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June 16th, 2025

Perfect

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


Posted In: Politics
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by Bruce | Link | React!
June 15th, 2025

I’m On Weather Underground

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.  


Posted In: Life
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by Bruce | Link | React!

Yet Another Crappy Beginning To Summer

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.


Posted In: Life

by Bruce | Link | React!
June 13th, 2025

Hoisted From The Archives. . .

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.

 


Posted In: Life
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by Bruce | Link | React!

Yes…Hot Air Rises And Cool Air Sinks…

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.


Posted In: Life
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by Bruce | Link | React!

Nope…

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.


Posted In: Life
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by Bruce | Link | React!

Mr. Fixit And The Solar Garden Lights

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.


Posted In: Life
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by Bruce | Link | React!
May 25th, 2025

Still Working On It…

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.


Posted In: Life
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by Bruce | Link | React!
May 17th, 2025

Gay Epiphany

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.


Posted In: Life
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by Bruce | Link | React!
May 10th, 2025

Very Intelligent Idiots

 

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.


Posted In: Gently Tapping My Pulpit
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by Bruce | Link | React!

Postcard From A Past Life

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.


Posted In: Life
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by Bruce | Link | React!
April 27th, 2025

A Noticeable Improvement

I do seem to be more “in the moment” now since I started taking this new heart medicine. It’s very much like what I experienced after the angioplasty with the resulting better blood flow. The world around me is more There. The afib hasn’t returned, and my energy level is noticeably better. I haven’t wanted to nap in two days. I think I’m also sleeping better.

I’m becoming convinced the atrial fibrillation was doing more to me than making my heart beat funny and putting me at risk of a stroke. It was also probably causing my nearly constant fatigue and fuzzy headedness, which I was just putting down to old age. 


Posted In: Life
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by Bruce | Link | React!

Feeling Changed

I’ve suddenly started having hyper vivid dreams overnight, one after the other. And I’m wondering if this is a side effect of the new heart pill I’m taking for the afib. It’s a side effect I don’t mind…the dreams are pleasant if just a tad odd in the way dreams can be. Maybe it’s just I’m sleeping better, because my heart isn’t misbehaving.

The afib has not returned since I began taking this pill. Also my energy levels are noticeably better. I haven’t had the urge to nap in the afternoon. I was given a sheet about afib in the hospital that said among other things that it can cause fatigue. It makes sense. If that’s what’s been making me tired all the time, and very slightly dizzy, then getting past that would be a Big improvement.


Posted In: Life
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by Bruce | Link | React!
April 26th, 2025

Sermon

Apologies for the long post, but I have to get it out of me. I think it’s important.

I’ll write another blog post later about why I had a stay in the hospital…long story short I was having atrial fibrillation that came and went, and so I went to my cardiologist to see what could be done about it. He and his assistant took one look at my cardiogram and checked me in to the hospital immediately. I was to receive a procedure that shocks the heart back to normal beating the next morning, after a period of observation. That procedure turned out to be unnecessary when my heart went back to normal on its own, but I got an overnight stay out of it. And another pill to take every day.

That hospital stay turned, unpleasantly, into a dialogue…I won’t say argument…on religion. It got particularly energetic when my hospital roommate had a visitor, who turned out to be a minister in their church. Actually they both were but they didn’t out themselves before they had a chance to make their conversation with me seem like just a friendly chat about one’s faith and not a crusade to win my soul to their particular Christ.

I could have thrown it all back at them, but my roommate and I were in the hospital just then because our hearts were acting up, and I didn’t want to have an emotional fight over religion. Or any other time actually. I could say that’s because I’m getting old and tired, but those of us who grew up in homes with someone who was angry all the time avoid getting into heated fights if we can.

