Automobiles… Cameras and photographic lenses…   Beer…   Crankiness…

Oh smile, it’s Pride Month.

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

These are the times that try men’s souls. Also their charity. Granted Walker was swimming in corporate money. Granted he outspent his democratic opponent 30 to 1. But the buck stops with the voters and at some point you just have to accept that more of them would rather cut their own throats then live in a state of peace and prosperity with people they despise.

Fine. I won’t help you cut your own throat but I’ll be happy to stand here and watch. I might even applaud if you’re good. Just don’t call me “neighbor” if I do. Don’t use that word in my presence. Don’t even think of me that way. My neighbor is the guy whose face you’re kicking.

Mud can make you prisoner
And the plains can bake you dry
Snow can burn your eyes
But only people make you cry…

Maybe I will become a misanthrope when I’m old. I’ll bet most misanthropes are people who’ve had their hearts broken a few too many times and now all they can do is stare at the pieces, just slightly amazed that there could be so many from so small a thing as a heart.

Via Sullivan this morning…

“Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. When it comes, it degrades one’s self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself.

Love, though it is no prophylactic against depression, is what cushions the mind and protects it from itself. Medications and psychotherapy can renew that protection, making it easier to love and be loved, and that is why they work. In good spirits, some love themselves and some love others and some love work and some love God: any of these passions can furnish that vital sense of purpose that is the opposite of depression. Love forsakes us from time to time, and we forsake love. In depression, the meaninglessness of every enterprise and every emotion, the meaninglessness of life itself, becomes self-evident. The only feeling left in this loveless state is insignificance,”

-Andrew Solomon.

Other then that, I am enjoying my stay in Key West very much.

“Maybe not,” she said as we came to the car. “But maybe that isn’t so bad. You can’t love anyone that way more than once in a lifetime. It’s too hard and it hurts too much when it ends. The first boy is always the hardest to get over, Haven. It’s just the way the world works.”  

—Sarah Dessen, “That Summer”

The reason I buy lottery tickets is my luck can’t be any worse at that then it is in love. Forty years to get the broken heart I should have got back in high school, but didn’t because back in 1972 a boy couldn’t tell anyone he was in love with another boy.

Oh…am I whining now? Fuck you.

Considering all the bellyaching going on around here about the just enacted Maryland state tax increase on wage earnings over 100k I figured I might have to sell the house and the Mercedes and go live on a steam grate. Preferably one that was close to work. Except those might all be full of students who coudn’t afford to pay back their student loans after they graduated and found out there isn’t any work. So I was bracing myself to finally lay eyes on the awful horrible details and trying to decide if I could get accustomed to the taste of dogfood. I was thinking maybe if I deep fried it and sprinkled it with a little Old Bay.

So finally I see the extra I’m being asked to chip in for running the state of Maryland. Under $300 more a year.

Wow…I just don’t know if I can spare another $300… Oh bullshit. I make six figures and I’m being asked to chip in an additional < $300 and I’m supposed to be outraged. Swear to god it’s a good thing I didn’t grow up in a wealthy family expecting to make the kind of money I’m making now or I might not know how good I have it and how hard everyone else is struggling and I might be making the same kind of jackass fool of myself other six figure earners in this state are making of themselves right now. $300! $300! Lawd have mercy I’ll be penniless! Penniless I tell you!

You there…peasant…fetch me my free lunch…

I appreciate that government should not spend tax money wastefully. I also appreciate that one taxpayer’s waste is another taxpayer’s necessary program. I do not appreciate a lot of jackass babbling about high taxes without any sort of follow-up about what it is you’d like to see cut. Don’t just give me this crap about taxes being too high. It costs money to run a state government. When the statehouse is taking in more money then it spends, and it has no debt it needs to pay back, then I’ll agree with you that taxes are too high. I don’t want to hear one more fucking word about high taxes. I don’t even want to hear that phrase ever again or I will simply tune you out because you aren’t being serious you just want to complain that you’re being asked to pay for services rendered. Tell me that government expenditures are too high. Tell me what the fuck you want to cut out of the budget. Tell me why anyone should think cutting it is a good idea. Or just shut the fuck up.

Pardon my liberal use of the f-word here. But I am getting really, really tired of this crap.

