Where Are You When We Need You, Nikita Khrushchev…
Seriously, I often say I am thankful for the cold war in that regardless of how scary it sometimes was…
…it gave me a decent education.
But there is something else I miss about the cold war…horrible as it was. The communist line was that communism was a better deal for workers then capitalism and developing nations should go communist to protect their workers’ interests over the evil running dog capitalists. So we had a propaganda war going on between us and them and Wall Street and big business were keen to prove to the world that our system was the better one for workers.
People Who Look Like That Want People Who Look Like That.
“Tell a girl she’s beautiful – she’ll believe it for a moment. Tell a girl she’s ugly – she’ll believe it for a lifetime.” -Unknown.
Boys too. Some boys. Basically what you’re telling people is they’re not desirable. It really cuts to the bone. It just takes all the life out of you. Everything becomes why bother. Every day is just empty going through the motions, walking through it, speaking your lines as though it were something real and it isn’t. You look in the mirror and you see nothing.
In a review of Eric Klinenberg’s Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, Benjamin E. Schwartz critiques the single life…
Schwartz says in part…
Going Solo bases itself on relatively new data showing that more than 50 percent of American adults are single, and 31 million- roughly one out of every seven adults – live alone.
Yes, and I am one of those solitary adults. I guess I was just born to have a bundle of negative stereotypes hoisted onto my shoulders. I am an only child. I’m gay. I’m a socially clumsy art/techno nerd. And now I’m getting old. I’m that weird old guy who lives by himself in the house down the street. The one you read about in all those newspaper stories where someone murders one or more other people and everyone in the TV news story says the suspect was a kinda quiet guy who kept to himself. Actually I don’t keep to myself. I don’t like keeping to myself (except when I’m in a mood to be at my drafting table). But being gay in America you get used to neighbors who chat pleasantly with you when you approach them, but who never once approach you. There are two openly gay guys on my block and we both get lots of smiles and friendly hellos and that’s about as much socializing with us as the heterosexuals on the block are willing to endure. As Truman Capote once said, a faggot is the homosexual gentleman who just left the room.
So there is more to the solitary life then mere self centered selfishness. But that’s a pretty reliable stereotype of singles, just as it is with only kids. We’re all just spoiled rotten…
As his subtitle suggests, he likes what the data tell us; his position could be summed up by the subtitle of a book he commends: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After. Klinenberg is rarely explicit about his convictions, which saves him the trouble of seriously assaying their implications, but he finally gets to the point directly in his conclusion, asserting that “living alone is an individual choice that’s as valid as the choice to get married or live with a domestic partner. . . .
I suppose it is for those who choose it. But not all of us do. For some of us it is a lot we’ve simply been cast into. And yes, there are a few negative consequences that follow from that. But don’t expect Schwartz to grasp them…he just goes off the deep end babbling about “expressive individualism”, a term I think he wants you to hear excessive individualism in, and society’s ability to transmit moral values. Because, you know, solitary people are innately immoral. Kinda like how poor people are poor because they’re lazy.
Here’s a moral value for you Schwartz: empathy. Not all solitaries are in that situation by choice, and even those who are aren’t all selfish. Selfish is when you stereotype people because you’re too damn lazy to actually look at them and see the people for your conceits. Maybe then people might see that a culture with half its members living alone has within it both the seeds of its own destruction and it’s own salvation. It’s a solvable problem, if only we as a society, as a culture can see the value in expending the kind of energy on making it possible for people to find the companionship in life they need that we do on…oh…let’s see…waging war and killing people’s husbands and wives. How about instead of fighting to keep same-sex couples from getting married, we built a society where no one has to live a life unloved, instead of casting the lonely into the trashcan of society? Moral values Schwartz, moral values.
And…Mr. Klinenberg… I am still awaiting all that surprising appeal of living alone you speak of. For some of us it’s more like life in solitary confinement then an exuberant life lived lightly. It’s hell but with air conditioned singles bars and pantries full of single size servings. We just learn to deal with it. Until we can’t anymore.
