Travels With Charley is the book that, at age 13, lit my hunger for taking road trips. I bought the novel in 1968 while on vacation with mom in Ocean City NJ, (relaxing on the beach with a book was something people did before smartphones) and devoured it before we made the trip home.

Then I read it again. And again. That worn 22nd printing Bantam paperback sits on my special books shelf with a few others, including Mary Renault’s The Charioteer and that first Golden Book of the Stars and Planets mom gave me when I was 9 because I spent so much time looking up at the night sky.

California was his birthplace and mine. He moved to the east coast of his own free will and I was dragged there at age two after my parents divorced, but I see a yearning for the land of his birth in this book that is similar to my own. Maybe this yearning for the homeland that was once ours is the wellspring of wanderlust and road trips. I didn’t know until recently that the motivation for Steinbeck’s road trip was his heart was failing and he knew he didn’t have much longer and he wanted to see America one last time. In his book he says simply that a writer who writes about his country should go look at it now and then. I wonder if the deeper motivation was that he wanted to plant his feet in California and Salinas one last time. If I knew I didn’t have much longer to live I would absolutely do one last road trip that ended up in Oceano, and the shores of Pismo Beach. 

Since that first road trip with classmates to the Southwest and California in 1974, I’ve taken more than I can count offhand. I remember Steinbeck’s warning that you don’t take a journey, it takes you, and it starts and ends on its own good time. But at the end of one road trip I am always ready for the next one. I look at my road atlas like I used to look at the annual Christmas catalogues when I was a young boy. I plan my trips to California selecting roads I’ve not yet driven to get me from Maryland to Oceano. I have spoken here before about escaping the gravity of home…

There’s a moment in every long distance road trip that I think of as escaping the gravity of home. Like the Apollo astronauts who escaped the earth’s gravity to go to the moon, there is a threshold you cross on a long distance drive where heading back home to your own comfortable bed is no longer possible, even if you push it bleary eyed into the night. You must bed down somewhere else. Keep going and its two nights. Then three. You’ve left the safe comfortable orbit of home. Now you’re traveling among the planets. At some point, and for me it’s usually the middle of the second day, comes the awareness that no matter what happens, you’re not getting back home any time soon. You and your car are a self contained capsule, scooting down the highway, looking for whatever it is ahead of you that you’ve never seen before…

Friday May 24, 2003

And even when the destination isn’t California, but somewhere else like Ocean City or Disney World and I am on vacation time and I am not going far, I know the vacation begins the moment I am on the highway travelling away from home. 

Next time I’m there I really need to see if I can get up to Salinas and behold his camper truck Rocinante with my own eyes and whisper a thank you.

This XKCD cartoon has been in my thoughts recently…

The other day I discovered to my displeasure that an old friend acquaintance has belly flopped into the anti vax sewer. So just replace the 9/11 conspiracy theories in that cartoon with COVID vaccine conspiracy theories and you have what I had to listen to the other day.

And yeah it breaks my heart because he’s smarter than that. But there’s that right wing talk radio streak in him. I suppose lots of us have people like that in our past. I hadn’t spoken to him at all since the last election because I knew where those conversations would end up going and I’d get angry again and hang up on him again and I just didn’t want to deal with him after that election day.

He’s actually probably not a Trumper, but he is a gun enthusiast to a degree I am simply not and it’s his one and only political issue when it comes to election day. He has the usual other talk radio issues, yes, but that one second amendment issue is the only thing he thinks about on election day and I am not that. I am all for background checks and keeping a tight control over who can and who cannot carry a gun in public. I’m not so much about “assault weapons” which I think is a meaningless term, but I absolutely think high capacity magazines should be reserved only for military and police use. I think our second amendment does give the people the right to own their own firearms and I think it makes complete sense in the context of democracy. But I also think the second amendment gives congress the right to regulate firearms too.

We regulate by law all sorts of potentially dangerous things people otherwise have the right to possess and use. Automobiles for instance. Firecrackers. Poisons. To be an electrician you need a license. To fly an airplane. Building homes requires permits and inspections. Guns are different only in that being dangerous is their purpose. They’re weapons, that’s what they have to be, that’s what they are intended to be, unlike a table saw which by law nowadays needs certain safety features in order to be legally sold. But the principle is the same. Some people should just not be allowed near those things. It’s not difficult to figure out who.

And when they tell you we need our guns to protect us from our own government, the answer is No, the ballot box is how we protect ourselves in a democracy. The first thing is you protect access to the ballot box. We lose that and it won’t matter how many guns you have.

