A neighbor across my street had to be taken off by the paramedics a couple nights ago. I just found out he’d had a really bad stroke and is still in the hospital, unable to move.

Him and his younger brother (both pretty old men, but 50s, maybe early 60s I’d say) live in one of the four single family detached houses across my street. The oldest brother who inherited the house was who had the stroke. He was into some sort of real estate business and possibly had other side work too. Whenever the weather was warm enough he’d be outside working on the front lawn or the side garden or the huge yard on the east side of the house with a Really Big tree and lots of scrub brush, which I saw him trying to clear out a month ago.

So he was active, if not a regular jogger or walker like me. I never once saw him smoking and he didn’t seem to be a drinker either. But I think his health wasn’t the best to begin with. He walked with some difficulty. Maybe it was the same sort of thing that had put his sister in a wheelchair.

The stroke scares me more than other possible health outcomes. For one thing I like to drive a lot and if it happens while I’m driving I could get other people killed. I’ve thought about that ever since I read the story of that school bus driver who apparently stroked out while driving the bus and crashed into a metrobus killing it’s driver and several passengers, plus himself. He’d apparently had a record of that happening before and should never have been given a school bus to drive. Luckily there were no children on the bus.

If I have the stroke, even one that doesn’t incapacitate me, I would need to give up my driver’s license, voluntarily if that isn’t the law. I won’t have that on me. But losing the ability to drive would feel like the end of my life.

I really don’t want the stroke. Unless it’s a massive one that kills me instantly. I can deal with that.

Second anniversary of being retired. And also time to gather my forms and do my taxes. So naturally I decide to evaluate my retirement funds…and stress out about money.

Yes, Yes…you knew the balance would go down when you withdraw money didn’t you. Didn’t You??.

It’s okay. I’m theoretically good for many many years beyond when the heart unit is depreciated and support is no longer available from the vender. But I have to watch my spending more carefully than I did when I was employed and making six figures. I can do that…I have budgeting spreadsheets I’ve created and some rules about what to spend and when. I have excellent health insurance beyond Medicare parts the A and B. Financially I’m good. Not fabulous, but good. I can pay my bills and generally maintain a lower middle class standard of living. Even take a Disney vacation every now and then. These days that puts me in the Very Very Lucky category. But the ability to stress over Everything is just baked into me I reckon.

At the moment a source of stress is that it’s looking like I can either take the two week Disney Vacation this spring or go to California and stay with family out there this summer…but not both. And those are two things I count on to relieve stress. Ha Ha. But I’m still crunching numbers. I’ll know by the end of this month. That’s plenty of time to either cancel my Disney reservations or tell my brother that a California stay will have to wait for next year.

And the fact is that cross-country road trip is getting very tiring now. I have to stop more often, which means more hotel money for the trip both ways. And the anticipation of driving cross country isn’t as exciting as it used to be. I’ve done just about all the parts of the country I wanted to, and some of it now, like Texas and Oklahoma, feel scary in a way they never did before.

Maybe I just fly out to California now and then for a week or two. Thinking about a road trip doesn’t get me excited, it just makes me feel tired now.

Oh dear…I’m 70 now aren’t I. (Looks at the old man skin on his arms) Yeah. That happened…

Been a while since I posted here…sorry. I’ve been taking a mental health break in Walt Disney World. Basically prepping myself for that bottomless darkness we singles get tossed into every year at this time. They call it Valentine’s Day.

Anyway…I wanted to put this out here because it’s something your LGBT neighbors have seen and known for a long, Long time…

This is from the Lawyers, Guns and Money blog. Go read the entire thing Here. 

I saw a TV news clip…I wish I could find it again…with Jerry Falwell and Anita Bryant standing together at a press conference and Falwell is telling the crowd that “a homosexual will kill you soon as look at you.” It was the kind of venomous hate we lived under for decades. There was no lie too extreme for them to throw at us, and all these years later they have not changed a bit. And it was so staringly obvious back then that the point was to whip each other up into a frenzy of hate. It isn’t an act, they’re not doing it for attention to rally the base, it is them. You don’t have to see that repeated very often, to conclude that the open sewer you are looking at is really what they are inside. 

