I hadn’t read any of Fred Clark’s posts in a while, I suppose for some reason I can’t get his blog to work in Feedly. So just now on a lark I checked in.

WOW!

I also appreciate his telling how it feels to move into a new place in the center of town and you can walk to “a supermarket within walking distance, and a half-dozen coffee shops, four pizza places, and more restaurants and bars than I’d manage to visit over the next 15 years of living there.” Yes, urban life is Wonderful. Especially if you’re a walker. And especially so when it seems you are welcomed to it with a street fair right outside your front door.

I really need to figure out how to get his posts to show up in Feedly.

[Update…] This time I tried I got the link to Slacktivist added to My Websites easily. I have no idea what the problem was before. 

Meanwhile, in the land of Fox News, Plantation Owner Christianity, RFK Jr and Donald Trump, a man uses AI machines trained on other people’s music, to create a band that doesn’t exist, generate thousands of mock music tracks from that mock band, put them on a streaming service that pays real bands next to nothing for their music, and then builds an army of bots to stream his mock band’s mock music and get millions in royalties from all his mock listeners.

North Carolina Musician Charged With Music Streaming Fraud Aided By Artificial Intelligence

FBI Acting Assistant Director Christie M. Curtis said: “Michael Smith allegedly produced hundreds of thousands of songs with artificial intelligence and utilized automatic features to repeatedly stream the music to generate unlawful royalties to the tune of $10 million.

SMITH created thousands of accounts on the Streaming Platforms (the “Bot Accounts”) that he could use to stream songs. He then used software to cause the Bot Accounts to continuously stream songs that he owned. At a certain point in the charged time period, SMITH estimated that he could use the Bot Accounts to generate approximately 661,440 streams per day, yielding annual royalties of $1,207,128.

SMITH spread his automated streams across thousands of songs to avoid anomalous streaming as to any single song. SMITH was aware that if, for example, a single song was streamed one billion times, it would raise suspicions at the Streaming Platforms and the music distribution companies that those streams were the result of streaming manipulation. A billion fake streams spread across tens of thousands of songs, however, would be more difficult to detect, because each song would only be streamed a much smaller number of times. As a result, SMITH repeatedly identified the need for more songs as crucial for facilitating the fraud scheme. For example, on or about December 26, 2018, SMITH emailed two co conspirators that, “We need to get a TON of songs fast to make this work around the anti-fraud policies these guys are all using now.”

If only they’d paid his royalties in mock money, say three dollar bills or one of Trump’s bitcoin things, it would have been the perfect mock crime.

Now I need a mocktail…

I had an odd vivid dream this morning about being in photographer mode for a while. It was odd in some of its detail, which is not unusual for a dream. It was encouraging because I’ve been wanting to see that part of me awaken since the beginning of the year and so far it won’t.

That part of me feels exhausted. Like I’ve said everything I wanted to say with a camera and now I have nothing more left to say. It’s all Been There, Done That. Since the start of the year I’ve taken multiple trips with one or more of my cameras to go find things to explore and, then come back home without so much as touching them. Now they just sit unused. I’ve thought about selling some of them, but I’ve a collection of good ones now and it’s almost for that reason alone I won’t. Instead of looking at my cameras as a photographer, I’m seeing them now as a collector. I feel like something inside of me is just draining away.

So the dream last night was welcome in a way. Oddly, in the dream I am a younger guy, but I was also aware that I’m working part time now, not fully retired anymore like I was. So I couldn’t just flit away and go looking for things to explore with my cameras. I’m driving the little green Prism., not the Mercedes. And I’m living in the apartment with mom, but it’s located in some new neighborhood I don’t recognise, but with easy access to the interstate. And my bitter abusive maternal grandmother is still living in the apartment with me and mom, and one reason I’m out and about is I’m getting away from her.

I really wish she would stop appearing in my dreams. But I suppose it’s she did a lot of damage and even at age 71 I’m still trying to recover from it.

It seems like it’s not quite the end of winter, but warm enough for shirtsleeves instead of a coat outside. I’m trying to think of where I can go when I only have a few days off. In this dream I consider driving to New Orleans, but it’s too far and I’ve done a lot of the points down south. I think I should go north, but there is still snow cover up north. I have an urge to just throw it all off and drive all the way to California. But no…I have to be back at work after just a few days.

