Apologies for the long post, but I have to get it out of me. I think it’s important.

I’ll write another blog post later about why I had a stay in the hospital…long story short I was having atrial fibrillation that came and went, and so I went to my cardiologist to see what could be done about it. He and his assistant took one look at my cardiogram and checked me in to the hospital immediately. I was to receive a procedure that shocks the heart back to normal beating the next morning, after a period of observation. That procedure turned out to be unnecessary when my heart went back to normal on its own, but I got an overnight stay out of it. And another pill to take every day.

That hospital stay turned, unpleasantly, into a dialogue…I won’t say argument…on religion. It got particularly energetic when my hospital roommate had a visitor, who turned out to be a minister in their church. Actually they both were but they didn’t out themselves before they had a chance to make their conversation with me seem like just a friendly chat about one’s faith and not a crusade to win my soul to their particular Christ.

I could have thrown it all back at them, but my roommate and I were in the hospital just then because our hearts were acting up, and I didn’t want to have an emotional fight over religion. Or any other time actually. I could say that’s because I’m getting old and tired, but those of us who grew up in homes with someone who was angry all the time avoid getting into heated fights if we can.

So instead while they were winning my soul to Christ I just stood my ground and answered back their theologies with the stories of science as best I knew them, and my own moral values because I’ve nothing to be ashamed of there. I did try to keep the conversation away from my sexual orientation, although in retrospect I think they decided eventually that I wasn’t One Of Those People because I didn’t present to their stereotypes. It wasn’t because I’m afraid of those conversations, I just didn’t want it to start being all about that, which it would have. I wanted to keep the conversation where I thought it needed to be. 

Like a lot of deeply fundamentalist, not necessarily religious, people, they came to the conversation serenely confident they had Truth. Robert Ardrey wrote about another set of dogmas, which he called the Romantic Fallacy [of human consciousness], in African Genesis thusly:

“As we experience it today, the romantic fallacy is a transparent curtain of ingenious weave with a warp of rationality and a woof of sensation that hangs between ourselves and reality. So transparent is its quality that we cannot perceive its presence.  So bright in outline do men and affairs appear beyond the curtain that we cannot doubt but that reality is what we observe. Yet in truth every color has been distorted. And rare is the conclusion based on such observations that would not bear re-inspection if the curtain were lifted.”

I think that applies to certain kinds of religious fundamentalism. Rose colored glasses, in other words. Or as James Burke once said, what we see is what our knowledge tells us we’re seeing. Eric Hoffer writes that an empty head isn’t really empty, it’s full of rubbish, and that’s what makes it so hard to get anything new into an empty head. Sometimes you see the truth of it the moment people open their mouths. When my roommate started on about the Bible and Truth I knew where it was going. He and his fellow minister were going to run the usual routine on me once they figured out the best line of attack, and where I wanted to keep the focus of the conversation on was Watch it not working.

What is Truth? You could say in the time of Donald Trump nobody cares what is, or what is not true. But I still care. I care very much.

I also made a choice to be careful that nothing I said sounded like a direct challenge to their religion or their beliefs. I reckoned just standing my ground was challenge enough, and I didn’t want the conversation to become nothing more than a lot of flag waving. Of course they were about to challenge My beliefs. I needed saving after all. Fine. I wanted them to see something that they wouldn’t if I made them get all defensive. I wasn’t interested in changing any minds, because I reckoned those minds were unchangeable. I wanted them to see something.

I’m 71 years old. I’ve been there and done that. I know what I’m about better than you know what you’re about. Now watch it not working…

This all begins when I went for a visit to my cardiologist that turned into a hospital stay. First they took me to the emergency room where monitors were hooked up and a drug administered to slow down my heart rate, which had hit a peak of 170. When they could, they moved me into a hospital room with two beds, one of which was already occupied. I was disappointed, but willing to make the best of it.

