I’ve been fixing some of the panels of A Coming Out Story, and it’s been very rewarding. I’ve not drawn in so long I was afraid I might be losing what little ability I had developed over the years. But at least the computer part of the process not only comes back to me, but I am still getting better at it. 

Occasionally I get a visitor to A Coming Out Story, which is a cartoon series about how I came out to myself way back in the early 1970s, after crushing hard on a classmate, that I am hosting here on this website (click one of the links to read it!). When I get a visit I will often go and look at the episodes my visitor looked at, trying to guess at why some got their attention and some were just passed over. I like to think I’m a good story teller, but the fact is my drafting skills are not the best. And that is where revisiting some episodes can really sting. I see all my mistakes, and sometimes it really disappoints me that I let some of those panels get out without fixing them first.

I know why I did it. I am so slow at getting the episodes done that I end up rushing myself to finish and put the artwork up. It’s good enough I think, in my hurry to get it out. But that is poison to let into your process. Another reason is lately, after the heart attack, I’ve worried that if I don’t put the artwork up now, Right Now, I might keel over dead before it has a chance to be seen. It’s stupid but there it is, and it’s why I reordered some episodes to put a kinda sorta end to the story up.

And then I’ve just let it sit there. There is so much more to that story. And then feeling guilty about not doing more of the story makes it all worse.

It’s a Lot of work. Even the single panel political cartoons are a Lot of work, and I haven’t done any of those in a long while because I don’t like being so angry all the time at what’s been happening to my country. The level of concentration I need to maintain just to get it out of me onto the paper is immense; more than anything I experience while I’m programming. And more often that not I have to go back and fix things even before I start the process of inking the drawings. And then I often have to fix things in the computer again after I’ve scanned the artwork in.

My only consolation is whenever I see the roughs that professional cartoonists let the rest of us see in their process. I know it’s hard painful work for everybody. The master David Low once said that every cartoon of his took three days: two days in labor, and one day removing the appearance of labor. But the finished work of the professionals still seems so beautiful and effortless compared to mine. I am perpetually dissatisfied with how static and two dimensional most of my drawings look. But that’s because it takes me a lot longer to break out of that 2D zone into the 3D one and I am always in too much of a hurry, so I take the easy path, so I stay inside my comfort zone.

So after I got a few visitors last week I’ve been making some fixes to some of the panels of A Coming Out Story, to at least not keep seeing mistakes that make me cringe Every Time I look at them. And happily, something deep inside of me reawakened. 

I’ve fixed a bunch of stuff so far that probably nobody will even notice, but I can’t help but see. Mistakes in perspective. Mistakes in anatomy. I start drawing the heads first and then the bodies, and sometimes they aren’t scaled the same. Cartoon heads can be slightly bigger than the rest of the body, but not too much bigger. I get the hands slightly wrong. The tilt of a three-quarters head wrong. But I don’t see it right away because I’m so damn focused on the details I stop seeing the bigger picture. And I’m liking the artwork much better now that I’ve fixed a bunch of that. 

There’s a lesson I need to take to heart here. I’m not a very good draftsman. And I end up concentrating so deeply that I stop seeing the whole for the detail I happen to be working on at that moment, and I rush it out in too big a hurry. That is how mistakes get onto my web pages. The lesson is to not be in such a hurry. To put the work away for a night before I post it here, and then look at it with fresh eyes the next morning. And the next. And the next. Until I stop seeing mistakes.

And to get out of my static pose, 2D comfort zone. Did I mention that comfort zones are usually traps?

I wasn’t wishing you dead. I was saying that I felt trapped. I was trying to say to you in my own awkward just letting a stream of consciousness unedited words tumble out of me way, what Jack said to Ennis in Brokeback Mountain. “I wish I knew how to quit you.” What you said to me that I won’t repeat here cut me deep, and I was hurting, and I lashed out. Because I knew what I was in for in the years to come.

Ever watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? I haven’t…I don’t think I could bear to watch a movie like that, any more than I could watch Brokeback Mountain. But I’ve read the various synopsis. The film, so I am told, follows two people who were in love, who undergo a procedure to erase their memories of each other after the angry end of their romance. There was a time I was desperately wishing it was a real thing. Until I read this part of the plot:

Joel re-experiences his memories of Clementine as they are erased, starting with their last fight. As he reaches earlier, happier memories, he realizes that he does not want to forget her.

No. I couldn’t put myself through that. 

