This came across my Facebook news feed a moment ago…

At a guess their algorithm has figured out I’m gay and is just throwing things at me to see what sticks. Now I’ve seen some very beautiful and attractive ladyboys and drag queens, but I’m a Kinsey 6 (6.8 since I’ve kept up with the updates). I am not about lady.

If you’ve read my previous blog post about my switch back from K-Cups to the drip coffee maker, then you know I’m using whole beans that I grind in a Krups burr grinder right before I make a pot. I get my beans from Baltimore Coffee and Tea, which has a store in Timonium next to the light rail stop.

They roast their own beans and that store is in front of their roasting facility, so what you buy there has come directly from that. The bean I’ve settled on is one they call Brazilian Fancy Santos. It brews a very low acid, smooth and light coffee that is surprisingly (to me anyway) loaded with caffeine for how nice it tastes. This much better taste is something I’m rediscovering.

When you make coffee this way you are a lot more in control of the process than when you simply pop a K-Cup into a Keurig and press the button. There’s the matter of your grinder settings and how much water you add for how much coffee grinds. The drip machine I use that I bought on the recommendation of Consumer Reports controls its own water temperature and gets it exactly right to my taste, but there are others that let you adjust the brewing temperature. Over time I’ve hit my sweet spot on the grinder setting and amount of water I use. But it’s still more coffee grind than is packed in a K-Cup I’m sure. It also has to be a Lot fresher, which may have something to do with the caffeine effects I’m suddenly feeling now.

I definitely have to limit my intake of this coffee, and when, if I want to get any sleep at night, whereas I could have several mugs made from K-Cups of Kirkland Summit Roast, or Peet’s Major Dickenson’s Blend, and as long as I stopped by 3PM I had no trouble sleeping. I’m finding out I can only have one mug of Brazilian Fancy Santos a morning, and just pour out what I haven’t finished by noon if I want to sleep at night. It’s surprising me because that coffee is so smooth and sweet and lovely compared to any other coffee I’ve had.

I guess all the early years I drank coffee from a percolator made me think that if it isn’t bitter it isn’t strong. Maybe the kick is coming from the fact that the way I’m doing it now (again), with freshly ground beans, so that it’s got to be a lot fresher than anything in a K-Cup, and possibly a lot more potent.

That Keurig machine really lured me in with its shear convenience. But this isn’t really all that much more work for something that’s a lot more enjoyable.

Greg Sargent on BlueSky has a killer thread about how public reaction to the Trump/Miller campaign of terror is unnerving some of their advisors that is a Must Read…

Trump is privately worried about the “optics” of ICE raids and his advisers are looking for ways to soften them, Axios reports. I’m calling bullshit: The terror and violence cannot be hived off from the broader policy agenda. They are 100% intrinsic to it.

There is no recalibrated or sanitized way to conduct the war that Trump and Stephen Miller are waging on American cities right now. That’s because it’s a campaign of deliberate terror.

The policy *is* the terror, and the terror *is* the policy.

The dream of sanitized, popular mass deportations rests on the idea that they can be carried out without mass disruptions. But that is not doable. The Trump-Miller agenda by definition requires prioritizing high removals over all else to achieve ethnic cleansing:

Terror is essential to Miller’s project. It’s designed to dissuade us from showing solidarity with the immigrants getting removed. Stand in the way of ethnic cleansing and you risk violence yourself.

Sargent’s BlueSky thread includes screen captures of his article in The New Republic. It’s well worth reading both!

This is Costco’s doing. Somewhat.

I went to the Costco in Reisterstown to buy another box of Kirkland Summit Roast K-Cups and forgot I needed to either pack a Visa card, of which I only have one, or my ATM card which I don’t keep in my wallet all the time for obvious reasons. I got to the self checkout and suddenly realized I didn’t have the correct plastic with me. Now I’m thinking do I have enough cash in my wallet? Yes I Do! So then I’m thinking I can just hand over some cash and I stay in line…wait in the Costco line…wait in the Costco line…wait in the Costco line…wait in the Costco line…, only to finally get to the self checkout and discover their self checkouts don’t take cash. So I had to just walk away from the purchase.