Love completes you, but hate is never satisfied. So I commend this blog post at LG&M to your attention, and if you can stomach it, the free link to the NY Times article on which it riffs. But here’s the bottom line:

What’s important to recognize here is that reactionary politics, political authoritarianism, white supremacy, and evangelical Christianity are all intimately related to each other in early 21st century America. The “paradox” of Donald Trump becoming the cult-like and even messianic figure at the head of pietistic authoritarian white supremacist reaction in our culture is only a paradox if you ignore how closely all these things are connected to each other.

Your LGBT neighbors have known this for decades. I suppose it was just too horrible for most everyone else to believe, so excuses kept being made. I think we’re finally, Finally at the stage now, where the excuses have become untenable. The ugly truth has been out there all along. There were no deeply held religious beliefs, only hate. There were no good faith objections to racial equality, only hate. There were no principled arguments about sexual equality, only hate. There were no traditional moral values, only hate. There is no culture, only hate. We have seen all this for decade upon decade. And so have you. Now it is time for you to start believing what is right in front of your nose. 

Or perhaps the Phenidone Test.

Finally…Finally…Finally! I just now received the last raw chemical I need to make up a batch of H&W Control developer from the recipe!

I have all the equipment I need to mix it up. Scale, mixing/heating plate, beakers, weighing trays. I’ve done several trial runs with water in the beakers, calibrating the scale and weighing things on it, getting the water up to temperature on the mixing plate. Everything looks good. I have almost everything I need.

Just waiting now for a little courage.

Seriously…I’ve never done anything like this before, this is allegedly a very weird phenidone based developer that extends the dynamic range of document microfilms which is something you’re not supposed to be able to do, and if I get one little part of it wrong I ruin a roll of film, and probably have to start over with ordering new chemicals. I only ordered enough this time to mix up one batch as a “proof of concept”. I have to end up seeing Something on the film when I take it out of the tank. If it’s off a little I can adjust.

If I see nothing on the film I cry. And stress for days about just being a failure in general.

Ultimately, if it all works, then I attempt to develop that old roll of H&W Control film I never processed back in the 70s. It’s been waiting in various refrigerators ever since, so it should still have something on it. I just have no idea anymore what.

My high tech thermostat was telling me that it’s 13 degrees outside when I got up this morning (it’s taking readings from the AC unit outside where it’s mostly in the shade this time of year). I was hoping for something a bit warmer so I could do my morning walk. But I reckon that’s going to have to wait.

I sure can’t wait for the temperatures to rise into the 50s, like the forecast is saying, later this week. It’ll come with a lot of rain but that’ll help get rid of the snow that’s keeping the car put for now. Of course that’ll mean more flooding.

I’m taking the train to Walt Disney World at the end of the month, as a winter mental health break. Initially I’d wanted to do it right after New Year but there were no roomettes available and this would have to be a train ride because this is the snow time of year and I didn’t want to drive down only to find my streets a foot or more deep in snow and nowhere to park. I’d given some thought to taking a week during Valentine’s day to perk me up, but on reflection that would only have depressed me more. A round trip on the Silver Meteor was available within my budget for the end of January and I took that.

But there were no Disney rooms available in the park other than the top level thousand dollar plus rooms which I can’t afford, and as I write this even those rooms are unavailable. It was frustrating, but on the other hand good to see that DeSantis and Rufo are having zero effect on Walt Disney World’s popularity. I made sure to get my room in Port Orleans Riverside for the May/June two week vacation (can I call them vacations if I’m retired??) now instead of waiting until the annual pass renewal.