A friend from back in the BBS days recently posted a photo of the Names Quilt panel of his very dear and still very deeply missed friend. It reminded me of something I need to keep close to my heart whenever I wonder if my art work matters much at all in the grand scheme of things, and why should I even bother. I was given the task of designing that panel, after the passing away of the one it was to be in tribute to. His name was Chip.
I was not as close to Chip as the friend who brought me the work, and I was deeply honored he even thought I would be up to the task. His friend made a few suggestions as to how to proceed, gave me some needed pieces to start with. I thought about it, about the person it was for, and about all his friends, and their love. What I was being asked to create was a pretty simple design, but I was afraid of getting it all wrong. Chip was much beloved in his circle of family and friends and I wanted more then anything to give them something that let them remember and heal.
There is an utterly non-verbal place inside where there are only feelings, and images that are feelings. I have no words to describe it…it’s just how that most creative part of the work happens. There are no words. I don’t even try to find words in there anymore. But there are images.
I drew a rough sketch and presented it for approval and the friend was so taken with it he insisted that was it and no more needed doing. He organized a gathering of Chip’s friends and the sketch was projected onto a canvas sheet and we all worked on it. I’d included a spot organic to the design where friends could sign their names, and perhaps leave their own memories, thereby completing it…making it the perfect tribute I alone never could. Basically all I did was create the setting. But it had to be something that put them instantly in mind of their friend, so all those feelings would come out of them, and they could do the rest, and make it their own. It worked. They put their own hands on it, and made it their tribute to their friend.
It’s part of the larger Names Project Quilt now. Time passes, the universe expands, and decades later that panel is still very much a place of remembrance and healing for Chip’s friends. It was a small enough task, but I will never feel as though I’ve ever done anything more worthwhile with my talents, such as they are. All artists want recognition. But even more what we want is to touch hearts, and maybe, if we’re good enough, lift them up a little. I can go to my own grave knowing my art was able to do it that one time when it was needed. Just a little sketch, but it did its work.
“All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.”
-Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me
I got the inks finished now on episode 15 of A Coming Out Story. This one has been like pulling teeth. There’s something to be said for not digging up your past. Double for not trying to find your first crush after so long. But I am more determined then ever to get this out of me because I think it’s worthwhile, not just as a personal exercise in exorcising my inner ghosts, but as an accounting of what it was like being a gay teenager in the years after Stonewall, but before the APA decided we weren’t mentally ill anymore.
There’s something to be said for all that advice out there about not searching for your first crush. But I had to. It’s been since March 2011 that I posted episode 14. There were times I thought I’d never finish this one. When I started this cartoon series I had no idea where the object of my affections in this story was, what his life might be like, or even if he was still alive at all. After the AIDS Quilt was first unveiled in Washington D.C., I used to have nightmares about walking along its rows and finding one with his name there. Every time I restarted the search for him it terrified me to think I was simply going to discover he was dead.
Then, shortly after I started this little online comic story I found him. And…creatively…my head has been a mess ever since. Somehow in the past couple of weeks I got a head of steam up for it again and I have just zipped through the finishing of the pencils and now the inks. I finished inking this basically in just two days. And my head is still as much a mess as it’s ever been these past six years.
I do not understand that right brain side of me anymore. Not that I ever really did.
Suddenly I Have This Strange Urge To Pick Up A Bone And Kill Something With It…
A random tweet returns me to a puzzle I’ve been chewing on for some time now: what do I call a damn smartphone? Really…like my iPhone…it’s not merely a phone anymore. In fact the phone part of it is the least used functionality. So I’ve been trying to think of a generic term for…whatever the heck these things are now. Sure, they evolved from cell phones. But now…
What really got me pondering this question was I got an app a few weeks ago that turns it into a flashlight or a magnifying glass (er…it’s called “Over 40″…sigh…). It uses the built in camera flash for the flashlight part, and the camera itself for the magnifying glass part. WTF? So now what was a telephone is something that can morph into a flashlight or a magnifying glass when needed. I don’t recall reading any science-fiction when I was growing up that had phones in it that turned into magnifying glasses for tired old eyes. Video phones yes. But a magnifying glass? A flashlight? A compass? There’s a compass app. WTF???