Why does Costco make it so difficult to pay for your purchases? It wasn’t a problem for me when they were taking American Express because I had one of their charge cards in my wallet all the time. That was my grocery and miscellaneous purchases card which, unlike a revolving credit card, you pay it off every month. Taking out a loan to pay for food seems kinda bad. But then Costco switched to Visa and only Visa or your ATM card and I’m still fuzzy about why, if they went to Visa, they couldn’t also go to Master Card too since my understanding is both charge stores the same percentage on purchases. But no…

So there was a BJ’s nearby, and they take all the cards including American Express. I would really rather buy things from Costco because they treat their staff right, but they could treat their customers a little better at the register. So I went over to the BJ’s and bought some of their Wellsley Farms coffee, and it was okay but not okay enough. I’d previously found that I like Peet’s Major Dickenson’s Blend, so I bought a box of their K-Cups to tide me over until the next time I was at a Costco and the wallet is loaded with the correct plastic.

The whole thing made me start rethinking how I was making my morning mug of coffee (I’m well beyond just a cup now).

There’s a New Yorker cartoon about how people make their coffee that is peak New Yorker (I’m a subscriber)…

So why was I using K-Cups? Nobody hurt me, I just got snookered into the convenience of it. 

Back when I was a teenager my morning jolt of energy was built-in and I was all bright eyed and bushy tailed the instant I got out of bed. How I wish it was still that. Back then grocery stores had coffee bean grinding machines with bags of whole beans stacked around it. You would empty one of the bags into the top of the grinder, select the grind you wanted, place the now empty bag under the chute (the bag had the price on it), and the machine would give you back freshly ground coffee you could take home. 

Years later I started drinking coffee in the mornings when I had my own apartment, a job writing computer software, and all the stress that comes with it. This was also when I started smoking cigars in the evenings. Grocery stores still had those grinder machines and I may have tried that a time or two, but soon I’d moved on to getting it in cans pre-ground. I gravitated somehow to Chock full o’ Nuts which I drank for years out of a percolator I inherited from mom that I never saw her use. I was reaching back to a childhood TV memory…

I will go to my grave still remembering some of those old TV ad jingles. So I’m told, this one was created by a gentleman named Wilbur England, who would tell the story of how he was asked to come up with musical jingle for Maxwell House coffee, and on a marimba he came up with the percolator theme. It sticks in your mind, which is what those jingles are supposed to do. I don’t think there’s a 50s/60s kid that doesn’t instantly know this tune the moment they hear it.

But the problem with percolators, as coffee purists will tell you, is it runs the brewed coffee back over the grind over and over again, and that makes it bitter. I can tell you for a fact it does but that was how I thought coffee was supposed to taste. Then in an issue of Consumer Reports I saw a review of drip coffee makers and there was a 15 dollar Black and Decker one that rose to the top over a bunch of way more expensive models. I bought one, and tried it out and was an instant convert. For 15 bucks I bought a second one I took to my office at Space Telescope, where by then I was working, and a can of Chock full o’ Nuts and some filters to keep by my desk.

I kept buying Chock full o’ Nuts, but I was also buying loose tea at Baltimore Coffee and Tea, which greeted me every time I went inside with a lovely scent of coffee beans from around the world. They roast their own beans and sell them from burlap sacks placed around the counter on one side of the store. I decided to give grinding my own beans a try, and sniffed around until I found some beans I liked the smell of. Which was a trick since my nose doesn’t work very well. I settled on a Mexican bean, and then later on a Brazilian one. I bought a Krups burr grinder and some whole beans. I ground some beans, put the grind in a filter, brewed it in the drip machine, took a taste, and decided that was The Way.

That worked for me for almost a decade. Then some years ago on a visit to California I saw that my brother was using one of those Keurig K-Cup coffee makers (he uses a press now), and I gave it a try. He had a K-Cup carousel with some Starbucks Pike Place Roast in it and I tried one. It was seductively easy to make coffee with it. You just popped in a K-Cup, set the machine for how big your cup or mug is, and presto…a cup or a mug of fresh coffee. And it tasted pretty good. Not as good as my freshly ground coffee at home, but a tad more than good enough.

