Kurt Vonnegut once said that you’re allowed to be in love three times in your life. I’m guessing that isn’t counting all those temporary infatuations you might have along the way, until you take a closer look and see they’re really not all that, or if you’re gay, until righteous godly people were able to step between both of you and put an end to it because you’re making baby Jesus cry. I’ve Had My Share of Those.
No. Pretty sure he meant three times to love truly, madly, deeply, as the Savage Garden song goes. Three times to go all in. Three times to lose yourself in it. But only three. Because a forth might kill you.
Three strikes. Strike one was the first. Setting eyes on him in high school yanked me out of denial. But it was 1971. Pretty sure his family found out he was talking to that queer kid in school and after that he kept his distance, and then they moved away so it would have had to end anyway. Strike two was a reawakening of hope. That first broken heart makes you certain it will never be (I nearly jumped off a bridge in front of a train…), and then suddenly it happens again and you believe again. But he was straight…
Pretty sure now that was the start of the Dark Time, though I’ve written before that my memories of that period in my life are so mucked up it’s hard for me to recall the timeline. I couldn’t pull myself out of it for years. I stopped doing art and turned to computer programming instead so I didn’t have to look at my feelings. Then along came strike three.
Strike three eventually told me we were just friends with benefits. Then he dumped me. I found out during an AOL Instant Messenger chat with him. This is how it’s done in the 21st century.
It could have been a lot worse. This graphic came across my commercial social media feed the other day…
I almost moved south to be closer to strike three. I had it set up with the agency I was contracting for. There were jobs to be had down there according to the agent I spoke to. But Three dumped me before I could set it all in motion. So I stayed in my apartment in Cockeysville.
Had I done it I would never have got the job at Space Telescope, and bought a house of my own. And he’d have dumped me anyway.
I have it pretty good now. But I never found a companion for my body and soul. I haven’t been whole for most of my life.
Don’t be telling me that I’m not the only one. Each and every lost one of us who failed at love, are the only ones.
Today is I Have To Stay Inside My Comfort Zone day, and for the occasion I’m going to spend time with my artwork, fix the electric tiller, take a few lazy walks around the neighborhood, possibly smoke a good cigar, have a nap, and if the weekend parking weather improves go to the hardware store and see if I can get some more solar mushrooms for the front yard.
Now that one of the Japanese maple trees out front isn’t there anymore, and the neighbor’s tree probably not by the end of this year, there’s plenty of sunlight on the front lawn for solar lights. I picked up a couple new ones for the front the other day in fact.
The backyard is already full of solar lights that I put out when the weather gets consistently warmer. Now I get to try doing the front yard. Only problem is being more visible from the street they’re more likely to get stolen. I live in the city after all. But so far my solar walkway lights haven’t been taken, and I kept them up all winter.
I see by my Google Calendar that tomorrow (Sunday the 23rd of March) is I Have To Stay Inside My Comfort Zone Day…
The day I asked if we could do something together on his own time and he told me no, “I have to stay inside my comfort zone.” This should be a special day for making myself comfortable.
That’s two Very Special Days in March! I think I shall have dinner at La Cuchara tomorrow…
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…
Joel comes to his last remaining memory of Clementine: the day they first met, on a beach in Montauk…
No. No, if that’s what you go through on the way to forgetting then I don’t want to do that.
I’ll live with it if erasing the memories are more painful than living with them.
And make myself comfortable inside my comfort zone.
Good thing this little life blog doesn’t get a lot of traffic, especially from anyone I ever loved.
I swear it’s the biggest joke or comedy or tragedy or whatever of my life that the one guy out of all the other’s I’ve ever loved, who turned out to possibly be the best match, is the straight guy. He was visiting briefly on his way here and there and in that short time we talked as I’ve never talked with any of the others, and felt a deep soulful synergy as I’ve never felt with any of the others. And I can see clearly now that none of the others were really a good match. We never talked like that. We never shared ourselves like that. And he’s straight.
Maybe that’s not entirely true. I know I talked lots with the others. Strike one and I talked for hours on the phone after we reconnected…for a while…before others began listening in. We would talk for house past closing time at his place of work. But that had to stop too. Strike three and I lived hundreds of miles apart and would talk on the phone for hours between visits. Before cell phones strike three and I would talk so long the batteries on our cordless phones would die and we’d have to switch to the wired landline. The cordless phones were a godsend. We would talk for hours while we each went about our household chores, untethered by a wire, like we were there together. But then it stopped and I got dumped.
