On SLOG…  Charles Mudede hits me where I am still pretty raw…  Where I guess it will always hurt…

This morning, around James and 5th, a woman across the street waves at me. She is around 50, black, and wearing a tracksuit. I think it is my mother. She is on her morning walk; she is waving at her son. But a closer look reveals the waving person to be not my mother but a crackhead who has mistaken me for a crackhead or dealer. I look away from her and walk up the hill.

But to slip by a trick of light and colors into that split second was something wonderful. In that split second I believed that my dead mother was alive and out and about. She was in the world with her own body. The thing about a death is that it finishes not so much the person but the relationship with that person. Instead of the subject object relationship, there is now only a subject—you who survives. The death of a close person is the total internalization of that person. Your living body becomes the site of their burial. It is here inside that the dead have something like an afterlife (alive but not alive, in time but not in time). They roam the body like a ghost roams a tomb.

Mom…  Dad…  My favorite uncle who I didn’t get nearly enough time with…  All the friends who are missing now…  It’s not the certainty of my own death that I hate.  Death doesn’t come like a thief in the night and take you away in the twinkling of an eye.  It kills you slowly…a little bit more and a little bit more every time it takes someone away from you.  Ghosts are the phantom limbs of the part of you that exists in a friend’s smile or a parent’s embrace, that your subconscious mind keeps insisting must still be there.   I could name them all.  Sometimes I still see them walking by on the street.  Then I realize it was just a chance resemblance in a walk, or a gesture, or a smile.  And it hurts all over again.

Ta-da…

Basically, I got tired of how it was always getting in my face unless I had it pulled back into a ponytail.  This is how I always used to wear it.

I’d forgotten how energetic the wave in my hair is.  Without all that extra weight it just comes roaring back, even when I blow dry it.

I’m going to let it grow out again in the back and sides eventually, but I’m keeping the bang because I don’t like it getting in my eyes.  The problem has always been finding hair stylists who know how to do long-haired guys any good.  That was why I just let it all grow out some years ago…I’d given up on hair stylists and decided to just let it grow and pull it back into a pony tail when necessary.  And…I wanted to see just how long I could get it to grow.  Now I know…about a third of the way down my back.  That’s it.  It won’t grow any longer then that.  I have this very fine baby hair and it takes forever to grow and it never gets very long.  I was hoping I could get it down to my waist.  But…not…

Damn…I’ve really gone gray haven’t I…?  Crap…

This may strike some of you, or most of you as odd…but most of my sexy guy sketches start with my seeing something aimed more at young heterosexual males…some pin-up photo of a sexy woman…and I’ll find myself thinking Hey…that’s a nice pose…but I’d rather see a guy in that photo… 

The young pirate I did some months ago was actually one of those little pirate statuettes you find for sale at some seaside resorts…a sexy female pirate being served a jug of ale by a little monkey.  I bought the statuette and when I got it home did several quick sketches, recasting her as a young man, and adding some background detail and giving him a slightly more direct and challenging look.  I guess you could say I butched him up a tad…but only a tad.  I was reaching for a sense where he’s beautiful and sexy but not in a passive way, such as I often see in most male heterosexual skin magazines.  I’m trying to thread a middle ground between the hyper-masculine art I see in a lot of gay magazines and the hyper-feminine stuff I see in straight boy magazines. 

It seems the gay sensual archetype here in the U.S. is the hunk.  I’m really not into that.  But I’m not really into uber twink either.  There is very little I find myself responding to in any of the gay magazines or the online photo galleries.  I’m not into porn.  Porn is obvious.  I want to be teased.  I like the sensual and beautiful over graphic sexuality.  And no…this isn’t just a middle aged guy loosing his interest.  I’ve always been like this.  In a world that must seem to the pulpit thumpers like it’s swimming in sex, there is very little in it I actually like.  I don’t see that as my being particularly finicky.  I’m an artist.  I don’t like saying that about myself because it sounds so damn pretentious, but there it is.  I spend a lot of time with my feelings…alone at my drafting table, or out and about with one of my cameras.  I know perfectly well what turns me on and it’s not that I have a sexually narrow bandwidth, it’s that the culture I live in does not like to admit that men can be beautiful and sexy that particular way.  Most of my skin magazines are Asian and that’s not because I have a thing necessarily for Asians, but because Asian cultures seem more willing to admit that males can be beautiful and sexy in a way that isn’t hunk.