So once again I start pondering the thing. Smart it is, yes, but phone is only a small part now of what it is. In my mind, the word Smartphone doesn’t really cut it anymore. You little dickens…what did you grow up to be? It’s a telephone. It’s a music player. I can read and send email with it. It’s a radio. I can play local stations or stations anywhere else in the world. It’s a news reader. It gives me weather reports. I can get the temperature outside or in Key West. I can call up a weather radar view and see the storms nearby and watch their motion before they get to where I am. It an atlas whose maps are always up to date. It can tell me where the nearest restaurant is, the nearest motel. It can tell me what the traffic is like where I’m headed. It’s a calculator. It’s a camera. It plays videos. It records videos. It’s a pocket dictionary and thesaurus. It’s a compass. It’s a calendar. It’s my appointment book. It’s my todo list. It’s a flashlight. It’s a magnifying glass. It’s a notepad. I can read books with it. I can hold it up to the night sky and it tells me where the planets are, what a star’s name is, the name of the satellite passing overhead.
Then I realize if I painted it entirely black it would look a bit like Clarke’s monolith…
There’s a good Huffington Post article making the rounds now, by another professor at the University of Texas…this one an actual professor of sociology as opposed to “associate professor”. Money-quote here:
Had Regnerus walked down the hall and knocked on my door, I would have been happy to explain that stress and instability harm children in any family context. Love and support help children to thrive and succeed. Pseudo-science that demonizes gay and lesbian families contributes to stress, and is not good for children.
Just so. Robert George is probably having a good laugh right now at the fast one he’s just pulled, of kicking the kids of gay parents in the teeth even as his and other homophobes’ concern for their welfare is taken for granted by the corporate news media.
Reading this something that was nagging at me finally clicked. Mark Regnerus is basically Paul Cameron, but with a job at an actual University. Bear in mind, Cameron’s evil genius is in his ability to deftly gerrymander his data while making it seem like his conclusions are purely and honestly arrived at. His original claim, the zombie lie that never dies, that gay men have vastly shorter lifespans, is the classic case in point. When you look more closely, you see that all Cameron did was select a data set that guaranteed he’d get the outcome he wanted. But you have to really look at what he did to see that was what he was doing, and there of course, is the rub.
Eventually intelligent people of good will would see though it and dismiss it as junk science, but people of good will were never his audience. In the end what he was doing, was giving the kook pews something to wave around as proof that persecuting homosexuals is just good public policy and no, they’re not just saying that because they’re a bunch of knuckle dragging bigots.
Stripped away from all its formal academic pretenses, what you see is Regnerus is doing what Paul Cameron has always done: deftly select just the data that will give him the answer he wanted in the first place, in such a way as to appear to the casual observer that he’s not deliberately biasing the data. This is the essential Paul Cameron technique. Mark Regnerus is just another Paul Cameron, but with a University office. Maybe Paul should send him a diploma from ISIS. Grant him a PhD. This was as good a thesis as anything Paul himself could have produced.
This site uses, among other things, a product called “Sitemeter” to track visits. The other day I noticed when looking at my visit reports on the Sitemeter web page, I kept getting requests to log in from a funny looking popup window, similar to this one that Towleroad was seeing…
The value of having my eternally suspicious nature: I saw this prompt come up several times on the main Sitemeter site after I was already logged in and figured something nefarious was going on. There was.
Lesson is: never enter your login credentials into popup windows that suddenly seem to appear out of nowhere and when you didn’t expect to have to log in.
Since no one has to log in to view my web site I assume everyone who visits would know this isn’t for real if they saw it. But I’m telling you now in case you ever wonder: you don’t need to create accounts or log in here. If you ever see a login screen come up while you’re reading my blog or looking at anything else around here, it isn’t real and for goodness sakes don’t give it any information.
