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

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

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

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

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

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

Cardiologist appointment tomorrow.

Answer: Their mouths are moving.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Scott Abel, 6-20-2025

The debt comes due eventually.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 30, 2006. . .

Offering

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

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

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

Please give me back a sign.

Well…I got my sign alright. Eventually.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While looking for stickers for one of my drink mugs I came across this Pride rainbow sticker purchase from many years ago. How many of my local friends who happen to read this remember Deacon Maccubbin’s Lambda Rising bookstore?

In the coming out stories that gay folk mostly tell…those of my generation at least…you get to the part where they walk into a gay bar for the first time and it’s an epiphany. They realize they’re not alone after all, and there are so many of us of all different kinds in all walks of life. But for me that moment of epiphany was the first time I walked into Lambda Rising. All the books and magazines and newspapers I had no idea existed…it was like the world had opened its doors for me. It was on the shelves of Lambda Rising I discovered Howard Cruse’s Gay Comics, gay fiction and non-fiction I had no idea existed, and magazines and newspapers I didn’t know about, or could only get if I walked into a seedy “Adult” bookstand in Wheaton.

That bookstore made it plain what Vito Russo once said about how It is an old stereotype, that homosexuality has to do only with sex while heterosexuality is multifaceted and embraces love and romance. The comprehensive ocean of our lives was there on those shelves. Nobody could ever tell me again that we weren’t just as human as our heterosexual neighbors.

The difference back then was our books were kept off the shelves of the major booksellers. No I am not likely to find a copy of The Front Runner by Patricia Nell Warren, or Counter Play by Anne Snyder, Coyote by Peter Gadol, The Boys On The Rock by John Fox, The Celluloid Closet by Vito Russo, Love Alone by Paul Monette, Farm Boys by Will Fellows (director Ang Lee gave Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal copies of this book prior to filming Brokeback Mountain) or Coming Out Under Fire by Allan Berube in a Crown Books, let alone a copy of The Advocate or The Washington Blade. 

I was a regular visitor to the store near DuPont Circle when I could borrow mom’s car, and then later when the Metro reached Twinbrook, then when I moved to Baltimore to the one in the gayborhood here. But like a lot independent bookstores and big chains it eventually closed its doors, unable I suppose to compete with Amazon, and I was deeply sad to see it go.

The gay bars are closing too it seems, but that’s because we’re becoming more integrated into our communities. And you can find sexual and gender minority content in the few chain and independent bookstores left. The next book in the Percy Jackson series focusing on boyfriends Nico di Angelo and Will Solace is coming later this year and will probably be on the shelves everywhere because the Percy Jackson books have been huge sellers. Rick Riordan has done an amazing job of inclusivity in his stories and characters, and it’s all the more amazing that these books are published under a Disney imprint. But it’s easy for minority voices to get lost in the torrent of pop culture. There are other voices, other stories, that I still have to dig to find.

The closest thing I have now to Lambda Rising is my subscription to the Gay & Lesbian Review, which is a literary journal (It used to be called The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review) that gives me pointers to new books. But I really miss being able to walk into Lambda Rising and just browse.

Yeah…or for that matter any good bookstore or newsstand. It’s a real shame.

This quote, which I remembered from way back when but not who said it, has haunted me all my working life in this trade. Until now.

I understand that Dijkstra is a well regarded figure in computer science, but he’s also a prime example of how a person can be very intelligent, and very stupid. These things do not necessarily contradict each other.

Don Juan would say he was defeated by the second foe (clarity). Great intelligence can do that to a person who stops questioning what they know and how they know it. Or to paraphrase Yoda, certainty is the path to the stupid side of the Force. Certainty leads to arrogance, arrogance leads to crankiness, crankiness leads to everyone around you suffering.