Do you dream? I wonder sometimes if you do, and how vividly. So I’m told there are people who don’t. I feel sorry for them. I dream dreams I can remember almost every night. I have a notepad I keep next to my bed so I can jot some things down before I forget them, which I will if I don’t immediately do that. And I have a Google Docs folder where I write some of my dreams. Some of them are so vivid I can feel the texture of clothing and furniture, and the taste of kisses on my lips. 

The one I had last night was about you. I have those often, also about other friends who have remained close to me. But it’s the ones about you that linger more. Mostly they are very nice, a little strange sometimes, and so vivid I sometimes wonder if I am not seeing things that are happening in a different universe. But I suppose that’s just wish fulfilment. Last night’s dream really got to me because of one specific detail.

You and I were together in your house, except it wasn’t the one you have in the real world, but a different one, in a different place, something like another suburb but deep in a beautiful woodland zone. It was late in the evening, almost nightfall, and we were having a very deep heart to heart conversation, and it seemed perfectly normal, as if we’d been close all our lives. I won’t write here what we said to each other, only that it was heartfelt and affectionate, like the talk between old couples, only in this dream we were young men, twenty-somethings, and you were still wearing your hair long. Oh…and we were in the kitchen. 

Eventually we walked from the kitchen into a space that was both a dining room and a living room, separated by a sofa facing a TV that was tuned to a news broadcast that we were paying no attention to. We were finishing up building a large wooden dining room table. I had made a top piece for it out of several lovely oak boards I’d glued together, then sanded and stained a light brown. Together we put the top of it on and fixed it in place with some wood screws and glue. Then I puttied over the screw heads and stained those.

We moved the finished table against the back of the living room sofa. You got down on your knees between the table and the sofa and asked me for a quote to write on the side of the table hidden by the sofa. I asked you if you didn’t mind a Disney quote, and you rolled your eyes a little but said sure, let me have it.

And I said “Dreams can come true.” And you wrote it on that side of the table, but I couldn’t see the words from where I was standing. Then you went back into the kitchen, and out the door to go to the grocery store. While you were gone I moved the sofa a bit and took a look, and discovered you’d carved the quote I gave you right into the wood, not written them with a marker. In German.

Träume können wahr werden.

Eventually you came back home, and began unloading the groceries you bought in the kitchen and we talked some more, and I woke up.

The full quote is, All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them. But it takes more than courage to make your dreams come true, and I never thought I was particularly brave, just stubborn. Some dreams, if they are not shared between two people, will never live. And there is nothing you can do about that. 

So we had a fight. It was probably inevitable. It went nuclear, like it was always going to. I wish I didn’t have that last angry glare you gave me to remember. I’d never seen that side of you before.

It’s been almost a decade now, and never mind what you said and what I said, I still feel trapped, I know I always will, and all I can do now is toss out these little messages in a bottle like I was doing for decades after the last time we saw each other in school, before I found you again 35 years later. Here one from my blog… 

September 25, 2006

Yet Another Message In A Bottle…

It’s been decades now since I saw that “For Sale” sign on your house. I can measure the years that have passed in all the little messages I’ve stuck in this or that random bottle, and tossed out into this ocean of time ever since. Hello? Hello? Are you still out there…somewhere…?

If only I hadn’t been such a nerdy little geek. If only I’d had a little more courage to just be myself instead of hiding behind my cameras all the time. And my cartoons. There’s more I wanted to say. But mostly this: You opened up the world for me.

Hello? Hello? Are you still out there…somewhere…?

These little messages in a bottle are the only way I have of waving to you now. But I reckon I’ll keep tossing them in…because I can still hope one of them will find you one day. Because I just want to wave at you one more time. Because I just want to see one more smile. Because I have to know. I tossed another one in yesterday. If it finds you, please wave back. Please.

Even before I had my own website I was tossing these out into the digital ocean every now and then, hoping maybe you’d see one and respond. Looking back on it I can see it came so close. If only I’d joined GeoCities. If only I’d not been such an awkward little geek. If only it hadn’t been 1971. If only I had been more brave instead of stubborn. Before I found you again I was sure you would be the braver one. After so much time had passed I figured if I ever did find you again you’re be living somewhere in the country of your birth, settled down with a guy who was much better looking, more intelligent, and a better all around catch than I could ever be and I’d just have to accept that it would never be, because you’d found someone better.

Then I did find you. And for a brief moment in time I saw you smile at me again. And you put your arm around my shoulders again. And we talked, heart to heart like we weren’t able to in the early 1970s. And it went where it had to, where it was always going to, because for both of us it was still the early 1970s.

