Scrolling through some old blog posts here I came across this one, did some double checking and…yeah…it’s just four months after this other one. It just really crashed everything I was up to creatively then. And then I spent another decade living in a wonderful dream only to crash and burn even worse.
Nat King Cole is singing on my iPod and it’s drizzling freezing rain outside and I’m nursing a glass of Kahlua and there is a face and a name that I just can’t get out of my thoughts, and it’s been like that for days now and I’m sorry. I had a couple of cartoons I wanted to get finished before today and I just haven’t been able to put pen to paper for days now. This is why I stopped drawing, stopped painting, stopped working with my cameras, for over a decade…it’s why I’m a software engineer now, and not the graphic artist or photographer everyone from Woodward assumed I’d become someday…this bundle of feeling that I have to deal with every time I walk into that space inside of me where all my creativity comes from. There’s a piece missing from what should have been my life and before I can sit down and do anything in my art room I have to deal with that and sometimes I just can’t. There’s a bit of that loss, that quiet, waiting, life-on-hold emptiness, in Everything I’ve Ever Done since 1975 and by the late 1980s I just got so sick of seeing it staring back at me from my artwork that I just stopped doing anything…I took my easel down, put my oils, my pens and charcoal sticks, my drawing pads away, put my cameras away, and just plinked on a computer (just like I’m doing now) for creative release.
I want that part of me back. I really want it back…
…it’s all just ambiguous enough that you can see in it almost anything you want to. Maybe this was medieval England’s 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover. Maybe its a devoted couple having a good laugh together that while they aren’t the perfect lovers of the folk tales and ballads, they’re still happily in love all the same. Maybe its a couple who’ve let each other down, angrily hurling impossible demands at each other. Maybe the song is about how love makes us rise above ourselves, brings things out of us that we’d never have known were there, never have known we could do or become, until we met that one person we would do anything for.
Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,
Perhaps once upon a time there were two people who might have loved, but time and circumstance just made it impossible. And now all they can do is wave at each other at a distance, smile a little, laugh a little, and ironically give each other these little absurd tasks to win each other, knowing full well it can never be.
Remember me to one who lives there, He once was a true love of mine.
What do you do when your heart is breaking? Write a song. Write some poetry. Make art that gets it out of you, before despair makes you want to go jump off a bridge.
Posts on Facebook today celebrating the release of Biloxi Blues with Matthew Broderick and Christopher Walken, who is amazing in his role (as usual) as Sergeant Toomey, but I cannot even think of that movie without remembering the scene where they gay soldier (private Hennessy, played by Michael Dolen) is taken out of a troop line by Toomey and some MPs, presumably after they pressured the other private he was involved with to name him, and driven away between them in a jeep. I can still see the look on his face and while I understand he was an actor playing a part it was so very disturbing. Great acting on everyone’s part but I cannot think of that movie without thinking of that scene. That Hennessy was the only one to stand up for the two Jews in the troop against the bigots (the character has a great line when asked by one of the bigots if he’s Jew too) just added to the impact of what was about to happen to him.
But of course, if you didn’t know very much of the history of that time and what happened to homosexuals who were caught in the jaws of the laws back then, you might just think it a sad little subplot in a movie about a young soldier enduring a slightly crazy drill sergeant and having his first time getting laid. If that story really was based on Neil Simon’s recollections of his time in the army then I am wondering if that character and was what happened to him was based on a real person and did they survive.
During World War II, U.S. military personnel suspected of homosexuality faced intensive interrogation, psychiatric evaluation, usually to implicate others in exchange for leniency. If found to have committed acts of sodomy, they were court-martialed, imprisoned in a federal penitentiary with terms of hard labor, and then given a dishonorable discharge. After the nightmare of what prison life was for a homosexual, that dishonorable discharge would keep him from getting any kind of a good job, and the conviction for sodomy attached to it would more than likely mean he’d lose his family, friends, and have to leave wherever he’d grown up for somewhere nobody knew him. It might have even been reported in their local hometown newspaper, and his entire family ostracised.
If he was a real person you wonder what happened to him, with a very dark pit of your stomach feeling that you know damn well what happened to him.
