My friends are oblivious.  Just…oblivious.  Either that, or they think I’m hopeless and I need to give up trying to find a lifemate because they’ve decided I never will, and they just don’t have the nerve to tell me so.  I’m not good looking enough.  I’m too geeky.  I’m too old.  They checked my Use-By date and it’s expired.  It must be that.  Or they just don’t care.  I can’t believe they don’t care.  So they must be oblivious.  Or they think I’m hopeless. 

Last night I made another attempt to get some people I know to introduce me to someone they’d told me about months ago.  He was a guy that they’d noticed was yanking my chain at The Miss Gaye Universe DC Ball some months ago.  I found out later they’d tried to get us together in the same room at one point but it didn’t happen for some reason.  They told me about it afterward, and everything they told me about him seemed too good to be true.  He was they told me, single, an IT geek like myself, a really nice guy according to his friends, and into older guys…which alas I guess I am these days.  In the weeks becoming months that followed, I’ve been nudging and cajoling my friends to Fucking Try Again! and it never happened.  If I had any contact info for him myself I’d have taken this matter into my own hands long ago but I don’t.  He’s just a first name to me, and a few photos I took of him at the ball.  Last night I brought it up again to one of them and the initial response I got just floored me because it seemed at first he didn’t even know what I was talking about.  And then he realized.  Oh…him…

WTF???  And then I get The Advice every lonely person who ever fucking lived gets…  You need to lower your standards…broaden your view…   Blah, blah, woof, woof.  Wow.  Great Advise there!  Just imagine the happy couple years later, whose significant other followed that advice, strolling hand-in-hand down the beach one romantic evening…  "I love you…"  "I love you too…but that’s because I lowered my standards…"

It’s like they’ve made up their minds that I’m not making any effort myself to find a boyfriend.  It’s frustrating.  I have to assume it’s because it was so easy for them, and that it’s excruciatingly difficult for me can only mean I’m making it difficult somehow and I just need to stop doing that.

I’ve tried the bars and clubs.  But I am shy.  When it comes to approaching people cold I just keep drawing a blank, and all the more so when it’s a beautiful guy that’s yanking my chain.  Tell me I need to get over it all you want but that’s the way I am, and any successful strategy for finding a mate either takes that into account or it’s doomed to failure, plain and simple.  Or to put it another way, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.  I may be shy, but I’m not crazy.  The bar scene is a great place to socialize with my friends.  But it is simply not somewhere I can go to Make friends.  Unless I have other friends with me and they’re willing to help me break the ice.  Which…they’re not.  Well…one of them seems to be.

I need someone willing to introduce me to potential boyfriends.  What I’ve found actually, is that most people find their other half that way.  Most Heterosexuals that is.

I did an informal survey of my heterosexual neighbors some time ago, asking them how they’d found their other half.  I only asked the ones in long term relationships.  What I discovered, unsurprisingly, was that about three fourths of them had been introduced to each other by mutual friends or by a friend of the family.  Sometimes it was at a party.  Sometimes it was a church or community social.  Sometimes it was some other activity.  But almost all of the couples had found each other via the networking of friends and family and community. 

Obviously, because of the enormous cultural hostility we have to live our lives in, this isn’t how a lot of gay couples are going to find each other. If the gay son is the shame of his family, they’re probably not going to introduce him to the gay son of a neighbor or friend.  If a heterosexual’s gay friend is merely the "some" in "some of my best friends are", then obviously they’re not going to give a flying fuck how lonely their "friend" is, or even notice that he might be a good match for that other gay guy another friend of theirs told them about.  The very thought of getting two gay guys together for a date probably squicks them out enough they don’t even consider it, and meanwhile their gay "friend’ spends one day of his life after another alone.  The social network heterosexuals live in every moment of their lives and take for granted just doesn’t willingly want to work for us.  But the damnable thing is often our own networks fail us too when it comes to relationships.  And I think that’s because so many of us seem to have internalized the message of the haters, that homosexual relationships either don’t really exist, or they only really amount to brief, barren assignations. 