So instead while they were winning my soul to Christ I just stood my ground and answered back their theologies with the stories of science as best I knew them, and my own moral values because I’ve nothing to be ashamed of there. I did try to keep the conversation away from my sexual orientation, although in retrospect I think they decided eventually that I wasn’t One Of Those People because I didn’t present to their stereotypes. It wasn’t because I’m afraid of those conversations, I just didn’t want it to start being all about that, which it would have. I wanted to keep the conversation where I thought it needed to be. 

Like a lot of deeply fundamentalist, not necessarily religious, people, they came to the conversation serenely confident they had Truth. Robert Ardrey wrote about another set of dogmas, which he called the Romantic Fallacy [of human consciousness], in African Genesis thusly:

“As we experience it today, the romantic fallacy is a transparent curtain of ingenious weave with a warp of rationality and a woof of sensation that hangs between ourselves and reality. So transparent is its quality that we cannot perceive its presence.  So bright in outline do men and affairs appear beyond the curtain that we cannot doubt but that reality is what we observe. Yet in truth every color has been distorted. And rare is the conclusion based on such observations that would not bear re-inspection if the curtain were lifted.”

I think that applies to certain kinds of religious fundamentalism. Rose colored glasses, in other words. Or as James Burke once said, what we see is what our knowledge tells us we’re seeing. Eric Hoffer writes that an empty head isn’t really empty, it’s full of rubbish, and that’s what makes it so hard to get anything new into an empty head. Sometimes you see the truth of it the moment people open their mouths. When my roommate started on about the Bible and Truth I knew where it was going. He and his fellow minister were going to run the usual routine on me once they figured out the best line of attack, and where I wanted to keep the focus of the conversation on was Watch it not working.

What is Truth? You could say in the time of Donald Trump nobody cares what is, or what is not true. But I still care. I care very much.

I also made a choice to be careful that nothing I said sounded like a direct challenge to their religion or their beliefs. I reckoned just standing my ground was challenge enough, and I didn’t want the conversation to become nothing more than a lot of flag waving. Of course they were about to challenge My beliefs. I needed saving after all. Fine. I wanted them to see something that they wouldn’t if I made them get all defensive. I wasn’t interested in changing any minds, because I reckoned those minds were unchangeable. I wanted them to see something.

I’m 71 years old. I’ve been there and done that. I know what I’m about better than you know what you’re about. Now watch it not working…

This all begins when I went for a visit to my cardiologist that turned into a hospital stay. First they took me to the emergency room where monitors were hooked up and a drug administered to slow down my heart rate, which had hit a peak of 170. When they could, they moved me into a hospital room with two beds, one of which was already occupied. I was disappointed, but willing to make the best of it.

I had gay friends who would tell me the reason I was single and lonely was I was too shy. They almost had me convinced when they took me to various clubs and just let me wander around, and I could not work myself up to engaging anyone in a chat because I didn’t know any of them. It was my high school crush who cleared it up for me. He worked in a German themed restaurant in Disney World with Oktoberfest seating, which many Americans don’t like. One day he complimented me on my ability to get a table of standoffish people talking to each other. But in Disney World I had dozens of built-in icebreakers. Hi…where y’all from? This your first time here? What’s your favorite park? All I ever needed was an icebreaker, which these “friends” would never give me because People who look like that want people who look like that. But if I have an icebreaker and I can get people talking then it’s actually pretty hard to shut me up. 

A hospital room gave me a pretty good icebreaker, but I realized I had to think about how to say it. If I asked “what are you in for”, that might sound too much like a bad joke about being in prison. So instead I asked conversationally “what brings you here?” In a hospital that’s a kinda personal question, and I was fine if he didn’t want to talk about it. He looked to be an older than me African American male, and I didn’t want him thinking I was uncomfortable being roomed with an African American, so I tried to be friendly. He told me what it was that brought him there; we were both heart patients, although his heart situation was slightly different from mine. It made sense to me that the heart patients would be grouped together.