I had gay friends who would tell me the reason I was single and lonely was I was too shy. They almost had me convinced when they took me to various clubs and just let me wander around, and I could not work myself up to engaging anyone in a chat because I didn’t know any of them. It was my high school crush who cleared it up for me. He worked in a German themed restaurant in Disney World with Oktoberfest seating, which many Americans don’t like. One day he complimented me on my ability to get a table of standoffish people talking to each other. But in Disney World I had dozens of built-in icebreakers. Hi…where y’all from? This your first time here? What’s your favorite park? All I ever needed was an icebreaker, which these “friends” would never give me because People who look like that want people who look like that. But if I have an icebreaker and I can get people talking then it’s actually pretty hard to shut me up. 

A hospital room gave me a pretty good icebreaker, but I realized I had to think about how to say it. If I asked “what are you in for”, that might sound too much like a bad joke about being in prison. So instead I asked conversationally “what brings you here?” In a hospital that’s a kinda personal question, and I was fine if he didn’t want to talk about it. He looked to be an older than me African American male, and I didn’t want him thinking I was uncomfortable being roomed with an African American, so I tried to be friendly. He told me what it was that brought him there; we were both heart patients, although his heart situation was slightly different from mine. It made sense to me that the heart patients would be grouped together.

At first, naturally, our brief chats were about our health and how getting older brings changes in our bodies that we just had to deal with. Those would segue into chats about how much the world around us had changed over the course of our lives. I told him about the work I did, and was doing at Space Telescope, and he was amazed at the pictures that came down from Hubble. How, he asked, did they get those pictures down to earth from a telescope in space. So I explained as much as I understood about the instruments on Hubble, and the way the image files were microwaved back down to Earth. He simply nodded his head, thinking.

I began to suspect we were not on the same page politically when he said later that night that he’d never thought he’d live to see two men kissing on TV. Well neither did I when I was a gay teenager trying to navigate a world that gave me static from practically every direction. 

I could have said something smartass back to him then, but we were on cordial terms just then and I didn’t want any arguments that would raise my heartrate again after the nurses went to all the trouble to slow it down. I pick my battles.

The next morning he had Fox News on his TV. Okay. Fine. Whatever.

When the nurse came that morning I was told the procedure they’d wanted to give me was called off for now because my heart had returned to what they call sinus rhythm all on its own. I mentioned again that the atrial fibrillation and rapid heart rate was a sporadic thing, and I was told I’d be held there longer for observation in case it did come back. I hoped that didn’t mean another overnight stay because the night before between all the wires on me and the activity out in the hallways I got absolutely no sleep, despite how amazingly comfortable that hospital bed was. 

A co-worker came the previous evening before I was moved to my room with a charger and cable for my cell phone, which allowed me to stay in touch. Then I discovered the hospital bed had a built-in USB connection to charge a phone. 

Nice!

So while my roommate watched Fox News that morning, I doom scrolled, tempted to go find some videos of two men kissing. But mostly I watched cat and train videos.

Lunchtime came and I was told I could have solid food again. We were brought lunch. After that my roommate struck up a conversation with me that quickly turned to religion. Much later I began to wonder if every conversation we’d had right from the beginning of our stay together had been just his way of sizing me up for the best approach to saving my soul. 

It began with questions about my job. We had another friendly chat about how we watched our space program put men on the moon, and all the changes and improvements we’d seen over the course of our lives in the pictures we got from space. We were the first generations, I said, who have seen the horizons of other worlds. He agreed it was an amazing time to be alive.

Now he began with telling me how amazing it was to see things that were so far away, and deftly segued into wondering how we knew how far away the galaxies were, and what force it was that brought the universe into existence. I talked about the doppler shift in light, what we knew so far about the Big Bang, and the discovery of the cosmic background radiation. He wondered aloud what force existed to produce the bang. Something had to be there before it. That something had to be God.

I’m 71 and I’ve been proselytized so much over the course of my life I can tell the difference pretty quickly between a simple sincere statement of belief and a prelude to picking the lock on the door to my soul. Okay, thinks I, that friendly chat about my job all this time was just so he could suss me out and figure where to start on me wasn’t it.

He began talking about the Bible and asked me if I’d read it. I assured him I had. He asked me if I was familiar with Proverbs chapter 8. Not off the top of my head says I. He directs me to Proverbs 8:22-31. He asked me to think about what it said. Read those verses he says to me twice more, and think about what they say.