The efficiency of it was attractive. You never used more coffee than you needed, whereas I was pretty sure my little drip coffee maker process was using a lot of beans for not so much coffee. What I maybe did not appreciate was you end up spending a Lot more per unit coffee when it’s in a K-cup. But once I figured out how to work the device I came to like using it. When I got back home I bought one exactly like his.

For a while the Keurig and my Black and Decker coffee maker sat side by side in my kitchen. I would use the drip machine when I wanted to make a pot for the day, and the Keurig for when I only wanted just a mug for my morning walk. Eventually it was exclusively the Keurig because it was just so damn easy to use. One of my co-workers at the Institute had a Keurig machine out in a common area we could all use, so I started bringing in some K-Cups. Eventually I cleaned and stored my two Black and Deckers. 

I never really thought about what I was missing for so long. I got used to the taste of what came out of the Keurig and forgot how lovely the coffee I made from freshly ground beans I bought at Baltimore Coffee and Tea was.

Costco’s policy of making it hard to pay for your purchases made me start rethinking it. I’d come to like the taste of their Kirkland Summit Roast which I could only buy at Costco, and since they switched to Visa Or Debit Only I had to make sure I had one or the other in my wallet before I got the idea to swing by Costco. BJ’s had the Starbucks Pike Place Roast but I don’t buy from them anymore since I learned how badly they treat their staff. What to do what to do…?

I still had my Black and Decker coffee makers, some filters and the Krups grinder. Baltimore Coffee and Tea is still where it always was. So bought some more whole beans from them and got out my coffee makers and the bean grinder, and gave the old process another try. I brewed up a pot this morning. Which is why I’m writing this blog post.

Wow… 

I don’t think I’m ever going back to the K-Cups. At least not at Casa del Garrett.

Now I have to figure out what I’m going to do when I’m road tripping and need my morning cup of coffee. Once upon a time hotels put drip machines in the rooms and I could brings some filters and a small tupperware container of beans I’d ground myself and make some coffee. Now it’s either a small K-cup machine or some weird device that only takes the hotel’s proprietary expensive coffee cartridge. I’d actually bought a small Keurig machine because of this to take with me on the road for my morning mug of coffee, and one to keep at my brother’s house. But Pilot/Flying J truck stop Columbian coffee is actually pretty good, so maybe I just stick with that on the road.

Via Crooks and Liars…

Trump Admits He’s Itching To Cancel Midterm Elections

Finally, under a heading Reuters euphemistically called, “MANAGING MIDTERM EXPECTATIONS, there was this explicit confession that Trump thinks there should not be a midterm election: “The president expressed frustration” that Republicans could lose power after the midterms, Reuters wrote. Then this: “’It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,’ Trump said. He boasted that he had accomplished so much that ‘when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.'”

That was the end of the article.

None of this is normal…a president of the United States saying openly that he thinks there shouldn’t be another election. This should be a headline everywhere, even in the local shopper saver. But our legacy news media keeps treating it like it’s normal. And so they sell their country, and everyone in it, out.

If stone could shed tears of grief every tombstone in Arlington Cemetery would be crying now.

This from Lawyers, Guns and Money…

Reuters did a 30-minute interview with Donald Trump. Here’s the LAST paragraph of their write-up of it:

The president expressed frustration that his Republican Party could lose control of the U.S. House of Representatives or the Senate in this year’s midterm elections, citing historical trends that have seen the party in power lose seats in the second year of a presidency. “It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,” Trump said. He boasted that he had accomplished so much that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

He’s laying the groundwork for cancelling the 2026 election, or at minimum cancelling it in democrat majority states.

From our Department Of Oversharing Yourself…

[Note…this has been edited massively since I first posted it. Maybe read it again?]

The other day I shared a post on Facebook about something that interests me very much, and touches on a muse that informs my artwork to a large degree. And it was just to share something that interests me but was also, in a way, like everything I put up there or on my blog, about me. The response was not exactly what I expected, but weirdlings like me get that periodically.

