A short time ago I read a story about the Spiderman actor Tom Holland discussing why he decided to quit alcohol and his three years of sobriety. What interested me about it was that after a discussion with his doctor about his liver scared him, Holland decided to quit drinking for a month to prove to himself he didn’t have a problem. It turned out to be so difficult that he extended his test to another month without drinking. Then it was three. Then, finally after a year without a drink, he was noticing how much better he felt, how much better he was dealing with his personal and professional relationships, his life and its stresses. He says now he’s never going back because he feels he’s having his best life.

Addiction can take many forms, but probably all of them are damaging to some degree. This week the loyal opposition (as opposed to the unloyal in power) have called for a week long boycott of Facebook and all of Meta’s social media properties, to protest Mark Zuckerberg’s not only kissing the Trump ring but belly flopping into the toxic masculinity pool along with Musk, Thiel, et al. The problem for me is I’m not sure I can. I’ve tried it before whenever Facebook has ticked me off about its content moderation policies; I’ve even removed a bunch of my artwork from it. But I’ve always come back to it fairly quickly. It isn’t just because I have a lot of friends on it.

I’ve told this story before, about how a question from a 14 year old kid in the Netherlands posted to a primitive FidoNet BBS echo board awakened me to the power of this technology to liberate gay and lesbian people forever from the identities pushed on us by heterosexual culture and its fear and loathing of homosexual people. We no longer had to see ourselves through heterosexual eyes. I consider “social media”, broadly defined as any computer communication technology that gives individual users a means to access a digital “commons” where they and others can gather and chat freely, as a vital part of gay liberation. Anyone who remembers being a gay kid in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s can plainly see that this technology has done miracles for our lives. It has done miracles for mine. And now I live and walk among a generation of gay people who do not remember a time before personal computers and modems, let alone smartphones and the internet.

But commercial social media is profoundly different from those first amature BBS systems, and then later after the internet became a thing, the first blogs. Prior to commercial social media, the users of various forums and commons were also either the owners, or the maintainers, or were purchasing the hosting of those forums and commons out of their own pockets. Now those commons are owned, if not entirely (thankfully!) by billion dollar corporations, or Elon Musk, whose interest in maintaining them could not be less about the welfare of the gay community, let alone this country, let alone humanity. And we are the products. The lives we live on commercial social media are sold to investors and advertisers. Our loves, our losses, our joys, our sorrows, our fondest hopes and dreams, our deepest fears…it’s all grist for the profit mill.

It was tolerable, barely, when what you could say you were getting out of the bargain was easy access to family and friends you didn’t have when all there was were blogs and AOL Instant Messenger. You needed a decent amount of expertise to use a computer and modem to connect to the greater outside world and a lot of people simply didn’t have, or want, that kind of involvement in computers. Commercial social media made it easy to connect. Also, and gradually, hard to go back to your favorite websites. Initially Facebook made it easy for bloggers to link their posts to Facebook. And when their users all flocked to Facebook it cut the blogs off. I admit the east of use Facebook gives me to knock out posts on my smartphone as opposed to writing this blog post on my personal computer, has left my little life blog suffering.

That ends today. I am joining the Facebook/Meta strike week not only as a show of solidarity against the impending billionaire fascism to come, and against Zuckerberg’s belly flop into toxic masculinity, but also as a test to see how big an addiction to Facebook problem I have. I see lots of people saying they understand the impulse to leave Facebook but they can’t because all their friends and family are there. But this is how it holds us hostage to its business model and it’s the number one reason you Must leave, or at least attenuate your use of it severely. Facebook wants you to believe if you leave it’s clutches you will lose all your friends and family contacts. But if they really love you that much, they’ll follow you elsewhere, even if they decide to stay on Facebook.

