…We Admitted That Our Lives Had Become Unmanageable…
Put the bottle down. Please. For everyone’s sake…
The polls were not skewed. Nate Silver was not making things up. Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. He did not raise taxes. The unemployment figures were not faked. Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction. Climate Change is real. Evolution is real. FEMA is not building concentration camps. Christians are not being treated like Jews were in Germany in the 1930s…
I just finished watching Rachel Maddow deliver a smokin’ hot riff on republican shock and confusion, as displayed on Fox last night, that the numbers they were certain were going to go massively in Romney’s favor didn’t. She showed clips from past Fox News predictions of a Romney landslide, showed that stunning live TV moment that’ll almost certainly go down in television history, when Rove got angry that the Fox News vote analysts called Ohio for Obama. Then…brilliantly…she added that no, the polls were not skewed, Obama was born in Hawaii, he didn’t raise taxes, the deficit hasn’t gone up, unemployment figures were not cooked, Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, climate change is real, evolution is real, FEMA isn’t building concentration camps…
…and god I hope I can get my hands on a video clip of it because it really said it all…especially how at the end of that grotesque litany of decades of republican right wing and religious right hallucinations she said that it is profoundly damaging to our democracy when one party is trying to cope with things as they really are and the other is living it it’s own detached insular fantasy world.
We need, she said thumping her pulpit, honest, good faith arguing and debating about policy…real argument not phony crap ginned up just to drive people to the polls or satisfy the pathetic conceits of religious and political fanatics…because it is in that honest debating of the issues that we have the best hope of finding answers that work. By cocooning in their own fantasy world the republicans have made that honest, good faith arguing and debating nearly impossible.
She said she hoped the shock of that collision with real numbers and real reality last night might break the bubble. I’ve heard others expressing this since last night, but I am not so sure. But there is the problem we face as a nation. It’s the problem we need to address before we can really and truly get down to addressing any of the others. The polls were not skewed. The unemployment numbers were not rigged. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Climate change is real. Evolution is real. FEMA is not building concentration camps. Homosexuals are not demon possessed tools of satan. Two plus two equals four. If any of this distresses you be assured that reality does not care about what you believe or about you. It just is what it is. You need to care about reality. If you can’t bring yourself to do that critically, honestly, with your eyes wide open, without letting your cherished preconceptions blind you to simple facts, don’t be bellyaching about the moral relativism, hedonism, nihilism whatever of the world around you. The nihilist is you.
I fell in love, understood myself to be homosexual, in 1971. I was seventeen and I didn’t have to be told in that moment that people like me were officially categorized as mentally ill…I got that feedback from every direction in my culture. It was there in books and magazines, newspapers and TV. When I was fourteen I sat in a sex ed class taught by our gym teachers, who told us that homosexuals were twisted dangerous psychopaths who often mutilated the genitals of the people they had sex with and then killed them. At seventeen the mirror my culture held up to me in TV and movies…even in many of the underground comix..was that of a sick, twisted pervert, sometimes dangerous, other times just a pathetic faggot, but always to be treated worse then even murderers, rapists, even communists.
Even Mad Magazine was telling me a I was a fair object of universal contempt…
Never mind the asinine poem, look at the people in that illustration. This was what my culture told me I was. I knew it wasn’t true, but how do you struggle against such a torrent of disgust, contempt and outright hatred? In the end, it was simply by being brave, and living openly. I’m not saying all the protests and militancy weren’t necessary, they absolutely were. The closet was killing us, we had to break down that door and get everyone’s attention or we would never be free. But once we got that attention, we had to show people that the scarecrow monster that had been made of us simply wasn’t real. Not everyone would be open to that message…as Oliver Wendell Holmes once aptly said, a bigot’s mind is like an eye: the more light you shine on it the tighter it closes. But you had to have faith that a nation that could put human footsteps on the moon was not built by bigots. You had to have faith that the evidence of our lives, as they really were, would prevail.
But never forget how hard and bitter that struggle, simply to be able to live our lives openly, was. I saw the early days of the gay rights movement here in America, the Anita Bryant backlash, the rise of the religious right, and decades of a torrent of venom and hate. Friends died in the AIDS epidemic. And month after month, year after year, I saw the news reports of gay people being killed randomly by gay bashers, many of whom escaped prison simply by asserting the homosexual had made a pass at them.