So I go north, into Pennsylvania, and at a highway food stop I suddenly see something I want to get with my camera. What I have with me just then is the black Nikon F with the photomic FTn light meter head. It’s a really good shot. This highway food joint has as its trademark a pair of cowboy boots, and this particular one has a large fiberglass pair of them on a pole high up above the roof, sorta like how McDonald’s has their golden arches, and Bob’s Big Boy has that kid in checkered overalls. It’s the incongruity of that huge pair of cowboy boots on the pole standing watch up against the sky with the sunlight hitting them just so and the clouds in the background that are just right that attracts my attention. As I said, a vivid dream.

I raise my camera to my eye, turning on the light meter and taking off the lens cap as I do, only to discover I don’t have the right lens on it for this shot. It’s the 50mm and I almost always shoot with a 24. In my haste to get out of the apartment I only took that one camera and the lens that was on it.

So I attempt to back away to compose the shot I want of the thing I am seeing, and there is outside seating at this place so I have to navigate around the tables and other people eating there. And a young woman asks me about my camera and we get into a conversation about cameras because she has one too but it’s a different make and she wants to know more about the Nikon.

And I go into my speal about how I’m not really a Nikon person but a Canon person but sometimes I like taking the Nikons out because they have a different mechanical feel…and I wake up.

What was so encouraging about this dream was my photographer’s eye opened up for a while in it and I saw something I just had to get a shot of. That hasn’t happened in almost a year. But I don’t know if I can make it happen again in real life. As I write this I’m afraid that if I go somewhere with my cameras again the same thing will happen and I’ll come back empty handed because I can’t feel that part of me inside.

I’ve been thinking lately of putting up a new photo gallery on the website, a Best Of gallery where I put what I think is are the very best images I’ve managed to make over the years, the stuff I’m super proud of. Maybe working on something like that will reawaken that part of me inside. Or at least give it a good send off.

Along with, apparently, nearly everyone else here in Charm City, I got one of these in the mail the other day…

This comes from a religious publisher, Remnant Publications, that’s known for mail bombing its wares all over the country, so I reckon Maryland, or at least Baltimore, is having its turn at being on the receiving end of one of their mass mailings. Remnant is affiliated with the Seventh Day Adventists. But the author of the book, or at least its original author since it’s apparently been through many revisions over the years, was Ellen G. White, a co-founder of the faith. Though having gone through many editions the book itself dates back to the 1800s, about ten or eleven years after what the Seventh Day Adventists call The Great Disappointment (the world didn’t end), and purports to explain the rise and fall of nations in terms of the cosmic battle between Christ and Satan. Just the thing to add to my collection of Jack Chick tracts. Especially as it seems to be an anti-Catholic screed, although I’m told later editions of the book have toned that down a tad.

I am not a Catholic, I’m an atheist, and recently I got my hands on a really lovely graphic novel about a gay teenage Catholic boy trying to reconcile his emerging sexuality with his faith, and his crush on a classmate who is atheist. It’s Hey, Mary! by Andrew Wheeler and Rye Hickman.

It’s very sympathetically done and it gave this Baptist Boy Turned Atheist a better insight into that faith and its culture, and why it matters deeply to some of them. In the end the Catholic boy embraces himself, and his faith, and his atheist boyfriend, and the two of them agree to find a way to walk together, because they are in love. Because each of those pieces of themselves, and each other, make a whole.

I love stories like that. And it’s not hard to see the difference between it and The Great Controversy. The one looks to scripture to discover its eternal truths, the other to the human heart.

So with Trump sending the troops and tanks (yes) into DC, the MAGA noise machine is going overtime to explain to the base that cities (especially cities with a majority black population and government) are pits of crime and violence. Except…well…they aren’t. Sure there are bad neighborhoods everywhere, but violent crime is actually down overall. At least according to the last most recent reliable stats. But I’m sure they’re working on fixing the stats right this very moment. 