It’s easy to point a web browser to your favorite blog. It’s even easier to link a blog reader to it, and to others (I use Feedly these days). Once upon a time there were lots of blogs and websites where like minded people could gather and chat. There were blog rolls where you could see what the folks running the blog liked to read. There was a community of bloggers. I got invited to one such gathering in Philadelphia by Jim Capozzola, author of The Rittenhouse Review blog. There I met other well known bloggers like Fred Clark and Duncan Black (Eschaton) who flips your bogus bit far too quickly. It was a happy gathering and a feeling of comradery I miss deeply. And none of us were beholden to a corporate business model.

I dropped off Twitter completely and it wasn’t hard at all, given what Musk had done to it. I joined BlueSky (@brucegarrett.bsky.social) when a friend gave me one of their test period invitation codes. I never felt any pain of leaving Twitter because BlueSky was an even better alternative. I give leaving Facebook a week. If it is excessively difficult then a month. However long it takes for me to not feel compelled to visit. After that I’ll only be going back to check for messages and remind people who want to follow me to visit my blog.

Maybe I’ll end up seeing myself living my best life…

I’ve had my website for just over two decades now, originally to showcase my cartoons and photography, but it also included a blog, which back in the day were simple online diaries. I keep telling people that mine is a life blog, because most of what you find in the blogosphere are topical blogs, most of them political, and I get political lots on mine. But it’s a life blog. You might find me writing about “Adventures in home ownership” in my “department of random complaining” as much as pulpit thumping about prejudice toward gay folk.

I was looking at my server logs this morning and saw that someone, via a Google search (Google doesn’t let you see the search strings anymore) hit on a series of blog posts that I tagged with the keyword “Prejudice”. So I decided to see what they saw and followed the link back to my blog.

Is it unforgivably vain of me to look at the old stuff an be impressed with the quality of my writing? There’s a lot of good stuff in there going back years. But also, browsing a lot of old blog posts on the topic of homophobia really drives home how the current torrent of hate mongering toward us isn’t all that much different from previous waves of it. It’s like nothing ever changes in the American sewer. But at least I could get a few things off my chest. Beats yelling at the TV.

I don’t know how much longer I have, hopefully enough to finish A Coming Out Story. I’ll be 69 in just a few weeks and the way I’m feeling lately I’m finally at the point of admitting to myself that I’m actually old now. I’m tired all the time now. But I could hope that something of my art, something of my photography, and maybe my blog have a life after mine. On the blog, which is after all just a life blog, I’ve said things I felt needed to be said whether I had an audience for it or not, and my blog has never had a lot of traffic. But at least I got it out there and I’m happy with what I wrote.

Back at ‘cha…

I know I love mine. This headline was laughing at me this morning…

Trump ends blog after 29 days, infuriated by measly readership

Upset that it was being mocked for low traffic, Trump ordered his team Tuesday to put the blog out of its misery

This cheers me up considerably, and motivates me to take better care of my own measly little readership blog. I haven’t posted to it in almost two months now because I’ve been so plague weary scatterbrained. I do have another episode of A Coming Out Story in the works that I should be able to get up here in a couple weeks. And a photo gig I will hopefully be doing this Saturday for Wayne Besen. I did a political cartoon for him that I’ll post here as soon as he’s got it up on his site.

And a bunch of stuff to talk about that I’ll put up here shortly. Thank you for your patience.

Former president Donald Trump’s blog, celebrated by advisers as a “beacon of freedom” that would keep him relevant in an online world he once dominated, is dead. It was 29 days old.

This blog has been running since 1998 in various forms and on various hosts. I started it when blogs were more of an artistic thing rather than a political and/or commercial thing. It’s a life blog. That is what blogs originally were. People talking about their lives online. If you have no life, there is not much point in blogging. Donald.

Did I say I had an eclipse story to tell…and that it was coming soon.  Erm…yes. Sorry. It’s something I’m still turning over in my head. In the meantime I have something to get off my chest…next post.

This graph I saw just now on Facebook says it all.   Mostly.

Why I blog.

