Some may say it was my awful diet that caused the heart attack. I was actually being careful before then to keep my weight down because I liked how I looked. Some may say it was the dozen or so cigars I chain smoked right after I realized he’d retired and what it meant. But those were just symptoms.

I’ve heard so many stories, particularly among the gay folk I have hung out with, of devoted deeply in love couples who died close to each other. One goes and not long after that the other. But nobody wants to hear the stories of the single and lonely. We decay slowly, out of sight, out of mind. 

I’m pretty sure these days that my heart (the actual one, not the philosophical one) would not be in the state it’s in now had I lived in a better world and found my other half. But that was not to be. The stress of being a gay kid in a world that threw hate at you from every direction, plus singleness on top of that, did it’s work. A few weeks ago I had an overnight hospital stay because my heart was dancing wildly in my chest. Atrial Fibrillation they call it.

Atrial fibrillation (AFib) is an irregular and often rapid heartbeat that occurs when the heart’s upper chambers (atria) beat out of sync with the lower chambers (ventricles). This can reduce the heart’s ability to pump blood effectively and increase the risk of blood clots, stroke, heart failure, and other complications.

They were going to give me a procedure to shock the upper chambers into sync with the lower ones, which they assured me would be painful. But thankfully overnight my heart went back into normal, what they call sinus rhythm, and so they called it off and sent me back home with a new pill to take that supposedly would keep the afib in check. It did not.

For four days after my hospital stay the afib was gone and I thought the new pill was working. They’d told me it only worked in 75 percent of patients, and sure enough it eventually came back. But I wondered what was going on in those four days that it Was working. Well, that was after my hospital stay where I’d had no coffee.

So I went cold turkey on coffee and the afib went away. Next I tried some decaf. I’d been resisting decaf coffee ever since I noticed that drinking it in the afternoon made my insomnia worse. But I could not see the point in decaf so I just stopped drinking it in the afternoon. Now it seemed plain to me that caffeine was aggravating my afib so I had to give it up and that pushed me into trying decaf. And being the geek I am I had to research how they took the caffeine out of coffee. Turns out there are two processes, one that uses solvents and the other just water. In fact the water process was the first to make decaffeinated coffee beans, and it was discovered accidentally when a shipment of coffee beans got waterlogged on the trip to the buyer.

I gave Peet’s water process decaf a try and found it tasted no different from regular…just you’re not getting the caffeine hit now. This was something I was going to have to adjust to. But at least decaf was enjoyable.

That mostly fixed the afib but it didn’t go away completely and I wondered if there wasn’t something else in my diet contributing to it. The only thing that stood out for me was the artificial sweetener I started using after I reconnected with my high school crush and decided I needed to lose weight. Prior to then I was mostly getting a sugar jolt in the afternoon snarfing down candy bars, and it was when I stopped doing that I switched to getting my wake up your tired self from coffee. But I was using Splenda in my coffee so it wasn’t costing my waistline anything.

I did some more digging discovered that afib was a possible side effect of constantly consuming sucralose, which is the ingredient in Splenda.

“…studies from the American Heart Association journals, have found that people who regularly consume artificially sweetened drinks may have a higher risk of atrial fibrillation (an irregular heartbeat) compared to those who consume fewer such beverages.”

According to what I read those studies are not definitive, but suggestive. My own experience recently is, yeah it does.

I drink constantly, all day long and somewhat through the night. I have a glass or a mug of something next to me all the time, at work and at home. If my co-workers ever saw me in a meeting without my coffee or ice tea mug next to me they might ask if anything is wrong. And ever since 2006 all those drinks have had sucralose in them instead of sugar because I wanted to keep my weight down, and I liked the way having a narrow waistline made me look.

I stopped caring about that March 6, 2016. And yeah…it shows now. But I have no reason to care anymore. So I gave up on Splenda and started sweetening my coffee and ice tea with sugar. The afib went away. Or at least it declined to the point I couldn’t feel it happening anymore.

Yesterday I went back down to DC to hang out with a friend who lives there and to hit Alero for some of their good mexican food and a Godfather margarita. That was also a test to see if I could have a drink every now and then without waking up the afib. That morning I tried sweetening my decaf with Splenda, also as a test. I was hoping maybe I can just go with decaf forever and still use the Splenda that I still have a lot of in stock. The afib came back almost right away and I had to lay down for a bit. By the afternoon I felt good enough to take the Metro into DC and try a margarita. I had just one and it was no trouble. Back home I stuck to my sugar sweetened decaf ice tea and had no trouble with afib all night long.

