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. 

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.

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.

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.

I’ve been collecting TV shows I used to watch when I was a kid for my home video library. What I’ve had to discover is how incredibly sexist a lot of them are, especially regards the one off female supporting characters per episode. There is so much heterosexual male fantasy there that, when I was that age, went right over my head, that I can’t stop seeing now. Okay…it probably wasn’t just my age back then. Gay boys tend to know even then that there is something a bit different about them.

TV shows like Burke’s Law, which if you ignored the heavy handed female sexpot of the day thread in the plots, was actually a pretty good mystery story series that played fair with the audience. The clues were always there for you to see, but you almost never did until Amos Burke pulled it all together. I tended to zone out at the romance scenes…there were an obligatory two per episode, plus the one at the beginning when Burke gets the phone call about yet another murder somewhere among the rich and famous. I always mentally skipped over the romance scenes. It was that Rolls Royce Silver Cloud II that totally fascinated me.

I picked up a set of Man From U.N.C.L.E. dvds, because I remembered how much I liked watching all the cool spy gadgets in it, and truth be told had I been willing to admit it, like a lot of girls back then I thought David McCallum was very nice on the eyes. What I’d forgotten, probably because I always zoned out on those scenes, was how relentlessly horny Napoleon Solo always was. You just couldn’t leave him alone with any of the female U.N.C.L.E. agents, who were of course always sexy and willing. Problem was there were men back then who felt perfectly free to be like that to the women in their workplace. And now they resent being told not to.

Speaking of secret agent shows, at least Emma Peel was played as the equal to John Steed, who was always a gentleman, even if she was required to have at least one scene per episode in those tight leather suits. And you got none of that in Secret Agent (aka Danger Man in Britain where it originated). I think the reason I liked Secret Agent more than the others was Patrick McGoohan was a more convincing secret agent, and he seemed like a decent man doing a very dangerous job for his country. The others were pure fantasy. Heterosexual male fantasy.  

And that fantasy played big in Hollywood, among the high testosterone studio heads. But sometimes it was played for laughs. One that went completely over my head until recently was Petticoat Junction. Look it up in the urban dictionary (“lots of curves you bet”), and also take note of the town just down the tracks named Hooterville. How did I not notice this? Did Hooterville have a Hooters I wonder.

That was Hollywood back then, where the hero of the story had to have a new babe every week, and gay males had to endure being told from every direction that there was something mentally wrong with them for being so preoccupied with sex all the time.

A few weeks ago I tried my best to roust myself out of the fatigue that’s been plaguing me for way too long, and at least Try to develop some film that’s been sitting patiently in my darkroom. I have several rolls of Fuji Neopan 100, 120 film shot in the Hasselblad (and maybe also in the Mamiya C330), some of which have probably been sitting there for a couple years. I got as far as loading the film onto reels and putting them in the tank. Then the tank sat there loaded for at least two, maybe three weeks. I’ve no idea which. 

This is where my head is at these days. It’s been making me think it’s time to pick out a coffin…except my will says to scatter my ashes back home in California, the land of my birth.  Then the other day I saw a post on Facebook from the Washington DC gay paper, The Washington Blade. It was about a reenactment of Frank Kameny’s historic protests for gay rights in front of the White House…in 1953.

You either have to be a gay or lesbian person of my generation or older, to appreciate how much guts that took back then.

Time was I would not have hesitated to be there to be a photojournalist once more and document that with my cameras. But I’m 71 years old and I’m tired all the fucking time anymore, and as soon as I thought I have to be there, I also thought but I’m too damn tired anymore. 

Something deep inside of me…I have no idea what it could have been…pushed me forward. I took a train down to DC, got a room at my usual hotel, and at the appropriate time I got on the Metro, got off at Metro Center, and walked to the White House. And for the first time in years and did my photojournalist thing, and felt alive again.

I came home and started going through my photos. The plan is to have another sub gallery up in my Life And Times gallery with the shots I got of the reenactment in it. Then I found a roll of black and white with some interesting shots I hadn’t catalogued.