Yay for private Jerome losing his virginity! To a female prostitute, when we wasn’t old enough to drink or vote, which was a rite of passage and certainly no federal offense.
I have this little tick whenever I see a picture of someone’s original Canon F1. I look for an image of its back so I can check the serial number to see if it’s lower than mine. So far…nope.
Pretty sure I bought one of the first ones imported into the USA. It has the Bell & Howell import sticker in the film compartment because they were the importers of Canon cameras here in the 60s/70s. According to the code inside the film compartment (you can’t go by the serial numbers) mine was made in June 1971 in Oita Japan. I bought it in July with money I made summer working at Burger Chef, and from selling my Miranda Sensorex. Production had only begun in March of that year. It was my first professional grade camera and I was so proud to get one when I did because they were so hard to find. It became my constant companion in my senior year of high school, and my workhorse during the time I was trying to make it as a photojournalist. It has been all over the country with me, and an artistic companion from my teens to my 70s.
I find myself using my Canon F1N more often now, it feels just as solid as the F1, and the F1 is so precious to me anymore that taking it out and about from time to time worries me about it getting damaged or stolen off me. But there are days I just have to have it in my hands, and it will always be the one camera I will never get off of no matter how much money I might suddenly need. I’d sell the Mercedes first. I’d sell the house first.
This came in the mail yesterday, and I gave it a first try this morning here at Casa del Garrett…
How Deep Will You Go is advertised as a connection conversation card game to play among friends or lovers. “What if the next time you hang out, phones were away and you saw a side of them you never knew?” There are three types of cards: Ice Breakers, Confessions, and Going Deep. But I didn’t buy this deck to play with others. I’m really not comfortable exposing myself that much to anyone, except the boyfriend I never had, I bought it because it looked like it would give me a more structured way to deep dive into my own self, by randomly picking a card every day and thinking about its question. Self psychoanalysis if you like.
This first morning I tried one of each type. Going forward I think I’ll just pick a card from one type depending on my mood when I wake up. The going deep card I pulled asked me to describe my biggest heartbreak and what it taught me.
Oh boy…
That would not be when I discovered my first crush had moved far away, like out of the country far away, and I’d probably never see him again, and I almost jumped off a bridge in front of a train. Which I didn’t do when it occurred to me that it would probably traumatize the engineer. Isn’t it always the case that when you think about how your life affects others it makes you a better person. But then Elon says empathy is western civilization’s biggest weakness.
No…it was my second crush, a few years later, which when it hit me left me overjoyed to think I’d been given a second chance at love after I was certain it was over for me, and we became very close, to the point of intense heart to heart conversations when we were alone, sending love letters while I was away with other friends on a road trip, then only to realize sometime later that I’d fallen in love with a straight guy, and it would never be.
I think I knew then what the future held. And in a culture that back then gave gay guys nothing but venom and static from every direction…
Mad Magazine, July 1978 by Jack Davis
…who was I to think it would be any different?
Well the card deck is working. I probably gave that question more serious thought than I ever did before. What did I learn? Well…it wasn’t a lesson I was ready to take to heart just then, but I knew it all the same: that we are all utterly, totally, completely alone in this life. That the universe does not care about our deepest heartfelt hopes and dreams, and if we cannot make that heart and soul connection with another, then we either treasure and care for our own heart, so as to at least keep being good people and doing our part to keep civilization moving forward, and loving as best we can our families and friends in this life, and somehow some way endure the empty loneliness ahead of you, or you just go find a bridge and jump.
Obviously I haven’t jumped. But there have been moments it really came close. What I have to think about now is I made a bunch of young gay friends during the Love In Action protests, some of whom still stay in touch with me, and I don’t want to set that example for them. It’s such a stereotypical way for gay guys to go. I don’t want them thinking its inevitable. I want them to see a future.
Empathy isn’t a weakness. It’s what makes civilization possible. It’s what makes moving on with your own life possible, absent that body and soul romance you never got.
Dreams Can Have Disturbing Ways Of Pointing Out Your Mortality
My new GP set me up with appointments with a neurologist and a CAT scan, to try and get to the bottom of why I’m tired all the time, slightly dizzy all the time, and have a hard time focusing on tasks for more than short bursts of concentration. She also wants me to schedule a sleep study. So naturally I keep ruminating about the results I might get, particularly regards the CAT scan and what the neurologist might tell me.
