Just received in the mail today a nice letter from Mercedes-Benz USA, all done up on Very Nice stationary, thanking me for “choosing one of the most advanced diesel automobiles in the world…” and then just about screaming at me to stick to the factory maintenance schedule.

It is critical that you follow the service interval requirements of not more then 10,000 miles or one (1) year, whichever comes first.   Permanent engine damage can occur if the interval is not closely followed.

(Emphasis theirs!)   Followed by two more pages of Very Nice stationary detailing the maintenance schedule. As if I’d buy a car this expensive and not read the service book.   You best believe I read the service book.   Like a seminarian studying the holy writ I read the service book.

But I get their concern.   I don’t think American drivers understand diesels.   I wonder sometimes if one reason the Germans don’t import many of their diesel models into this country is because most American drivers just don’t know how to take care of one.   The reputation of diesels, particularly Mercedes diesels, for über longevity probably doesn’t help any.   People think hey…it’s a diesel…they’re tough. Well…yes.   They’ll outlast a gasoline burner every time.   But you have to do the maintenance.   Oh…and don’t stomp on the accelerator in a futile attempt to get gasoline engine acceleration out of one because it isn’t in there.

The simplest routine thing you do for a car’s engine, the oil change, is absolutely vital for a diesel engine.   That’s because the compression ratios on a diesel are greatly higher then even a high performance sports car’s is.   Compression is how a diesel ignites its fuel. They work on the principle that compressing air heats it up.   So at operating temperature a diesel gulps down a bunch of air, compresses it to temperature, and then at the right moment injectors squirt in the fuel and it ignites and you get your power stroke.   For that to work compression has to be high enough to heat the air enough. (when starting cold, diesels use either glow plugs or pre-heat the fuel before it is injected.)

Compare: The Corvette LS9 6.2 liter V-8 with an Eaton four-lobe Roots type supercharger has a power output of 638 bhp at 6500 rpm and 604 lb ·ft at 3800 rpm and a compression ratio of 9.1:1.   My 3 liter V-6 twin turbocharged Mercedes diesel on the other hand has a compression ratio of 17:1.   In diesel fashion it only generates 240 bhp at a red line of 4500 rpm…about a third the Vette’s.   However it generates 400 lb ·ft at 1800 rpm.   So the Vette engine has it on torque and horsepower, but the diesel is less then half its displacement, still has 2/3rds its torque and look at where the torque Is.

These engines are not racehorses, they’re draft horses and they will go any distance and bear loads that would give a gasoline burner of equal size a heart attack.   But you absolutely have to do the maintenance.   You can slack on the oil changes in a gasoline burner or cheap out on the grade of oil used and still get good service out of one for quite a while before it catches up with you and gets expensive.   A diesel can be completely destroyed in a very, Very short time if you do that.   Like in under 30k.   Try this wee experiment: look at the dipstick right after you’ve given a diesel engine an oil change.   See how nice and golden the oil is?   Look at it again at 100 miles.   Looks dirty as hell doesn’t it?   17:1 and running on diesel oil not lightweight gasoline will do that.

This is the big reason why I never bought one second hand though I’ve wanted one since I was a teenager.   By the time I was old enough and making enough to afford a second hand Mercedes diesel I’d seen tragically what your typical American driver does to a diesel engine.   Yes, they’ll last practically forever.   You can’t build 17:1 ignition-by-compression on the cheap and expect it to outlast the warranty.   And the routine maintenance isn’t expensive.   But you have to do it.

And I would recommend changing the oil twice as often as the factory recommends on any car.   I’ve done that on every car I’ve ever owned and never had any engine problems.   But it’s especially critical for a diesel.   Daimler gives its engines very large oil reservoirs…something around nine quarts in the V-6s (compared to around 6 in an American V-8) and they say change every 10k.   I change at five.   The other service gets done on schedule.

So anyway…I’m looking at this very nice letter from Mercedes-Benz USA printed on Very Nice stationary and what I’m seeing is evidence that Americans just don’t know how to take care of a diesel.   And these aren’t just any diesels.   These are Mercedes-Benz.   These are magnificent automobiles, they are expensive, they are exceptionally well made, and it is so embarrassing to see how MBUSA needs to gently remind its customers…it’s presumably well to do customers…on Very Nice stationary, to take fucking care of their cars.