It always stopped. I never stopped wondering what was wrong with me.
For a moment, for a few short hours, I had it back with number two. It was wonderful. My heart sang. And he’s straight.
Good thing I’m an atheist, because if I died right now, right this moment, and there actually was an almighty god creator of the universe, I’d spit in its face. But there is no god. So it’s all good.
Reposted from Thanksgiving 2017…with a wee bit of editing…
(Note…this did not happen this Thanksgiving because I could not attend the yearly gathering…I caught a flu that I’m still getting over. But in all the digging into the homophobia of the 60s/70s for the upcoming episode of A Coming Out Story, I began to feel that suffocating old stereotype dragging me back to a time when most of us didn’t dare live our lives openly, even if we were fine with being gay. Then this post appeared in my Facebook memories (I will often post in both places) and I had to marvel once again at how the anti-gay industrial complex just Does Not Get Us. And I can just hear them saying Oh, but you’re a Good homosexual. No I’m not. Don’t you dare be putting me into that pigeonhole. I am not a Good homosexual. I am a proud homosexual.)
——-
“Gay Community” is an awkward term, but the language doesn’t seem to give us any other ones. We are people of a shared sexual orientation, and to a certain extent, a shared history of oppression. But there really isn’t all that much uniting us. Things you would expect such as marriage equality and protections from discrimination in employment, housing, and the marketplace, often generate a surprising amount of static among us. And running beneath it all like a hidden underground stream is how being hated, and being taught to hate ourselves, damages our capacity for sexual intimacy, trust, and love. And even that is not exactly a shared experience among us.
There is, and I am seeing more clearly with the passing of years, a distinct generational difference. Younglings living in a more accepting and affirming culture, having more and better, healthier, opportunities to date and discover love and desire in the ways heterosexual kids have for generations, are starting to look more and more like their heterosexual peers when talking about relationship issues. For a gay guy of my generation it is wonderful to witness. But then, inevitably, like snapping back out of a pleasant daydream, I must return to my own life, my own generation because that is where I am fixed in time and place, and where I reckon I will always belong. Among them is where I must find companionship, because only they understand me.
They know what the world was like when John Lennon was alive, and Hendrix was playing at the Fillmore, and Jefferson was Airplane. They know what America was like before Reagan. When music came on vinyl disks and telephones had wires and shopping centers had newsstands and bookstores and we were putting footsteps on the moon. They know me. Or so I would like to believe anyway.
But community is an awkward way of describing us and “family” is even more awkward. Yesterday I had Thanksgiving dinner with as much “family” here on the east coast as I have now and while the host was a good friend with a good heart whose company I thoroughly enjoy, most of the guests were gay guys of my generation, none of whom I really knew very well. A couple of them frequently drove the conversation into territory I found uncomfortable at best and distasteful mostly, and the rest just went gamely along and I kept my mouth shut.
A conversation was started about the first gay bar we’d ever been to, a thing I couldn’t specifically recall but I gave it my best shot: a piano bar called Friends, and later Windows. I can’t actually recall the first time I set foot in a gay bar…or any other sort of bar for that matter. When I was a toddler my maternal grandmother would walk me to the grocery store periodically, and every time we passed by a bar she would point at the door and say “the devil lives there” (yes grandma…and I’ll have what he’s having…) So never mind working up the nerve to enter a gay bar, my first step ever into a bar probably took a lot of nerve, but I don’t now recall it. I remember Friends though, because it was the only gay bar at the time I felt comfortable in. And there was a reason for that. But the topic quickly took off and others of the group took it and ran with it into the backrooms and toilets.
I tried to steer the conversation to When Did You First Come Out To Yourself. That generally went in the same direction. Eventually I made myself a drink and sat some distance from the others and just listened.
Understand…I don’t particularly care what sorts of sexual shenanigans people get themselves into. It’s not that important. In her biography (and I know I’ve quoted this often here on the blog so just bear with me…), the author Mary Renault is quoted as saying that politics like sex, is just a reflection of the person within, and if you’re mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in your sex life and it will come out in your politics when what matters is you’re not the sort of person who behaves like that. People who talk at me that there is more to life than sex are missing it profoundly. Life…the life you live…and sex…the sex you have…is a reflection of the person within and it’s the person within that matters. It matters to me that you aren’t mean and selfish and cruel. The rest is detail.
