Ten years to the day…

I was at Biergarten just now. It’s still a nice place, and there are still people there who remember you, but some things have changed and not for the better. You may be glad of being retired now.

The one thing I liked most of all (besides you) was the Oktoberfest seating. When you are a single traveler it’s nice to be able to be seated with others you can chat with. Table for one isn’t that. It’s pretty lonely actually, which is why I usually sit at the bar. But Biergarten had this really nice Oktoberfest seating thing and I loved it not only because it made it very easy for a single diner to get seated, but also I could have a good time with the others at my table.

You told me once, and this was a very helpful thing you did for me, that I was good at getting a stand offish table talking to each other. But that was because you have a bunch of built-in ice breakers at Disney World. Hi…where y’all from? This your first time here…? What’s your favorite park? Where are you staying? And so forth. I told you once about the gay friends who had me convinced I was too shy and that was why I am single. But no…I’m just a little introvert who needed ice breakers to talk to anyone. You said back then that I needed better friends. You were right.

But Oktoberfest seating at Biergarten is no more, because apparently Americans don’t like being seated together with people they don’t know. And it’s not just a Biergarten it seems.

I took the train down from Baltimore this trip. I had a bunch of Amtrak points from cross-country rail trips I’ve taken and I used some for this vacation. I’ve taken the train a bunch and something I like about rail travel that reminds me of Biergarten is the dining car and being seated with some other passengers and being able to chat with them as we go. In my mind it’s one of the best things about rail travel…meeting and chatting with people in the dining and lounge cars.

This trip, for the first time, I heard the dining car staff as they called for passengers with reservations at whatever o:clock to come to the dining car to be seated, warning the passengers that they would be seated with other travelers who they might not know. Because seating is limited in those dining cars and they use every available space to seat people.

Have Americans become so insular they can’t stand eating with other people anymore?? Oh well…

I just don’t get it. But I’m weird I reckon. Some of the best conversations I’ve ever had were in a dining car, or at Biergarten. Not counting the ones I used to have with you.

I have another Disney trip coming soon…a week at Saratoga Springs, which I now truly regret buying back into DVC for. The math doesn’t work anymore for it. I just got dumped a thousand dollar dues fee and it wasn’t that long ago that my Boardwalk and Grand Floridian dues combined were less than 500. I don’t see how this is saving me any money staying at a DVC resort…but then Everybody is complaining now about the cost of going to the Disney parks. Except of course the very rich. I guess it’s their world now. But you warned me about this didn’t you.

Anyway…

I have another Disney trip coming next week, and so of course I’m thinking of you. I wish we were still talking. There is so much I’d like to ask you, and to know, about your thoughts on our current political disaster. I worry about you getting into it with ICE. I worry about you and another classmate, whose older brother you apparently knew back in Woodward, a lot lately. I wish I could talk all this out with you. You and I were on the same page about so much.

I replay some of our last conversations in my head over and over, wishing I’d handled them better. Like when you told me it won’t be all the people I ever had sex with I’ll be thinking about on my deathbed, but all the people I love. I was just so awestruck with the fact that you were giving me this heartfelt, deep conversation, when most of the time our chats were about current events or Disney stuff, that I wasn’t paying attention to what you were saying, so much as that you were saying it. I felt wonderful. But I missed an opportunity to make myself clear.

It was like you were saying the Venn Diagram of those two things…people you’ve had sex with, versus people you love…didn’t touch. That’s…not necessarily true. In fact I would say it’s almost never true. I should have said then that remembering the times I was laying down with the one I was deeply in love with would be the best ever last memory before the end. I should have told you that all I ever wanted out of life was that wholeness, that body and soul connection. I should have told you I never wanted to lay down with anyone I wasn’t at least crushing on, if not madly in love with. That I knew there are people who don’t want or don’t seem to need that connection to just enjoy a tumble in the sheets, but that isn’t me, and never was, even back in high school.

I was looking for a boyfriend. But it was 1971, and all I’d ever been taught about gay people is that we are trash.

