I’ll have this week’s cartoon up by the end of the day Monday.  Sorry for the delay.

Via Peterson Toscano, a powerful reminder that James Dobson’s greatest crimes against humanity aren’t the ones he’s committed against gay and lesbian people, but his methodical and systematic breaking of the bond of love between parent and child.  Ex-ex-gay blogger Christine writes about what it was like growing up in a fundamentalist household, where Dobson’s pathological hatred of children had found its soil, and taken root…

I was disciplined and guilted and shamed into submission for many years. It somehow seems appropriate to me that Focus on the Family is such a partner with Exodus. My parent’s treatment of me as a child (using Dobson as their guide) no doubt made me all the more vulnerable to the ex-gay message. I was ready and willing to believe myself a damaged and broken person that needed to be fixed, with my sin nature needing to be beaten down and submerged, subdued, and dominated. I was willing to believe that my homosexuality was a part of my own strong-willed defiance gone horribly wrong and satanically out of control.

I can’t even look at Dr. Dobson’s book Dare to Discipline without wanting to weep…

Well somebody needs to look at it.  Because this man has single handedly shattered the lives of countless thousands of helpless children.  And he did it by manipulating their parent’s fundamentalist religiosity, their fear of Satan, and that secret empty place inside of them, where other people have a conscience and a capacity for basic human sympathy…

For parents like mine, who got almost all of their parenting advice from Dr. Dobson, is it any wonder that everything turned into a battle of wills and they saw their child as a "strong-willed tyrant" that needed to be battled into submission? Dr. Dobson is a man who says that "If discipline begins on the second day of life, you’re one day too late." What kind of discipline could a one-day old infant possibly need?!?

I have heard of Dobson-style parents commenting on how "manipulative" a four-month old baby is, because the baby will smile when an adult is playing with them, but cry when it is left alone.

This is sickening.  Of course an infant will cry when its left alone.  Look at that, because the temptation is to think that Dobson desensitizes parents and he doesn’t.  Infants are helpless and vulnerable and need to be cared for.  For Christ sake they’ll cry when they’re hungry too, when they’re sick, when they’re in some kind of pain.  The first reaction of any normal human being to the sound of an infant crying is that anxious sensation  that something’s wrong.  But the problem Dobson’s parents face isn’t that they don’t know what to do with a crying infant, it’s that they don’t know what they’re supposed to feel. 

And Dobson supplies them with an explanation of child parent interaction that fits their sensibilities perfectly: there are no genuine human emotions…everything is manipulation.  Love… affection… tenderness… anxiety… grief… sorrow…  Dobson tells them that all of that is really just different ways humans manipulate one another.  Ask yourself what kind of person this makes sense to, and the horrors inflicted on so many children in this world by their own parents stop being so surprising.

There’s also the story of how Dobson treated his own dog, Siggie (yes, after Freud) in a battle of wills between man and beast. Dobson relates this story in The Strong-Willed Child:

"I had seen this defiant mood before [defiant mood being indicated by Siggie not wanting to leave a warm spot in the house and go to his kennel, and subsequently growling at Daddy Dobson], and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me ‘reason’ with Mr. Freud."

You can read the chilling conclusion here.

If you decide to click on that link, brace yourself.  They say that the abuse of animals is a prime indicator of deeper sociopathologies.  Its something they watch for in young children as a warning sign of potential for serious pathological violence later in life.  Dobson however, is in the enviable position of being able to exercise his pathologies by proxy.  Why abuse children yourself, and risk a very long prison term, when you can get their parents to do it for you? But not just any parents mind you.  You need the ones who are missing that extra something most humans have…a capacity to feel sympathy.  A heart, capable of whole hearted love for another.  You find yourself enough of these, and then the rest is just a matter of invoking the name of Jesus, and telling those parents that their children are Satan incarnate. 

No…I’m not exaggerating…

This brings me to another thing I’ve wondered of late. In talking with other ex-ex-gays or those who have survived fundamentalist upbringings, many of us have in common parents who are absolutely unable to love unconditionally. These parents do things and say things that most parents would not utter to their children no matter how upset they were with them. Is it the idea of sin or satan somehow controlling our lives that gives them license to think of us this way, or talk to us this way? Is it a lifetime of thinking of us as "defiant tyrants" that gives parents the idea that their child is in league with the devil himself?

My own mother once looked at a 5-year old boy and said out-loud to him "get thee behind me, Satan!" because she was convinced that he’d looked at her in a defiant manner that gave her chills and that she could only attribute to Satan. She told our family about this later, with an air of pride that she’d had the guts to speak out against Satan in this manner (nevermind the poor child who probably still remembers that church lady calling him "satan"). For those of us whose parents see us in this light…could this be an explanation for why they are so willing to throw us away, to denounce us and reject us? Do they truly still see brazen and defiant tyrants controlled by satan when they look at us?