I call it up on my iPhone and give it a read, then follow up with some of the commentary because it was one of those ambiguous passages you could read just about anything into, and I wanted to see what, if any consensus there was about it. 

22 The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old;

23 I was formed long ages ago, at the very beginning, when the world came to be.

24 When there were no watery depths, I was given birth, when there were no springs overflowing with water;

25 before the mountains were settled in place, before the hills, I was given birth,

26 before he made the world or its fields or any of the dust of the earth.

27 I was there when he set the heavens in place, when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep,

28 when he established the clouds above and fixed securely the fountains of the deep,

29 when he gave the sea its boundary so the waters would not overstep his command, and when he marked out the foundations of the earth.

30 Then I was constantly at his side. I was filled with delight day after day.

31 rejoicing in his whole world and delighting in mankind. 

The commentary I read ranged widely as to its meaning, but it was a passage my roommate said that told us Wisdom existed before the creation.

Okay, thinks I, the science geek, one way you could look at that is it’s saying the physical laws that emerged in the Bang were there before the Bang, and necessary for the Bang to happen. But I think too long about how to put that to him, and now he’s telling me that Truth existed before the creation. 

Well…okay…I can dig that too. Probably not the way you do though.

Then it turned, oddly, to a discussion about how ancient Hebrew is different from the modern, and how that turned into mistranslations of the original text. Most Bibles he said, are false (no surprise there). But there was one true Bible (yes, of course), and it is based on the ancient Hebrew, that only a few have translated correctly. And of course, thinks I, your religion just happens to have that True Bible translation and none of the others do. The heathens after all, are the people in the church across the street.

I bring up the fact that the New Testament was originally written in other languages. Yes, he says, but that’s not the old Hebrew. Only the old Hebrew is correct, because it was written before the rest of the Bible, closer to creation, and to the Wisdom that existed before the creation. That is why it has Truth. I just want you to think about that, he says. I don’t reply that I could think about how deep the rabbit hole in Alice In Wonderland really went but I’m not tying my brain up on that one either. 

He asks how often I read the Bible. I deflect for the moment and tell him I was raised in a Yankee Baptist household. It seems to surprise him. I add that I have several Bibles at home including a modern English version of Tyndale’s Bible, and the Book of Mormon (I declined to mention my copy of The Satanic Bible). At the mention of Tyndale he seems impressed. Did I know that Tyndale was executed for translating the Bible into English? I said I was aware of the story, and that Tyndale’s crime was making the Bible accessible to the common man and woman. Also that I liked Tyndale’s plain spoken English more than the floral Elizabethan of the King James. I bring up the fact that different faiths have different versions of the Bible. This includes the Catholics I say, noting we are in a Catholic hospital (there were Catholic style crucifixes inside every room I was in, above every door). Yes, says he, but there is only one True Bible. 

Yes, thinks I. The one you read.

I tell him I recognize the importance of the bible as a historical document, but the bible speaks with many voices. And while the people who wrote its books were just as human as any of us, they lived in a time so long past it’s almost impossible to take the meanings you read in it for granted. I ask him to consider how much detail we have about the culture in America during the Revolutionary War period, and the thinking of the people who lived through all that, and that was only about two-hundred and fifty years ago. The events of the Bible took place thousands of years ago.

I tell him some of my experience trying to learn other languages and what I discovered about how language influences our understanding of our world. English for example does not have gendered nouns, Some languages have two. German nouns come in three genders…male, female and neuter. What is the understanding of the world in a culture where “mirror” is masculine and “cat” is feminine even if it’s male, and “girl” is neuter. How do you read the poetry of other peoples without knowing you may be missing what the poet intended you to get? It’s risky. I tell him that I’ve heard the poets say that translators are traitors.

It’s getting on into the afternoon. We are visited by the nurses again, and I am visited by a doctor who says he is working with my Cardiologist on my case. It looks like I will be discharged later in the afternoon if nothing about my heart changes. I am relieved. I want to be done with all this wiring connected to me. It makes if very difficult to move around, let alone go to the bathroom. My roommate is also told he will be discharged soon. He told me previously that he’d been there for four days by then.