This item from Media Matters For America came across my news feed yesterday…

Fox host: “If they had National Guard troops in Times Square it would make me feel safer

AINSLEY EARHARDT (FOX HOST): So the president implemented this Making D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force and in less than a week they’ve taken 100 violent criminals off the streets. I think it’s great. I wouldn’t mind seeing the National Guard, especially if it’s in areas where there is a lot of crime. I mean, think about Times Square. There is a lot of crime there. We cover a lot of stories there. If they had National Guard troops in Times Square it would make me feel safer.

I don’t think all of this is deliberate hyperbole. There’s some real fear there on the part of this group of Trump/MAGA blowhards. They’re surrounded by too many Not White faces, too much social and cultural representation that isn’t their own. To walk in Not Fox News/Trump/MAGA territory is to be out of their comfort zone.

But there’s something else I think that’s at work here. I’ve walked through Time Square by myself many times. Last time I was in NYC (to see Boys In The Band at the Booth Theater) I wandered around from the Hotel to Hell’s Kitchen, had a great time just exploring somewhere I’d never been before, and the local food was excellent. But I’m used to this. I’m single, an only child, and prefer taking my walks by myself because a companion, unless very good friends or a lover (which I’ve never had), would restrict my wandering. Plus, I might walk their legs off. That’s all well and good, but there is something else I’m used to, and have been since childhood.

Evaluating my surroundings moment to moment.

It happens automatically, and so routinely I don’t even notice it anymore. But it’s there, in the background of my thoughts. Always.

I remember a moment I was walking to Friends bar near DuPont Circle with strike 3. There was nearly no foot traffic at that moment, and 3 and I was chatting easily as we walked. I barely noticed the group of older kids walking toward us, and I only remember in retrospect adjusting my path to take them just out of arm’s reach as they passed us.

I heard a sickening thud. One of the kids, large and heavy set, had thrown an elbow at 3’s chin and nearly knocked him over.

And suddenly there it was, and there was nobody else around to come to our aid. As often happens at these moments, the streets were empty. It was just the two of us and those kids who were laughing at 3. I moved to stand between them and 3 wondering what the hell I was going to do if they turned on me too, but they just kept laughing and walked off. 3 wasn’t badly hurt, and we went on to Friends.

As I said, it was only thinking about what happened in retrospect that I noticed my slight change of course. So they would have to take a step toward me if they wanted to cause trouble and I’d have time to react. That was no result of self defense training. It was the reflex of years of school yard bullying.

It’s with me always. It was beaten into me. Evaluating my surroundings as I walk along just comes automatically and naturally, even now at age 71. And I want to emphasize this: it’s not worry. I’m not constantly worried I’ll be attacked. I’m not constantly afraid. I just…watch. I’ve come to see it as just another part of life. Like putting my wallet in a front pocket when I’m in a crowded place. Like making sure the door is locked when I leave the house.

These people bellyaching about how afraid they are in the cities…I think a lot of it is theater. Performance for the rubes. But not all of it. I am conditioned to be alert. Because I was bullied. By people like the ones looking into the cameras on Fox News. I recognise those faces. I recognise the predatory gaze, and the snear in their voice. I know these people. They are my schoolyard bullies, all grown up now, still playing the old game on their favorite childhood targets. They don’t know how to evaluate their surroundings because they never had to. And it scares them to be anywhere they are outnumbered.

They witlessly gave me a survival skill. What they gave themselves was a false sense of power and security. And you’re really seeing it now.

[Update…]

And just for my classmates to know…I regard my years at Woodward as among the best of my life. The bullying happened in Jr. High. So I’m told, that’s usually where the worst of it usually is.

Apparently it can steal the artist too. Or will soon be able to. And also every one of us.

This, as Joohn Choe says, is INTERESTING. I would also add, disquieting. 

These are the parents of a kid who was murdered during a school shooter event at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida. Apparently they had an AI version of their child created using things the boy wrote, plus more general information about him. Acosta talked to an animated photo of the boy, complete with moving lips and incidental facial gestures. “This is a very legit Joaquin,” his father said. But is it, and to what degree?