Stanley Kurtz bastardizes a Dutch study to prove that same sex couples don’t last very long and are never monogamous. The Family Research Council bastardizes statistics on domestic violence so they can claim that same sex couples are more likely to assault each other then love each other.  Orson Scott Card claims same sex couples are only playing at house and insists that acceptance of bogus same sex marriages will lead to the end of the human race.  We get angry and counter with real science.  We laugh and mock the haters.  We fight back however we can.  But the assault on our human dignity is relentless and we as a people, need to look, really and honestly look, at how much of that crap we’ve internalized despite ourselves.

We need to, as a people, stop and look at all the ways that hate has made our love lives desperate, and fight it, because there is no more noble a fight then that one.  In the face of a venomous hostility that insists, absolutely insists, that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex, we can wage no greater battle then, in addition to proudly embracing our sexual nature, nurture relationships, and nurture as well a social ecology where lovers can find each other, and make a home for themselves in a world that keeps throwing up every barrier it can to their love.  You want to wage the radical war on homophobia?  Next time you see two lonely hearts who might be right for each other, bring them together.  Even if they don’t find that place of joy and contentment within each other, every time, every opportunity you take to nurture love, you defeat hate.

So much, so obvious.  At least to me.  But not apparently to everyone.  So on the way home last night, finding myself taking yet another drive back to Baltimore no closer to finding my other half then I was last week, I tried to think of what I could do differently now.  Hanging out in a bar is never going to work for me.  My friends won’t help, frustratingly even when they happen across someone who might make a good match.  So once more my thoughts turned to dating services.  It’s one of the bitter ironies of my life, that I’ve probably spent as much on dating services as some gay guys have spent on ex-gay therapy.  Yes, it runs into the thousands over the course of my life.  And like the ex-gay ministries, the dating services charge you up front for something they don’t even promise to deliver.

And a thought came to me, as it has often lately when I reconsider dating services…This is backwards isn’t it?  Imagine going out to a restaurant and having to pay up front just to look at a menu with only the Possibility of getting anything on it.  Imagine having an attack of appendicitis and having to pay the entire hospital bill for only the Chance of getting a qualified surgeon to operate.  Here’s a list of surgeons we’ve matched you up with Mr. Garrett…  Dr. Hideo has a degree in floor waxing from the Johnson and Johnson Institute…  Dr. Albatross has performed many successful tattoo removals.  Dr. Dustbunny is an expert on the biology of nose hair in south American primates…   We’re sorry you find our matches unacceptable…perhaps you should lower your standards…

Has anyone actually done a study of the success rates of dating services?  They all seem to have so many happy couples in their testimonials, but somehow I’ll bet the odds of winning the MegaMillions jackpot are way better. 

Suppose instead of us paying them just to throw a random list of other lonely people at us, they only got paid for the matches that actually worked?

I’ve been turning that thought over in my head for years now.  Bitterly.  But then it occurred to me last night that nothing was stopping me from doing just that myself.  Why not create my own dating service that works the way I think they should, and use it to help me find my other half…?

Some months ago I read a sad story of an elderly British man who offered to pay someone to be his drinking companion at a local pub.  Perhaps that sort of thing would work for that sort of companionship.  But for staringly obvious reasons you can’t just offer people money to go on a date with you.  The true heart would take offense, and the cheats would flock to your door.  And the prostitutes escorts.  You can’t buy love with money.  But you can buy introductions, which is what the dating services have been marketing to lonely people for ages.  Last night I realized something:  If Mr. Right is really out there, looking for someone like me, then all of Mr. Right’s friends are that dating service.  I just need to get them to work for us.

So. Instead of throwing myself at yet another dating service, I’m going to create my own.  And you’re it.  Maybe.  Possibly. 

Do you know someone who might be a good match for me?  Do you know someone who knows someone?  Probably you don’t.  But maybe I can interest you in looking over my dating profile and thinking about the single gay guys you know.  Probably you will draw a blank then anyway.  But maybe I can interest you in keeping an eye out for him.

Here’s how it works: I’m going to post my dating profile page here soon.  When I do, take a look.  If you think you know somebody that might make a good match for me, write me about him.  Don’t introduce us right away.  You tell me about him.  If I’m interested I’ll say so.  If not, I’ll honestly say why and maybe that gives you a better idea of what I’m looking for.  Feel absolutely free to ask me questions if you feel you need to know more about me before you introduce me to one of your friends. But probably the best source of information about the kind of person I am is my blog.  It goes back years.  Read it.  And the cartoon pages.  And the photo galleries.  Between them they really should tell you everything you need to know about me, about the kind of person I am and whether you want to introduce me to a friend of yours.  By all means, show it to him too.