La Noonan today while eviscerating Romney, flings this one out…

“I wrote recently of an imagined rural Ohio woman sitting on her porch, watching the campaign go by. She’s 60, she identifies as conservative, she likes guns, she thinks the culture has gone crazy. She doesn’t like Obama. Romney looks OK. She’s worried about the national debt and what it will mean to her children. But she’s having a hard time, things are tight for her right now, she’s on partial disability, and her husband is a vet and he gets help, and her mother receives Social Security.

“She’s worked hard and paid into the system for years. Her husband fought for his country.

“And she’s watching this whole election and thinking. You can win her vote if you give her faith in your fairness and wisdom…”

Right there’s your problem Peggy. Your party has been faking that fairness and wisdom thing for decades now…ever since Reagan showed them how to do the fakery right. He was an actor after all. But it was never sincere and back in those days the party did its fakery with its eyes wide open. So Reagan could assume that wise and kindly American dad persona at the same time he began his campaign where three civil rights workers were murdered with a speech about states rights. He knew what he was doing.   He knew you can’t win by telling Americans you want to dick them over.   It seems you’ve forgotten that.

But somewhere between then and now you folks started eating your own dogfood and now it’s Romney who carries the flag.   Face it Peggy, he didn’t steal it, your party gave it to him.   Romney Is The Modern Republican Party.   Its sickeningly plastic smile plastered over its transparent plutocratic callousness toward everyone who isn’t wealthy, sprinkled with the usual bigotry toward darkies, women, faggots and patronizing contempt for all the rest that grow their food, serve their meals, build their homes, mow their lawns, nanny their children and die on foreign battlefields.

For decades you’ve reached that elderly woman on the porch and her husband by way of their fears and prejudices. But their lives have been growing more and more pinched as the plutocrats have been sucking up more and more of the nation’s wealth.   And now your party is up against a democrat who talks about citizenship and community, the old American values your kind regards as a dirty joke.   He speaks to our hopes and dreams and aspirations as a Nation, not as a collection of gated communities.   And that elderly woman is old enough to remember a time when that America was peaceful and prosperous.

It gets harder and harder to wrap policies that are dicking her and her husband over in that fake folksy Reagan fairness and wisdom, but it’s either that or resign yourself to living in a country where even the commoner’s children can grow up healthy, go to school, get a decent education and make a good life for themselves.   You needed an ever better Reagan this year and you don’t have one, and that’s because you forgot the only way you win with that woman is to tell her the darkies are coming for their daughters, the homos are coming for their sons, and bullshit her about kinder gentler conservatism and that shining city on the hill they can behold as their standard of living sinks slowly into the sunset. You really needed to groom another good actor for the role.   But you ate your own dogfood, you bought into your own spiel about rising tides lifting all boats and Romney, corporate raiding tax evading, everpandering, plastic smiling Mitt Romney is what you got.

Now give him a big hug and a kiss because he’s everything you ever believed in made real.   Sickeningly, appallingly, unavoidably real.

Cheer up Peggy. It could have been Rick Santorum.

I took a day trip to York, Pennsylvania yesterday to do a little test of the Hasselblad with the metering prism, diopter and focusing screen I bought for it, and two new black & white roll films I’d never worked with before; Fuji Neopan 100 and Agfa Retro 80. The Agfa is advertised has having almost H&W Control like qualities of grain and red spectrum response, but it develops so they say in HC-110. Since Kodak is not at all well these days, and they’ve stopped making Pan-X altogether, which is what I like using in my medium format cameras, I need another source of film.   So I am experimenting.

I haven’t developed the Agfa yet, but the Fuji is already stunning me. It’s emulsion backing is more transparent then the Kodak…to an H&W Control degree practically…so there will be more bandwidth in the resulting images.   Plus it lays absolutely flat on the scanner tray. I don’t need to fuss with it to get it to lay flat, it just does.   My shots with it in York are running though the scanner now.   I’ll see what kind of images I get later today.

But I am already delighted with what I see the metering prism doing for me.   All exposures are exactly on target with the new prism.   Much, Much better then I was able to get reliably get with the Gossen hand held.   My thing is I like shooting into the sun and that can be tricky.   I’ve developed the Fuji and the two additional rolls of Kodak Pan-X I took with me and glancing at the negatives as they came out of the wash everything was spot on.

And it’s faster to work with then I expected. Since there is no direct coupling between the meter and the lens, you have to transfer the reading you see in the meter to the lens manually. But the reading you get is in EVs (Exposure Values) and the Hasselblad lenses have EV settings on them that are a snap to use. Once you set the EV on the lens, the shutter speed and f-stop settings are latched together and you just rotate both depending on whether you want the highest speed or the greatest depth of field.