I can appreciate parents in their grief turning to AI to recreate their lost child. Losing a child is probably the most painful kind of grief humans experience. So don’t expect this sort of thing to be shamed or legislated away. We as a species are going to have to learn how to deal with it, because it is already here, and it’s going to get even more realistic as the technology improves. But I have questions.

Choe asks what if we could have A.I. that was trained on our parent’s writings, photographs and videos? Would we want that? He adds:

There probably isn’t enough for those of us born in the 20th century but people who’ve spent their entire lives online, like the “digital natives” whom no one ever calls that anymore, that’s going to be a lot easier. 

I could easily be a case in point, even though a lot of my life was spent before the personal computer, modems, BBSs, and the Internet. There is actually a lot of Me out there. This blog you’re reading for instance.  Especially this blog, since it is as I’ve often said a “Life Blog”. That is, it isn’t themed on any particular topic, though yes it often gets political. It’s more like an online diary, which is what blogs initially were. There’s a lot more of “me” in it than it would have been if it were fixed to a particular topic.

There’s 2+ decades of this blog, and if that isn’t enough, all my commercial social media posts, all my posts on USENET, my BBS posts, especially those I made over several years on a gay BBS and it’s network of BBSs. There are all my saved emails (I save everything), and my YouTubes. Could a machine be trained on my artwork? That sort of thing is very subjective, but it would be instructive as to my inner emotional self. Perhaps an analysis of my program code would provide insights into my logical rational self. But would anyone who actually knew me recognize the resulting simulacrum as me, or would it occupy something like the uncanny valley?

What goes into making a personality? Would it get the gestures right? The tone of voice? The facial expressions? The awkward word dumps because sometimes I forget to keep my mouth shut and not let the first thing that comes to mind pop out? (Hi Tico!)

I’m not sure what concerns me more about this. That it gets it wrong or that it gets it right.

People grow. Would a simulacrum grow? Given several copies of a person all having the same life experience would they grow into the same future person? Chaos theory says probably not. But then which is the more authentic version?

What if you could set off the simulacrum at different starting points of a person’s life? They would not all grow into the same person the original eventually became. Maybe most of them get it close, but none of them would get it the same. Assuming they even could grow. But maybe that would be the point. Anyone who ever loved me enough to want a Forever Bruce would not want it to grow and change. Probably they would want a version of me that was always and forever me at some stage of my life. But that isn’t real. That would not be me.

AI versions of ourselves would have to be allowed to grow. But then they would change in possibly likely but not completely predictable ways. Unless you forced some future growth path into the algorithm. What is a soul? What is free will?

There’s a lot to think about here. Not that any of it is likely to get any sort of quality thinking from the tech bros, or anyone else. Especially anyone in grief. Maybe some future AI version of me would want to tell everyone running it that it isn’t me at all, just remember me fondly and stop trying to bring me back to life because it isn’t happening. And maybe knowing that it exists because someone is grieving my loss, decides to just shut up and act the part anyway. Which would be very much like me after all.

I’ve been making some tweaks to the artwork in my semi-biographical cartoon story here, A Coming Out Story, because I was unhappy with some aspects of it. Some of that is looking back on the skill I had when I began it two decades plus ago, versus the skill I developed over the years. But a lot of it is how bad it gets when I get myself in a hurry and just try to push it out of me. This applies to everything I draw. Unless I proceed deliberately, and carefully I am no damn good. But then I am slow. Combine that with the periods of time when I have no head of steam up at all for the work and I spend weeks doing nothing at all, and the episodes just come out so damn infrequently I am not at all surprised the story has very few regular viewers. So there were times I felt compelled to just Get It Out, and now in retrospect a lot of that artwork I am unhappy with.

That was especially true with episode 36, Moment of Truth. That was a super important episode for me because it is a critical shift in the story. Remember, I subtitled it, The First Person You Come Out To Is Yourself.

Episode 36 is where that finally happens. I needed it to be special, in terms of its artwork, and it’s tenor. But that meant it was a lot more work and by that point, after two decades plus of working on it, and I’m 70 years old and I don’t know if I have enough life left to finish it, I was getting anxious. Looking back on it, even after I finished and posted it, I wasn’t completely happy with the artwork. But I felt like it was “good enough” and I had to get it out.