Then my roommate gets a younger visitor who I assume at first is a family member. He brings my roommate some fried chicken which smells delicious. Apparently it came from a local eatery, not a chain. Are we heart patients allowed fried chicken? I have no idea but none of the staff seem to have objected. The nurses who came in afterward all knew the name of the place it came from and were enthusiastic about it. I accept my roommate’s offer of a piece of it. It was…okay.

My roommate continues his attempt at salvation while his visitor just listens in. What are atoms he asks me. What force makes them they stay together? It must be God. How is it that a rock and a feather both fall to earth together when they weigh so differently. By now I’m well aware that his questions are rhetorical and intended to elicit a response from me that he can hook into a Bible verse. I have watched this game played so many times. But instead of giving him snark, which I might have in any other setting, I take his questions seriously. 

I talk about Albert Einstein’s ideas on how mass curves spacetime. I talk about the difference between mass and weight in a gravity field. But how does gravity make things move, he asks. There must be some force moving them. How can satellites remain in motion around the earth if there is nothing moving them, he asks. I reply with Newton’s first law. Objects in motion will remain in motion unless acted on by some external force. But how can it just stay in orbit around the earth unless there is something to keep it there at that distance. I relate the story of Newton and the apple, adding that it was Newton that gave gravity its name.

His visitor just keeps listening throughout all this, occasionally telling me he finds our discussion very informative. Yes, of course you did, I will later think.

My roommate asks me if I believe in God. 

So here’s the direct question. Sort of. He doesn’t ask what God but I think it’s a pretty safe bet he means the one he believes in. So here it is, Now it’s either out myself or duck. Kinda proud that I’ve never once ducked whether it was this or my sexual orientation.

I tell them I don’t believe. I don’t use the word Atheist because it is such a loaded word amongst the deeply religious and I don’t want all the baggage that comes with it getting into this conversation, and then they stop seeing the person in front of them for a scarecrow stereotype. To the degree I can, to the degree it’s even possible, I want them to keep seeing a person, not a thing. I am an unbeliever. That is enough for them to know.

I mention a favorite quote by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright: I believe in God but I spell it nature. I tell them that for most of my young adult life I considered myself an agnostic. H.L. Mencken once called agnosticism the most beautiful religion because it just trusts, has faith, and doesn’t subscribe to any particular theology (he once called theology an attempt to explain the unknowable in the terms of the not worth knowing). But I eventually grew out of that and now it’s I accept nature as best as science reveals it to us. I think this world and the universe as it is, is beautiful. Nature is beautiful. Reality is what it is. Science, as the physicist Richard Feynman said, is just a way we have of not fooling ourselves. And you, he added, are the easiest one to fool. By which I said I was pretty sure he meant beware of confirmation bias. You see what you expected to see and then you look no further and you miss something important. This was an attempt to keep the conversation on the track I wanted it to stay on.

Watch it not working… You do not have the key and the door will not be forced…

I tell him about my favorite landscape artists, Frederic Church and others of the Luminist movement. Church especially painted stunningly beautiful landscapes that were informed not only by his religion (he was a Calvinist), but also what was called in his day, the volume in stone. They believed that everything that was in the Bible is also revealed in nature, and could be understood with careful study.

I didn’t add, then Darwin came along and spoiled it for everyone.

Finally his visitor starts to join in, and now I discover they’re both ministers in their particular church. 

We’re not here to proselytize you, he says, but to give you a better understanding of the biblical Truth. Yes, of course. A difference that makes no difference is no difference. He begins to tell me about how the Bible is authoritative, and that if we follow its teachings we will have the lives God intended for us to have. 

Oh…thinks I this is a tag team now is it…

Think about that, he said. Where else can we know life God wants us to have.

I tell them I appreciate they’re not here to proselytize me. I relate again how I was raised in a Baptist (yankee) household, and Baptists (the yankee Baptists we were anyway) offer testimony in lieu of outright proselytization, and hospitality. It isn’t join our church or face eternal fire and brimstone (although I sat in on some tent preaching that were spectacular displays of fire and brimstone), but sit with us and be welcome. And they believe in what they call Soul Competency, which is that every living person has that inner light to guide them to a relationship with God. I say I am not a believer, but I still accept that my responsibility is to let people find their own way, and simply offer my own testimony and hospitality. I am simply giving you my testimony, I say. You teach not by preaching, but by giving testimony, and by setting an example. 

