Ultimately, your relationships from grade school will always be what they were. Years go by and you happen chance to cross paths with someone you knew once upon a time. Maybe they are someone you paled around with.  Maybe it’s someone who bullied you.  Maybe it’s someone you were, and still are, deeply madly in love with.  And the two of you tentatively reestablish a link between you.  And maybe you both decide not to let the past happen again.  You’re both grown up now.  Things will be better this time.  And for a time they are.  And then, slowly but it seems inevitably, you both fall back into the old patterns of behavior.  It feels like you are trapped in a time warp, no matter what you both do.  And perhaps in a sense that’s what it is.

It’s like the time travel paradox. Say you have powerful regrets about events in your past…so you invent a time machine, so you can go back in time and change what happened.  Maybe it’s something you regret doing, or that was done to you.  Maybe it’s a chance you wish you had taken.  So you invent your time machine and go back in time and you fix that thing you have wanted to fix all these years.  But now the present stops being what it is and so you live your life with no powerful regret, and no need to go back in time and change anything.  And so you don’t invent that time machine after all, and you don’t go back in time…and so nothing gets changed after all…

The universe does not permit paradoxes like that to happen.  Somehow, someway, however it must, time will not allow itself to be mucked with.  It isn’t about you.  The universe does not care about you.  It doesn’t care about your regrets, about your wounds, about all the chances you never took.  All it cares about is its rules are never broken, it’s mechanical structure never breached.   The laws of time and space are what they are and they don’t give a good goddamn about you.  Time must flow…perfectly…

I have a theory: Whenever you reconnect with that old school friend, or pal, or enemy, or crush, you are going back in time and your attempts to change that relationship will inevitably be defeated. Because time won’t let you do that. The physical universe just works that way.

And if you can’t move on, then just let it be.  You endured that regret all this time, you can live with it a little longer.  Maybe.

Why am I here?   What is my destiny?

We ask these questions naturally.   And as we grow up we are given answers.   We sit in our parents laps and we are told how it was the family came to be where it is now.   How it was mom and dad met.   How it was we ourselves came to be.   And when we are young, we do not question them.   They become unconsciously part of the bedrock of our lives.

And sometimes…sometimes…some few of us when we are older, look back upon those answers and discover that they make no sense.

I was born in California, to a mother who had traveled there shortly after her father had passed away. That is the basic fact of my life.   Mom grew up, was born and raised in Greensburg Pennsylvania.   But I was born in Pasadena California, and raised in Maryland after mom divorced dad and moved here.   And it’s only been recently, now in my fifties, that I’ve looked at that and wondered.   She was born and raised in Greensburg, and yet suddenly her and her mother uproot themselves in the late 1940s and move clear across the country to live somewhere they knew practically nobody.   And when she divorced dad, her and her mother moved back across the country again.   And it wasn’t back to their childhood home they moved, but once again to somewhere else that they knew practically nobody.

Well even when I was a small child I often wondered about that.   And always when I asked, I got the same story.

Mom’s father had died she said, from a series of massive strokes, back in a time when medicine could do little for stroke victims.   The event had disturbed her deeply.   She moved to California she said, because she could not bear to live in the house she had grown up in, because the memories of the events of her father’s death were too traumatic.

Mom’s emotional life during that period was rough.   Before her father died mom had loved a man, a navy man, who had gone to war.   It was world war II.   He was Jewish and, she told me, her father had not particularly liked Jews.   But, she said, he had come to know the man she loved and that had changed him.   He had eventually come to like this man, Morris she said his name was, and as time went on approved of their love.

Then one day, so she always said, he had come back from the war changed, disturbed.   Her beloved sailor had been on a ship that was ordered into Nagasaki harbor after the war ended.   His ship she said, became trapped in the harbor briefly due to all the bodies floating in it from the atomic bomb.   She said the sight of it had driven him mad.

So her relationship with her sailor came undone.   Morris’ family, she said, had taken him off to a mental hospital.   She never saw him again.   And then her father had his stroke.   He lingered horribly, for months incapacitated, unable to do anything for himself, unable to speak or even feed himself.   After six months of it he had another stroke and died.

Mom said that afterward her dreams tormented her.   In the way people did back then, before the funeral his body had laid in rest in a coffin situated right in the living room of the house.   Family and friends had held the service for him right there in the house.   That was common in those days.   Mom said that afterward she had dreams of her father rising out of his casket, and walking up the stairs to her room.

After her father was laid to rest, her mother sold the house, and also his nice cabin in the woods in the hills of Pennsylvania.   That cabin was a special memory of hers….of summer months spent there with her father and the family, her dog Jigs, and all her childhood friends from Greensburg.   Sweet childhood memories.   She would tell me fondly of the summer months spent there.   She loved that cabin, and was for the rest of her life sorry that it had been sold.   The new owners had left a fire burning on a stove…the cabin had no electricity…and it had burned down.

But they had to leave Greensburg, mom always said, because she could no longer bear to be in the house she grew up in.   During the war her younger brother, Dean, had found work in California, and so mom and grandma left Greensburg and traveled to California to live near him.   Grandma bought a house in Pasadena, presumably with what she had gotten from the sale of the house and the cabin.   They moved close to where her brother lived.   And one day they traveled to Catalina Island, and there, on the pier in Avalon, she met dad.   They married, and soon they had a son.   Me.

That is the story I was always told.   It is the story of how I came to be.   And now I look at it, and it makes no sense.

My grandfather, who I never met, who mom always told me because I took an interest in electronics and technology that I took so much after him, had two nice homes, and a business.   And after his death they sold it all, and simply left everything they had, everyone they knew, and moved across the country to a new place where they knew nobody but her brother and his wife.   Because mom could not bear to live in the house where she grew up.

Really?

I’m fifty-eight years old now, and now I look at this story and it makes no sense.   Maybe everything happened just for the reasons she said it did…but now that I look at it with the experience of my own adulthood I can’t escape the feeling that some important piece or pieces are missing.   Perhaps to understand my doubt you need to understand something I do and maybe you don’t: what the distances we’re talking about here seemed like back in the day before cheap jet air travel and the Internet.

I am old enough to have glimpsed the last days of the great passenger trains.   When I was a kid, most people didn’t travel by air…that was for rich people.     And in their day passenger air travel would have been burdensome even if you were rich.   Before the first Boeing 707s passenger airplanes were propeller things that took much longer to go from coast to coast.   Nearly everyone back then traveled by bus or by train.   Train mostly for the longer distance trips if you could afford it.   It took days, not hours, to go from coast to coast.   So any sort of travel from the east coast to the west wasn’t just a trivial thing back then.   If you traveled far away, let alone moved, you just about fell off the planet as far as your family and friends back home were concerned.   You might send a postcard or two back home…   Having a wonderful time, wish you were here… You sure wouldn’t phone home.   Way too expensive.   Back then long distance phone calls were an expensive luxury.   Postal mail had two grades…regular and air mail.   You sent letters by air mail if you wanted them to get there in a couple days.   Otherwise it might be weeks to get something from clear across the country.   The highways and the rails where how most people and everything including mail traveled.

So if you went on a cross-country trip you were on another planet until you came back home.   And then it was everyone gathered around while you showed your snapshots and told your stories of the far away place you’d been to.   To actually go live on the other side of the country, well, you might as well have moved overseas.   It’s hard to grasp now, but that is how it would have been for my mom and her mother back then.   When they left Greensburg they didn’t just go move to a neighboring town…they didn’t even move to a neighboring state.   They moved about as far away from Greensburg as they could and still remain in the lower 48.

Now I’m grown up and I look at this and wonder…did she not have any roots there?   I know she had a job there for a brief period at an architectural firm…she used to tell me about working with the ammonia stench of the old blueprint machines.   And…she had friends there.   I know because he spoke of them, but not often.   There were a few she kept in correspondence with.   They were friends she never saw again.   After mom passed away I was given a stack of her old correspondence, but there were no letters to her from her Greensburg friends among them.