I am having zero problems now with focus.   The new focusing screen is both brighter and because it has that split-image focusing aid in the center, quicker to focus with.   Plus the diopter is a big, big help.   I can see everything snapping into focus now, whereas before I had to search it out and sometimes I was just guessing at it.   I got it wrong a bunch of times I later found out.

I should have done this Much earlier, but it was a pricy accessory.   The only problem I was having as I wandered around York was the Distagon wide angle lens is flarey.   I had to pass by a bunch of interesting shots simply because there was obvious lens flare where I was shooting from and I could not find a way out of it.   The Distagon is an old design.   It also has noticeable vignetting at the extreme corners.     But it’s amazingly sharp.   There is a newer 50mm lens for my Hasselblad I’ve seen on the used market, which they claim has improvements over the Distagon in terms of vignetting and flare.   But that’s another big wad of money.   There’s a 40mm that’s an even bigger wad of money and I really like shooting at the wide angle perspective.   It suits the kind of work I do.   But I can only spend so much on photography equipment in a year.   Film itself is getting a tad pricey…for some reason.

The Hasselblad is a tad heavy to start with, and the metering prism adds to that.   But it’s a compact weight and I don’t mind carrying it around if it’s because the camera is built to last.   I like solid things in my life and especially my tools.

[Edited a tad…]

Actual Fox News Headline:

Obama Calls Libyan President To Thank Him After US Ambassador Murdered.

Unbelievable. Barack Obama called Libyan President Mohamed Yusuf al-Magariaf today to thank him for his support.

This is the day after US Ambassador Stevens was murdered at the consulate.

And, the Islamist killers may have been tipped off by elements within Libya’s security forces

Media Matters reports in regard to the above:

As  USA Today reported,  the White House said in a statement that  Obama called Magariaf to thank him “for extending his condolences for the tragic deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, and two other State Department officers in Benghazi.”

You see now, in the information network streams, decent people all across the political spectrum looking at all of this in disgust.   What you need to understand is it doesn’t matter anymore. They’ve lost all concern for how they appear to people outside the bubble. All they care about now is whipping up the rubes, and themselves.   But here’s the thing…the rubes know they’re being played and they don’t particularly care.   It’s all about dancing the tribal war dance now. Because the lizard brain is all they have left of themselves inside.

This is what hate does to people. Your gay neighbors have seen it for decades now. Hate does not share power within a person’s heart. It will make you throw everything fine and decent inside of you overboard, the minute, the second any of it gets in its way. And then all that is left inside is the steady beat beat beat of the tribal war drums. You have stopped being a person. Now you are just a tool of hate…dancing, jerking, stumbling onward to its drumbeat.

Looking back over my receipts, I bought the Hasselblad in January of 2005 with the Kiev 45 degree prism and the 80mm Zeiss Planar lens and hood for just under a thousand bucks. Sounds expensive but they went for about that new back in the 70s when I was a poor teenager and a thousand bucks back then might as well have been a million. I’d wanted one ever since I saw what those amazing Zeiss lenses were capable of. But it was way out of reach. New ones are still way (way!) out of my reach. But used older ones are something I can afford now, and this one was in cherry condition…like whoever owned it had barely used it. Over time I bought another two film backs for it and a 50mm Distagon lens because I like shooting wide angle. But the camera mostly sat in the camera cabinet.

That was partly because Apple’s Aperture software just gaged on the large scans off it. To work with them in Aperture I first had to drop them down in resolution in Photoshop. It was a pain in the neck. The workflow completely broke with those scans. You couldn’t even bring the image up in the browser because it would just go gray and you would get an “unsupported format” error message. Eventually Apple just declared it would not support grayscale image scans altogether, that Aperture was for digital photography only, and that pretty much meant it would not be usable for photographers who still liked working in film.

I could have switched to Adobe’s Lightroom product, but after working with the Hasselblad for a while I was discovering that everything about working with that camera was a pain in the neck. The standard focusing screen had no focusing aid and my aging eyes could have really used one. Or at least a diopter. So I was never able to focus on a subject quickly. Plus I had to work with a hand-held meter which only added to the slow deliberate pace of taking pictures with it. Some photographers are fine with that but that just completely messes me up when I want to explore a subject. And it was a triple pain when I had the red filter on it and had to futz with calculating the filter factor in addition to everything else.

