Bruce Garrett Cartoon
The Cartoon Gallery

A Coming Out Story
A Coming Out Story

My Photo Galleries
New and Improved!

Past Web Logs
The Story So Far archives

My Amazon.Com Wish List

My Myspace Profile

Bruce Garrett's Profile
Bruce Garrett's Facebook profile


Blogs I Read!
Alicublog

Wayne Besen

Beyond Ex-Gay
(A Survivor's Community)

Box Turtle Bulletin

Chrome Tuna

Daily Kos

Mike Daisy's Blog

The Disney Blog

Envisioning The American Dream

Eschaton

Ex-Gay Watch

Hullabaloo

Joe. My. God

Peterson Toscano

Progress City USA

Slacktivist

SLOG

Fear the wrath of Sparky!

Wil Wheaton



Gone But Not Forgotten

The Rittenhouse Review

Steve Gilliard's News Blog

Steve Gilliard's Blogspot Site



Great Cartoon Sites!

Howard Cruse Central

Tripping Over You
Tripping Over You

XKCD

Commando Cody Monthly

Scandinavia And The World

Dope Rider

The World Of Kirk Anderson

Ann Telnaes' Cartoon Site

Bors Blog

John K

Penny Arcade




Other News & Commentary

Lead Stories

Amtrak In The Heartland

Corridor Capital

Railway Age

Maryland Weather Blog

Foot's Forecast

All Facts & Opinions

Baltimore Crime

Cursor

HinesSight

Page One Q
(GLBT News)


Michelangelo Signorile

The Smirking Chimp

Talking Points Memo

Truth Wins Out

The Raw Story

Slashdot




International News & Views

BBC

NIS News Bulletin (Dutch)

Mexico Daily

The Local (Sweden)




News & Views from Germany

Spiegel Online

The Local

Deutsche Welle

Young Germany




Fun Stuff

It's not news. It's FARK

Plan 59

Pleasant Family Shopping

Discount Stores of the 60s

Retrospace

Photos of the Forgotten

Boom-Pop!

Comics With Problems

HMK Mystery Streams




Mercedes Love!

Mercedes-Benz USA

Mercedes-Benz TV

Mercedes-Benz Owners Club of America

MBCA - Greater Washington Section

BenzInsider

Mercedes-Benz Blog

BenzWorld Forum

March 5th, 2023

Yet Another Anniversary

So soon after my one year of retirement anniversary, like a mugger, March 6 is waiting just around the corner. Where do the years go? 

I stayed so long after closing one night enjoying the company of someone in Germany (Epcot) that cast members had to escort stragglers away from World Showcase and toward the exits, lest we get eaten.

Just a couple short years later I was the one eating. Eating a Very Nice Kobe Steak at the Brown Derby, when I got your angrygram. Never contact me again in any way shape or form… I have a question. How do you contact someone with a shape? I can see ways, and I can see forms, but shapes? By way of reply to your tetrahedron of March 6 please review the enclosed dodecahedron… Thing of it was, I hadn’t said anything to you that day that I didn’t many times before. You knew. You remembered. It was okay. We would chat for hours on the phone, toss emails back and forth (hope you’re still enjoying the Nissan Leaf. Bunch of Teslas with charging stations in my alleyway these days) and photos (still not sure what you meant by sending me that picture of the beach), sit together for a while after hours and chat happily. But that was when our conversations were private.

So here comes another March 6. And oh look…in the New And Improved Rockville (Now North Bethesda!) there’s an upscale Brazilian steakhouse not far from the old homesteads! Perfect for a day of remembrance.

Such a perfectly styled coiffure. You should start wearing it long again, now that you don’t have the Mouse to answer to.

by Bruce | Link | React!

October 26th, 2022

The Empty Zone Beyond Time

I was unemployed for an extended period of time back in the early 1980s and I remember how badly that mucked with my wake/sleep patterns. There was probably a marginal case of depression along with it that kept me from being more energetic about finding work. I did manage some odds and ends…usually Manpower type temp work for a day or so. But mostly I just sat in my room listening to music or reading. And smoking pot. All night long.

