When a straight friend from back in the day calls to let you know an old episode of Black Sheep is on and a young Peter Frampton is in it, because he knows your taste in guys…

Came home to find a letter from the Maryland State Insurance Commissioner’s Office, telling me that they’d convinced State Farm to cancel my car insurance premium hike and refund the money Plus Interest.

I’m stunned. After I mailed off my form protesting the hike, back in October, I heard absolutely zilch back from them and figured it had just been conveniently lost in the bureaucratic shuffle. I would have expected at least a notice that the form and been received. But it was dead silence. Five months later they tell me I won.

Well this is good, but I hope State Farm doesn’t think it means I’m sticking with them. I was in the middle of exploring other options for car and home owner’s insurance when this letter came. There are lots of companies out there offering cheaper rates for the same coverage or better. And I am not at all happy that my local State Farm Agent dropped a clause into my home owner’s policy exempting damage from collapse. I have a flat roof and that is the one thing you absolutely need protection on if you have one of those.

While staying at the Walt Disney World parks I would make extensive use of my  annual pass. It basically gives you freedom to wander around the parks without worry about  when your tickets expire or which park you’re allowed into that day. So if I was staying at Boardwalk I’d start my morning with a walk down the path to Hollywood Studios…

…and make my way to The Writer’s Stop to get my morning coffee and a danish.  The Writer’s Stop is  a nice little coffee shop/bookstore tucked in a corner of Hollywood Studios, themed as a studio writer’s lounge/hangout.  And now it looks like they’re going to close it, another one of my favorite places in WDW, to make way for more Star Wars stuff.  I can’t really blame them. Star Wars is hot right now. It’ll bring the tourists in…and the money.

I’m probably not going back to Walt Disney World, largely because it’s not as much fun if I have to remember the fight I had with a certain someone every time I go back. But there is also this, and I discussed it the other day  with a co-worker who is also a big Disney fan: it’s feeling less and less every year like Walt Disney’s World, and more like Disney Corporation’s World.

I think when I started going back in 2008 I was just seeing the last fading light of Walt Disney’s influence on the parks. It was something special to me because I’m old enough to remember watching TV when Walt Disney was still alive and when I walked into Epcot that first time it all came back to me. But in the years since they’ve bought Star Wars and they’ve bought Marvel, and while those are all fun things they’re not necessarily Disney things. I don’t think that much matters to the boardroom anymore. Those of us who still remember Walt Disney are getting old.

It’s still the Rolls Royce of theme parks. The nearest competition can’t even come close. But I wasn’t a theme park kinda guy back in 2008…I only got talked into it by a certain someone, and then, to my surprise and delight, only dived in because I remembered Walt Disney. I don’t need to keep coming back anymore, if it can’t at least still be his theme park.

I’m feeling Wonderful. Aren’t breakup fights supposed to make you miserable? Well…we weren’t boyfriends, just, for a while, casual long distance friends, never to be anything more than that. But we had a past. I would have walked through fire for him. But not into the closet for him. That turned out to be the sticking point.

Yeah it hurts. But not badly at all, as it turns out. Mostly it feels like I have my life back, like it’s been reset back to before the time I found him again, and everything I had then and everything I felt then, I have back now. I’m not kidding…I’m feeling ten…twenty years younger. (grin) Now if I only looked it.

I came back home and the weather here in Charm City is feeling spring like and I’m really looking forward to summer. It’s stunning to realize I wasn’t before. It was just something that was out there. Now it feels like the open road beckoning. Like life always felt.

Back home just now after my excellent Disney World Adventure. I’m going around waking up the house now from its slumber. Water turned back on, hot water heater lit, Internet connectivity re-established, car unpacked…

Peace and quiet. You get it by making an authentic life for yourself, realizing that those moments of actual peace and quiet that come your way, like most things in life, the good and the bad, will come and go in their own good time.