(emphasis mine)  I’ve seen that with my own two eyes.  Guy I dated once had a father like that.  Couldn’t love unconditionally if Jesus Christ gave him his heart to do it with.  And there’s the problem, in all its horrible stomach churning glory.  There’s the Pit you don’t want to stare into for too long, because it also stares back into you.  The fundamentalist demands structure, tight all controlling structure to their world, because the world of intimate human interaction is utterly incomprehensible to them.  If they have to manage their way in the human community the way the rest of us do, by building bonds of trust and Empathy and love, they’re completely lost at sea and cannot cope.  Without that all controlling structure to tell them how to conduct their lives at the interpersonal level, they simply can not fathom right from wrong. They just can’t figure it out.  Telling a five year old boy that he’s the devil no more disturbs their conscience then telling him the time of day would.  The boy does not exist in their conscience as a boy, but as an incomprehensible…thing.  It might be human…it might be a child…on the other hand it might be the devil himself.  They’ve just no way of knowing, apart from some structure, some tradition, some religious dogma, telling them what the boy is.

And into this soil fertile for every human horror you can imagine, because none of them have any brakes beyond the traditions and social structures they live inside of, comes Dobson – telling these parents that their children are, in fact, the very images of satan himself.  The growing child who expresses the slightest shred of their own human individuality is, in fact, channeling the serpent in the Garden of Eden…

Perhaps this tendency toward self-will is the essence of ‘original sin’ which has infiltrated the human family. It certainly explains why I place such stress on the proper response to willful defiance during childhood, for that rebellion can plant the seeds of personal disaster.

To suck the human identity out of a child, leaving their soul an empty blackboard that any authority figure can scribble their will upon, is Exactly Dobson’s purpose here.  But I don’t think Dobson means to be that authority.  I think he just takes pleasure in the emptying of a human soul, and leaving it with nothing left to Be. A vampire gains some nourishment from the people whose blood they take.  Dobson is one of those toxic human voids that just suck the life out of everything they touch, for the pleasure of watching something they could never themselves become die. Oscar Wilde once said that we’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.  Dobson is the man handing out hot pokers to parents, determined that every child will grow up blind, so they will never know that the stars above his gutter and beyond his reach, even exist.

…many of us have in common parents who are absolutely unable to love unconditionally… My own mother once looked at a 5-year old boy and said out-loud to him "get thee behind me, Satan!"…  Never mind the stacking of the Federal Courts…here’s the legacy of the ascendancy of the religious right that America will be suffering under for generations to come.  Tens of thousands of soul wounded children, walking into adulthood with their only understanding of what it is to trust and love coming from parents who were taught to regard them as satanic beings.

[Edited a tad…] 

You may have already heard the story of Jason Johnson, a gay student who was expelled from the fundamentalist University of the Cumberlands in Kentucky.  You may have heard this university claims the right to treat any of its students like less then dog shit because…hey…they’re a private institution and they don’t have to answer to any of those damn secular civil rights and equal opportunity laws.  You may have heard further that the University of the Cumberlands is slated to get a sweetheart 11 million dollars of Kentucky tax payer money from the state assembly this year…it’s status as a private institution willing to discriminate against any citizen of Kentucky it damn well pleases to notwithstanding.  God says it’s okay to steal money from the heathens.

What you may not have also heard, and which attracted my attention just a few moments ago while reading this article about the incident, is that the University of the Cumberlands is apparently also quite willing to lie through their teeth about Jason’s school record…

The summer after his freshman year, he came out to his parents and returned to campus as an openly gay man.

"I just knew that I couldn’t go back to hiding again. I wanted to be out," said Johnson, adding that he never experienced harassment or conflict because of his sexual orientation. "Being gay is part of who I am, but not the totality of who I am."

Johnson posted messages about his boyfriend and being gay on his profile at MySpace. com, and school administrators eventually saw the Web site; Johnson doesn’t know how they found it. They confronted him last week with a printout of the site, an order to leave the school and failing grades for a semester that probably would have ended with honors.

The university did not return calls seeking comment yesterday.

(Emphasis mine) Okay…it’s one thing to say that an openly gay student doesn’t conform to your school’s religious teachings.  It’s one thing to expel that student.  But it’s quite another to claim in his transcripts to any other school he might want to attend, that he failed classes which in fact he was doing quite well in, but which in fact you did not permit him to finish.  No…you mark the semester as incomplete, and if you’re ashamed to go into detail about why this particular student didn’t complete the semester you let it go at that.  But you don’t say he failed, because he didn’t.  He wasn’t allowed to finish.

The word for what University of the Cumberlands is doing here….is lie.  The word for people who do that sort of thing…is liars.  But the word from the pulpits in America now, is that it’s okay to lie through your teeth about homosexuals, and god won’t mind.

Morals.  Values.  Who would Jesus slander?

Now, this is funny.  From aTypical Joe:

Just borrowed Brokeback from Video Warehouse. They’ve put a big sticker on every copy which reads, in red letters, "Explicit Homosexual content."

Seems to me if someone doesn’t know what Brokeback is about, they won’t know what the word homosexual means either.