I can only wring five nights in a hotel row hotel this trip, but that gives me walking access to Disney Springs which is a must have if I can’t get into any of the park hotels (resorts…whatever…), and the train ride is itself a relaxing part of the vacation. I haven’t done the Silver Meteor in a long time. This time I’m getting off in Kissimmee instead of Orlando. It’s just the next stop down but that gets me a drive into the parks without having to navigate I-5 traffic. I’m renting a car for the stay so I can get around the parks on my own schedule, not the bus schedule, and Florida weather allowing it should be a moment of fun and relaxation. 

Then I get to go back home and trudge through the rest of the winter in Maryland. And spend money on the car. It needs new engine and transmission mounts. So it goes…

I hadn’t used my Netflix account for a long time and needed to reestablish my credentials on the Roku. The idea was to finally watch Pray Away, the Netflix documentary about the rise and fall of ex-gay ministries like Love In Action and Exodus. When I was able to get my account working with a new password, and some updated profile info, I found the documentary and first watched the trailer. Then I became too depressed to actually watch the documentary. But probably will later.

I never went through anything like that, although I’ve often wondered whether mom would have done it to me had I come directly out to her. I’ve written about that elsewhere, and touched on it in A Coming Out Story. So I don’t have those particular scars on my heart. Mine are different. But I lived through those times, and made friends of people who were there, by choice and not. Revisiting it is difficult, even for the likes of me, who never felt any shame, never believed that God hated him. That torrent of abuse you got from every direction got to all of us, worked its way deep inside.

I might not even be the audience for this documentary. I don’t need convincing about how toxic the practice is. But I do now firmly believe that much of the progress we’ve made to that better world where we can all live honest lives, has been because people who’ve been through this have found their voices and have spoken out. If you need any convincing that sexual orientation is biologically innate and cannot be therapied out of, listen to the people who tried really hard, and then listen to the people who ran those outfits and finally had to stop because they could not keep lying to their customers anymore, or to themselves about what they were doing to them.

3:19PM. It’s getting late in the afternoon for this time of year and the shadows are getting longer and the temperatures are going down from the high of cold as hell to colder than hell. And my car is completely clear of ice. I had to do very little wiping it off and no scraping at all. Most of the clearing was done by the sun. It is currently 26 degrees outside.

All that said, I’m retired now and didn’t have to be in the office this morning. I could lounge around the house doing a laundry and some odds and ends and just let the sun do most of the work. But I didn’t hear a lot of scraping this morning either. Work From Home is still apparently a thing for most of the working neighbors here.

Streets are mostly clear of ice and snow but I am not taking the car anywhere for a while because of all the salt on the road. This is the time of year when I have to make double sure I get the undercarriage wash at the car wash. Frequently.

Finally swept four inches of snow off the car just now. There’s still a thin crust of ice covering most of the body, but here’s the thing: with the sun out now and a clear sky, even though it’s well below freezing that sunlight will melt the rest of it off by mid afternoon.

It was 19 degrees out there as I worked, but on the side of the car where the sun was hitting the car body directly there was liquid water in spots and I was able to just brush off the ice with a gloved hand in those locations.

Probably helps that my car is painted a dark color.

I found this on my porch this morning so either the delivery person left it late last night or sometime before 6am today.

Of the great film photographers, there are four whose influence have always been with me, going back to my teen years. David Plowden, Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Frank…and one I tend to mention with some hesitation: Diane Arbus.

Her photography is like an ice pick to the soul, or at least it is to the painfully romantic such as myself. But she was unquestionably one of the grand masters of the art form. She knew what she was about, and she hit her mark with precision.

If I were to choose one image that most represents her to me, it wouldn’t be the boy with the toy hand grenade, or the work she did with asylum patients, the images of midgets, transvestites, old people. It would be the shot of the Hollywood set house on a hill. It’s an unusual one for her in that there are no people in it, its subject is in the distance, and the sky and space around the subject are essential to it. I don’t think there is anything else in her oeuvre quite like it.

Diane Arbus: A house on a hill, Hollywood, Cal. 1963 

This one shot to me is the heart of it. Everything she ever did emerges from what she is saying in that one shot. 