And there is this…as I grew up I just accepted the constant tension that was in the family.   It was just part of the background noise.   But she was the apple of her father’s eye…daddy’s girl.   That is the one thing everyone seems to agree on, even the ones who later cut her out of the family.   I have albums of the photos her father took of her…he was, like me, an amateur   photographer.   The photos all show a beautiful young girl, posed in various scenes in and around the house and the cabin.

He loved her very much.   And she loved him very much.   If there is anything I am certain of it is this.   But throughout my own childhood there was tension between her and the rest of her family…all except her younger brother Dean and one cousin.   It was a tension I always put down to her marrying my father, who they all despised.   But looking back on all of it now it just seems to me that the tension had to be caused by more then that.   Something more must have happened to her to make her mother take her away from the town they both grew up in, and had spent their entire lives in.   Whatever caused the friction in that side of my family tree, it started well before mom met dad at the pier in Avalon.

I’m fifty-eight years old now, and while I don’t think of myself as worldly I am old enough now to understand some things better that I could not have while I was growing up.   She had a life in Greensburg.   She had friends, family, community.   And so did her mother.   Greensburg was their home.   They were both born and raised there.   It was where everything and everyone they had ever known was.   And I was told they sold everything, their house and the cabin, and left it all for California.   Because mom could not bear to stay in the house she had grown up in after her father had died.

It makes no sense.   They could have bought another house.   Surely whatever trauma mom experienced she’d have needed her friends.   Surely grandma would have had friends of her own there as well to help her through the death of her husband.   In an age before cell phones and cheap long distance, when letters took days to arrive from the next state over, let alone clear across the country, and when long distance cross-country phone calls were so expensive people would gather around the telephone at the appointed time to wait for the call, to move from one end of the country to another would have been like moving to another planet.   They’d have both given up everything they knew, everyone they knew, to literally start life all over again in California.   Because granddad died of a stroke?

No.   Just…no.   It makes no sense.

I am not on friendly terms with that side of the family anymore…not that I ever really was.   Except for uncle Dean nobody was really nice to me.   I was my father’s son, and they despised him and I was living evidence of that marriage they all hated.   I had his face.   At various times when it was useful to them, and particularly to grandma, I was told I had all his bad traits too.   Did I talk too much?   Well he’s his fathers son isn’t he.   Did I forget to do my homework?   That’s his dad in him.   Was I too proud of something I had accomplished?   A piece of artwork?   A good grade in school?   His dad was vain like that.   Did I a get a bad mark in class?   His dad was shiftless like that.   Stubborn?   His father’s blood obviously.   Whatever I ever did that was wrong, it was always because I was my father’s son.   I got used to it.   By the time I was seventeen and began to realize my homosexuality, I already had a lifetime of training in coping with being hated for something I was that I couldn’t help being. So it wasn’t all for nothing.

The only one who really took an interest in me was uncle Dean.   Mom and he always got along great, and I have lived to regret I grew up on the east and not the west coast where I could have been near him and away from the others.   Whatever it was that was the cause of so much tension in the family, her brother Dean was never bothered by it, or blamed her for it.   Shortly after mom passed away, I took a trip out to California and visited my aunt Cleone, uncle Dean’s wife, and she told me something that shocked me enough to make me pretty much divorce myself, finally and forever from that side of the family.   She said one of my cousins, a daughter of mom’s oldest brother Wayne, an uptight right wing jackass, had told mom after Wayne passed away that mom would not be allowed a grave in the family plot in the Greensburg cemetery.   I put it down to their hatred of dad, but it made me furious.   It still makes me furious to think about it.   So I’ve pretty much disconnected myself from that branch of the family tree entirely.

Whatever they thought of mom, she was a good mother to me, and a thoroughly decent person.   She set a good example for her son.   After she passed away people in the town she had retired to would come up to me…people I didn’t know from Adam…and tell me what a ray of sunshine she was everywhere she went.   That wasn’t an act…I grew up with it, it was her.   It made me absolutely furious how that side of the family treated her…all except her brother Dean and her cousin who lived in the small Virginia town she retired to.   He cousin also loved her very much.   Her older brother and the rest of that family, not so much.   And me…I’m living evidence that mom married a man they all hated.   So I can get no answers from them, and I wouldn’t trust any I got now if I asked.

I had always, until now, put the family static down to her marrying dad.   But now I look at it and it just seems so…wrong…so incomplete an explanation.   Was that really all of it?   I don’t know, but I am certain now that there is something that I was never told, because the story makes no sense.   You just don’t pack up and leave everything, even over such a traumatic experience as your father dying of a lingering illness.   Something happened.

Dad, let it be said, had…issues of his own.   The marriage didn’t last.   Mom loved him to the day she died, but the marriage didn’t work.   Mom divorced dad when I was two, and she and grandma took me and moved back across the country…but not back to Greensburg.   They moved to Washington D.C., to live near mom’s cousin, who was living there at the time.   She got a job as a clerk for the Yellow pages.   We lived in a series of small apartments.   Whatever money they had from the sales of the house in Greensburg, the cabin, granddad’s business, and the house in Pasadena, somehow was all gone.   I grew up in a very low budget household, being raised by a single working mother, in a time when women made about 60 cents for every dollar a man doing the same job made.   Mom’s family in Pennsylvania made no effort whatever to help her out.   It was something I took for granted as a child…but now it really stands out.   I’m having a hard time now believing that was all because of her marrying dad.   They basically shut her out.

But not grandma.   Someday maybe I’ll write about what growing up was like with that cold constantly angry, fire and brimstone Yankee Baptist women in the house.   Somehow she remained a bridge between mom and I and the rest of that side of the family, and a powerful force in it.   She stayed by mom’s side from the time granddad died to the day she died, but at times it seemed to me more to punish her daughter then support her as she tried to raise a kid by herself in a 1950s/1960s world that regarded single divorced women with children as less worthy of respect then prostitutes.   I never saw grandma smile, unless it was at the misfortune of others.   When bad luck struck other people it always seemed to satisfy her somehow.   And I remained a favorite target until the day she died, because I had the face, and the last name, of the man she hated.   Stinking Rotten Good For Nothing Garrett Just Like Your Pap was her favorite name for me.

And me…I grew up with next to nothing, but I never really noticed that until I got older.   I was fed on a bland, low budget diet but I never went to bed hungry.   I often wore hand me downs but I never left the house in dirty clothes.   I never saw mom cheat another person, lie to them or say anything about them behind their back that she wouldn’t have said to their face.   I never once heard her utter a curse word or saw her take a drink or light up a cigarette.   When I was a kid the first time I ever saw someone else’s mother smoking it shocked me…I didn’t think mothers did that.   Mom sat down with me and my homework, tried her best to teach me right from wrong, and always encouraged my creative impulses.   We didn’t have much, but I had what I needed to grow up on:   I never doubted mom’s love.   Never.   Grandmas hate, and the disdain of most of that side of my family, I just accepted as part of the background noise.   The love of a good mother can give a kid all he needs to stand up to whatever static life brings his way.

How her older brother, various other members of that side of the family, and especially her own mother treated her is something that some days makes me livid to think about, and others completely baffles me.   She really was that ray of sunshine everywhere she went, a completely decent person and a good mother.   Some of my childhood friends had horrible parents.   Everyone told me how nice mine was.   Everyone.   It wasn’t an act.   Yet her own family, with one or two exceptions, treated her miserably.   I never once heard her complain.   At least, not when I was there to hear it.   Mostly the family tension was just there in the background.   Always there.   Something I just shrugged off whenever I thought about it.   Mom loved me, that was all that mattered.   The only time it burst out into the open in my presence, was when I was 16 and they discovered she had started seeing dad again.   It was like being in the center of a nuclear blast.     But that incident centered on dad.   That they hated him does not really explain it all.