At first, naturally, our brief chats were about our health and how getting older brings changes in our bodies that we just had to deal with. Those would segue into chats about how much the world around us had changed over the course of our lives. I told him about the work I did, and was doing at Space Telescope, and he was amazed at the pictures that came down from Hubble. How, he asked, did they get those pictures down to earth from a telescope in space. So I explained as much as I understood about the instruments on Hubble, and the way the image files were microwaved back down to Earth. He simply nodded his head, thinking.

I began to suspect we were not on the same page politically when he said later that night that he’d never thought he’d live to see two men kissing on TV. Well neither did I when I was a gay teenager trying to navigate a world that gave me static from practically every direction. 

I could have said something smartass back to him then, but we were on cordial terms just then and I didn’t want any arguments that would raise my heartrate again after the nurses went to all the trouble to slow it down. I pick my battles.

The next morning he had Fox News on his TV. Okay. Fine. Whatever.

When the nurse came that morning I was told the procedure they’d wanted to give me was called off for now because my heart had returned to what they call sinus rhythm all on its own. I mentioned again that the atrial fibrillation and rapid heart rate was a sporadic thing, and I was told I’d be held there longer for observation in case it did come back. I hoped that didn’t mean another overnight stay because the night before between all the wires on me and the activity out in the hallways I got absolutely no sleep, despite how amazingly comfortable that hospital bed was. 

A co-worker came the previous evening before I was moved to my room with a charger and cable for my cell phone, which allowed me to stay in touch. Then I discovered the hospital bed had a built-in USB connection to charge a phone. 

Nice!

So while my roommate watched Fox News that morning, I doom scrolled, tempted to go find some videos of two men kissing. But mostly I watched cat and train videos.

Lunchtime came and I was told I could have solid food again. We were brought lunch. After that my roommate struck up a conversation with me that quickly turned to religion. Much later I began to wonder if every conversation we’d had right from the beginning of our stay together had been just his way of sizing me up for the best approach to saving my soul. 

It began with questions about my job. We had another friendly chat about how we watched our space program put men on the moon, and all the changes and improvements we’d seen over the course of our lives in the pictures we got from space. We were the first generations, I said, who have seen the horizons of other worlds. He agreed it was an amazing time to be alive.

Now he began with telling me how amazing it was to see things that were so far away, and deftly segued into wondering how we knew how far away the galaxies were, and what force it was that brought the universe into existence. I talked about the doppler shift in light, what we knew so far about the Big Bang, and the discovery of the cosmic background radiation. He wondered aloud what force existed to produce the bang. Something had to be there before it. That something had to be God.

I’m 71 and I’ve been proselytized so much over the course of my life I can tell the difference pretty quickly between a simple sincere statement of belief and a prelude to picking the lock on the door to my soul. Okay, thinks I, that friendly chat about my job all this time was just so he could suss me out and figure where to start on me wasn’t it.

He began talking about the Bible and asked me if I’d read it. I assured him I had. He asked me if I was familiar with Proverbs chapter 8. Not off the top of my head says I. He directs me to Proverbs 8:22-31. He asked me to think about what it said. Read those verses he says to me twice more, and think about what they say.

I call it up on my iPhone and give it a read, then follow up with some of the commentary because it was one of those ambiguous passages you could read just about anything into, and I wanted to see what, if any consensus there was about it. 

22 The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old;

23 I was formed long ages ago, at the very beginning, when the world came to be.

24 When there were no watery depths, I was given birth, when there were no springs overflowing with water;

25 before the mountains were settled in place, before the hills, I was given birth,

26 before he made the world or its fields or any of the dust of the earth.

27 I was there when he set the heavens in place, when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep,

28 when he established the clouds above and fixed securely the fountains of the deep,

29 when he gave the sea its boundary so the waters would not overstep his command, and when he marked out the foundations of the earth.

30 Then I was constantly at his side. I was filled with delight day after day.

31 rejoicing in his whole world and delighting in mankind. 

The commentary I read ranged widely as to its meaning, but it was a passage my roommate said that told us Wisdom existed before the creation.