But sometimes the detail can be bothersome all the same. And especially when you are in the company of others who either consistently don’t get yours or regard them as hangups you just need to get over. And that’s one of those generational things I was speaking to earlier. My generation of gay men, post Stonewall, came of age when the gay rights movement was taking to the streets, angrily, loudly, renouncing the suit and tie assimilationist tactics of the Mattachine Society. It went from Michael in The Boys In The Band lamenting If we could just not hate ourselves so much, practically overnight to No fuckers we aren’t just like you, and we don’t want any part of your straight sexist sex-negative society! Nuance is for reactionaries.
When I was a teenager, I fell in love, as teenagers will. It was wonderful. I wanted that feeling to last forever. I thought I’d found the person who could make that happen. But it didn’t. So I kept looking. And looking. And looking. And now I’m 64 and single and never had so much as a boyfriend let alone a spouse to have and to hold. And here I am on Thanksgiving day with a group of other mostly lonely old gay men listening to some of them talking about the time when a certain bathroom at the University of Maryland was a hookup spot, and random sex with strangers at this or that gay bar back in the day. There’s a reason I couldn’t contribute to any of those tales, but I’m broken in a different way, so don’t take any of this to mean I think I’m better than they are because I don’t.
Oscar Wilde once said that we are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars. No, we are not all in the gutter. But some of us who are looking at the stars cannot help but notice all that darkness surrounding them. And that it is from that darkness we behold the stars. Some of us.
Facebook memories this morning brings me back to a Pearls Before Swine cartoon I riffed on briefly a couple years ago. Rat is harassing Stephan about how old he is, asking him if he was alive during World War 2, and Stephan says he wasn’t born until 23 years after that war ended, at which point Rat brings up the fact that his prom was 34 years ago.
Ha ha. Yeah…
My prom would have been 52 years ago now. I’ll be 70 shortly. Oddly enough, still regretting I didn’t get my prom. Or those first dates. Gay teens didn’t exist back in 1971.
Could have been worse I suppose. I could have been born right after the war instead of eight years after and had to be a gay teenager in the late 1950s/early 60s. I’m trying to slug through “Hoover’s War On Gays” by Douglas M. Charles. It’s a Very difficult read. My generation, just barely post Stonewall, had it pretty good all things considered. One of my high school teachers, Bill Ochse, actually brought a group of gay activists to his class to talk to his students, and the mob didn’t burn the school down.
I had him for a class but I wasn’t in that particular class that day. So I watched from a distance as they left his classroom, still talking to Bill and a few of the other kids. How I wished I could have sat in and listened to them. I’ve ached at the memory ever since. But at least I could know back in 1971 that there was such things as gay activists. I could at least know that I wasn’t alone, even if it felt like it.
I didn’t get my prom. It was 1971. Not even Woodward would have been ready for gay teens stepping out onto the dance floor back in 1971. Are you kidding? And even in a better world I probably wouldn’t have been able to take the guy I was crushing on to the prom. He was a catch, stunningly beautiful, smart, decent, lived in the nice neighborhood, and I was a weird kid from across the tracks, unhandsome, crooked teeth, unruly hair, living with a single divorced mother, preoccupied with his artwork and photography. Didn’t get my prom. Didn’t get a boyfriend either.
I’ll be 70 soon. I’ll die having walked from one end of an adult life to the other single. And the fact is there was more stacked against me than the treachery of a few I believed to be my friends (We’ve seen the guys you look at. People who look like that want people who look like that.). Back in 1971 even Mad Magazine thought our claim to having a common humanity with out neighbors was ridiculous (You shout that you are victimized by bigoted attacks. Forgive us if we’re more concerned with Indians and Blacks). The scale of what was taken from us so righteous people could build their stepping stones to heaven out of pieces of our hearts is nearly impossible to grasp. And the teenager I was stopped hoping long ago.
70. It isn’t quite the milestone I was thinking it would be. I really don’t want any more birthdays. But I need to get A Coming Out Story finished.
So my calendar is telling me that today is your birthday. How I wish we had stayed in touch. Maybe I could have helped keep you steady when the sickness started taking you. Maybe I could have got you the help you needed. Maybe I could have just been there to be someone you could trust and rely on. To listen. To be a friend. I should have been there. But we were so young, and you at least were beautiful, and the world will have its way with us. And now we’re both old men. And I will always regret not being there.
