Wow…  It’s really Work trying to draw this bad… 

…don’t ask.

The catalogs are coming in all of a sudden.  In the mail today I received an L.L. Bean catalog for all these guys:

1. Bruce Garrett
2. Bruce A. Garrett
3. Bruce Garnet
4. Bruce Garret

I had no idea I had so much company here.   Maybe this is why my tequila keeps disappearing. 

But wait…there’s More!  Ladies and gentlemen…introducing the Williams Sonoma…

…Veg-O-Matic.  Swell.  That’ll go great with my Wüsthof Ginsu knife.  They should have made it entirely of stainless steel though.  How much would you pay Now..?

I have a pair of nesting catbirds in the Japanese maple in my front yard.  For a couple months now I’ve watched them setting up house and listening to their occasional mewing.  At the same time of course, they were watching me.  I knew where they were, they knew where I was. 

This morning, as I packed my car for a trip to the Goodwill clothing bins (re: this post), they were screaming in my face like they’d just then figured out there was a human in the neighborhood.  I’d bring a load out to the car and one of them would perch on the limb closest to my front door and yell at me.  As I walk to the car it would follow from one branch to the next.  By the time I got back to my front door they were both there yelling at me.

I’ve no idea how many eggs they had in the nest but I figured one of the younglings had fallen out and was probably hiding somewhere in the azalea by my front steps.  The screams got louder the closer I was to my front door and the azalea is the only place there where a small bird can hide.  So after I got the car loaded I paused on the front steps and, not moving, scanned the bush beside them with my eyes while the catbirds screamed at me.  There it was, keeping still and quiet.  It still had most of its down, but a few feathers had already grown in.  Its wings however, were no where near flight capable.  Problem is, I need to use my front door every now and then. 

We have cats in the neighborhood, so I don’t know if the little youngling is going to make it, but at least it wasn’t advertising its whereabouts like a mockingbird youngling will (and I’ve never figured that out), so maybe it can keep hidden until it’s wings grow in.  In the meantime, I’ve got a couple of catbirds that don’t want me using my front porch anymore.  There was a nice summer shower just now and with it a slight cooling breeze and I wanted to sit out on the front porch with a drink and enjoy it and I couldn’t because the catbirds kept screaming at me.  Oh well.  Better catbirds then mockingbirds.  Were they mockingbirds I’d have been getting pecked as well as screamed at.

Note to self:  When putting your shirts in the wash, remember to remove those mini-cigars you put in the pocket of one of them before going down to the bars last Friday first.

Hey nineteen
Thats ‘retha franklin
She don’t remember
The queen of soul
Its hard times befallen
The sole survivors
She thinks I’m crazy
But I’m just growing old
Hey nineteen
No we got nothing in common
No we cant talk at all
Please take me along
When you slide on down

Toto…maybe Kansas wasn’t so bad after all…

Poor guy…confined to a prison cell…fearing for his life…

Josef Fritzl going stir crazy in cell

Josef Fritzl, who locked his daughter in a cellar dungeon for 24 years, has asked permission to leave his prison cell after admitting he can no longer stand being cooped up.

Fritzl, 73, kept daughter Elisabeth locked in a windowless cellar in Amstetten, Austria, and fathered her seven children before being caught by police. Three of the children had never seen daylight before being released.

Now, after just two months of incarceration and despite his fear of being attacked by fellow prisoners, he has demanded his right to 30 minutes exercise every day.

Fritzl has now twice had half-hour walks, protected from other inmates by a close guard of prison officers.

Prison spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Erich Huber-Guensthofer said: "Mr Fritzl is accommodated in a cell for two and recently he has made use of his right to go outside for half an hour per day.

"He usually sits there watching television all day, especially news programmes about him," said one prison source. "He’s terrified that someone will attack him or try to kill him."

What’s German for Schadenfreude?