This was taken by a friend with my camera, for possible inclusion into the yearbook. The odd framing is an artifact of the film scanner I have. I was staff cartoonist for the student newspaper (serendipitously called The Advocate) and was also made staff photographer after the previous one had a tiff with the editors and quit. This shot was for a spread in the yearbook about the student newspaper staff, but didn’t make the cut. Instead they had me arrange another one of a small group of us, thereby saving page space.
I remember this. What I like about this shot is my friend actually managed a snap when, for an instant, I got into the drawing I was working on and was actually concentrating on it there for a moment. It’s not often I get to see my concentration face. I’m 17. I’m posing at one of the art room desks, drawing, not pretending to draw but actually drawing, one of my cartoons. I was a stickler for authenticity (still am) and even though the shot had to be posed I insisted I would be working on something for real, not faking it. You can’t see my hand with the pen in it in this shot, but that’s the drawing on the board and paper in front of me. The tackle box also in front of me is typical. The tool boxes they sold in art stores for artists were expensive. I figured the tackle boxes they sold in the sporting goods section of most department stores would do just as well and they cost a lot less.
And this by the way, is why to this day I draw on a horizontal surface and not with the drafting table top tilted at an angle, although it can be. All my grade school art rooms had tables like these and I just got used to drawing that way and now I find it more natural then having the table top tilted. But see the board I have the paper on. I still cut Masonite boards to use for drawing and tape my paper on them. Then I have the paper on a nice smooth solid surface I can turn this way and that.
This is the kid I’m doing A Coming Out Story about. When this was taken I was just on the verge of finally coming out to myself as a gay teenager. This was late 1971, but probably still a few weeks away from the day a certain someone put an arm around my shoulders, gave me a squeeze before heading out the school door, and thereby sent my head and heart into the stratosphere, and I couldn’t rationally deny it any longer. Such were the printing lead times back then, yearbook photography had to be pretty much done by the end of the first semester. So when this was snapped that kid there was head over heels crushing over a certain someone, but still not at all ready to admit it to himself.
And who could blame him? It would be another couple years before the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from it’s diagnostic list of mental illnesses. The kid you see in this photo is about to come out to himself in a world that had no other understanding of homosexuality other then a ugly sexual depravity. To be a homosexual was more loathsome then anything else a man could be. It was the bottom of the bottom of the human gutter. This was a message you got from every direction.
I look at this kid and I just want to go back in time and tell him he’s smart and beautiful and worthy of being loved and never let anyone tell him otherwise. But he would ask questions. He will ask what the future will be like for him. And I could tell him all sorts of wonderful things that will eventually happen to him. Except for one thing. This is why I’m having a hard time maintaining energy to work on A Coming Out Story. I need a better ending then the one I’ve got.
Thing about most dreams is once awake you recall how limited your mental bandwidth was (for lack of a better term) while you were in it. It’s the thing that telegraphs to you instantly that you are really awake: your mind is all there. In most dreams (at least my own) I have no memories of prior events, no sensation of thinking really. I don’t feel my body or even notice it much. There are none of the usual sensations of motion or my environment. I don’t feel temperature, don’t feel the air around me, don’t feel the sensation of gravity on my body. My consciousness is entirely on the surface of things. I am an automaton strolling through the dream.
But some dreams are so vivid I find myself remembering things, including past dream events I’d forgotten. I have conversations with the people in my dreams and think in depth about what is being said to me while talking to them. I can feel my environment, feel hot or cold, feel the wind, feel gravity tug at me while doing things like running or climbing. I sit quietly and ponder something and I am thinking in depth, just as if I was wide awake. And lately I’ve noticed myself even daydreaming in my dreams.
What is it when you’re daydreaming within a dream? I was doing that last night.
Our minds…our human consciousness…it is such an amazing, intricate, constantly surprising thing…
And Speaking Of The Long History Of Heterosexual Marriage…
This started coming across the wire the other day and I just have to repost it here. Alas, I’m suspecting many of my fellow Americans won’t even get it…
Yes, yes…I can hear it already. King Henry didn’t redefine marriage, it was still one man and one women. And the next woman. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next.