How does a teenage boy, just coming of age in a world that constantly dumps this on them, try to find a boyfriend? I was a mess. We all were.

And when you told me that sex was like farting (“I know it sounds strange but think about it…it stinks for a little while and then it’s gone…”) I should have asked you if you ever considered that maybe you are ACE. Nothing wrong with that, I know a few of these and they’re good people, completely capable of being in love, they just don’t or rarely if ever feel any sexual desire. I am myself maybe a half step away from that, being what the kids these days call a Demisexual. 

Hindsight…twenty-twenty…so on and so forth. I just wish we were still talking. There is so much for us to talk about. Mostly, I just hope you are safe, wherever you are. If it’s back in Germany, so much the better I guess. Nobody is safe here anymore. We’ve all been living in a state of trauma since 2016. I saw this in my Facebook news stream yesterday…

I think that’s right…that the country as a whole is done with him. But then there’s the rest of it…that it took three more horrible, nightmarish years to finally finish it, even after everyone including them knew it was over.

The two justices he and Mich McConnell stacked the supreme court with told him ‘no’ over his tariffs and the MAGA nutcases are freaking out. At least we know who the hard core fascists on the court are now: Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh. No surprises there I reckon. Someone, I forget who it was now, said the secret fear of tyrants and bullies is that most people really are decent deep down inside. MAGA will drag it out even knowing they’re finished, because they hate us for our humanity, and they want us to suffer for making them see everything a human can be that they are not. They burned down Germany, they’ll burn down the United States, just for the satisfaction of making us hurt. But we can win this thing eventually. If it wasn’t for the decent three-quarters of humanity there wouldn’t even be civilization. The worry is how much we all have to bleed to get there.

I hope you’re safe somewhere. Maybe I’ll live to see the end of this. I didn’t get a chance to tell you about my heart attack, or the Afib and the ablation. The ablation scared the heck out of me. They thread two wires into your beating heart, one to detect the rogue cells sending out incorrect beat signals, and the other to cauterize them. Before the procedure I made sure my brother knew where my will was, and had all my passwords and account numbers. But it went okay and the Afib is gone now.

Sometimes the trick is not to mind that you’re afraid. I wish I knew that back in high school.

Fifty-Four years ago…

December 15, 1971…sometime around twilight I took a walk from the apartment mom and I shared, up Parklawn Drive to Twinbrook Parkway, then across the railroad tracks and to Rockville Pike. I sat down on a curb near the Radio Shack and watched the twilight deepen over Congressional Plaza. A classmate I was madly crushing on, but could not admit to myself that I was crushing on, had put an arm across my shoulders as we walked together down a school hallway to a side exit where he always parked his little motorcycle, and given me a quick little squeeze, and my head went into the stratosphere and I’d been walking on air ever since. I was watching the colors in the sky deepen, but all I could see was his face, and all I could think about was how it felt to have his arm around me.

Eventually I could think it: I’m in love. And then I could think the rest of it and not be afraid or ashamed, because nothing had ever felt so wonderful. And from that moment on I was never afraid or ashamed. Life was better than I’d ever thought possible.

It didn’t last. He left the country the following summer for parts unknown. A classmate told me he probably went back to Germany which surprised me because he always led me to believe he was a Brazilian. It wasn’t until many years later I found him again and we reconnected briefly. I should tell the rest of this story at some point.

My problem with cancelling my Disney+ subscription is I did that months ago when I found out my Disneyland annual pass had been allowed to expire and they never told me that was going to happen.

The theme parks are apparently run as separate entities under the corporate umbrella, and Disney World spares no effort to let me know when my annual Disney World pass is getting close to expiring. I get email notices, letters (big poster card letters) in the mail reminding me that it’s time to renew. Disneyland could not have cared less and when I found out I was heartbroken because it was such a lucky break that I got it at all. Disney hands out chances just to buy an annual pass now like they’re indulgences from the gods above. So in my anger I cancelled Disney+ even though I really Really wanted to watch the next installment of its Percy Jackson series.