But God give us that example in His Word, and His Son.

Yes, yes… I said I accept a different authority. “My Book is the volume in stone. It’s there everywhere around us, not just the stars in the sky, but the rocks in the ground (channeling that the lord is my rock quote). If you believe God created everything, okay, then a pebble on the ground is God’s handwriting. God made it, if that’s what you believe. Perhaps Wisdom existed before the creation, but if God created everything, a pebble is God’s handwriting. A grain of sand (channeling Blake here) is the original manuscript. Everything else is commentary.”

“Your mileage may vary”, I say, “and I’m okay with that because I still accept soul competency and besides I don’t think religion matters. What matters is the heart.”

The visitor keeps smiling and says that he can see I’m a good man and that the bible shows us the way to be better men.

And I came back, “Thank you. I can see you’re both good men too. And I appreciate what you’re telling me about how the bible is a guide. People who lived thousands of years ago speak to us in it. But that guidance is there throughout the story of mankind’s history (I want to speak my truth as much as I can in their language so they don’t instantly blank out over wokeness). We can read it in other books besides the Bible. And in those other books the people who lived that history speak to us too.”

I say, “That human history tells us what matters is you’re not mean and selfish and cruel. What matters is you’re trustworthy. What matters is you speak the truth, take responsibility, do your share of the work, and chip in and help out when you can. What matters is you’re the sort of person Mr. Rogers was talking about, when he said ‘look for the helpers’.

“That’s the important stuff. Everything else is detail.”

And the comeback was “and God shows us in His Book how to become that person.” 

I could see by then I’d made my point, by how automatically the prefabricated replies were being dispensed. They weren’t prodding and sizing me up anymore, looking for the right pick for the lock. Instead I could see them just waiting as I spoke for the relevant biblical comeback. Which I took to mean they were on automatic pilot now because they’d give up on getting their Truth into me and now it’s just standing up for theirs, which I wasn’t interested in disturbing anyway. The existence of the likes of me being disturbance enough.

The conversation ended shortly thereafter, when my roommate was told his discharge papers were ready for him to sign. I was told mine were coming. Please I begged, get these darn wires off me then so I can get dressed.

So I’d made my point. The two ministers probably left still confident they’d seen a lost soul in need of salvation, and that I would not be moved probably made them very sad. But what they also had to have seen was an unbeliever who would not be triggered into outright hostility. What they saw was an unbeliever who was willing to patiently explain himself and keep standing his ground. When they asked me to think about what they were telling me, I gave them evidence that at age 71 I’d actually been thinking about it for quite a long time. What they saw, hopefully, was some depth behind the patient face of an old longhaired baby boomer who began dressing himself for discharge with a summer shirt full of cat faces. Whatever it was they took me for to start with, they must have found I was not that. 

What they made of it afterward I have no idea and I don’t care. I gave them testimony, and hospitality.

Before he left my roommate gave me a card with a link their church’s website and some bible studies.

Maybe at some point in the future one of them finds themselves doing a little gardening, or sidewalk cleaning, sees a small pebble and remembers what I said. Because whether or not you believe in an almighty creator, the rock has to outrank the word.

[Update…]  In retrospect it occurs to me that neither one of them offered me their testimony. It was all just What The Bible Says. At least I might have seen them as more than simply a couple of ministers doing to me what I’ve had done to me so many times before. Place holders for a type. But I reckon they didn’t want to be more than that. Testimony might have brought them down to my level.

Those readers (there must be a few of you) who read my previous post about the dark time probably won’t find what I’m about to say as strange as others. I’ve touched on that dark time in other posts…this one from just a year ago for example…when I said that I could see it happening again. I wrote that post during my second year of retirement when, as I said, I could feel myself entering a downward spiral of inactivity. In that post of several days ago I wrote that I’d accepted part-time work at Space Telescope and I was pretty sure it would bring me out of it, like it had that first period of darkness. What I wasn’t prepared for was how much more alive I began to feel. 

