For decades this blog has been my way of journaling. I’ve said often that it is a life blog. It gets political at times because that’s life in these United States these days. But it’s a life blog, not a political one. It’s where I write about my life. If it gets strange, I’m strange. If it gets disturbing, you should see my life from my perspective. Welcome to my life. Blog. Thing of it is though, I don’t get a lot of feedback here. And even if I did, it wouldn’t be of the kind we all really need. I never found a boyfriend. I never found that significant other to talk with, to share our innermost selves with. It leaves you disconnected, drifting through life. I can get things out of me in my art, and here on the blog, but it’s a one-way conversation. I’ve never had the chance to share my life with anyone, who would share theirs with me. I’ve had no companion on this journey.

I recently bought a couple journaling books in the hope that, at this end stage of my life, I can gain some better insight into myself. Self acceptance is a hard thing to achieve, especially when you believe you’ve already achieved it. I’ve often prided myself on never feeling ashamed of my sexual orientation, but that is one aspect of personality among many, and looking back I had it very hard growing up, in a bunch of different ways. Picking through all of it to rescue the exuberant, curious, expressive boy I was before getting tossed into grade school has been a lifelong journey. He got suffocated, first by my maternal grandmother and most of her family out of hatred of my dad, then by my grade school teachers who thought I talked too much and took excessive interest in my art projects, then by the pervasive homophobia that surrounded me as I came of age. After mom passed away I entered therapy for a brief period, but it was shallow at best. I was told being an only child was a “toughie” and that I “present young”, as if that was somehow a bad thing and not a lost little portion of that exuberant and expressive boy I once was, still trying to live.

I came across a card game with the title “How Deep Will You Go”, and bought it not to play with anyone, but to draw a card every morning and try to answer the questions: What is your biggest struggle right now? What’s something simple that makes you smile? Is there closure you never got to have? What are you afraid to let go of? I thought these could be helpful for solitary me, who never found a soulmate to have these sorts of conversations with. 

Later I saw a daily journal book, each day a page with a similar sort of question at the top for you to write about on the page below it. Write something you’ve been wanting to tell someone. What’s something you haven’t said out loud yet? Write a letter to someone who hurt you. When I went to order one there was another journal you could get bundled with it, inviting you to dig deeper. Where do you go to feel closest to yourself? 

These were both hardbound books and I figured I would write out my answers with my good fountain pens, my awful handwriting might even improve a tad since I seldom write longhand anymore until I’m signing a document or putting my name on some artwork. My handwriting is very scrawly. But the books have arrived and I’ve begun the work, and immediately discovered a difficulty. I have nowhere to actually write, that isn’t a computer desk with a keyboard taking up the space where handwriting would otherwise happen.

In grade school my maternal grandmother bought me a student desk with open shelves instead of drawers so I couldn’t hide anything from her. I used it all through school and when I finally moved out of the apartment I shared with mom and broke it into little bits because I didn’t want anything of hers to follow me into the rest of my life. I’ve not had a writing desk since, but I bought a very nice drafting table while I was still living with mom and it’s followed me to the little Baltimore rowhouse of my own. I’ll do the journaling exercises on that. Seems appropriate. 

…and it goes very well, thanks to the advice I got on a Facebook page. Imagine that!

A few days ago I had the F1 out and put the 85mm f2 lens on it, which isn’t a large telephoto but it’s still a honking big piece of glass, and I noticed some wiggle. It was ever so slightly loose, but not in the lens mount but on one side of the camera body flange. That was worrisome because the wiggle meant the lens wouldn’t be square to the film plane and of course it was going to get worse if I didn’t attend to it. I figured it was just one or more screws loose on the flange, and wondered if it was something I could fix myself because old film camera repair shops are getting scarce, and I’d probably have to ship my camera somewhere, and that particular camera is precious to me. It’s been my companion in the art of photography since I was a teenage boy in high school. 

So I asked on the Facebook Canon F1 page I follow if it was something I could fix myself or did it require taking so much of the body apart to get to that screw I was better off taking it to a camera repair place. I mentioned how precious that camera was to me. I got a reply that it was a super easy fix that just involved removing four philips screws that held the plate around the flange to the body. BUT…I absolutely had to do it with Japan Industrial Standard screwdrivers or I’d strip the heads trying to get them off. I did not know about JIS screwdrivers until that moment. I thought my usual jeweler’s screwdrivers would suffice. But I took the advice and, discovering I didn’t actually have any, bought a small set of JIS screwdrivers.

Much glad I did. The difference is the screws they match to are for screwdrivers that fit deeper into the head, which gives them a much better surface area grip. The screws in question were the tiniest things I’d ever seen, but with the right JIS screwdriver it only took a little torque to get them started and the entire operation went smoothly, once I figured out how to jiggle that front plate off around the flange.