Okay, thinks I, the science geek, one way you could look at that is it’s saying the physical laws that emerged in the Bang were there before the Bang, and necessary for the Bang to happen. But I think too long about how to put that to him, and now he’s telling me that Truth existed before the creation. 

Well…okay…I can dig that too. Probably not the way you do though.

Then it turned, oddly, to a discussion about how ancient Hebrew is different from the modern, and how that turned into mistranslations of the original text. Most Bibles he said, are false (no surprise there). But there was one true Bible (yes, of course), and it is based on the ancient Hebrew, that only a few have translated correctly. And of course, thinks I, your religion just happens to have that True Bible translation and none of the others do. The heathens after all, are the people in the church across the street.

I bring up the fact that the New Testament was originally written in other languages. Yes, he says, but that’s not the old Hebrew. Only the old Hebrew is correct, because it was written before the rest of the Bible, closer to creation, and to the Wisdom that existed before the creation. That is why it has Truth. I just want you to think about that, he says. I don’t reply that I could think about how deep the rabbit hole in Alice In Wonderland really went but I’m not tying my brain up on that one either. 

He asks how often I read the Bible. I deflect for the moment and tell him I was raised in a Yankee Baptist household. It seems to surprise him. I add that I have several Bibles at home including a modern English version of Tyndale’s Bible, and the Book of Mormon (I declined to mention my copy of The Satanic Bible). At the mention of Tyndale he seems impressed. Did I know that Tyndale was executed for translating the Bible into English? I said I was aware of the story, and that Tyndale’s crime was making the Bible accessible to the common man and woman. Also that I liked Tyndale’s plain spoken English more than the floral Elizabethan of the King James. I bring up the fact that different faiths have different versions of the Bible. This includes the Catholics I say, noting we are in a Catholic hospital (there were Catholic style crucifixes inside every room I was in, above every door). Yes, says he, but there is only one True Bible. 

Yes, thinks I. The one you read.

I tell him I recognize the importance of the bible as a historical document, but the bible speaks with many voices. And while the people who wrote its books were just as human as any of us, they lived in a time so long past it’s almost impossible to take the meanings you read in it for granted. I ask him to consider how much detail we have about the culture in America during the Revolutionary War period, and the thinking of the people who lived through all that, and that was only about two-hundred and fifty years ago. The events of the Bible took place thousands of years ago.

I tell him some of my experience trying to learn other languages and what I discovered about how language influences our understanding of our world. English for example does not have gendered nouns, Some languages have two. German nouns come in three genders…male, female and neuter. What is the understanding of the world in a culture where “mirror” is masculine and “cat” is feminine even if it’s male, and “girl” is neuter. How do you read the poetry of other peoples without knowing you may be missing what the poet intended you to get? It’s risky. I tell him that I’ve heard the poets say that translators are traitors.

It’s getting on into the afternoon. We are visited by the nurses again, and I am visited by a doctor who says he is working with my Cardiologist on my case. It looks like I will be discharged later in the afternoon if nothing about my heart changes. I am relieved. I want to be done with all this wiring connected to me. It makes if very difficult to move around, let alone go to the bathroom. My roommate is also told he will be discharged soon. He told me previously that he’d been there for four days by then.

Then my roommate gets a younger visitor who I assume at first is a family member. He brings my roommate some fried chicken which smells delicious. Apparently it came from a local eatery, not a chain. Are we heart patients allowed fried chicken? I have no idea but none of the staff seem to have objected. The nurses who came in afterward all knew the name of the place it came from and were enthusiastic about it. I accept my roommate’s offer of a piece of it. It was…okay.

My roommate continues his attempt at salvation while his visitor just listens in. What are atoms he asks me. What force makes them they stay together? It must be God. How is it that a rock and a feather both fall to earth together when they weigh so differently. By now I’m well aware that his questions are rhetorical and intended to elicit a response from me that he can hook into a Bible verse. I have watched this game played so many times. But instead of giving him snark, which I might have in any other setting, I take his questions seriously. 