I remember that time we passed back and forth a ski lift ticket I’d found on the pavement, like it was a talking stick, because you needed to explain something to me and didn’t want any questions. I remember listening to the guy I thought hung the moon and the stars way back when, telling me to go look elsewhere because a life in the closet had damaged him so much some days he didn’t know who it was he was looking at in the mirror.

It broke my heart, and maybe it also radicalized me to gay activism in a deeper way. But I was determined to at least show you by example that there was nothing wrong with you, and you could live an authentic life for yourself, even now, even if not with me. Because by then I was doubting we were ever that compatible. I could have courage, but you had to have it too. The best I could do was set an example, and I was not so much brave as stubborn. But maybe that’s what you have to be sometimes. But it was still the early 1970s.

I don’t think anyone who didn’t live through those times can grasp the hostility, the outright hate that gay and lesbian Americans got from every direction. Today on this last day of Pride month, let me give you one little example of what that did to us.

It was March 8, 1970. A gay bar not far from the New York City 6th precinct was raided, by the same cop that had raided the Stonewall Inn just eight months earlier. Not wanting a repeat of the six-day riots at Stonewall, that cop, lieutenant Seymour Pine, had all 167 of the bar’s customers of the bar hauled off to the 6th precinct, which was just over a block away. One patron, justifiably terrified of what was about to happen to him, because back then the practice was to give the names of those arrested at a gay bar to the local newspapers, which would gleefully publish all their details for everyone, family, friends, neighbors, employers, landlords, to see, attempted to escape by jumping out of a window. 

This is what happened to him.

I don’t know how you can expect a gay teenager coming of age in those times, in that climate of loathing and hate, to be anything but terrified at what was going through them when they are having their first crush and it’s on another boy. That is more courage than a lot of adults could muster.

So you and I just circled around each other, flirted a bit, teased at each other a bit, and I took lots of photos of you because I always had my camera with me and I just could not look away. And then you disappeared.

I remember that last telephone conversation we had, after we made arrangements to take our cameras to Great Falls, but instead of getting you on the phone I got someone else and then I guess the jig was up and you got told.

And then decades later I reconnected with you, and for a while we were close again, and this time we didn’t have to hide anything from the world around us, and I suppose you got told again, and then you told me I’ve made my allegiances, I have to stay inside my comfort zone.

It’s not a comfort zone if you’re pushed into it. It’s a trap.

But…so it goes. I am so very grateful I never saw your name on a quilt. And that I saw you smile at me again after all those years. For that I can live with that last angry glare. I get it. For many of us in our generation, it will always be a time before Stonewall. Trapped.

Respect the ones who could escape. Cry for the ones that could not, if the tears will come. Do what you can to keep it from happening to the generations that follow.

And don’t be afraid to dream. For the things that could have been, and might still be, in some better world than the one we are in. Not all dreams come true. But they can still be dreamed. For the courage we need to do the work still left for us to do.

Attending to a little long overdue blog housekeeping. The right hand column of the blog page has been static for far too long. I’ve updated all the little graphics about my current interests in Books, Comics, Music, and Home Video. Not that it’s of interest to anyone but if something really catches my attention I feel like giving the artists a shout out.

DC Pride this Pride month instead of several stories by different LGBT artists and writers, is a single story told by several by different LGBT artists and writers. Very well done.

This year, for its fifth anniversary spotlighting DC’s LGBTQIA+ Super Heroes, the DC Pride anthology transforms from a collection of short stories into a singular story arc of interweaving narratives told by comic book creators Tim Sheridan, Vita Ayala, Josh Trujillo, Skylar Patridge, A.L. Kaplan, Max Sarin, and more.

DC Pride 2025 brings DC’s heroes together when a century-old tavern, the center of queer life in Gotham City, unexpectedly announces its imminent closure. It’s a huge loss to the community, and generations of patrons return to pay respects to a space they’ve endowed with entire lifetimes of memories, wishes and dreams—including Alan Scott, the Green Lantern. Alan returns, for one last time, to the place he fell for his first love, Johnny Ladd, to touch the wall on which they carved the symbol of their love, to remember the days before everything went to hell for them…and to say goodbye.