[Update…And Furthermore…!] Just so we’re all on the same page here, listen…if the government is running a deficit and you believe in a balanced budget then either government expenditures are too high or taxes are too low. Do not babble at me about high taxes. I can see arguments for deficit spending, particularly during an economic downturn, but regardless of where I or anyone stands on that matter, taxes cannot be too high if government isn’t taking in enough money to pay its bills. Spending might be too high. Fine. If you can get enough voter agreement to cut spending here and there, do that. I might be with you on it depending on what it is you want to cut. Do not cut taxes without first cutting spending and then tell me that you are a fiscal conservative, I’ll laugh in your face.

German Unamused Llama is unamused…

Wir sind nicht amüsiert!

Good post today over at The Southern Poverty Law Center…

National Organization for Marriage Continues to Spread Lies About Gays

Last Nov. 15, the Ruth Institute, a project of the NOM Education Fund, published the first eight paragraphs of an essay by anti-gay activist Michael Brown that asked what topic even far-right radio host Rush Limbaugh might be afraid to bring up in the face of “political correctness.” The part of the essay on the Ruth Institute website didn’t say what that topic was, but gave a “Keep Reading” link to a site run by an openly gay-bashing hate group, the American Family Association.

There, it took readers another three paragraphs to get to the red meat: “Could it be that the [Penn State] sex abuse scandal involved a man allegedly abusing boys, meaning that the acts were homosexual in nature? And could it be that even Rush Limbaugh didn’t have the guts to address this? (Contrary to the protestations of some, a man who is sexually involved with boys is a homosexual pedophile; a man who is sexually involved with girls is a heterosexual pedophile.)”

Note…The Ruth Institute is a project of the NOM Education Fund. So here is another example of NOM, via one of it’s arms, slyly waving around the rhetoric of a hate group. The SPLC article goes on to note…

To NOM’s many critics in the LGBT community, this is par for NOM’s course. For more than a year now, gay rights activists have alleged that NOM is playing a shell game, avoiding the most egregiously false defamations of gay people on its own website, but linking directly to others who don’t. The charge had enough impact that Maggie Gallagher — who co-founded NOM in 2007, is past chairwoman of the board, and remains a key NOM spokeswoman — felt forced to respond.

In a Dec. 9 post entitled “A Link Is Not An Endorsement,” Gallagher said such an argument “would lead to the absurd conclusion” that NOM agrees with the editorial positions of The New York Times or The Advocate, an LGBT newspaper. She didn’t mention the fact that the anti-gay article “leaders” on NOM’s site are almost always presented without any hint of criticism and, to all appearances, do seem to be endorsed by NOM. Some are simply republications of essays without any introductory commentary, while others feature laudatory introductions.

For example…

Just this Dec. 7, for instance, NOM’s Ruth Institute posted a gushing recommendation for a book titled Same-Sex Marriage: Putting Every Household at Risk, a jeremiad by Mathew Staver, head of the anti-gay Liberty Counsel. “Anybody who cares about the future of our society should read this book,” NOM said.

The 2004 book that NOM says “gives you real answers” isn’t further detailed on the NOM site, but it is jam-packed with precisely the kind of misinformation that Gallagher suggests she abhors. Perhaps most remarkably, the book claims that “29 percent of the adult children of homosexual parents had been specifically subjected to sexual molestation by that homosexual parent, compared to only 0.6 percent of the adult children of heterosexual parents… Having a homosexual parent(s) appears to increase the risk of incest with a parent by a factor of about 50.”

Staver’s citation for this hair-raising claim is remarkable — a debunked 1996 article co-authored by Paul Cameron…

…

Again and again, NOM seems to come back to pedophilia…

Go read the whole thing. It’s something that needs to keep being pointed out about NOM, over and over and over, because by now it should be obvious that NOM is in fact just playing a shell game. We are not a hate group, because we didn’t actually write any of the hate propaganda we keep feeding the public…

Every time Gallagher or Brown gets on TV, smiles into the camera, puts on their best look of innocence and says that they bear their gay neighbors no hate it needs to be pointed out that if they don’t, they sure like trafficking in it.

