It’s like watching those old Republic serials that start out with something like 12 men in a boardroom or on an expedition and over the course of 12 episodes they get knocked off one by one by a mysterious villain in a skull mask or black hood or something, operating out of a secret cave with a lot of flashing lights and Jacob’s Ladders, and he has two henchmen that wear dark suits and fedora hats, and then you get to the final episode and you find out which one of the 12 was under the mask all that time because the others are all dead by then.
This timeline would be a lot more fun if it was a Republic Serial.
I had to give in this afternoon and turn the central AC on, after the temperature in the house rose to nearly 80 degrees with the windows open and all the ceiling fans on. Oh well. It’s a new (as of ’24) high efficiency unit and my cooling bills are lower.
When I have the AC on I have to keep all the second floor doors closed because I have this little narrow Baltimore rowhouse and cool air sinks. But it’s old enough it has return vents in every major room so air still circulates. But it’s the time of year in Maryland when the weather bounces all over the thermostat so, for now, I won’t have to have the AC on all the time. That happens starting in July.
I Can Now Appreciate Why Some Artists Lock Stuff Away Until After Death
I took down that short story I posted here a few days ago. If it weren’t for AI bots my little corner of the internet tubes would hardly get any notice anyway and that story was a pretty gruesome one about a pretty ugly crime spree that I wanted to bring a measure of justice too, if only in a fictional way. I’m not sure I want people seeing that side of me creatively. My Skywatcher stories sure, and the blog posts I put up here. At some point I want to start serializing this “ghost” story I’ve been working on for nearly two decades. But the real crime stories I’m uncertain about. I think they’re good, but that’s a side of me I’m not completely comfortable with artistically. I reckon horror story writers don’t really care what anyone sees inside of them or they just think it’s fun, but I do. I might put that one and some others in that series in their own fiction page on my website later.
These past few days another one such story has come to mind that I’m been refining…in my daydreams not on paper…but it’s one I could not possibly show to anyone while I’m still alive. It’s not even about a real crime, but a fictional one that I read many years ago, and which is to this day the only book I’ve ever thrown across the room and torn to bits after I finished it. I have this powerful reflex against damaging books that got put into me when I saw footage of the fascist book burnings in grade school, and for that particular book to overrule that still gives me the creeps to remember.
That particular author is popular in some circles, and his magnum opus has been made into multi-million dollar Hollywood blockbusters. But even his diehard fans can’t figure out how to bring That particular book to the screen without getting the stench of it all over them too. Last I heard some filmmakers were trying to find a convincing way to rewrite the ending. Hahahahaha…
I had occasion to remember it again recently and a better way of ending that story came to mind. But there is too much about My version of that story that is politically incorrect so I won’t be able to share it while I’m still alive and breathing. Maybe I’ll stick in in one of those literary archives, Not To Be Opened for a certain term, like Arthur C. Clarke did a bunch of his stories and essays apparently. Boy I’d love to read whatever Those were, but I’d have to live to 105 and I don’t think that’s in the cards.
If you missed it, sorry to vaguebook about it. But we’re all disengaging from social media anyway so what does it matter? Anyway…I took the story down.
Well it seems like you’re not on Facebook anymore, not even just to be on messenger, or I’d have wished you a happy birthday. But anyway…Happy Birthday! I hope things are still going well for you and your significant other, and that life is wonderful. I’m old and tired and coming to the end of my road, but I will always remember you fondly, and that strange amazing time. Good things happened in spite of all the static circling everything. Progress was made. And smiles. Lots of smiles.
The case started with a religious therapist in Colorado Springs providing talk therapy for people who said they didn’t want to be gay, transgender
I see neutrality in Colorado isn’t just for baking cakes anymore.
So Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only one of nine who had the slightest shred of human decency on this matter. Six of them you can see exactly where they are coming from, especially Gorsuch. But Sotomayor’s insistence that this was a simple free speech issue and government must remain viewpoint neutral is as pernicious as it is disgusting. What seems to have escaped her notice is that this “therapy” is not only worthless if measured by its stated goal of change, it is overwhelmingly proven to be harmful. Like…drives some of its patients to suicide, when it isn’t fucking their lives up harmful. But I reckon when it comes to the lives of gay people medicine cannot take sides between healing and poison.
First do no harm…unless it’s to homosexuals. And surprise, surprise, the “therapist” in question is religiously motivated. Jesus died for her sins, but a few dead gays might also help out with that.