I could not be more distant from her in my own work, and yet it speaks to me and I admit a lot of it resembles her. I admire David Plowden for his straight on composition and for the deeply felt, timeless silence within. I love the drama in the photography of Margaret Bourke-White, and her mastery of the black and white process, which is every bit as good as Ansel Adams’. Robert Frank’s work captures moments that show us the humanity of its subjects in their environment. He is as humane as Diane Arbus is alienated. I don’t think anyone who knew her was surprised by her suicide. Saddened and grief stricken surely, but how can you look at the body of her work and not be surprised at how she ended it.

Her work speaks to me because I am usually wandering down the same dark paths she did. Why I didn’t fall in like she did I have no idea, other than different metals behave differently in the fire. Maybe I’m just too curious to be completely demoralized. Or maybe I just accept the indifference of the universe in a way she never could. There is no despair in my photos, at least I hope that’s not what anyone sees in them. What I do in my art photography is, as best as I can tell from a lifetime of doing it, maybe something akin to brutalism, a sensation of the gods talking past you, conversing among themselves and not even seeing you, timeless, eternal, indifferent. It’s the silence that moves me. I am more like David Plowden than Diane Arbus. There is no silence in her work, just a lot of despair.

She was one of the grand masters. I admire her because she knew what she was about and she hit it with precision every time. That not only takes skill, it takes a lot of self examination to be that good at it. I have one of her photography books, and I bought this because it promises to tell me more about the artist and hopefully I get a better idea of why she fell into the darkness she saw everywhere.

Been a while since I’ve had to put my snow boots on.

We got about four inches overnight. City says you have to clear your sidewalks within 3 hours after the snowfall ends, unless it ends between 3 pm and 6 am, in which case snow must be removed by 11 am. But I only have this little 15 foot stretch of rowhouse sidewalk to clear and it just takes a few minutes. I got it done by 7 this morning and with the deicer I put out the sidewalk is completely clear now.

I’m 70 and I’ve had one heart attack already. So I’m doing this one small piece at a time and it’s the light powdery stuff that’s pretty easy to clear. The big job, as always, is the backyard deck, which I Must get clear before the snow begins to melt and refreeze.

The car can just sit for a while. I’m not driving Anywhere in this. The house is fully stocked and I can walk to the grocery store if I need anything. Maybe take a walk to Papi’s later.

…is my favorite winter activity. We just had a band of pretty fierce snow flurries pass through Bawlmer hon. Moderately large flakes being driven horizontally by the wind. Seems to have stopped as I’m typing this. Forecast is for a bit more snow this coming Tuesday.

When it snows I enjoy hanging out at home in just my cutoffs and a t-shirt, drinking hot coffee or tea with the heat turned up a notch. Yes it adds a tad to the heating bill but I keep the heat low most of the rest of the time and I can afford it. Heinlein said to budget for the luxuries first. I budget for the utilities first. I suppose there’s some overlap there.

Mayo Clinic sent me a follow-up survey about the Cologuard test I had last year. I’ll stick it in the mail when the weather permits. They should know how many of us had false (abnormal) positives (me) versus how many positives were in fact the real thing.

I haven’t had to fill in the beans with a #2 pencil since grade school. But it all came back to me!

I woke up just before sunrise and went downstairs to check the bay window to see if there were any leaks after the rain last night. There were no leaks, but also practically no rain overnight either that I could tell, at least compared to the big storm a couple days ago. So I really don’t know if I fixed the leaks or not. I patched every possible gap and crack I could see where water might get in though, so there’s that anyway. And what rain there was Did hit the front of the house directly like before. There just wasn’t as much of it.

Next step is to tempt fate and put everything back on the bay window shelf and see if it gets leaked on again. Hahahahaha… Sigh.

Before I took a look outside to see what the overnight rain patterns looked like, I checked the thermostat to see how cold it was out there. It told me it was 50 degrees outside. In January. Before sunup.

I got out onto my porch in my cutoffs and a t-shirt and I swear it felt like a spring morning. There were even robins chirping in the trees just like a typical spring morning around here.