So you deal with the drama as best you can, which you can because you have lived an authentic life, and you have learned how to cope, not how to act like you’re coping. And likewise you navigate the hardships, the pain, the disappointments. And you relish the good things, and all the joys life brings to you, large and small trivial and sublime. And you enjoy the peace and quiet when it comes, while it is there.

But if you go looking Specifically for peace and quiet you’re not making a life, you’re building a cocoon. And pretty soon the cocoon is a prison. And then…a coffin, from which only the dust that could have been a person emerges.

Word of advice…

Few things in life make pampering yourself more sensible than hostility from your high school crush. So my last vacation day I went to the Brown Derby to hang out with the other stars and have drinks and five star food and stuff…

I love this place. Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World is one of my favorite theme parks for the way part of it tries to be like the Hollywood of the 1930s/40s. I love the art deco main street, at the end of which is a reproduction of the last of the three Brown Derby incarnations. You walk in and you feel like you’re there. Well…except for all the other guests making it painfully obvious this isn’t 1930s Hollywood.

It took almost 45 years for my first high school crush and I to have our breakup fight. The advantage to waiting so long is at this age I can handle the emotional swings of it better, plus having some real life experience under your belt gives you better aim when you’re throwing shit back in someone’s face. So for this special occasion I went and ordered the Good Steak…

You’re looking there at the most expensive dinner I’ve ever had, or ever will have, because it’s not bloody likely I’m ever spending that kind of money again on dining out. (100+) But as it was a special occasion it was worth it. How does a steak dinner get so expensive? Simple. You add the 25 dollar Kobe beef option to the already expensive Brown Derby steak dinner.

It was Delicious! Everyone should have steak this good once in their lives. Well…if you eat meat anyway…

It was almost exactly when my server set this down in front of me my phone buzzed and I saw I got another lying harangue from das Submissive complaining about how unruly I am, (just for you hon!) and that we shouldn’t speak anymore because a closet needs peace and quiet. Time was I’d have canceled my vacation and gone back home in tears. This time I settled down to a nice steak dinner.

“Corpse food”…I think the vegetarians call it.   Yes.   Quite.

Reposting this one because it seems so appropriate somehow…

…not that I’m grieving, I’m beyond all that now. This is about das Submissive still working through all those stages of denial. He’ll be a while.

More fun to come when I get back to my drawing table!

Don’t want me to contact you in “any way shape or form” do you? Okay. Fine. (How do you contact someone with a shape?) I shall comply.

But…seriously…you should take that act on the road.

To Whomever German It May Concern…

Did you get pissed off last night because I spent all that time talking to that other guy? Really? No…Really??

You told me he was going on a road trip. Road trips are a big deal with me. I didn’t spend 60k for a car they say you can put 100 thousand miles on and it’s only just broken in because I wanted a status symbol. I Love Road Tripping!   But…you know that. That’s probably why you told me he was going on one.

He showed me his plan and I showed him the tons of road trip photos I have on my smartphone and my Facebook page and we talked road trip stuff and then he mentioned backpacking and I showed him that photo of me back when I was 30 with my pack on and we talked backpacking stuff.

Then he spent practically the rest of the night trying to find where you went because he knew we were friends (as opposed to acquaintances) and that I wanted to spend some time with you before it was time to go. And you’d bugged out.

You do that sort of thing. Like you suddenly get pissed off at me because of something I didn’t see coming and I would have avoided if I had seen it. And then it’s months before you talk to me again.

Love how you tease me every time we meet. You can launch yourself into a tea party tirade about how Obama has wreaked the economy with a perfectly straight face and if I didn’t know any better I’d swear you meant it. Of course, when I suggested with my own straight face that Trump was a good alternative the look on yours my dear German was priceless. Yes, I can tease back.

But teasing is only fun when there is a bedrock of honesty between friends and you don’t want me that close. For some reason. After I joked about Trump you said I was hard to read sometimes. No I’m not, and neither are you. And that’s really the problem all along isn’t it. We’re birds of a feather on the same wavelength every time we meet and you still can’t handle that. So you keep me at arm’s length. And then misjudgements happen.