If I ran a political action committee dedicated to outlawing doors that lock, and I quoted voluminously from the writings of burglars, funded burglary educational groups, linked to the web sites of burglars and spoke glowingly of the posts on breaking and entering, invited burglars to my conferences and my political rallies, how convincing would I be if I told you that I found burglary abhorrent, that I only want to outlaw locking doors because I want to prevent children from getting accidentally locked out of their homes?

There’s a quote I read somewhere running through my mind right now, about how the way you get to peace is to work for peace…

Mississippi legislator fears for life after comments about gay marriage

A pastor turned Mississippi legislator is fearing for his life after activists say he endorsed the killing of gay men on his Facebook page.

Rep. Andy Gipson cited a Bible passage earlier this month to slam President Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage, saying he believed that homosexuals shouldn’t have the right to marry.

“The only opinion that counts is God’s,” he said, then quoted a Bible passage that he interprets to say that being gay is a sin.

He also quoted another passage:

“If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”

The man behind the pulpit cites a passage from Leviticus, the one saying that God detests homosexuals and gives everyone a free pass to kill them, and now he’s worrying about death threats. Worry’s kinda like hindsight isn’t it…always 20/20. Here’s the thing about death threats…they’re worse then bullets.   Bill Cosby gave a talk once about inner city gun violence in which he said that once you pull the trigger you can’t call that bullet back.   Death threats are like that but worse.   You can’t call them back and they multiply faster then tribbles.   Some of them might come back home to you.   Some of them might go zipping off to find people you love.   I think the bible had something to say about that too…preacher…   For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind…

Ah…here’s what I was looking for…

“Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.” -Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ends and means.   Ends and means.   Look at your means…there’s your ends.   All you pulpit thumpers out there, pounding away, waving your arms at your flocks about the homosexual menace…do you not understand you are talking about your neighbors…and all the people in your pews looking back at you, hanging on your every word as you wave the bible around like a damn trophy…it’s their neighbors too that you’re babbling about.   Don’t you get that?   Their neighbors.   And their kin.   Their homosexual children.   Their homosexual brothers and sisters.   Their homosexual aunts, uncles, cousins.   Their kin.   That blood that verse talks about, the stuff that’s on the heads of homosexuals…that’s their blood too you moron! And yours…assuming you’ve got any in you.

There is nothing more ordinary then human diversity. Some of us are blue eyed, some brown, some green. Some of us have blond hair, some black. Skin color, height, weight, proportion of leg to torso…ask anyone who observes and draws or photographs the human form how identical we are to one another. Some of us are left handed, some right. There are males, females, and also transgendered individuals. There are mathematicians, mechanics, chefs, doctors, painters, musicians, actors, soldiers, firefighters, teachers. There are people who just seem to light up a room whenever they walk into it no matter the gloom that was there before, and people who bring their own little grey cloud with them wherever they go. It is normal to be different. And very young children, generally, accept this in each other. As the song goes, You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught.

For decades now the homophobes have warned about the “normalization” of homosexuality. Dire consequences would follow. Very dire consequences. What everyone is beginning to see now, finally, is that when the homophobic static is gone, normalcy returns. Here in Maryland, the Baltimore Sun today has an article about how the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is playing in at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. The answer seems to be a catastrophic decent of society into pure unadulterated normalcy.

Gay cadets at the U.S. Military Academy and the Coast Guard Academy are forming clubs. Gay alumni at the Air Force Academy hosted their first football tailgate last fall, and gay alumni at the Air Force Academy and West Point held their annual dinners on campus for the first time.

It’s not all roses of course. Some worry about the effect coming out will have on their careers once they leave the academy. Others insist it will have little to no impact. But the effect here in Maryland, as elsewhere, of lifting the outcast status on gay people, that dangerous alien other label, has been mostly…business as usual. Or rather, business more usual then it previously could be when people had to be afraid. The sense you get is of peace descending, finally, after a long and brutal battle. We are all neighbors once more. Now that the fires of prejudice and hate are subsiding a sense of community becomes possible once again. Normalcy returns.

This recently, from a Canadian Evangelical…

Most of us evangelicals in Canada, regardless of personal beliefs about homosexuality, can admit that since same-sex marriage has been legalised in Canada, our society has not gone to hell in a hand basket, nor has traditional marriage, or our families been under attack. Scare tactics and wild-eyed fear-based rhetoric rarely turns out to be true. In actual practice, our society has become “live and let live” which is actually a rather tolerant and comfortable place to be.