I wish they could have lived to see this day. All the lost to AIDS, to violence, to despair. Maryland, Wisconsin, Washington state and Minnesota could not have been won with our votes alone. I have lived to see us change from dangerous twisted perverts into neighbors.
And now, I can see something else starting to happen…gazing back on so much of a life lived under such absolute and relentless disgust and hatred; those times are fading away, as if unreal, surreal.
I am a neighbor. How could I have have been not? Did any of that really happen?
On Facebook, Valley Motors (my Mercedes dealer) asks, Who remembers Herbie the Love Bug? Do you have a favorite television or movie car?
Well…I did once upon a time, sure. Mine were, in some sort of order, Supercar…
Well…that one wasn’t really a car as such… James Bond’s Aston-Martin DB5 in Goldfinger…
Amos Burke’s Rolls Royce Silver Cloud…
(it was what I watched the show for), The Monkee Mobile…
…a highly modified Pontiac GTO…legendary car customizer Dean Jeffries did it and I thought it was the coolest riff on a production line car I’d ever seen. I still think that GTO is the coolest looker of all the custom cars California custom shops churned out back in the 60s.
…and finally The Green Hornet’s Black Beauty…
…a 1966 Imperial Crown sedan, also customized by Dean Jeffries.
That was kidhood. I never really saw anything in the movies or TV that caught my imagination after the sixties. I liked the look of the Batmobile in the 1960s TV series, which was built by the legendary George Barris from a Lincoln concept car, but hated the TV show so much I couldn’t separate it from the god awful camp of that show.
Back in those days most of my favorite celebrity cars were actually quarter mile funny cars like The Little Red Wagon…
…and the Hemi Under Glass…
…not exactly something you’d drive to the grocery store in, which is not to say that wouldn’t be fun. I had an eye for exotic cars too, like the Rolls Royces and Lamborghinis. But when it came down to serious dreaming, somehow in the latter part of my teenage days, when a driver’s license in my wallet was on the cusp of becoming a reality, the dream machine…the one I would actually own someday…maybe…I hope…was always a Mercedes diesel sedan. So I guess that really says it all about me and cars.
And last December I finally did get my teenage dream car after all…
It’s not an Aston-Martin DB5 with an ejector seat and tire flattening wheel knockoffs, but there’s a difference between having a dream and having a fantasy. Which isn’t to say the ability to flatten someone’s tires wouldn’t come in handy every now and then.
So this morning before leaving for work I see one of the bird feeders needs topping off and as I bring it down off the tree I see the calico watching me from under my car. She’s seen me get into and out of it often enough now to have associated it with me and I guess that makes under my car a safe space. Fine. But now she’s staring at me as I’m bringing down the bird feeder and next thing I know up the stairs she’s coming and I can see where this is going: she wants fed in the morning too.
I thought we had a routine going; she gets food from me but only in the afternoon. I am the afternoon meal. You’re feral lady, you don’t want human companionship. You’re on your own for the rest of the day. That’s the bargain, right? But of course the bargain is whatever the cat wants it to be.
Now playing in four states, virtually identical ads designed at heading off marriage equality at the ballot box. These ads are merely a retread of the template created to defeat marriage equality in the Proposition 8 ballot referendum of 2008 in California.
They are all produced by the kingpin of anti-gay politics: Frank Schubert. They are all premised on the foundation of one basic lie: that a state implementing marriage equality will compel the state to teach children in public schools all about gay marriage.
It won’t
But…no. That is not the foundational lie. The bedrock here is Homosexuals Will Rape Your Children…
If it was just about teaching school kids that some couples are same-sex then where could the venomous hysteria possibly be coming from, the bottomless rage? These people are spending millions all over the country, the couple in this ad appearing in one state after another, just to darkly warn that Dick and Jane might learn about Adam and Steve…?
No…just…no. First of all, these people don’t even believe that homosexuals are capable of forming stable long lasting relationships. The possibility that same-sex couples might get married and form households, and that school children might learn that this happens in human societies does not concern them and that is not the warning they are broadcasting in these ads. The sly implication in all of them is the schools are now going to teach children how to have gay sex. And, to the degree same-sex marriage normalizes homosexuality, that the entire motivation for it is to leave children open to the idea of having sex with homosexual adults, thereby recruiting them into homosexuality. This is what the homosexuals want. Not to be married, but to have access to your children.