Why my art photography will probably never be well liked…

While working on that I noticed I had a third sub gallery for Sleep Talking God that I never finished, and I also started working on that.

Then just now I finally developed those two rolls of Hasselblad film I loaded several weeks ago.

Something triggered me…I have no idea really what it was. And I’m still tired all the fucking time. Maybe it’s just a spring awakening. Maybe I’m getting over regret at going back to work and not diving into my creative arts like I’d thought I would in retirement. I’m regretting going back, much as I loved that job and everything I was able to accomplish being a part of the space program. But things there are different there now, in ways that prevent me from fully engaging in the work I used to love. Right now if I had it to do over again I would decline the offer. But I was on a downhill spiral then anyway, so maybe it makes no difference. Part time retired or not I still have to wake myself up somehow.

This is a start. Hopefully.

There’s a neighborhood cat that comes around to my front door periodically now. All I know about it is it isn’t a feral, it’s a young male tabby, and supposedly he belongs to someone in the apartments a block over. 

It began as it has every time with me. First the cat starts coming around because I put out bird feeders and that attracts cats. A cat comes around and next thing I know we’re sitting on my porch together. Then it starts letting me pet it. Next thing I know I’m letting it in the house and from that point on the cat thinks mine is a second (or third, fourth, fifth, sixth…and so on…) home.

This time around I decided I would not feed it, because after the calico I don’t want another second hand pet. I will go to my grave wondering if I could have done things any better for her last days. She was a feral who I spent years gaining the trust of. Then she got sick, I took her to a vet but she got worse, and then she wandered off and I never saw her again. She was maybe eighteen years old. You get really attached and when things go wrong you blame yourself for every little thing you think you could have done better forever. Like when I let Claudia go outside that morning.

So this one, and I still don’t know his name, gets no food from me, but I will put out a water dish. Then when he started coming indoors more often I put out a litter box in the upstairs bathroom, on the principle that it really isn’t a good idea to let the cat choose for itself where it goes to the bathroom. The calico taught me that one. I figured he would usually do his business outside and I keep the same agreement with him that I’ve kept with all the other outdoor cats that have come my way, which is when they want out the door opens. After what happened to Claudia I’d rather his owners kept him inside, but once an outdoor cat always an outdoor cat and I just accommodate as a matter of trust. But since he was spending more and more time in the house I put out a litter box. He ignored it for slightly more than two months, but then one day I found he’d made a deposit. 

Several weeks of random visits went by until yesterday when he made another one. This was during the usual routine of inspecting the basement, then racing up the stairs to the second floor, only to lounge in the hallway cleaning and groom himself for a while. Occasionally he decides to take a nap on my bed, which I’m fine with. We’ve napped together twice. But he never stayed more than an hour or two and that was probably because I wasn’t feeding him. Which was the plan. No more pets. It’s too much for me anymore.

So…anyway…This morning he presented himself on my front porch to be let in. Then raced up the stairs to use the litter box. Then back downstairs to be let out again.

Wait…what?

I’m not sure I like where this is going. But then the plan all along is I don’t want him getting too attached, so maybe this is how he sees the bargain we’re making.

Walking back from the grocery store yesterday morning, I chanced across a neighbor walking to their car and we started chatting. Being pretty much in the same age group the conversation took a turn toward the trials and tribulations of growing old. We compared notes. Yes, back in the day we could recover from small injuries pretty quickly. She mentioned her husband once played in a band and still had his drum set in the basement. I mentioned my Alembic bass that I’d mostly taken up because kids of my generation were supposed to learn a musical instrument and I still felt that even though I’m a graphic artist, it would help my mindset if I did.

I guess it was my usual way of making banter, but as she was getting into their car she mentioned that however old I am I still act like I’m young.

It’s not the first time I’ve heard that. After mom died I entered a period of therapy, and the shrink who worked with me told me that I “present young.”