It was a post about the geology of the east coast and how it shaped the history of european migration into north America…

“So there is an invisible line that’s just going through the eastern US. You probably haven’t noticed it, but this line is important. You’ve crossed it again. You didn’t notice. You didn’t even know existed. But this line determines where the cities are when the rivers start getting all wonky. It’s called the fall line. Not because it’s where people fall, but it’s actually. Well, it’s where the rivers fall. Like, they. They stop being chill rivers, and they fall violently. So the fall line is the boundary where ancient hard bedrock meets softer coastal sediments. This means this is where rivers go from being chill and navigable. Navigable to white knuckle chaos. This all happens within a mile. And that’s because we have the Appalachian Mountains right there, and they’re pretty old. And over hundreds of millions of years, they eroded and dumped to this sediment along the coast, gradually dumping it eastward, creating this coastal plain. So now we have solid rock on one side and soft clay and sand on the other. And water hates this transition. That’s why every major East Coast city sits on this line. You know, you have Philly, you got Baltimore, you got Raleigh, you got Atlanta, Richmond, DC, Columbia, you name it. These are all the furthest points that settlers could reach inland before the water turned to waterfall chaos. So they stopped there, they said, that’s good, built cities, installed Mills, collected money, and the rest is literally history. Fall Line created a hydro power. Before electricity. It created trade routes. And this fall line is important today. You know, soil chemistry, flooding and seismic activity.”  (post by Active Earth on Facebook)

As you can see it has a bunch of awkward language in it that I just glossed over for the fresh take on the information in it. I’ve seen badly constructed sentences like that before and it’s not always an AI artifact. People will often fiddle finger a keyboard and/or express themselves awkwardly. I can relate, I have thoroughly mucked up language in my own text from impatient editing and re-editing and then posting it somewhere I can’t fix what I later realized I mucked up. Now I try to let the words simmer a while before clicking on PUBLISH. But I understood the facts presented to be correct so I shared it. Because the artifacts geologic time and human history leave behind have fascinated and enchanted me ever since I was a small boy wandering around on foot. I just assumed everyone else I know on Facebook would be enchanted too. I make that mistake lots.

Here’s the image of the invisible line that accompanied the post…

It’s not exactly invisible, in fact it’s pretty obvious once you know it’s there, but you have to have driven up and down the east coast to figure that out. I’ve been pondering it for a long time. Ever since I got my first driver’s license actually. The thing is, you don’t have to drive the roads of North America very much to appreciate how its geology has shaped human migrations and history. What gets surprising as you learn more about it is how deep into the details of our history that goes. 

Well before I was old enough to really grasp what it was I was seeing in things like a meandering creek beds, highways, or rows of storefronts, I was thinking to myself, why is it like that? The different scales of time, human versus geological, and then to the astronomical, was a source of deeply felt awe even at that age. Mom eventually gave me a Little Golden Book Of The Stars And Planets that I still have, because she kept seeing me looking up at the night sky in wonderment.

Now I take long road trips. I remember one moment I was driving through a little town called Mexican Hat in Utah and saw layers of rock in cliffsides not far from the road, bent like liquid waves in an ocean.

It was amazing. I had to pull off the road and get my camera out, and I just stood there for I don’t know how long drinking it all in. I tried to get a sense of how long it must have taken to bend that rock above the town into those shapes. I later learned that the rock was uplifted and tilted on its side, and then it eroded into those shapes, something like what happened in Arches National Park. I was staring at evidence of time on a scale I knew I could not grasp and it was thrilling. And then I remembered that was sedimentary rock. How long did that take to form? Right…this was all an inland sea at one time wasn’t it? And now it’s how far above sea level?

Every time I take the drive to Florida and Disney World I think about how I-95, at least from the part of it I know well from Pennsylvania to Georgia, practically defines the line between the piedmont and the coastal plains. The first major north south highway wasn’t Route 1, it was the Atlantic Highway, which brought people and settlements that they kept building because that’s what humans do. To expand, add new pavement and towns, they had to do that west of where they built that first auto trail because to the east was the sea. So that’s where I-95 eventually ended up, right along the boundary line between the old mountains and the coastal plains the erosion of those mountains helped to form, because building it there was cheaper and by then there were already local roads, like route 301 (which I still want to drive one day).