By day, if I was awake, which usually I wasn’t until mid-afternoon, I would take long winding walks around my neighborhood, or along the railroad tracks. Then it was back into my room, door closed, to smoke some pot and zone out with some music or a book. Oddly, or not given we were Baptists, mom was actually very very glad it wasn’t alcohol and said nothing about the pot. On my walks I’d often smoke a cigar because even then I didn’t want cigar smoke in the house. I knew mom would have a fit about tobacco. This was before I had my first computer.

I remember how it distressed mom to see me so aimless and sad all the time, but from my own point of view I don’t think I’ve ever been down in that dark pit so deep since. I’d broken up badly with Strike Two (he’s straight so it wasn’t his fault), and I was thinking that this was going to be my life now (romance wise it was…but that’s not what I’m thinking about now. Or the pot). It was my first extended period of time where the clock didn’t matter. And it royally screwed up my sleep/wake patterns.

I can see it happening again. The difference now though is I am at least as active as I was when I had a full time job. I’m not just sitting around the house listening to music, and last California visit I discovered, to my regret, that pot does unpleasant things to my head now so I can’t indulge like I was hoping to after retirement. Maybe it’s, as they say, the stuff is stronger now. Or it’s I’m old and my brain is full enough of a lifetime of art kid strangeness to take in any more strange. Or both. Maybe. I’ve read my Don Juan. I know what you have to do when the ally turns on you. I think I’m finally past that ingrained Baptist fear of things that make you feel good, but not so post Baptist that I can’t grimly accept the pleasures of the past are no longer mine. Life, veil of tears, and all that. Dust we were and dust we shall be…so on and so forth. Just leave it alone.

Now it’s I go to bed super early, like 7 or 8, wake around midnight, do housework, laundry, dishes, work on a project, blog, whatever, until sleep beckons around 4 or 5, then wake up again around 10 and lay in bed reading social media until nearly 11. I was taking stock and thinking that I’m not living a full day when I realized that, well, yes I am, just in random fragments.

It’s just…spooky…how it’s beginning to feel like that time back in the early 1980s when I was unemployed for like…a couple years I think it was. This was also when I stopped doing art. Somehow I roused myself out of it. I think it was I got hooked on the personal computer. When I saw my first one it grabbed my attention somehow and then I had something for my brain to engage with, that didn’t have to touch my feelings. First it was I wanted to tune in to those mysterious shortwave teletype signals. That segued into online computer bulletin boards and my first real connection with the gay community. And from there I learned programming, networking, got work, built up a resume…

You’d have had to see that kid back in the 1980s all alone nights in his room zoned out without any prospects at all to appreciate how different his life became. And how spooky it feels now, to experience that same mucking up of my sleep/wake patterns I did back then. Good thing having a house is like having a second job.

by Bruce | Link | React!

March 6th, 2021

The Stab That Bleeds

I post on my Facebook page about plans for a nice celebratory dinner today…someplace good…cost no object. Except of course it’s still a time of plague so it needs to be carry-out, not fabulous seated dining. A friend (who should know my history better than this by now) asks what is to special about March 6th. Oh goodness…here, let me tell you the whole sordid tale…and why I will never put anyone up on a pedestal, ever again…like teenage me did to a certain someone, once upon a time…

March 6, 2016. Walt Disney World.

I was becoming aware that if I told a certain someone I was coming down, when I got there he’d be all standoffish and wouldn’t come over and talk like he used to. But if I just showed up he was all happy to see me and became a chatterbox and we’d talk for long enough after closing time I might have to be walked out of the park by cast members lest the Langoliers get me. But by then our conversations via email were no longer just between us.

This trip I’d made noises about coming down, but I wasn’t sure I could get away from work. It would depend on the schedule at work, which seemed to be in a perpetual state of flux. So he starts sending me all these shots of him and others in the family Nachbarschaft having a Perfectly Wonderful Time at a ski resort somewhere and I shouldn’t bother coming down if I wanted to see him. By this time I was becoming skilled in detecting his bullshit. Losing the rose colored glasses helped. It disturbed me to see so much of it. But that is what a life spent burying your innermost self does, and why I swore I would never do that to myself.