And yeah…the screws holding down the flange were all lose but one. So I tightened those and put everything back together. I’ve never been more grateful for a magnetized screwdriver because I could not have possibly fingered those tiny things back in to get them started.

Via Fred Clark’s Slacktivist blog…which you should read regularly.

Conversion therapy is soul-crushing — and it doesn’t work

None of the hundreds of people I met in conversion therapy received the miracle we’d been promised. In fact, it has been discredited by every major medical and mental health organization as ineffective and harmful. -by Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez, April 2, 2026

You should go read Timothy’s post. He is a survivor of conversion therapy. He is a witness.

I would only respectfully submit that the right wing members of the Robert’s Court that struck down Colorado’s conversion therapy ban understand what it does completely. If anyone misunderstands it that would be the ersatz liberal members of the court, who seem to think healthcare, at least when it comes to LGBT Americans, should maintain a neutral stance between medicine and poison, and really is poison so bad as long as the patient can also choose medicine if they want? The conservatives however knew exactly what they were doing and the harm conversion therapy does. We have to be carefully taught to hate ourselves, to the point that self hate leads to dangerously harmful behaviors, even to the point some non-trivial percentage of us kill ourselves. Otherwise where will they get the broken pieces of our hearts to build their stepping stones to heaven with? As is said in my trade, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

But this is good that these stories are once again being told. It was the authentic voices of people, teens and adults, who had been through this, voluntarily and by force, that these laws were passed in the first place and the first wave of these outfits started closing their doors. Now we will have to fight these battles all over again but that’s the story of the ages. Love completes us, but hate is never satisfied.

I thought I knew what being a solitary was like after all these decades. But I didn’t. I thought I could always handle it. And unfortunately, I can. But I see something I never really appreciated before. And having that significant other, a body and soul connection where our innermost selves feel completely at ease with each other, embraced, loved, seen…grounded…home…would be really good to have now.

I never found him. I’m an only kid. Maybe that made it easier for me to get used to the inner solitude, even in those times when I tried to escape it and couldn’t. Plus the torrent of abuse gay kids got in the 60s/70s, to remind me that love was not mine to have. I tried to find him, but as I became a senior citizen I settled in to the void because there was no where else to live (people who look like that want people who look like that…) and by then I’d made it comfortable. It was the room of my own I always had ever since I left the cradle, where I could occupy myself with pastimes, where love could have been but never was. I never really grasped how it would feel, when I finally came to this moment, and I saw the void was bigger than I realized without that significant other to keep us both steady.

Got my brain imaged at Union yesterday morning. They said they got good data because I didn’t move throughout the procedure. I perfected the art of playing rag doll for the doctor ages ago. The only time I have trouble with it is when they need to examine the area around my stomach because I am massively ticklish there.

The slow steady increase in my memory problems, combined with my having subtle but definite balance issues, and trouble getting words out sometimes, is troubling me lots. So I am keen to see the results of this. There are two possible things that could be causing it, neither of them are good outcomes. But hopefully it’s just I need to be more regular about taking my vitamins at my age, and getting out of the chair in front of my computer more.

Like…now for instance.

I’ve had the last two movements of Hector  Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique on heavy replay these past few days, thinking not of the story Berlioz was telling, but imagining a certain fictional kidnapper and murderer getting his comeuppance for fictionally kidnapping and murdering a fictional 13 year old boy. I really should not have re-read parts of that story I threw across the room and tore to shreds back in the day, but I wanted to get some of the details in my alternative version of it correct. It’s been bothering me ever since.

“In all men is evil sleeping; the good man is he who will not awaken it, in himself or in other men.”  -Mary Renault

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” -Mahatma Gandhi

I came of age before the Internet was opened to public commercial use, before the advent of amature computer bulletin boards, before the first home personal computers. So I never had Grindr or anything like it.

All I had to navigate my way through the maze of my own teenage emotions to find love in a world that was screaming hate at me from every direction, when it wasn’t expressing a kind of rancid pity, was the knowledge given to me by that first teenage crush that there was nothing more wonderful than falling in love, and there was nothing wrong with me. I’m in love. I’m gay. It’s wonderful. But I flailed my way through my first teenage crush like someone who doesn’t know how to swim trying to figure out the trick while in the middle of drowning. Because the first thing you know when you know about yourself is you have to hide.

So then I’m a position of trying to say something to my crush from inside my closet, terrified that if I say anything to him next thing is it gets all over the school. Which is bad enough, but then it gets back to mom and she breaks into tears and starts yelling at me, and I get dragged to church to pray it away every day of my life until I turn 21 and have to leave the house. If I don’t get thrown out first. I have never doubted that mom loved me. But the stigma back then was something I reckon you had to be there to experience and really appreciate. For years after grade school, whenever I tried to nudge the conversation some place where I’d feel comfortable coming out to her, the icy glare I got back would scare me to my bones. I’ve often wondered if there had been something like Love In Action or Exodus Ministries whether mom would have tossed me into one of those if she found out when I was an age I could not refuse.