It was: see an interesting subject. Stop. Fuss with taking the meter out of my pocket and its case. Figure how to get a good reading. Do I need to walk in close? Angle the meter down a tad? Wait…I don’t have my reading glasses on. I can’t see what the meter is telling me. Put the glasses on…take a reading. Transfer the reading to the lens. Bring the camera to my eye and compose. Wait…take your glasses off.. I’ll just set them down over here. No…better put them back in my pocket. Now try to focus. No…I need my distance glasses to focus because I don’t have a diopter on this thing. Focus…focus…not sure that’s right but it’s the best I can do… Compose. Shoot. Put meter back.

So I became disappointed with it and mostly the camera just sat. And I never got a chance to see what an amazing camera it really is or how much fun it could be to work with. I figured I would just stick to my 35mm SLRs for expressive photography.

As I said, Apple eventually declared it would not support film photographers. I discovered this after an upgrade to Aperture completely hosed the display of all my black and white image files and I looked on their support boards to see what the problem was. (As an aside…Never tell Apple disciples…never even hint to them…that their holy computers and software are anything but perfect.) So I bought a copy of Lightroom. I figured since Photoshop had no problem with the scans off my film scanner it wouldn’t either. And it doesn’t. So I was finally was able to just wander around the shoots I’d done with the Hasselblad. as few as they were because I hadn’t taken it out much…and I was stunned.   (The following JPEGS don’t do justice really to what I saw…but to do that I’d have to upload the original size image files and at about 150 meg a shot you would wait a long time for those to load…)

My God…why hadn’t I been using this camera more…? Well..could be because I needed a diopter and a metering prism at least. Through the lens metering is much, Much faster, more accurate because you are getting a reading of exactly what you’re taking a picture of, and if you put a filter on the lens you get a meter reading on the light coming through the filter…you don’t have to futz with filter factor calculations (those two shots of Monument Valley were taken with a red filter, which darkens the blue sky and brings the clouds out into sharp relief).   Then this month KEH ran a medium format equipment sale and I decided it was time to spend the money to make the Hasselblad usable for the kind of photography I do. Light footed, hand held wandering around for what I like to think of as found images. What I figured I needed to do it right: a plus 1 diopter, a brighter grid lined focusing screen with a split image focusing aid, and a center weighted metering prism.

The pieces came in the mail over the past couple days and just a few hours ago I assembled everything and…whoa. Gonna shoot some test rolls this weekend. One roll of Rollei Agfa Retro 80 and a roll of the Fuji neopan 100. Because Kodak is not looking at all well and I need other sources of film to feed my habit. But already I am Loving what the Hasselblad has turned into with the new accessories. This is going to be fun. Finally.

The Wretched Two-Step…as choreographed by Rowan Williams…

Ah One…

The archbishop reiterated the church’s opposition to gay marriage…

Ah Two…

…but said it had been “wrong” in its past treatment of homosexuals.

Yee-Haw!

Mom’s tragedy was she liked bad boys. Dad being the specific case in point. Mine is I like good boys. Decent, honest, responsible. Problem was the good boys of my generation were almost universally terrified of telling their parents they’re gay. And should their parents have found out anyway and told them to pack themselves off to a therapist or a nice ex-gay ministry, they’d pack their bags and dutifully headed to the nearest one.

Yes mother, yes father, I will put my heart and my soul and whatever fulfilled and contented love life I might have had, put them in this little coffin and bury it. Because I am your good son.

I’m on the verge of turning 59, which it seems to me is on the verge of turning 60, and thereby becoming officially an old man.   The old, single, lonely gay male troll I swore I would not let myself turn into when I came out to myself at age 17.   Somehow it happened anyway.   But I had help getting there.

When I was a teenager, before I came out to myself, my straight friends and I would do little things to help a friend break the ice with a girl or boy who’d caught their eye.   And sometimes not so little things.   Once we arranged to get two of them together at a local Baskin-Robbins and then, one by one, found an excuse to leave until they were the only two there.   That was just something you did, some happy little thing you did, to help a friend.   There was more then ample reward in the glow of happiness you saw in their faces when they had that chance to connect with someone who made their heart skip a beat.   It made you feel almost as wonderful as if it had been you.