The Mitt Romney smile he was wearing in those photos was very disturbing.

On a previous trip I’d asked him if we could just hang out together somewhere after his shift. Maybe some favorite restaurant or other place, just somewhere we could talk about…things…and maybe get a few things between us out in the open. I was still very disturbed by the long conversation we’d had years previously. He looked at me seriously and said that he’d made his allegiances, and he had to stay in his comfort zone.

Okay…fine…but I needed a Disney vacation and I like Biergarten because it’s one of the few places a single traveler like me can sit at a table and chat with the other guests. It’s expected. Oktoberfest eight to a table seating and all that. And you have a lot of ready icebreakers to start a conversation with. Hi…where are you folks from? This your first time in Disney World? He told me once that he would watch me and I was great at getting a table to open up and start talking with each other. So when the schedule at work opened up like I figured it would, I ducked down to Disney World.

He got really standoffish…actually more like angry when he saw me. And I reckon it was written all over my face that I knew he’d be there and not skiing somewhere. But this time he did something he hadn’t ever done before. There was a new German kid waiting tables…Disney brings them over to the various World Showcase spots for a year or two from the host countries and Disney gets work out of them and they get a visit to the USA. So he introduces me to the kid, Nico, (yes that was his name). Nico told me about his plans to do a big USA road trip and oh my goodness I was full of all sorts of suggestions, as well as photos of places I’d been on my various road trips. We talked for hours.

He was cute, and smart, and full of energy. He was really looking forward to his road trip and I felt him as a kindred road runner spirit. We talked. And Talked. And talked. Between his needing to take care of his customers. He’d go off to one of this tables, take impeccable care of his guests, and then come back and we’d talk some more. And as we did, I saw that certain someone getting more and more pissed off.

What the fuck are you getting jealous over…you’re the one who foisted me off on this kid…yeah I like him…he’s a nice guy…so what… Finally it was closing time and I wondered where a certain someone had gone, because he Never left without at least saying goodbye. Nico went to find him for me, came back saying he’d just walked out and it was so very much unlike him.

The next day I blogged about it. I’d asked him once straight up once if he ever read my blog or looked at my cartoons and he insisted he did not. So I figured he’d see what I wrote on the blog that day. He did. I checked my server logs.

Later I had a reservation at the Hollywood Brown Derby. I liked having one nice dinner on my last day in the parks. But before I checked into Hollywood Studios I went to his restaurant just to say goodbye like I always did on my last day in the parks. Usually it was a pleasant exchange of goodbyes, even if he’d been standoffish before. But that day you have never seen such an icy cold German stare. But he wasn’t rude, that isn’t the German way. It was all very formal. Kinda like how a Baptist might say I’ll pray for you, in that tone of voice that says burn in hell.

Okay. Fine. Then I went to The Brown Derby and for some reason I felt like ordering the best they had, which right then was the Kobe beef steak. You order something like that and when the waiter asks you how you want it, you just say “whatever the chef recommends” because that’s what you’re going to get anyway. Under no circumstances do you ask for well done.

On my facebook page that morning I wrote:

Few things in life make pampering yourself more sensible than hostility from your high school crush. So…I’m Going To The Brown Derby! To hang out with the other stars and have drinks and five star food and stuff…

It was magnificent. Halfway into it I got an email from a certain someone telling me I was creeping him out and never to contact him again “in any way shape or form.” And, “My peace and quiet begins Now!” Well whoever is disturbing your peace and quiet Deutscher it isn’t me because I live a thousand miles away and all I ever do is email you from time to time. But our emails stopped being private sometime in 2011, just after that disturbing conversation. And the three months you took off work for…some health related thing. No it was not torn rotator cuff surgery. Nobody fully recovers from torn rotator cuff surgery and is slugging plates full of liter mugs of beer around in three months. But it’s about the amount of time someone will typically spend in…well…

So I blasted back, again on the blog which he never reads anyway, and every March 6th since I’ve treated myself to the best dinner I can find anywhere, price no object. Some kind of meat. Beef some years, pork one. This year I’ll do the baby back ribs at Corner Stable…carry out because plague. But it has to be meat. The best steak, or the best ribs, or something like that absolutely stunning pork steak entrée I had a few years ago at Rocket To Venus here in Hampden.