There are males like that everywhere.  But here in the U.S. they have to dress like slobs or butch up or they catch grief from other U.S. males.  Once upon a time, back in the 70s and early 80s, sexy lean and beautiful guys could wear their jeans tight and low and their hair long and their cut-offs high and nobody gave it a second thought.  That was a great time to be a young gay man I’m here to tell you.  But then as the gay rights movement grew and became more vocal, heterosexual males experienced a kind of gay panic and then those gawd awful baggy pants and swimsuits began to appear and all the sexy beautiful males went into hiding, lest someone think they were gay.  Meanwhile, gay males, after being told for generations that they were pathetic mincing swishy faggots, began to reclaim maleness for themselves.  That’s a good thing, but alas it’s become too much of a good thing.  At least for me.

So when I want to spend some sexy time at the drawing board, I find myself inspired more by straight boy pin-up girls then by anything I see in the gay press or online on the gay websites.  It’s weird I guess, but except for the passivity I usually see in it, I find myself drawn more to that then to explicitly gay stuff.  I just mentally switch the gender of the subject a lot.  I find myself looking at something that is very nice, but would be greatly improved by adding a few ‘Y’ chromosomes.  But not too many. 

The sketch in the previous post started out as a photo of a gay guy in low riser jeans with thong straps rising up slightly in a very sexy way from the pant waist.  I thought that was a good idea, but I didn’t like his pose and he was a tad too muscular for my taste.  I like muscle…I like the hardness of the male body…but there are limits.  Then I saw another photo of a woman in a very tiny bikini and a hat.  She was looking at the camera in a pouty pin-up girl kind of way.  I took her pose and the idea of the low risers and thong straps and tried to combine the two.  I made the pose a tad more assertive and changed the facial expression from pouty pin-up girl to more introspective and sensual male.

I do most of my pencil work these days on layout paper because it’s easier to erase and re-draw and I am a hunt and peck kind of draftsman, not a professional by any means.  I am completely self taught and it probably shows.  When it’s sexy time at the drafting table my goal is making myself all hot and bothered.  It isn’t like I have anyone in my life to do that to me.  So I do it to myself.  I find that it’s often the simplest strokes of the pencil that can have the most dramatic results.  The concentration level is intense…almost trance like…while I’m working with the pencil.  That logical analytical side of my brain is working on the mechanics of drawing, and at the same time it is dispassionately watching the libido.  I draw to make my libido go…Damn!  Goddamn! 

Beats sitting alone in a bar pondering the fact that Facebook is feeding me ads for Mature Gay Dating now.  I would love to find a nice, good looking, good-hearted gay guy about my own age to date.   As long as he wasn’t mature.

[Edited a tad…]

You’re not it.  No…not you…You!  I was walking through the house working off a few chores just a moment ago, and glanced in a mirror, and for the first time in months I kinda liked what I saw in there again.  Thank you Joe, for making that such a hard thing to do.  A friend isn’t someone who craps all over your self-esteem.

This is the first winter that the outdoor cold has been able to keep me inside despite cabin fever.  I want to go out for a walk, but every time I go to the door and step outside to check the weather, something inside of me just wants to go crawl back into bed and wait for spring. 

I’m getting old.  There.  I said it.

I just took a small overnight to Stroudsburg to visit an old friend from way Way back, and drop off tons of my old computer stuff.  It was good to give that all stuff to someone likely to make use of it.  I hate the thought of all the electronic stuff we generate just getting dumped into landfills because it becomes obsolete every few years.  I managed to wrest a promise from him that he’d come visit Casa del Garrett sometime soon.  It would be good to have some company here, even if it’s only for a day or so.