The Sexual Degenerates Are In Your Bathroom Mirror…Looking Back At You…
Jesus’ General (an 11 on the manly scale of absolute gender) points us to a discussion about women wearing pants, which Thinking Housewife regards as a despicable feminist renunciation of feminine femininity, and quotes Thinking Housewife Contributor Jesse Powell thusly…
If there was a general societal norm that men wore pants while women wore dresses it would be very clear that there was a difference between the sexes.
To which my low key apologetic libido says…
Or a guy’s ass. Seriously…pants make it easier to tell a person’s sex. If both sexes are wearing pants it would not typically be very difficult to identify the sex of the person wearing them. I admit you can still occasionally be fooled. I once mistook a gal named Martha for a guy and no she was not big and ugly, she was lithe and handsome and very very cute. But she had small hips and butt for a gal, and she liked wearing big floppy jackets so I never got a good look at her breasts and it threw me. But that’s not the usual case. The usual case is it’s pretty obvious.
But you’d only know that if…you know…you ever looked carefully. In the A Coming Out Story episode above the joke is I was only looking at guys. Little teenage me grew up without much of an interest in girls and tons of interest in guys and it showed, to my embarrassment whenever it was pointed out to me, in my artwork. The joke here I suspect is we’re witnessing more firsthand evidence that a childhood drenched in right wing sexual mores result in grown adults with pitifully arrested sexual development. If you need gender restrictions in clothing and dress in order to tell the boys from the girls it isn’t society that’s sexually degenerate.
Oh I know…I know…it isn’t that they can’t tell the difference…it’s that clothing as a personal expression of beauty and sexuality is a symptom of evil taking of joy in life. The clothes you wear should remind you of your place and reenforce keeping you in it. More then a uniform, clothes must be a prison within which, hidden and contained, is the shameful flesh, within which is doubly imprisoned the damnable human soul. Else the person inside might escape and have a life of their own.
I’ve been posting about this on my Facebook page but not so much here. Last December I traded the C class (Traveler, henceforth known as Traveler I) for a new E class diesel, which I’ve named Traveler II (or simply Traveler. The Garrett side of my family tree has a habit of simply passing down names and since this is another Mercedes sedan I’m just continuing a tradition.) The trading in of cars before they’re completely unusable with age is not typical of me, but I’d wanted to own a Mercedes diesel since I was a teenage boy and an uncle came for a visit in his brand new 220D. The lady who sold me Traveler I called, left voice mail because I didn’t pick up, and said she could put me into a new C class for less then I’d paid for the first one. I called her back, left voice mail because she didn’t pick up, and said I was very disappointed Daimler still wasn’t importing the C class diesels (they sell one in Europe that gets an honest 40mpg around town so they say), but if she could put me into a new E class diesel for not too much more I might be interested. Well of course I got an immediate call back: Oh there’s one on the dock that’s just for you!
A diesel suits me better then any other sort of car for the long distance road trips I like to take, and because I like having solid things in my life and a diesel is solidness and robustness embodied. When I started this car up for the first time on the dealer’s lot the engine made a sound like I could have driven it clean around the world and it would have only just been broken in. It was love at first revs.
The Mercedes-Benz diesel-powered mid-size sedan is as durable a notion as you’ll find in autodom. Mercedes created the world’s first production diesel-powered passenger car in 1935 and began putting oil burners in its mid-sizers (a.k.a. Pontons) in 1955. The very words “Mercedes diesel” conjure all kinds of associations, from college professors who have forsaken their Peugeots, to wiry German mechanics, to cab drivers in Kabul. It’s an archetype; a 911 Turbo for meerschaum-smoking squares, a Shelby Mustang for people who got beat up in high school. -Car and Driver, “2011 Mercedes-Benz E350 BlueTec Diesel – The evolution of der classic”
I’m 58 years old, and if this car lives up to its heritage it will be the last car I ever own. Every now and then since driving it home I’ve pulled up to the diesel pump and someone in a Mercedes has pulled up to the other side of the pump and we chat. Often they’re cars that are 10, 20 even 30+ years old and their owners are still in love. These are expensive cars but my sense from talking to other owners is most Mercedes owners, at least the diesel owners, are enthusiasts who weren’t interested in owning an empty status symbol. I took the car to Key West a couple weeks ago and on the way back talked to a man who pulled up to the pump in a 1979 300D. The car looked nearly new, except for wear on the seats, so he’d been taking very good care of it. It had just over 400k miles on it and its owner was still delighted with it.