Corpse food as the vegetarians call it. Yes. Quite.

Never love yourself less than you love somebody else.

by Bruce | Link | React!

February 25th, 2021

In Seven Words Describe How Your Life Is A Complete Not Worth Living Failure…

Joseph Gordon-Levitt occasionally posts these little challenges on Facebook for his readers. Every now and then one of them hits me pretty hard…

He was beautiful, but it was 1971.

Kinda hard to realize that even back when you were a teenager falling in love for the first time it was already over and done.
But I had to keep learning it over and over…and over…and over…

Strike one…strike two…strike three…strike one redux… You’re just not getting the message are you kid…your kind isn’t allowed to love…

 

 

by Bruce | Link | React!

July 19th, 2020

Facebook Keeps Giving Me Memories. . .

There’s people who gaslight you, and then there is gaslighting yourself. But Facebook keeps helpfully reminding me that it wasn’t just my imagination…

 

Swear if it wasn’t for that daily Facebook Memories feature I would be remembering it as my own damn fault for being such a pest. But no…I was invited in. And then the door was slammed in my face.

We talked. Frequently. Mostly by email, but we talked. I sent him things. He sent me things. We chatted easily like classmates and friends do. One of the last things was a conversation started by his bragging about buying an electric car (A Nissan Leaf). Sometime before that it was his new iPhone he had to tell me about while on the road to Vegas. Less than a year after telling me all about the Leaf he was telling me never to speak to him again. Probably because of something he read on my blog that he swore to my face he never reads. (Hi!) But I’m not entirely sure the order came from him.

Whatever. I got angry. It’s only natural when someone you trusted sticks a knife in you.

by Bruce | Link | React!

June 8th, 2020

Memories Of Standing On The Outside Of The Comfort Zone Looking In

Facebook tossed this memory from today, 2015 in my face just now. I was visiting Walt Disney World and I had to vent…

Some days I visit he’s being a jerk and doesn’t want to talk to me. Others, like last night, he’s all warm smiles and cheerful eyes and just can’t stop talking and we stay long past park closing time and I’m walking on air all the way back to my room. But then it’s always why can’t we spend some time together outside the park and his comfort zone won’t allow it.

So either way I have to struggle to get my vacation started back up again. If he’s grouchy then I’m miserable and just want to go home. I’ve called vacations off early when it’s been that. If he’s full of sunshine and smiles then I feel like I’ve hit the high point of my trip and why bother staying. There’s that back to the reality of things after the visit let-down to climb back out of somehow. I have to remind myself I need the break regardless.

This morning I’ll hit the grocery store for some perishables I couldn’t bring down with me, and more ice tea, and maybe something from the liquor store so I’m not always paying Disney prices for alcohol. Then spend the rest of the week chilling out, maybe working some more on A Coming Out Story (I brought my drawing things). But I’m in a state now I really have no words for, or at any rate words I’m willing to speak. He said something to me that lifted me out of myself in a way only someone who really gets you can. And it took a load off my psyche certain other gay someone’s I know weighed me down with for years.

It was all about how I don’t interact well with people. Too shy, too self absorbed, blah, blah, blah, your photography has no people in it, blah, blah, blah… Biergarten is “Octoberfest” seating, which means you get seated at a table with other random guests and you’re expected to talk and share a good time together. This time I was seated with a group that seemed really stand-offish. They just gave off chilly vibes. But after a while I got them talking about where they’re from and what they do, and of course when they found out I work at Space Telescope and on Hubble and James Webb they got all interested in that. And by the end of the night we were all chatting happily.

And after they left he and I were chatting and he noticed too how chilly that group was initially. He’s worked this line of business for so long now he can probably read a table the second he walks up to it. Then he said he’d always seen me open people up and that I was good at it and that I was always getting everyone talking and having a good time no matter how chilly the table seemed at first.