The “therapist” in question claims to only treat people who voluntarily come to her for help changing their sexual orientation. During the Love In Action protests I met quite a few of these who had checked themselves in voluntarily and were still struggling to heal from what was done to them, and to their relationships with their parents and families. I have photos of a wall covered with written expressions of pain and anguish at the ex-gay survivors conference I was allowed to document. It was in the quiet room where they could go when remembering became too much for them. So Jack McIntyre checked himself into to Love In Action when it was the first of its kind and located in San Francisco in the 1970s. When he saw that the “therapy” wasn’t working, Because It Could Not Work To Begin With, he fixed the problem by killing himself. Had ex-gay therapy been banned and some actual therapist been able to bring him into a state of peace with his sexual orientation and his religion, he might still be alive today. But that wouldn’t have been neutral.
Calling this a “Free Speech” issue neatly erases the question of harm. Because harm is not a consideration when it’s homosexuals we’re talking about. It’s not a bug as they say, it’s a feature. Gorsuch is on board with that…he’s all in for it. Sotomayor insists on being neutral because she is either stunningly ignorant, or just doesn’t care one way or the other about the fate of gay people. She cares about not taking sides.
Dante despised the neutrals the most, putting them completely outside the circles, saying Heaven refuses them and Hell does not want them. I reckon you have to see for yourself the damage they do to understand how appropriate that was.
Via Facebook Reels I see, Every Gay Man Remembers At Least One Of These. I dunno…maybe I just had such an oddball path growing up, or I’m just getting old and forgetful (a Real possibility) but the only one of these I still remember much of is my first Pride Day in downtown Washington DC, in the gayborhood around DuPont Circle. It was Anita Bryant’s win in Florida that pushed me into going.
1) The First Time You Realized You Might Be Different…
Somehow I always knew I was different in some way that I couldn’t explain, even when I was small. My family situation, not having a dad in the household, the unspoken tension regarding my dad, my being an only child, the constant, overpowering yankee baptist religious atmosphere in the household, my constant need to create art, my constant chattering curious always asking questions thing that really irritated my elementary school teachers, getting bullied all the time and not just by the other kids for reasons I could not back then understand. When you live in these situations they always seem normal to you because it’s all you know. But I could see how the other kids in my neighborhood and at school lived and I knew my life wasn’t like that.
2) The First Gay Character You Saw On TV…
I do not remember the first gay character I saw on TV. For most of my childhood and adolescence in the 50s/60s/70s you just didn’t see those. You saw comic sissies, sexual predators and dangerous psychopaths but those were seldom openly identified as gay back then, probably because of TV censorship. So I read, the first openly gay character on TV was a toss off foil for Archie Bunker in 1971. I must have missed that episode because I don’t remember it. Post 1972 I was out to myself (see A Coming Out Story) and began actively looking for the gay characters, but you still mostly had to read them between the lines, and just as often as not when you found any they were still largely based on the most ignorant and prejudicial stereotypes. It wasn’t until VIto Russo wrote The Celluloid Closet in 1981 that I began to understand why.
3) The First Time You Told Someone…
I don’t remember this exact moment either. I remember a bunch of times I had to dig in my heels about it. I think the first time I voluntarily said so was to crush #2, but not even sure about that. It might have been one or more classmates in the little group I fell into after high school. I never told either mom or dad. Pretty sure my brother knew from scanning my website and reading my blog.
4) The First Pride You Followed Even From Distance…
First Pride was the block party in front of Deacon Maccubbin’s Earthworks store. I think Lambda Rising had already moved around the block. It was an amazing experience, more so than even walking into my first gay bar which I don’t remember now. I sat on the porch in front of Earthworks with a go-go dancer from one of the clubs who would periodically hop up onto one of the stone walls and dance for the crowd, and a cute guy from the suburbs who invited me back to his apartment. That was when learned something important about myself, and letting myself get picked up by cute guys I had no actual romantic interest in.
5) The First Time You Felt Like Yourself…
I have always felt like myself. To quote Stephen Fry, not a noun, but a verb. And it has always felt weird. I think even before I came out to myself I’d accepted that.
Think Of Constant Stress As The Fire Alarm And Your Body As The Fire
This came across my news feeds just now…
NEWS: New reporting from POLITICO reveals Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons has been hospitalized multiple times for stress while carrying out Trump’s aggressive immigration agenda.
According to officials, Lyons faced intense pressure from the White House to ramp up deportations, amid reports of heated calls and internal chaos. It is also said that Stephen Miller frequently yells at him on calls. In one incident, he was rushed to the hospital overnight. In another, officials feared he may need emergency intervention on the spot.
I went and looked him up only to find he was born in 1981, almost a decade after I graduated from high school. Is this even the same planet I lived in when I was a young man, let alone a teenage boy. I don’t generally feel old, but for a moment there I really felt the years I’ve lived. I guess sometime soon there won’t be anyone left who remembers the America that was, before Reagan promised us that shining city on the hill.