But I have many, Many more issues now with Disney and the parks, not the least of which is I just don’t feel safe going down to Florida anymore.

…and if DeSantis’ homophobia wasn’t enough…

‘It’s just scary’: In Florida, parents ponder future with fewer vaccines

Madeline HalpertBBC News

“We’ll end up having pockets of outbreaks of different types of infectious diseases,” Florida’s former surgeon general, Scott Rivkees, told the BBC. “Individuals who are older, immunocompromised adults and children who may have cancer, for example, are going to be afraid to go out into public.”

If Florida goes ahead, it would be one of the first states to officially do away with childhood vaccination mandates, which have long been a fixture in parents’ back-to-school plans. In April, Idaho’s governor signed a law loosening vaccine requirements.

These moves come as Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, a vaccine sceptic, undertakes remaking US vaccine policy, and the nation’s public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is in turmoil.

So, dig it. DeSantis’ Florida removes vaccine mandates for school children and Walt Disney World is full of children and their parents. Pixie dust, magic and disease.

I got talked back into DVC and now I have points in Saratoga Springs (gives me walking access to Disney Springs) but I can rent my points out and get some of that money back. The parks have changed so much since I started going in 2006 it’s not the fun it used to be. The Writer’s Stop is a tap bar now, because I suppose you can make more money selling beer to adults than books to kids. Star Wars has overrun half of Hollywood Studio, The Great Movie Ride is gone, MuppetVision 3D is gone, the riverboat and Tom Sawyer Island are gone, the bar seats are back at the Tune-In Lounge but you still can’t order food. And tickets are worthless if you don’t also make a Park Reservation. Don’t get me started about park reservations!

And…a certain someone is gone. For all I know he’s back in Germany because a green card just doesn’t cut it here now.

I just don’t feel like going anymore. It isn’t fun anymore. It isn’t magic anymore.

I reckon I’ll probably let that annual pass expire too. It’s a shame because I really liked going, and even with all the complaints I just listed I could still enjoy going because Disney World is so big and I can have a great time just wandering around the parks and trails between the resorts. I do a lot of pleasure walking. But it’s in DeSantis’ Florida and I don’t feel safe going there anymore.

I wasn’t wishing you dead. I was saying that I felt trapped. I was trying to say to you in my own awkward just letting a stream of consciousness unedited words tumble out of me way, what Jack said to Ennis in Brokeback Mountain. “I wish I knew how to quit you.” What you said to me that I won’t repeat here cut me deep, and I was hurting, and I lashed out. Because I knew what I was in for in the years to come.

Ever watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? I haven’t…I don’t think I could bear to watch a movie like that, any more than I could watch Brokeback Mountain. But I’ve read the various synopsis. The film, so I am told, follows two people who were in love, who undergo a procedure to erase their memories of each other after the angry end of their romance. There was a time I was desperately wishing it was a real thing. Until I read this part of the plot:

Joel re-experiences his memories of Clementine as they are erased, starting with their last fight. As he reaches earlier, happier memories, he realizes that he does not want to forget her.

No. I couldn’t put myself through that. 

Do you dream? I wonder sometimes if you do, and how vividly. So I’m told there are people who don’t. I feel sorry for them. I dream dreams I can remember almost every night. I have a notepad I keep next to my bed so I can jot some things down before I forget them, which I will if I don’t immediately do that. And I have a Google Docs folder where I write some of my dreams. Some of them are so vivid I can feel the texture of clothing and furniture, and the taste of kisses on my lips. 

The one I had last night was about you. I have those often, also about other friends who have remained close to me. But it’s the ones about you that linger more. Mostly they are very nice, a little strange sometimes, and so vivid I sometimes wonder if I am not seeing things that are happening in a different universe. But I suppose that’s just wish fulfilment. Last night’s dream really got to me because of one specific detail.