Something happened.   Something more then just her marrying dad.   Something that made them leave Greensburg and everything and everyone they knew, and when her marriage failed, prevented them from returning.   Something her family, other then her brother Dean and her cousin, never forgave her for.   Probably I’ll never know what it was.   Mom never strayed from the story.   Nobody else did either.

[Edited some for clarity, and add a few details that I missed occurred to me…]

The Scene: A table in an upscale restaurant located in a trendy vacation resort.   Two old friends are sitting across from each other.   One openly gay since he was seventeen, the other a Happily Married Man having long since overcome the unwanted same-sex attractions of his youth.   They are discussing Openly Gay Friend’s problems finding someone to love and settle down with. Happily Married Man is finding it hard to believe that Openly Gay Friend has been single and struggling all these years.

Happily Married Man: Don’t you have any gay friends?

Openly Gay Friend: Oh yes.   About half my friends are gay.   I have a regular Happy Hour crowd I try to go out with every Friday.   It gets me out of the house.

Happily Married Man: How long have you known them?

Openly Gay Friend: Oh, most of them since the mid-eighties…

Happily Married Man: Wow…I can’t believe they haven’t tried to hook you up. Didn’t they ever even try?

Openly Gay Friend: Oh get me started…there was this one time…

Happily Married Man: You need to get some better friends!

Openly Gay Friend: They’re nice people. I think they just don’t get me…they just don’t get romantic types. They think I should just go get laid and that’ll make me feel better. They don’t get how random loveless sex might make someone like me feel a whole lot worse afterward, not better.

Happily Married Man: You need to get some better friends!

Openly Gay Friend: I want you to understand something…that isn’t just a gay thing. If I was straight and my happy hour group was a bunch of other straight guys I’d be getting the same advice. Just go get laid and you’ll be fine.   The cure for every lonely heart is to just get laid.   The popular culture pays a bunch of lip service to the idea of love and romance, but it’s all about just having sex in the straight scene too.

Happily Married Man: Sex is overrated…

Openly Gay Friend: I’m not saying that…

Happily Married Man: It’s just a bodily function.

Openly Gay Friend: Uhm…

Happily Married Man (emphatically): When you’re on your death bed it won’t be the times you had sex you’ll be remembering, but all the people you loved.

Openly Gay Friend: Yes…absolutely! That is so very true. But I would want my last memory to be the times I spent laying down with the one I loved. That one special body and soul relationship…that’s what you would be remembering. At least I would…if I’d ever had that. (looks wistfully at Happily Married Man, then looks away) But your life is what it is…

Happily Married Man (rolling his eyes): Stop whining….

Openly Gay Friend: I’m not whining…

Happily Married Man: You’re whining. You have to work with what you’ve got to work with and accept that. Stop thinking about what ifs. Sex is overrated…

Openly Gay Friend: Well yes, I agree completely that it isn’t all there is to life, but it’s still important…

Happily Married Man: It’s like a fart.

Openly Gay Friend: I’m sorry?

Happily Married Man: This may sound strange but think about it. It stinks for a little while, and then it’s gone.

(Openly Gay Friend looks blankly back at Happily Married Man)

Happily Married Man: Sex is like that.

Openly Gay Friend: Uhm…it helps if you’re having sex with a person you’re sexually attracted to.   (ironically) Then it’s actually a lot of fun…more engaging…more satisfying…(looks Happily Married Man in the eyes) and it makes a whole lot more sense that way.   You kinda understand then why everyone else is so into it.

Happily Married Man: You’re a piece of work…you know that?   Well it’s getting late and I have to go home now.   I’m a happily married man.

Openly Gay Friend (unhappily): So I see.   And I’m still single and unhappy.   And for gay men of our generation it will always be a time before Stonewall won’t it?

Happily Married Man: Stonewall?

(This was mostly a real conversation.   Some lines were edited for brevity, and Openly Gay Friend didn’t actually say his last two lines to Happily Married Man because just then his head was spinning.   But now he wishes he had.)

Continuing our gallery of morose, possibly horror story grade film or novel scenarios, here’s another based on the stream of thought I had contemplating the plot device in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That’s the one you may recall, where the two lovers break up and one decides to undergo a procedure which erases the other from their memory, and the other, sad to learn of it, does the same.   Then they reconnect anyway which only goes to show they were really meant for each other to begin with and love isn’t always a fairy tale but a lot of hard work for both people. Yes, yes…so very romantic. Actually, I love that plot device. But somehow it always turns a tad dark in my imaginings…

I have an idea. It’s a story about a heterosexual man…

When he was a teenager he was well liked by his teachers and friends. He’s very open minded, somewhat more so then his parents who are mostly liberal, but with some hang-ups about class and gender and race. They’re not raving prejudiced, because that isn’t fashionable, and they try, really try their best, to teach their kid not to be that way.

In school he befriends a gay kid and right away they start to get along really well. He defends his gay friend from bullies and takes his part in political arguments about gay civil rights and same-sex marriage. They become very close friends. Brothers almost. But as often happens, not just in gay/straight relationships either, he finds his perfect girlfriend, and the gay kid finds a nice boyfriend, they slowly begin to drift apart.

The gay kid’s boyfriend turns out to be a real jerk, and as he grows older it becomes a pattern with him. He falls into a bitter cycle of one disastrous affair after another. Nothing seems to work for him.

The straight kid’s girlfriend on the other hand is his perfect match. They have a lovely, almost fairy tale romance that grows ever more beautiful over time. They marry, have beautiful kids, he finds the career of his dreams, they settle down in a nice suburban community with good schools and decent shopping.

Fast forward. The straight guy is in his late middle age, and he is reflecting on how happy his life has been. Especially compared to most of his classmates from way back when. Many of them have had it really hard. One day, he reconnects with his gay buddy from back in the day. His gay buddy has had it hard. Very hard. He’s still single, and bitter.

They have lunch together one day and they instantly reconnect like old and dear friends. The gay friend is happy that his old pal has had it so good and it is obviously sincere joy. Seeing how happy his old friend from high school is makes him a bit happier too, brings him out of his gloom and lifts his spirits. It makes him believe once more, after so long, that life maybe doesn’t have to suck after all. It can get better.

He decides to tell his straight friend that he’s re-considering something his parents tried very hard to talk him into back when they were teenagers. There’s a procedure…it’s frowned upon in more liberal circles, but not illegal…that can change a person’s sexual orientation from gay to straight. It’s just been so hard living my life as a gay man, he says, so lonely, so terribly terribly lonely... For all his accomplishments as a gay political activist, his private life has been completely miserable. I’m not sure I want to go on the rest of my life like this, he says. His straight friend is appalled. He urges his gay friend not to do it, it would be a sell-out, not just to the cause he’s long fought for, but to himself, to his soul. Yes, says his gay friend, but…it’s so hard being so alone. At least as a heterosexual, I’d have more of a chance at finding the kind of life you’ve had.

It is a sad conversation, but by the end of it the straight guy has mostly convinced his gay friend to hang on, and live an authentic life. Even if you change he says to his gay friend, how do you go on knowing that it isn’t really you, but something that was done to you? Then his gay friend lays one more thing on him. The procedure can be coupled with a memory wipe, so you never know you were once gay. New memories are introduced to make you believe you were always straight. That’s completely outlawed now against children, but he says, even on adults it’s a lot harder to do that to someone our age. Too many memories…the risks of complications are much higher. No…he finally says, it isn’t worth it.

They get up to go their separate ways and now it seems the gay friend has had a definite change of heart. No…it’s too late now to even think about changing. Better he had done it back when he was a teenager. But really…better still to live an authentic life. And anyway he says with a shy smile that takes his straight friend back to their school days, the worst thing would be having to forget you.