Behold the dire consequence. A reader of Andrew Sullivan’s blog, responding to a question put to Maggie Gallagher about the harm to individuals and society where same-sex marriage has been legalized, noted that her reply was basically worry about the status of homophobes like herself…

Essentially, Maggie Gallagher is concerned about the affect of same-sex marriage on people like Maggie Gallagher. She cites no data or statistics or study which shows how any heterosexual marriages or children in families with same-sex parents have been damaged. She makes no claim that any such damages has occurred, only that people like her have been made social pariahs instead of the gay people who ought to be the pariahs. I’m sure there’s a social science term that describes what she is doing, but I guess I just find the complaint that “you’re making other people not like me” to be a rather petty and self-absorbed. Where, I wonder, is her concern about the affect on people other than Maggie Gallagher?

There’s the problem. To fear and loath your neighbor over some trivial difference just isn’t normal. To incite those fears and loathings in others is damaging to community and nation. Once the homophobic static is gone everyone just gets along with each other. The horrible outcome of the normalization of homosexuality is world where we are all neighbors once again and we just get on with life and things get back to…normal. The scapegoat, the hated other, no longer hate themselves, and are no longer hated. We are neighbors once again, each of us just going on about our business. And the only thing that warning anyone who will listen about the homosexual menace teaches them is what an creep you are.

Sullivan today…

The longer I am in this debate, the more something emerges. Most people don’t really care much about gays. The subject doesn’t come up; and most adjusted straight men do not feel passionately on the subject one way or the other. And so you notice patterns. You find that most of the really impassioned anti-gay activists are just as motivated by personal passion – whether as an early victim of sex abuse (Paul Cameron), or as the father of a gay son (Charles Socarides), or as a single mother abandoned by her boyfriend (Maggie Gallagher), or someone fighting to restrain their own gay feelings (Ted Haggard, Larry Craig) – as pro-gay activists are.

He’s commenting on the story that the father of anti-gay junk science Paul (homosexuals live an average of 36 years) Cameron acknowledged finally his homosexual urges, saying that he’d been sexually abused as a child.   You would watch that creep on various TV interviews and your gaydar would go off like a fire alarm.   The only thing that surprises me here is he finally admitted it.   Yeah, yeah…he claims he’s overcome his urges.   Spends every waking hour of every day obsessing about the homosexual menace, but he’s overcome those homosexual urges. I’m going to overcome my chocolate chip cookie urges by spending nearly every waking hour thinking about chocolate chip cookies.

There was a time I understood what Sullivan is saying there to be occasionally true, but just too pat to rely on as an explanation for the extremely passionate homophobes. Now…not so much. Decades of seeing it over and over and over…it’s the other shoe that almost always drops eventually.   Oh, they have a gay child…oh, they had a gay spouse…oh, they were abused as kids…oh, they’re gay…

But make no mistake, you also see the thoroughly heterosexual anti-gay crusader, who cheats on a spouse, has their own history of sexually abusing other people, or otherwise fails morally in some miserable spectacular way, and needs a scapegoat. And that’s where we come in. Newt Gingrich. Rush Limbaugh. They’re not all dealing with their own private confictedness about homosexuality, but they’re all nursing a private moral failure they need a scapegoat to dump it on.

A Facebook friend’s status post and subsequent comment thread tosses me back to a memory of my pre coming out to myself days that is both funny and cringe inducing at the same time.   Funny how often memories of our teen years are like that…

A friend is posing for an underwear fashion shoot and he’s asking for advice on getting a nice pair of black briefs because black is the specified color of the shoot and all he has are a pair of AussieBums that he doesn’t like.   He points to a link to the AussieBum page and I take a look.   They’re nice, thinks I. I have a thing for briefs and find it regrettable that they’re not the fashion in the younger set anymore. When I was a kid, boxers were what the old men wore.   Now I’m getting old myself and boxers are what the young guys wear and they think briefs are old guy underwear.   But briefs are still out there, gay guys at least still like wearing them, and the AussieBums I’m looking at are very nice…except like a lot of underwear companies these days, the waistband is like a damn billboard with the company name occupying almost as much real estate as the material below it.