My new Mercedes diesel is in a metallic color called “Lunar Blue”, which looks almost black in the shadows and a nice deep sky blue in the bright sunlight. I couldn’t get every option and still be able to afford an E class…unlike the ‘C’ I had to settle for less then I wanted…but I got a couple good safety options, including the lane keeping option which uses a camera to detect the lane markings and if you start drifting out of your lane it bumps the steering wheel to get your attention. The best part is it has more passenger and trunk space, feels lots more comfortable then the C (which was itself amazingly comfortable on long distance trips), is solider, quieter, more sumptuous (in the no bullshit understated Mercedes way) then the C and yet it gets way better fuel mileage then the C did and is cleaner emissions wise due to its high tech urea emissions control system. The urea tank occupies the space the spare tire would have, so I have run flats instead.
When I first brought the C class home several years ago it raised some eyebrows in the neighborhood. When I brought this E class home I think some of my neighbors thought I’d gone overboard in the self gratification department. Well…yes and no. The self gratification element is I bought my Mercedes because ever since I was a teenage boy I’ve been simply awed by the quality of their engineering and build. Well…except for that little stretch between 1998 and 2006. But they’re building them again now like they used to and after driving this one for six months now and driving it to Florida twice I am convinced that this model E will take its place with some of the other legendary sedans like the W123. As I said, I like solid things in my life and these cars are magnificently engineered and built. I wish I could shake the hand and thank personally everyone on the assembly line in Sindelfingen who built mine. It isn’t a status symbol, and not even really a statement although you can read it as being one. I simply like over engineered solidly made things that are built to last. It’s the waste-not, want-not plus do the job right or don’t do it at all mindset I grew up on. It’s served me well throughout my life and the older I get, the more I believe in it.
Which also means you don’t buy something like this and run it into the ground. Traveler has had its first 10k service ‘A’ and two oil changes already. I change the oil in my cars at least twice as often as the factory recommends. I changed the oil every two-thousand miles in my first car, a 1973 Ford Pinto, and got almost 136k out of it and even then the engine was in near new condition. I only had to get rid of the car because everything around the engine was falling apart. American cars in those days, an especially small American economy cars, were simply not built to last; consider they only had five digits on the odometer back then. Now I own a car with a heritage of extreme longevity. You take care of a car built like that and you don’t feel like you’re fighting a loosing battle. Every month I get my cleaning tools, shop vac and buckets out and spend several hours giving the Mercedes a good going over inside and out. I had about a half dozen bottles of various car care lotions arrayed around the car last Sunday…something for the vinyl seats, something for the dashboard, something for the wood trim, something for the leather wrap around the steering wheel, tar remover, carpet cleaner…and so on…(I’m a geek…I researched all of this stuff to get exactly what was right for the car) and I have all these different kinds of towels and cleaning tools and brushes and the shop vac’s attachments for various tasks and I’m a busy little bee going here and there around the car. They built me a good car, and now I’m going to take care of it. But it’s a labor of love too.
And something I’ve noticed is people see me doing that and the attitude changes. You can park an expensive German luxury car in a working class neighborhood and if your neighbors see you sweating over it, fussing over it, taking care of it, then its just your own personal eccentricity rather then an empty ostentatious display of money. People don’t mind you spend that much as long as they see some respect for the value of money on your part.
Now the car and I get smiles from the neighbors we didn’t at first. Now it’s I’m just another American male in love with his car. They know better then to start a conversation with me about Mercedes-Benz automobiles though because I’ll talk their ears off about it.
Happy new E Class diesel owner aging longhair hippy nerd on day of delivery,
complete with psychedelic license plates…
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