They part ways. The straight guy had always known his gay friend had a crush on him, and for his part he was always very fond of his gay friend. Back in school they were almost inseparable. Brothers almost. But it was always clear to both of them that it could never be. He is thoroughly heterosexual. He has always liked women. And now he has a wife he loves very much, and even at their age they still have a great sex life.

But now something is bothering him. He does a little digging into this ex-gay procedure. It was something he’d never really looked at before. He’d always opposed it, had always spoken out against it. There had been attempts to outlaw it completely that he had supported.   But activists had only succeeded in outlawing the practice on children.   Mostly he avoided the issue altogether.   And now that he thinks of it, that seems a little strange.   In his own low key way he is actually very politically aware and active. But his style was more behind the scenes then his gay friend’s upfront activism.

It quickly falls entirely out of his mind. Then he gets an email from his gay friend thanking him for the visit after all these years, and the encouragement. He writes that he’s redoubling his efforts to find a mate after all, and getting back into the fight for full gay equality. He would still like to see the ex-gay procedure completely outlawed, and he tells his straight friend he’s getting back into that fight now.

Oh yes…that. Now it begins to bother him how uncharacteristically he’d just put it all out of his mind. It was something that should normally still bother him about the world he lived in. His parents had raised him to be tolerant and progressive, even if they’d had their own repressed doubts and prejudices. Homosexuality wasn’t something they’d ever much discussed when he was a teen. But as an adult, often while remembering his gay schoolmate, he had always worked for the better, more inclusive world.

Now he looks more deeply into it, forcing himself at times, posting reminder notes just to make sure he follows up on things he finds out about the ex-gay process…its invention, its history of usage…the patterns of its use…the political controversy. Sometimes it’s a struggle to maintain an interest…he has so much else he’s busy with in his own life. But soon his wife, also very much the progressive and pro-gay rights person, gets involved and begins helping him with it. He has told her the story of his gay friend’s struggles and she is very sympathetic, and as disgusted by the very existence of the ex-gay clinics as he is. With her help, he maintains focus.

So he digs for information and learns more and more about the procedure that turns gay people straight and wipes their memories of ever having been gay. What he learns appalls him. He periodically writes his gay friend back and tells him about what he has uncovered…much that was never really fully aired in public. His gay friend is overjoyed to have his old pal back in the fight.

But at night the research is also causing him very unpleasant dreams…dreams about sudden violent arguments with his parents…or someone’s parents, he is not sure. He wonders if they are real memories or just his own projections of what his friend’s home life must have been like.

One morning, saying nothing to anyone of his plans, he goes to a private investigator, someone who he has read about, who has done much of the main investigation for various gay rights groups concerning the ex-gay clinics. This man has a reputation for uncovering secrets in not always legal ways, but his revelations were crucial in getting the procedure against children stopped. He asks this man to check to see if anyone in his high school class had been taken to one of the ex-gay clinics, and then had their memory of being gay wiped.

The investigator takes him into another room, stacked with filing cabinets, some bulging. Through various court cases, and a few not completely legal methods, he has acquired tens of thousands of what were once secret files, documents, recordings, some he is still not at liberty to disclose the contents of publicly. These files have proven critical in the search for victims, the investigator says, and the prosecution of some of the people who ran the clinics, as well as the outlawing of the procedure against children.

Tell me a little about the school you all went to, says the investigator. Tell me about the neighborhood, the area churches, politicians, community leaders. Certain ex-gay clinics were intimately connected to certain churches, and certain politicians. Tell me a little more about the students…and…about yourself… The whole sordid story of these clinics is in these files. Tell me what I need to know, and I can give you the information you are looking for.

He spends hours talking to the man, who all the while is entering data into a small computer. Then the investigator gets up, walks over to a filing cabinet, and after a little flipping through the files inside, pulls one out. He hands it to him. In it is a name and a case history. Somehow he is not completely shocked to learn that, yes, there was one kid from his high school that got sent to an ex-gay clinic.

Him.

He reads. The evidence in the file suggests it was done to him against his will. His memory of ever being gay, of ever even suspecting he was, was completely wiped. He checks the dates. It had to be he realizes, very soon after his parents found out about his gay friend.

And then and there in that office, reading the notes on his case for himself after all those years, he remembers it all in a sudden rush…about when his parents first learned about his gay friend. They had turned suddenly angry and suspicious. They’d had an awful argument. The next day some men had entered his bedroom in the middle of the night, and taken him to a place…somewhere…somewhere dark…

He can recall no more then that. But it is enough.

He walks back home in a daze. He loves his wife. Really deeply and truly loves her. And without a doubt she loves him. Their sex life is great, even in late middle age. They have beautiful kids, grown now and pursuing their own careers and love lives.

But…he loved his gay friend too. To his gay friend he has always been a straight buddy. Yes, his gay friend had a crush on him…that was always something they both knew, but it was always clear to both that it could never be, because he was straight. Except he wasn’t. At least, not born straight. He looks back to their teen years together and sees it clearly. They were always more then just friends. They were soul mates.

I…I loved you…

And he sees the life his gay friend had…his very lonely, bitter struggle…and sees now, clearly, the life he could have had…the life they could have had.

But…what does he do? What Can he do? Who does he tell? What good would it do to say anything to anyone at this point? His parents have both passed on…he, his wife, his gay friend, are all at the doorstep of old age. What good would it do to tell anyone? But there is more. The last words the private investigator spoke to him before he left the man’s office echo in his brain: You know don’t you, that the procedure can be reversed. You can be the man you were born to be again. If you want. Others, many others, have had the procedure reversed.

But could he really, after so much time has passed? And what would happen to his family then? What would they have? He loves them very much.

It’s not true that there is only one perfect soul mate out there for each individual. His gay friend still has a chance to find someone to love, and be loved by. They both know this. He decides to say nothing. The investigator had assured him that nothing would be said about him unless he specifically authorized it. Privacy laws forbade it. When he gets back home he finds an email from his gay friend telling him he’s dating someone new now, hoping that this time it would be different.

He agrees to meet them both for lunch somewhere, he and his wife and his gay classmate and his new boyfriend. And at that pleasantly cheerful little gathering of old friends and their lovers, he sees that this new guy is nice on the outside where it doesn’t count, but isn’t any better deep down inside where it does then any of the other guys his friend has hooked up with in the past. He can see another broken heart coming for his friend all over again.   And it makes him angry, angry at the new boyfriend/creep, angry in a deep dark place inside where he had never been angry before.

His wife sees the broken heart coming for his gay friend too. He’s such a beautiful spirit, his wife says to him later. It’s so tragic he never found someone. I hate how this world treats people like him. Not just that he’s gay, but that he’s such a beautiful spirit. It’s so hard for people like that to find love. So hard for everyone really. I’m so glad I found you.

Not all horror stories have blood splashing everywhere.

“Evil enters like a needle and spreads like an oak tree.”
-Ethiopian Proverb

Another one of the Big Three major loves of my life finally decided to get himself a Facebook account recently…I discovered during another of my periodic name searches.   I mentioned on my status update that I wished there was a Forget You pill I could take, but that I’d only take it for one of the Big Three (Hi Keith!).   A friend then directed me to the film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

I was already aware of that film, although I haven’t watched it yet.   But the central plot device is a beautiful one for a romance story: Two people who choose to undergo a procedure that makes them forget about each other, who then hook up again later anyway, which means they were really meant for each other to begin with. Yes, yes…a very lovely tale of true romance. And one I’d happily read myself, if it were presented to me in a gay context.

Writing it myself is another matter, and not just because I’d have to copy it outright from somebody else, a thing I regard with distaste when I see other would-be artists doing that.   On the other hand, Picasso himself said a mediocre artist copies and a great artist steals.   And this plot device is just brimming with possibilities.

Unfortunately for you dear reader, those possibilities always seem to take a dark and morose turn with me.   I can’t imagine why that is.   But in the interest of getting some of this stuff that has always been percolating in me ever since I can remember…I seem to be able to think up more ideas then I ever have time to follow through on…let me belabor you with a few scenarios for a novel or movie.   Go ahead and use them.   If they flop and everyone hates you for making them sit through it, you can always blame me.