I’m a native Californian, raised alas in Maryland.  But I was born there, and half my family tree is there.  So I have a somewhat stereoscopic view of my birth state.  I see it from both within and without.  The land of fruit and nuts, as they like to joke, ironically, out in America’s heartland.  Ironic, because if you put the heartland nuts together in the same room with the California nuts the only way you could tell them apart is the California nuts would have a better tan.

One good thing to come from the same sex marriage decision out in California is that the rest of the country can see how batshit crazy the California republicans have become in recent years.  And in particular, the rest of the country can see how coastal California is not central California.  This, from Box Turtle Bulletin… 

We told you in June about the lunatic idea that Randy Thomasson and the Campaign for Children and Families came up with to try and have Kern County Supervisors put an ordinance in place restricting marriage to the opposite sex.

Not surprisingly, the County’s counsel informed them that this was unquestionably unconstitutional. And the County Supervisors decided that inviting lawsuits that they were guaranteed to lose was not a wise decision.

In a WorldNetDaily article before today’s decision, Thomasson had these words to say:

“This will be as inspirational as the Alamo, without the guns, knives, blood or death,” he said.

…because everybody knows hate mongering gay people doesn’t result in their blood or death. 

Dig it.  The county clerk’s office ended all civil marriages in Bakersfield, after consulting with attorneys from Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice, rather then marry any same sex couples.  Then the kook pews there decided it would be really swell if Bakersfield in effect, just declared itself a separate state.  It’s not the Alamo they see themselves as, so much as the Confederate States Of America.  Probably, much of coastal California would love to see it leave.

There are conservative, mostly rich suburban enclaves in coastal California.  But their contempt at having to share paradise with the hired help is nothing compared to the bitter fanaticism of the central agrarian part of the state where the concept of what America ought to look like differs very little from that of your average heartlander.  The San Joaquin Valley is more like Kansas then it is the Pacific Coast, and Bakersfield more like Lubbock Texas then San Jose.  The America of their dreams is straight, white, protestant, and run by the good old boys.  The rest of us exist just to pick their cotton. 

It’s a shock to some folks back here in the east to see that part of California rear its ugly head.  But it’s as much a part of the state as the Golden Gate.  My home state, Maryland, is fairly democratic and tolerant.  During prohibition, we were dubbed the "free state" because we wouldn’t pass a state enforcement law.  H.L. Mencken wrote here for the Baltimore Sun.  But we also gave the Union Justice Taney and Spiro Agnew.  California was the first state to legalize inter-racial marriages and now to legalize same sex marriages.  It has in San Francisco one of the most vibrant and politically active gay communities in the world.  In Silicon Valley, it holds the creative cutting edge of information technology.  There is Hollywood and Disneyland.  There is Rockwell International, Lockheed, and Northrop.  The human potential never had it better then in California.  It is a place of magic.  But you need to remember it also gave the Union Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

The flower scene from The Brave Little Toaster. Just for kicks and grins I decided to see if anyone else out there was struck by that scene and maybe posted it to You Tube. Sure enough. It’s shorter then I remember, and I got a few details wrong, but otherwise I seem to have remembered it fairly well. And David Newman, who composed the background music, knew what he was doing.

You know…that damn scene still makes me want to bawl…

Some years ago, I was living in a basement in Wheaton Maryland, and trying to date this cute guy who lived nearby.  I knew him from a gay BBS we were both on.  One day he invited me over and we sat around chatting for a bit, and he popped this cartoon he said he really liked into his VCR.  It was called The Brave Little Toaster, and on that basis alone I think I’d never have so much as touched it.  It just sounded like one of those suffocatingly cute children’s things I used to absolutely hate when was a child myself.  But it caught my attention instantly.  There was, I could tell right away, an insightful, and playful, and very very smart mind behind it.