• I don’t get interrupted in the middle of answering a question or explaining something.
• I don’t get told to make it brief. I can make it as long or as short as I feel it needs to be.
• I can think about what I want to say, write it out, and then tweak it until I’m satisfied with it.
• I can put it out there and not have to worry about what people actually understand; because some will and some won’t but either way I got it out there and I’m happy with it. (This also applies to my artwork and photography)
• People who think I’m over verbose or don’t like what I have to say don’t have to read my blog. Unlike how Facebook and Twitter decide what you will see in your newsfeed or tweet stream, you actually have to go visit my website to read my blog. It’s an active not a passive activity. So if my words are not to your liking then you can completely ignore my blog and be welcome. There are cats and Willy Wonka memes out there you probably haven’t seen yet.
• It gives me a record of my life and thoughts I can look back on to better understand where I’ve been and where I am now.

Another reason I blog: It’s taken me decades to claw my way out of the shell I left Jr. High School in due to bullying, plus that closet those of us who were growing up gay in the late 60s and early 70s inevitably shut ourselves into. And while I’m still not the free and cheerful kid I once was I’m better at just being Me now than I’ve been since I was a teenager. But some days when it feels like I’m being shoved back into that cocoon again for various professional and personal reasons, I know I can always turn to my blog, and my artwork, and get it out one way or another. This is how some of us, who’ve never found our significant other, computer nerds mostly I reckon, cope with trying to be understood.

I’ve said here before, this is a life blog. That’s something blogs just were before they became a media for political expression. Nowadays there are probably as many blogs out there as reasons people blog. Facebook, Twitter and other social media have cut into what was for a while a vibrant blog culture based around blogrolls and readers, but for those of us who have a need to get it out there in our own voices blogging is still an ongoing thing. Just recently a writer I follow, Jim Wright, had a post he put up on Facebook taken off after some unknown jackasses complained about it. The post in question was a heartfelt and angry reflection on the anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, so you can see why it might not have been to everyone’s liking. But Wright is a thoroughly decent man, a retired US Navy Chief Warrant Officer and he knows how to make himself clear even to nitwits. Eventually Facebook put it back up and apologized, but you could always read it on his personal website, Stonekettle Station. This is why it’s a good thing blogs are still out here.

After a few false starts I’ve managed the upgrade.   At some point I might start looking for another theme since I very seldom update the right column anymore.   But for now all I wanted to do was get the blog on the current version of WordPress.

I am also running a class reunion site here that has been woefully neglected and now it’s so far behind in WordPress versions it’s not even displaying anymore and I had to take it down.   That’s going to be a manual upgrade process I am not looking forward to…

Folks stumble across this little internet space of mine now and then and a few stick around and I reckon I have to keep posting this so there aren’t any misunderstandings, particularly about the blog.

This is a life blog. I started doing this before blogging became a thing, before it became a legitimate alternative to the pop media and corporate news services, before it became a kind of citizen journalism.   ‘Blog’ back in the early days of the World Wide Web, was a kind of shorthand/slang for ‘Web Log’…little online diaries people posted on their personal web sites in the days before you could update your status on Facebook.   The first blogs, started by artists, who were thought by some to be crazy putting their entire lives out there for the whole world to see, were just artistic experiments.   Then it became a thing.   Particularly during the Bush presidency, and the Iraq war, as people became frustrated and angry with the mainstream news services.   Nowadays, many blogs are topical, political, outlets of citizen journalism.

But this is not that kind of site.   This is a life blog.   It is my life blog.   I vent a lot here about politics, but I am a gay man, who grew up during the cold war, and even worse, lived most of my life in the suburbs of Washington D.C., which isn’t exactly known for its rural pastoral arcadian lifestyle…

No, Seriously.   I did my duck and cover drills in elementary school.   I listened to the monthly tests of the air raid siren behind the apartment complex mom and I lived in.   I did my pre-induction physical six months before Nixon ended the Vietnam war.   I remember sitting at the desk in my underwear with a few dozen other guys filling out this form that asked things like were we ever communists, wondering if I should check the box that asked if I was a homosexual.   I lived through the counter-culture wars in the 1960s.   I marched and took photos at the Nixon Counter Inaugural. I came out to myself on December 15 1971 somewhere between 4 and 5PM. I have marched in every gay rights march on Washington since the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1979.   I wandered among the panels of the Names Project quilt when it was first unveiled on the Washington Mall in 1987, terrified that I would find one with the name of a certain someone I first fell in love with once upon a time there among them.