One day after I graduated I discovered my crush’s family had left the country with him and I fell into a dangerously deep despondency, made all the worse for my self perceived cowardice in not telling him how I felt. Because I wasn’t brave enough to tell him that meant I wasn’t worthy of him. Maybe I wasn’t worthy of any love. I walked to one of my favorite bridges where I would watch the trains go by, and decided I would fall off in front of one. Maybe they’d think it was an accident. But while I was waiting I began thinking about what doing that would do to the engineer and I pulled back. The lesson I learned was if you can wait it out the urge to kill yourself will eventually go away. It has been helpful.

In high school I knew of one gay bar in DC, The Georgetown Bar & Grill, which was supposedly located somewhere on Wisconsin Avenue close to M street. It was spoken of like a dirty joke among the other kids and I would have died rather than be seen anywhere near it. I’ve told the story elsewhere about how I found I could get my gay newspapers and magazines in a seedy adult bookstore in Wheaton that sold hard core pornography. That was the world young gay hearts were confined to back in the 1970s, and for decades after. In some parts of this country that’s still where we’re supposed to stay.

Eventually, after I got my driver’s license I found my way to a gay bookstore in downtown Washington DC; Lambda Rising, where I discovered a world of gay literature and history that was much Much bigger than I’d ever hoped. It was as if a parallel universe had opened up to me, and in a way it was. There was a rich and deep history I’d never known or had a chance to explore in grade school. There were books that spoke to the honor and dignity of the love of same sex couples and I devoured those. The books of Mary Renault stand out for me in that period of my life. The books I found there gave me hope.

I attended my first Pride block party in front of what used to be the Earthworks comic book store and headshop, around the corner from where Lambda Rising had moved. I let myself get picked up by a cute guy watching the party with me on the porch of Earthworks, only to discover that being attracted to someone’s looks wasn’t nearly enough to make me ready for having sex with them. Took me some decades more before I began to understand that I am a demisexual: someone who experiences sexual attraction only after forming a strong emotional bond with someone. I still love to look at and draw beautiful sexy guys, but for it to go any further than that there needs to be at least a crush.

When Personal Computers became a thing I bought a Commodore C64 and the modem for it and discovered the world of computer bulletin boards. I found my way into a gay FidoNet echo board and suddenly the whole gay world opened to me and I didn’t have to go into a bar anymore to find it. Eventually that ability to socialize with others like me motivated me to dive into computers and programming, and I built an IBM PC compatible from parts I got at a HAM Fest at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds. This would eventually lead me to a career as a computer programmer, and to a job at Space Telescope Science Institute. I found my way to G.L.I.B., The Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau BBS, and I was able to socialize on and offline with the other members.

That was my first experience with the idea of online gay dating which looked attractive because it meant I could try to find a boyfriend someplace other than a hook-up bar. It was a time before graphic user interfaces so we got to know each other through posting messages on the BBS echo boards, by private email, and the occasional meetup at a local gay or lesbian bar. I had high hopes but I got nowhere. Two of the members that I’d fancied ended up dating each other instead, and one of them, a guy I’d managed to coax out a couple times to let my camera, if not me, give him some love, apologised profusely about it which only left me thinking it was just as well he’d pushed me away. Many years later at a Pride Fair I ran across him manning one of the booths, I forget what it was promoting, and asked him how things were. He was single just then and began complaining about how relationships were So Much Work. I wanted to smack him.

At around that time I bought into a gay dating service, and when that one didn’t pan out, another. They never matched me up with anyone even close to what I was looking for in a date, and none of the ones they set me up on resulted in seconds. Usually we would both end our date complaining that the service kept missing the mark. One guy I was matched up with was a sports jock whereas I said one of my interests was hiking and wilderness backpacking and those are two very different sorts of personalities. But since we both ticked of the interested in outdoor sports box it must have been good enough. Except it wasn’t. We met in a parking lot and chatted for maybe five minutes and mutually decided to go our separate ways. I remember the look on his face when he laid eyes on me, and in all fairness I probably gave him the same look. It took a lot of time and money, neither of which I could afford to finally figure out those things only existed to extract money from lonely people.

I got older. The years went by, the universe expanded, I never found a boyfriend.

I have no idea what I might have done had something like Grindr been available to me when I was young, let alone the kind of social media we have now. But I don’t think I would have gravitated to a hook-up app because hook-ups were never my thing. I have always been looking for a boyfriend. Well, until I hit 70 and figured all that was in my rearview mirror. Would I have posted sexy selfies of myself like they used to do on MySpace until they clamped down on it shocked, shocked that anyone would even Think of using social media for such things!? Probably not. I have always had a poor body image, and I mentioned the time I was shocked to learn about group showers in gym class didn’t I?