So let’s say we agree your friend and I should meet each other.  You introduce us…maybe at a nice club or restaurant some place where we can all chat informally and have a nice evening out.  Maybe nothing more comes of it then we all have a nice dinner at a good restaurant.  But maybe what comes of that is I like him and he likes me.  So maybe we start dating.  One date.  A second date.  You can’t really tell if the spark has found tinder after only a few days, or even weeks.  But if it lasts at least six months…you get a thousand dollars. 

Another six months, another thousand.  And another.  And another.  The longer we keep dating, the more you get, every six months, up to six grand.  So, we date for at least three years, you end up with six grand. 

The point is this: I don’t want to be matched up with someone who isn’t looking for, or isn’t emotionally equipped for a long term relationship.  So, hopefully, stipulating that we have to both be interested enough in each other to date for at least half a year filters out the one night stand guys, and the cheats who only want the money.  But on the other hand even given the best intentions all around it won’t always work.  Dating isn’t an exact science or there wouldn’t be so many lonely people.  I can’t expect people to make an effort on my behalf if I make the rewards seem difficult to impossible to win.  So you don’t have to find me Mr. Right to get some money out of this.  All I’m asking for are the kind of good matches I never got from commercial dating services.

But wait…there’s more..!  If our dating manages to move us to the stage where we move in together and set up a household for ourselves, you get five grand more.   And if we ever decide to tie the knot (married legally, not civil unioned), you get ten grand. This is in addition to the five grand over two and a half years.  So for example, if we date the full term and then say it’s another two or three years later before we decide to move in together, you still get that five grand.  If it takes us several more years to work up the nerve to marry, you still get that ten grand.  Because you introduced us.  Because without you, we might never have met.  Because I made you this bargain.  Oh…and you get a wedding invite too.  And a standing invitation to every summer back yard barbecue we throw.

So.  Introduce me to someone and you could eventually end up with twenty-one grand out of it (and my eternal gratitude).  But even if it doesn’t go there, as long as it went Somewhere you could still make a thousand or more out of it, and I will still be grateful because even if it didn’t last more then half a year or so, as long as it was honest and real it will have been worth the try.  And I can still keep this deal out there for you, or someone else to give it another try.

I’m going to spend the next week working on a dating profile page I can send around, along with a more formal statement of the bargain I’m willing to make here, in exchange for an introduction that leads to serious dating.  And I’ll post progress reports, for better or worse, on the blog.  I’ve tried just about everything else.  Maybe this will do the trick.  And yes, my oblivious friends are welcome to participate.  Stay tuned. 

Thanks to the Internet, YouTube, Amazon and iTunes, my iPod’s "TV Theme" playlist is starting to hold a bunch of kidhood memories…

The Cisco Kid – Ending
The Outer Limits – Ending (First Season)
Burke’s Law
Twilight Zone – Ending (Herrmann)
Cimarron Strip
The Green Hornet
Route 66 – Ending
Mysterious Universe
I Spy
The Avengers – 1968
Lassie – Ending (1966)
Ranger Hal
Captain Kangaroo
Courageous Cat

And much more…

I was able to snag a copy of the Green Hornet theme with Al Hirt’s fantastic trumpet playing, and without the hokey voiceover, off of some fan’s web site.  Same for the really nice copy of the end music to Route 66.  I got the end music to Lassie off of YouTube, where I was pleased to see other fans were just as taken by its simple and beautiful sentimentality as I was long ago.  From YouTube I also got the end title music for The Cisco Kid.  It was music that promised a kid way more adventure then TV back then could deliver unfortunately.  It’s amazing looking back on it, how low budget TV was in those days, and yet how good some of the music was.  When I was a kid I’d try to record some of this stuff and always had to contend with the local TV station blaring something over the music as it played.  It was frustrating.  Now I’m finding tons of this music on YouTube.  Amazingly, I’m also finding clips from the local morning and afternoon kid’s shows I used to watch once upon a time.