That is what’s being said, between the lines but well heard all the same, in every single one of those ads.
There is nothing new under the sun when it comes to anti-gay propaganda. Ever since Anita Bryant it’s been predatory homosexuals want to recruit your children because that’s the only way homosexuals can reproduce. The packaging of the lie changes, but it’s always the same lie.
She’s an adorable little calico and she’s feral so she won’t let anyone get too close. But for several years now she’s been lurking around my street and occasionally visiting Casa del Garrett, to check the menu around the bird feeders, and every now and then catching something. I keep the feeders well off the ground, in part to keep city rats from getting into them and in part to keep little calico cats away from the customers, though I suppose she, and the occasional hawk, also consider themselves that. I’d rather she left my birds alone. But she is the most amazing hunter I’ve ever seen and part of me respects professionalism in every endeavor.
And bravery. I watched one day as she stalked up to the edge of a fenced in yard that usually contains two very large dogs. She would have been a bite sized snack for either one but cat sense must be far superior to spider sense as she seemed to know even though she could not see the entire yard from street level that the dogs weren’t in there. But a small flock of birds was, feeding on some seed that had been put out. I watched her suddenly leap over the fence, run up the hill, run back down and back over the fence and across the street with a small bird in her mouth. It happened that quick. Another time I was serenely watching the birds at my feeders from just inside my front door and she suddenly leaped over the top step (where you see her sitting in that photo) and tried to snag one of the birds that were inadvisedly ground feeding there. What caught my attention was when she made her sudden leap her front claws were striking in the air above the sidewalk, not where the birds were, but where she knew they would be. That time she missed but was close…one of those birds must have felt the whiff of air as a claw passed by. I have seen the occasional feathery left overs scattered around my walkway. Usually it was a pigeon. She can have all of those she wants.
In a heartbeat I’d take her in, but as I said she’s feral and those cats will never accept human companionship. But somebody has been watching out for her because her coat is usually very clean and well kept and one ear is clipped (you can barely see it in this photo) which means at some point someone scooped her up and took her to the vet to be spayed and given her shots). I’m guessing the city doesn’t mind at least some feral cats prowling about, provided they’ve been spayed/neutered and topped off with anti-rabies, as they’ll help keep the rodent population in check. And at least until recently someone must have been feeding her. Good as she is hunting, I don’t think that’s enough to account for the her overall good condition. Most ferals I’ve seen looked pretty tattered. He coat is always shiny and clean. Or at least it was until recently.
In the weeks before Sandy hit I noticed she seemed a bit…disheveled. Her coat had started to look a bit…worn. And she seemed tired all the time. She’s been around the neighborhood for some years now and I thought perhaps age was beginning to set in. Or maybe one of the other ferals around here had bullied her out of her place wherever she was getting food and shelter. Or maybe the crazy older lady everyone in the neighborhood suspects is feeding the strays had stopped for some reason. I hadn’t seen the woman around her house for a while. She’s easy to spot when she goes for her walks. She’s the one who always wears a heavy winter coat when she goes for her walks, even in a brutal heat wave. She has family that stops by regularly and I began to wonder if maybe they’d finally taken her away.
So I began to worry about the little calico. Then Sandy barreled in. During the worst of the storm I caught a glimpse of the calico huddled in the basement window sill and I felt frustrated I couldn’t just bring her inside. But any move I might have made toward her just then she would have bolted into the storm which would have only made matters worse. So I let her be, afraid the next morning I’d find a little dead kitty in front of my basement window. But somehow she survived it. Maybe she moved on to wherever it is she normally beds down for the night. There are crawl spaces under some of the houses, and somewhere under one of those maybe there would be shelter and heat. I have no idea. All I know is after the hurricane she was gone, but later the next day she showed up again. And the next day I did something I swore I wouldn’t. I put some food out for her. I knew the moment I did that I was making a commitment I wasn’t sure I wanted to be making. But I did it. It was the sight of her huddled wet in the basement window sill and I couldn’t do anything but hope she wasn’t going to die of exposure.