I can appreciate a company wanting to get its name out there…but I really hate it when the branding on clothes demands more attention then the body wearing them. I am not your walking billboard. Plus, when I see an attractive guy, and especially if he’s not wearing very much, I don’t appreciate advertising getting in the way. My Facebook friend merely replies that it’s all about the branding, and that normally it’s only a glimpse of the wasteband that’s visible. A company has to get your attention when and where it can.   Okay.   Fine.   I get that.   But I’m still annoyed by it.

And then suddenly I’m remembering myself as a teenager, and those first confusing, thrilling times when getting that glimpse of an elastic waistband peeking out above a guy’s   belt line would make me all hot and bothered for some reason I really didn’t want to explore just then.   I touched on it in Episode 10 of A Coming Out Story…

There’s a toss-off line in John Fox’s The Boys On The Rock, where the young protagonist Billy takes note of the different kinds of underwear he and his new boyfriend are wearing as they are undressing each other.   It’s the kind of detail, that the kid even knows how some brands of underwear are different from other brands, that tells the reader this kid has been looking at guys in a sexual way for a while now. I suspect some of my straight peers back then could tell just by glancing at a girl’s tight shirt who made her bra, and whether it had hooks or snaps. They’d have probably been surprised to learn that men’s underwear differed from brand to brand in anything more then just price. Had I told them I could tell what make of underwear they were wearing just by looking at the waistband they’d have known more about me then I was ready to tell anyone. Including myself.

In the 1960s, long before they’d come out with such things as designer underwear for men, you had maybe four major brands of underwear.   There were Fruit of the Looms, Hanes, BVDs and Jockeys. Back then your choices were white cotton, high in the waist and cut such that the leg openings didn’t rise up the thigh much.   Not terribly sexy by today’s standards. All the same to a gay kid whose hormones had tentatively started percolating the underwear pages of the various catalogs suddenly became pretty riveting reading. I started ogling them when I was nine or ten I think.

I can hear the snickers now.   A catalog? Given the level of open sexuality these days, gay and straight, it’s probably hard for people who didn’t live that period to get how sexually repressed it was, and how shocking the free love morality of the Beat and Woodstock generations were to their elders.   My peers and I grew up in their shadow and in the 1960s even my heterosexual peers had to resort to the catalogs to get their fix, though they could also at least find the occasionally discarded Playboy in the trash bins.   I remember a friend finding one of those and gleefully passing it around as we gathered in one of our secret hiding places. There was an article about a nudest camp and I remember being completely riveted by the few naked guys I saw in the pictures. My companions were all making admiring comments about the women and parrot like, I mimicked them. But I never took my eyes off the naked guys. That was discovering sex when you were a kid back in those days. You and a bunch of the other guys, in your treehouse or fort or secret hiding place, passing around a Playboy someone had found in the trash.   There was no Internet you could browse alone in your room when your parents weren’t looking.

I was careful to ogle the catalogs when I knew I was alone in the house, knowing full well at some level what I was doing and yet at the same time not admitting it to myself. And true to form the budding little geek in me began around then to critically analyze the object of my fascination. It wasn’t long before I could spot the difference between a Hanes and a BVD at a glance. The catalog retailers, Sears, Montgomery Ward, J.C.Penny, used to buy from one of the big companies and rebrand them with their own names. I could tell just by looking at them.   These are made by Fruit of the Loom…these are really BVDs…

Most spellbinding of all were the Jockeys. The first time I saw another kid in the gym locker room wearing one of those Y fronts my jaw almost hit the floor. I’d never seen anything so…alluring. Particularly on that one kid who had a body that looked like it had stepped out of one of my anatomy for artists books. It was junior high and I was fourteen or fifteen.   Being careful not to gawk in the locker room wasn’t usually a problem though. It was so embarrassing to have to undress, let alone shower naked with a bunch of other guys, that I became adept at tuning everything out and just getting on with it (I joke sometimes that it’s a trick I learned in Vacation Bible School). Plus, even at that age when you are busy becoming all hormones and nerve ends my libido was very low key and persnickety. But there were close calls. When the other guys my age began rhapsodizing about advertising for bras and woman’s lingerie I knew I had to keep my mouth shut. But I wasn’t ready to admit to myself why.