And it’s not our second amendment superfans who generally want to insure that every adult American citizen has access to the ballot box these days is it, and that everyone’s vote counts the same as everyone else’s. 

So…anyway…I had a reason to chat with him by telephone the other day because I have a revolver I think he might like to have and which I don’t really want anymore. I am its legal owner. We can both go through our background checks unscathed, and in fact I recently got my Maryland license to purchase (not carry) a handgun. My police record is cleaner than your kitchen floor so that sort of thing is no problem for me. I was able some years ago to pass a background check to get clearance to do work in the James Webb Space Telescope Mission Control Room. If my old friend acquaintance and I do a deal on that revolver we’ll follow the law here in Maryland. We’ll agree on a price and then do the paperwork and make the transaction through a licensed FFL dealer. Our police records will be checked and then we’ll get a go-ahead to do the transaction. This is Maryland not Texas. SOP.

I wanted to give him the right of first refusal before I put the revolver up for sale somewhere else because we have a shared history in the shooting sports. So after nearly a year of not speaking to him I texted him and asked if I could call. He said I could and we chatted for nearly an hour. First it was about the revolver I want to sell, then it was almost like old times talking with him about this and that, and I was thoroughly enjoying our conversation. But it couldn’t last.

I brought up a particular .45 automatic that he owned and let me shoot every now and then. An all stainless steel AMT Hardballer I liked the look of, and how good the adjustable sights on it were. But it kept chucking its spent brass right in my face. Once one of those spent cases hit my forehead and wedged between my safety glasses and my cheek and it was Hot. I didn’t want anything to do with that gun after that and I said it was a shame because otherwise it was a very nice gun. My old friend acquaintance promptly told me the brass getting chucked in my face was a user problem not a gun problem. He said it was my limp wrist.

It was probably a momentary knee jerk reflex he just couldn’t stifle, and just never mind that I’ve shot other .45s with no trouble ever. But that is such a hoary old stereotype…

Mad Magazine, July 1978 by Jack Davis

I wrote a blog post about that side of him back in July last year, Here. He’s the guy who unfriended me on Facebook because he didn’t want to see “that gay stuff” in his feed.

Truman Capote once said A faggot is the homosexual gentleman who just left the room. This is something that we of the homosexual persuasion all know to one degree or another. As you grow older you come to expect it in certain situations. It never loses its sting, but you find yourself putting up with it, at least in my generation, unless it is so in your face that you have to cause a scene as a matter of keeping your self respect. But where it really hurts is when you suddenly get it coming from someone you considered a friend for so very long, only to discover it wasn’t real after all.

I’ve been mostly low key about my sexual orientation over the years, largely because I’ve never had a boyfriend to be proud of, just a lot of near misses and one guy who told me we were just friends with benefits. Otherwise I’d have been pretty loud about it. And all that time among my straight friends, I figured I was giving them a living example of how all the myths and stereotypes of homosexuals they were taught were wrong, and all that time they, some of them anyway, probably figured I was a discrete homosexual and therefor a good homosexual. A bigot’s mind, said Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., is like an eye…the more light you shine on it the tighter it closes.

Once upon a time, back in 1971, I fell in love and it was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me. It really was like one of those romance movies. The sky was a bit more blue, the birds sang a bit more sweetly, and the stars were brighter than ever. I was twitterpated. Just being alive was a better thing than I had ever known. I knew how it was with me then, and I have never felt ashamed since. There was nothing to be ashamed of.

I think at age 72 I’m old enough now to stop caring what anyone thinks or assumes because I am this or that. I own guns, I like to shoot them. I am homosexual, I like a certain type of guy and although at age 72 the possibility of a romantic sex life is in my rearview mirror I still like to gawk at beautiful men. Also, I get my vaccines whenever its time. And I am a liberal democrat. And a man of science. A photographer. A cartoonist. An artist. I paint, I draw, I write stories. I write computer programs, run Windows, MacOS and Linux computers on a common network here at home. I’ve done work for the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb. I am an atheist, but I grew up in a yankee baptist household and I have a bunch of that still inside me. I love the open road. I am a Disneyphile. And easily manipulated by cats. And what you think about any specific one of these things means as to the sort of person I am is probably wrong if that one thing is all you can see. And I have no fucks to give anymore. Especially after the last election.

Anyway… I’d like to file a bug report…

And I need to schedule this year’s flu vaccination. And the new COVID-19 booster…