Did you really get jealous? I swear…sometimes it’s like you forget I spent 33 years searching for you.   By now…don’t you know?

I just woke up from what was probably the most wonderful dream I’ve ever had. And no, I wasn’t having sex. Actually, since I hit 30 I’ve almost never had dream sex,

I was asked out on a date. That’s never happened to me in real life. Never. I’ve always had to be the one who asked. And usually I got the you’re a nice guy Bruce but it just wouldn’t work answer back.

I won’t go into the details, but me and the object of my affections were both teenagers in this dream, and he was someone I was madly crushing on (and still am…but I said I wouldn’t go into details…). What made the dream even more enchanting was some fairly old fashioned family members were watching all this go down and gave me a signal they approved of the nice boy asking me out, once they’d had a chance to size him up.

It was like a slice of life from a better world, a better life. I woke up feeling Wonderful.

I’m 62, going on 63 now. I’ve had my three strikes. I know it will never be. I think this must be how acceptance feels. I’m okay with the dream I just had. Better than okay. Some dreams don’t have to come true after all. They can just be dreams.

Put my bird feeders back up over the weekend. After I’d finished I noticed I seemed more awake, more aware of…everything…than I had in a long time.

I’d stopped feeding a couple winters ago (counting this one) because the mess was getting more annoying than I wanted to deal with. Birds are messy eaters and the shells get tossed every friggin’ where. Plus the additional cost of stocking up on big sacks of seed before winter set it was more one year that I wanted to bear.

But there was more to it, and even back then I knew it in that just-barely-aware space where you put things you flinch away from looking at too closely. Somehow I’d just lost interest. It’s weird, but looking back on it now I think I know why. The front yard was Claudia’s hangout and when she died, counter intuitively, I lost interest in the bird feeders.

I think it was the feeders were something I enjoyed looking out at.  Watching birds at the feeders is one of those little joys I’ve indulged ever since kidhood. I’d have them out on the apartment balconies everywhere mom and I lived. One of the big deals of having a house of my own was I could really indulge it if I had a nice yard and space to put up different kinds of feeders for different kinds of birds. Then it happened and afterward I didn’t much care about the front yard anymore. Or more specifically, looking out the front window.

It’s odd and interesting how emotions can seem to be about one thing when they’re really about something else. I had no noticeable aversion to looking out the front window at the front yard and the street. I did it often if only to check on the weather and my car from time to time. My house being an middle-group rowhouse doesn’t have side windows, so the front, which faces the south, is my main source of sunlight. So it always got its blinds opened first thing in the morning. Had there been  something making me actually flinch away from the window I’d have noticed it and walked it back to the source. But it was only disinterest in feeding the birds starting that winter. That little joy didn’t matter much anymore for some reason. So I took the feeders down. And without the feeders I never bothered looking out that window much, except to check on the weather, and the car. It’s been years since it happened  and  I still sometimes get flashbacks of glancing out that window and seeing Claudia thrashing on the street, and knowing in that instant  she’d been run over.

Last Friday while telecommuting I saw a chickadee hopping around on my Japanese maple looking for the feeders that used to be out there and I thought I should go dig out one of the small sunflower seed feeders. It was a chore because all the feeders were in a storage container under the backyard deck and the outside door to it was still blocked by the huge pile of snow I’d shovelled off the deck. I could get to it from the basement door but I just knew it would be covered in funnel spider condos which I just didn’t want to get near without a lot of de-spider spray. Plus it was blocked off with workshop items like the table saw and ironically, the storage cans where I keep the wild bird seed.

But I got into it anyway and cleared out the spider encampment (I swear this spring I’m hiring an exterminator to de-spider the space under my deck) and worked my way to the container with the bird feeders in it. I ended up taking most of the stuff in it out. As I began setting things back up in the front yard something apparently awakened inside. I found myself trekking to the Wild Birds Unlimited out in Cockeysville and buying some new feeders and mounting poles, and some fresh suet cakes for the woodpeckers. And when I’d finished I looked at my front yard  it seemed with fresh eyes, like as though for the past couple years I’d not really been seeing it right there in front of me.