I found clips from Ranger Hal and set about trying to locate the happy-go-lucky title music they used for that show.  I figured it was some easy listening song and I was right.  Some YouTube poster identified it for me as an old Mitch Miller song, Whistle Stop.  It wasn’t available on Amazon or iTunes but Googling around I found an mp3 of it on another fan site and I’ve been grooving to it for the past couple of days, letting it take me back to a time when life stretched out in front of me wide open and so very very large.

The clip Mysterious Universe, was used as background music to The Space Explorers, which I used to watch raptly on Ranger Hal’s show.  Long after Ranger Hal went off the air, and The Space Explorers faded into distant memory, I would hear that music whenever I looked up at the stars.  I found out a couple years ago that it’s actually from a library of canned music and not available for sale anywhere.  How I got my copy I am not at liberty to say, and I made a promise not to pass it around, but I will be forever in that person’s debt.

I would pay serious money for a copy of the background music they used in the Courageous Cat cartoon series.  It was composed by Johnny Holiday and it’s serious 1950s detective show jazz…the kind of thing you’d more likely expect to hear on a show like Peter Gunn or 77 Sunset Strip then a kid’s cartoon.  Holiday and his orchestra were Smoking when they recorded that music!  Why he didn’t do more stuff like that I’ll never know.

Some people may have forgotten by now, that Rowan Williams became Archbishop of Canterbury bearing a history of progressive thinking on homosexuality…

Rowan Williams: gay relationships ‘comparable to marriage’

Rowan Williams believes that gay sexual relationships can “reflect the love of God” in a way that is comparable to marriage, The Times has learnt.

Gay partnerships pose the same ethical questions as those between men and women, and the key issue for Christians is that they are faithful and lifelong, he believes.

Dr Williams is known to be personally liberal on the issue but the strength of his views, revealed in private correspondence shown to The Times, will astonish his critics.

The news threatens to reopen bitter divisions over ordaining gay priests, which pushed the Anglican Communion towards a split.

But this isn’t new, and that needs to be emphasized.  What is being reported here are Williams’ correspondence on the issue Prior to his becoming Archbishop…

As Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Williams recommitted the Anglican Communion to its orthodox position that homosexual practice is incompatible with Scripture at the Lambeth Conference, which closed on Sunday.

However, in an exchange of letters with an evangelical Christian, written eight years ago when he was Archbishop of Wales, he described his belief that biblical passages criticising homosexual sex were not aimed at people who were gay by nature.

He argued that scriptural prohibitions were addressed to heterosexuals looking for sexual variety. He wrote: “I concluded that an active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex might therefore reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage, if and only if it had about it the same character of absolute covenanted faithfulness.” Dr Williams described his view as his “definitive conclusion” reached after 20 years of study and prayer. He drew a distinction between his own beliefs as a theologian and his position as a church leader, for which he had to take account of the traditionalist view.

The letters, written in the autumn of 2000 and 2001, were exchanged with Deborah Pitt, a psychiatrist and evangelical Christian living in his former archdiocese in South Wales, who had written challenging him on the issue.

In reply, he described how his view began to change from that of opposing gay relationships in 1980. His mind became “unsettled” by contact as a university teacher with Christian students who believed that the Bible forbade promiscuity rather than gay sex. 

This wasn’t unknown to church reactionaries at the time of his appointment.  They kicked up a fuss over Williams precisely because of what they knew his thinking on same sex relationships was.  The question is, does Williams still think this or did he, upon becoming head of the church, revert back to his previous beliefs.  Because Williams, despite the hysterical protestations of the haters, has been anything but a friend to gay people.  At every juncture on the road to the schism that sure looks inevitable to me, Williams has consistently, Consistently, ratcheted up official hostility toward gay people.  He has done nothing, absolutely nothing, to bring gay people more into the heart of the church.  Everything, absolutely everything that he has actually done, has pushed gay people further away from it.  It’s hard not to conclude that he’s had a profound change of heart regarding the sanctity, the reflection of God, in same sex love.

If the stiff arm he’s giving to gay Anglicans is his way of trying to mollify violent haters like Bishop Akinola enough that they won’t bolt from the church, he’s worse then merely an idiot.  And not simply because Akinola and his kind won’t be satisfied with anything short of a purge of homosexuals from the face of the earth, so they sure as hell aren’t going to accept them in the church pews, let alone in the leadership.  Those who were hopeful when William’s took office need to consider that the man never really had his heart in affirming gay people as his neighbors.  His "definite conclusion" simply melted away when they put the Archbishop’s robes on him, leaving behind only the bedrock that preexisted it. 