Traveler is getting crusty with road salt and I need to take him to the wash soon.  Tomorrow weather permitting.  In the meantime I’m back to work on clearing out the house of old stuff that isn’t needed anymore.  The homeowner exempted naturally.  I think I’m still good for a few things.  But yesterday and this morning my friend and I were both complaining about stiffness in various joints and muscles and all I could think was Damn…we’re all getting old, the class of ’72.  At least he managed to have himself a love life of sorts.

So far this holiday season hasn’t been as dire lonely as I’d feared.  Probably because I’m busy with the house.  You’ve heard of comfort food?  Housekeeping is my comfort work.  Which is not to say it looks like a Martha Stewart showroom here because it doesn’t.  I am busy living in my house and it shows.  But I try to keep it uncluttered and comfy.  Best complement I ever got about the house was from Peterson who told me he and a mutual friend who’d been here both agreed my place was the best geek house they’d ever seen.  Maybe one of these days I’ll post a tour of the house or something.  Maybe a few YouTubes.  I’ve been thinking about posting a YouTube of me drawing one of my cartoons.

I think I’m experiencing the first little touches of arthritis in my hands now.  At least, that’s how it feels.  I haven’t seen a doctor yet about this so it’s not official.  But it feels like that’s what’s happening. 

Luckily, it’s happening first in my left hand (I’m right handed).  The index and middle finger of the left hand are getting stiff.  I notice it more in the morning, but throughout the day if I try to bend those two fingers to my palm they resist.  I can still do it, but they resist.  Unfortunately, I can feel it a little bit in the index finger of the right hand too.

I don’t do MySpace that often anymore.   Or Facebook that much either. which I got lured into because so many of my co-workers are on it.  But of the two I think it’s been Facebook more these days then MySpace.  But I’ll still check into MySpace every now and then. 

MySpace will feed you ads tailored to your profile…meaning I get a definate gay slant to the ads I’m being fed.  That’s okay with me.  Better then okay actually.  In a world that still seems to have trouble admitting that folks like me exist, let alone treat us fairly, it’s kinda nice to be talked to by advertisers, instead of talked past all the time. 

But just now when I logged off, I got fed an ad for "Senior Dating".  Swell.  Just what I needed.  I’m assuming this isn’t ‘Senior’ as in Senior Software Engineer. 

Great.  Just great.  First thing in the morning and I get called a lonely old fart by MySpace.  Bet I find another goddamned AARP card in the mail again tomorrow too.  I must have thrown out two or three dozen of those damn things already.  I’m not old.  I’m at that awkward age.  You know…somewhere between birth and death.

I’d never have thought that viewing all the photos of the happy couples out in California over the past couple of days would have had this effect on me.  I’m happy for them.  Delighted actually.  It’s good to see love succeeding somewhere in this poor angry world.  And particularly in California, the land of my birth.  I should be happy.  And I am.  For them.

But…  A wave of utter fatigue has washed over me, simultaneously with the arrival of those images on my computer screen.  I’m happy for them…but it’s all passing me by.  Don’t be fooled by career and money and status.  Don’t be lulled into thinking they mean anything.  They don’t.  Nothing else matters if you don’t have that intimate other in your life.  Nothing.

I’ve failed.  I am a senior systems engineer for the Space Telescope Science Institute…I own a nice house within walking distance of work and shopping, own a Mercedes, and can look back on a life that never once cheated anyone for profit nor broke anyone’s heart.  I never lied my way into anyone’s pants, or their company, or their trust.  I never met a bill I couldn’t pay.  My word and my money and my credit are good.  And…I failed.  None of it really matters.  For the past several days I’ve seen what matters in so many happy couple’s faces.  I’m 54 years old and…I failed.

I have, ironically enough, a wedding to go to this weekend.  A relative on mom’s side of the family in southern Virgina invited me to her wedding, and as she and her brother helped give mom some of the best years of her life in retirement, I feel obliged to go.  This is the Southern Baptist side of my family tree.  They would all probably cheerfully vote my right to marry away without a second thought, and tell me they did it with love in their hearts.  But I’m genuinely happy for her, and I hope she and her husband to be have a long and happy life together.  There needs to be more of what they have for each other in this world, not less.