In high school, in the early 70s low riser bell bottom jeans started coming into fashion and I began seeing other guys my age wearing them in school.   Not every guy who wore them really had the body for it, but those who did drove me nuts every time they walked by.   The best of these really showed off a guy’s…attributes…nicely.   And if the shirt wasn’t tucked in you might see a glimpse of elastic peeking up above the belt line.   By the time I was 17 I had become I became expert at telling the brands apart just by the waistband because the stitching each company used was different. Fruit Of The Looms had a small blue stripe with a yellow stripe below it. BVDs had a black dotted line, sometimes with a red dotted line below it.   Nowadays on a lot of brands the elastic waistband is a damn billboard.   Back then it was something you decoded stealthily, like a secret message.

How I could become such an expert on men’s underwear and at the same time remain clueless about my sexual orientation is something I’ve been trying to delve into in my cartoon, A Coming Out Story.   It was a combination of the horrible things I was taught about homosexuals back in my ninth grade sex-ed class, and the relentless stereotypes of that time. On the one hand I knew I could not possibly be a homosexual because I was none of the horrible things that I’d been taught homosexuals were.   On the other, I knew perfectly well what would happen to me if it became common knowledge that I was one.   Already through most of my grade school life I’d been tormented and bullied severely because I was small, scrawny, and I hated sports.   Faggot was a routine insult kids like me got whether we were actually thought to be queer or not.   I didn’t need the extra added threat of the other kids knowing for certain that I was, in fact, a queer.

So I kept it all inside. But sex is an instinct older then the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates, let alone humans, let alone teenage boys. You can try to bottle it up inside of you, but it will find its way out no matter how much you’d rather it just went away. Even such a tame little apologetic libido as my own.   It just kept…insisting that I look at all the beautiful guys.   Especially the ones with a tempting bit of skin showing between the belt line and the shirt.   Insisting that I look as they walked by.   Oh…look over there…that one…well now, his hips move very nicely as he walks don’t they?   Long legs…   Nice jeans…   Oh look…he’s wearing Jockeys…

I count it as a blessing that I was able to avoid the years of self loathing other gay guys of my generation endured.   I fell in love and in that wonderful glorious rush of teenage first love was able to finally come out to myself and not see myself as perverted, mentally ill or an abomination in the sight of God.   But I understand completely how it is that some people, strident cultural conservatives getting caught with rent boys, politicians getting caught soliciting vice cops in parks or public restrooms, can do the things they do, things that fairly write I Am A Homosexual on their foreheads in neon lights, and still resolutely not consider themselves to be gay.   All I have to do is remember back to when I was a kid alone in the house with one of the big mail order catalogs, gawking at the men’s underwear pages, one part of me completely entranced, the other just keeping its mouth shut.

[Edited a tad…]   I had to add the words “advertising for” to the end of one of the paragraphs there to make it clear my childhood friends weren’t transvestites.   I’m not saying any of them aren’t…just that back then they were ogling advertising for bras and women’s lingerie like a lot of boys that age did back then, not fantasizing about wearing it.   A couple wise guys here apparently thought I meant otherwise…

Posted to Twitter: “Man, Diablo III is super hard. I’ve been playing for 30 minutes and haven’t even defeated the login screen. #error37”

For some really, really good laughs, try the #error37 hashtag. If nothing else you’ll discover how very quick witted a lot of gamers are. But I suppose you need to develop that if you’re going to spend any time in that world.

I haven’t owned a game console since the ColecoVison I had way back when, just to give you and idea of how much I am into gaming (still have my box of cartridges for it though). This massive twitter howl of agony is interesting to me mostly to the degree it shows me where DRM is headed. There’s a saying about how passions increase in reverse proportion to the substance of the issue. That’s not always true, but it sure seems to explain why it’s the entertainment business that’s so hyper about losses due to theft of product.

Listen to me: you are selling entertainment. You need to be entertaining.

This first #Diablo3 screen seems suspiciously similar to Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. #error37

Or at least as entertaining as your customers.

One does not simply login into #Diablo3

Damn you guys are hilarious…

A friend on Facebook remarked after I posted the first installment of this “WOW! I’m impressed that you are releasing this story to the world.”   But it’s time.   I need to get this out of me.   And I replied…

Well there’s more to this story then my dad, which hopefully I’ll be able to get out there too. But…yeah…I was aware when I decided to finally tell the story of my growing up that this was going to be the thing that got people’s attention.