I talk about Albert Einstein’s ideas on how mass curves spacetime. I talk about the difference between mass and weight in a gravity field. But how does gravity make things move, he asks. There must be some force moving them. How can satellites remain in motion around the earth if there is nothing moving them, he asks. I reply with Newton’s first law. Objects in motion will remain in motion unless acted on by some external force. But how can it just stay in orbit around the earth unless there is something to keep it there at that distance. I relate the story of Newton and the apple, adding that it was Newton that gave gravity its name.

His visitor just keeps listening throughout all this, occasionally telling me he finds our discussion very informative. Yes, of course you did, I will later think.

My roommate asks me if I believe in God. 

So here’s the direct question. Sort of. He doesn’t ask what God but I think it’s a pretty safe bet he means the one he believes in. So here it is, Now it’s either out myself or duck. Kinda proud that I’ve never once ducked whether it was this or my sexual orientation.

I tell them I don’t believe. I don’t use the word Atheist because it is such a loaded word amongst the deeply religious and I don’t want all the baggage that comes with it getting into this conversation, and then they stop seeing the person in front of them for a scarecrow stereotype. To the degree I can, to the degree it’s even possible, I want them to keep seeing a person, not a thing. I am an unbeliever. That is enough for them to know.

I mention a favorite quote by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright: I believe in God but I spell it nature. I tell them that for most of my young adult life I considered myself an agnostic. H.L. Mencken once called agnosticism the most beautiful religion because it just trusts, has faith, and doesn’t subscribe to any particular theology (he once called theology an attempt to explain the unknowable in the terms of the not worth knowing). But I eventually grew out of that and now it’s I accept nature as best as science reveals it to us. I think this world and the universe as it is, is beautiful. Nature is beautiful. Reality is what it is. Science, as the physicist Richard Feynman said, is just a way we have of not fooling ourselves. And you, he added, are the easiest one to fool. By which I said I was pretty sure he meant beware of confirmation bias. You see what you expected to see and then you look no further and you miss something important. This was an attempt to keep the conversation on the track I wanted it to stay on.

Watch it not working… You do not have the key and the door will not be forced…

I tell him about my favorite landscape artists, Frederic Church and others of the Luminist movement. Church especially painted stunningly beautiful landscapes that were informed not only by his religion (he was a Calvinist), but also what was called in his day, the volume in stone. They believed that everything that was in the Bible is also revealed in nature, and could be understood with careful study.

I didn’t add, then Darwin came along and spoiled it for everyone.

Finally his visitor starts to join in, and now I discover they’re both ministers in their particular church. 

We’re not here to proselytize you, he says, but to give you a better understanding of the biblical Truth. Yes, of course. A difference that makes no difference is no difference. He begins to tell me about how the Bible is authoritative, and that if we follow its teachings we will have the lives God intended for us to have. 

Oh…thinks I this is a tag team now is it…

Think about that, he said. Where else can we know life God wants us to have.

I tell them I appreciate they’re not here to proselytize me. I relate again how I was raised in a Baptist (yankee) household, and Baptists (the yankee Baptists we were anyway) offer testimony in lieu of outright proselytization, and hospitality. It isn’t join our church or face eternal fire and brimstone (although I sat in on some tent preaching that were spectacular displays of fire and brimstone), but sit with us and be welcome. And they believe in what they call Soul Competency, which is that every living person has that inner light to guide them to a relationship with God. I say I am not a believer, but I still accept that my responsibility is to let people find their own way, and simply offer my own testimony and hospitality. I am simply giving you my testimony, I say. You teach not by preaching, but by giving testimony, and by setting an example. 

But God give us that example in His Word, and His Son.