Well…yeah… One thing is you always know you’re with other Disney people here…so that’s something. It’s not like you’re in some random bar with bad mood people. We’re all Disney people here. And that Disney kid just comes out of me here. It’s a kind of freedom to be that kid I once was I never really appreciated I was missing before I started coming here. But I’m not the hopelessly detached single certain other people somehow managed to convince me I am either. I’m not that…so how did I get to thinking of myself like that? He just pulled that out of me with a few words and the look on his face when he said it.

He does that. It’s when someone shows you things about yourself you didn’t know, but should have known, that makes it serious. And…it’s been like that since we were teenagers. When he’s not in a touchy mood, it’s still like that.

But we never got the chance other kids did. And now he has his comfort zone, and I need to get on with my vacation. Somehow.

It was around this time that I’d figured out that if I told him in advance I was coming down he wouldn’t have anything to do with me, but if I just showed up it was all smiles and happy face and good times. Something just less than a year later we had nuclear war…I’d told him I was coming down and he lied about being on a ski trip and I shouldn’t bother and I came down anyway and he was so stand-offish even the new servers there noticed something was wrong with him. Afterward he sent me a nastygram telling me never to speak to him again and I blew up because I hadn’t done anything wrong or said anything to him I hadn’t said dozens of times before…and it was all over, and with it every memory I ever had about it being good…wonderful even. It’s amazing what tricks memory can play on you. If it wasn’t for these occasional Facebook memories I wouldn’t remember it ever being good with him now, not even back in high school. But it was. I wasn’t twitterpated for no reason. He felt it too. But whereas it lifted me out of myself, erased every shred of guilt or shame I might have had, it must have done the opposite to him.

…which set a pattern for the rest of my life. Because I would always fall for the nice boys…the ones I might have met in a better world at a church social, or coffee house. But in the world I grew up in all those nice boys were terrified. They didn’t want their families to hate them, they didn’t want God to hate them.

I’ve made my allegiances, I have to stay in my comfort zone…

So it goes. I reckon. I should get back to work on A Coming Out Story now that Facebook gave me that. But everything from back in the day is bad now. I finally found the guy I wrote about in this blog post (link) and he didn’t win his race. His life took a really bad turn through no fault of his and discovering that is really heartbreaking. And now this Facebook memory is something else to tap me on the shoulder, and whisper in my ear that everything is pointless.

In my senior years I’m basically just walking forward on auto pilot, going through the motions because what else is there to do…

by Bruce | Link | React!

May 28th, 2020

The Cartoon That Was Not, About The Loves That Were Not…

…and the life that was not.

I’m going through some Google Docs looking for something and stumble across this script for a cartoon was going to do for my 60th birthday. I managed to get a few pencil sketches done but never finished it. For some reason.

This riffs off a running gag in Tim Barela’s wonderful gay comic strip Leonard and Larry…which he described once as a kind of gay Our Miss Brooks. Every tenth year Larry had a birthday all his anxieties about getting old surfaced in a dream that he was having his birthday party while laying in a coffin with a birthday cake on it and his friends making catty jokes about his getting old. Picasso said a mediocre artist copies and a great artist steals. So I stole the idea (with proper acknowledgement). But the only thing I managed to finish was the script. Probably for the best…

Here it is. As Joe Friday and my own Sargeant Stoneface would say, The names have been changed to protect the innocent. And especially the not so innocent!


The Big Six-O!
(Slightly Anonymised) 

SCENE: My birthday party.  a’La Leonard & Larry, I’m in a casket with the lid open and a birthday cake on the bottom half lid that reads Happy 60th.  Surrounding me are my three loves. We shall call them CRUSH1, CRUSH2 and CRUSH3.

PANEL 1: (Most of the following panels are as above.)

ME: I really appreciate the party you guys, and this coffin’s a swell gag, but I have to admit the margarita embalming fluid bottles was a brilliant touch.

CRUSH2: I liked the asperen bottles labeled “For Headaches Due To Lovestruck Bruce”.

CRUSH3: That was 1’s idea.


PANEL 2:

ME: (off panel) Ha, ha… Yes, very funny…

CRUSH1: (to the others) Drove me crazy back in high school watching him try to work up the nerve to tell me he had a crush on me.