But love is a kind of magic, and, in Alan’s experience, magic can take on a life of its own. Before anyone knows it’s happening, heroes, villains, and civilians alike from across the DCU with powerful ties to this mysterious place—the Question, Midnighter and Apollo, Harley Quinn, Green Lantern Jo Mullein, Bunker, Connor Hawke, and Blue Snowman among them—find themselves spirited away to strange, alternate worlds where everything they ever thought they wanted can be theirs…but at what cost?

I especially like the new female The Question character. Initially yet another Steve Ditko Ayn Rand homage like Mr. A. The Question was the basis for Alan Moore’s Rorschach, who Moore created after the copyright owners found out Moore intended to kill off The Question in Watchmen. Like a lot of characters who were able to escape the clutches of Ditko’s abject Rand worship, it evolved into an actually interesting character.

Currently, and relevant to DC Pride, the character is now embodied by Renee Montoya who was once a detective in the Major Crimes unit in the Gotham City Police Department. After being outed as a lesbian and framed for murder, she resigned from the police force and began operating as The Question after the original Question was killed. 

“DC Pride 2025 is a celebration of life, love and the power of community—even and especially in uncertain times,” said Tim Sheridan, writer of the GLAAD Media Award-nominated series Alan Scott: The Green Lantern. “The roster of talent shaping this story is as epic as the story itself—so all I can say is buckle up for big action, bigger fun, and the biggest stakes yet. This book, as it has been in years past, is a way to reach out to our community and remind them we’re all in this together.”

So…all in all, another excellent edition of DC Pride. I’m so grateful I lived to see a world where characters like these could exist.

It really lifts my heart to see so many stories out there now about gay kids finding that first love and it’s not tragic and the central premise of them isn’t that they’re tragically damned but that love is magical and wonderful, and worth whatever hardships the characters in these stories face to have and to hold. Films like Young Hearts, animated stories like In A Heartbeat and the different webtoons I’ve read like Tripping Over You, and this new one I learned about on Instagram called 3rd Wheel.

But there’s a downside to this for me. I “ended” A Coming Out Story abruptly because my heart issues made me wonder how much longer I had to work on it and I didn’t want to suddenly go belly up and leave the story in an uncompleted state. So I moved some episodes around so I could just tack one on at the end that I felt gave the story some degree of closure. But there was a lot more to that story and every time I go reading some new webtoon I see how incomplete my own story is and I want to fill out the rest of it.

And I have no energy for it. Along with having no energy for any of my creative arts.

There are short, one-off cartoons I’d like to do that I have all scripted out in my head but when I try to get them out of me it just…stops. Partly it’s my lack of confidence in my own abilities. And the longer I stay away from it, the rustier I get. Party it’s something like Approaching End Of Life Sadness and I never found that significant other and I’m just…alone. I sit down to work on A Coming Out Story especially, and it just drains all the interest out of me. But there was so much more to tell.

I posted the other day about how painful it is to try and revisit that past where AIDS was killing so many of us, and the hate was thrown at us from every direction. It’s hard to remember all those faces. It’s hard to remember all the static you had to live in the middle of every day. But for some of us every failure to connect romantically is another hard thing to look back on. Not even my own awkwardness about it all, but the fact of the times I was living in, and trying to connect while the world around me was making sure I could not because what I needed, what young gay guys like me needed, was a disgusting sin. So many close calls in my life that others had to put a stop to in the name of decency and morality. I blog about some of them every Valentine’s Day.

And so I sit down at the drafting table, or in my darkroom, and I just feel empty, and I can’t get it out. And I see all this wonderful storytelling out there and it lifts me up. But I’m still empty inside, and I am not a natural talent at the drafting table. The level of concentration I have to maintain when I draw or paint is even more than when I am coding. Lots Lots Lots more. I hardly touch my cameras anymore. I have undeveloped film piling up. I have a tank with rolls I ran through the Hasselblad I loaded up two weeks ago and still haven’t made some chemistry to develop so those rolls have just been sitting there in the tank. I don’t know when I’m going to be able to manage doing art again.

Cardiologist appointment tomorrow.

Answer: Their mouths are moving.

This is a lie for the base to swallow and maintain their anger at the rule of law. Immigration judges are senior attorneys who work for the Justice Department as at will employees. Federal district court judges outrank them, are confirmed by the Senate, and serve with lifetime tenure. Immigration judges are Article 2 officers (executive branch) who are subject to Article 3 (judicial branch) review.

But the MAGA base doesn’t know or just as likely doesn’t care how the constitutional system works. So Trump’s goons just throw this stuff out there because they want to end the rule of law in this country and replace it with a dictatorship. 