There’s a scene in the movie I still distinctly remember.  The little toaster is walking through a grassy field (on its four tiny little toaster legs) and it walks past a flower.  The flower glimpses its own reflection in the toaster’s chrome sides and instantly perks up, attracted to the beautiful reflection it sees.  No, says the toaster (I’m trying to recall the dialogue from memory here…), I’m not a flower.  But the flower doesn’t understand.  It leans closer to the reflection it sees, utterly entranced…delighted…yearning…  No, says the toaster again, distressed.  That’s you, not me.  I’m not a flower.  And the toaster walks away.  And all the flower knows is that the beautiful flower it saw just walked away from it, and when the toaster looks back, it sees the flower wilting. 

It was just a little toss-off scene in the film, not really bearing at all on the action.  But the depth of it stunned me.  And I thought to myself A gay man wrote this…

But my attention was also distracted at the time, ironically, by the cute guy in the room with me, who would soon walk away from me too, and I never looked closely enough at the film credits to know who the creator of all this magic was.  Well, now I do. 

Alas and damn… 

Sci-fi Writer Thomas Disch Commits Suicide

Science fiction writer and poet Thomas Disch has committed suicide. Disch died July 4 and his body was discovered July 5, according to the New York City Police Department. He was 68.

The author of popular sci-fi novels Camp Concentration and 334, Disch had been openly gay since 1968. Following the 2004 death of his partner, poet Charles Naylor, Disch reportedly began suffering from depression.

Awarded many honors for his fiction, including two O. Henry awards, the genre-bending Disch also published more than a half dozen books of poetry, a whimsical Child’s Garden of Grammar (1997); a history of speculative fiction, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of (1998); and the Brave Little Toaster series for children.

It got him.  His other half died and it got him.  I could feel it myself that week, like a dark shadow hovering over the earth, patiently watching for stragglers.  And, reading Anna Quindlen’s review of the book The Brave Little Toaster was based on, makes me wish I’d read it first before seeing the movie…

The publisher optimistically says ”for both children and adults,” but what would the average 10-year-old make of the information that flowers can speak only in verse and that ”daisies, being among the simpler flowers, characteristically employ a rough sort of octosyllabic doggerel, but more evolved species, especially those in the tropics, can produce sestinas, rondeaux, and villanelles of the highest order”? Besides, most of the jokes are too good for children. Like C. S. Lewis’s Narnia chronicles or ”The Phantom Tollbooth” by Norton Juster, ”The Brave Little Toaster” is a wonderful book for a certain sort of eccentric adult. You know who you are. Buy it for your children; read it yourself.

Yeah…

"…before any of the small appliances who may be listening to this tale should begin to think that they might do the same thing, let them be warned: ELECTRICITY IS VERY DANGEROUS. Never play with old batteries! Never put your plug in a strange socket! And if you are in doubt about the voltage of the current where you are living, ask a major appliance.”

Damn.  Rest in peace Mr. Disch.  I wish I’d known how good you were when you were alive…

”Once a mortal, soon to be in Heaven, I may be

your best chance to distinguish yourself

as someone specially Blessed and bound for Glory

without going to a lot of trouble or expense …

Start with a little Tom My God shrine beside the BBQ

and before you can say Glory Be the whole back yard

and all its gardening tools are tax-deductible!

If your tax returns are challenged, show this poem

to the judge and ask him how many believers

constitute a Faith …”

But I know now.  And if you and Charles aren’t together now in some better place, at least you lived to see a world where the two of you could be together in our memory.

So I’m looking at the Google News headlines this morning, and once again I see that the militant gay agenda is being just too damn hard on people, and Mr. Adrian Sobers down in the Barbados takes exception to that…

I HAVE RESIGNED myself to the fact that the abuse of the word "intolerant" is a permanent fixture in this dear country of ours. Intolerant is now almost always (mis)used as a synonym for disagree.

I am "labelled" [sic] as "intolerant" if I disagree with the homosexual lifestyle (or the idea that all roads lead to Rome).

Has a catchy ring to it doesn’t it?  Sorta like "I am labeled as antisemite if I disagree with the international Zionist conspiracy."  "I am labeled as racist if I disagree with the Negro’s lazy shiftless watermelon eating way of life." "I am labeled sexist if I disagree with feminazis who should just shut the fuck up when a man is talking."