And all the roads we have to walk are winding And all the lights that lead us there are blinding There are many things that I would like to say to you, but I don’t know how
April 2012…about when I began to suspect that the guy I’d put up on a pedestal back when we were both teenagers wasn’t all that after all. And also, that everything is crap.
But it was all so Wonderful back in the day…as the next episode of A Coming Out Story will show…if only I can drag it out of me. As I say in the story notes, I started that comic strip story many years ago, as a way of trying to make sense of what happened to me back then. And I’m Still trying to make sense of it…
Those of us who are single. Those of us who have never found that intimate other. Those of us who crashed and burned on the alter of Love. It’s the day after that is ours. The day when the flowers start to wilt and the candy goes stale. There you will find us. The books holding stories of love that never was, waiting forever on the remainders shelves as a last desperate hope for a buyer. The closest thing I ever had to a boyfriend told me we were but merely friends with benefits. Swell if that sort of thing suits you. Too bad I was in love. Strike Three!
Today is the most miserable of days for those of us who have been single our entire adult lives. This year I have my pending retirement to distract me from it, so there’s that. That, and the fact that I’ve reached an age now where the need is beginning to wane. Let’s hear it for getting old. I tell myself I survived the heart attack because my heart has a lot of experience living with damage.
But…since I’m seeing so many others sharing their favorite Valentine’s Day poems on Facebook today, let me share a couple of mine. Not really Valentine’s Day poems you say? Oh my goodness…yes…yes they are!
Because I liked you better Than suits a man to say, It irked you, and I promised To throw the thought away. To put the world between us We parted, stiff and dry; ‘Good-bye,’ said you, `forget me.’ ‘I will, no fear’, said I. If here, where clover whitens The dead man’s knoll, you pass, And no tall flower to meet you Starts in the trefoiled grass, Halt by the headstone naming The heart no longer stirred, And say the lad that loved you Was one that kept his word.
-A. E. Housman
I’ll just quote a couple lines from The Man On The Bed by Debora Greger…
If the heart is a house, he thought, it is rented to strangers who leave it empty.
That’s a hard one to find to read since it’s not been published widely, but it’s there in the November 24, 1974 issue of The New Yorker. If you have a subscription you can read it online. I bought a copy from a place that sells back issues just so I could have the entire thing. I think it’s a perfect Day After Valentine’s Day poem, but that’s probably not what the poet had in mind.
Many years ago I did a series of charcoal and ink drawings on a theme of first love, which I’m still really proud of…
The Old Gate
I was still so sure that I’d find my other half eventually. But that was then, and this is now. Crush #1 and I are not speaking to each other anymore, and crush #3 is living happily with the guy he dumped me for, except you can’t really say you were dumped when all you ever were was a friend who provided benefits when called upon. Age brings wisdom. And…heart attacks. Of the physical sort no less. If I’m still alive next year I might restart this blog’s annual Valentine’s Day Poster Contest.
But by then I might be fully across the threshold of old enough not to care anymore. Think of it as being nature’s way of saving the quest for love for younger folks who can take a beating. Or culling the herd of the ones that can’t. Some nights I have no idea why I’m still alive.
(Note, this does not include anyone whose peace and quiet began March 6, 2016…)
I heard you. Now hear this.
If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out that’s not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven’t even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won’t even admit the knife is there. -Malcolm X
The Wrecking Ball That Breaks Your Heart One Day, Lifts Your Spirits The Next
Time passes…the universe expands…I’ve lived long enough to see so many of my kidhood haunts coming down. Rockville it seems, is a city that just wants to eat itself all the time. Shortly after mom and I moved there, they tore down the old city center and built a doomed shopping mall they eventually tore down just a decade or so later, and then tore down what they’d built on top of that. A classmate posted that you can’t go home again, and I replied that’s especially true if home was Rockville, because you’ll get lost they’ve re-routed so many of the roads we used to drive down. I’m still stunned that Randolph Road now goes under Rockville Pike. My beloved high school got torn down recently and I’m still miserable over it, but I got a keepsake brick so there’s that. So much of my past is vanishing under the wrecking ball. But it’s not all bad. In fact, sometimes it’s wonderful.