Well…at least mentally. Physically I’m still a 71 year old man who never worked out as much as he should have. But even that is abating just a bit more every day. I walked in to the office the first couple days I was back, though the walk back home was more fatiguing than the walk there. The new Mac Pro laptop they gave me is heavier than I expected, almost as heavy as the older Macbook Pro I have that was top of the line in its day, but no longer runs the most current versions of MacOS. This new Macbook Pro is Very Nice and I considered buying one until I saw how much they cost.

So I got a new and up to date Mac laptop, with the Institute’s VPN software and all the other accoutrements necessary to work from home. As I am part time I don’t get my own office, though I think I would if I was expected to be at the office most of the time. I think this is not the case now. The work I will be doing is almost exactly like the work I did before I retired, which means some of the machines I will need to be working on at kept off the internet tubes for security reasons. So when I need access to those machines I will have to be present in the office. 

This first week was for reorientation, getting my access card established, and getting back into the work. So I was there every day, although one of those days I broke early, went back home, and picked up where I left off back in my den with the office laptop connected to the household network. That was mostly to make sure it all worked remotely too. And as I said, I suspect I will be doing most of my work from home. That’s because the Institute is very tight on office space. So tight us part-timers don’t get our own offices.

What they have for us, and for remote workers who need to come in from time to time, is a hoteling system. A bunch of offices are dedicated hoteling rooms with desks that have laptop connections and monitors available by way of a reservation system. If you know you’re coming in one day, or even on the spur of the moment, you go to the hoteling reservation system, see what’s available, and reserve a desk. That’ll work out fine for me, except I tend to want to bring in snacks, K-Cups and ice tea, which I don’t want to keep backpacking in every day. Be nice if I could just leave a bunch of stuff there.

At my old office on the ground floor (which, due to the steep grade around the building is actually two floors below street level) I had a mini fridge, a microwave and a coffee maker. Above my desk I had a lovely poster picture of Maligne Lake and Spirit Island, which I used to joke was my window (it was an interior room). That’s up on my bedroom wall now. I had a bunch of office supplies and computer cables, adaptors and other things I needed every now and then. Plus a bookcase with all my computer manuals, software and documentation. I have no place for any of that now. No official place.

My project manager says I can leave my computer books and stuff in the test lab which is off limits to everyone except those of us in the testing and integration branch. That’s okay…sort of…but meetings and tests are often conducted in there that I can’t be disturbing. And I still need a place for my snacks, coffee and ice tea.

Well it turns out that after I retired, they made the room my desk was in a hoteling room, and I can reserve my old desk to work at for the days I’m in the office. So I’m going to keep doing that, leave my snacks, K-Cups and office supplies in its desk drawers, and see what happens. I could see bringing in a small cooler for my ice tea every day, and maybe a sandwich, but then I’ll have to drive it and the walk into the office is very refreshing.

My branch had a small pre-Halloween party during lunch in one of the conference rooms and I got to socialize a bit more with all the new faces, and a bunch of the ones I remembered from before I retired. All week I kept crossing paths with people I worked with in the before I retired time, and it was more uplifting than I’d expected.

All week I walked down hallways I’d walked a bazillion times in the before time, and not much at all had changed, other than people I’d known were in different offices now. But that was always a thing at the Institute. The main building is small, and they have always been tight on office space, and it was not unusual at all to find your co-workers, computer labs, and conference rooms even had been moved around. I was something of an outlier in that I managed to keep one office for (I think) about 15 years. Which was how it ended up being almost a home away from home.

The employee cafeteria is the same, but the menu is Much better. The shared Keurig machine around the corner from my old office is still there…I checked to make sure while I was scoping out what had happened to my old office. I made some coffee with it and a K-Cup I’d brought with me just in case.

The work is the same, but not in any kind of boring same old same old way. I built and administered several computer testing facilities, wrote software to measure progress on various projects and generate reports for Goddard and NASA. Now the Institute is moving on to new projects and I will be a part of all that, again, working on new things for new space projects. So it’s what I’ve always done for them, but it’s the next steps forward in space telescope explorations. I would not have come back out of retirement for anything else but this.