I have walked and driven it lots, that sudden transition from piedmont to coastal plains. Those shots of Great Falls in that article…

…I’ve stood there, hiked Billy Goat trail. The Potomac River is still cutting its way down to the coastal plains as you watch. Back in the day it made the river unnavigable, so they built a canal with locks on the Maryland side. An attempt to build one on the Virginia side was made and then abandoned. Then the first steam powered railroads became a thing and a railroad was built along the river that killed off the canal, which is now a park and tourist attraction. I used to hike the towpath lots.

Every time I swing around the Baltimore beltway from US 40 down to I-95 I get to see a lovely view looking down from where the Maryland piedmont drops onto the coastal plains. Early on the B&O Railroad put a tunnel under Baltimore because they figured it would be cheaper than trying to do it over the Maryland piedmont or crossing the Patapsco and it nearly bankrupted them. Baltimore straddles that divide. I live in the piedmont part of the city and can walk and few blocks and look down on the coastal plains part. I’ve seen the drop even more spectacularly whenever I went south after a visit with mom in Hillsville, down I-77, but even much more so on route 52 next to it, in the place they call Fancy Gap.

That natural barrier, one of many across North America, changed the way people migrated and you can still see it in the maps of highways, railroad and cities and towns. And here’s the thing: he past isn’t really past. It’s still there in the old main streets. In the earth beneath our feet. In the atoms and stars.

You can visualize towns forming like crystal growth around a sweet spot in the earth. Then as time goes on there is evolution. Old buildings retrofitted and made new again and again, and if you look closely you can figure out what they started out as. There’s a pest control company in a building not far from my house that was obviously once a trolly car barn. But that would have been before Hampden was part of Baltimore city and The Avenue was third avenue, not 36th street.

The story of humanity is laid out in front of you as you walk or drive, or just look at the map. It is also the story of the Earth. Which is also the story of the universe.

But this muse is something, I reckon, that sets me apart. Even among the freaks and geeks.

I get a paper cut and pause while dripping some antiseptic on it to consider how it’s red because of blood cells that hold the shards of an ancient sun. Some decades ago in a science magazine I saw a schematic of the atomic structure of a hemoglobin molecule and it indicated four iron atoms. Those iron atoms are what make it work to transport oxygen throughout the body. My weirdness tells me that, in a sense, we still burn from the heat of that ancient star. Okay, its ash. But still…

I know where you can look up and if the sky is dark enough see a fuzzy blotch of light that took two and a half million years to reach your eyes, which themselves evolved from the first mammalian eyes two-hundred million years ago, made of stardust that’s billions of years old.

That sense of the scale of time informs my art…weirdly.  Where you really see it is in my pure art photography galleries. But I can see the weirdness of me in all of it, even in the photojournalism galleries. For a while I was doing oil paintings that were weird imaginary landscapes that were my musings about the infinite disregard of space and time.

I have a friend who gives me the same lecture practically every time we’re together, about how it’s okay to be crazy as long as you don’t let Them know it because you might lose your freedom. I’m not sure exactly what he’s trying to tell me but in these Donald Trump days I feel like I’m not crazy I’m just ahead of the curve (that was a Heath Ledger Joker reference). But I’m fine with me. It took me decades and finally reaching my 70s, but I’m fine with me. Mostly. I’m not hurting anyone by being me. I do my work, I pay my bills, I keep my promises and the trust of others. I look out for my neighbors. Yes I’m stubborn, I have a temper, I get impatient over trivial things. I take things to heart that maybe I shouldn’t while other things I maybe should pay attention to go right over my head. I hate being talked over, and I don’t socialize very well with more than a few people I know at a single time. Sometimes what comes out of my mouth is the tail end of a train of thought no one else in the room was privy to. Which is probably why I get Those Puzzled Looks from time to time. I make strange art.

And sometimes I toss things out there on Facebook because something about it completely enchanted me. Like that video of the blue grey gnatcatcher, or the one of that alligator attacking a painting of a deer, or the musician playing Vince Guaraldi on his electric keyboard accompanied by the clothes dryer. Cool stuff. I’d share them here but embedding videos in your blog has become a lot more problematic now that they’re business assets.