I’m 72, and I can feel myself losing it. But if I look at it logically I’m actually in pretty good shape for my age. I’ve outlived some of my classmates, but most of the one’s I’ve kept in touch with are still hanging in there. But anyone with the artistic nature I possess, plus a powerful imagination that I’ve daydreamed in since I was a kid…
…can’t really help but ponder all the possible things a CAT scan might reveal, and what that might me for how much longer I have to live, and all the art projects I never got around to starting, let alone finishing.
So it really doesn’t help when you wake up in the morning hearing your mom calling your name. Especially when she’s been dead for over two decades.
And it’s one, two, three, What are we fighting for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn, Next stop is Vietnam…
In my news streams today I see that Country Joe McDonald has passed away, and I don’t think there is anyone of my generation and those older kids who came of draft age during the Vietnam war who aren’t replaying that song in their heads now, like when they were teenagers back in the day wondering if they would live to be adults, or breath their last in some far away jungle for the sake of Realpolitick, the Domino Theory, and the egos of various presidents, generals, and cabinet members. Or get fried in a nuclear holocaust between us and Russia. For all the same reasons.
I’m sure a lot of us have vivid memories of those times, most of them horrible. Let me tell you about mine. The day I almost got drafted and sent to war.
It started, as it did for young American males in the late 60s – early 70s, with the obligatory trip to the local draft office when you turned 18. At 18 I was a skinny little gay teenager, coming off his first broken heart after my high school crush’s family suddenly moved away, and so rail thin a friend’s mother once asked him if I was a heroin addict. But no…I was your usual teenage boy with a physiology that could snarf down candy bars, doughnuts, cheeseburgers, fries and sodas and not gain so much as an ounce. How I wish some days I still had a body that could do that.
Looking at me back then you wouldn’t think I was G.I. Joe material, but when a nation needs cannon fodder for a war nobody but the politicians and generals wanted size doesn’t matter. Much.
And it’s one, two, three, What are we fighting for?
My draft office was in the basement of the old Rockville post office. After my 18th birthday I presented myself to them as required by law, and as I sat while the clerk behind the desk typed up my forms I glanced around the room, and saw a sign they’d posted over the door…
Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here
Ha ha. And happy birthday young man! Maybe you’ll have another one.
I was issued my draft card, which by law I had to carry with me at all times. And as it turned out, almost immediately afterward I got this letter in the mail…
Notice the word “ORDER”. You are ordered to report. Not asked. Not told. Ordered. That’s how it was. There was a war on and nobody really understood why we were in it until Daniel Ellsberg leaked copies of a 7,000-page top-secret Department of Defense study to the New York Times and The Washington Post. That study detailed 25 years of American involvement in Vietnam, and not so incidentally the torrent of lies aimed deceiving the public and congress about the Realpolitik motivating that war, it’s actual scope, and our glorious progress in defeating world communism and keeping the dominoes from falling.
There was no declaration of war, there was only the Gulf Of Tonkin Resolution giving the president authorization for a “military action” to defend US military forces. But the basis for that resolution, that our destroyers in the area had been attacked, was a lie. There was no attack. The American public would not know that for decades. But it got us where the generals and the politicians wanted us.
You hear people speak after these mass casualty disasters, of all the lost potential, all the things that could have been, all the progress in the arts and sciences that might have been made, only to end up buried in so many thousands of graves. But in the rarified halls of power where their Realpolitik hallucinations mattered more than the lives of the kids they were sending off to war, of course war had to be the case and never mind the cost. Those were other people’s children.
You hear a lot of things said about my generation and the 1960s/early 1970s. If you want to really understand those times you need to look at, really look at, what that war did to this country. How many parents never got to see their kids have families of their own, and grandchildren they could dote on. And Vietnam went communist anyway.
So there I was the early morning of October 4, 1972 waiting at the designated draft office bus stop with several dozen other teenage boys, wondering if that morning would be the last time mom ever saw me alive.
They loaded us onto a couple Greyhound busses to drive us to Fort Meade for the pre-induction physicals. But before we were driven off, some men from the Navy and Air Force got on the bus and told this group of trapped and terrified teenage boys they’d get a better deal from them if they enlisted now. Some left the bus with them.