I know stress. I’ve felt its clutches on me. It’s driven me to tobacco and alcohol and I know it’s shaved years off my life. If what this reporting is saying about you is true Mr. Lyons, Get Out Of There. It isn’t worth it. Whatever it is you think you’re accomplishing in there it’s rotting your soul and killing your body. These aren’t patriotic conservative men, they are the bottom of the human sewer, and if you don’t want to spend your last hour in there with them and be remembered along with them then get out. Go find the better man you can still be, while you still have some hours left.
I’m up in my den idling away the precious minutes of my life sitting at my computer desk when I hear a knock at my front door. I get up from my chair and look out the window behind the monitor. Down at street level I see some dressed men walking past my house. This looks familiar. Clue one.
Early mornings I leave my front door open and the screen door locked to allow some morning sunlight into the living room. As I walk down the stairs I observe a well dressed man standing outside wearing the sort of pasted on smile I have seen many times before. I note that he is holding some brochures in one hand. Clue two. Pretty sure I know what’s coming. No…you’re not a salesman…exactly…
Yes?
Good morning sir. Are you ready to experience Jesus’ promise for eternal life?
I’m not a believer. This conversation is over.
Proselytizer walks off, no further trying, facial expression totally unchanged. I begin to wonder if I’ve just spoken with some new kind of ambulatory bot. Maybe it was the pride flag hanging off my porch. Or my long hair and the tie dye t-shirt I was wearing. Or my face just then. I have often wondered what my resting face looks like after hours staring into a computer monitor.
First proselytizers of the season…start of spring was a few days ago wasn’t it…
I go back upstairs. As I walk back into my den I begin regretting that I didn’t thank the man for getting me away from the darn computer, even if it was just momentarily. I still have to do my taxes.
Scrolling through some old blog posts here I came across this one, did some double checking and…yeah…it’s just four months after this other one. It just really crashed everything I was up to creatively then. And then I spent another decade living in a wonderful dream only to crash and burn even worse.
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…
…it’s all just ambiguous enough that you can see in it almost anything you want to. Maybe this was medieval England’s 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover. Maybe its a devoted couple having a good laugh together that while they aren’t the perfect lovers of the folk tales and ballads, they’re still happily in love all the same. Maybe its a couple who’ve let each other down, angrily hurling impossible demands at each other. Maybe the song is about how love makes us rise above ourselves, brings things out of us that we’d never have known were there, never have known we could do or become, until we met that one person we would do anything for.
Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,
Perhaps once upon a time there were two people who might have loved, but time and circumstance just made it impossible. And now all they can do is wave at each other at a distance, smile a little, laugh a little, and ironically give each other these little absurd tasks to win each other, knowing full well it can never be.
Remember me to one who lives there, He once was a true love of mine.
What do you do when your heart is breaking? Write a song. Write some poetry. Make art that gets it out of you, before despair makes you want to go jump off a bridge.
Posts on Facebook today celebrating the release of Biloxi Blues with Matthew Broderick and Christopher Walken, who is amazing in his role (as usual) as Sergeant Toomey, but I cannot even think of that movie without remembering the scene where they gay soldier (private Hennessy, played by Michael Dolen) is taken out of a troop line by Toomey and some MPs, presumably after they pressured the other private he was involved with to name him, and driven away between them in a jeep. I can still see the look on his face and while I understand he was an actor playing a part it was so very disturbing. Great acting on everyone’s part but I cannot think of that movie without thinking of that scene. That Hennessy was the only one to stand up for the two Jews in the troop against the bigots (the character has a great line when asked by one of the bigots if he’s Jew too) just added to the impact of what was about to happen to him.
But of course, if you didn’t know very much of the history of that time and what happened to homosexuals who were caught in the jaws of the laws back then, you might just think it a sad little subplot in a movie about a young soldier enduring a slightly crazy drill sergeant and having his first time getting laid. If that story really was based on Neil Simon’s recollections of his time in the army then I am wondering if that character and was what happened to him was based on a real person and did they survive.
During World War II, U.S. military personnel suspected of homosexuality faced intensive interrogation, psychiatric evaluation, usually to implicate others in exchange for leniency. If found to have committed acts of sodomy, they were court-martialed, imprisoned in a federal penitentiary with terms of hard labor, and then given a dishonorable discharge. After the nightmare of what prison life was for a homosexual, that dishonorable discharge would keep him from getting any kind of a good job, and the conviction for sodomy attached to it would more than likely mean he’d lose his family, friends, and have to leave wherever he’d grown up for somewhere nobody knew him. It might have even been reported in their local hometown newspaper, and his entire family ostracised.
If he was a real person you wonder what happened to him, with a very dark pit of your stomach feeling that you know damn well what happened to him.
Yay for private Jerome losing his virginity! To a female prostitute, when we wasn’t old enough to drink or vote, which was a rite of passage and certainly no federal offense.