I think, at long last, I’m finally giving up on this.  I just don’t have the energy anymore to keep holding on to it.  I have no idea what that change holds in store for me.  None.  All I know is, I failed.

I’ve been wondering about this for years now…

Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain

When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong.

Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.

I’m only (yes…Only!) 54 years old and I’ve been struggling with the sensation for years now that my world is getting too full of information.  But I’ve always reckoned that to be a consequence of the information age. 

Maybe not so much… 

Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer’s disease, for example, strikes 13 percent of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful.

“It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing,” said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.”

For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.

When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students

“For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,” said an author of the review…

You know…I remember that.  In school, whenever I stumbled over something that didn’t seem to make any sense, I’d just roll on by and hope that I got something later on that made the awkward piece fit in.  I try to do that now, and my mind just won’t seem to let the awkward piece go and move on.  It gets frustrating.  I feel as though I’m learning more slowly.

And I’ve always…Always…been easily distracted.  Unless I’m totally focused on something, in which case I’m more like an obsessive then an absent minded little geek.  But that total mental focus comes in spurts.  Like when I’m drawing something, or photographing something, or deep into code at work.  Then it’s almost as if I’m in a trance.  I just can’t keep that up for long though.  And the totally focused moments are always in familiar mental territory.   When I’m working with the camera, or at my drafting table, I Know what I’m doing.  Beyond those moments, I seem to be more and more adrift in a restless sea of information, where my attention is constantly being grabbed by this and that.

And I get pissed and start tuning things out.  Much of my day is a struggle to filter.  In my adolescence I used to dislike most advertising.  Now I loath it.  Never mind spam…mainstream corporate commercial advertising just seems to get more and more Insistent every year that you Have to pay attention to it, and always right at some moment my mind is busy with something else. The reason I stopped listening to broadcast radio long ago was that I didn’t like being busy with something around the house with music playing in the background, and suddenly my attention is yanked away from whatever I’m working on by a commercial.  They work Hard to grab your attention.  It isn’t just they compress the audio so the commercials seem louder, they use a host of sound gimmicks besides that to draw your attention to the ad.  Ever notice how a lot of ads are conversations now between two people talking in an urgent, or excited tone of voice?  Or maybe it’s someone who sounds vaguely like a friendly authority figure from your past…someone you used to respect and listen to a lot.  You can’t help but listen.  Lets hear it for the off switch.

I actually spend a lot of my day at home now in complete silence and I don’t even notice it.  When I do listen to music, it’s usually via the iPod while I’m fussing around the house doing chores.  There was a time I liked to have the radio or TV going in the background for company.  Now I very seldom do that, because it’s just too distracting.  For quite some time now I’ve been wondering, and worrying, if this is because my mind is getting older and slower, or because my world is just getting too crammed with information demanding my attention.  It might be neither.  My 54 year old brain may just be getting better at sucking it all in. 

“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” Dr. Hasher said. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”

In a 2003 study at Harvard, Dr. Carson and other researchers tested students’ ability to tune out irrelevant information when exposed to a barrage of stimuli. The more creative the students were thought to be, determined by a questionnaire on past achievements, the more trouble they had ignoring the unwanted data. A reduced ability to filter and set priorities, the scientists concluded, could contribute to original thinking.

Creativity has always been my trump card in life.  Pulling rabbits out of the hat as I like to think of it.  It gets me by when my plain looks, horrible fashion sense, and general social geekiness seem like a ball and chain.  I can figure things out, usually before any of the cool kids do, and that keeps me in the game.  I can think outside the box.  I can create.  And this is why, ultimately, I didn’t end up in a dead end job.  Yes, there was a lot of luck involved too, but some brains just can’t recognize a dead end when they encounter one.  There are no dead ends, only difficulties that you can’t let go of until you understand them. 