I am labeled as intolerant if I lump homosexual people into one big idiotic stereotype that I can easily feel superior to.  I am labeled as intolerant if I’d rather talk about homosexuals as if they were a bunch of empty dancing scarecrows then living breathing human beings who have the same human needs I do.  I am labeled as intolerant if all I want to see when I look at teh gay are stereotypes that stroke my pathetic bar stool conceits.  I am labeled as intolerant if I just don’t want to see the people for the homosexuals.  Woe is me.  Woe, woe is me.

Oh…and he goes on in his editorial to cite NARTH junk science as proof that homosexuals can change.   And he concludes with a brief but rousing pulpit thumping diatribe about godlessness and evil and atonement.  How anyone could think he’s an intolerant asswipe is beyond me.

No Adrian, all roads don’t lead to Rome.  Some of them lead straight into the gutter.  Yours, for instance. 

First…a little GLBT history…

A gay man dies alone in an unfamiliar hospital while his longtime partner tries fruitlessly to get permission to be by his side. It’s a too-common scenario that documents such as living wills, powers of attorney, and domestic-partnership registration are supposed to prevent. But in the death of Robert Lee "Bobby" Daniel, 34, at the Maryland Shock Trauma Center in October 2000, none of that mattered, according to a lawsuit filed by Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund on February 27. San Franciscan Bill Robert Flanigan Jr., 34, had power of attorney for Daniel, his registered domestic partner, but was barred from his room and from consulting with physicians because Flanigan was not considered "family" by the hospital, charges the suit, which seeks unspecified damages.

The couple had been driving to meet family in northern Virginia when Daniel became ill. He died without being able to say goodbye to his partner. "I have a huge hole in my heart, and my soul, because I wasn’t allowed to be with Bobby when he needed me most," Flanigan said in a statement.

Hospital officials denied any wrongdoing. "We deliver compassionate care to every patient, with sensitivity to the wishes of our patients and their loved ones," spokesperson Ellen Beth Levitt, told The Baltimore Sun.

Bad medicine – The Advocate, April 2, 2002

Flanigan and Daniel, both residents of San Francisco, signed a legal document giving Flanigan the power to make medical decisions for Daniel in expectation that doctors might not recognize Flanigan. Daniel confided to Flanigan that he did not want to go on life support at the end of his life.

Daniel was transferred to the Shock Trauma Center from the Harford Hospital in Havre de Grace, Md. That night, Flanigan sat in the waiting room for four hours while they worked on Daniel but was never consulted about medical decisions, according to the claim. When Daniel’s sister and mother arrived at the hospital, Flanigan was allowed to see Daniel for the first time.

When Flanigan and the family saw Daniel, he was unconscious with his eyes taped shut, and a breathing tube had been inserted, contrary to Flanigan’s requests, according to the claim.

UM hospital focus of discrimination suit – The Diamondback, March 7, 2002 

I did this cartoon about the tragedy back in 2002… 

I’d only just started adding the political cartoons to my web site back then, and my drawing skills were stunted from years of neglect, but unlike a lot of the other cartoons I did at that time, this one still holds up I think.  Reading the story of Flanigan and Daniel had made me livid, and probably that anger lifted my limited drawing skills up a notch or two.  I also blogged about it over and over.  Flanigan later found the cartoon while searching the web and I’m happy to say sent me a very heartfelt email thanking me for it. 