A couple days later after work I got a distinctively colored and shaped bowl out of my kitchen cabinets and put it on the basement window sill where I’d seen her during the hurricane. It had one of the cans of tuna from my winter pantry. I had about a half dozen of them I knew I wasn’t going to finish by the sell by dates on them, so I figured they weren’t going to waste if I gave them to the cat. The next morning I saw the bowl had been eaten from, and I hoped it was her and not a city rat that got into it. I brought it inside and cleaned it out. I had a plan.
The next day when I came home from work she was there on my front steps. The front steps are one of her usual perches where she stalks my birds. I spoke to her and she moved away, but not too far. I went inside, got the bowl out, put another can of tuna in it and walked outside to where she could see me. When she saw the bowl her face lit up. There was a reason I picked that particular oddly shaped and colored bowl. Seeing me holding it she could make a connection between it and me. I put it down on the basement window sill, and nearby on the front porch, a smaller bowl of water. Then I went inside, walked down to my basement art room and peeked under the curtain in front of the basement window. There she was, eating. When she was done, she moved away and I came back upstairs and took the bowl back inside. I don’t want to be feeding all the neighborhood cats, let alone the city rats. Just her.
A few minutes later I walked back outside. It was Halloween night and I wanted to put up some decorations and attract some goblins. As I was stringing some lights on the front steps rail, she came out from under one of the cars parked on the street, walked closer to me on the sidewalk then she ever did, still well out of arm’s reach…sat down…and stared right at me for a time, never taking her eyes off me, like she was sizing me up. For a good five minutes she did that, as I tried talking a calming patter to her while I was stringing lights. Then she seemed to shrug, and walked away. The next day, promptly after work, she was sitting on my front steps, waiting.
So now we have a routine going. And her coat is looking nicer again and she seems to have more energy. I have no idea if that’s me or her other source of food is back online too. But it’s good to see. I’m too single to have a pet and this is in many ways an ironic echo of the story of my life. It seems no matter who I take a fondness to I always get kept at arm’s length. So in a way this is a relationship I’m used to. But she’s lived on the city streets for years now, and the other side of that coin is I probably don’t have to worry about her too much if I go away for a while. I might be able to talk one of my other neighbors into putting some food out for her while I’m gone.
The other day I bought some nice stainless steal cat bowls, one for water and one for food. And some cat food. Today she ate from both. She actually seemed to like the cat food better then the human food. And thus Bruce, walking the stations of life, steps into that crazy old man who feeds stray cats stage. Oh well. I guess I don’t mind.
In 2006 Romney went on to stop the publication of an anti-bullying guide for public school students, because the term “bisexual” and “transgender” were used in a passage discussing harassment against students. These and other actions were a stark turnaround from when Romney had, in his Senate run in 1994, told gay activists that he was better on gay issues than Ted Kennedy, claiming to support an array of rights for gays and saying that his voice would have more weight on the issue than Kennedy’s.
What seems clear now, looking at Romney’s record, in which he made a lot of promises to gays in those early years but never delivered, is that the pandering he did was to gay activists and the voters of Massachusetts, as the devout Mormon used that state as a stepping stone to the presidency.
This. Romney’s constant verbal flip-flops and outright lying over the years make him appear to be a total panderer. But he isn’t. Look at his record, both in and out of public office. There’s the man. Bigoted. Cruel. Predatory.
If you’re still committed to vote for this man admit it…you don’t care that he’s a brazen in-your-face liar. You care about something else. Maybe it’s the president is a darkie. Maybe it’s the homosexuals are after your children. Maybe its rape is a gift from God. Whatever.
You’re going to vote for the liar. Because he shares your moral values.
People Who Look Like That Want People Who Look Like That…
I my twitter stream via Juan Cole…
@GoogleFacts: “It’s possible to die because of a broken heart. It’s called “Stress Cardiomyopathy””
No shit Sherlock. And it does not help that the solitary life is seemingly incomprehensible to those who have coupled. Even if that coupling was ultimately unsuccessful it was something at least.
I have felt the stress of aloneness taking years off my life for quite some time now. This winter is going to be…difficult.