Just heard on another page that this place is going under the wrecking ball next week. I couldn’t be more delighted. It was originally called Fritzbe’s. I have a particularly bad memory…a really Bad Memory…that place played a supporting role in. I have wanted to see it razed for decades.
What Happened:
It was a lovely summer night in 1981. I was in my middle twenties and on the downside of my second disastrous crush. We were close, or so I thought. I sent him love letters from the road while on a road trip with friends in the southwest. On my return it seemed we became even closer. But he was straight. What I learned from it is that straight guys can fall in love with other guys too, but for them it’s a purely platonic thing. For the gay guy who gets that deeply involved with a straight guy it’s a heart wrenching mess.
That night in 1981 he suggested we go to this new place that opened. It would have been at one time an easy walk, nearly a straight line from the apartment I grew up in to Congressional Plaza or the Radio Shack across the street from it. But the new Metro subway system was under construction and my path across the railroad tracks was now forever blocked, so my friend picked me up at the apartment and we went to Fritzbe’s. At Fritzbe’s I learned another lesson.
I was having a night out at a new place with the guy I was still crushing on madly. So I put on my best blue jeans and favorite shirt, got my long hair all washed and blow dried, put on my new Nike’s. But let’s face it, I was a scrawny ugly faced twenty-something no matter how well I dressed, and the summer humidity probably didn’t do wonders for my hair either. We got to the door to Fritzbe’s and there were two doormen standing there. One of them said my friend could go inside, but I couldn’t.
I was stunned. My friend told me he wanted to go in and just look around for a bit. So he did and I waited while the doormen made sure I stayed outside. When he returned it was clear to me that he wanted to spend the evening with the other cool people inside but first he had to figure out a way to dump me without making it look like he was dumping me. My memory of the rest of that night is a bit fuzzy, but I clearly recall saying something on the order of what’s wrong with me that I can’t come in I look okay, and under his breath he said “actually no you don’t”. So that was that. I politely excused myself from the evening and walked back home.
I got put in my place…which, of course I was. What was I thinking when I went out that night? Me? Really? The weird kid from the other side of the tracks. Clothes he bought at Sears or JC Penney…hair’s a mess…crooked teeth…no social skills at all…queer… Oh I know… Falling in love feels so wonderful, until the moment you hit the ground. It was impossible anyway, he was straight after all, but had the positions been reversed I’d have walked away from that place rather than go inside without my friend. I’ve actually done that a time or two. But that night I saw I was disposable. And that’s never just a circumstantial thing. It is what you are. Always.
People who look like that, want people who look like that…
Fritzbe’s eventually folded…I can’t imagine why. Well yes I can. Turn the uncool away as a matter of policy, to cultivate the shallow beautiful people, and eventually they’ll flit away to the Next Big Thing and what’s left are all the customers you might have had if you hadn’t pissed them off. So the name on the door changed but I never set foot in there. I was told not to go in and I don’t need telling twice. And now it’s going under the wrecking ball.
In its place, so I’m told, will be a massive new development of some sort that will occupy the entire block. Until that eventually gets torn down. Rockville just does that to itself. But eventually so does everywhere. The only thing that endures is the reputation you made for yourself. Whoever owned that chain and set its policies and created its theming probably made a lot of beautiful people very happy for a little while, and broke a lot of hearts for much, much longer. And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make.
I probably shouldn’t blame the poor building. Like Hill House in Shirley Jackson’s novel, some places cannot help but take the shape of their builders souls. And the people who occasionally occupy them. But I am definitely taking one of my cameras down to the old neighborhood and snapping a few shots of the destruction. I’m toying with the idea of taking a few c notes with me and asking the wrecking crew if I can pay them to let me take a few whacks at it myself. But probably I’ll just go watch for a while, snap a few photos, and applaud at inappropriate moments.
I could hope they sow the ground with salt afterward. But concrete and asphalt will do.
Made my usual pilgrimage to Biergarten at Epcot. Still the same COVID dining changes I saw since last September. Instead of it being buffet eating, they bring the buffet to your table, and since there’s a plague going on and I’m a party of one I’m the only one at the table. I fear a lot of food gets wasted this way. I’d wondered how they were going to manage having guests at the buffet counters and thought they’d just mark out six foot increments like they do elsewhere in the parks where there are lines. But no…they’ve dispensed with the buffet altogether.