You and I were together in your house, except it wasn’t the one you have in the real world, but a different one, in a different place, something like another suburb but deep in a beautiful woodland zone. It was late in the evening, almost nightfall, and we were having a very deep heart to heart conversation, and it seemed perfectly normal, as if we’d been close all our lives. I won’t write here what we said to each other, only that it was heartfelt and affectionate, like the talk between old couples, only in this dream we were young men, twenty-somethings, and you were still wearing your hair long. Oh…and we were in the kitchen. 

Eventually we walked from the kitchen into a space that was both a dining room and a living room, separated by a sofa facing a TV that was tuned to a news broadcast that we were paying no attention to. We were finishing up building a large wooden dining room table. I had made a top piece for it out of several lovely oak boards I’d glued together, then sanded and stained a light brown. Together we put the top of it on and fixed it in place with some wood screws and glue. Then I puttied over the screw heads and stained those.

We moved the finished table against the back of the living room sofa. You got down on your knees between the table and the sofa and asked me for a quote to write on the side of the table hidden by the sofa. I asked you if you didn’t mind a Disney quote, and you rolled your eyes a little but said sure, let me have it.

And I said “Dreams can come true.” And you wrote it on that side of the table, but I couldn’t see the words from where I was standing. Then you went back into the kitchen, and out the door to go to the grocery store. While you were gone I moved the sofa a bit and took a look, and discovered you’d carved the quote I gave you right into the wood, not written them with a marker. In German.

Träume können wahr werden.

Eventually you came back home, and began unloading the groceries you bought in the kitchen and we talked some more, and I woke up.

The full quote is, All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them. But it takes more than courage to make your dreams come true, and I never thought I was particularly brave, just stubborn. Some dreams, if they are not shared between two people, will never live. And there is nothing you can do about that. 

So we had a fight. It was probably inevitable. It went nuclear, like it was always going to. I wish I didn’t have that last angry glare you gave me to remember. I’d never seen that side of you before.

It’s been almost a decade now, and never mind what you said and what I said, I still feel trapped, I know I always will, and all I can do now is toss out these little messages in a bottle like I was doing for decades after the last time we saw each other in school, before I found you again 35 years later. Here one from my blog… 

September 25, 2006

Yet Another Message In A Bottle…

It’s been decades now since I saw that “For Sale” sign on your house. I can measure the years that have passed in all the little messages I’ve stuck in this or that random bottle, and tossed out into this ocean of time ever since. Hello? Hello? Are you still out there…somewhere…?

If only I hadn’t been such a nerdy little geek. If only I’d had a little more courage to just be myself instead of hiding behind my cameras all the time. And my cartoons. There’s more I wanted to say. But mostly this: You opened up the world for me.

Hello? Hello? Are you still out there…somewhere…?

These little messages in a bottle are the only way I have of waving to you now. But I reckon I’ll keep tossing them in…because I can still hope one of them will find you one day. Because I just want to wave at you one more time. Because I just want to see one more smile. Because I have to know. I tossed another one in yesterday. If it finds you, please wave back. Please.

Even before I had my own website I was tossing these out into the digital ocean every now and then, hoping maybe you’d see one and respond. Looking back on it I can see it came so close. If only I’d joined GeoCities. If only I’d not been such an awkward little geek. If only it hadn’t been 1971. If only I had been more brave instead of stubborn. Before I found you again I was sure you would be the braver one. After so much time had passed I figured if I ever did find you again you’re be living somewhere in the country of your birth, settled down with a guy who was much better looking, more intelligent, and a better all around catch than I could ever be and I’d just have to accept that it would never be, because you’d found someone better.

Then I did find you. And for a brief moment in time I saw you smile at me again. And you put your arm around my shoulders again. And we talked, heart to heart like we weren’t able to in the early 1970s. And it went where it had to, where it was always going to, because for both of us it was still the early 1970s.

I remember that time we passed back and forth a ski lift ticket I’d found on the pavement, like it was a talking stick, because you needed to explain something to me and didn’t want any questions. I remember listening to the guy I thought hung the moon and the stars way back when, telling me to go look elsewhere because a life in the closet had damaged him so much some days he didn’t know who it was he was looking at in the mirror.