Here’s Scenario 1…there isn’t much to it.   Call it, The Good Life…

It’s about a gay guy who tries all his life to find his soul mate.   Comes out to himself as a teen, but instead of going through fear and loathing about his sexual orientation, he accepts it, and tries extra hard to make himself worthy of a nice boyfriend.   Gets good grades, graduates near the top of his class, never cheats or lies or steals.   He’s no cardboard prude by any means, but he tries extra hard to be a worthy lover, so he can attract the man of his dreams.   Unfortunately for him, all he ever gets are the boyfriends from hell…the ones attracted to Nice Guys because they’re easy to manipulate and fun to cheat.

That’s his life.   One bad, failed romance after another after another after another.   His gay friends are no help either.   Oh they believe in love all right…but they think our hero is a tad childish to believe in Romance and finding that man of your dreams.   Better they keep telling him, to settle for Mr. Right Away instead of Mr. Right.   Who knows they say, that sexy rent boy you purchase for an evening might turn out to be a steady thing.   And if not, hey, he’s affordable at least.   Time and again, though he never finds out what the audience does, they fail to connect him to other guys who might actually be right for him.   Romance is for daydreamers.

Eventually he’s a very old man.   And one day he realizes this is all that will ever be.     He sees that he will never find that love of his life after all, that he is going to die alone and loveless, never having been loved, never having had that life affirming body and soul relationship with another person, never known that quiet peaceful joy of holding, and being held in the arms of the one you love.   Now, at the twilight of his life he sees, finally, the reason that there are so many beautiful love stories out there isn’t because there really are so many beautiful love stories out there, but that so terribly many people are like himself, lost and lonely and aching for a love that will never come.   He wishes he had never been born.

But all is not hopeless.   Modern technology has an answer for everything.   He takes the last little bit of his life savings and goes to a clinic, where they replace all his bad memories of failed romances with a fake memory of meeting his soul mate when they were both teenagers and they have a happy life together and then in their shared old age his soul mate dies (peacefully of natural causes) and he morns.   But then he goes on with his life because they both promised each other that they would if one of them died before the other.

He leaves the clinic knowing only that he had checked himself in for a very normal and natural case of depression after his one true love had passed away.   The doctors and nurses there he remembers, were all very kind to him, and all said he’d been a very lucky man to have found such a beautiful meaningful love, and he left the clinic feeling a little sorry for them, because they were still searching for it.

He spends his last few years peacefully remembering his lover, spouse and soul mate, and dies one day a happy man, knowing he had lived life to its fullest.

You see?   Even horror stories can have happy endings.

.

So it occurs to me while having to restart both the iPad and iPhone this morning to get them responsive again, that either Murphy’s Law applies to software systems too, ie: software increases in complexity to its level of incompetence, or the 2nd law of thermodynamics applies to software, in a sense: with every upgrade, chaos always increases…

So…yes…I Twitter. I’m coming to find that the running Tweet list is a really great way to stay informed and pick up on interesting conversations. Of course, it all depends on who you’re following. Follow a bunch of vacant celebrities and you get nothing but vacant celebrity babble. But follow people like Atrios, Ezra Klien, Rachel Maddow, Krugman and such and you get a really absorbing mix of real time chatter. And there are celebrities who are worth following: George Takei, Eddie Izzard, Christopher Walken (Although he doesn’t tweet much anymore…)

So…anyway…I tweet. And I watch. Mostly I watch. And during last night’s nightly bout of insomnia I saw this from Myth Buster Grant Imahara…

…and the first thing that crossed my mind was Who are Lanikai and Mahalo and why haven’t I read their stories? I have tons of yaoi here at Casa del Garrett and I have never heard of these characters that are supposedly so popular.   However, the concept of “starter ukes” is…intriguing…

What a starter uke might look like…

What I don’t get is why Shuichi didn’t make the list.   In my opinion he’d make an excellent starter uke, provided you could handle his mood swings…

After consulting my iPhone’s weather radar app, I take a quick trip over to a nearby deli to grab some diet ice tea drinks.   Figure I can get there and back again before the next wave of drizzle hits.   On the way back inside the Institute building, a young woman with her iPhone ear buds plugged into her head, is chatting loudly with…some disembodied somebody.     She is oblivious to everyone and everything around her, talking very loudly to the person at the other end of the digital network connection.   Did I not know about cell phones I might think her a lost crazy person talking to the voices inside her head.   In the lobby I walk quickly past her and to the stairwell down to my office, where I nearly collide with another co-worker whose eyes on fixed on the LCD display of his iPhone.

The trope is all our little computer devices are making us somehow less human, less able to interact with each other as humans beings.   And it’s a false one.   These devices don’t subtract from our human identity, they are a consequence of it.   We made these things, and then took a sudden passionate fondness for them, because we are what we are.   As a matter of fact, yes, millions of years of adaptive evolution made us into smart phone consumers.   It created us to eventually build the cell phone and text messaging and computer information technologies and online social forums just as surely as it put the color in our eyes.

Robert Ardrey, in his book African Genesis, took note of our species long preoccupation with weapons.   How long, he asked, would the first human have survived on the African plains, were they not born with a weapon in their hand?   Nothing, he said, in our long history has ever stopped the slow steady progression and refinement of the weapon.   We are the species, he said, whose instinct is to kill with a weapon.   But we are something else besides, something probably even older then the weapon in our hands, something that had to have played just as critical if not an even more critical roll in our kind’s success on planet Earth, and to this day I’m surprised that a writer of all people didn’t see it too:   Language.   We are the species that talks.   We are a chattering breed.   And nothing in the long difficult history of the human kind has ever stopped the slow steady progression and refinement of human communication.

It is the nature of tools to change what they touch.   So the plow changed the earth, but also the farmer.   The mistake is thinking the plow made the farmer less human.   It made him more human.   It made him better at being the thing that millions of years of life on Earth created him to be.   And we are the species that talks.   We communicate with one another.   By whatever available means at hand, by whatever way gets it across the best, we will communicate.   It’s what we do.   It’s why there are libraries and opera and art galleries and weather radar apps.   So we refine our tools and so our tools refine us.   That inconsiderate moron in the restaurant babbling loudly into his cell phone hasn’t been dehumanized by the digital revolution.   Look at him.   He is simply obeying a very old and very ancient and powerful urge to communicate it…whatever it is…to someone.   Birds sing.   Humans babble away.   Smile kindly upon him, before you take that cell phone out of his hand and smack him over the head with it.

No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows

This house, which seemed somehow to have formed itself, flying together into its own powerful pattern under the hands of its builders, fitting itself into its own construction of lines and angles, reared its great head back against the sky without concession to humanity. It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.

–Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

I am not a superstitious person, but this abandoned office building has been creeping me out now since I first laid eyes on it last year on one of my trips down here to Disney World.   It’s located right next to the Holiday Inn I’m staying at.   A sign in front of it suggests that it was due to be converted into a resort/spa opening sometime in the spring of 2009. I’m guessing the money ran out and it’s just been sitting here ever since.

Ever notice those lost little spots in the commercial strips..the ones that never seem to make a go of it and repeatedly close, open again under new management, only to close again and repeat the cycle over and over until they’re finally torn down.   Often the new place doesn’t do much better.   It’s as though some earthly places are just bad spots to build on.

This was one of the intriguing concepts in Shirley Jackson’s haunted house story that really captured my imagination so many years ago.   See…Hill House wasn’t a disturbed place because there were ghosts walking in it.   The ghosts were there because the house was disturbed.   The house was, as Jackson wrote, insane. Old Hugh Crain didn’t create an evil house, so much as unwittingly cause an evil house to be built.   Perhaps I wondered, it had just been built on a very wrong spot.   Maybe old Hugh, because he was such a wicked man, had been unwittingly drawn to it.   But as Jackson wrote, the house had formed itself.