So I think the Splenda is out now too. Alas I have a lot of it to give away. Also a bunch of K-Cups with Kirkland Medium Roast coffee in them, and all the bags of coffee beans I got at Baltimore Coffee and Tea. Things like Splenda and K-Cups I tend to buy in bulk at Costco because it’s cheaper in the long run. So it goes. The sugar I still have lots of is still good because that stuff does not go bad if you store it carefully. I kept that around for guests that didn’t want Splenda.

There’s a “Buy Nothing Hampden” Facebook group I can put the unopened splenda and coffee on (I have some downsizing I need to do this year so I’ll probably be hitting that page lots anyway). I think I can still keep my weight down if I just don’t snarf down a lot of candy like I was before 2006. If I can manage the afib with just some diet and lifestyle changes I’d rather do that then go for the ablation and possibly a pacemaker too, both of which won’t necessarily fix the problem anyway so I’ve been told by folks that have had that done.

The gay, single, and old life in the American healthcare system. Broken Heart Syndrome? 71 isn’t that old these days. I wonder lots lately if any of this would be happening to me now and not maybe in my 80s or 90s had I lived in a better world.

While looking for stickers for one of my drink mugs I came across this Pride rainbow sticker purchase from many years ago. How many of my local friends who happen to read this remember Deacon Maccubbin’s Lambda Rising bookstore?

In the coming out stories that gay folk mostly tell…those of my generation at least…you get to the part where they walk into a gay bar for the first time and it’s an epiphany. They realize they’re not alone after all, and there are so many of us of all different kinds in all walks of life. But for me that moment of epiphany was the first time I walked into Lambda Rising. All the books and magazines and newspapers I had no idea existed…it was like the world had opened its doors for me. It was on the shelves of Lambda Rising I discovered Howard Cruse’s Gay Comics, gay fiction and non-fiction I had no idea existed, and magazines and newspapers I didn’t know about, or could only get if I walked into a seedy “Adult” bookstand in Wheaton.

That bookstore made it plain what Vito Russo once said about how It is an old stereotype, that homosexuality has to do only with sex while heterosexuality is multifaceted and embraces love and romance. The comprehensive ocean of our lives was there on those shelves. Nobody could ever tell me again that we weren’t just as human as our heterosexual neighbors.

The difference back then was our books were kept off the shelves of the major booksellers. No I am not likely to find a copy of The Front Runner by Patricia Nell Warren, or Counter Play by Anne Snyder, Coyote by Peter Gadol, The Boys On The Rock by John Fox, The Celluloid Closet by Vito Russo, Love Alone by Paul Monette, Farm Boys by Will Fellows (director Ang Lee gave Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal copies of this book prior to filming Brokeback Mountain) or Coming Out Under Fire by Allan Berube in a Crown Books, let alone a copy of The Advocate or The Washington Blade. 

I was a regular visitor to the store near DuPont Circle when I could borrow mom’s car, and then later when the Metro reached Twinbrook, then when I moved to Baltimore to the one in the gayborhood here. But like a lot independent bookstores and big chains it eventually closed its doors, unable I suppose to compete with Amazon, and I was deeply sad to see it go.

The gay bars are closing too it seems, but that’s because we’re becoming more integrated into our communities. And you can find sexual and gender minority content in the few chain and independent bookstores left. The next book in the Percy Jackson series focusing on boyfriends Nico di Angelo and Will Solace is coming later this year and will probably be on the shelves everywhere because the Percy Jackson books have been huge sellers. Rick Riordan has done an amazing job of inclusivity in his stories and characters, and it’s all the more amazing that these books are published under a Disney imprint. But it’s easy for minority voices to get lost in the torrent of pop culture. There are other voices, other stories, that I still have to dig to find.

The closest thing I have now to Lambda Rising is my subscription to the Gay & Lesbian Review, which is a literary journal (It used to be called The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review) that gives me pointers to new books. But I really miss being able to walk into Lambda Rising and just browse.

Yeah…or for that matter any good bookstore or newsstand. It’s a real shame.

This quote, which I remembered from way back when but not who said it, has haunted me all my working life in this trade. Until now.

I understand that Dijkstra is a well regarded figure in computer science, but he’s also a prime example of how a person can be very intelligent, and very stupid. These things do not necessarily contradict each other.