This AIDS survivor’s post came to me by way of a friend of my generation. We all lived through some pretty dark times…

Back in the day, gay men like me became masters of emotional origami. We folded grief into smaller and smaller shapes until it fit neatly behind a joke, a cocktail, or a color-coded pill organizer. It was survival, not strategy.

We lived through a pandemic that killed nearly everyone we loved, then got up the next morning and went to work, to brunch, to the gym—pretending we weren’t haunted. Pretending we weren’t furious. Pretending we were fine. (Spoiler: we were not fine.)

You see, repressing emotions isn’t free. It’s more like a buy-now-pay-later situation. The debt comes due eventually—usually at 3am, or during a perfectly innocent CVS run when they play that one Whitney Houston song.

So if you’re one of us—one of the walking wounded who made it out of the ‘80s and ‘90s alive but emotionally duct-taped together—this is your reminder: it’s okay to feel stuff. Cry. Scream. Hug someone. Say their names out loud.

And if you’ve never lived through something like that? Hug us harder. Ask us how we’re doing. Mean it.

-Scott Abel, 6-20-2025

The debt comes due eventually.

Just so. I have on my bookshelves, books I was bequeathed in a friend’s will after he had passed away due to complications from AIDS. I cannot look at those books, let alone pick one off its shelf, without thinking of him. And then I begin to remember that time. 

A friend writes about telling younger audiences (I reckon everyone is younger to our generation now) about his experiences during the AIDS crisis and hearing gasps from the audience. I know the feeling, and not only about telling about living through AIDS, but also those pre/post Stonewall times in general.

It’s hard for people nowadays to believe that at one point gay men were rounded up and placed for an indefinite period of time in a locked down mental ward simply for being homosexual and nothing more (see: “Sex Crime Panic” by Neil Miller). That there was an executive order signed by President Eisenhower (executive order 10450, April 27, 1953. I would be born just a few months later that year) that forbade homosexuals from serving in the government or its contractors in any capacity. That every state once had a sodomy law that defined our very existence as criminal, and made it possible to deny us jobs, places to live, and services. While I was growing up Virginia had a law on its books forbidding restaurants and bars from serving known homosexuals. I tell this to people nowadays and the jaws drop. Really?

You grew up back then knowing you were loathed and hated, or at best granted a sort of rancid pity. You saw it every time there was a fight over applying non-discrimination laws to us. But when we started dying in the early 1980s you really saw the depth of how much we were hated.

I volunteered for an HIV vaccine trial, because I am a man of science and I wanted to help stop the dying however I could. In my case it was offering up my scrawny little body to a vaccine toxicity test. After they determined I was in good health and a good fit for their test, I was sat down with several other volunteers and given a four hour lecture on the possible bad outcomes, so there would be no doubt we were giving informed consent. I kid you not, half of the bad outcomes we were warned about were not medical, but political.

You see, the only way of testing for the presence of the virus back then was to look for antibodies to it. There were two tests, ELISA and Western Blot. As I understood it, ELISA just reacts if the antibodies in the range its testing for reach a certain threshold. It needs to be followed up with a Western Blot which detects specific antibodies. It looks almost like a barcode with dark bands representing specific antibody proteins.

Well…what is a vaccine supposed to do to protect you from disease? It generates antibodies to be there in position in case of infection. An invader enters the body and the army is already there to fight it. So if the candidate vaccine works, you get antibodies to HIV. Which means you will look like you have it when anyone gives you the basic ELISA HIV test. Unless someone who knows what they’re doing follows up with a Western Blot which will show that, no, this is a vaccine response, you would get tagged as being infected with HIV. And there was precious little of the kind of interest back then to look deeper into it. Not to people stricken with HIV, and not to homosexuals HIV or not. I’m an out gay man, so of course I’m an AIDS spreader.

So in that room we were told we could lose our jobs, get thrown out of homes, apartments, get denied healthcare…all of it, everything that actual AIDS patients were suffering through back then on top of everything the virus itself was doing to them. I’m proud to say none of the half dozen of us in that room backed out.

But there it was. People were dying, horribly, and instead of sympathy people took it as an excuse to hate us even more.

There were heroic exceptions to that, and we can remember and honor them today. But those were very Very dark times, and you have to appreciate how difficult it is to talk about it because then we have to remember.

It’s been a while since I’ve had that dream about walking among the quilt panels on the Washington Mall that day. But I still have that one from time to time, walking among the panels, terrified of the name I might see.