But every Yin has its Yang and severe social geekery may not be so much a curse as the price you pay for having that creative mind.  That, and a feeling of being overwhelmed more and more as you get older.  I’m not getting stupider after all.  My bandwidth isn’t narrowing, it’s still slowly getting wider and wider as I walk through life learning more and more and that has consequences I wouldn’t have expected.  And unexpected consequences means that life is still interesting and I’m still in the game.  So I reckon I need to adjust my coping mechanisms somewhat. 

Relax and enjoy the inevitable as Heinlein would say.  I’m beginning to see now why older people seem to always look so bewildered.  It’s not that life is passing them by.  Some of them anyway.  It’s that it’s all rushing in on them more then when they were young.  I probably need to just get comfortable with constantly feeling like I’m swimming in a torrent of data.  That feeling of being overwhelmed means that my brain is still working the way its supposed to, not that it’s getting tired and loosing its edge.  So just get on with it.

From Atrios…  The hard part about discovering that you are over the hill is realizing that it happened quite some time ago.

Getting Older

I spoke in an undergraduate class today. As a friend of mine has said a few times about her students, pretty soon you’re going to have to explain to them what the Lewinsky scandal was. This isn’t a comment on the quality of the students, just that the degree to which 19 year olds have shared cultural and historic experience with me is shrinking fast. Bush v. Gore happened when they were 11. What’s recent history to me is a vague recollection for them.

I suppose I need to stop comparing Bush and Reagan, let alone Nixon…

This is really sad…

Position vacant: £7 an hour. Person to drink beer

To customers perusing the notice-board in the village post office, the job advertisement must have seemed too good to be true. For £7 an hour, with all expenses paid, a man was required to visit a local pub and drink beer.

The assignment was to be carried out at at least twice a week at the Compass Inn in Winsor, Hampshire, in the company of an elderly gentleman.

The advert is genuine, and the four men who have applied for the position so far are to undergo trial drinking sessions in the coming week, though their potential employer is open to applications from new candidates.

It is an appeal from a desperate man. Until recently, Jack Hammond, 88, would drink four times a week with a neighbour in Barton-on-Sea. Then he moved into a nursing home a few miles away to be closer to his family. Forest Edge Care Home boasts a garden and easy access to shops; what it cannot offer Mr Hammond is a suitable drinking partner. All but one of his fellow residents are women. Which is how the advertisement came to be placed in the nearby village of Cadnam.

For some it is a sign of the times that an elderly gentleman lacks a companion with whom to visit the local pub, although it is increasingly common.

Mr Hammond’s wife died 12 years ago, and the upheaval of moving into a care home has left him feeling isolated. “It was a bit upsetting when I had to leave as I left all my friends back home,” he said.

Jeeze…I’m only 54 and I can already relate.  I moved to Baltimore and left all my friends behind in Washington because up here was where i was getting work, and I could actually afford the rents.  But at least I’m healthy enough I can drive down to Washington to see my friends regularly.  The day is coming, when all I’ll have is what’s within a short distance from where I make my bed.  But maybe by that time I’ll have voices in my head to keep me company.

People have had to buy sex since before the written word.  Here’s what it’s come to in our age: people are having to buy friends.  Except you can’t.

Better to go down dignified

With boughten friendship at your side

Than none at all. Provide, provide!

So said Robert Frost.  He was wrong.  You can buy sex but you can’t buy love.  You can buy a companion but you can’t buy friendship.  Hopefully Mr. Hammond has had enough love and friendship in his life that he can find all he needs now in a bought companion.  But the rest of us need to look at this and worry about what we are becoming.  It shouldn’t have to be like this.  In an age where advertisers can track our every desire and feed us up products we’re likely to want, just by tracking our web browsing habits, we are loosing our humanity.  How is it, that this guy was moved away from his friends into a nursing home located where it is, simply to be closer to his family, and nobody seems to have given any thought to his need for companionship?

Chris Perry, director of Hampshire Age Concern, often sees elderly men who lack a companion for their regular pub visits. “It is easy to become socially isolated at this age due to bereavement or from people moving away,” he said. “But this man needs to be commended for using his initiative for putting an advert in the window.”

And you need to feel ashamed, very, very ashamed, that he had to.  So it’s easy for people to become socially isolated at that age is it?  So you often see elderly men who lack companionship do you?  Then what fucking use is your goddamned Hampshire Age Concern?