Because, if the love between a same sex couple Does reflect the love of God, then isn’t the man who strikes at those lovers for bearing that love within their hearts guilty also of striking at God’s love?  Either Williams still believes what he wrote or he doesn’t, or worse…he thinks the structure of the church is more sacred then the love of God, reflected in the hearts of the faithful. 

It might well be the latter.  And if that’s the case, it’s unsurprising that he’s loosing the battle for the soul of the church to the likes of Akinola.  Take the love of God out of the church, and Akinola is exactly what you have left.

At some point Akinola is going to lead his flock away from the church of England.  If that hasn’t been staringly obvious before now his current argument that the Church of England is a relic of colonialism should I think, decisively settle the question.  He is going to do it.  And at some point after that…soon I would guess…Ratzinger and Akinola are going to publically shake hands.

Five weeks.  That’s how much vacation time I have accrued.  My employer allows us to store up to three months worth and then you begin to loose it.  I doubt I’ll ever get that much stored away, but a couple years ago when the layoffs were pending I had two months stored, because if they lay you off you get your unused vacation time as part of the severance.  A lot of us back then were hording our vacation time in case we needed it to tide us over between jobs.  I’m not willingly hording mine now…I just can’t afford to take the kind of vacation I like…the extended road trip.  The cost of gas is forcing me to hold off until I get some actual money saved up, as opposed to vacation time alone. 

But saving that money has become unaccountably hard lately.  Well…not…  I know what’s happening.  I only think I’m cutting down on my gas expense.  In reality, I’m just nibbling at it.  You may think you’re saving money by not driving as much too.  Well…no.  You aren’t.

Oh yes…I see the price of gas creeping back down a tad at the local gas stations, and the corporate news media is waving that around.  Whoop-de-do.  Oh look…it’s back below four dollars a gallon now!  Sweet!   But you need to keep in mind that you’re paying for fuel every time you buy something.  What’s that you say?  Your grocery bill hasn’t risen all that much?  Hahahahaha…

Here’s a fun little mystery for you guys. How can taking away 4 oz of coffee produce more cups of coffee? We’ve been thinking about it ever since Blueprint for Financial Prosperity sent us this photo the other day, and we just can’t figure it out. Could it be magic? Some strange new property of the Grocery Shrink Ray?

Click on that last link…the one marked Grocery Shrink Ray.  Go ahead.  In the meantime, I need to add The Consumerist to my blog roll.  They’re kinda like the Upfront and Selling It pages of Consumer Reports, but more pissed off.

Just saying…

Misadventures in Atlanta
A Dating Scene Blog

Excuse me ma’am, but your husband is gay
By Blanca

When I moved to the South, I thought I lost an important tool: my gaydar. I routinely met men I believed were gay, only to discover they either only dated women or were married to them.

I mourned the loss of my sixth sense, but then a co-worker clued me in: Blanca, if you think they are gay, it’s likely because they Are.

Obviously this isn’t always true, but I’ve since learned that some of the couplings I questioned were indeed what I suspected.

As we all know, Atlanta has an expansive, vibrant and seemingly supportive gay community, but some men (and women) instead choose a traditional partnership with someone of the opposite sex. In some cases, their spouse knows, while in others it can either be a lifelong secret or a Jerry Springer episode…

In the case of people who go into these gay-straight marriages knowing what they’re doing, as opposed to being in denial about their sexual orientation, I’m willing to bet that it’s mostly a generational thing, with more older gay folk doing this then younger, and that it’s also mostly a bible-belt thing.

As I said in a previous post, I’ve had this track record in my dating life of falling for guys who later claimed to be completely, perfectly, absolutely heterosexual.  Yet my shyness when it comes to dating nearly immobilizes me, and I am not one of those who likes to hit on straight guys by any means.  And yes, there are gay guys like that.  Think of it as the gay male version of a straight guy who thinks lesbians are hot.  I am not anything like that guy.  I need someone who is on the same page as me.  Very much so.  And between that and my shyness I have never, Never approached any guy who wasn’t pinging my gaydar pretty solidly…or so I thought at the time. 