CRUSH2: (rolling his eyes) I had to deal with Overly Attached Gayfriend.

CRUSH3: Tell me about it. He actually thought we were boyfriends just because I let him sleep with me a few times.

 

PANEL 3: Closeup on Crush2 and Crush3

CRUSH2: Sparks didn’t fly eh?

CRUSH3: (Looking morosely down at his drink) Let’s just say I went Ex-Gay for six years.

 

PANEL 4: Closeup on me and Crush1

CRUSH1: (Smiling, gesturing to me while looking at the others off panel) Quick, tell NARTH! We’ve found the cure for homosexuality!

ME: (Frowning) Ha, Ha.  Very Funny.

 

PANEL 5:

ME: Can I get out now?

CRUSH1: Not on your life.  We’re selling you off as a collector’s item. 

CRUSH2: (gesturing to the ages) The gay man that never had a boyfriend. Too young to be liberated in 1971, too old to marry anyone in 2013.

CRUSH3: You’re a museum piece.

 

PANEL 6:

ME: You sold me to a museum?

CRUSH2: Museum?  Are you kidding?  We sold you to Disney World.

CRUSH3: You’re going to be a prop in the Haunted Mansion queue.

CRUSH1: I’ll stop by every now and then before my shift to dust you off.

 

PANEL 7:

ME: I’m dreaming all this aren’t I?  This is all about my anxieties over getting old isn’t it…and you guys are here representing the three chances for love Vonnegut spoke of…

CRUSH1: We prefer to think of ourselves as your three strikes.

 

PANEL 8:

ME: This is going to turn into a nightmare now isn’t it?

CRUSH1: You’re not asleep dear, you’re hallucinating.

CRUSH2: You drank half that bottle of tequila all by yourself and when you sober up again you’re going to feel like you’re 160.

 

With Apologies to Tim Barela and Larry Evans…

 

by Bruce | Link | React!

March 6th, 2019

Life As A Sequence Of Fine Dining And Lots Of Tequila

I’m going to start a gallery of foodie shots of every nice dinner I’ve had on March 6 since 2016…

…but first…

Afternoon of March 6, 2016.  One of the shots I took inside one of my favorite watering places in Walt Disney World (the other two are Tune-In Lounge and Jock Lindey’s Hanger Bar). The margarita before the storm. Plus chips and jalapeno and cheese dip. Hot? Ohhh Dios mío…the day is about to get hotter…

The Kobe beef steak I was having at the Brown Derby when I got scolded. In retrospect it would have sounded better in the original German…

Rocket to Venus 2017…their absolutely decadent pork steaks and garlic mashed potatoes. I’ve been mourning the loss of this item on their entrée menu for a long time…

Rocket to Venus 2018 (noticing a pattern here?). I forget what this one was but it was amazingly good, as always. I can’t recommend this Hampden, near The Avenue eatery enough.

And here I am drinking my margaritas every march 6 since 2016.

Probably heading out to Rocket to Venus again for dinner tonight. Because the food is great, the staff are nice, and one of the bartenders is very nice on the eyes, doesn’t mind my gawking at him in disbelief, and I can get drunk enough I can appreciate the sight of a beautiful guy and not feel any pain. Plus I can walk home stinking drunk and not be a hazard to everyone else on the highway. 

Prost!

by Bruce | Link | React!


No Pain, No Gain


Life goes on…

by Bruce | Link | React!

February 12th, 2019

A Lesson In Love From One Of Charm City’s Most Famous Writers

 

Baltimore…where the lovelorn weirdos come to drink and die. Alone.

by Bruce | Link | React!

February 7th, 2019

Guten Appetit Little Guys!

Back again Valentine’s Day? I thought I told you to never speak to me again. What’s that? Gifts for my spouse? You know perfectly well I’ve never had one of those. Gifts for my boyfriend? You jerk…you know I’ve never had one of those either. Gifts for my secret crush? Hahahaha…I don’t keep secrets like that from someone…I’m an artist, I wear my heart on my sleeve. You just want to sell me a paper one to give to someone I love that they can throw in the trash a few days later. I’m not biting. I’ve had my real heart tossed in the trashcan many times. Go Away!