Stupidity is a force of nature…

Via Pam’s House Blend…  The Stranger is reporting that a pharmacy in Seatle refused to fill a woman’s perscription on moral grounds.  The morning after Pill?  Contraceptives?  Oh mes non:  Antibiotics…

The complaint includes one incident at the Swedish Medical Center outpatient pharmacy in Seattle. According to the complaint, someone at the Swedish pharmacy said she was "morally unable" to fill a Cedar River patient’s prescription for abortion-related antibiotics. Cedar River’s complaint quotes its Renton clinic manager’s May 17, 2005, e-mail account: "Today, one of our clients asked us to call in her prescription… to Swedish outpatient pharmacy. [We] called the prescription in… and spoke with an efficient staff person who took down the prescription. A few minutes later, this pharmacy person called us back and told us she had found out who we were and she morally was unable to fill the prescription." (Cedar River thinks their client eventually got her prescription filled.)

Cedar River Clinics, is a women’s health and abortion provider.  What you need to pay attention to here is that the pharmacy in question has at this point, no idea whether or not the woman who needed the antibiotics has even had an abortion.  They only know the doctors calling the prescription in work for a clinic that provides abortions.  But…never mind.  The moral position now seems to be to let woman who do have abortions die from post surgery infections.  And it gets better…

The complaint also includes an incident from November 2005 in Yakima, in which a pharmacist at a Safeway reportedly refused to fill a Cedar River patient’s prescription for pregnancy-related vitamins. The pharmacist reportedly asked the customer why she had gone to Cedar River Clinics and then told the patient she "didn’t need them if she wasn’t pregnant."

Perhaps the day is coming in which grocery store owners can legally deny food to certain people on moral grounds too.  Who would Jesus starve to death?

"I’m a uniter, not a divider."  Remember that?  Anyone remember that?

I noticed a difference the very first morning after using the CPAP machine.  I noticed it the moment I opened my eyes with my head on the pillow.  My head was clearer.  Visually, everything in my bedroom seemed suddenly sharper and clearer to my eyes.  The morning light coming in my windows streamed over walls and bookcases and bedroom furniture and dozens of little objects scattered throughout the room that looked richer in detail then before.  The wood grain in my beach dresser stood out in the morning light in a way I hadn’t noticed in years.  There was a world out there.

It’s hard to explain the sensation.  It isn’t like my eyes became suddenly sharper.  It’s that the visual detail in my environment was suddenly more there then before.  I was still tired.  My body was still not nearly as energetic as it used to be.  But my head was noticeably clearer, and it was taking everything around me in. 

I’d known at some rational level that my sleep problem had been dragging me down, not only physically but mentally as well.  I had to work to keep things in focus.  For years now I’ve been having to force myself to concentrate in a way I’d never had to before (unless I was seriously high).  I’d known at some rational level the state I was in was bad.  But I hadn’t realized how down, how out of it I’d been for years, until that instant of waking up, and looking around my bedroom. 

You know how it is with cars…they get worn and cranky and you have to work to get the engine up to speed, and before long you have a dozen little work-arounds you just do automatically to compensate while you’re driving. Imagine one day you get into that car and turn the key and the engine just starts purring and when you get it out onto the road the car just leaps forward.  Yeah…it was like that.  But only mentally.

My body is still tired.  I have years of living a sedentary life I have to work now to overcome.  And I expect that at 52 that’s not going to be a piece of cake.  But if I don’t want my body to spiral down into complete helplessness when I’m aged then I need to get it back into some kind of shape now.  If I inherited the trend of males on mom’s side of the family to die of stroke in their 60s or before I’m fucked anyway.  But if my circulatory system has more of dad’s side in it I might live a reasonably healthy old age.  I need to start getting myself back in shape now though…

But…the difference in how I feel mentally now is just…amazing…

For example…

Dream…

I’m walking through the halls of my old High School.  Usually in these dreams I’m a teenager again, but this time I’m the grown adult I am now, and I’m walking alone in empty halls, while paradoxically all the kids I grew up with are outside, still teenagers, talking noisily to each other as they begin their walk home from school. 

Instead of following them I walk into the big central gym and in my dream it morphs into the arcade of some big shopping mall, the same one I’ve visited hundreds of times in my dreams.  I think this dream Mall is some mental aggregate of all the Malls I’ve ever lived near.  I don’t know how other people’s dreams are, but in mine things can just change instantly from one setting to something else entirely and it never seems to faze me.  One minute I’m walking into the school gym, but I go through the doors and then I’m strolling around in a Mall, and I never seem to notice the oddness of that while I’m dreaming it.

In my dream I recall that there is a subway station down one level, down at the end of this particular arcade, and wanting now to go home, I walk toward it.  For some reason though, instead of going down the escalators to the subway I stop and sit on a stone bench nearby, and just relax for a while watching the people in the Mall walking by. 

Then I notice a beautiful guy sitting on a similar bench on the other side of the arcade.  He’s just breathtakingly beautiful.  He notices me looking at him…and he smiles back at me.

I work up some sort of nerve I don’t normally have and smile, quickly, back at him and then look away.  I’m such a damn wuss.  You want to know why I’m still single?  That’s why.  I can never, never work up the nerve to make the first move.  Been like that my entire life.  And I’m not nearly good looking enough to be waiting around for a beautiful someone to make a move on me. 

So I sit there, like I always do, stealing glances at this beautiful guy sitting across the arcade from me.  From time to time he smiles at me.  Then he reaches over to his backpack, pulls out a notebook and starts writing.  He strolls over to my bench, sits down, and passes me a note…

Hi…what’s your name?