Here’s the thing…I’ve been more reluctant to tell people this then that I’m gay. It’s that Sins Of The Fathers thing. You get afraid of what people will think of you. It still worries me and it shouldn’t. Mom was the one who raised me, not dad, and in any case I am not my father. Both my brother and I (he’s my half brother actually) were raised by good mothers and we’ve both lived by the values they set. He’s got a good home improvement business going for himself and I’ve been working in IT for almost twenty years now. Our police records are cleaner then your kitchen floor. We are not our father. But then…nobody is. Turn it around. If dad was a saint that wouldn’t automatically make me one either.

But I think it is true that the home you’re raised in makes a difference. The problem is these days we can’t have a discussion about home and values and what it does to a kid because we’re in the middle of a culture war and that means a lot of basically good homes have to get attacked and a lot of basically good parents and good kids have to suffer. It’s reminding me of how my own mother was treated back in the late 1950s and early 60s because she was a single divorced mother. And myself. Back then I didn’t need people to know dad was a crook to get placed in the problem child box, just that my mom was divorced and still didn’t have a man in the house.

I wouldn’t be telling this story if I didn’t think there was a point here I’d like people to get. I am not that narcissistic. You hear a lot of talk from the religious right about morals and values and what great champions of these they are and it’s all bullshit. They’re a bunch of tribalistic runts thumping their drums and screaming at anyone who isn’t of the tribe. It’s time the other tribes started thumping back because actually the moral high ground isn’t theirs.

That’s the story I’m telling here.   So to continue…and here I am reposting some of what I’ve written previously about mom’s first boyfriend…

There’s a reason my generation are called the baby boomers. We are the generation born to the ones who fought that war, came home, and all at once returned to what would have been normal lives were it not for the war…which for heterosexuals (and homosexuals, because the closet was not an option but a necessary means of survival in those days…) meant getting married and having kids.   All at once.   It was literally a baby boom.   Housing was scarce for the new families for years.   Suburban Levittowns sprang up all over America.   Schools had to be built, many schools, many, Many schools, to handle the load…only to later be decommissioned as my old high school eventually was, after the last of the boom had graduated. We are a massive bulge in the population, and that is because there was a war.   A very big, catastrophic, savage and bloody war…that changed so much…so very very much…

Mom told me often about the sailor she dated during WWII. When she got started, I could see that look of remembrance of first love in her eyes, hear it in her voice, still, so many years later.   So many little things about him she remembered vividly.   So many stories about the times they had together…about waiting patiently for his letters from overseas during the war…about how her father disliked Jews, but came to see them as fellow neighbors in life by coming to know the Jewish man she loved.   She loved him, probably to her dying day.

When I asked her once why she married Dad instead, she said her sailor was on a ship that was ordered into Nagasaki harbor after the war ended, and that his ship became trapped in the harbor briefly due to all the bodies floating in it.   She said the sight of it had driven him mad.   And for years I wondered, never doubting that he’d gone mad as mom had said, if that bodies trapping a big U.S. navy ship part of the story could possibly be true.   Really?   Perhaps he’d seen lots of bodies certainly…but so many they trapped a huge Navy ship?   Madness if it will strike, strikes young men around the age he was, so perhaps it would have happened to him anyway.   But I saw a post Conor Friedersdorf made in which he linked to an Atlantic article about World War II…The Real War. In it was related the experiences of a two soldiers, Neil McCallum and his friend “S.” who came upon the body of a man after a shell had landed at his feet…

“Good God,” said S., shocked, “here’s one of his fingers.” S. stubbed with his toe at the ground some feet from the corpse. There is more horror in a severed digit than in a man dying: it savors of mutilation. “Christ,” went on S. in a very low voice, “look, it’s not his finger.”

…and I got part way though the Atlantic article, when this passage struck me…

In the great war Wilfred Owen was driven very near to madness by having to remain for some time next to the scattered body pieces of one of his friends. He had numerous counterparts in the Second World War. At the botched assault on Tarawa Atoll, one coxswain at the helm of a landing vessel went quite mad, perhaps at the shock of steering through all the severed heads and limbs near the shore. One Marine battalion commander, badly wounded, climbed above the rising tide onto a pile of American bodies. Next afternoon he was found there, mad.