(sigh)

For some years now I’ve had to wear glasses to read with.  It started out with the tiny print.  You know…the font the food companies print the ingredients lists on their product packaging with.  It got worse slowly…like a creeping fog cluttering up my vision.  One day I noticed I could not read the year mark on a dime.  Then it was the print in a newspaper.  Then it was the print in a book.  Then it was the print on maps.  Then it was the text in my computer display.  I gritted my teeth and just bought new half frames with stronger and stronger magnification factors.  I didn’t mind the half frames so much.  They were light in weight, and I could tuck them into my day pack and shirt pocket where they didn’t take up much room.  And I liked the look of them on me.  Even after a friend called me Granny Garrett when he saw me wearing a pair.  Half frames were invented by Ben Franklin, a man I greatly admire.  They’re so typical of his practical, common sense inventiveness.

I’d held out a hope that my distance vision wouldn’t be affected.  But some time ago I had to admit deep down inside that it was not to be.  I noticed myself having to work to get distant signage into focus.  Then I noticed I was doing the same thing to get the horizon into focus.  I could see it coming then.  So I did what any graphic artist would do when he notices his vision is getting worse.  I went into denial.

As long as I could reasonably make out what was there in the distance, I didn’t bother noticing that it was all getting fuzzier and fuzzier.  I just didn’t want it to be.  When the letter from the Maryland DMV to renew my driver’s license came in the mail the other day, I hoped that I could still pass the eye exam and for another couple of years at least not get the damn notice put on my license, that this driver needs to be wearing glasses to legally drive.  After all, I could still read the highway signs.  I just had to work my eyes a tad to do it.

Well…it was on the road to Memphis yesterday that I finally had to admit it.  My distance vision isn’t right anymore.  It’s not horrible by any means.  But it isn’t right.  Driving down highways that are unfamiliar, in traffic flows you are not used to, you really need to be watching the signs the moment they appear in the distance, so you can make your lane changes safely, well before the cutoff points.  When you can’t read the big green Interstate highway signs at a distance anymore, when you need them to be almost on you before the fuzziness goes away enough that you’re certain you know what they’re saying to you, you need glasses.  

Had I dealt with this more rationally I might have had some before I started heading out to Memphis.  As it was, I was able to get by using an old, old pair of spare reading glasses I’d stashed in the glove compartment.  They were so old they were useless for reading with, and I’d been meaning to toss them out.  As it turned out, luckily, that was just right for seeing the highway signs again.  But what really convinced me when I put them on and looked into the distance, wasn’t just the highway signs.

Oh…the horizon…it’s full of stuff now…

I could see it all…and yet I couldn’t.  I could see all the trees and houses in the distance, all the buildings in the far city skylines, all the elegant structures, human and natural, in the world around me.  But over the last couple years apparently, the detail in all that plenty had been fading away like the color in an old photograph.  And I didn’t know how much of it I’d already lost, until I put those old, weak, useless reading glasses on and looked out at the world beyond the highway signs.  I’d allowed my world to loose more of its richness and vitality then I’d realized, because I just didn’t want to know that my eyes were getting old, and that I was going to have to start wearing glasses all the time.

I hate it.  I used to have great eyes.  My left eye had better then normal vision in it: 20/14.  It’s still the better of the two.  But both of them need help now.

Since I was going to stay in Memphis for a while, I checked around to see if one of those quickie eye glass places could take me in, and make me a couple pair to tide me over until I got back to Baltimore.  I found a place that says they can do my exam first thing tomorrow morning, and probably have my glasses ready in an hour.  That’ll do until I can get back home.

My face is going to have a whole new look I reckon.  Oh.  And one other really irritating thing.  In the motel, I took a look at myself in the mirror with those old reading glasses I’d been using to drive down the highway with.  I’m 53 years old, and I hadn’t thought I was looking my age, until I looked at my face with a pair of glasses that allowed me to clearly see all the detail that I’d been missing, probably for the past couple years.  Damn.  Damn.  Damn.