Like a couple of damn teenage school kids we pass this note back and forth for a while.  Swear to god it was even ruled loose leaf notebook paper we were writing on…

I’m Bruce.  What’s your name?  Do you live around here?

Eventually we dispense with the note passing and start chatting.  I forget now what we chat about, but I’m enjoying the conversation immensely.  

The foot traffic in the arcade suddenly starts to get heavy.  We’re suddenly surrounded by crowds.  I check the time.  Of course, it’s rush hour, and people are starting to head to the subway.  The beautiful guy I’m sitting next to looks annoyed at the crowd around us, and for an instant I think he’s just going to get up and leave.  That’s almost always how these sorts of dreams end for me.  But no…instead he gives me a serious look and asks me if I know of someplace where we can have a little more privacy.

And…amazingly…I do.  I’ve walked this particular dream Mall many times.  There’s a spot just down the arcade full of tiny little boutique shops that seldom get any foot traffic.  And there are little nooks here and there along it, where you can sit and not be seen. 

We start walking that way, still chatting easily.  We leave the crowds behind, and enter this very odd little corner of the Mall I’ve never figured out.  It’s full of these tiny little stores that never seem to get any customers, but they’re always open all the same.  There are no boarded up shops here, no look of economic despair, but just the opposite.  Brightly lit stores everywhere, that just never seem to do any business.

I point out a nice quiet spot along the arcade where we can be alone for a while… 

…and I wake up.  Crap.  The damn CPAP mask is crowding my face again.  About four or five times a night now it does that and I wake up having to get it all adjusted again.  I need a better mask.

But…damn!  In my dreams the beautiful stranger never approaches me.  Never.

Okay…it’s getting just plain medieval deep in the heart of Texas.  Bill Nye, The Science Guy, was giving a presentation at McLennan Community College in Waco, and some people walked out after he told them that a literal interpretation of Genesis 1:16 just doesn’t square with the facts…

And God made two great lights: A greater light to rule the day, and a less light to rule the night, and he made the stars also. -Tyndale’s Old Testament

Well…okay…  As poetry it kinda works, but it isn’t right.  The sun is a star, and a fairly common type of star at that.  And the moon shines in the sun’s light (and also a bit of reflected earth light too from time to time, so we get light from it that’s been doubly reflected), not its own.  The moon is not a light, anymore then the mountaintops that reflect the last light of the day as the sun goes down are lights.  It’s the moon…a pretty amazing object in its own right, but it is not a light.  And the sun is a star too…little different from most of the other stars whose light we see at night.  But the person who wrote those lines could not have known any of that and you can see their intent well enough.  God made all the things which shine down upon us from the heavens above…the sun which gives us the day, and the moon which shines brightly in the night and also all the stars that shine in the night…

Fine.  I can dig it.  I’ve spent many a night gazing up in rapture at the creator’s work.  This is a beautiful amazing universe we live in.  Depending on how expansive your view of God is (or how willing you are to admit you really don’t know crap about what God is, other then it’s that which created the cosmos), science and religion don’t really have much to argue about in Genesis 1:16.  But some people just don’t want to hear it…

The Emmy-winning scientist angered a few audience members when he criticized literal interpretation of the biblical verse Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.”

He pointed out that the sun, the “greater light,” is but one of countless stars and that the “lesser light” is the moon, which really is not a light at all, rather a reflector of light.

A number of audience members left the room at that point, visibly angered by what some perceived as irreverence.

“We believe in a God!” exclaimed one woman as she left the room with three young children.

Fine, but you don’t seem very willing to embrace that which God hath wrought are you?  What the hell were you doing in a science lecture lady?  See…this is what’s a tad scary about this story.  This fundamentalist woman took her children to a science lecture expecting to hear nothing that contradicted her religious conceits.  So what have they been teaching in science classes in Texas for the past generation or two?

Did you remember to count all the hungry mouths you feed…?

More Mark and Josh tax time fun, here and here.   I missed getting one in for 2005.  The 2003 cartoon is obviously an early effort at drawing the two…I’d only just discovered them recurring in my political cartoons.  They’ve managed since then to get themselves a better kitchen table set, and a slightly better artist. 

This is hilarious.  From the Washington Post…

It was with some trepidation that we opened a most interesting card, which announced on a blue-jeaned cowboy’s belt buckle something called the "5th Annual VOLPAC ’06 Weekend" in Nashville on April 21-23.

Problem was you had to unbuckle the cowboy’s pants and look inside to see what this was all about. Seemed a bit too "Brokeback Mountain."

VOLPAC is Senator Frisk’s grassroots leadership committee.  I’d have loved to have seen the look on the grassroots face as it unbuckled the cowboy belt.  But wait…it gets even better… 

The back of the card shows the cowboy from behind with a red flowered handkerchief sticking out of his right pocket. Wait a minute — wasn’t there something about how this used to be some kind of code in the gay community years ago? A way to signal each other in crowded, noisy bars?

So we checked the GayCityUSA.com’s Hanky Codes. Sure enough, there it was in the chart explaining what they mean: red hanky in right pocket. Oh, dear.