I can tell you it’s not affected in any way. If anything I’ve had to work most of my adult life at allowing me to be me…my school years prior to Woodward were so stifling, plus the constant static I got from my maternal grandmother simply for being my father’s son. And…yes…having to deal with my sexual orientation when that became a thing. Who do I trust? Who can I be open with? Where can I just be me? Those moments when you have to suddenly decide whether to be true to yourself or duck never stop coming. But you learn to handle them…for better or worse.

All I can think is I was always a science kid, and us science kids never stop enjoying discovering things about nature and the world around us. Which means you never ‘grow up” because you never stop growing.

Sure you move into different stages of life…you get a job, you take on responsibilities you didn’t have to when you were a kid…but you stay curious. Life keeps on being an adventure, even in your old age. Yes it can be harrowing at times. Heartbreaking even. But still an adventure. There is always something more to be discovered.

So I present young. It’s just me. I reckon I won’t have that second childhood they talk about old people having, because I never got completely done with the first one.

So I have my two main characters, Terry and Jeff, a twenty-something gay couple, plus several other supporting characters all involved in this supposed ghost hunt arranged by a cheap reality TV show. Neither Terry nor Jeff believe in ghosts. Terry’s there because he wants to investigate the goings on at this supposedly haunted place because it’s tweaked his curiosity. He thinks ‘supernatural’ is a meaningless term, and that everything has a logical reason. And for the five hundred bucks the TV show routinely offers to anyone who can spend the night in their haunted place du jour, because his spending habits have caused friction in the relationship. Jeff gets involved because so many other local ghost hunters dropped out as soon as they laid eyes on the abandoned office building where this all happens, and the producer offers him a slot in it at the very last minute when he shows up with Terry. And because he’s afraid his man is walking into trouble.

So the cast includes true believers, a couple non believers, and the scam artists working the reality cable TV show. I’m finding that the more I work with the background characters the more I come to know them, the more I see how important their individual background stories are to the story I’m telling. Which isn’t about ghosts.

The thing about ghost stories, the good ones anyway, is the stories aren’t actually about ghosts. The ghosts are a catalyst for the events in the story, which is about the people. And I’m telling story two stories really. One is the love story I never got enough of, especially when I was younger. The other is a morality play I’ve thumped on many times in many different ways.

I like writing these stories the way Ken Burns’ Civil War series did about the war, where you have the big players like Lincoln, Grant, Lee, and Jefferson Davis, but he moves the story along with entries from the diaries of everyday Americans who were caught up in it. It is in their stories you get your best sense of what that war was about, and why it had to be fought.

Ayn Rand (who yes I’m embarrassed now to admit I have read) had her grand larger than life story embodied by her larger than life heroes. It was a mistake, but probably one she couldn’t help making because she was what she was, namely a worshiper of strongmen. Yes she had her secondary characters, Eddie Willers, and that too beautiful not gay could not possibly be gay brakeman we first meet whistling the tune to Hally’s fifth concerto. He never even gets a name. But the story does not live in any of them. 

That’s the problem. She almost gets it, when she relates in a series of quick sketches after the John Galt speech, how everyone knew after they heard it who would be going on strike and disappearing next, and who would not. But she doesn’t tell those stories. She isn’t interested in them. The everyday people who stand up to crooks and bullies are not her heroes. But they’re mine.

Tolkien got it when he wrote, “Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.”

I submit that those small everyday deeds Are the great power. And when, in your art, you thump your pulpit about it, you can draw in large bold strokes the morality sermon at the heart of it, but it’s in the detail where you show how it lives in your characters and your reader sees it.

In the background of my story are the corrupt billionaires and crony capitalists who built the Palmer Building. But they never actually appear in the story. I’m pulling a switch on the Ayn Rand method, where my larger than life characters are deep in the background and it’s the street level people who are my main focus. I tell the reader about all the thievery and grift that built the Palmer Building, but what I put front and center is a reality TV producer who gets his kicks, and his money, manipulating people, because it amuses him. Everything about his TV show is faked, simply to attract a gullible audience and a few true believers, and this time a couple young skeptics, all of whom he uses purely for entertainment. Behind their backs he’s sneering at them. He’s a dime store swindler, but no different in any meaningful way from the ultra rich crony capitalists who built the location of his current bit of flimflam.