After I came out to myself, I figured my straight friends wouldn’t be much help in that department.   These days it’s different, but back then gay people were still considered mentally ill and sodomy illegal in all but one state. You could loose a job if you were found out…ask me how I know. And while I don’t think my own mother would have thrown me out of the house, I had a pretty good idea that she wouldn’t take it very well.   My straight friends, even the most progressive and liberal ones, wouldn’t have known very many out gay people.   They couldn’t connect me with potential dates the way we’d done for each other.   So right away I knew I was going to have a much harder time finding that special someone then my straight friends.   I had to find my way into the gay scene.   The problem was I had no idea where to go look for it, other then the one seedy gay bar downtown everyone knew about…a place I felt pretty sure the sort of boyfriend I was looking for would not be waiting, and in any case not the best of places for a gay teenager to hang out.

So for almost a decade, well into my thirties, my dating life was a pretty brutal struggle.   Even when I chanced across someone who made my heart beat, and I seemed to do the same for him, navigating ourselves to a place where we could feel safe opening up our feelings toward each other was a minefield.   Once I met a guy at the catalog retailer I was working at at the time…a small outfit that had only three stores and sold mostly during the Christmas season from the glossy catalog it mailed out.   I worked in the warehouse and he at the store at Montgomery Mall…and whenever I went out there with a van full of new merchandise, or he came to the warehouse on some errand, and our eyes met, I swear the sparks flew.   But it was a dangerous time for gay people, and were either one of us found out, we could be fired.   So I was cautious…I figured first I’ll strike up a conversation with him the first chance I get him alone, get his name, and we’ll talk.   But it seemed every chance we tried to get ourselves alone together, in the warehouse, at the store loading dock, we were constantly watched.   One day his manager saw us share a smile and I saw the look on her face.   The next day we were both fired.   I never got his name.

That’s how it was.   Then in my thirties, I found my way to the first gay BBSs and from there to one from which I made nearly all of the gay friends I ever had until 2005, and the Love In Action protests.

I came to know an older gay man there, knew him for decades, and eventually came to consider him one of my best friends.   My attempts at finding a boyfriend from among the BBS users were pretty uniformly unsuccessful, but I had confidence because now I had such a big theoretical gay social circle that was away from the bar scene…a place by that time I understood to be pretty much exclusively about tricking.   I wasn’t into trick.   I wanted…I Needed…someone to love and be loved by.   I understood by that time that lots of people, gay and straight, couldn’t care less about the love part.   They just wanted sex.   Fine.   You look for your paradise, I’ll look for mine.   I figured…I Trusted…that the gay people I had made friends with by then would help out just as me and my straight friends had helped each other, once upon a time.

I’m shy, but not paralyzingly so.   And…introverted.   But all I need is a little help breaking the ice, getting me a name, an introduction.   Better still, some info.   Am I his type?   Is he mine?   Then I’m okay.   You expect friends who know people who know people who know people, can help out with that.   Once the ice is broken I can pretty much handle things myself.   But left to myself I have a really hard time socializing in a crowd of people I do not know, and which is full of cliques I am not a part of.

The older gay guy I came to know…and Trust…would sing his favorite song to sing at me whenever I got to feeling lonely.   Bruce…you need to get out more and try harder. And he and his boyfriend would take me out clubbing some nights, and to the dancing boy bar in Southwest D.C..   But when some nice looking guy caught my attention I was always on my own.   And when I would ask him about that he would sing his song.   You need to get out more Bruce…

It went on for years and I eventually I began to notice that not one iota of help meeting people was coming from his direction, or that of his younger boyfriend.   One day, in an effort to get him to realize that, actually, I had been trying pretty goddamned hard my whole life, I sat down at the computer and wrote him up my entire dating life resume’, starting with the guy in A Coming Out Story and walking through the entire mess, one name at a time, how I met each one, how I tried to win their affections, from age 17 to the age I was then.

It went on for page after page after page. I was hoping at least, being my friend, being someone I thought I could confide in, he could at least tell me what I was doing wrong so goddamned consistently.   Instead, he casually dismissed it out of hand and like a broken record, began singing that same damn song again. I was aghast…did you not read what I wrote there?