…and I realized then how I knew that war had been sanitized greatly by the mainstream press at the time so as not to damage homefront moral.   So I saw it then that yes, it could have been just as Morris told mom. Just imagine the aftermath of the first plutonium bomb, small as they say that one was, compared to what nuclear weapons can do nowadays.   Reading this Atlantic article I could see how it probably was exactly as mom had said.

So her sailor boyfriend became lost in madness.

Mom told me his family eventually had him committed to a mental hospital.   Mom was heartbroken.   Then her father had his stroke, or series of really bad ones.   He lingered, back in a time when medical care could do precious little for stroke victims.   When he passed away, mom was devastated.   Ruth probably was too.   Growing up I sometimes wondered if Ruth’s bitter view of life was in part because the only man she ever loved was gone.   Sometimes I feel like I need to cut her memory a break.   Sometimes.

In any event, Ruth sold their house, and apparently everything else my maternal grandfather Albert owned, including his business making and selling radios back in a time when radio was the high tech of its age.   I’ve written elsewhere about my doubts about the totality of this story.   But that isn’t what I want to go into here.   Mom would always tell me when I was growing up and exhibited an interest in electric gizmos, how much like her father I was.   At a very young age I would bring old junked radios I found in the dump and got them working again.   It wasn’t a lot of effort…back then radios were mostly vacuum tube contraptions and getting them back in shape was mostly a matter of taking the tubes to the local drugstore and running them on the tube testers that were ubiquitous then.

I would replace the bad ones with good and…presto…a working radio.   I never thought it was any big deal but mom encouraged that in me, along with my artistic talents.   I was a tinkerer, but also a budding romantic, and when I got a shortwave working I would sit with it for hours listening to the signals from distant lands, completely absorbed in the wonder of hearing signals from worlds beyond my little neighborhood.   When I was in fifth grade mom’s older brother Wayne bought me my first Heathkit radio kit, which I dove into happily.   I would have been nine then.   By then I also had my first camera, given to me when I showed some talent in the photography department.   Mom told me grandad Albert was also an amateur photographer and showed me some of his work…mostly poses of mom.

She was his darling girl and it really scarred her deeply when he passed away in such a painful, lingering way.   She never hesitated to encourage anything in me that she could see something of her dad in.   We didn’t have much when I was growing up…I never got every toy I wanted.   But I got nearly every book I asked for and anything that encouraged my interests in electronics and art she did her best to provide.   In many ways I owe a lot to granddad Albert.   I have always wished I had a chance to know him.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.   Mom and Ruth moved to California, to live near where her younger brother Dean lived in Pasadena. Mom and Ruth lived there for several years, and then one day they went for a trip to Catalina Island, and on the pier at Avalon she met dad.   They fell in love, married, and shortly thereafter they had a kid.   Me.

So many people died in that war…many from the two atomic bomb blasts alone.   Every year they toll the bells in Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the a-bomb dead.   And every year it’s been in the back of my thoughts always to wonder if I was born because of one of those atomic bombs.   But that war violently changed a great many lives, and I am certainly not the only war baby ever born, who but for war would not be.

To be continued…

Via Right Wing Watch…

Jim Garlow was on Daystar TV’s “Celebration” program to promote his recent book “Miracles Are For Real,” but before the discussion about his book began, Garlow and hosts Marcus and Joni Lamb spent several minutes talking about President  Obama’s statement last week in support of marriage equality.

Garlow weighed in, declaring that religious liberty and “the radical homosexual agenda” were on course for a head-on collision in America because “they cannot both exist in the same nation at the same time.”

Because persecuting homosexuals is a sacrament more vital to one’s own salvation then being baptized.   If homosexuals can live their lives in peace we might as well close the church doors and wait for the rapture because salvation just isn’t possible anymore.

Oh, but he’s not through yet…

Garlow warned that advances in marriage equality will eventually force the Christian church underground because the gay agenda is all about “coercion, and crushing, and taking away our liberties and freedoms.”  But nonetheless, Garlow said, Christians must be willing to stand up and speak out in opposition even though “we are coming into an era where it could cost us everything, including our lives”

Whereas homosexuals don’t have lives.   And if they do our relentless incitement of religious passions toward them certainly isn’t costing any of them theirs.