Only this time the haunting is real. The final boss, as the gamers say, is waiting for him, and for them all. Something deeper and darker than anything even the rich and powerful could manage, let alone the cheap and contemptuous: and different metals behave differently in the fire. Which I think is a better story than simply spilling a lot of blood and guts and cheap scares, Or straight up sermonising.

Jacob Bronowski once said that art does not set out to preach but to shine a light, and that “the values by which we are to survive are not rules for just and unjust conduct, but are those deeper illuminations in whose light justice and injustice, good and evil, means and ends are seen in fearful sharpness of outline.” 

That was Rand’s failing. She seemed constitutionally incapable of just showing the reader the values she’s going on about. She has to hit them over the head with them. Over and over again. That John Galt speech near the end was, in its comprehensive pontification, an abject failure of artistic nerve. By that point after being hit in the head with it over and over and over in a Russian sized thousand page plus novel the reader should have bloody hell already got the message. But the reader could not be trusted to see. Probably because the light was so dim.

I submit that where you really see those deeper illuminations is in those small everyday acts of kindness and love. And in the quiet courage and inner strength those things arise from. That is the glue that holds civilization together, and keeps the darkness at bay. The world does not need Atlas, it can hold itself up. One small act of kindness and love, one small act of courage, at a time.

The American Age Is Over

1. Canada

Fittingly, it was the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, who declared the official time of death.

“The global economy is fundamentally different today than it was yesterday. The system of global trade anchored on the United States, that Canada has relied on since the end of the Second World War—a system that, while not perfect, has helped to deliver prosperity for our country for decades—is over.

Our old relationship of steadily deepening integration with the United States is over.

The eighty-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership—when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect, and championed the free and open exchange of good and services—is over.

While this is a tragedy, it is also the new reality.”

And just like that, the age of American empire, the great Pax Americana, ended.

We cannot overstate what has just happened. It took just 71 days for Donald Trump to wreck the American economy, mortally wound NATO, and destroy the American-led world order.

He did this with the enthusiastic support of the entire Republican party and conservative movement.

He did it with the support of a plurality of American voters.

He did not hide his intentions. He campaigned on them. He made them the central thrust of his election. He told Americans that he would betray our allies and give up our leadership position in the world.

There are only three possible explanations as to why Americans voted for this man:

they wanted what he promised;

they didn’t believe what he promised; or

they didn’t understand what he promised.

Pick whichever rationale you want, because it doesn’t matter. Whatever the reason was, it exposed half of the electorate—the 77 million people who voted for Trump—as either fundamentally unserious, decadent, or weak.

And no empire can survive the degeneration of its people.

2. No Going Back

Understand this: There is no going back.

If, tomorrow, Donald Trump revoked his entire regime of tariffs, it would not matter. It might temporarily delay some economic pain, but the rest of the world now understands that it must move forward without America.

If, tomorrow, Donald Trump abandoned his quest to annex Greenland and committed himself to the defense of Ukraine and the perpetuation of NATO, it would not matter. The free world now understands that its long-term security plans must be made with the understanding that America is a potential adversary, not an ally.

This realization may be painful for Americans. But we should know that the rest of the world understands us more clearly than we understand ourselves.

Vladimir Putin bet his life that American voters would be weak and decadent enough to return Donald Trump to the presidency. He was right.

Europeans are moving ahead with their own security plans because they realize, as a French minister put it, ‘We cannot leave the security of Europe in the hands of voters in Wisconsin every four years.’ He was right.

The Canadian prime minister declared the age of American leadership over. He was right.

Instead of arguing with this reality, or denying it, we should face it.

It’s bad enough being a failing empire. Let’s not also be a delusional failing empire. Let’s at least have some dignity about our situation.

The world will move on without us.

Economically this means that international trade will reorganize without the United States as the central hub. Relationships will be forged without concern as to our preferences. The dollar may well be displaced as the world’s reserve currency. American innovation will depart for other shores as the best and brightest choose to make their lives in countries where the rule of law is solid, secret police do not disappear people from the streets, and the government does not discourage research and make economic war on universities.