And that post about the line between the piedmont and the coastal plains.

If you don’t get what I’m sharing or why, just keep scrolling…swipe left…whatever…

[Edited Massively… Apologies if you read the previous version I put up here while I was still feeling stung over the comments I got on Facebook. I’m still feeling stung, but I think I’ve handled it better now]

Are you still here dear Deutscher…or have you fled to the homeland. I wouldn’t blame you. In fact, I’d feel a lot better if I knew you were somewhere safe from our overweight piss ignorant manchild Trump-Polizei.

There was a pro Vietnam war poster I used to see back in the day that said “When you have them by the balls their hearts and minds will follow.

That was before we had to bail out of Vietnam.

No…their hearts and minds do not follow…

This thread on BlueSky caught my attention…

I had it good in the early 1970s in that I was living in a pretty well educated and liberal part of the country, and my classmates were all very cool about the whole thing. But I still felt that social static in the air all around me. You got a torrent of it from the media and pop culture.

The 80s weren’t much better, and in some ways they were worse because those were the Reagan years and the time of the AIDS epidemic. That scene of Will coming out to the others felt completely real to me, down to the detail that he doesn’t actually Say he’s gay, just that he doesn’t like girls…that way. It was a hard thing for people to be out with back then, and that first step, coming out to yourself and trying not to hate yourself, was the hardest part for many.

I was so very lucky that it hit me the way it did. And maybe for having the stubborn streak I do. That moment of first love for me was wonderful. But even so I knew I had to be careful. Very, very careful. I never did find a boyfriend. At least, according to the storyteller, Will does.

In case you weren’t sure, after everything that’s been happening recently, whether or not they’re deliberately hiring nativist white supremacist thugs who would love nothing better than cracking a few minority heads for excellent pay and benefits…

I haven’t actually watched Stranger Things, only clips of it on Facebook or YouTube. So going into this I have a patchy and disjointed understanding of its characters, its plots, and themes. So corrections to anything that follows are welcome. 

That entire genre of horror and monsters is mostly a big turn off for me, having experienced my kidhood watching the old black & white monster and big bug movies of the 1950s on the TV after school. Now it’s all CGI and gore and I’m not into gore. Plus, the thinking seems to be now that scary movies have to make you feel powerless against evil or they’re just not scary enough. I seriously object to that.

So I saw the online talk about Stranger Things ever since the first episodes appeared when I began to see it as less a sort of Twilight Zone or Outer Limits kind of thing and more like an IT thing I just let it slide. But more recently I started seeing online talk about two of the characters, Mike Wheeler and Will Byers, possibly having a gay romance, and it began to get my attention.

The proponents of this theory had clips of the behavior of these two that were very convincing. But I just expect that anything coming out of Hollywood or big bucks entertainment won’t treat us or our relationships seriously, so I figured at some point someone would put the hammer down on any such speculation like they did for Luca. I was pretty sure it would come to nothing. 

I’ve posted this Vito Russo quote so often everyone reading me is probably very tired of it, but here it is again:

“It is an old stereotype, that homosexuality has to do only with sex while heterosexuality is multifaceted and embraces love and romance.”

So when the finale came and went and no same sex romance I wrote it off to the usual entertainment establishment homophobia. Oh sure, progress has been made. We’re not pathetic sissies or psycho murderers anymore. We can exist, just not have love lives like real people do.

We can even have coming out moments now on screen. I began seeing clips of Will’s big speech about how afraid he has always been to be out to anyone, and how after he made that speech everyone in the room said how much they still loved him, and a great big group hug ensued.

I was actually very happy to see that. But because of the nature of that short clip based view of the story, I missed its significance. And that significance was, I believe now, a major milestone in how audiences not only see us as people, but in the context of the overall series plot, it also spoke to the deeper meaning of our civil rights struggle.

This story takes place in the 1980s, which while it was better than previous decades, was still a very hostile time. That’s something younger audiences aren’t quite getting when they watch that scene, and start wondering online about why it was made such a big deal in the story. But that’s only part of it.