When we got to Fort Meade we were made to strip down to just our underwear, weighed (I did not know this at the time, but the moment they weighed me I failed the exam, but they kept on with it anyway), and then led to stand in two lines for an initial examination.
I’ve told this story here before…
…about the morning I came to my sixth grade class and I saw that some kids from the previous year had come to class before we got there to visit their old teachers. And they’d written about their experiences in junior high on the chalkboard, and how much fun it was going to be for us when it was our turn. I started reading…and then I came to this line…
Tell them not to worry about group showers. It’s no big deal.
I wish I had a picture of my face just then. My jaw dropped. I was horrified. What!? WHAT!? WHAT!!!??? Suddenly I was no longer looking forward to high school, junior or otherwise.
So there I am in this line of several dozen other teenage boys in their underwear and you might be thinking as you read this that I‘m in gay kid paradise and it wasn’t that at all. They wouldn’t let us put our clothes back on for the entire two hour ritual and I spent them in a kind of state of shell shock. I am just not a clothing optional kinda guy, and that was the most degrading thing I’d ever experienced up to that time or ever since. But it was the point being made, right then and there: From now on you are government property.
And it’s one, two, three, What are we fighting for?
A pair of doctors went up and down the lines, making us take deep breaths while listening to heartbeats, checking pulses, examining teeth, skin (I guess looking for tattoos). They made us drop our underwear, bend over and spread our butt cheeks while they walked up the lines looking for I have no idea what. Then they walked the lines feeling each kid’s balls and telling them to cough. I’m told that lets them detect hernias. We were cattle being sized up for grade. One kid across from me started laughing uncontrollably when the doctor cupped his hand around his balls and the doctor quickly moved on.
We were allowed to pull our underwear back up. Then led to booths where eyesight and hearing were tested…still wearing only our underwear. Then, still wearing only our underwear, we were led into something like a classroom where were put under oath, and told to sit in some small student desks. We were handed sheets of paper, told to fill out our names, and then look at each of the line items and check Yes or No. Are you an American citizen? Were both your parents citizens? What is your race? Ancestry? There were the names of various subversive organizations and we had to check if we’d ever been a member of any of them. I forget now if the American Civil Liberties Union was one of them, or the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Then I came to this question…
Are you a homosexual?
I looked at it carefully, weighing my options. I had just sworn to tell the truth, and the truth was I knew damn well by then that I was, and the honest answer was Yes. And answering that question honestly would have probably kept me out of the army and Vietnam. But it would have also probably got me placed onto some police and FBI lists somewhere, which would haunt me for the rest of my life. It was 1972, sodomy was illegal in nearly every state, and those laws were used against us in so many ways never mind having sex. You could be denied employment, housing, an array of professional licenses. They would have probably told mom and I still don’t like thinking about what would have happened then. It could have been that every time somebody’s child disappeared I’d get a couple policemen knocking at the door.
So I lied. I checked No.
At the end of the ritual I was told that since I was eleven pounds underweight I would be put back on the bus for Rockville. As I remember there were a couple others of us on it. I was told they’d call me back for another physical in six months. But before that could happen Nixon turned off the draft and I was never inducted into the Army and never had to go to war.
I have no idea how many of those other kids that were with me during the pre-induction ritual never made it back to their country alive. But I can still see their faces.
After Nixon turned off the draft, for a brief period of time, nobody had to register for the draft. There’s a subset of baby boomers who never felt its touch, and who keep being lumped in with the rest of us. I met one of them once on a gay BBS I did some volunteer work for. He was staunchly conservative, and a big fan of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
Eventually they bought draft registration back, but so far nobody has been forced to join the Army or go die in another war nobody wants. Yet.
And it’s one, two, three, What are we fighting for?
The trip back on the Silver Meteor was nice, but I’m glad to be back. My deluxe week in my DVC one bedroom villa was worth the time spent, even though I didn’t do much but eat at the nice restaurants and drink at the good bars and wander around Saratoga Springs. This is a problem that’s only getting worse as time goes on. I have no energy, and no motivation to do art much anymore, other than work on my “ghost” story novel. Which I hope to start serializing here eventually. If I can get motivated to make the illustrations I want to include.