I am not a superstitious person, and yet like all of us I sometimes wonder.   I see a house that, as Jackson wrote, is never off guard, always seeming to be watching, and it creeps me out.   I let my imagination give it an appropriately despairing past, and fill its spaces with lonely ghosts to walk inside. I am human…I read a quote somewhere to the effect that ghosts were born the day the first human opened their eyes.   It had never occurred to me before now, that a modern spandrel glass and concrete aggregate office building could give birth to a good ghost story. But there is one here to be written by someone.

It was a quiet out of the way spot on a road just starting to attract the attention of developers and big money financiers.   Hotels were rising, strip shopping centers, discount stores, office parks.   Somehow it had remained untouched in the rush to cash in.   Eventually a particularly slimy developer laid his eyes on the spot and saw a quick fortune to be made.   Financing was hastily arranged via his reliable network of equally slimy bankers.   A magnificent office building was planned and pre-sold to an equally slimy corporation, whose board of directors were even more degenerate then the bankers and developer.   It was dedicated in a glittering grand opening ceremony costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Within weeks of settling into their new office space, the CEO announced a sudden change of plans and moved his company out in a hurry.   Suits and counter suits ensued.   The building was put up for sale.   Nobody who leased it ever occupied it for more then a few days. Turnover in the security guards hired to keep vandalism in check was high.   Reports that vandals broke in at night, stealing some things and wreaking others, could never be verified because nothing ever seemed to be missing the next day. When questioned, former tenants all swore they had never, and would never enter the building at night to take things…or for any other reason.

Somebody needs to write this.   I know a good place to go for inspiration.

At The Daily Dish, Conor Friedersdorf links to an Atlantic article about World War II…The Real War…

WHAT WAS IT ABOUT THE SECOND WORLD War that moved the troops to constant verbal subversion and contempt? What was it that made the Americans, especially, so fertile with insult and cynicism, calling women Marines BAMS (broad-assed Marines) and devising SNAFU, with its offspring TARFU (“Things are really fucked up”), FUBAR (“Fucked up beyond all recognition”), and the perhaps less satisfying FUBB (“Fucked up beyond belief”)? It was not just the danger and fear, the boredom and uncertainty and loneliness and deprivation. It was the conviction that optimistic publicity and euphemism had rendered their experience so falsely that it would never be readily communicable. They knew that in its representation to the laity, what was happening to them was systematically sanitized and Norman Rockwellized, not to mention Disneyfied.

Neither man, Disney or Rockwell, was, of course, a journalist.   Nor did either one make any such claim to be one.   They were artists.   I tire Very easily now, of the use of Rockwell and Disney’s names as synonymous with Phony.   These men were many things but phony was not one of them.   Neither one ever put anything before the public, I am absolutely certain, that they themselves did not believe.   Art, said Picasso, is a lie that makes us see the truth.   All artists are liars in one sense, but in that other sense, that soul speaking to soul sense, relentlessly truthful.   Both men spoke to us from their hearts, honestly and sincerely, and you can argue that life isn’t like that if you wish, but my reply to that is Yes, you’re right, it isn’t, but it ought to be.

It’s a different matter though with journalism.   Journalists need to tell the public the facts, or else we simply cannot function as a democracy.   And that is especially true in times of war.

That war, morally justified as it was, was also very heavily sanitized on the home front.   With the last of its soldiers passing away now, we are only beginning to see how nightmarishly savage it was.   The bloody slaughter of the American Civil War it seems, was merely prelude to the 20th century…

You would expect frontline soldiers to be struck and hurt by bullets and shell fragments, but such is the popular insulation from the facts that you would not expect them to be hurt, sometimes killed, by being struck by parts of their friends’ bodies violently detached. If you asked a wounded soldier or Marine what hit him, you’d hardly be ready for the answer “My buddy’s head,” or his sergeant’s heel or his hand, or a Japanese leg, complete with shoe and puttees, or the West Point ring on his captain’s severed hand. What drove the troops to fury was the complacent, unimaginative innocence of their home fronts and rear echelons about such an experience…

After one artillery exchange, two soldiers, Neil McCallum and his friend “S.” came upon the body of a man after a shell had landed at his feet…

“Good God,” said S., shocked, “here’s one of his fingers.” S. stubbed with his toe at the ground some feet from the corpse. There is more horror in a severed digit than in a man dying: it savors of mutilation. “Christ,” went on S. in a very low voice, “look, it’s not his finger.”

I got part way though the Atlantic article, when this passage struck me…

In the great war Wilfred Owen was driven very near to madness by having to remain for some time next to the scattered body pieces of one of his friends. He had numerous counterparts in the Second World War. At the botched assault on Tarawa Atoll, one coxswain at the helm of a landing vessel went quite mad, perhaps at the shock of steering through all the severed heads and limbs near the shore. One Marine battalion commander, badly wounded, climbed above the rising tide onto a pile of American bodies. Next afternoon he was found there, mad.

There’s a reason my generation are called the baby boomers. We are the generation born to the ones who fought that war, came home, and all at once returned to what would have been normal lives were it not for the war…which for heterosexuals (and homosexuals, because the closet was not an option but a necessary means of survival in those days…) meant getting married and having kids.   All at once.   It was literally a baby boom.   Housing was scarce for the new families for years.   Suburban Levittowns sprang up all over America.   Schools had to be built, many schools, many, Many schools, to handle the load…only to later be decommissioned as my old high school eventually was, after the last of the boom had graduated. We are a massive bulge in the population, and that is because there was a war.   A very big, catastrophic, savage and bloody war…that changed so much…so very very much…

Mom told me often about the sailor she dated during WWII. When she got started, I could see that look of remembrance of first love in her eyes, hear it in her voice, still, so many years later.   So many little things about him she remembered vividly.   So many stories about the times they had together…about waiting patiently for his letters from overseas during the war…about how her father disliked Jews, but came to see them as fellow neighbors in life by coming to know the Jewish man she loved.   She loved him, probably to her dying day.

When I asked her once why she married Dad instead, she said her sailor was on a ship that was ordered into Nagasaki harbor after the war ended, and that his ship became trapped in the harbor briefly due to all the bodies floating in it.   She said the sight of it had driven him mad.

…and all these years I wondered, never doubting that he’d gone mad as mom had said, if that bodies trapping a big U.S. navy ship part of the story could possibly be true.   Really?   Perhaps he’d seen lots of bodies certainly…but so many they trapped a huge Navy ship?   Madness if it will strike, strikes young men around the age he was, so perhaps it would have happened to him anyway.

Or…not…

At the botched assault on Tarawa Atoll, one coxswain at the helm of a landing vessel went quite mad, perhaps at the shock of steering through all the severed heads and limbs near the shore…

It wasn’t an a-bomb that did that either.   So just imagine the aftermath of the first plutonium bomb, small as they say that one was, compared to what nuclear weapons can do nowadays.   Reading this Atlantic article I see now it probably was exactly as mom had said.   So her sailor boyfriend became lost in madness. So some years later on the pier at Avalon she met my dad and they married.   So now here I am, writing this.

So many people died in that war…many from the two atomic bomb blasts alone.   Every year they toll the bells in Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the a-bomb dead.   And every year it’s been in the back of my thoughts always to wonder if I was born because of one of those atomic bombs.   But that war violently changed a great many lives, and I am certainly not the only war baby ever born, who but for war would not be.

Via Sullivan…     Here’s a handy flow chart showing how various energy sources were used here in the U.S. in 2005…

The contribution of the alternative fuels is vastly smaller then even I had imagined.   Even hydro-electric sources are way too little to be of any reasonable help replacing petroleum, natural gas and coal.   Take away petroleum and you have not only eliminated motor vehicles for all practical purposes…you’ve killed off the airplane.   Without petroleum and natural gas we just about have no industry left.