…but not entirely out of step with Karl Rove’s way of doing business though, as Ron Suskind found out one day outside of Rove’s office… 

Eventually, I met with Rove. I arrived at his office a few minutes early, just in time to witness the Rove Treatment, which, like LBJ’s famous browbeating style, is becoming legend but is seldom reported. Rove’s assistant, Susan Ralston, said he’d be just a minute. She’s very nice, witty and polite. Over her shoulder was a small back room where a few young men were toiling away. I squeezed into a chair near the open door to Rove’s modest chamber, my back against his doorframe.

Inside, Rove was talking to an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had displeased him. I paid it no mind and reviewed a jotted list of questions I hoped to ask. But after a moment, it was like ignoring a tornado flinging parked cars. "We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!" As a reporter, you get around—curse words, anger, passionate intensity are not notable events—but the ferocity, the bellicosity, the violent imputations were, well, shocking. This went on without a break for a minute or two. Then the aide slipped out looking a bit ashen, and Rove, his face ruddy from the exertions of the past few moments, looked at me and smiled a gentle, Clarence-the-Angel smile. "Come on in." And I did. And we had the most amiable chat for a half hour.

So…I mean…maybe Frist really meant to put a red handkerchief in that cowboy’s back pocket.  The right pocket would have been right.

Which…brings me to something I’ve wanted to vent about for years.  Beg pardon for a moment…

I fucking hated that handkerchief code!

Thank you.  (whew!)  That felt good…

See, before there was a code, back in the 1970s, there were only cute longhaired gay guys who discovered how really tantalizing it was to hang a bit of that kerchief us longhairs had all been tying around our hair out the back pockets of our jeans.  There was no code, just a little something to draw the other guy’s attention to the fact that you had a really nice ass and make him all hot and bothered.   Jeans were low around the waste, and tight around the hips and thighs, and a few good designer brands had just started to come out, that really accentuated a guys natural attributes.  Ah…those were the days…  And then some idiots decided to make a goddamn formal code out of it, with right being "active" and left "passive" and various different colors for various different kinds of sex (and a lot of stuff I don’t really consider to be sex at all…but then I’m like that…).

So besides making it impossible to wear that really nice red bandanna you liked so well, because you thought red was just a sexy color, especially when hanging provocatively down around a nice tight set of denim curves with maybe a wee bit of skin showing just above the belt line, it also formalized a rigid set of sex roles, which just don’t work for some of us…maybe most of us.  I do not identify as either "active" or "passive" and in fact I find the terms mildly idiotic.  Sex isn’t something one person does to another…it’s something you both do together.  These terms just don’t make sense to me sexually.  If you’ve ever found yourself in the sack with someone who turned out to be an "aggressive bottom", then tell me please who was the active and who was the passive partner.  It might make sense in a given moment, but not as a state of being and not even as a descriptive term for fucker verses fuckee.  And I don’t get "top" and "bottom" either, as terms of identification.  I mean…I do…but neither one of them is me.

But there are only two back pockets in a pair of pants, and damn if putting your kerchief in one of them suddenly meant you were one thing, and putting it in the other meant you were the opposite thing.  And I guess you have to be a painter to appreciate how imprisoning it feels to have colors suddenly confined to particular sex acts.  ARRRGH!!!  I Hated it!  And as I said, I like the effect of a red bandanna over blue denim.  Well…boy was that one spoiled for me when I looked up the code.  Ugh!

It was all just cheerful spontaneous gay male sexuality for a brief moment in time.  And then they had to fuck it up.  I went and looked up the Hanky Code again and there are 76 X 2 possible ways to identify your sexual preferences listed there, and back in 1979-’80 when things started getting really crazy, I saw guys wearing several kerchiefs at a time in their back pockets.  Then they started hanging little plastic cupie dolls and stuffed bears off their back pockets.  I don’t even want to know.  Nothing ever stays simple and sexy in this culture.  And no…I don’t mean gay culture, I mean American pop culture.  It’s like we have to hype everything, even the simple joys of life.

Young man on a skateboard – circa 1977
Copyright ©  2006 by Bruce Garrett. All rights reserved.

Eye candy of the late 70s, before the Reagan years and the rise of the religious right, and the gay panic set in among young heterosexuals.  Yes, believe it or not there was a time when even a straight boy felt perfectly fine showing off his body to the girls like that.  But the kerchief in his pocket means he’s probably gay because even before the code that was mostly a gay thing.  It’s color does Not correspond to any code…so don’t even go there!  He’s just being sexy.  There was a time when you could just do that and all it meant was you were trying to bother the other gay guys.  It was a lot more fun when that was all it meant.

Brokeback Mountain has been released onto DVD and I’ll probably pick up a copy sometime this weekend.  I might skip through it when I get it back home but I doubt I’ll sit through the whole thing for quite a while.  As I’ve said before, I am not really up to watching tragic and doomed love affairs these days.  But after Hollywood’s giving it the pie in the face last month, I figured the least I could do was my part to help DVD sales.