But I considered him a friend, a very good friend, who had helped me get my start in the IT world and gave me a comfortable place in his circle of friends.   Then (and this is a long story I’ll set down here someday soon probably) I watched him sit on a chance to set me up with a date with a guy who, it seemed, might be a good match.   It never happened…I’ll never know now whether we would have been a good match or not.   I Trusted him when he told me he’d get around to it…eventually.   I waited half a year for him to get around to it…pinging him every now and then on progress…Yes, yes, Bruce…we don’t socialize with that crowd much anymore…we’ll get around to it…I just need an excuse to ask about it… As if my being desperately lonely wasn’t excuse enough.   And when I finally confronted him about it he told me the chance was gone, the guy in question was seeing someone else now…and I felt like I’d been kicked in the face.   I trusted him.

And his boyfriend, his younger boyfriend, looking me in the face one night before that confrontation, and telling me,   “I’ve seen the guys you look at…people who look like that want people who look like that…”   Didn’t make me feel a whole hell of a lot better.

I had to wonder after that, how many other times he passed over a chance to introduce me to someone compatible.   There was one time I got help from one of the others in our little happy hour group. He was new to our group, saw my eyes light up, saw my difficulty breaking the ice with the object of my attention, and with a little smile, he got me a name.   That was all I needed and I dove right in. Nothing eventually came of it…he was already seeing someone else…but it was looking back on that I realized I never had any help at all from the others in our group, or that older gay friend or his boyfriend.

I should have walked away from them then.   No…way before then.   I should have noticed what they were trying to tell me all those years I’d known them.   I didn’t want to.   You get beaten over the head when you’re small about being a good for nothing…because your mom is a divorcee, because your dad is a crook…and it has it’s effect.   No matter how proud you are later in life of your accomplishments, and how far you managed to rise above the circumstances of your youth, buried deep within is the small kid who feels like every friendship with one of the kids on the good side of the tracks is something he is lucky to have and doesn’t really deserve, because he is good for nothing.

How could you leave me to a lonely life?   Granted, we all have to find our own way in love..but friends can help.   How could you not want to help?   How could you let chances to help Bruce go passing right on by like it was no big deal?

Because: People who look like that, want people who look like that… One day it finally dawned on me that the dating resume’ I’d sent him had probably proved him right after all.   I wasn’t getting out enough.   I wasn’t trying hard enough.   There was the proof.   You see…I knew their names.

What he’d been telling me all those years I knew him, that I didn’t want to hear because I couldn’t believe anyone who knew me would tell me this, was what I was doing wrong was seeking out a boyfriend. Someone like me needed to just get used to picking up a nightly trick. Bruce, accept the fact that you’re not boyfriend material, just get out and get laid more, and you’ll be a lot happier. In many different ways, he kept trying to tell me this and I didn’t hear it because I didn’t want to. I didn’t believe anyone who knew me would tell me this. I didn’t listen to what he said, I listened to what I wanted to believe he meant.

I remember one day in his kitchen, early on in our friendship, when he first started singing that song to me, he gave me a little talk about how I needed to get out more, and he added, who knows maybe someone will (and here he paused as though choosing his words carefully) find me…attractive.   I saw that pause, that hesitation, saw it for what it was then, in that instant, and pushed it down somewhere in my consciousness where I didn’t have to know what it was I saw.   He…didn’t mean that the way it sounded…

Oh yes he did… Beauty. It’s a subjective thing, but you look at the representation of it in popular culture and you see a lot of agreement about what it is all the same.   I don’t think that’s commercialism pushing a concept of beauty onto us.   When it comes to sex and sexuality, it’s a libido thing too, and that is, I am convinced, hard wired into us in a very deep place, and you can’t reason with your libido.   Nobody can.   This is something your gay neighbors know all too well.   So by American standards of male beauty, I fall pretty short.   But…so what?   Never mind I’m not particularly attracted to that standard of male beauty.   There is no ugly.   I have seen, and so have you, couples that make your head spin, wondering what each sees in the other physically.   But they make each other happy, and part of walking through life with your eyes wide open is figuring out that your cup of tea isn’t necessarily everyone else’s.   Everyone’s libido is different.   Your gay neighbors know this perfectly well too.   Some males are not attracted to women, and you can’t psychoanalyze or pray us out of that.   It is what it is.   Growing up, living life with your eyes open, you come to accept that some people will find beauty where you don’t, and never will and that’s okay as long as they do find it eventually.   There is no such thing as ugly, there is only we really don’t do it for each other, and my problem isn’t I’ve never been hit on, just not hit on often enough by someone I’d hit on myself that the magic ever had much of a chance to happen.   Plus, when I was younger, and theoretically much more hittable, it was a dangerous time for gay people to be open about it, even a little.