What’s that? a gift for my ex? I don’t have an ex…exactly. But now you’ve piqued my interest. You sly devil…

The El Paso Zoo isn’t the only zoo offering a non-traditional Valentine’s Day promotion. The Hemsley Conservation Center in Kent, England, will name a cockroach after your ex in exchange for a donation. You can also name a roach at the Bronx Zoo, which calls them “eternal” and “timeless” gifts.

Happy Valentine’s Day! I named a cockroach after you.

I told you never to speak to me again. And could you be any more adolescent? You’re a piece of work.

I had it fed to a meerkat.

Gott im Himmel…

Valentine’s Day…I think I’m in love with you again. Guten Appetit!

 

 

by Bruce | Link | React!

March 15th, 2018

Please…No More Doomed Gay Couples…Okay?

Call Me By Your Name DVDs are for sale now, and I’m not at all sure anymore that I want to see this movie. So, like Brokeback Mountain I may end up giving it a pass.

Like Brokeback, and frustratingly, once again we have the tragically doomed homosexual relationship. A tale as old as time you might say. Or as old as Hollywood at any rate. As far as we’ve come and we still get told our love affairs are doomed. But that’s not the worst of it, at least for me. Spoiler Ahead for those who haven’t already seen the movie or read any of the reviews that go into Timothée Chalamet’s stunning performance, particularly in the final scene.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Time has passed, and Oliver has told Elio over the phone that he’s getting married. To a woman (the story is set in 1983). So the last scene is the poor kid sitting in front of the household fireplace crying but still trying to keep his shit together while the rest of the family goes on about their business behind him. His first love dumped him, not so much for a woman as for respectability. So really…what was he to Oliver?

Just…a little too close to the bone. I just can’t watch this.

I don’t know that I can ever get to the point where I can watch this movie. I haven’t watched Brokeback either, though I did read the Annie Proulx short story. That was difficult enough. I’m not wanting some superficial junk food romance. I don’t want to be told sweet lies about the inevitability of love, or True Romance Comics stories of how perfect it is. It’s just as false. Heterosexuals get their tragedies, but also their triumphs, because their relationships are seen as legitimate, complex, multifaceted. Ours, as Vito Russo once said, are just about sex. What I’m seeing here is that even when Hollywood grasps that it’s more than that, it still can’t fathom it being more than a summer affair. Well at least it’s not the tire iron.

I have gay friends whose couplehood made it possible for most of my adult life to believe that it is even possible to have that kind of deeply felt, body and soul relationship, not just something I read once in a Mary Renault novel. But I’m in my middle 60s now and all I have to look back on is one strikeout after another after another after another, usually via the agency of some hostile third party that needed a righteousness boost. But I can at least live it vicariously in art, if not in life. It gives me a reason to keep getting out of bed and contributing, in a small way, to the work I do at Space Telescope. It allows me to keep pursuing my little efforts at art while sitting at the drafting table, or walking about with my cameras. But the suspicion keeps nagging at me: what does it really matter? Was I really the kid that was never meant to be born? Is this why I always feel like I’m on the outside of life looking in? I don’t need to be told love fails, my entire life keeps telling me that every waking moment of my day. I need art that reminds me the struggle is worth it, even so.

I don’t think anybody who knows me knows how badly I need those reminders. 

Maybe when I’m ready to watch Brokeback I’ll watch this one. In the meantime what I’ve read of the father’s speech was good. I’ll keep that much of it.

by Bruce | Link | React!

March 9th, 2018

The Walking Wounded In The Garden Of Paradise

Political cartoonist I follow (including following him to the same web host his site is on, on the theory that if they were willing to host him they should be cool with me too), tweeted out something the other day about it being four months since his life came apart. So I went looking on his profile for all his previous tweets for the last four months and it’s looking like he suffered a breakup. To the point that he’s had to go find another place to live.