While scanning google for articles about the DVD, I came across a little tidbit in the Deseret News, which all the more interesting because that paper is owned outright by the Mormon church.  It’s about Larry Miller, the Utah creep who canceled the showing of Brokeback at his theater right at the last minute, while ticket holders were in line, allegedly after he was told what the movie was about.  And I say, allegedly…

Miller says he knew he’d catch some flak for pulling the film about homosexual cowboys from his theaters,  but did so because he’s very worried about the break-up of the traditional American family.

In his words, he wanted to draw a line in the sand by not showing the film.

Miller said, "Getting away from the traditional families, which I look at as the fundamental building block of our society, is a very dangerous thing." 

Oh really?  Well…here’s what Scott Pierce in the Mormon owned Deseret News had to say about that…

 Miller, of course, has every right to his opinion. And every right to choose what movies to show in his theaters. And we should be grateful to him for standing up for "traditional families."

Just like he does with the TV station he owns, KJZZ.  Let’s look at a few things airing on Ch. 14 next week:

• "Friends," which is replete with extramarital sex, plots about porn and even homosexuality.

• "Cheers," which revolves around an unrepentant womanizer.

• Various forms of extramarital sex and vulgar shenanigans on such sitcoms as "Just Shoot Me," "Becker" and "The Parkers."

• "ER" — sex and a decidedly pro-gay agenda.

And here are a few of the movies KJZZ will be airing:

• "The List," about a high-priced prostitute.

• "Her Best Friend’s Husband," about a woman who has an affair with her best friend’s husband.

• "Primary Suspect," about a man who kills his wife.

Miller’s TV station it turns out, also carries Montel Williams, Tyra Banks, and Maury.  Swell family values fare that.  But it gets even more ironic:

Oh, and don’t forget next week’s eight airings of "Will & Grace," which not only features healthy, happy gay guys but is replete with the most off-color humor you’ll find in a network sitcom.

Will and Grace.  Miller’s TV station shows Will and Grace, and he balks at showing Brokeback Mountain in his movie theater?  No.  I think not.  Pierce goes on to complain about what Miller does show…

This week alone Miller’s theaters are showing R-rated "Basic Instinct 2," "Slither," "Inside Man," "Find Me Guilty" and "V for Vendetta."

Not bad.  But wait…it gets even better…

And one of the biggest stories the Jazz generated this season was about how the wife of one of the players granted him the right to one extramarital sexual encounter per year.

"The Jazz" would be that Utah NBA basketball team that Miller owns.  I guess more then one extra-marital affair a year might count as a dangerous thing for the Traditional American Family.  Mind you…this criticism comes from a newspaper that almost certainly welcomed Miller’s canceling showings of Brokeback Mountain, and would have probably liked it very well thank you if the film never saw the light of day anywhere in the United States, let alone Utah.  But Miller is no more a true believe then George Bush.  What Miller, like Bush, knows is when to throw a little human flesh to the mob, and from whose skin.

Here’s what I think: Miller knew damn well what the subject matter of Brokeback Mountain was, and to him it was just another booking until someone(s) in the powerful Mormon church had a chat with him and told him they’d like it very much thank you if he just pulled it from the venue.   R rated fun and games for sexually ignorant and repressed heterosexuals in Utah is one thing, but a film that so graphically shows how ignorance and prejudice have utterly destroyed the emotional lives of gay and lesbian people in America is more then the market will bear.  Particularly when that market is so deeply implicated in that destruction.  Miller can show Will and Grace and the religious right may bellyache about it, but Will and Grace is lite TV entertainment that manages to have its cake and eat it too, re-enforcing many gay stereotypes along the way while laughing along with them like it’s all an in-joke.  Brokeback on the other hand, is desolate landscape with a finger pointed right back at hate.  That simply cannot be tolerated.

A man from Johns Hopkins came this morning and delivered my CPAP machine, and gave me a short lecture on how to use it.  He came to my door with the CPAP in its smallish carrying bag slung over his shoulder, and I was surprised at first glance by how small and innocuous looking it was.

We sat around my kitchen table, a spot that’s become my place to interrogate the various contractors that have come into my house to do business.  Last time it was a parade of home heating and air conditioning contractors that sat there with me.  For about an hour the guy from Hopkins gave me the beginner’s lecture on how to operate and care for the unit, at first speaking to me like I was a little old lady who’d never seen an electronic device before, except maybe radio she listens to her soap operas on.  There was a time when that sort of thing would have really gotten my goat, but I’ve mellowed a tad in my middle age. There’s this so true it hurts passage in William Dale Jennings’ The Cowboys, where the trail boss, Wil Andersen, observes that it’s the smart boys you have to watch the most, because the slow boys will eventually get it, and once they do they’ve got it for life, but the smart ones are always trying to out think everything and it gets them into trouble.  Do tell.  So now when I’m being lectured below my grade level I just sit and listen anyway.  And the lecture gave me a chance to glean what the typical CPAP patient must be like, and what they usually didn’t get right about using their machines.

The Unit they sent me is a REMstar Pro-2, which according to my paperwork, only cost my insurance company 90 dollars.  However, the add-on humidifier unit cost an additional three-hundred.  With extras (like the mask) the total bill to my insurance company was about five-hundred and fifty dollars.  A lot less then I’d worried.  For kicks I searched for a price online and saw the same unit selling for around five-hundred dollars without the humidifier, and five-hundred, ninety with.  I have no idea what kind of creative billing is going on here with my insurance company and Johns Hopkins, but it boils down to the same price either way.