Oh wait…it’s Maryland. They’re calling for snow next week…

That storm I spoke of previously hit us Tuesday evening and it brought with it a driving rain the likes of which I’ve never seen around here. I have a roofed over front porch and maybe a few inches of rain around the porch floor is as much as I’ve ever seen. It’s very infrequent that it even reaches the front doorstep. This time the storm completely soaked the front door and the bricks on the front wall, all the way up to the top of the porch ceiling. I’ve never seen that in the 22 years I’ve owned this house.

I staged a step ladder on the second floor so I could poke my head up into the tiny attic space…it isn’t even a crawlspace, just maybe six inches between the roof beams and the ceiling beams…and shine a high intensity flashlight around to check for leaks. It was dry as a bone up there, even during the worst of the storm. The bay window in my living room was another story.

I’d never seen it leaking before. Ever. But those leaks may have all been laying in wait for just the right storm to come along. I got out some buckets and some construction bag liners to divert the water into the buckets, then mopped up as much as I could. It wasn’t a disaster, just something new I had to fix that I wasn’t expecting.

I figured there was some leaks on the outside top of the bay window I needed to take care of next morning. But next day was cold and very windy and I didn’t want to be up on a ladder in that weather. So I put the big ladder up today and took a look at what sort of work I have in store up there, thinking that if I fall over and break my neck at least I’ll have died doing something I love (smirk).

(I was careful to put my Apple watch on before I started climbing the ladder, because it will detect a hard fall and if I don’t respond it will alert my brother and call 911 for me, giving them my GPS coordinates.)

There was nothing there that I could see that would even possibly be a way for water to get in. I judged the area around the window frame when it meets the brick might use a touch of that rubber sealant I bought, but it seemed pretty solid. The brickwork above it was another story.

See…my little Baltimore rowhouse only has front and back outside walls, and they are brick veneer over concrete block. What I saw were several largish holes in the mortar between the bricks where water could easily get in between the brick and the concrete block, assuming the rain was being driven hard in that direction, and then run down to the inside top of the window.

Normally this would not happen since rain doesn’t hit that side of the house very hard. Yes it gets wet, but windy driving rains here tend to come from either the east or west, not the south and they don’t hit the face of the house with a lot of force. But at the right angle those holes in the mortar could easily have let in the rain water that was dripping from the inside top of my bay window. Repointing the brick is going to be expensive and I’ve nowhere near that kind of money set aside just yet. But it couldn’t be done in the winter anyway.

Here’s where city life came in handy. So I’m taking my morning walk around the neighborhood thinking about what to do about those holes in the mortar before the next storm arrives…maybe squirt some Henry’s into them…when I walk past an end of group unit with someone on a ladder up against the side of the house, and it looks like they’re dealing with the same brickwork problem I have. Bear in mind all the houses here are the same basic floorplan, the only difference with that one was it’s an end of group unit so it had three exposed walls to the weather.

So I go over and ask him if he’s a contractor or the homeowner. He says he’s a brother-in-law. We chat for a bit. Seems his bother’s side windows were leaking during that last storm just like my bay window was, and likely for the same reason. What are you using in those holes, I ask. He shows me a tube of fibrous mortar patch, and explains how that’s better to use in this weather, and doesn’t cause a problem with repointing the bricks later.

I make a mental note of the product thinking I’ll go get some. Then he says he has an extra tube he won’t need and he’ll sell it to me for what he paid for it. I love city life.

I squirted that stuff into the holes, and a few large cracks, in the mortar above my bay window. Then I ran some of that spray rubber sealant around the edges of the window frame. Now we wait.

I’ll keep the buckets handy. Thing is, if there are no more leaks but the rain doesn’t hit the house this time like it did last time, I still won’t know if I fixed the right problem or not.

Turns out there is a significant amount of debugging involved in owning a house.

Running the vacuum cleaner after tracking in bird seed shells and leaves from working outside. Noticing (this is for all you old people reading this) that I no longer see static on the TV screen when I run the vacuum.