Tomorrow morning I have a first visit with the doctor who will hopefully become my new GP, since the one they connected me with at Whitman-Walker after my prior one retired has been very indifferent. My new one will be affiliated with the same hospital my cardiologist and the surgeon who did my ablation are, and hopefully this results in better care for this 72 year old body. I’m going to talk to them about how I’m tired all the time anymore (it was almost too much just to walk to the grocery store a few blocks away to restock some items), and getting way too forgetful.
I put a lot of things down to being single and lonely, but I’m pretty sure I don’t fit the description of someone who is clinically depressed. On the train ride back I had a wonderful time chatting with my fellow travelers in the dining car and at various stopping-refueling points along the way, where passengers have a few moments to step outside the train and get some fresh air. I am not so introverted that I can’t enjoy the company of people I’ve never met before, where the situation provides natural ice breakers. It’s different than the highly competitive and very cliquish crowd at a gay bar, which was my problem with socializing in that environment. Not that they likely ever wanted to give solitary me an assist anyway, but all I ever needed was an ice breaker, and all I ever got from them was gaslighting about being too shy. Tico once told me I was good at getting a stand-offish table at Biergarten talking to each other and having a good time together, but that was Disney World which has an assortment of built-in icebreakers I could use. Actually, I really dislike sitting quietly by myself when I’m out and about. If I want solitude I can get it at home. Or just take a long walk. Go on a road trip.
But that’s probably also a problem, and partly at least, if not more, why I’m so tired and unmotivated anymore. My house is a lonely place. I walk alone. I go places, driver here and there and meet people along the way, but on the road it is just me and my car. That has been slowly killing me for years, I see now.
There are dark times I keep picking at that I shouldn’t by now, but I can’t help myself. Tico telling me to go away would be one. But seeing, finally, the total indifference of the gay guys I trusted, and thought of as friends, was another, and it is worse. Tico got angry at me. The others stuck a knife in my heart like it was no big deal, and I’m pretty sure to this day they think I overreacted. It is indifference, not hate, as Elie Wiesel once said, that is the opposite of love.
I would add one more thing: friends get angry at each other, strangers just stick the knife in and walk away.
I was at Biergarten just now. It’s still a nice place, and there are still people there who remember you, but some things have changed and not for the better. You may be glad of being retired now.
The one thing I liked most of all (besides you) was the Oktoberfest seating. When you are a single traveler it’s nice to be able to be seated with others you can chat with. Table for one isn’t that. It’s pretty lonely actually, which is why I usually sit at the bar. But Biergarten had this really nice Oktoberfest seating thing and I loved it not only because it made it very easy for a single diner to get seated, but also I could have a good time with the others at my table.
You told me once, and this was a very helpful thing you did for me, that I was good at getting a stand offish table talking to each other. But that was because you have a bunch of built-in ice breakers at Disney World. Hi…where y’all from? This your first time here…? What’s your favorite park? Where are you staying? And so forth. I told you once about the gay friends who had me convinced I was too shy and that was why I am single. But no…I’m just a little introvert who needed ice breakers to talk to anyone. You said back then that I needed better friends. You were right.
But Oktoberfest seating at Biergarten is no more, because apparently Americans don’t like being seated together with people they don’t know. And it’s not just a Biergarten it seems.
I took the train down from Baltimore this trip. I had a bunch of Amtrak points from cross-country rail trips I’ve taken and I used some for this vacation. I’ve taken the train a bunch and something I like about rail travel that reminds me of Biergarten is the dining car and being seated with some other passengers and being able to chat with them as we go. In my mind it’s one of the best things about rail travel…meeting and chatting with people in the dining and lounge cars.
This trip, for the first time, I heard the dining car staff as they called for passengers with reservations at whatever o:clock to come to the dining car to be seated, warning the passengers that they would be seated with other travelers who they might not know. Because seating is limited in those dining cars and they use every available space to seat people.
Have Americans become so insular they can’t stand eating with other people anymore?? Oh well…
I just don’t get it. But I’m weird I reckon. Some of the best conversations I’ve ever had were in a dining car, or at Biergarten. Not counting the ones I used to have with you.
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