It broke my heart, and maybe it also radicalized me to gay activism in a deeper way. But I was determined to at least show you by example that there was nothing wrong with you, and you could live an authentic life for yourself, even now, even if not with me. Because by then I was doubting we were ever that compatible. I could have courage, but you had to have it too. The best I could do was set an example, and I was not so much brave as stubborn. But maybe that’s what you have to be sometimes. But it was still the early 1970s.

I don’t think anyone who didn’t live through those times can grasp the hostility, the outright hate that gay and lesbian Americans got from every direction. Today on this last day of Pride month, let me give you one little example of what that did to us.

It was March 8, 1970. A gay bar not far from the New York City 6th precinct was raided, by the same cop that had raided the Stonewall Inn just eight months earlier. Not wanting a repeat of the six-day riots at Stonewall, that cop, lieutenant Seymour Pine, had all 167 of the bar’s customers of the bar hauled off to the 6th precinct, which was just over a block away. One patron, justifiably terrified of what was about to happen to him, because back then the practice was to give the names of those arrested at a gay bar to the local newspapers, which would gleefully publish all their details for everyone, family, friends, neighbors, employers, landlords, to see, attempted to escape by jumping out of a window. 

This is what happened to him.

I don’t know how you can expect a gay teenager coming of age in those times, in that climate of loathing and hate, to be anything but terrified at what was going through them when they are having their first crush and it’s on another boy. That is more courage than a lot of adults could muster.

So you and I just circled around each other, flirted a bit, teased at each other a bit, and I took lots of photos of you because I always had my camera with me and I just could not look away. And then you disappeared.

I remember that last telephone conversation we had, after we made arrangements to take our cameras to Great Falls, but instead of getting you on the phone I got someone else and then I guess the jig was up and you got told.

And then decades later I reconnected with you, and for a while we were close again, and this time we didn’t have to hide anything from the world around us, and I suppose you got told again, and then you told me I’ve made my allegiances, I have to stay inside my comfort zone.

It’s not a comfort zone if you’re pushed into it. It’s a trap.

But…so it goes. I am so very grateful I never saw your name on a quilt. And that I saw you smile at me again after all those years. For that I can live with that last angry glare. I get it. For many of us in our generation, it will always be a time before Stonewall. Trapped.

Respect the ones who could escape. Cry for the ones that could not, if the tears will come. Do what you can to keep it from happening to the generations that follow.

And don’t be afraid to dream. For the things that could have been, and might still be, in some better world than the one we are in. Not all dreams come true. But they can still be dreamed. For the courage we need to do the work still left for us to do.

November 30, 2006. . .

Offering

I needed to give you something. An offering. So I brought out a few things from my private treasure box. This and that I found along the way, that reached me where no one ever has, and I kept for myself. My own private gold and silver. It had to be something from there. Something for you. Something worthy.

Stars bigger than the orbit of Saturn. Clouds of ice and dust so big light from when I was born hasn’t seen the other side yet. Secret places tucked in the folds of dust between Orion and Betelgeuse, where new born stars emerge, perhaps one day to beckon new life into the universe. Galaxies, wheeling, colliding, dancing. Spirals. Barred. Ellipticals. And those small faintly glowing red ones, like beacons shimmering on a distant horizon, their light shining into my eyes from near the beginning of time.

They lifted me. They struck the silence into me. So did you once. So I gave them to you. An offering.

Please give me back a sign.

Well…I got my sign alright. Eventually.

Germans like you probably saw this coming but I never thought I’d see the day and I am scared for you. Never mind all the water under this bridge I am scared for you. Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and he is using it to deport even green card holders like you without any sort of appeal or legal review.

I’m watching my country going down the tubes. It’s just stunning. I’ve no idea what I’ll do to get by but I reckon I’ll cross those bridges when I get to them.

I hope you’re somewhere safe. Please be somewhere safe.