How the man who, while editor of the Dartmouth Review, penned a racist parody of African American students titled “This Sho Ain’t No Jive Bro” and later outed a gay student using stolen mail between members of the Dartmouth Gay Student Alliance can in any sense be labeled a Christian is something confederate christianists can explain I suppose. But here it is again: the righteous anti-gay moralist getting caught with his pants down around his morals.
Self-hating closeted gay people and anti-gay fundamentalists have this in common: they’re both so busy fighting the homosexual menace they never develop the skills necessary to honorably manage their own sexual desires. And every time they fail miserably at it they double down on their fight against the homosexual menace.
I made a promise to myself, the day I turned 30 (ages ago it was), that I would not turn 60 and still be single and alone. I am going to keep that promise.
A friend posted this photo to his Facebook wall the other day…
…to which another friend remarked, “Some churches seem to self-select for the ignorant and the gullible. But I like the comment someone left: “Take this sh*t seriously. It’s all fun and games until someone starts shooting.” And in other news…some days this dream I had back in April of 2005, somewhere in George Bush’s America, still bothers me…
In this dream I’m driving to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to visit some gay friends. From Baltimore, Gettysburg is not all that far away. This is a day trip I’m taking, and I have three gay friends with me…a full car. We chat easily as I drive with the windows down and the moon roof open through some very lovely Maryland, and then Pennsylvania countryside. I don’t recognize anyone in the car with me…never saw their faces before in my life. But somehow…in this dream…I know they are all friends of mine. It is a beautiful day. Perfect actually. Not too hot, not too cold. The air smells sweet and crisp and clear. The sky is a perfect blue, with just a few fluffy clouds in it here and there…just enough to make it beautiful, but not so many as to block the sun. A perfect day. My companions and I are feeling as sunny and cheerful as the weather. Peace and contentment and companionship. A perfect day.
Eventually we get to a small and cozy old cottage house in Gettysburg. Somehow I know it is not far from the battlefield nearby…somewhere over the rolling hills of grass and trees. But the sight of such a charming little house puts all thoughts of that terrible war out of my mind. It is so cozy and peaceful to look at. Like something out of a Currier and Ives print. There is a large plot of land around it, with a very nice stone walled garden on one side of the house. Inside we meet more friends, There is a table of lovely snacks and wine. Delicious. I chat with a few of the folks inside, get a few snacks from the table and a small crystal glass of wine, and walk out into the garden…back out into the perfect day. I don’t recognize any of these people. But somehow in my dream I know that they are all gay friends of mine. We chat about this and that in the beautiful garden. The couple who owns the house has clearly done years of careful loving work on both house and garden.
The garden is surrounded by a low stone walls that I think must date back hundreds of years. Inside the wall are so many beautiful bushes and flowers it just takes your breath away. A little paradise. It is a very peaceful, tranquil setting, and I feel a warm, serene ease being there, and being in the company of these other gay folks. I don’t know any of them, yet I feel that we are all compatriots…comrades somehow. Kindred.
I am sitting on one of the low stone walls. A guy about my age is sitting beside me on my right. Several other guys are standing in front of me. We are chatting easily about this and that. As we chat, about a dozen bright yellow birds, American Goldfinches, land on the wall near us. We watch as they fly a short distance to one of the garden’s Azalea bushes, now in full rosy bloom. Yellow birds hopping around in a rose red bush, looking for some food I suppose. The sight is lovely. One of my companions remarks on how colorful they are, and I agree.
The goldfinches fly off, and almost immediately about a dozen or so starlings land on the stone wall a short distance away from us. My companions ignore them. Some people don’t like starlings, they’re not very pretty birds, but I like and even admire them in some ways. But starlings are not welcome in most places because their flocks can get Huge and they make a lot of mess.
My companions ignore the small flock of starlings. As I watch one of the birds starts walking very awkwardly on the stone wall, over towards where I’m sitting. As it gets closer I can see its feathers are unkempt…ruffled…disordered. Some look broken. It’s little pointy yellow beak is broken and bent in the middle. It comes closer, awkwardly waddling on little stubby bird legs. I can see eyes are just two black holes in its head…empty sockets in its little bird skull.
It walks awkwardly over the stones to me and then it stops, fixes those empty socket eyes on mine, and in a little dry, gravelly voice, begins singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic to me…
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.
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