June 10, 2020… That Facebook screen cap would be ten years old now…

Continuing my Facebook Memories from my Disney World Vacation of 2015…this final snapshot flew by this morning…

At least this blog doesn’t throw the past back in my face unless I go looking for it. How do things go from all warm smiles and cheerful carefree conversation to mutually assured friendship destruction in just under a year?

I appreciate that I can be intense and hard to handle from time to time, but by 2015 he’d already know that and we were still good. I have close friends who know me from our grade school days and they’re all use to me. I get exuberant. I get moody. I get quiet. I will talk your ears off. Yeah I chatted with him a bunch in email. But he always answered back. He seemed to like hearing from me. Like when I passed him technical details of the German diesel emissions scandal, or that Youtube of a couple guys drinking German beer laced with helium. He loved it. I geek out about things that interest me. But they interested him too. We had so many mutual interests. Space. Technology. Current events…we were on the same page there. Sometimes he’d tell me to just get to the point. Everybody tells me that. I don’t just explain things, I tell stories. Discovery is the joy of life. The journey is the point too. I wear my heart on my sleeve. He’d seen all that since high school. He saw sides of me that nobody else sees. He knew me. Either he was faking it, and every smile he ever gave me, or something really got to him that spring in 2016.

I can’t believe he was faking it. None of my theories add up. He just blew up at me. And I did too because it wasn’t fair. And that was that. I’ll probably never know what it was. Maybe if he’d told me what it was I would have stayed home that time and let it pass and we’d still be talking. Maybe. But it’s probably for the best.

That’s a really small comfort zone you have there.

They actually played “Fortunate Son” as they marched past him. Which I’m sure went right over everyone’s heads, which makes it even more delicious.

Some folks are born made to wave the flag
Hoo, they’re red, white and blue
And when the band plays “Hail to the chief”
Ooh, they point the cannon at you, Lord

It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no senator’s son, son
It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no fortunate one, no

Or at least my new outdoor weather station is. Carrier’s new Better And Cooler Higher Tech app doesn’t show the temperature outside that the compressor unit is reading anymore, it just gives you the local weather report temperature. Mornings while just waking up and getting dressed for your day, you come to appreciate not having to go downstairs to check the outside temperature when living in a narrow mostly vertical city rowhouse. I wrote Carrier asking why they took that feature out of their new Better And Cooler Higher Tech app but of course they don’t care. So I decided to try another WiFi enabled outdoor weather station. My first attempt at that failed due to a lot of WiFi interference from my neighbor’s WiFi signals. That’s life in a tightly packed city rowhouse neighborhood. 

The new unit is also internet enabled, and can send data to the Weather Underground site. They say the have currently over 250,000 participating individual weather stations in their network. Given Musk and Trump gutting NOAA this is a good thing to have, though admittedly a weak substitute for things like daily weather balloons and super computer weather models. But every little bit can help. So I signed up and did the configuration routine to get mine onto their network.

Basically you create an account, connect your weather station to your household network, logon to your Weather Underground account, tell them about your weather station (model, location, height above the ground…), they give you an ID and key to plug into your station’s indoor monitor, and it begins automatically sending data to them. There is also a smartphone app you can use to view your weather station’s current data. 

So far, so good. I’ll have to monitor it for WiFi interference, but this new weather station has three channels I can set and maybe find one that’s clear, or clear enough from interference.  

I have all my solar garden lights out of storage. I am repairing those that need it, putting batteries in, and I’ve bought a couple new ones for this season. I’ve tentatively put a few out, and I’m ready to start putting the rest out.

Now if only the sun would come out. I’m not putting them out for “first light” of the season without a good daytime charging. I might bring back in and turn off the ones I’ve already put out if this keeps up.

November 30, 2006. . .

Offering

I needed to give you something. An offering. So I brought out a few things from my private treasure box. This and that I found along the way, that reached me where no one ever has, and I kept for myself. My own private gold and silver. It had to be something from there. Something for you. Something worthy.

Stars bigger than the orbit of Saturn. Clouds of ice and dust so big light from when I was born hasn’t seen the other side yet. Secret places tucked in the folds of dust between Orion and Betelgeuse, where new born stars emerge, perhaps one day to beckon new life into the universe. Galaxies, wheeling, colliding, dancing. Spirals. Barred. Ellipticals. And those small faintly glowing red ones, like beacons shimmering on a distant horizon, their light shining into my eyes from near the beginning of time.

They lifted me. They struck the silence into me. So did you once. So I gave them to you. An offering.