But all that wasn’t the first thing that caught my eye here.   Look…just look…at how much goes to waste.   That’s the gray band on the graph.

Think just of your automobile.   Unless yours is an all electric model, it’s the heat from gasoline combustion that makes it move.   That heat is almost entirely lost to entropy, in the form of waste heat.   Very little of it actually moves the car.   Most of it goes out the tailpipe.   Some leaves via the radiator and some just radiates off the motor, drive train and exhaust pipes.   And when you apply the brakes, the energy of your car’s motion is reduced to brake pad and disk heat and radiates into the air.   Some electric and hybrid vehicles recapture some of that energy via “dynamic braking”   (that is, you load the traction wheels with an electric generator which charges batteries).   But even there, most of the momentum of the car is simply lost to heat, to entropy.

Think you’re getting a better deal from an electric automobile?   Just look at the lost energy in the electric grid.   That’s what really shocks me here…how much energy is lost in electric power transmission.   Every time you put a current down a wire you create a magnetic field.   That field radiates out into space, and takes energy away from the current you are throwing down the wire.   A/C transmission recaptures some of that, by switching polarity so that the magetic field repeatedly collapses back into the wire and gives it a little extra jolt.   I thought it was more efficient then this.   But…jeeze…look at it.   I suppose a lot of that is also heat loss in transformers and switches too.

Entropy.   You really have to admire its relentlessness.   It’s like a tax on everything you do, every muscle you move, every breath you take practically.

I have no idea what a post oil world is going to look like.   I am not simply an optimist.   I think I’m a little bit more of a realist then the doomsayers.   Necessity as they say, is the mother of invention, and I am certain human ingenuity, curiosity, ambition, greed and just plain laziness will find a way to keep our factories and our vehicles in motion.   Eventually.   But that future is going to look very, Very different from anything being imagined now.

A larger version of the graph is Here.

Via Atrios…   Digby has a good post up about Hippie Randism and Libertarian Lefties that goes into something I’ve wanted to discuss more.   A libertarian isn’t a Randiod and either one of these could occasionally seem to resemble either a conservative or liberal.   Or to put it another way, and speaking of Whole Food’s hippy climate change denying champion of absolute corporate deregulation and union busting, just because someone looks and acts like a granola organic liberal progressive New Age self-actualization holistic health guru that doesn’t mean they aren’t a right wing asshole when it comes to the prerogatives of massive corporate money.   Here, Digby quotes the Times profile…

In the early eighties, Mackey told a reporter, “The union is like having herpes. It doesn’t kill you, but it’s unpleasant and inconvenient, and it stops a lot of people from becoming your lover.” (That quote, to Mackey’s dismay, won’t go away, either.) His disdain for contemporary unionism is ideological, as well as self-serving. Like many who have come before, he says that it was only when he started a business—when he had to meet payroll and deal with government red tape—that his political and economic views, fed on readings of Friedman, Rand, and the Austrians, veered to the right. But there is also a psychological dimension. It derives in large part from a tendency, common among smart people, to presume that everyone in the world either does or should think as he does—to take for granted that people can (or want to) strike his patented balance of enlightenment and self-interest. It sometimes sounds as if he believed that, if every company had him at the helm, there would be no need for unions or health-care reform, and that therefore every company should have someone like him, and that therefore there should be no unions or health-care reform. In other words, because he runs a business a certain way, others will, can, and should, and so the safeguards that have evolved over the generations to protect against human venality—against, say, greedy, bullying bosses—are no longer necessary. The logic is as sound as the presumption is preposterous.

Digby goes on to say…

He’s a libertarian who identifies culturally with the left. He’s into New Age religion and self-actualization and believes in holistic health practices, clean food etc. But he’s not a left libertarian. These things get confusing, but it’s important to make the distinction.

Basically, this guy is a standard issue right libertarian which means that he is a free market fundamentalist, hates unions, hates government and extols the virtues of the John Galts like himself, although he believes in a sort of corporate paternalism that requires him to look after the parasites (workers) in some rudimentary fashion. He is also a believer in civil liberties and drug legalization. (I assume that since he’s a Paul supporter, he’s also critical of the Fed.) There are quite a few of these folks out there who seem like your liberal next door, more than you might realize. Hollywood, for instance, is full of them. I worked for a few. Many of them even think they’re liberals and will vote for Democrats on social issues. But when it comes to taxing the wealthy and regulating business they might as well be Dick Cheney.

There is, of course, an actual left libertarianism and it is best articulated by Noam Chomsky, not some wealthy twit like Mackey…

It gets confusing, and I suppose it will only get more so as the republican party degenerates further and further into theocracy and outright populist-nationalist lunacy.   Others have noted how the 2010 edition of the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference is going to be sponsored in part by the John Birch Society…they of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Was A Communist fame.   If this is what the republican party wants to become then don’t be surprised to see people fleeing from it into a lot of factions and libertarianism is a very popular label to wear in some circles.   But that’s really all it is in most of them.   Just a convenient label the wearer hopes means I’m Really Not A Right Wing Asshole…Honest…

There are Lefty Libertarians.   They think government shouldn’t regulate business and shouldn’t regulate morality.   There are Right Wing Libertarians.   They think government shouldn’t regulate business and states should regulate morality but not the federal government since it had the unmitigated gall to desegregate the schools.   And then there are the Randoids.   Rand herself and her intellectual spawn Leonard Peikoff absolutely loathed the libertarians.     There are mixes and matches (call them mashups if you will…) of all three and then some.   There are almost certainly for example, John Birch Libertarians and John Birch Randoids.   Probably some of these shop at Whole Foods and look outwardly like hippies.

I like to think of it as that little corner of the Twilight Zone where which way is up depends on which ideology you’ve bought into.   The problem with all of these is they have very little interest in how things actually work, and why things can and do fail.   It’s all about the ideology.   So in one very real sense there isn’t much to practical difference between any of them.   But don’t try to tell a Lutheran that they’re more or less like an Episcopalian just with different vestments.

It’s going to be a fun decade, with the republicans leading the way to a political landscape where parties begin are more and more like religious movements, then conversations about how to…you know…actually govern…

Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, “Don’t do it!” He said, “Nobody loves me.” I said, “God loves you. Do you believe in God?”

He said, “Yes.” I said, “Are you a Christian or a Jew?” He said, “A Christian.” I said, “Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?” He said, “Protestant.” I said, “Me, too! What franchise?” He said, “Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?” He said, “Northern Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?”

He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region.” I said, “Me, too!”

Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.” I said, “Die, heretic!” And I pushed him over.

-Emo Philips, The Best God Joke Ever

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!

The great photographer Margaret Bourke-White once averred she became positively irrational if she couldn’t get a shot she wanted. I know the feeling, but I guess part of the reason I never became a professional photojournalist is I am too polite about it.

Case in point: I’m driving home from Orlando, up I-95, in the lost, lonely mood I usually am after vacationing in a spot where I’m likely to run into a lot of happy couples. It’s the morning after New Year’s Eve and it’s gray and cloudy and looking very, very somber, and I am driving back north away from the sunshine and warmth of Orlando and Disney World and back into the Baltimore Maryland cold. So I’m not feeling exactly cheerful.

As I drive through North Carolina, I see an abandoned motel to my right, that oddly has its front walls entirely removed. What you see is just the shells of the rooms behind the wall, like a lot of post office boxes with their doors torn off. The effect is of a stark hollowness.

No… I think to myself. It’s too obvious… But I can’t get the image out of my mind. I’m driving north and the miles are piling up and I just want to get back home and back to my nest and sulk for the last few remaining days of my vacation and maybe do a little housework. But I can’t get the damn thing out of my head. I even know Exactly the shot I want to get. I can picture it in my head clearly…picture exactly where I need to stand and what angle to shoot at and what my camera settings are.