But I look back at those few photos I have of myself back then and I was pretty cute for someone that skinny whose hair was always a mess. Maybe I would have learned a better body image of myself from the examples of others. Maybe I would have dressed myself better, worn better fitting clothes. (My butt is the only part of my body that ever reliably got complements…and a few straight up feels before I could object. One guy almost got slapped for it. I am not a touchy-feely kind of guy.) Maybe I would have found someone to give me better haircuts and learned to use a straightening iron, and got my teeth fixed so I could smile back at people without hesitating. And then maybe I could have attracted some attention and found a date without feeling like a beggar for asking. Or maybe all that would have just made me a target for sexual predators and gay bashers. For every better world there is an infinite number of worse ones.

[NOTE: This blog post is dedicated to the betraying older gay jackass who kept telling me that I was single because I was too shy didn’t get out more…then fucked me over by keeping a slender probably impossible chance at love from me because people who look like that want people who look like that.]

I’m such a bundle of stress lately it’s really making it hard to live my days. If I could just get some of it out of me in my art room or with my cameras I would feel a lot better. But I can’t concentrate on anything, even just mindless housework, enough to do any of it.

The best I can manage is write some stories and work on my ghost-ish novel, but that’s only because how I write. I don’t start at the beginning, I start in the middle, and write pieces of it from the inside out, then try to connect everything together and make it flow. It’s hard, but doable even in my present state.

The only time in my life I ever started at the beginning of a story and wrote through to its end was my first ever erotic short story I finished a couple days ago. It riffs on something that was bothering me and I had it practically all written out in my head even before I sat down to it (which is kinda how I do my cartoons and art drawings) and I just blasted through it in one sitting and that’s never happened to me before. I remember reading that when James HIlton got the idea for Goodbye Mr. Chips he finished it in one sitting and I could not imagine how anyone could do that, even one as short as that one was (it’s more of a novella). But I did it and I’m pretty happy with it and no one will ever see it. Connoisseurs of pronography can laugh but I’m the kid who was shocked to discover there would be group showers in Jr. High School gym. I’m the gay adult who wouldn’t take his clothes off while staying in clothing optional gay resorts at Key West and Puerto Vallarta. Normally I write my fiction on Google Docs and my essays on my blog, so I can have them to work on no matter which computer I’m sitting at. I’ve got that story locked away in one of my IronKeys. I think Google Docs censors stuff like that anyway.

I have an MRI scheduled for Monday morning at Union Memorial, and a session with a neurologist later this month. Hopefully I get some answers as to why I can’t concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes, why I’m getting more and more forgetful, and why I’m slightly dizzy all the time. I keep wanting to sit down at my drafting table and I don’t because I can’t concentrate.

The seductive thing about nicotine is it calms you down but doesn’t dull your mind. To a degree it actually improves concentration and deep thinking. But today, just now, I only needed some calming. The stress was really getting to me. It’s probably not doing my heart any good either. 

There are certain kinds of crimes against youth that really get to me. They press all my buttons, and I have to find some way to distract myself from it. Maybe it’s just the natural adult reaction to monsters who hurt kids. But my reaction is so intense I wonder if I don’t have a suppressed memory in there somewhere from way back when. I just get too angry about it. Maybe there is no suppressed memory, it’s just I can see it could easily have been me.

So I continued watching the second season of the Disney+ Percy Jackson series. Maybe work on finishing the book I’ve been struggling to read. I should read more books and do less doom scrolling. Stories about ICE ripping apart young married couples and kids from their parents isn’t helping my mindset either. But this is about one specific book that started nagging at me again for some reason I can’t pin down. It’s still pushing my buttons after all these years.

I should go ahead and buy another copy of it, second hand, and put it in my collection of homophobia, because it’s really about that author’s disgust of his gay kid, and his need to punish him for it. You have to dig into the homophobia that runs through everything he ever wrote to really see it, but then you can’t unsee it. It’s like how Wagner’s anti semitism runs through all his operas, or Rowling’s cheapshit prejudices her stories and it surprised people when you point it out because they like listening to or reading that crap. It has a different impact when it’s about people you.

76 bucks to fill my tank from a tad under half just now. And that’s diesel. Diesel used to be dirt cheap. Ah but then so was gasoline.

I’m having to spend nearly four grand on maintenance for the Mercedes this quarter, first for a brake job, and then the passenger rear wheel bearing is going bad. After having a lot of expensive work done my usual thing is to go take a road trip, but with fuel prices what they are that isn’t happening.

Good thing I can walk to nearly everything I need on a day to day basis here in Charm City. But I’m going to feel suffocated not being able to drive for hours on end just enjoying the open road.

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 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.

US Supreme Court strikes down Colorado law banning conversion therapy for gay, transgender minors

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.