At first the German staff that used to work here are nowhere to be seen. Except the band. The only thing that’s changed with them, apart from a couple members, is when the sing the German drinking song, Ein Prosit, they no longer call out at the end Oans, zwoa, drei, gsuffa! Zicke, zacke, zicke, zacke, and the crowd is supposed to reply, hoi, hoi, hoi! and it’s never loud enough so the band leader has us do it again but LOUDER before we get our Prost! I’m guessing that’s so we aren’t all shouting COVID into the dinning area at the top of our lungs, assuming anyone who has it got past the multiple temperature screenings before they got inside. So the band is still there, but I figured it was like last time when all the regular workers were all gone, and worried that they were never coming back. Apart from the Usual Suspect, I’d actually made some friends there and I was worried about them.
But as it turned out some of the usual German staff are here, hard to recognise when we’re all wearing masks, and I talked to a few and got the scoop. Disney is slowly calling them back as things either improve or they get better at figuring out how to do things in the new reality. But they also tell me a certain someone has officially retired. He came back when Disney was calling the workers back, but then he retired. If he did that when I suspect he did, it was because he’d just made it to his full social security retirement age.
The saddest story was another older guy I used to see all the time here apparently came down with Alzheimer’s and can no longer work. I feel badly for him for a couple reasons. He always wore an expression like someone stuck in a job he really didn’t like but just kept at it because he was too old to go anywhere else. I never saw him smile. But also, the way a certain someone used him as a setting off point for a story that, as the story progressed, turned into a confession, the sadness of which I’ll take to my grave. I don’t think this old guy deserved to be used that way.
The staff I spoke with included some new faces, but they knew my classmate and offered to tell him I was there. I told them why that wasn’t a good idea, and then on the spur of the moment I did something that always irritated him… I showed them pictures I took of him back in high school. That was always a big hit with the ladies and tonight was no exception. Oh he was So Adorable!!!!! Squeeee!!!!
Oh yeah…made my jaw drop too…once upon a time. I tell myself that in a better world I wouldn’t have had a chance with him anyway. I was the little dweeb from the other side of the tracks whose clothes never quite fit and whose hair was always a mess. But then maybe in a better world that wouldn’t have been true either. It’s hard to reckon with how that torrent of hate and loathing you grew up under, long before you even began to suspect anything about yourself, cut into the life you could have had, were all of that not there.
I bet he never sets foot in Walt Disney World ever again. It’s how it looks to me like he ducked out the moment he reached full Social Security (I’ll avoid abbreviating it SS in this blog post out of respect). I don’t think he liked his job and I don’t think he really liked his employer much. His co-workers yes, but not the company. Mom did exactly that same thing. She worked for the company that had the advertising contract for the Yellow Pages, back when Ma Bell was a monopoly, for thirty-five years, and the instant she reached her full retirement age she was OUT OF THERE.
I on the other hand, love my job, and I’m still amazed to be working where I do. It’s just so wonderful. If it wasn’t for the heart attack, and then the second heart “event”, plus my legs now starting to give out on me and I’m starting to feel like my body is getting close to its End Of Maintenance date, I wouldn’t even be considering retiring. But I’d like to have at least a few years to spend doing other things, mostly time to spend on my artwork, and being able to have more time in California if possible.
If things ever get back to some semblance of Vacation Normal around here, I can visit Biergarten more often and not have to worry about whether You Know Who had enough peace and quiet that day or not. It’s not everywhere a single person can sit at a table and chat with the other diners there. Plus it’s real easy to get into, even when its crowded, since if you’re party of one you can be filler.
“Comfort food a’la hopelessness and plague, on Fiestaware and 1950s chrome and formica table”. Collection of the author.
Pierogies, Hot Cider Bourbon, and Chicken Fried Steak entree at Rocket To Venus here in Hampden. Because they’re local and I like them lots, and whoever is running their kitchen knows what they’re doing, and their carry-out process seems way more COVID safe than Corner Stable, which makes you walk inside their tiny restaurant (it really was at one time a corner stable) and walk all the way to the back by the bar.
A friend on Facebook pointed out that this didn’t look so good for a heart patient to be snarfing down. I laughed. My heart? My heart? I thought it had died of loneliness years ago and the rest of my body was just living on inertia and disbelief. But the food is good.
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