Don Juan would say he was defeated by the second foe (clarity). Great intelligence can do that to a person who stops questioning what they know and how they know it. Or to paraphrase Yoda, certainty is the path to the stupid side of the Force. Certainty leads to arrogance, arrogance leads to crankiness, crankiness leads to everyone around you suffering.

Microsoft made many good improvements to the BASIC language that lifted it from a tool to teach students programming to an impressive tool for creating business applications. Microsoft gave BASIC scoping, subroutines and functions that returned values. You could set a keyword at the beginning of a file, and I always did, that forced variables to be declared before their use. You could have unions. In Visual Basic you got try-catch blocks, and eventually the BSTRING which gave you a real pointer to a string instead of a pointer to a descriptor that you had to decode. This was very useful for Windows API calls. In Visual Basic I had COM objects I could use to manipulate all the Microsoft Office applications. But even in DOS PDS Basic I could utilize a rich selection of third party libraries of assembly routines that allowed me to avoid the ON ERROR GOTO hack, and simply test for a return value when I did things like file I/O.

But the essence of it was still BASIC, which I’m sure would have kept it on this man’s shit list anyway. I loved working with it though, because if you gave your variables logical looking names you could write code that almost read like plain english. I made a good living working in BASIC. There was no mutilation, there was emergence. But try telling this to a dick like this man.

Anyway…I just read this on a Facebook page dedicated to the BASIC programming language, and it was very helpful in putting that ghost to rest.

This from Richard Keijzer, really tells you everything you need to know about the man…

Did you ever experience that knowledge of Basic programming was a liability? It prevented me from doing my job. This is what happened:

Last century I was a journalist for a trade magazine in The Netherlands. We got news that computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra was about to give a lecture in Amsterdam and we tried to arrange an interview beforehand. It seems he had a list of people that “indulged in Basic” and I was on that list. He made it very clear that he would not speak to bunglers, and there I stood in the corridor. The door to the room where Dijkstra was staying did not open for me…

So instead I went to his lecture, and transformed the data he gave there into an interview. My editor wouldn’t be satisfied if I returned empty handed.

A couple of weeks later I met with a friend, who was professor of computer linguistics and pattern recognition. I told him what happened and how I felt about that. He looked me in the eye and said: “Dijkstra has written a program to prove the correctness of other programs. The only problem is, his program cannot cope with discontinuities. Now, the GOTO command represents a discontinuity… You do the math!”

Yeah I can do the math. I can also write a very good business application in any of Microsoft’s BASICs. Also Java, and Python. Half of what’s in this website is my own HTML.

I have a postcard I sent to mom long ago, that I keep on one of my bookshelves with a bunch of odds and ends from passages of my life. Oh, and also some books. This particular postcard was one I found among her things after she passed away. Every now and then I take it off the shelf to read once more.

I would have been dating, or thought I was dating, strike three, “K” who was living on Hilton Head at the time. I would have been making a good living as a contract software developer renting a very nice garden apartment in Cockeysville, Maryland.

It was a time before affordable cell phones and the end of long distance charges. He and I would chat for hours on our land lines. The new cordless telephones were a blessing for us. We could chat together while going about our household chores as if we were together. This was a time when long distance rates still applied, so if he called me the plan was, since I was making good money and he wasn’t, that we’d hang up and I would call him and take the charge. We’d talk for so long the batteries in our phones would give out and we’d have to restart the conversation on the corded phones for a bit. I’d make plans to go visit him in Hilton Head when I was between contracts, or could take a long weekend. His place in Hilton Head was less than a day’s drive down I-95 so it was easy to spend time together with him. I was in love…again. This time, I thought, it’s really happening. I have a boyfriend.

But it was more a thing in my own mind than his. At some point I started making plans to move down there to be with him…I’d talked with a recruiting agent with the firm I contracted for, who told me there were jobs down there to be had, though mostly in North, not South Carolina. But it was shortly after that K dumped me for another guy who lived in Massachusetts he’d been chatting with on AOL. That guy eventually moved down there and they began living together. He told me later that he decided to call it off when he heard me talking about moving down there.

Anyway…this is a postcard I sent to mom during one of my visits to K. Mom knew…but we had a don’t ask don’t tell agreement she enforced almost right up to the day she died. So it’s my sad little way in my scrawly handwriting of trying to tell her that her boy is gay and he’s in love with another guy.

She liked K. He was a good Baptist boy from our church. I like to think she’d have reconciled herself to it if it was him. Anyway, she kept that postcard. Now I have it. Every now and then I look at it and remember K and I strolling the beach late at night when nobody could see us holding hands and looking up at the stars.