The REMstar is smallish and very lightweight… about the size and heft of a largish toaster.  It seems made particularly for traveling, an issue I’d raised several times at the sleep clinic.  It takes a two-prong non-polarized plug so it can theoretically plug in just about anywhere here in North America.  The mask they gave me is similar to the one I used at the sleep clinic: it fits just around my nose and has a nice soft gel cushion around it, making it very comfortable to wear.  It straps around my head like a pilot’s oxygen mask with Velcro and buckle adjustments.  But you take it off by unsnapping a toggle snap around the front of the mask. 

The air hose attaches via an elbow joint that can freely move around as you turn your head on the pillow.  I just tried laying down with it on a moment ago and without all the wires attached to me I had on at the sleep clinic, it’s actually very comfortable.  The only thing is I can’t bury my face in the pillow.  But I don’t do that anyway.  Mostly I sleep on my side or my stomach, with my face to one side or the other on the pillow’s edge, and this mask works just fine for that.  The only thing that might disturb my sleep is tugging on my face by the air hose.  But they gave me a six foot hose so I’m hoping that won’t happen.

My prescription pressure setting is the lowest possible for this machine, which makes sense because in the first sleep clinic they determined that I didn’t have it severe enough that I actually ever stopped breathing.  I only have these periods of difficulty during the night that pull me back out of a deep sleep, so I never get much of any deep sleep.  I strongly suspect that it’s more the sound of snoring, then any mild difficulty I have breathing, that’s jarring me awake at night.  I know for a fact that’s what’s been knocking me awake while I’m trying to nap in the afternoons.  I’ll be drifting to sleep and then the back of my throat suddenly catches and I’ll start to snore and it’ll just pop me right back awake.  First thing I noticed during the second sleep clinic stay was that wasn’t happening with the CPAP machine on.  I still had a horrible night, but it was all the wires they’d attached to me that kept waking me up.  And that damn coffin sized bed I couldn’t stretch out on.

I’ll probably try my new machine out this afternoon during one of my naps.  I’m hoping to notice right away that I’m breathing much better, and going to sleep better.  How long it will take my body to notice after all these years of not sleeping well is another story.

Fred Clark has this wonderful picture up on his blog of a group of second graders, who were watching a presentation from an educator with the Philadelphia Zoo.  They had just introduced the kids to a great horned owl and the owl had just spread its wings when the photographer snapped…

Some months ago my brother and I were on the phone brainstorming vacation times and places.  I live on one coast, he on the other.  It would be neat, says he, if we could all meet somewhere, like the Bahamas, or the Florida Keys…or say, how about Jamaica?

Uhm…not: 

(Kingston) Students at University of the West Indies rioted as police attempted to protect a gay student and escort him from the campus.

The Daily Gleaner reports that the student had been chased across the Mona campus by another student who claimed the gay man had attempted to proposition him in a washroom.

Dozens of students joined in the case and the student sought protection in a university building.

The mob demanded that campus security turn the student over. With security guards badly outnumbered college authorities called in police fearing the gay man would be killed.

The Gleaner reports that a contingent of police in full riot gear battled with students in an effort to protect the gay man.

Students threw objects from all directions at the officers. At one point the gay man was stabbed by another student, although the injuries are reportedly superficial.

The crowd only began to disperse when one officer drew his gun and fired a shot in the air.

This is far from the first story I’ve heard in a year, of Jamaican mobs chasing down gays (or more to the point, people only suspected of being gay) with the intention of killing them.  Last January a mob chased a young man through the streets and off a pier to his death, shouting homophobic epithets at him all the while.  And in December the man who who ran Jamaica AIDS Support for Life, Lenford Harvey, was shot to death on the eve of World AIDS Day.  Three men broke into his house, tied up two of his housemates and then forced Harvey into their car.  His body was found two hours later.

The Jamaica tourism web site says of the island country that it is a place of "sweet fragrances, shimmering sunsets, spicy flavors.  No wonder hearts beat faster in Jamaica."  Especially when they’re being chased through the streets by bloodthirsty mobs no doubt.

I had my second round of sleep clinic exams last weekend, and I’ve been meaning to post a little about the overall experience.  But then I read this guy in the New York Times (registration required), and I see an experience eerily similar to my own…

Lights out. During the night, as I traveled between wakefulness and sleep, sending back streams of data like a space probe, the technician appeared and disappeared, adjusting my wires, and exiting my consciousness in a ring of light — the door to the corridor — like a spectral visitor, a goblin that only the sixth-sensed see. He monitored my voyage from a desk somewhere in the clinic, taking notes as I sped through the blackness.

The next morning, miles from a cup of coffee, my head damp with mist and dotted with what looked like old toothpaste, I filled out another form, asking, among other things, what I had dreamed about.

"I dreamed I was wired to a bunch of wires, in a threatening tangle, that pulled me back to a wall every time I tried to escape," I wrote, truthfully.