There’s a reason why countries like Belarus and El Salvador aren’t tech hubs.

All of this will mean slower growth at home and declining economic mobility. The pie will shrink and people will become more desperate to hold on to their slices.

If you want a small preview, look at what has happened to the British economy since Brexit.

The drag we experience will be much greater, because we had much further to fall.

In the security space, Europe will organize apart from us. The Europeans will create a separate nuclear umbrella and will likely include Canada, Japan, and Australia in their alliance. The ‘free world’ as we have understood it for the entirety of our lifetimes will no longer include America.

As a result, America will either drift, or find itself becoming more closely allied with the world’s authoritarians. We may become closer with Putin’s Russia or Xi’s China. We may find that we need them — Russia as a counterweight to democratic Europe and China as a source of cheap manufacturing to relieve some of the price pressure on American consumers.

The end of the American era doesn’t mean everything will become chaos overnight. We aren’t going to wake up tomorrow to the sound of the blaring war rig horn from Mad Max. We are still a rich country, with momentum carrying us forward. But in ways that will soon be perceptible and eventually be undeniable, things will get worse. And facts about America and the world that we have taken for granted since the end of the Second World War will no longer hold true.

3. Idiots

On the day that Trump’s tariffs collapsed America’s position in the world, Secretary of State Marco Rubio went to Brussels to demand that NATO allies increase defense spending to 5 percent of their budgets.

But here is how utterly stupid and unserious our government is:

Europe IS going to rearm. And they are going to do so by building up their internal defense industries so that they do not have to rely on America, which is in the process of threatening military action against a NATO member.

And the American response to this has been to cry foul.

U.S. officials have told European allies they want them to keep buying American-made arms, amid recent moves by the European Union to limit U.S. manufacturers’ participation in weapons tenders, five sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The messages delivered by Washington in recent weeks come as the EU takes steps to boost Europe’s weapons industry, while potentially limiting purchases of certain types of U.S. arms.
Our government thinks it can simultaneously:

demand that Europe re-arm;

threaten our European allies with territorial annexation; and demand that Europe buy American weapons.

We have a deeply stupid government — from our economically illiterate president to our craven and foolish secretary of state, from the freelancing billionaire dilettante who is gutting American soft power to the vaccine-denying health secretary who is firing as much talent as he can. From the senior economics advisor who thinks comic books are good investments, to the senators who voted to confirm this cabinet of hacks, to the representatives who stumble over themselves justifying each new inane MAGA pronouncement.

But also, we have the government we deserve.

The American age is over. And it ended because the American people were no longer worthy of it.

-Jonathan V. Last
The Bulwark
April 3, 2025

Bruce here. When I was a younger guy, watching Neil Armstrong plant the first human footstep on the moon, I would never have expected that I would be living in a failed nation in my old age. But here we are. And as Last says there is a lot of inertia left in what was the United States, so hopefully I won’t live to see the curtain rise on the dark ages, just the warm up to them.

But I am so desperately sorry for the younger gay guys I came to know during the Love In Action protests, and all the LGBT kids out there now. They are probably going to have to find somewhere else to live eventually. Preferably before everyone’s passports are confiscated, and/or the rest of the civilized world locks its doors against us. Like we did to the Jews during WWII.

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
-H.L. Mencken

I’m up early and step out onto my porch to check the weather and see if the neighborhood cat is out and about and wants to come in for a bit. I see that it’s rained, and there was some wind overnight because blossom petals from a tree nextdoor are scattered all over my porch. It is pleasantly warm.

Then one of the more impressive flashes of lightning I’ve ever seen streaks across the sky. Not sky to ground but cloud to cloud spreading out and covering half the sky above me. I’ve seen this sort of thing before but never that expansive and right over me. Seconds later a blast of thunder tears through the sky, then decays into a slow growling rumble that goes on and on.

I give it the applause it’s due, thinking maybe I wait a while before taking my morning walk.