Later, when an all heterosexual jury excused Maryland Shock Trauma for what they did to Flanigan, I did a follow-up cartoon that was pretty lame and I’ve since removed it from the cartoon site.  I guess by that time my anger had turned into a weary contempt.  Maryland Shock Trauma had finally found a way to give straight juries an excuse to let hospitals stick a knife in the hearts of same sex couples without having to acknowledge their own bigotries.  Oh…we were just too busy to let the Not Family Person into the room with that other homosexual…

All of this is to say that if you google the case of Flanigan and Daniel you will likely run across one or more of the pages here on my web site, either in the cartoon pages or the blog pages.  Hold that thought for a moment.  Because the case of Flanigan and Daniel is not, alas, unique.  It’s still happening to same sex couples, who thought, like Flanigan and Daniel did, that their power of attorney documents might actually mean something to gay hating hospital staff…

Jackson Memorial barred lesbian from seeing dying partner

The family vacation cruise that Janice Langbehn, her partner Lisa Marie Pond and three of their four children set out to take in February 2007 was designed to be a celebration of the lesbian couple’s 18 years together.

But when Pond suffered a massive stroke onboard before the ship left port and was rushed to Jackson Memorial Hospital, administrators refused to let Langbehn into the Pond’s hospital room. A social worker told them they were in an "anti-gay city and state."

Langbehn filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday charging the Miami hospital with negligence and "anti-gay animus" in refusing to recognize her and the children as Pond’s family, even after a power of attorney was faxed to the hospital within an hour of their arrival.

…

Pond, 39, was pronounced dead of a brain aneurysm about 18 hours after being admitted to Jackson’s Ryder Trauma Center. Langbehn said she was allowed in to see her partner only for about five minutes, as a priest gave Pond the last rites.

"I never thought almost 20 years of love and family could be disregarded in an instant," said Langbehn, a social worker who lives with her children in Lacey, Wash.

…

Jackson officials declined to comment, except to say that the hospital follows state and federal laws on patient privacy that can forbid releasing health information to those outside the patient’s immediate family.

The hospital also may limit visitors if a patient is being treated for a trauma, emergency or serious infection, said Valda Clark Christian, an assistant county attorney representing Jackson.

That last statement there from the ironically named Valda Clark Christian is Jackson Memorial Hospital picking up the knife that Maryland Shock Trauma gave it, and anti-gay hospital staff everywhere.  Oh…we were just too busy to let that Not Family Person into the room with that other homosexual…  Power of Attorney?  You homosexuals have no power here…this is an anti-gay city and state…

What Jackson Memorial Hospital is going to do now is play the Maryland Shock Trauma trump card.  In the case of Flanigan and Daniel, first they said Flanigan wasn’t family.  Then they told him that the power of attorney document had been misplaced.  Somehow none of that mattered when Daniel’s Legitimate Family arrived at the hospital because they were let right in and that was when Flanigan was, purely as a matter of coincidence surely, also allowed to see his beloved.  When Flanigan sued the hospital finally came up with the excuse that they were just too busy to let Flanigan in.  Never mind that they could have still respected his medical directives anyway.  They didn’t have to let him into the room to do that.  Daniel had a fear of dying with tubes stuck down his throat and that was precisely what the hospital staff did to him.  When Flanigan and Daniel’s family were finally allowed to see him, not only were there tubes shoved down his throat, the hospital staff had put Daniel into restraints when he tried to take them out. 

That was how Daniel spent his last moments on earth, in the tender care of Maryland Shock Trauma.  Because they didn’t give a good goddamn about the faggot in the waiting room and his so-called power of attorney.  First they openly told Flanigan that he wasn’t being allowed in because he was "not family".  Then they said the power of attorney documents had been misplaced.  Then when Flanigan sued they told the jury they were too busy taking care of Daniel to deal with Flanigan too.  Probably they were too busy putting the tubes down Daniel’s throat.  In any case, the "too busy" excuse allowed the all heterosexual jury to acquit the hospital of any wrong doing.  If gay ain’t shit you must acquit…

Jackson’s lawyers surely have their own resources to look up how the case of Flanigan and Daniel went down.  But the hospital is  covering all its bases apparently.  Someone there is doing a little research on the web regarding that case, probably to get a sense of just how the Maryland Shock Trauma excuse card is played.  According to my site meter logs, someone at Jackson paid me a little visit the other day…