So I tend to vent a lot about politics here.   But this is not a political blog.   It is a life blog.   I put stuff here on the blog, mostly for the same reason I post my cartoons and photography elsewhere on this site. I am an artist. It sounds pretentious to say it, but there is no way to understand my frame of mind at any given time without understanding that I have this powerful need to Get It Out Of Me regardless of who cares or who even understands.   Mostly I do graphic art.   Sometimes words come out.   The Internet is just another way I have of putting my stuff out there.   It is not and does not function as an online publication of some kind.   It is a life blog.   Think of this place as being slightly retro…like it’s owner.   Matter of fact, apart from this blog, the rest of this site is all hand coded by me in simple HTML.   Yes, I’m a computer geek too.   That’s how I earn my living.   That’s where the artist and the Internet meet.

I have comment moderation turned on, not so much to regulate the content here but to keep spammers out of the comments.   For every real comment I get here I also get about 50 – 100 spam comments.   These are posted just to raise the rankings of a particular web site in the search engines and there’s no easy way to filter them out.   This is why we can’t have nice things.   My email box is even worse.   Send me an email and I might not even see it in the torrent of spam.   But this is not an online publication, it’s a life blog.   If you post a comment here or send me an email it might not show up for a while…maybe even a long while.   That might be because I’m not paying close attention to the blog because I am occupied elsewhere in my life, or it might be because I want to read it over carefully and post a response.

I don’t particularly care if you need to tell me why something I posted here is wrong.   I might argue or I might just eventually post your comment and say nothing. I might even agree I was wrong, or at least clumsy.   But I won’t endure a long heated argument either.   Obviously outright abuse won’t get posted, but I seldom get that here for some reason, probably because a troll wants a bigger audience than just me and the few regulars here.

This isn’t a political forum.   I am not a citizen journalist.   I am a software engineer for the Space Telescope Science Institute.   I am a computer geek.   I am a technology nerd.   I am a science geek. I am a photographer.   I am a cartoonist, I do political cartoons for Baltimore OutLOUD. I am a painter.   Sometimes I write stories.   I am an artist.   This is my life blog.

…not a political blog or some other sort of blog.   It’s what blogs were before blogs became a thing. I’m just documenting my life here, such as it is, and maybe throwing a reference or two out to other things I do besides vent, like my photography or cartoons.   If what I’m putting up here has any value to anyone it’s because it’s about Life, not so much about Me specifically. If it gets heavy sometimes that’s because life will do that. If I don’t name names in something I post here that’s not because I’m being coy, it’s because the specific people don’t matter.   It’s not about them, it’s about life.

…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.

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.

I’ve been very graciously linked to recently by a couple folks, including Fred Clark whose readership I must assume is every bit as decent and good hearted as he is. So for the sake of those just tuning in, and especially after that last post, I feel should explain something.

You may have noticed things are a bit odd around here.   Hi…my name is Bruce Garrett.   This is my place.   It’s odd because I am.

I started blogging back before blogging really took off, years ago in the late 1990s when I read about someone who was just basically posting their diaries online as a kind of living art project. I thought that was kinda cool and started doing it myself.   I wasn’t about getting attention.   If you have the art gene in you too then you understand. Mostly, I do graphic art…imagery.   Try the cartoon and photo galleries sometime.   But sometimes I try to write.

I started blogging back in 1998, although this blog’s archives only go back to 2002.   Before then it was just a random note here and there on what was nominally my cartoon and photography web site, hosted by the company I had my email account on.   Then in late 2001 a friend showed me how to get my own domain started up and offered to host me.   Once again the site was mostly about my political cartoons and my photography, with the blog being an extra…a place I could write about this and that.   The blog, like everything else about the site back then (and mostly still now) was hand rolled. I was earning a good living then as a software developer and I just typed my own HTML into my programmer’s editor and uploaded it. It wasn’t until my original domain host retired and I had to move the site elsewhere that I was talked into switching the blog software over to WordPress. Even so, most of the rest of the site, like my household computers (apart from the Macs), is hand built.