Not to go into any great detail about the complex plot of this series, but Will was being mind-manipulated by an evil entity (Vecna) that wanted to eradicate all life on Earth. As I understand it (remember I still haven’t watched the entire thing) at the heart of this story is a wormhole (they call it the Upside Down) linking our Earth with a dark desolate mirror Earth full of monsters, trying to get into our Earth. Vecna wants to use these monsters and the wormhole to eradicate all life on Earth (out of, I assume, just pure hate). It’s been using Will’s fear of how his family and friends will react to him if they find out he’s gay, to alienate Will from his friends, and his friends from each other. And especially from Mike. 

Will has a crush on Mike. Mike sees his relationship with Will as they are best friends. He loves Will, but its Philia, not Eros. Mike’s heart belongs to a girl, El. And seeing it is breaking Will’s heart, and causing stress in their friendship that Mike can’t figure out and Will can’t bring himself to be honest about. There’s a scene where Mike and Will are being driven to Nevada to find El, and Will is telling Mike that if El seemed like she was being mean or pushing him away it’s because she knows she’s different…

This is from a transcript of the scene I found online. Not sure if it’s from the script… [Update… It is from the script]

[Will] (haltingly) …and when you’re different, sometimes you feel like a mistake. 

The pain is real. His own words cut deeply to the core.

I hate who I am.

On the verge of tears, he turns back to Mike:

[Will] But you make her feel like she’s not a mistake at all.  Like she’s better for being different. And that gives her the courage to fight on. If she was mean to you, or she seemed like she was pushing you away, it’s because she’s scared of losing you, like you’re scared of losing her. And if she was going to lose you, I think she’d rather just get it over quick. Like ripping off a Band-Aid 

Now it’s Mike who doesn’t get it.

[Will] (CONT’D) (convincingly) So, yeah, El needs you Mike. And she always will.

Mike’s face brightens.

[Mike] Yeah?

[Will] (breathlessly) Yeah.

Will FORCES out a SMILE and Mike returns with a NOD. Thanks, I needed that.

Will turns to the window full of emptiness that goes on forever. HE STIFLES HIS SOBS, finally resigned to knowing that he just ripped off the Band-Aid.

Vecna has been using kids since the start of the series because, as it admits, kids are easier to manipulate. And it is using Will’s fear of being outed to mind-manipulate him into doing things, to cause strife among the friends, and their friends, and keep them all week and easy to manipulate.

The scene where Will comes out to everyone in the room, terrified, but determined to do it and take whatever comes of it, is pure gold on several levels. So I’m told shooting it took two twelve hour days to get it where it had to be emotionally for the actor playing Will Byers, Noah Schnapp, and also the others. I’m quoting the speech here in it’s entirety because it only works as a whole.  

I haven’t told any of you this because I don’t want you to see me differently. But the truth is… I am. I am different.

I just pretended like I wasn’t because I didn’t want to be. I wanted to be like everyone else. I wanted to be like my friends and, I am like you. I’m like you in, in almost every way. We like playing D&D late into the night and we like that old person smell in Mike’s basement, and we like biking to Melvald’s for malted milkshakes, and we like getting lost in the woods and getting lost in Family Video and arguing about what to rent and settling on ‘Holy Grail’ for the millionth time.

And we like Milk Duds in our popcorn with extra butter, and we like drinking Coke with Pop Rocks, and we like bike races and trading comics and NASA and Steve Martin and Lucky Charms and literally all the same things.

I just— I just— I— I don’t like girls. I mean, I do just— Just not like you guys do. And I had this crush on someone even though I know they’re not like me. But then I realised he’s just my Tammy, and by Tammy, I mean it was never about him. It was about me. And I thought I was finally OK with myself.

But then today Vecna showed me what would happen if I did this, if I told you guys the truth. He showed me a future and in this future, some of you are just worried for me, worried that that things will be harder for me, and it just makes me feel like something’s wrong with me.

So I push you away and for the rest of us, we just drift apart more and more and more and more and more until I’m alone and I know none of that has happened and Vecna can’t see into the future but he can see into our minds and he knows things and it just felt so real. It felt so real.

