Facebook Memories shows me this one from the end of 2015…

Why do I stay on Facebook anymore? I left Twitter after Musk turned it into a fascist playpen and went to Bluesky (@brucegarrett.bsky.social). But most of my friends and classmates are still there and that Memories feature is a nice way of looking back. But not always.

So this was when I realized the Christmas card wasn’t just late…it wasn’t coming at all. They say hindsight is 20-20, but I knew something was up then. I knew it years before when we sat at that table where he worked and passed a ski ticket I found back and forth like a talking stick, and he tried to explain to me how living in the closet fucked him up so badly he didn’t know some days who it was he was looking at in the bathroom mirror, and I needed to look elsewhere. But whenever I came into his presence I fell back to being that awkward clueless teenage geek I was in 1971-72 and I kept coming back anyway. And some visits he seemed grateful for my company, and others he was icy cold. By then our conversations were not private and I realized that it was when I told him I was coming down that Icy Guy appeared, and when I just showed up unannounced it was all smiles and conversation like it used to be. But that was not sustainable. 

So anyway that was the year I sent a card and he didn’t. He was being told, just like when we were schoolboys and the family learned somehow that he was talking to that faggy kid at the school… We agreed to go to Great Falls with our cameras. I never said that. Yes you did. I just don’t know why you’re calling me. You gave me your phone number. Well I didn’t think you’d use it. Two and a half months after this Facebook memory he told me never to contact him in any way, shape, or form, and I felt betrayed and angry and I lashed out, and said things maybe I shouldn’t have, but he said things to me that cut deeply and after everything we had said to each other it was completely unfair. 

So it goes. Maybe I should have paid closer attention to when he said life in the closet had fucked him over. I’d seen how it did that to other gay guys of our generation, I just didn’t want to see it in him.

I was sitting down to a lovely Kobe beef steak when I got his angrygram. What I should have done then and there was send him a shape.

Regards your angrygram of March 6, please accept this truncated dodecahedron by way of reply…

Then I should have drawn up an Affinity Return/Exchange form for him to fill out. Please include original receipt…

…which gives me an idea.