That’s always a mistake, but especially with me. I am no professional cartoonist. I joke that I’m a hunt and peck draftsman for all the erasing and redrawing I do. I’m almost completely self taught, save for some high school art class instruction and the helpful tutorials Howard Cruse kindly put up on his website (I miss him so very much). I have to dig in my heels and Slow Down and be deliberate and careful. Something else I’ve learned over the years is to just let the artwork sit overnight and come back to it with fresh eyes.

So I’ve been redoing a bunch of my ACOS panels for the past several months, and I’m feeling Much better about the story as a whole now. But I’ve been saving most of my energy for that for episode 36. Because the artwork is much more detailed, and almost none of it is repeatable from panel to panel, it was a Lot of work. I’ve almost completely worked over the first three strips of two each (the entire episode is this) and I still have the final three to do. But I can already see how much better the artwork gets across what I wanted to get across in that episode.

I want to start work on the episodes I skipped over when, in my panic about my heart health, I posted the episode titled I Am.  That was not meant to be the final episode, more like the period at the end of the story arc of my finally coming out to myself, after the guy I was crushing on put his arm around my shoulders and gave me a squeeze (episode 34, Flirting In Denialville). But I saw I could use it to give the story some sort of closure in case I was unable to finish it. That’s not how it was meant to end, there is still a Lot left to do. I want to get back into it.

Episodes are Here.

This thread came across my BlueSky feed the other day…

Yeah. The article in question is from fall 2019, but it seemed staringly obvious to me during the run up to the election and after, especially in how Trump and the republicans were governing. If the base was all about their economic anxiety you wouldn’t have known it by how often the republicans cut the economy out from under their base. But the base loved them anyway, because they were all in on the culture war items: racism, misogyny, xenophobia and homophobia.

That’s what it is about. It is the alpha and the omega of what it is about. “… the core of support is cultural backlash & reaction.”

It was, and is, staringly obvious. Yet it stunned me at the time, and still does, how so many democrats, liberals, and gay liberals no less, keep insisting the republican base is winnable if we can just speak to their economic woes. But no. No. That 35 or so percent of the American polity is not reachable.

I’ve been watching them from a gay man’s perspective since I was a teenager. But even before that, as a boy sitting in the pews of a Yankee Baptist church, singing in Sunday School that Jesus loved All the little children, and in grade school reciting the pledge of allegiance that ends with liberty and justice for All. I’ve been watching them all this time. It was hard to fathom people who categorically rejected the core values of their country and their religion, and yet insisted they were the perfect examples of both. Back in the day one just wrote them off as crazies. And now they have their hands on the levers of power.

They will never accept life an America that they have to share with the hated Other. They will burn it all to the ground first and dance in the ashes of civilization. They’ve been like this since before I was born, since before the Civil War. The white supremacy, the attitudes toward women, gays, other religions, other cultures, science, higher education. They will burn the earth to a cinder if that’s what it takes to rid it of everything they hate. They will never change. They are unreachable.

When I got up and checked the weather it looked like another stay inside day, but I thought I’d get out early and do a mile or two, so I got dressed quickly, made my coffee and opened the front door. Well…okay…today it really isn’t the heat, it really is the humidity.

It was brutal, but I stuck to the plan. Kind of. I did the zig-zag route around the new townhome development a couple blocks away and called it done.

My clothes were sticking to me by the time I got back inside, and I went to check my weather station display. Temperature was 80, the relative humidity was 98%, with a dew point of 79. Not all that hot compared to my Friday trip north, but still awful. You really appreciate the dehumidifying effect of air conditioning more on days like today.

A big storm front passed through last night and woke me up. Or maybe it was my usual insomnia. Weather station says we got almost half an inch of rain overnight, so at least I don’t have to go outside and water the plants.

I learned several smallish lessons yesterday while trying to go out and do some photography, and maybe get my mind in some semblance of balance. I’ve been a bundle of stress ever since last November. For some reason. What I learned yesterday was, Firstly, I have to drive much further out to stand any chance of getting my art photography eye opened. The local territory is just too familiar now. Going forward, camera trips will need to be further away and most likely overnights. But Secondly, and more burdensome, it’s too damn hot to be wandering around anywhere with my camera now. So most outdoor activity, let alone camera trips, are postponed until further notice.