Figured it might take me months to get my old customers back. They were all there by the end of that day.

Puritan Valentine’s Day Cards!  Oh yes…

A friend on Facebook says,  “For that special someone you’re willing to tolerate until one of you is dead.”

This came across my Facebook steam this morning, and managed to re-ignite an anger I try very hard to keep contained…

Celibacy at Gay Christian Network: What’s that all about?

It was the following passage, right at the beginning of the linked article. I read stories like these and they make me really angry about what has been done to gay people…not only in the name of religion to be sure, but a certain sort of fundamentalist religion bears a lot of the blame…

On my first full-day at the Gay Christian Network annual conference, meeting in Houston, Texas, January 2016, I met a gay man, my age mate, who told me that for the past twenty years he has lived his gay Christian life committed to celibacy, but no more. Relatively recently, a pastor of a Southern Baptist church from his home state told him he could fully embrace his sexual orientation as a gift from God and enter into a same-sex marriage if he so desired. The man was, to use the expression, bursting with joy as he told me this…

…and I just want to go grab both sides A and B and yell in their faces while trying to shake some life back into them: get that goddamned cult leader off your back, whoever they are, however sincere they seem to be…Especially if they are sincere…You Do Not Need Third Party Permission To Be a Human Being!

And no, this isn’t about my being an atheist getting all holier than thou about religion. I have always had this reflex toward religiosity, or any politics for that matter, that is controlling. And that’s what this is all about; not denial of sex but denial of the heart within. There is no meaningful distance between I Give You Permission To Have That Intimate Heart-To-Heart Body And Soul Companionship and Permission Denied But Feel Free To Ache For It Until You Die Or Else God Won’t Love You And Neither Will We. None. Zero.

Listen to me, it isn’t Jesus you need to know better…it’s yourself. Love and desire are wonderful beautiful things. Finding it in another is one of this life’s perfect joys. The philosopher Lao Tzu said that being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. Shame can only corrupt it, turn it against itself, lock you inside an insidious barbed wire fence. And the loveless soul soon becomes the empty shell for others to live vicariously in. If your faith isn’t a light within you, then it is a shroud someone’s wrapped you in. Unwrap yourself Lazarus, and go live life.  

And love God if that’s where you are, or love an amazing and sublime godless cosmos if that’s where you find yourself, and especially find someone to share it all with and love each other wholeheartedly, and don’t ask Anyone’s permission!

I guess the thing that really surprised me is I always thought you’d be the braver one. I never considered myself brave, just stubborn.

While researching the events of 1977 and Anita Bryant’s campaign, I came across this via a Google image search that turned up this Jack Davis cartoon in the July 1978 issue of Mad magazine…

It might seem surprising now how low class Mad Magazine’s attitude toward gays was…

Mad #145, Sept ‘71, from “Greeting Cards For The
Sexual Revolution” – “To A Gay Liberationist”

…but this blog post puts it into context: it wasn’t just the times, but also the 50s mindset of the staff. The liberal free spirit I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony mindset of the 60s-70s didn’t usually extend to Teh Gay. Check out the limp wrist in that Jack Davis cartoon. This is the world I came out into.

That summer of 1977 I had to listen to the BBC on my shortwave radio to hear the news from Florida because none of the TV and domestic radio news bothered to say anything about something that was obviously not of interest to decent normal people. Close to midnight sitting by the shortwave I learned that three out of four voters in Dade county had voted to kill an ordinance that simply said gay people ought not to lose their jobs or their housing simply because a boss or a landlord found out they’re gay. The next day as I walked through the city I found myself counting down three people for four I passed…trying to grasp the scope of how much people like me were still loathed.

Then later that December 1977…I watched the Christmas TV special that’s been on my mind the past couple days…