Regrettably when I was in the prime of whatever sexy I might have had, you had to be extra careful what you said, and to who.   A lot of gay people back then, struggling under that suffocating culture of anti-gay hate, never found love.   But we weren’t supposed to.   Love is not something the scapegoat can be allowed to know, because love can move mountains, and the one thing you never want the scapegoat to do is move mountains.   But it seems, far too many of us of my generation and before, took that homophobic message to heart and either stopped looking for love altogether, or decided that gay people are better off not needing it.   Especially the ugly ones.

How toxic relationships endure: I let them put me in the too ugly for a boyfriend box because I didn’t want to believe that my friends would ever do that to me.   They had no right…it was stupid, it was ignorant, it was a sickening betrayal of friendship and trust.   But I have to admit looking back on it, that I saw them doing it.   So I suppose, when all is said and done, it actually is my fault after all, that I’m nearly 60 now, and still single and lonely.   I should have walked away from them the moment I saw they’d put me in the too ugly for a boyfriend bin.   I should have found gay friends who saw someone deserving of love in me.   I should have gotten out more.

Dan Savage…

I blew up a corner of the Internet last night. After reading  this observation about Ann Romney’s speech at the Dish…

[Ann Romney says] what she and Mitt have is a “real marriage.” Who has a fake one, one wonders?

…I tweeted something about my  unreal marriage and created the hashtag  #unrealmarriage. The #unrealmarriage hashtag quickly trended as other people in marriages that the GOP doesn’t consider legitimate—and the Republican party has ways of shutting our marriages down—started tweeting out their unreal 140-character love stories, their unreal wedding pictures, photos of their unreal kids, etc., all with the #unrealmarriage hashtag.

Now I wasn’t watching Ann Romney’s speech—I also missed Rick Santorum’s speech—so I didn’t hear her “real marriage” remark in context before I tweeted. My bad. So here’s Romney’s “real marriage” phrase in context…

I read somewhere that Mitt and I have a “storybook marriage.” Well, in the storybooks I read, there were never long, long, rainy winter afternoons in a house with five boys screaming at once. And those storybooks never seemed to have chapters called MS or Breast Cancer. A storybook marriage? No, not at all. What Mitt Romney and I have is a  real marriage.

Angry conservatives soon swarmed #unrealmarriage to argue that we were being unfair to Ann Romney because she wasn’t drawing a distinction between her opposite-sex marriage and the same-sex marriages that keep Rick Santorum up at night. But “real marriage” is a loaded a phrase—particularly in the context of the Republican National Convention. It’s so loaded a phrase, in fact, that even those who were watching the speech—like Andrew Sullivan—took it as an unsubtle dig at folks in same-sex marriages. And while Romney’s comments seem benign in print/pixels), consider the  reaction of the anti-gay crowd.

Here’s the thing…  you can’t turn words like “Family” and “Values” into dog whistles for hating on gay people and then get miffed when whenever you use those words to actually mean Family and Values people keep hearing that dog whistle.  You’re the one trashed the neighborhood and forgive me (or not) for thinking you did that out of spite because you couldn’t make the rent.  And if you turn the institution of marriage into a seedy dive with a sign over the bar that reads…

…just remember, the one who devalued marriage, is you.

…in your fancy car…

Well you’ll just have to wait until I’ve finished my nap…

…and cleaned my paws.

She’s one of the neighborhood feral cats…a beautiful little calico I’d take into my home in a heartbeat but of course she won’t let anyone near.   Her pelt is always well kept and shiny so either someone in the neighborhood is feeding her or she’s making a good living on the local rodents…and er…birds.  This is why I keep my feeders out of reach of little calico cats.  Also one ear has been clipped which means someone took her to the vet to be spayed and given her shots.

She likes to nap under my car, where she can keep an eye on my bird feeders.  Normally she walks off when I get in the car but that time she just stayed put and I just waited her out.  I was in no big hurry.  She did this little indifferent cat stroll away from the car when I came down to it…parked herself a short distance away, made a big deal out of grooming herself, stretch, walk a little way further down the road, repeat…  I’d have a cat of my own in the house but I am single and often away and there is no one I know here in Baltimore I’d give the key to so they could look in on a pet while I was gone.  My life here is more solitary then her’s, and I will not bring a pet into the house just so it can be alone most of the time.  They say cats are fine with being alone but I think no animal, bird or mammal, can be alone for too long.  A pet needs a better home then I can give it.