Yes, yes… I said I accept a different authority. “My Book is the volume in stone. It’s there everywhere around us, not just the stars in the sky, but the rocks in the ground (channeling that the lord is my rock quote). If you believe God created everything, okay, then a pebble on the ground is God’s handwriting. God made it, if that’s what you believe. Perhaps Wisdom existed before the creation, but if God created everything, a pebble is God’s handwriting. A grain of sand (channeling Blake here) is the original manuscript. Everything else is commentary.”

“Your mileage may vary”, I say, “and I’m okay with that because I still accept soul competency and besides I don’t think religion matters. What matters is the heart.”

The visitor keeps smiling and says that he can see I’m a good man and that the bible shows us the way to be better men.

And I came back, “Thank you. I can see you’re both good men too. And I appreciate what you’re telling me about how the bible is a guide. People who lived thousands of years ago speak to us in it. But that guidance is there throughout the story of mankind’s history (I want to speak my truth as much as I can in their language so they don’t instantly blank out over wokeness). We can read it in other books besides the Bible. And in those other books the people who lived that history speak to us too.”

I say, “That human history tells us what matters is you’re not mean and selfish and cruel. What matters is you’re trustworthy. What matters is you speak the truth, take responsibility, do your share of the work, and chip in and help out when you can. What matters is you’re the sort of person Mr. Rogers was talking about, when he said ‘look for the helpers’.

“That’s the important stuff. Everything else is detail.”

And the comeback was “and God shows us in His Book how to become that person.” 

I could see by then I’d made my point, by how automatically the prefabricated replies were being dispensed. They weren’t prodding and sizing me up anymore, looking for the right pick for the lock. Instead I could see them just waiting as I spoke for the relevant biblical comeback. Which I took to mean they were on automatic pilot now because they’d give up on getting their Truth into me and now it’s just standing up for theirs, which I wasn’t interested in disturbing anyway. The existence of the likes of me being disturbance enough.

The conversation ended shortly thereafter, when my roommate was told his discharge papers were ready for him to sign. I was told mine were coming. Please I begged, get these darn wires off me then so I can get dressed.

So I’d made my point. The two ministers probably left still confident they’d seen a lost soul in need of salvation, and that I would not be moved probably made them very sad. But what they also had to have seen was an unbeliever who would not be triggered into outright hostility. What they saw was an unbeliever who was willing to patiently explain himself and keep standing his ground. When they asked me to think about what they were telling me, I gave them evidence that at age 71 I’d actually been thinking about it for quite a long time. What they saw, hopefully, was some depth behind the patient face of an old longhaired baby boomer who began dressing himself for discharge with a summer shirt full of cat faces. Whatever it was they took me for to start with, they must have found I was not that. 

What they made of it afterward I have no idea and I don’t care. I gave them testimony, and hospitality.

Before he left my roommate gave me a card with a link their church’s website and some bible studies.

Maybe at some point in the future one of them finds themselves doing a little gardening, or sidewalk cleaning, sees a small pebble and remembers what I said. Because whether or not you believe in an almighty creator, the rock has to outrank the word.

 

[Update…]  In retrospect it occurs to me that neither one of them offered me their testimony. It was all just What The Bible Says. At least I might have seen them as more than simply a couple of ministers doing to me what I’ve had done to me so many times before. Place holders for a type. But I reckon they didn’t want to be more than that. Testimony might have brought them down to my level.


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by Bruce | Link | React! (4)
April 21st, 2025

Another Special Day

Seems I need to add another Special Day to my calendar. Call it, The Sweetness Before The Fall.

This is a screenshot of a blog post I came across last night, whilst flipping through some old posts referenced in today’s Facebook memories.

 

Several months later I got told People who look like that want people who look like that.

God what a naive little twerp I was…

Can anybody who knows me…anyone at all…see how affection starved the guy who wrote that is?? I’m like a starving beggar thrilled to be tossed some vague promises of food and shelter when he knows every time he looks in a mirror he doesn’t deserve that sort of attention.

 


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by Bruce | Link | React!
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