Yet I seemed to keep making the same mistake over and over again.  So over the years I came to think that the problem is I have lousy gaydar.  I began making jokes about how bad my it is.  But now I look back over the course of my adult life and I realize that I have spent most of the waking hours in a week in the workplace with tons of heterosexuals.  And when I look at how those heterosexuals relate to each other, verses the ersatz straight guys in my life, I have to wonder.  Anyone who thinks that gay people, gay men in particular, are way more preoccupied with sex then heterosexuals are, is living in Fantasyland.  The subtext between them is always there, just as it is between gay guys or lesbians…

Harry Burns: You realize of course that we could never be friends.
Sally Albright: Why not?
Harry Burns: What I’m saying is – and this is not a come-on in any way, shape or form – is that men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.
Sally Albright: That’s not true. I have a number of men friends and there is no sex involved.
Harry Burns: No you don’t.
Sally Albright: Yes I do.
Harry Burns: No you don’t.
Sally Albright: Yes I do.
Harry Burns: You only think you do.
Sally Albright: You say I’m having sex with these men without my knowledge?
Harry Burns: No, what I’m saying is they all WANT to have sex with you.
Sally Albright: They do not.
Harry Burns: Do too.
Sally Albright: They do not.
Harry Burns: Do too.
Sally Albright: How do you know?
Harry Burns: Because no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.
Sally Albright: So, you’re saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive?
Harry Burns: No. You pretty much want to nail ’em too.
Sally Albright: What if THEY don’t want to have sex with YOU?
Harry Burns: Doesn’t matter because the sex thing is already out there so the friendship is ultimately doomed and that is the end of the story.
Sally Albright: Well, I guess we’re not going to be friends then.
Harry Burns: I guess not.
Sally Albright: That’s too bad. You were the only person I knew in New York. 

–When Harry Met Sally 

And it’s exactly that subtext, which I see all the time when I’m in a mixed company of straight men and women, that I just never pick up on in certain other contexts.  Just as there is a difference between acting gay and being gay…

…there is a difference between acting and being straight. 

Was I really mistaken about the sexual orientation of those guys I tried to date once upon a time?  Or was it the nobility I thought I saw within them that I was mistaken about? 

…by the way…  Happy National Underwear Day!

via The Local…

Germany wants limits for uranium levels in drinking water

The German Health Ministry is reportedly preparing to establish maximum levels for uranium in drinking water after a study found the radioactive material in water supplies throughout the country.

How about zero?  Geeze… 

I stumbled across this story in the St. Petersburg Times the other day and it’s been haunting me ever since…

The girl in the window

The family had lived in the rundown rental house for almost three years when someone first saw a child’s face in the window.

A little girl, pale, with dark eyes, lifted a dirty blanket above the broken glass and peered out, one neighbor remembered.

Everyone knew a woman lived in the house with her boyfriend and two adult sons. But they had never seen a child there, had never noticed anyone playing in the overgrown yard.

The girl looked young, 5 or 6, and thin. Too thin. Her cheeks seemed sunken; her eyes were lost.

The child stared into the square of sunlight, then slipped away.

And lost forever she would have been had someone not finally called the police.  We’ve all heard one or more variations on this story before haven’t we?  Someone finally walks in the door and finds not so much a home as an indoor landfill…

Plant City Detective Mark Holste had been on the force for 18 years when he and his young partner were sent to the house on Old Sydney Road to stand by during a child abuse investigation. Someone had finally called the police.

They found a car parked outside. The driver’s door was open and a woman was slumped over in her seat, sobbing. She was an investigator for the Florida Department of Children and Families.

"Unbelievable," she told Holste. "The worst I’ve ever seen."

The police officers walked through the front door, into a cramped living room.

"I’ve been in rooms with bodies rotting there for a week and it never stunk that bad," Holste said later. "There’s just no way to describe it. Urine and feces — dog, cat and human excrement — smeared on the walls, mashed into the carpet. Everything dank and rotting."

Tattered curtains, yellow with cigarette smoke, dangling from bent metal rods. Cardboard and old comforters stuffed into broken, grimy windows. Trash blanketing the stained couch, the sticky counters.