Microsoft made many good improvements to the BASIC language that lifted it from a tool to teach students programming to an impressive tool for creating business applications. Microsoft gave BASIC scoping, subroutines and functions that returned values. You could set a keyword at the beginning of a file, and I always did, that forced variables to be declared before their use. You could have unions. In Visual Basic you got try-catch blocks, and eventually the BSTRING which gave you a real pointer to a string instead of a pointer to a descriptor that you had to decode. This was very useful for Windows API calls. In Visual Basic I had COM objects I could use to manipulate all the Microsoft Office applications. But even in DOS PDS Basic I could utilize a rich selection of third party libraries of assembly routines that allowed me to avoid the ON ERROR GOTO hack, and simply test for a return value when I did things like file I/O.

But the essence of it was still BASIC, which I’m sure would have kept it on this man’s shit list anyway. I loved working with it though, because if you gave your variables logical looking names you could write code that almost read like plain english. I made a good living working in BASIC. There was no mutilation, there was emergence. But try telling this to a dick like this man.

Anyway…I just read this on a Facebook page dedicated to the BASIC programming language, and it was very helpful in putting that ghost to rest.

This from Richard Keijzer, really tells you everything you need to know about the man…

Did you ever experience that knowledge of Basic programming was a liability? It prevented me from doing my job. This is what happened:

Last century I was a journalist for a trade magazine in The Netherlands. We got news that computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra was about to give a lecture in Amsterdam and we tried to arrange an interview beforehand. It seems he had a list of people that “indulged in Basic” and I was on that list. He made it very clear that he would not speak to bunglers, and there I stood in the corridor. The door to the room where Dijkstra was staying did not open for me…

So instead I went to his lecture, and transformed the data he gave there into an interview. My editor wouldn’t be satisfied if I returned empty handed.

A couple of weeks later I met with a friend, who was professor of computer linguistics and pattern recognition. I told him what happened and how I felt about that. He looked me in the eye and said: “Dijkstra has written a program to prove the correctness of other programs. The only problem is, his program cannot cope with discontinuities. Now, the GOTO command represents a discontinuity… You do the math!”

Yeah I can do the math. I can also write a very good business application in any of Microsoft’s BASICs. Also Java, and Python. Half of what’s in this website is my own HTML.

I have a postcard I sent to mom long ago, that I keep on one of my bookshelves with a bunch of odds and ends from passages of my life. Oh, and also some books. This particular postcard was one I found among her things after she passed away. Every now and then I take it off the shelf to read once more.

I would have been dating, or thought I was dating, strike three, “K” who was living on Hilton Head at the time. I would have been making a good living as a contract software developer renting a very nice garden apartment in Cockeysville, Maryland.

It was a time before affordable cell phones and the end of long distance charges. He and I would chat for hours on our land lines. The new cordless telephones were a blessing for us. We could chat together while going about our household chores as if we were together. This was a time when long distance rates still applied, so if he called me the plan was, since I was making good money and he wasn’t, that we’d hang up and I would call him and take the charge. We’d talk for so long the batteries in our phones would give out and we’d have to restart the conversation on the corded phones for a bit. I’d make plans to go visit him in Hilton Head when I was between contracts, or could take a long weekend. His place in Hilton Head was less than a day’s drive down I-95 so it was easy to spend time together with him. I was in love…again. This time, I thought, it’s really happening. I have a boyfriend.

But it was more a thing in my own mind than his. At some point I started making plans to move down there to be with him…I’d talked with a recruiting agent with the firm I contracted for, who told me there were jobs down there to be had, though mostly in North, not South Carolina. But it was shortly after that K dumped me for another guy who lived in Massachusetts he’d been chatting with on AOL. That guy eventually moved down there and they began living together. He told me later that he decided to call it off when he heard me talking about moving down there.

Anyway…this is a postcard I sent to mom during one of my visits to K. Mom knew…but we had a don’t ask don’t tell agreement she enforced almost right up to the day she died. So it’s my sad little way in my scrawly handwriting of trying to tell her that her boy is gay and he’s in love with another guy.

She liked K. He was a good Baptist boy from our church. I like to think she’d have reconciled herself to it if it was him. Anyway, she kept that postcard. Now I have it. Every now and then I look at it and remember K and I strolling the beach late at night when nobody could see us holding hands and looking up at the stars.