I don’t know much about his personal life. But for one recent post selling t-shirts his website has no posts since last October. And he’s been vague booking what happened, but it’s not hard to read between the lines. I don’t know if he was married or not. He was on tour in Europe promoting one of his books and apparently came back home only to be blindsided by whatever it was. But if it was a relationship breakup I wonder how blindsided it could have been. When Keith dumped me for some guy he met on AOL Instant Messenger it was a shock, but deep down inside not an entirely unexpected one.

I’m learning all this just a couple days after I had my nuclear war with my first crush remembrance and dinner. I was eating the premium Kobe Beef dinner at the WDW Hollywood Brown Derby when I got the Hey, Let’s Both Burn Our Bridges And Dance In The Ashes email from him, so I’ve tried to buy myself the best dinner I can afford at a nice local restaurant on that day every year since. But it’s somehow more depressing to see it happen to other people than to me. Maybe that’s because as a barely post-stonewall generation gay guy my expectations were low to begin with. Maybe it’s because after a lifetime of singlehood I’m inured to my own experience. Keith never actually said the magic three words to me, which is probably why I saw it coming deep down inside. He was strike three and by that time walking alone back to the dougout was almost a relief. But seeing the hurt in others can still get to me.

Some folks in my life have suggested that I’ve been better off single because then I never had to deal with this kind of loss. From the inside though it seems to me like I’ve been fighting a two front war all my adult life, not to hate myself, and not to hate the world. Somehow, I’ve really no idea how, I’m still winning that war. But the internal cost…you’ve no idea, and I wouldn’t want you to.

I wish that cartoonist healing and peace. I wish it to all the lonely. We deserved better. Life is good, even so. But goddamn it can cut you just as deep as how high it can lift. So we walk. So it goes.

by Bruce | Link | React!

December 25th, 2015

I’m Missing A Christmas Card This Year…

Met my old lover in the grocery store
The snow was falling Christmas Eve
I stole behind her in the frozen foods
And I touched her on the sleeve

She didn’t recognize the face at first
But then her eyes flew open wide
She went to hug me and she spilled her purse
And we laughed until we cried

We took her groceries to the checkout stand
The food was totaled up and bagged
We stood there lost in our embarrassment
As the conversation dragged

Went to have ourselves a drink or two
But couldn’t find an open bar
We bought a six-pack at the liquor store
And we drank it in her car

We drank a toast to innocence
We drank a toast to now
And tried to reach beyond the emptiness
But neither one knew how

She said she’d married her an architect
Who kept her warm and safe and dry
She would have liked to say she loved the man
But she didn’t like to lie

I said the years had been a friend to her
And that her eyes were still as blue
But in those eyes I wasn’t sure if I
Saw doubt or gratitude

She said she saw me in the record stores
And that I must be doing well
I said the audience was heavenly
But the traveling was hell

We drank a toast to innocence
We drank a toast to now
And tried to reach beyond the emptiness
But neither one knew how

We drank a toast to innocence
We drank a toast to time
Reliving in our eloquence
Another ‘auld lang syne’

The beer was empty and our tongues were tired
And running out of things to say
She gave a kiss to me as I got out
And I watched her drive away

Just for a moment I was back at school
And felt that old familiar pain
And as I turned to make my way back home
The snow turned into rain

-Dan Fogelberg, “Same Old Lang Syne”

by Bruce | Link | React!

April 2nd, 2015

Plan ‘B’

Plan ‘B‘: Quit my job, sell the house and pay off all the bills, sell the car, sell as much of what’s in the house as I can and trash the rest, go find a low wage job somewhere that will just barely pay for a room in someone’s basement, and go back to the hopeless low income low expectations life I had before October 1991 and that programming job at Baltimore Gas & Electric, because at least that life wasn’t promising me happiness it could not deliver…

by Bruce | Link | React!

Visit The Woodward Class of '72 Reunion Website For Fun And Memories, WoodwardClassOf72.com


What I'm Currently Reading...




What I'm Currently Watching...




What I'm Currently Listening To...




Comic Book I've Read Recently...



web
stats

This page and all original content copyright © 2022 by Bruce Garrett. All rights reserved. Send questions, comments and hysterical outbursts to: bruce@brucegarrett.com

This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.