-Bruce

I had a surprisingly nice dinner at Biergarten yesterday. I say it was surprising, because I’d just assumed that all the servers I used to know there (excuse me…Cast Members) had either retired or left Disney by now. But no…several who remembered me and a certain someone were still there and I got to talk to a couple of them about what was going on with me, and what was not going on with me and a certain someone. One of the servers came over to chat with me for a bit and congratulated me on my return to work at Space Telescope.

I’ve had the theme song for the first series of The Littlest Hobo (the one I grew up with, not the second series music) going through my head all night for some reason…

Facebook Memories shows me this one from the end of 2015…

Why do I stay on Facebook anymore? I left Twitter after Musk turned it into a fascist playpen and went to Bluesky (@brucegarrett.bsky.social). But most of my friends and classmates are still there and that Memories feature is a nice way of looking back. But not always.

So this was when I realized the Christmas card wasn’t just late…it wasn’t coming at all. They say hindsight is 20-20, but I knew something was up then. I knew it years before when we sat at that table where he worked and passed a ski ticket I found back and forth like a talking stick, and he tried to explain to me how living in the closet fucked him up so badly he didn’t know some days who it was he was looking at in the bathroom mirror, and I needed to look elsewhere. But whenever I came into his presence I fell back to being that awkward clueless teenage geek I was in 1971-72 and I kept coming back anyway. And some visits he seemed grateful for my company, and others he was icy cold. By then our conversations were not private and I realized that it was when I told him I was coming down that Icy Guy appeared, and when I just showed up unannounced it was all smiles and conversation like it used to be. But that was not sustainable. 

So anyway that was the year I sent a card and he didn’t. He was being told, just like when we were schoolboys and the family learned somehow that he was talking to that faggy kid at the school… We agreed to go to Great Falls with our cameras. I never said that. Yes you did. I just don’t know why you’re calling me. You gave me your phone number. Well I didn’t think you’d use it. Two and a half months after this Facebook memory he told me never to contact him in any way, shape, or form, and I felt betrayed and angry and I lashed out, and said things maybe I shouldn’t have, but he said things to me that cut deeply and after everything we had said to each other it was completely unfair. 

So it goes. Maybe I should have paid closer attention to when he said life in the closet had fucked him over. I’d seen how it did that to other gay guys of our generation, I just didn’t want to see it in him.

I was sitting down to a lovely Kobe beef steak when I got his angrygram. What I should have done then and there was send him a shape.

Regards your angrygram of March 6, please accept this truncated dodecahedron by way of reply…

Then I should have drawn up an Affinity Return/Exchange form for him to fill out. Please include original receipt…

…which gives me an idea.

You should say Hi sometime.

(It works equally well in both English and German)

Bridges burned can always be rebuilt.

If you are still living in Orlando, leave now! Or at least batten down the hatches. But seriously…get out!

I don’t know why I still care. But I still do. Alas. And now I’m back to tossing these little messages in a bottle out into the sea of sighs like I was doing for decades before October 2006. Life comes full circle I reckon. Except now I have to go on knowing. So it goes.

Seriously…get out!

[Update…] Yes, this blog post is speaking to a certain someone who has told me to my face Many Times that he Never reads my blog or looks at my cartoons, so I am confident he will never see this and take offense.

That said…Seriously Mr. A, get out of your damn comfort zone, breathe the free air again. You had so much to give to this world, and we’re both old and gray but it’s not too late. Your allegiances are suffocating you. They are not worthy of you.

Live a life, while you still have some life to live. There is more to you than you think. Let the world see it. Let yourself see it.

I have been called “a piece of work.” Perhaps. But there’s another word for it. It’s a word that feels really pretentious to call myself. But I am an artist. Given what Stephan Fry said even so…

Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it. That is your punishment. But if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.
— Stephen Fry

This is truth. So maybe artist is just one of the verbs I go by. But notice all the verbs he goes by are arts. I am an artist, and not simply because I create art…

art·ist / noun

a person who produces paintings or drawings as a profession or hobby.

a person who practices any of the various creative arts, such as a sculptor, novelist, poet, or filmmaker.