People who look like that, want people who look like that…

Let’s hear it for ugly lonely trolls, without whom beautiful people would not know who ravenously beautiful they really are.   We also serve who press our faces into the canteen window and wonder what it must be like to never go to sleep hungry…

…and I am not the nicest person I have ever met. That would be mom. Mom loved everyone, tried to see the best in everyone and everything, and was a ray of sunshine everywhere she went. My Baptist grandma was another story, and proof that the fruit actually does fall very far from the tree every now and then. Misanthropy was her hobby. She frowned at racists not because they were racist but because they thought their own race made them something. She didn’t think black people were good for nothing because they were black. Black people were good for nothing because they were people. And I was especially good for nothing because I was dad’s son. Dad didn’t give a good goddamn what anyone thought. Mom loved him until the day she died, but often said he couldn’t walk past a mirror without looking in. Sometimes I think grandma loathed dad more for that then that he was a crook. If homosexuality is the biggest sin of all in some Fundamentalist circles, vanity was the unforgivable sin in grandma’s. Not knowing you were good for nothing was wicked in the eyes of the Lord.

I like thinking of myself as having all their genes.

So I drop folks from my Facebook “friends” list advisedly. Who am I, a stinking rotten good for nothing Garrett just like my pap, to set myself above all the other good for nothings in this wicked sinful world? It isn’t exactly a list of friends…there are friends in there, but there are also family members, co-workers, fellow travelers in the Militant Homosexual Conspiracy, and folks who’ve stumbled onto this blog, or my cartoons and friended me on Facebook because of that. It’s all good. But every now and then someone in there will piss me off and I have to let go. I love all the good for nothings in this life that is but a mere vale of tears but I will not endure cheapshit prejudices for very long, especially when they’re flung at people who get kicked around a lot as it is. All us good for nothings need to be rays of sunshine for each other, and if you can’t be that at least try not to spit in the other guy’s mirror.

Rep. Steve King: I’ve Never Heard Of A Girl Getting Pregnant From Statutory Rape Or Incest

Rep. Steve King, one of the most staunchly conservative members of the House, was one of the few Republicans who did not strongly condemn Rep. Todd Akin Monday for his remarks regarding pregnancy and rape. King also signaled why — he might agree with parts of Akin’s assertion.

King told an Iowa reporter he’s never heard of a child getting pregnant from statutory rape or incest.

“Well I just haven’t heard of that being a circumstance that’s been brought to me in any personal way,” King told KMEG-TV Monday, “and I’d be open to discussion about that subject matter.”

A Democratic source flagged King’s praise of Akin in the KMEG interview to TPM. But potentially more controversial for King is his suggestion that pregnancies from statutory rape or incest don’t exist or happen rarely. A 1996 review by the Guttmacher Institute found “at least half of all babies born to minor women are fathered by adult men.”

And so it goes…

Don’t assume he’s merely nuts. Of course he’s heard of minor girls getting pregnant. He isn’t stupid…at least not in that sense. This is how you fight a culture war. In this discussion the only fact that matters, the only fact that is real, is that women cannot be allowed control over their own bodies. That is the prerogative of men. That is the only fact that matters.

Facts are either your soldiers or theirs. When confronted by opposing facts, you kill them. It’s war after all.

I know where each and every one of my folds are. Sometimes I try to make pictures out of them…

…like on that longish essay I posted over the weekend about what a luxury car is.   Re-reading it I wasn’t satisfied with the last several paragraphs, thinking I’d gone off track and didn’t end up saying what I’d meant to say when I started setting my thoughts down.   So…just FYI in case anyone reading this blog is particularly interested, the last part of it is a lot different now…better I think…more to the point I intended.

And anyone reading this blog should know I do that here from time to time, rewriting things I go back and re-read when I feel I really didn’t get it out right.   In my defense I try not to make a habit of that because at some point you just need to move on with it and if what you did wasn’t very good in retrospect and you can’t make it better after several attempts then it’s best to just let it go and try to do better next time.   But whenever I do rewrite stuff here I will generally place something at the end saying that it’s been edited or updated, so nobody thinks I’m trying to be devious.   This, as I said before, is nothing more or less then my own personal life blog, and life isn’t always amicable to nice, clear-cut plotlines and prose.   And I am my own editor here, and ask anyone who has ever had to edit me for professional reasons (software engineers are often asked to provide documentation) how much fun that is.   I have been told I must be why they invented spelling and grammar checkers.