Please give me back a sign.

Well…I got my sign alright. Eventually.

I must remember living in my little narrow and vertical Baltimore rowhouse, to keep the upstairs doors closed when it gets hot outside. And close a select few of the vents downstairs to force more AC air upstairs, especially now that I have this super efficient AC unit that always tries to run the fan and the compressor at the lowest possible speeds.

You live in one of these…it has to be really narrow and vertical…and it really makes you pay attention to how hot air rises and cool air sinks. After I came back from my Disney vacation and got the house reawakened I was wondering why the upstairs wasn’t cooling down while the rest of the house was pretty chill. And then I remembered. Oh yes…I spent most of my life in a series of apartments and I’m still getting use to how a multi-level home behaves.

Nice thing about this one is every major room has both exhaust and intake vents. So I can close all the doors and still have circulation. That’s not all that common anymore in new construction.

The diffusers in my other tiki lights came apart at my barest touch. Plus for some reason the light output of those (they’re a little different) is way down. So I ordered a set of new ones. Hopefully they arrive this weekend.

It looks like the flame effect isn’t digital as I’d thought. Instead it looks like they use randomly blinking leds behind a light baffle, something like was used in the old motion lamps (I have two of them), to generate the effect of a flickering flame.

I waited until after my Disney vacation to really did into getting my backyard lights up, but now it’s time. This is a project I begin every June and which usually takes several days because inevitably some will need repairing. For example: the tiki torch lights, some of which are over ten years old now…way past their expected lifespan of just one season and next year buy new ones (these things are made Very cheaply), and I’m a fix instead of buy new kinda guy.

At the end of last season the diffuser in one of the older set of tiki lights just came apart in my hands as I took the light apart to get the batteries out. The diffuser is a cylindrical piece of translucent plastic that helps with the illusion that the flickering led bulbs inside of it are actually a torch flame, and the plastic it was made of became brittle over the years. It just fell apart when I took it off the lamp to get to the batteries. When that happened I made a mental note to replace it somehow next year.

So now it’s Next Year and I pick the lamp up out of its storage container and remember…oh yeah…I need to replace that. But with what? I could go to the hardware store and get a thin sheet of translucent plastic but heat bending it into a cylinder wasn’t something I wanted to get into unless there was no other way. I actually have experience doing that from the time I worked at a custom plastic fabrication shop.

So I’m thinking and thinking. I start looking through my spare parts but nothing good comes to mind. Then I remember I have bunches of semi transparent drafting paper I could easily cut and bend into the correct shape. Oh…but no…it’ll get wet and soggy when it rains. I thought about it some more. Oh yes…I have some clear urethane spray I can coat it with. Hopefully that keeps rain off the paper.

It won’t be a perfect solution because the one lamp will probably look a bit different from the other, but hopefully not too much different. I’ll give it a test tonight.

Eventually I’m going to want to replace the tiki lamps with newer ones that project a really convincing illusion of flickering flame, but I am stubborn. I think the way the lights I have now work is charming. One set has two amber led lights inside, only one of which flickers off and on and the effect is actually pretty convincing for something so simply done, which is why I really like these more than the newer ones that are projecting an image of a flame. I have always been a big fan of practical special effects over CGI.

Some may say it was my awful diet that caused the heart attack. I was actually being careful before then to keep my weight down because I liked how I looked. Some may say it was the dozen or so cigars I chain smoked right after I realized he’d retired and what it meant. But those were just symptoms.

I’ve heard so many stories, particularly among the gay folk I have hung out with, of devoted deeply in love couples who died close to each other. One goes and not long after that the other. But nobody wants to hear the stories of the single and lonely. We decay slowly, out of sight, out of mind. 

I’m pretty sure these days that my heart (the actual one, not the philosophical one) would not be in the state it’s in now had I lived in a better world and found my other half. But that was not to be. The stress of being a gay kid in a world that threw hate at you from every direction, plus singleness on top of that, did it’s work. A few weeks ago I had an overnight hospital stay because my heart was dancing wildly in my chest. Atrial Fibrillation they call it.

Atrial fibrillation (AFib) is an irregular and often rapid heartbeat that occurs when the heart’s upper chambers (atria) beat out of sync with the lower chambers (ventricles). This can reduce the heart’s ability to pump blood effectively and increase the risk of blood clots, stroke, heart failure, and other complications.

