I have another Disney trip coming soon…a week at Saratoga Springs, which I now truly regret buying back into DVC for. The math doesn’t work anymore for it. I just got dumped a thousand dollar dues fee and it wasn’t that long ago that my Boardwalk and Grand Floridian dues combined were less than 500. I don’t see how this is saving me any money staying at a DVC resort…but then Everybody is complaining now about the cost of going to the Disney parks. Except of course the very rich. I guess it’s their world now. But you warned me about this didn’t you.

Anyway…

I have another Disney trip coming next week, and so of course I’m thinking of you. I wish we were still talking. There is so much I’d like to ask you, and to know, about your thoughts on our current political disaster. I worry about you getting into it with ICE. I worry about you and another classmate, whose older brother you apparently knew back in Woodward, a lot lately. I wish I could talk all this out with you. You and I were on the same page about so much.

I replay some of our last conversations in my head over and over, wishing I’d handled them better. Like when you told me it won’t be all the people I ever had sex with I’ll be thinking about on my deathbed, but all the people I love. I was just so awestruck with the fact that you were giving me this heartfelt, deep conversation, when most of the time our chats were about current events or Disney stuff, that I wasn’t paying attention to what you were saying, so much as that you were saying it. I felt wonderful. But I missed an opportunity to make myself clear.

It was like you were saying the Venn Diagram of those two things…people you’ve had sex with, versus people you love…didn’t touch. That’s…not necessarily true. In fact I would say it’s almost never true. I should have said then that remembering the times I was laying down with the one I was deeply in love with would be the best ever last memory before the end. I should have told you that all I ever wanted out of life was that wholeness, that body and soul connection. I should have told you I never wanted to lay down with anyone I wasn’t at least crushing on, if not madly in love with. That I knew there are people who don’t want or don’t seem to need that connection to just enjoy a tumble in the sheets, but that isn’t me, and never was, even back in high school.

I was looking for a boyfriend. But it was 1971, and all I’d ever been taught about gay people is that we are trash.

How does a teenage boy, just coming of age in a world that constantly dumps this on them, try to find a boyfriend? I was a mess. We all were.

And when you told me that sex was like farting (“I know it sounds strange but think about it…it stinks for a little while and then it’s gone…”) I should have asked you if you ever considered that maybe you are ACE. Nothing wrong with that, I know a few of these and they’re good people, completely capable of being in love, they just don’t or rarely if ever feel any sexual desire. I am myself maybe a half step away from that, being what the kids these days call a Demisexual. 

Hindsight…twenty-twenty…so on and so forth. I just wish we were still talking. There is so much for us to talk about. Mostly, I just hope you are safe, wherever you are. If it’s back in Germany, so much the better I guess. Nobody is safe here anymore. We’ve all been living in a state of trauma since 2016. I saw this in my Facebook news stream yesterday…

I think that’s right…that the country as a whole is done with him. But then there’s the rest of it…that it took three more horrible, nightmarish years to finally finish it, even after everyone including them knew it was over.

The two justices he and Mich McConnell stacked the supreme court with told him ‘no’ over his tariffs and the MAGA nutcases are freaking out. At least we know who the hard core fascists on the court are now: Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh. No surprises there I reckon. Someone, I forget who it was now, said the secret fear of tyrants and bullies is that most people really are decent deep down inside. MAGA will drag it out even knowing they’re finished, because they hate us for our humanity, and they want us to suffer for making them see everything a human can be that they are not. They burned down Germany, they’ll burn down the United States, just for the satisfaction of making us hurt. But we can win this thing eventually. If it wasn’t for the decent three-quarters of humanity there wouldn’t even be civilization. The worry is how much we all have to bleed to get there.

I hope you’re safe somewhere. Maybe I’ll live to see the end of this. I didn’t get a chance to tell you about my heart attack, or the Afib and the ablation. The ablation scared the heck out of me. They thread two wires into your beating heart, one to detect the rogue cells sending out incorrect beat signals, and the other to cauterize them. Before the procedure I made sure my brother knew where my will was, and had all my passwords and account numbers. But it went okay and the Afib is gone now.

Sometimes the trick is not to mind that you’re afraid. I wish I knew that back in high school.