The floor, walls, even the ceiling seemed to sway beneath legions of scuttling roaches.

And in a small room, about the size of a walk-in closet, they found the little girl.  She was almost seven years old, and had never been outside.  She was malnourished and anemic.  She made no eye contact, spoke not a word, only occasional grunts.  Yet battery of tests showed there was nothing physically wrong with her brain.  Brain scans, vision, hearing and genetics tests found nothing medically wrong with her. She was not deaf.  She not autistic.  She had no physical ailments such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy.  She was aware of her surroundings, yet utterly unable to relate to them, or to the people around her.  It was as if, no matter where they took her, she was still alone in the small room she had grown up in.  When nurses inserted an intravenous feeding tube into her, the needle penetrating her skin elicited no response.

The romantic image of the human infant left abandoned in the wilderness, raised only by animals, makes for some great fantasy.  Tarzan.  Mowgli.  Here’s the reality.

The doctors and social workers had no way of knowing all that had happened to Danielle. But the scene at the house, along with Danielle’s almost comatose condition, led them to believe she had never been cared for beyond basic sustenance. Hard as it was to imagine, they doubted she had ever been taken out in the sun, sung to sleep, even hugged or held. She was fragile and beautiful, but whatever makes a person human seemed somehow missing.

Armstrong called the girl’s condition "environmental autism." Danielle had been deprived of interaction for so long, the doctor believed, that she had withdrawn into herself.

The most extraordinary thing about Danielle, Armstrong said, was her lack of engagement with people, with anything. "There was no light in her eye, no response or recognition. . . . We saw a little girl who didn’t even respond to hugs or affection. Even a child with the most severe autism responds to those."

The human consciousness is not a blank slate.  But the pull instinct has on it is subtle.  We are not born with the knowledge we need for life.  We are born with a ravenous curiosity that drives us to learn.  We are not born knowing how to relate to our own kind.  What we are is born with is a hunger for contact.  The ancient legacy of all those who came before us in the chain of life can only take us so far.  The newborn mind immediately sets out on the rest of the journey to the human status, hungrily absorbing everything it can see and hear and touch, calling out to the world in blurps and grunts and howls and giggles, digesting the response it gets back.  And when there is no response, It simply fills itself up with its own internal chatter, and that becomes the child’s world.

Dani, the girl in this story, was placed in foster care, and eventually found a loving family willing to do the hard work of taking care of her.   There is hope that she may learn to take care of herself one day, but it is a constant fight now, against the internal world her mind had to construct for itself…

Every weekday, for half an hour, speech therapist Leslie Goldenberg tries to teach Dani to talk. She sits her in front of a mirror at a Bonita Springs elementary school and shows her how to purse her lips to make puffing sounds.

"Puh-puh-puh," says the teacher. "Here, feel my mouth." She brings Dani’s fingers to her lips, so she can feel the air.

Dani nods. She knows how to nod now. Goldenberg puffs again.

Leaning close to the mirror, Dani purses her lips, opens and closes them. No sound comes out. She can imitate the movement, but doesn’t know she has to blow out air to make the noise.

She bends closer, scowls at her reflection. Her lips open and close again, then she leaps up and runs across the room. She grabs a Koosh ball and bounces it rapidly.

She’s lost inside herself. Again.

But in many ways, Dani already has surpassed the teacher’s expectations, and not just in terms of speech. She seems to be learning to listen, and she understands simple commands…

For the rest of her life it is going to be a fight with that internal world because she can just disappear into it in the blink of an eye and will, repeatedly, because it is more familiar to her then the real world outside of her skin, because it is more real, because it loved her first. 

And reading about Dani’s struggle, I think I understand something about myself a little better.  The shyness.  The nearly debilitating shyness. It’s not that I’m afraid of people.  Oh contraire…people fascinate me no end.  And I love companionship.  I need company.  Lots of it.  But…I just don’t know how to get it.  I don’t know how to approach people.  That’s what I’m afraid of.  Not people, but…weirdly…socializing with them.  I’m lost when it comes to that.  Absolutely lost.