Vecna showed him what would happen if he came out. But it was a lie. Everything Vecna said would happen if he came out, is actually what would have happened if he’d stayed closeted. Will would always feel like something was wrong with him. He would eventually push all his friends away out of fear and they’d all drift away and he would end up alone. And Vecna creates the mutual distrust it needs, and that’s how it wins.

But Will comes out anyway, despite his fears. And when he does, and he is accepted, and loved, at that moment Vecna loses its control over him, and the power it had over all of them.

Do you see what the filmmakers have done here?

This subplot of Will struggling to deal with his sexual orientation in 1980s America is a metaphor of our civil rights struggle. It was never just about how liberating it is for us to be able to, finally, at long last, live honest decent whole lives, but also about liberating society at large, for all of us to be able to live in a world where the all too human monsters among us no longer have power over us. All of us.

These filmmakers/storytellers get it. That is so deeply gratifying.

Which brings me to the other thing I am very gratified to see in this story: How the filmmakers handled with genuine sympathy Will’s crush on Mike.

El is Mike’s true love. The advocates of a Mike and Will romance weren’t giving us the clips that clearly showed that. I don’t think it was meant to deceive, I think they just had a really bad case of confirmation bias. They were only seeing what they wanted to see in the scenes between Mike and Will and brushing off the scenes between Mike and El. If you didn’t see how Mike felt about El before the finale you had to have during it. Mike is best friends with Will, but El is his true love. A romantic relationship between him and Will would have been contrived and disrespectful of the characters.

Recall that scene where Will comes out took two twelve hour days to film. That was not just about getting Will’s emotional state right, but also the characters watching it. During Will’s coming out speech Mike, and this is something the filmmakers have confirmed, realizes for the first time that Will has a crush on him. The actors are good. During that scene you can see dawning awareness on Mike’s face (Mike is played by Finn Wolfhard).

In the next and final episode, as the team prepares for the final battle with Vecna, Mike has a talk with Will…

[Mike] Hey, um… What you said earlier at the Squawk… I’m sorry. I mean, not sorry about what you said. That came out wrong. Or not came out wrong. Jesus Christ.

[Will] [chuckles] It’s okay.

[Mike] No, it’s… it’s not. I should have been there for you, and I wasn’t. And I guess I was just so self-absorbed that I couldn’t see it. I just… I feel like an idiot, and I… [sighs] I’m sorry.

[Will] You don’t have to be sorry. And you are not an idiot. You’re not. It’s just… I didn’t even understand it myself for the longest time. I just… I think it needed to happen the way it happened. I needed to find my own way. But what matters is that you’re still here, and you still think we can be friends.

[Mike] Friends? No, thanks. Best friends. All right, come on. We’ve got a planet to catch. 

Which brings me to this: After the final battle, Mike is bereft over losing El. Sheriff Hopper has a talk with him. It’s worth embracing.

It’s not your fault. What happened is not your fault. El made her choice. Now it’s time for you to make yours. And the way I see it, you’ve got 2 roads ahead of you. You’ve got one road where you keep blaming yourself for what happened. You keep going over it in your head, what you could’ve done differently. You push people away, and you suffer, because that’s what you think you deserve. And then there’s another road, where you find a way to accept what happened. Find a way to accept her choice. Doesn’t mean you gotta like it, doesn’t mean you gotta understand it and never think about it. You just accept it. And you live the best goddamned life you can. I’ve been down that first road before, and I don’t recommend it.

There’s something there about acceptance for the characters, and also the audience. For Mike, for Will, for the viewers who so deeply wanted that Mike and Will romance to happen. For all the loves that were lost. For all the loves that might have been but weren’t. For everyone of us who were still in deeply love and the other just walked away. And maybe, especially, for all of us gay kids who had crushes that would never be on straight boys who just couldn’t go there: It’s not your fault. You can keep going over it in your head and wonder what you could have done differently. You can suffer alone because it’s all you think you deserve. Or you can find a way to accept what happened and have a life, even if it wasn’t the one you wished for. Doesn’t mean you can never think about it. Denial just makes a fixation worse. You just accept what happened and live the best goddamned life you can.