Nice.  Note the search string: "lambda legal flanigan daniels court findings ruling judgement"  Too bad you can’t search for your missing sense of human decency on Google.  What the Maryland Shock Trauma excuse does is give hospitals the absolute right to disregard anything anyone tells them about patients in their care, whether they’re the "legal" family of the patient or not, whether they are legally married or not, have a power of attorney or a medical directive document.  The Maryland Shock Trauma excuse gives hospitals free reign to do to your loved ones as they damn well please, so long as they die of it quickly enough that they can claim they were performing emergency procedures.  Nobody’s family rights have to be respected now in any way.  But of course everyone understands that it’s only the homosexuals who have no rights a heterosexual is bound to respect. 

This is why the fight for same sex marriage is so important.  Not that a marriage ring will give bigots any more respect for same sex couples, but that the system will never see our relationships as being equal to those of heterosexuals unless we fight for equality, not some separate but equal civil union status.  It’s not about the legal paperwork.  Langbehn and Pond had the same legal paperwork that Flanigan and Daniel did, and it conferred nothing.  It’s not about the paperwork.  It’s about respect.  Heterosexuals mate to the opposite sex.  Homosexuals mate to their own sex.  That’s it.  There is nothing more to it then that.  If that’s all it takes to make care givers treat loving and devoted couples with less compassion then they’d grant to laboratory rats then the moral problem here isn’t with us.  They were a lesbian couple.  If the word ‘lesbian’ negates the word ‘couple’ for you then You are the one with the moral problem not Langbehn and Pond.  Langbehn, in her struggle to care for her beloved, had more integrity and virtue then any of the runts at Jackson Memorial, who spit on their family while Pond was dying.  That’s what this is about.  We are not fighting over a word.  We are not fighting for a piece of paper.  We are fighting for the human status.  For the righteousness of love. 

A hospital can be a place of hope against all the odds.  It can be a place where the human heart takes its ultimate stand against the finality of death.  We all die.  That we still fight anyway, still love anyway, is either to our glory or just a pathetic conceit.  A hospital can be a monument to our capacity to love one another, that even the taint of death cannot take from within us.  Or it can be a place of despair, of the end of all things, even love.  Yes, sometimes, in the heat of battle, hospital staff have to be left alone to do their jobs.  But why even bother, if not for love?

Something’s wrong when the old friend from high school, who once told me he and his wife are "more into nature then technology" are more comfortable paying their bills online then I am.  I’m a computer systems engineer for chrissake.  He told me the other day that it was "Very ironic.  Very." that I wasn’t using online payment these days.  And there is this now: most of the places I mail paper checks to convert them into electronic payments anyway, and I never get a canceled check back.

So this weekend I’ve been setting up online payment accounts at various places.  Also automatic payment plans for things like the phone service and utilities.  I’ll get them to send me email statements now, and over the summer work on cleaning out my filing cabinets of packrat junk I just really never needed to keep, just look at and pay once a month.  All I really need to keep on hand I think, are the bank statements, the pay stubs and the tax forms I’ve filed over the years. 

I’m going to make an effort this summer to simplify my life some.  I have too much clutter in the house…things I inherited from mom I just don’t need to keep, even for sentimental value.  Furniture I really don’t like or want, old computer books and hardware I’ll never touch ever again.  Keepsakes that don’t mean anything to me anymore.  My house is too cluttered with stuff that I don’t use or need or want and isn’t me anymore.  Some of it came here when mom passed away.  Some of it is stuff I’ve kept over the years because it reminded me of a simpler time when I was younger and the future seemed brighter.  I need to go through it all.  I need to simplify. 

I don’t drink to forget.  I don’t drink to ease the pain.  I don’t drink to make life more bearable.  I drink to make my Baptist grandmother roll in her grave. 

Hey grandma…my fellow sodomites took me to Mexico last month and I discovered Tequila!  It’s very nice!

Relax and enjoy the inevitable…as Heinlein once said…