I have this little tick whenever I see a picture of someone’s original Canon F1. I look for an image of its back so I can check the serial number to see if it’s lower than mine. So far…nope.
Pretty sure I bought one of the first ones imported into the USA. It has the Bell & Howell import sticker in the film compartment because they were the importers of Canon cameras here in the 60s/70s. According to the code inside the film compartment (you can’t go by the serial numbers) mine was made in June 1971 in Oita Japan. I bought it in July with money I made summer working at Burger Chef, and from selling my Miranda Sensorex. Production had only begun in March of that year. It was my first professional grade camera and I was so proud to get one when I did because they were so hard to find. It became my constant companion in my senior year of high school, and my workhorse during the time I was trying to make it as a photojournalist. It has been all over the country with me, and an artistic companion from my teens to my 70s.
I find myself using my Canon F1N more often now, it feels just as solid as the F1, and the F1 is so precious to me anymore that taking it out and about from time to time worries me about it getting damaged or stolen off me. But there are days I just have to have it in my hands, and it will always be the one camera I will never get off of no matter how much money I might suddenly need. I’d sell the Mercedes first. I’d sell the house first.
This came in the mail yesterday, and I gave it a first try this morning here at Casa del Garrett…
How Deep Will You Go is advertised as a connection conversation card game to play among friends or lovers. “What if the next time you hang out, phones were away and you saw a side of them you never knew?” There are three types of cards: Ice Breakers, Confessions, and Going Deep. But I didn’t buy this deck to play with others. I’m really not comfortable exposing myself that much to anyone, except the boyfriend I never had, I bought it because it looked like it would give me a more structured way to deep dive into my own self, by randomly picking a card every day and thinking about its question. Self psychoanalysis if you like.
This first morning I tried one of each type. Going forward I think I’ll just pick a card from one type depending on my mood when I wake up. The going deep card I pulled asked me to describe my biggest heartbreak and what it taught me.
Oh boy…
That would not be when I discovered my first crush had moved far away, like out of the country far away, and I’d probably never see him again, and I almost jumped off a bridge in front of a train. Which I didn’t do when it occurred to me that it would probably traumatize the engineer. Isn’t it always the case that when you think about how your life affects others it makes you a better person. But then Elon says empathy is western civilization’s biggest weakness.
No…it was my second crush, a few years later, which when it hit me left me overjoyed to think I’d been given a second chance at love after I was certain it was over for me, and we became very close, to the point of intense heart to heart conversations when we were alone, sending love letters while I was away with other friends on a road trip, then only to realize sometime later that I’d fallen in love with a straight guy, and it would never be.
I think I knew then what the future held. And in a culture that back then gave gay guys nothing but venom and static from every direction…
Mad Magazine, July 1978 by Jack Davis
…who was I to think it would be any different?
Well the card deck is working. I probably gave that question more serious thought than I ever did before. What did I learn? Well…it wasn’t a lesson I was ready to take to heart just then, but I knew it all the same: that we are all utterly, totally, completely alone in this life. That the universe does not care about our deepest heartfelt hopes and dreams, and if we cannot make that heart and soul connection with another, then we either treasure and care for our own heart, so as to at least keep being good people and doing our part to keep civilization moving forward, and loving as best we can our families and friends in this life, and somehow some way endure the empty loneliness ahead of you, or you just go find a bridge and jump.
Obviously I haven’t jumped. But there have been moments it really came close. What I have to think about now is I made a bunch of young gay friends during the Love In Action protests, some of whom still stay in touch with me, and I don’t want to set that example for them. It’s such a stereotypical way for gay guys to go. I don’t want them thinking its inevitable. I want them to see a future.
Empathy isn’t a weakness. It’s what makes civilization possible. It’s what makes moving on with your own life possible, absent that body and soul romance you never got.
Dreams Can Have Disturbing Ways Of Pointing Out Your Mortality
My new GP set me up with appointments with a neurologist and a CAT scan, to try and get to the bottom of why I’m tired all the time, slightly dizzy all the time, and have a hard time focusing on tasks for more than short bursts of concentration. She also wants me to schedule a sleep study. So naturally I keep ruminating about the results I might get, particularly regards the CAT scan and what the neurologist might tell me.
I’m 72, and I can feel myself losing it. But if I look at it logically I’m actually in pretty good shape for my age. I’ve outlived some of my classmates, but most of the one’s I’ve kept in touch with are still hanging in there. But anyone with the artistic nature I possess, plus a powerful imagination that I’ve daydreamed in since I was a kid…
…can’t really help but ponder all the possible things a CAT scan might reveal, and what that might me for how much longer I have to live, and all the art projects I never got around to starting, let alone finishing.
So it really doesn’t help when you wake up in the morning hearing your mom calling your name. Especially when she’s been dead for over two decades.
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