firmly rooted in the animal world, and to its subtle, antique ways our hearts are yet pledged. Children of all animal kind, we inherited many a social nicety as well as the predator’s way. But most significant of all our gifts, as things turned out, was the legacy bequeathed us by those killer apes, our immediate forebears. Even in the first long days of our beginnings we held in our had the weapon, an instrument somewhat older than ourselves.
[Man] is a fraction of the animal world. Our history is an afterthought, no more, tacked to an infinite calendar. We are not so unique as we should like to believe. And if [man] in time of need seeks deeper knowledge concerning himself, then he must explore those animal horizons from which we made our quick little march.”
He was writing this during peak cold war about when I was doing my duck and cover drills in the elementary school I attended. So I have a hunch about what “time of need” he’s talking about there.
The book instantly grabbed me for these nuggets of pure gold on the first page: not born in original sin, but born of this earth, and we can know ourselves after all, but to do that we have to look to our past, to our evolutionary heritage. He makes it even plainer later in the book when he says we are not fallen angels but risen apes; a metaphor I have always held close.
His books have been rightly criticized for the over emphasis on the killer ape hypothesis. I’m told the opening sequence of Kubrick’s 2001 was heavily influenced by African Genesis. A different and more complete picture has emerged since the book was published. I bring it up here only to say that Ardrey made me familiar with the long and acrimonious argument Dart’s discovery began, as related in the above video. But science Does self correct, if the evidence is there. Eventually even his most ardent critics came to admit they were wrong, and Dart was right. And it was walking upright, on two legs, that grew the large brain, not the other way around, freeing the arms and hands to do…things.
And I think Ardrey’s point still stands, if not quite as dramatically as he put forward. Given our ancient ancestors’ lack of physical stature, our canines ridiculously small by comparison, having no claws or talons or poisonous venom, how long should we have lasted on those African plains, had we not been born with a weapon in our hands? This same videographer has another one about the one simple thing we could do that gave us an advantage over the other animals we were competing with for food: we could throw things, hit and inflict damage at a distance from our physical selves. Our bodies, our shoulders specifically, are adapted to it.
Rocks and stones first probably, then spears, and from there to arrows…bullets…nukes.
Ardrey addresses this in his book too. The weapon that gave us a survival advantage, now threatens it, if we don’t learn to manage as he put it, those deeper understandings of ourselves, and those animal horizons from which we have made our quick little march.
This video came across my Facebook feed just now and I’m glad I found a copy on YouTube I could share with you on my blog here. I can see myself in it so clearly I’m stunned.
This is me, mostly. And it might seem strange to think of me as having grown up in an unstable environment, because the usual image of that is a horribly brutal family situation and mine wasn’t that. I never experienced childhood homelessness. I was never physically abused. I never went to bed hungry or out the door in dirty clothes. By all rights I have to say I had it pretty good. But family life on mom’s side was still dicey at times and this video really gets how I learned to cope with it.
Thing is when you grow up in certain situations they don’t seem unusual to you because that’s your normal environment. It’s only as you get older and have more contact with the world around you that you begin to see how odd it might seem to others. But even then it’s still normal to you.
Mom’s love was the one constant I had growing up. Everyone else in her side of the family (I never had any contact with dad’s side until I was in my middle teens) was a minefield of is it good today or angry, and that was mostly about the central family drama that I was in the middle of and which I won’t go into now. The only one I never had to be careful around on the maternal side besides mom was my maternal uncle who lived in California who was always cheerful and fun. But he was clear across the country from me. I grew up with a bitter always angry and hostile maternal grandmother and that was the big minefield I learned to navigate growing up. Mostly by going to my room and closing the door, or going out for a walk. To this day long walks are how I work off nervous energy.
Don’t even get me started on the teachers I had all through grade school until I entered Woodward. Being the only son of a divorced mom they all pegged me as a problem child the moment I entered their classrooms and treated me that way (Montgomery County let me see the notes those teachers wrote in my school record, but wouldn’t let me make copies alas). Then there were the bullies my being a skinny girlish art kid attracted. Woodward was paradise compared to everything that came before, but even then it wasn’t until my senior year there that I finally began to feel secure enough to open up and make real friends.
So I see myself in this video very clearly. I can think of at least one other friend here who probably can too. I see you. Survivor’s Intelligence.
Of all the symptoms of Parkinson’s, the one I dislike the very most is fatigue. Tremors at this stage I’m in are trivial. I get the occasional stiffness, mostly in my thighs, but it’s not bad. I get the dizzy spells randomly. The brain fog comes and goes. But fatigue, when it hits, slams me down. It sucks the minutes of my life I still have left away and I just want to stay in bed and I get nothing done.
I have to be careful though, and not attribute everything that happens to me to Parkinson’s. The fact is I am 73 now and so some of this, maybe even most of it, is simply just my getting old. Also, my heart. I was told when I had the heart attack in 0ctober 2019 (tomorrow is the anniversary), that I have a leaky heart valve. I’m three years away from the time my cardiologist and the surgeon that did my angioplasty say are when I’ll probably need it replaced.
They say it can be done nowadays without opening up my chest. Lovely. Another scary procedure to be done inside my beating heart.
I have a book I purchased to write everything my family would need to know upon my demise. It’s titled “Sorry, It’s Your Problem Now.” I should probably get to work on it…
Got some good woodworking done today, something I’ve been looking forward to doing once I was on retirement time. Happy to note that Parkinson’s wasn’t bothering me at all and I can still work the table saw and other power tools pretty easily for a 73 year old. Even moving and lifting to its feet the Ryobi table saw wasn’t a problem.
As you can see I’m doing all this outside. I keep the table saw in an outside tool shed because it’s much too heavy for me to take up and down stairs, and there is really no place inside for me to be doing any woodworking. This means I have to do any woodworking during the part of the year it’s warm enough and not raining.
I had two things I wanted to at least get cut so I could stain and seal them later, and what you see in this photo is, or will be when I’m through with it, a lid for the storage bench at the front of my basement art room I needed to make after I got the new hot water tank; which required adding a bunch of new pipe and regulators to a space I was using to store art supplies. The lid will keep all that new plumbing in its own space and I can store my supplies on top of it.
I needed to buy nothing. The wood was from my stack of spare pieces from other projects. The power tools I’d bought long ago. The minor skill set I have for this work I got long ago while working for a couple of guys who had their own custom speaker shop, plus while working in a custom plastic shop. That odd skill set I have now was a benefit of the way I ricocheted around different jobs and workplaces when I was a young man, before I settled in to PCs and software development. I am no carpenter, but I can do most of the Harry Homeowner stuff around the house that needs doing and maybe a bit more.
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