Of course, being the times we live in, the blog started capturing my feelings about political issues and in particular the gay rights struggle.   But this is not actually a political blog.   It is not a blog about gay rights specifically, or religion or philosophy or economics.   It is not about my opinions on anything.   I am not doing punditry. I only vent a lot about politics here because it’s more satisfying then yelling at the TV.   But that’s not what this blog is.   It’s a life blog.   Basically just random bits and pieces of one guy’s life as he lives it, like an always changing collage. It’s The Story So Far…

If it seems confusing at times, that’s normal.   I’m confusing.   Just ask anyone who knows me.   Especially the certain someone whose regrettably thin skin I’ve been poking with that Llama.   Or maybe you shouldn’t ask him.   No…don’t ask him…

I’ve been getting a lot of hits on this particular google search lately…for some reason…

robbie benson

When I first noticed it I got a tad scared that he’d suddenly passed away or something.   But no.   It seems the gods of Google are just favoring my little blog with hits from people, I assume they’re mostly girls, who think Robbie is very nice on the eyes.   I know the feeling.   I’m assuming they came here for this…

Yes…it’s a nice one.   So for all you folks who ratcheted up my hit count lately over this photo, I would like to take a moment to say thank you…

You’re welcome.

To the Verizon DSL user running Windows on their Mac (ugh!) who asked google today…

bruce garrett gay?

The answer would have to be…yes.   But you knew that after shuffling through all my episodes of A Coming Out Story I suppose.

I got a flyer in the mail today from Costco advising me to pre-order my Valentine’s Day flowers now, right next to an offer of $4 off on Splenda artificial sweetener.   It must be an omen.   So to the user whose google…

valentine’s day posters

…brought them here: Come back in February.   This year’s winner promises to be even more worthy then last year’s!   Here’s a wee sample of the awesomely fun time we have here during the annual Valentine’s Day Poster Contest!

Be sure to stop by then.   It’ll be Fun!

I just upgraded to the very latest WordPress…so if you notice any odd things happening around here please let me know. I think I have everything running smoothly again…but you never know…

Sorry that my last post alarmed some of you, but this isn’t a political blog, it just looks like one sometimes.  It’s just one guy’s little life blog…my small corner of the Internet when I can put up my cartoons and photography and write about this and that so family and friends can see what I’m up to.  Life isn’t all wonder and joy, and I was very depressed when I wrote that.  Thank you, those of you who write, for your kind words of encouragement.  I think I’m over the worst of it now.

And I believe I understand better now, why I got so terribly down, and I’m working on a post about that.  But for the record I took a brief weekend trip back down to Epcot a couple weekends ago and managed three things.  First, I enjoyed the Epcot Food & Wine Festival immensely.  Really…the food at all the little nation kiosks was fabulous.  Second, I managed to drive past Hilton Head without so much as phoning my ex.  I’m not over him so much as I understand better now why I need to keep my distance from him.  It’s worse when they still want to be friends.  There was no lover’s quarrel…I just got dumped but he still wants me to come around his way whenever I’m down there and it isn’t good for me to do that.  I’m fifty-six years old and I’m only now learning lessons about dating and boyfriends I should have learned when I was a teenager.

Thirdly, I got to see a certain someone down in Florida this time around, that I didn’t last time.  It cheered me up a lot. 

As I said, I have a post I’ve been working on I want to put up here, before I resume regular blogging.  In the meantime, I’ve been chattering away on Facebook, so you can look for me there if you want.

[Update…]  I’ve pulled that post for the time being.  My blog is a place for me to think out loud, vent, thump my pulpit…and even occasionally bleed in public.  Just not too much.