"Perhaps it was not a dream," the technician said, reviewing my responses, with a graveyard humor that was also chilly and serious. Working nights will do it to you.

Yeah…something like that.  After a second miserable night in the sleep clinic I began to wonder if they aren’t measuring how well I sleep, so much as how well I sleep with a lot of wires attached to me.  Going in I was assured that they had the wiring down to an art now, and it would not disturb me in the least.  Well, that might be true if you sleep like you’re in a coffin, but I turn this way and that all night long and you just can’t do that with wires attached to several different spots on your head, and on both legs.

You go in bearing a little overnight bag.  They lead you to a room that looks half like a cheap motel room but with a (way too) narrow hospital bed in the middle, that has lots of plugs and gizmos in the headboard.  I sleep like a cat, sprawled all over the bed.  I took one look at that sleep clinic bed and just knew it was going to be a bad night, even before they put the wires on.  Hamilton in the Times describes a similar room to mine, so I reckon they’re all doing it the same now…

Try this sometime.

Plaster about two dozen electrodes to your face and head and tape some more to your chest and legs. Give yourself two to three feet of wire on each, and attach the other ends to the wall next to a bed, so they tug tightly when you move. Make sure the bed is in a room that you’ve never seen before, something that looks like a hospital room disguised as a hotel room. A kind of Soviet-era bugged spy box for information gathering, with a video camera, pointed at the bed, blinking silently from the ceiling.

Then turn out the lights and go to sleep.

At least they didn’t need to cut any of my hair to get the head leads on.  They use a paste that’s conductive and which comes out easily in the shower with just a little soap and water (really).  They didn’t bother misting my head at Johns Hopkins to get the leads off…just pulled gently.  I was given pretty much the same questionnaire that Hamilton was, but nobody reviewed it with me.  The first time I did the sleep study I dreamed that a technician woke me up and led me into the Hopkins Director’s office, where the Director sadly informed me that they probably couldn’t cure my sleeping problems, but if I wanted to I could finish the night sleeping on his office sofa. 

This second visit was to calibrate a CPAP machine for me.  They got a small nose mask that fit me very well, and after a time I hardly noticed it was on me.  Putting it on though caused a weird sensation because they had the machine on when they did it.  CPAP stands for Controlled Positive Air Pressure…it’s supposed to keep your post nasal breathing passages pressurized just enough that they don’t collapse (which is what causes snoring) and make it hard for you to breath while sleeping.  They tell you to close your mouth when they put the mask on, but it’s instinctual to open it when your nose is being closed off by something, and for an instant I had air going in my nose and coming back out my mouth.  Felt…very funky.  My brother, who scuba dives, would probably have seen it coming.  But I sleep with my mouth closed normally, and once you close your mouth you don’t notice the pressurization. 

But I noticed the effect it had on my breathing immediately.  My sleep problem has been developing over a period of about a decade now, and I hadn’t realized how hard it had become for me to breath at night with my head on the pillow, until it was suddenly effortless again.  I’m actually starting to think now that I may get this problem licked after all.

And in researching my problem I’ve discovered that sleeplessness is no joking matter.  The consequences of chronic sleeplessness that I’m digging up out there, are actually starting to scare me a bit…

The mortality rate is significantly higher in patients with untreated OSAS [obstructive sleep apnea syndrome] than in patients who have received adequate treatment or who experience primary snoring. Several studies have shown that there is a positive relationship between OSAS and cardiovascular morbidity, including myocardial infarctions and stroke. Patients with coronary artery disease may experience myocardial ischemia during episodes of apnea.

Systemic hypertension is found in 70% to 90% of patients with OSAS, and 30% to 35% of patients with essential hypertension also have OSAS. Cardiac arrhythmias are another serious complication of OSAS. The most common pattern consists of repeated cycles of bradycardia during apnea followed by tachycardia with arousal that terminates the apnea. Other arrhythmias include sinus arrest, second- or third-degree heart block, premature ventricular contractions, and potentially lethal tachyarrhythmias.

Automobile accidents caused by sleepiness or degraded perception and response, or both, are another cause of morbidity and death. In addition to higher mortality and morbidity rates, patients with OSAS have more cognitive impairment and a poorer overall quality of life than people without OSAS. Other complications include peripheral neuropathy, gastroesophageal reflux, increased intracranial pressure, optic neuropathy, glaucoma, recurrent delirium, and exacerbation of cluster headaches.

Fuck! 

Okay…this explains why my HMO isn’t bellyaching about paying for all this.  Supposedly they got enough data from me at the sleep clinic last weekend to know how much pressure my CPAP machine will need.  Too little and the breathing problems come back.  Too much and I’ll keep popping awake like I always do now anyway.  I’m supposed to be contacted by someone about getting my machine this week.  If it works for me I’ll look into my surgical options, because I don’t want to be tied to a machine for the rest of my life.  Especially one that requires a visit to the sleep clinic every time it needs adjusting.  These sleep clinic visits are running about two grand a pop.  And I’m not ready to have my house, and especially my bedroom, invaded by a lot of weird looking medical equipment.

And how the hell am I going to attract a boyfriend if I have to sleep next to him looking and sounding like Darth Vader?  No…if this works, I’ll have the surgery.