They were going to give me a procedure to shock the upper chambers into sync with the lower ones, which they assured me would be painful. But thankfully overnight my heart went back into normal, what they call sinus rhythm, and so they called it off and sent me back home with a new pill to take that supposedly would keep the afib in check. It did not.

For four days after my hospital stay the afib was gone and I thought the new pill was working. They’d told me it only worked in 75 percent of patients, and sure enough it eventually came back. But I wondered what was going on in those four days that it Was working. Well, that was after my hospital stay where I’d had no coffee.

So I went cold turkey on coffee and the afib went away. Next I tried some decaf. I’d been resisting decaf coffee ever since I noticed that drinking it in the afternoon made my insomnia worse. But I could not see the point in decaf so I just stopped drinking it in the afternoon. Now it seemed plain to me that caffeine was aggravating my afib so I had to give it up and that pushed me into trying decaf. And being the geek I am I had to research how they took the caffeine out of coffee. Turns out there are two processes, one that uses solvents and the other just water. In fact the water process was the first to make decaffeinated coffee beans, and it was discovered accidentally when a shipment of coffee beans got waterlogged on the trip to the buyer.

I gave Peet’s water process decaf a try and found it tasted no different from regular…just you’re not getting the caffeine hit now. This was something I was going to have to adjust to. But at least decaf was enjoyable.

That mostly fixed the afib but it didn’t go away completely and I wondered if there wasn’t something else in my diet contributing to it. The only thing that stood out for me was the artificial sweetener I started using after I reconnected with my high school crush and decided I needed to lose weight. Prior to then I was mostly getting a sugar jolt in the afternoon snarfing down candy bars, and it was when I stopped doing that I switched to getting my wake up your tired self from coffee. But I was using Splenda in my coffee so it wasn’t costing my waistline anything.

I did some more digging discovered that afib was a possible side effect of constantly consuming sucralose, which is the ingredient in Splenda.

“…studies from the American Heart Association journals, have found that people who regularly consume artificially sweetened drinks may have a higher risk of atrial fibrillation (an irregular heartbeat) compared to those who consume fewer such beverages.”

According to what I read those studies are not definitive, but suggestive. My own experience recently is, yeah it does.

I drink constantly, all day long and somewhat through the night. I have a glass or a mug of something next to me all the time, at work and at home. If my co-workers ever saw me in a meeting without my coffee or ice tea mug next to me they might ask if anything is wrong. And ever since 2006 all those drinks have had sucralose in them instead of sugar because I wanted to keep my weight down, and I liked the way having a narrow waistline made me look.

I stopped caring about that March 6, 2016. And yeah…it shows now. But I have no reason to care anymore. So I gave up on Splenda and started sweetening my coffee and ice tea with sugar. The afib went away. Or at least it declined to the point I couldn’t feel it happening anymore.

Yesterday I went back down to DC to hang out with a friend who lives there and to hit Alero for some of their good mexican food and a Godfather margarita. That was also a test to see if I could have a drink every now and then without waking up the afib. That morning I tried sweetening my decaf with Splenda, also as a test. I was hoping maybe I can just go with decaf forever and still use the Splenda that I still have a lot of in stock. The afib came back almost right away and I had to lay down for a bit. By the afternoon I felt good enough to take the Metro into DC and try a margarita. I had just one and it was no trouble. Back home I stuck to my sugar sweetened decaf ice tea and had no trouble with afib all night long.

So I think the Splenda is out now too. Alas I have a lot of it to give away. Also a bunch of K-Cups with Kirkland Medium Roast coffee in them, and all the bags of coffee beans I got at Baltimore Coffee and Tea. Things like Splenda and K-Cups I tend to buy in bulk at Costco because it’s cheaper in the long run. So it goes. The sugar I still have lots of is still good because that stuff does not go bad if you store it carefully. I kept that around for guests that didn’t want Splenda.

There’s a “Buy Nothing Hampden” Facebook group I can put the unopened splenda and coffee on (I have some downsizing I need to do this year so I’ll probably be hitting that page lots anyway). I think I can still keep my weight down if I just don’t snarf down a lot of candy like I was before 2006. If I can manage the afib with just some diet and lifestyle changes I’d rather do that then go for the ablation and possibly a pacemaker too, both of which won’t necessarily fix the problem anyway so I’ve been told by folks that have had that done.

The gay, single, and old life in the American healthcare system. Broken Heart Syndrome? 71 isn’t that old these days. I wonder lots lately if any of this would be happening to me now and not maybe in my 80s or 90s had I lived in a better world.