No…no…it’s too obvious. And…I don’t want to go there. I’m feeling down enough as it is right now. Do I need to make myself feel worse? I think not. Damn…the sky is just right for that shot though. I’ve never seen a place with just its front wall torn off. Why the hell did they do that? It’s so damn odd… Be nice to just wander around it a bit. No…it’s probably fenced off. I’ll bet they have No Trespassing signs plastered everywhere. Do I want to get arrested in North Carolina? Seriously. Just let it go. Damn the sky is just right… Those gray clouds…just the right amount of sunlight up there. That scene really wants to be low contrast. I should just keep going. I don’t need to go there. I’m feeling miserable. Damn that sky is just right. If I stop some other trip it won’t be right. They might have the rest of it torn down by then. I should just keep going. There will be other shots like that one. I’ve never seen a place with just the front wall torn off like that. Do I really want to be wandering around a derelict building all by myself? It might be dangerous. Some thug might see me pull up in my Mercedes-Benz and decide to shoot me for my car and my camera and nobody would ever know what happened to me. Too dangerous. Why the hell did they just take down the front and leave the rest of it up? It’s so damn perfect. It’s like its bearing its empty heart to the sky. All those people who stayed inside, found warmth, shelter for the night, maybe a moment or two of love, and eventually they all left without a second thought and now it has nothing. The front wall was its face…and then the people left and its face fell away and all that’s left are the empty rooms open now to the sky. I should keep going. I don’t need this. I should turn around. Do I really want to go there? Darn it…I can’t let that one go… How far to the next exit…

Which by then was about 3 miles ahead of me and the motel in question about 12 miles behind. I did a loop back and on the way looked for some other possible shots in the landscape. And I found a few, which made me feel better about loosing travel time. There were two service roads paralleling the main Interstate where some lonely restaurants and strip shopping seemed to be barely holding on. I figured after I took a few shots at the abandoned motel I could drive up one of the service roads and get a few more of other stuff by the highway.

I actually had to drive past it again and loop back to find the correct exit. What apparently happened was a new highway was built nearby, cutting off the old exit by the motel, which killed its drive-by business. I had to go back to an exit a few miles in the other direction, and find the place where I could access the service road that led to it. There were few other surviving businesses along that road. A collection of self storage bins. Some odd pumping station whose purpose I had no idea. There were some empty highway billboards and a junk yard/auto body shop that looked like it had been picked over until nothing of value was left. Yet it seemed to still be in business. I wondered who got their work done there. Close by the motel was a trailer/RV park that actually seemed to still be doing a reasonably good business. It was called Sleepy Bear.

I have no idea what the abandoned motel next to it was called, but it was clear that its current owners wanted nobody getting near it. There was a huge, and I mean huge NO TRESPASSING sign right in front. The building itself was only partly fenced in however. Anyone could just walk onto the property from the street.

The service road dead-ended just past the motel, where the old highway interchange had been closed off. I wasn’t about to park in the lot. But there were some pull-offs just down the street that were off the property and I stopped Traveler there and popped the trunk. I took out the new camera, popped off the lens cap, adjusted the hood, switched on and checked my settings. I took a quick light reading. Then I wandered over.

Damn…that sign is big…

Okay…fine. They didn’t want me trespassing. I looked the site over to see if I could get the shot that had been so fixed in my mind the moment I laid eyes on the motel, without setting foot on the property.

Yes…I can do this…

But I was beginning to get the creeps. It was deathly silent all around me…gray and overcast and a tad chilly. Even the Interstate just a few dozen yards away was quiet, due to it being early New Years Day. All the revelers were sleeping it off. Only us lonely travelers on it now…just the occasional sound of a car going by was all there was.

I walked up to the fence along one side of the motel. I couldn’t take my eyes off the building. In a creepy sort of way it felt like it was looking back at me, through empty eyes…

Damn…they really did just yank the front walls off of everything here. WTF…???

I began to wonder if trespassing meant don’t go beyond the fence or if I was trespassing by simply walking up to it. I decided to just get my shots and skedaddle. This is why I am not a professional photojournalist. I am way too timid. The spirit of Weegee laughs at my timidity.

I couldn’t shoot through the fence…the chain link was too much in the way. So I raised my camera above my head and started shooting. The nice thing about a digital camera is you can see your shots instantly and know if your getting it. Every time I clicked the shutter the LCD display on the back of the camera showed what I had just taken. So I could adjust the camera angle a tad and take another…and so on until I had it. At one point, I knew I had the one I wanted…the one that said it. Whenever that happens, it’s like a little electric current goes through me from the camera. I swear.

I backed off and looked around some more. I felt something tempting me in. But I wasn’t going to risk getting arrested. I’d seen a little house down a private driveway next to the motel, and there were certainly people over at Sleepy Bear. As I walked back to Traveler I saw a truck towing a nice vacation trailer behind it drive away. I wondered if the driver noticed me. I walked briefly to the front of the motel again, near the sign but well on what I thought was its good side.

Damn…that sign is Big…

I fired off one more shot of the front of the motel and tarried with the idea of wandering around the front some more to see if there were any other good shots I could get from outside the fence. But something about that sign kept creeping me out.

They really mean it…

So I got back into Traveler, started up and headed back toward the Interstate. There were a couple other shots I’d seen as I made my way to the motel and as I approached one of them, a sign that said simply “Units Available” in front of a long lonely row of cookie-cutter identical self storage bins, I wondered if I could just stop my car in the middle of the road and take it from out the window, because it didn’t look like there was any usable shoulder to the road there. I didn’t want to get stuck. I was about a quarter mile away from the motel.

Suddenly I saw a police car coming at me from the opposite direction. It blew right past me and if it wasn’t doing at least 90 I am no judge of speed. There was nothing in the direction it was going, except Sleepy Bear, the little house behind the motel, and the motel, and the end of the road.

Damn! Damn! Did someone see me taking pictures and call the cops??? I wasn’t about to hang around and find out. Good thing I didn’t stick around… I decided to forgo getting my other shots and politely asked Traveler for triple digit velocity. Traveler happily obliged. I don’t think Das Auto likes being confined to American highway speeds. I had a couple tight curves to navigate but Traveler hunkered down over them and didn’t even flash the Electronic Stability Program light at me, and there wasn’t anyone else out on the roads just then except me and Mr. Policeman.

Good thing I didn’t have the camera hanging out the window… I figured the cop, if he was called out for a trespasser at the motel, would first check the area and only then would the thought cross their mind that perhaps the perp was in the car that they’d shot past like a bat out of hell. By then I’d be well down the Interstate and it would be a fifty-fifty shot at guessing whether I was going north or south, if I was even on the Interstate to begin with. I didn’t think anyone could have gotten my license plate, and at a distance all I would have seemed to be driving was a white compact car of some kind.

I slowed to legal speed when I got on the Interstate. I wasn’t about to get caught in a radar trap either and I had noticed a lot of them already that morning.

Probably they’d have let it go when they discovered the trespasser had left the scene. Why bother, right? Except…do you blast down the road like a bat out of hell just to nail a trespasser at an abandoned motel?

I wasn’t trespassing dammit. I stayed behind the damn fence. What is it with that place…?

I stressed about it all the way to the Virginia boarder. I took the memory card out of the camera and hid it so I could plausibly say, What…Who…Where…Huh if cornered. Except that people who wear their hearts on their sleeves like I do don’t make excellent liars.

The spirit of Weegee mocks my timidity. Did I take some pictures? You talkin to me? Yeah I took some fucking pictures…

Oh well. I got my shot and it was worth it…

Abandoned Motel – Lumberton, NC.

Dang…I wish I could wander around that site and get a few more shots. But I don’t think they want to let me…

So I’m looking through my server logs and I run across this google search string…

as by the gods how as by prayer do you petition the five sex groups as a knowledge part of Eden

Er?  What?  The five sex groups…?  That anything like the four food groups?