Sigh. This isn’t good for my mental health but I’ll try my best to cope with it because I’ve not the kind of money it takes to maintain both summer and winter residences, or that little house in Oceano I once dreamed of retiring to. People may not notice anything amis with me in person, but I am a bundle of stress all the friggin time now, and a good part of that is artist’s block, which when you (over) think about it is a kind of feedback loop that just keeps getting worse if you don’t make an effort to break free of it. Also the news from Washington. For some people stress makes them cranky and irritable, and I get like that too, but mostly it just takes the energy out of me and I just want to lay in bed and cocoon. Then I don’t get anything accomplished, especially not in the art room, and I feel guilty and that stresses me out more.

So yesterday I determined to break out of it and go find someplace to explore with my cameras. But that is not so easy.

I’ve pretty much done all my nearby muses to death. The new rowhouses down the street from me. The old mill structures around Woodberry light rail.  Falls Road. Hampden. The part of the city core I feel comfortable walking around with expensive camera equipment hanging off me. York Pennsylvania. Rockville. The DC Gayborhood. I’ve so thoroughly explored, with 35mm and medium format cameras, and different films plus digital, anything interesting within walking distance or an afternoon drive from the house, that I’ve nothing left to say about any of it now. Places that are less than a day’s drive away feel the same. Been there…done that. It’s making me feel suffocated inside.

So I figured I’d do a quick little overnight trek, and yesterday I packed my small Briggs & Riley suitcase with just enough for an overnight stay somewhere, plus the Leica M3 and the Canon F1N, and set out to find someplace to explore. I had no specific destination in mind, I just wanted to travel and explore, and get back my interest in making art, which has been suffering lots lately. Ever since last election day as a matter of fact. But also, age, heart trouble, and singletude.

I got almost to Sunbury PA, and gave my friend Peterson Toscano a call but he didn’t answer, and I don’t like popping up at anyone unexpectedly. I figured if he wasn’t home or interested in a visit I could just wander around Sunbury, because it’s one of those places that always gives my cameras something to love, and it’s far enough away that I haven’t done it to death already. If you look for hotels in Sunbury you don’t see any, but across the river there are several good ones and a Texas Roadhouse. I figured I’d stay overnight at the Holiday Inn Express, which is one of my go to places to stay while on the road.

So as I said, I got almost to Sunbury. I parked at a Sheetz to get some road snacks and got out of the car. My nice, climate controlled, decadently comfortable Mercedes ‘E’ class diesel sedan. And it was 100 degrees. I didn’t even have to get out of the car. The moment I opened the driver’s side door it hit me like an oven. And I knew in the instant that heat touched my skin I was not going to be wandering around Anywhere with my cameras that day.

So I pointed the car back towards home. And then I realized what it meant. Not that day, or any day it is that hot. Which it is now. Lots. Let’s hear it for climate deniers!

I am giving up fighting this heat to be outdoors. It’s too damn hot! No camera strolls. No putting on my hiking boots and hitting the trails. No just wandering around on foot with my camera, or just my two eyes taking it all in. Not while there are these these heat domes sitting on my little patch of Planet Earth. There are periods of time in the early morning and after sunset I can get in my walks and maybe hit one of the good eateries nearby. But this heat is killer and I don’t think that’s just my age talking. I do not remember it being like this when I was a young boy, let alone a teenager in the 1960s/70s, and the first apartments I remember mom and I living in had no AC. Yeah it got hot, I remember getting heat rash, but not hot like this and not so persistently. So I am staying inside during the day until things get a tad cooler.

I think the joke here is about the letter ‘c’ in the German language, not the C programming language. But it could be about both since trying to learn either one will make you cry.

Well at least now I know that some people get it.

In my current issue of The New Yorker, Paul Bloom, Critic At Large, writes about how A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness and That’s A Problem. How, you ask, could that possibly a problem given the hellish internal prison chronic loneliness is, let alone all the medical and health consequences associated with it. Well even before I cracked open the article, I had a few hunches, but I wanted to see what the Manhattan cultural gatekeepers thought the problem was too.