The home I grew up in couldn’t have been more the opposite of Dani’s.  We were low budget, but I never went to bed hungry.  My clothes were mostly second hand, but I never walked out the door in them dirty.  I had all the hugs I could ever have wanted.  I never doubted I was loved.  I had some toys, not many but enough to engage my imagination.  And books.  They had me reading before I’d even entered first grade.  There was family, there was our little concrete block and folding chairs Baptist church.  There were all the adults on our block of little apartments that kept an eye on me as I played in the little back yard.  Mom took me everywhere she went just about, except of course to work.  She took me shopping with her, to the museums and movies.  Her and her church friends took me on outings in the country.  We went on vacation every year to the seashore, where I would wander around under mom’s careful eye, picking up seashells and building sand castles.  My world, before I’d ever entered first grade, was full of all kinds of fascinating, absorbing, curious things. 

Except for one thing.  And I’m only just now really realizing it.  There were no children like me.  That I didn’t get until we moved to a new set of apartments out in Maryland, because mom didn’t want me going to school in the neighborhood where I’d been a toddler.  We moved from a tiny apartment in Washington D.C. to a much nicer one in the county.  Now I had a big field of grass out back to play in.  And a tiny forest of my very own.  And a creek.  And a little playground.  And…there were other children.  Lots of other children.  Some my own age, some slightly older.  And about a month later, there came my first day in school, and I found myself swimming in a sea of other kids my own age. 

And that was when things became…difficult.  And the more difficult they became, the more pleasure I found in my books, and drawing, and my toys, and all the imaginary worlds I’d created for myself when I was living in that other neighborhood, because there was no one else to play with.

If you’d asked me just last week if I’d had the company of other kids in my life growing up I’d have instantly said yes.  But those were my school years I would have been remembering.  It never occurred to me to look again at the little bit of life I can recall before that first day of school.  And now that I think of it…no.  There were absolutely no kids in my life back then.  I am not kidding.  There were none.  Plenty of caring, loving adults.  Lots of affection.  Tons of human interaction.  They took me places.  They read to me.  They hugged me.  They cared for me.  But…there were no other kids.  I played alone, in my own imaginary worlds back then.  And when I suddenly found myself surrounded by other kids, I played by myself most of the time.  That was, I told myself in later years, because I got bullied a lot.  Which was true enough.  But I was painfully shy.  Meeting new people in a purely social setting has always been an enormously stressful thing for me.  I can do it in a business setting, no problem.  I can do it when there is some larger context I can relate to.  But to just walk into a room and socialize stresses me out to the point of immobility.  I just want to run away.  And when I can’t, I withdraw into the world inside my head.

And I still am.  And to this day, I find myself popping back into the world inside my head whenever I’m stressing out.  Until I read Dani’s story, I’d never given that the slightest bit of thought, other then to acknowledge that I have a very active imagination.  And imagination, I tell myself, is a good thing.  And, it is.  My ability to construct things inside my head and work with them as though they were real is what makes me a good programmer.  That I can’t actually See a program running, but only it’s output, has never once fazed me.  I can easily visualize the flow of a program in my head.  I don’t have to see gears and wheels turning to understand how it works.  I can disappear into algorithms for hours at a stretch, refining them to an elegant perfection.  It is a pure pleasure.  And it makes me a very good living.  I draw this way too.  I almost never do preliminary sketches on paper.  I sketch a thing in my head for hours, until I know how I want it to look on paper.  Then I pick up the pencil.

But sometimes I don’t bother.  Often…all too horribly often…just having created it in my head is satisfying enough.  My series, A Coming Out Story, is like that.  I have it mostly all scripted out…in my head.  And I can spend hours looking at it, and enjoying it…chuckling to myself over and over again at certain passages…refining it a tad here and there.  Getting it out has been a real struggle though, and that’s not all because it represents a stressful time in my life.  Sometimes, the world inside my head is a lot more fun then then world beyond.  I have to struggle sometimes to place myself, firmly, solidly, in that other, Real world.

I have been told, over and over again, by longtime friends, that part of the problem I have socializing may be that I spend too much time inside myself.  But it’s not entirely that.  I just don’t know how to approach people.  I keep drawing a blank.  Now for the first time in my life I’m really looking back at that period just before my first day of school, when I had no one else my own age to play with, and I’m wondering. 

So…I’m still chewing on it.  More later…

[Edited a tad…]