I would add something to this. Something about you produce art so you don’t go crazy. Something about you do it because you have that inner compulsion to do it and you can’t not do it. Vincent van Gogh so I’m told, once said he painted so he wouldn’t go mad. I know that feeling even if not to the degree he felt it. And to that I would also add that you have that need to get it out of you, whether or not you have an audience. You would do it if you were alone on a desert island. You would do it alone on a desert island if you did not have any of your artist’s tools, because you would make tools out of whatever you found on that island.

This is me. There was a time when I became so depressed at seeing what was coming out of me…my second attempt at finding love failed miserably because I’d crushed on a straight guy…that I stopped completely because I just didn’t want to deal with my feelings anymore. But it’s not so easy. You can’t stop yourself…

One way or another it comes out. I was doing volunteer work for a gay BBS and while creating login scripts and programs to help out with some of the work I’d signed up for, I discovered there was beauty in the relentless machine logic of computer code, and it was a kind of beauty that didn’t get into my broken heart feelings. It was mostly a left brain enchantment, all logic and elegance of form. I dove into it. And that led to a well paying career as a software engineer that I worked for just over thirty years before retiring. Then, part way through that I stumbled onto the Hopkins student fair grounds while they were setting up the rides and something inside me reawakened, and I got out my camera again after nearly a decade. I rediscovered my other art media…painting, drawing, cartooning. I am a graphic artist, mostly. For a while I felt whole again.

Maybe being a bit older by then allowed me to work with my feelings and make art again. Also, I was part way into strike three and it had not yet come undone, so there was a new allotment of hope there. Now I’m 70 and at a crossroads feeling hopeless again and not wanting to do art anymore because I hurt so much inside. But I know I will eventually.

So this is the essential thing to know about me, noun or verb: I am an artist.

And the thing about that is, if you have a thin skin, we really can’t be friends.

Because I’ll either piss you off or weird you out. I won’t mean to, I won’t want to, but it’s like that scene in the movie The Adam Project, where Big Adam played by Ryan Reynolds asks his younger self (it’s a time travel movie) played to perfection by Walter Scobell, “Do you ever have a thought and not let it come out your mouth?” I’m 70 years old now and I’m only just getting the hang of that. It mostly goes into my artwork, but sometimes it does just come out of my mouth or it’s something I do or something I’m wearing or something I’ve done with my hair that you just think is weird.

I am an artist. I will occasionally say and do some very weird shit. I’m pretty solidly Chaotic Good on the chart, but that’s my tribe.

I am not the sort of person who provokes for the sake of provoking. To make me deliberately insult someone they have to really Really get on my nerves and even then I’m more likely to just walk away. I was raised by a single divorced Baptist mother and there is a lot of morality baggage that comes with that, some of which I still very much appreciate and live by, some of which I still struggle with (I really should have learned to dance). But though I might initially appear to you as some sort of middle class quiet kind of guy, not very adventurous, not given to extremes (except for that long hair), I am an artist. I will occasionally say and do some very weird shit. Not that I think it was weird when I said or did it. If anything I might have thought you would appreciate it. 

If that is going to bother or offend you then maybe just keep your distance. Even if I am sending signals that I’d like to get closer. No…especially if. 

We tend to wear our hearts on our sleeves (if you’re any sort of regular reader of this life blog you know what I’m talking about here), and that makes them easy targets, even if you don’t really mean to stab. And the thing about that is we also wear the scars on our sleeves (have you been reading my blog?). Hell, we take them out and make art with them. Some of my best art is stuff I made from the scars. Nearly all of my art photography is off of some bleeding part of my heart. This is how we deal with the weight of our lives. Normal people just drink. Well…we do that too actually.

The fact is a thin skin does not pair well with an artist.

(This post is mostly for a certain lieber Deutscher. Yes I was talking to you. Mostly.)