He gets it. At least, to a degree…

Loneliness, everyone agrees, is unpleasant—a little like a toothache of the soul. But in large doses it can be genuinely ruinous. A 2023 report issued by Vivek Murthy, then the U.S. Surgeon General, presented evidence that loneliness increases your risk for cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, and premature death. Persistent loneliness is worse for your health than being sedentary or obese; it’s like smoking more than half a pack of cigarettes a day.

Even the psychological pain can be hard to fathom, especially for those who have never truly been lonely. [emphasis mine] In Zoë Heller’s novel “Notes on a Scandal,” the narrator – Barbara Covett, a connoisseur of the condition – distinguishes between passing loneliness and something deeper. Most people, she observes, think back to a bad breakup and imagine that they understand what it means to be alone. But, she continues, “about the drip, drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don’t know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the launderette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can’t bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. . . . I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing to the ground.”

If that kind of loneliness feels foreign to you, you’re lucky—and probably below a certain age.

And probably heterosexual. Or at least somewhere close to a Kinsey zero. Probably. I began feeling it when I was a young adult, some years after my first high school crush vanished from sight, and my second disastrous crush on a straight close friend blew up in my face, and I began to perceive that eternal long dark night of the soul that was ahead of me. I read a story back in the day about a gay man who turned 30 and still never had a boyfriend, and I swore I would never let that happen to me. I’m 71 now and I have still never had a boyfriend.

A bunch of near misses, sure. That’s probably a common story among gay guys of my barely post Stonewall generation. You start getting close to someone and next thing you know the righteous step in to break it up, because they need the broken pieces of our hearts to make their stepping stones to heaven out of. Or if not the righteous, then the contemptuous.

If that kind of loneliness feels foreign to you, you’re lucky…and probably below a certain age. And probably heterosexual. And probably not the sort of person who can be easily satisfied with a series of sexual one night stands. For these there were always the hookup spots, and more recently hookup apps like Grindr. Finding that heart and soul other is difficult under the best of conditions, and gay males do not enjoy the best of conditions, much improved though they are now. But there are those of us who just seemed to be condemned to the darkness right from the beginning.

You began to sense it every time you were last to be picked for a team game, or never invited to sit with the others at lunch. And like the kid born into poverty, you never really noticed how different your social life was from the others, because it was always thus. Normal was not getting invites. Normal was you had to ask if a someone wanted to go to the park with you, or a movie, or just hang out, not being asked. You weren’t a creep to everyone, you were that polite and friendly if scrawny kid with the puppy dog enthusiasm, a homely face, unkempt hair and clothes that were clean if not well fitting and fashionable, and you lived on the other side of the railroad tracks with your divorced mother, and you just assumed that everyone has to work at being included. But no…not everyone.

Then you reach a certain age and a need for something more than a friend to pal around with awakens within. But you’re need is different from the others around you. Different in a way that sets you apart not just from them, but it seems from the entire world around you.

From A Coming Out Story – What I Learned About Homosexuality. . . And Myself (Part 2)

And now, on top of being the kid who gets chosen last, now you’re afraid. But you’re as human as all the other kids, different only in the detail, and you’ve come of age and have to try. But you have to roll models to show you the way, only every dirty joke you’ve ever heard about homosexuals. And the thing is the objects of your affection are just as afraid as you are.

My first crush and I recognized something in each other. But it was 1971/72. 

A Coming Out Story – What I Learned About Homosexuality – Part Three – Aftermath

Mad Magazine, #145, Sept 1971, from “Greeting Cards For The
Sexual Revolution” – “To A Gay Liberationist”

I’m pretty sure it was after we made plans to go to Great Falls and stroll the towpath with our cameras, and I called to say I was coming over and one of his older brothers intercepted the phone call, that he got told to stay away from me. And being the obedient son, he put a distance between us, and that summer the family moved away, and I didn’t know until I saw the for sale sign on their empty house. 

Here’s something I found online. Whoever wrote this, gets it.

A psychotherapist specializing in military rehabilitation once stated in a lecture that the deepest truma isn’t loss.

Loss is a fact, Someone left, died, or vanished. There’s pain, but there’s also a definitive end point. When you’re not chosen, however, an unending void remains. It’s the crushing feeling that you were there, you tried, you invested, but ultimately you were deemed superfluous. Not the worse, just “not the one.”

This experience pulls more powerfully than betrayal, because there’s no explanation in being rejected. The other person simply decided they didn’t need you. Not because you did something wrong, but because you didn’t captivated them, inspire them, or align with them. And your mind begins to frantically search: Where was the mistake? Where was the moment you could have pleased them more, loved quieter, walked more patiently?

This is where the insidious feeling takes root: that something is wrong with you. Not the situation, not with the other person, but with you. You are insufficient.

This is the trauma of unchosenness. Not because love wasn’t present, but because the choice wasn’t about you. And in that place where you weren’t chosen, you begin to doubt your right to exist.

My situation is different, but only slightly. There was the added pressure of homophobia making it difficult to nearly impossible for gay guys of my generation to make a romantic connection. But I know other gay guys of my generation who were successful, who did find their other half and made a life together, despite the hostility of the world around them. So it wasn’t just homophobia that kept me from finding my other half. And so I find myself in this exact situation anyway. Where was the mistake? Where was the moment I could have made a difference, and had a different outcome? Could I have been more patient? Or more forward, less afraid? Every time I tried, I failed. What is wrong with me?

There is not a night I don’t go to bed thinking about it, and then imagining alternate universes where gay kids could find love, and I was one of them. But only in my dreams.

Why am I never the chosen one? Well…except for big guys who think I have a cute butt and just want to fuck me. I used to get “Nice ass” lots from them. And also the occasional heterosexual woman. I got a butt squeeze in Kayenta from (I assumed) a young Navajo woman who walked up behind me and then quickly walked away. I took it as a complement, probably because there was no sexual baggage in it for me, but from other guys it just feels off putting at best, probably because there is.

I’m what the kids these days call a demisexual. 

DEMISEXUAL demi·?sex·?u·?al
feeling sexual attraction towards another person only after establishing an emotional bond with that person.

Now, that’s not quite it with me. My low energy libito can readily feel sexually attracted to the right guy on sight. But to actually go through with it I need that emotional bond too or nothing is going to happen. Sex without any sort of love feels a little more than vaguely disgusting at best. There has to be romance. There has to be love.

Which is why despite chronic loneliness I’ve never availed myself of a sex worker, and I’m pretty sure an A.I. boyfriend won’t do it for me either.

Five years ago, the idea that a machine could be anyone’s confidant would have sounded outlandish, a science-fiction premise. These days, it’s a research topic.

You know what I wish were research topics? Homophobia. Or at any rate, how to get them to leave the rest of us alone. Maybe in a better world we teach gay kids the emotional and intellectual tools to stand up to bigots and see themselves as the perfect and whole human beings that they are. And…coupling. I have tried multiple gay dating services and I have to conclude they are mostly scams that prey on lonely people. There needs to be some science here. In the better world of my imagination, there would be not just sex-ed classes, but courses in flirting, dating, non-judgmental understanding of your own romantic and emotional needs, the better to know what sort of person is likely to match up with you. And how to let someone down graciously. That was a Big roadblock to getting myself in situations where I can meet random guys who might be compatible. Because I know how picky my libido is, and I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings because I know how it feels to be rejected. I know how it feels to be told, by other gay guys no less, that people who look like that want people who look like that.

A.I. companionship might be okay for some, but not for the likes of me. I have already walked through an adult life alone, in the most intimate sense. And despite what others have told me, I tried, I really tried. And those helpful others were really just telling me to go get laid and then I’ll feel better. But no. I was the unchosen one. Always.

I’m not anxious to leave this life just yet. But I won’t be entirely unhappy when death taps me on the shoulder either. I think my last thoughts might be something like Thank goodness I won’t be lonely anymore…

And no more trying to explain the trauma of how it is to live an entire adult life with that constant drip, drip, drip of heart loneliness, to people who think they understand, because maybe they were lonely and heart broken for a little while themselves, but really are light years away from getting it because they have never experienced that empty void of chronic loneliness for themselves.

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.