I’ve put it like this often and every time I do it stuns me to see what it is that I am a part of: We harvest light from near the dawn of time and give it to the world to study and learn from.

So I’m back in the saddle again. And I feel like I’ve been reborn.

I feel…young again. Somewhat. And well of course I’m not actually. I’m a 71 year old man and I really feel my age sometimes lately. Especially that first day I had to be in the office at 9am. For two and and three-quarters years I could just slow walk myself out of bed because I had no schedule to keep. It was wonderful. It was liberating. And then it wasn’t. That first day back was a bit difficult. Getting up on time was difficult. Walking into the office with a heavy backpack was difficult. The walk back home was hard. Some of that is probably that spiral downward and inward I was getting stuck back on. 71 is a hard time to try and regain some physical stamina, but I can feel my body awakening a tad, as my mind is reawakening. I’m seeing the world around me with fresh eyes. Wide awake eyes.

It’s like I’ve been reborn. Those are the only words I can find to describe it. But I am not the same person I was in the before time.

Last day of my first week I set myself a goal to have a new system my project manager wants established online and available for the others to test. Almost right away I ran into a difficulty I needed our IT staff to work with me on. And there was some back and forth and I got stuck and it did not get done. There will be more back and forth next week. But that is nothing new. Our IT people are the best, but even with the best people there will always be things that need to be worked through, and especially when you are breaking new ground with what you are doing. And we are always breaking new ground.

Time was I would have stressed massively over not getting it done. What’s different now is I’m an old man, which doesn’t mean old and tired but someone with more life experience than he had when he was younger. It means I’ve walked down these roads many times and I know the territory. What’s different now is I have felt death tapping me on the shoulder a bit more insistantly than before. It gives you some perspective.

It isn’t that I don’t care anymore; I care deeply that the things I am tasked with get done and get done Right. But I am not going to stress out over it like I would have in the before time. I’ll keep my project leads and my users in the loop and we will work through it and we will get it done together.

Some lessons take a lifetime to learn. I was an only child. Teamwork has been mine. Also, that family doesn’t have to feel suffocating. But that’s another story for another time.

There is no growing up, there is only growing. And…every now and then…being reborn.

They asked me why I’d come back out of retirement. A few friendly jokes were made and we went our separate ways, knowing we’d see each other again at the office soon. I could appreciate why they might not have understood. Our lives weren’t all that different, but different enough.

I’ve been trying now for just over a year to get a head of steam up for doing some of the art projects I have stacked up. And…I couldn’t. I have artwork on my drafting table and in my iPad that I can only touch occasionally, and then on briefly. Mostly they just sit unfinished. My cameras sit untouched. I have rolls of film sitting in my darkroom and chemistry to develop them with that I haven’t touched. 

I would lay in bed for hours flipping through the social media posts on my smartphone. Often it’s just staring at the beautiful guys on Instagram or YouTube. I have a Google search string that brings me photos of beautiful long haired guys that I flip through, one after the other. Then I put the phone down on its charger, turn off the light and try to sleep. I imagine stories about gay couples having adventures in science fiction or fantasy worlds until I can finally sleep. Sometimes I try to write these stories but I have no energy to really dig into it.

It began to feel all too familiar. Like it’s the 1980s again, and I’m sitting in my bedroom with the lights turned down, almost off, and I’m staring of into the darkness outside my bedroom window, unable to feel anything inside of me.

I think of that period in my life as the dark time.

In my photo catalogs there’s a note about the discontinuity in catalog numbering. Actually there are two. The catalog numbers begin with a 10000 series. Those are the rolls of film I shot starting in the early 1970s when I was just getting serious with photography. I started counting the rolls of black and white negatives at 10001. At some point suddenly there is a shift to a 20000 series. That discontinuity I explain in the notes, is the gap in my photography that occurred when I lost all interest in my artwork, and for a period of time, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I did nothing creatively. It wasn’t just my photography that suffered, but apart from a series of drawings on the topic of gay first love…and these disturbing drawings…

I did nothing. In part, it was I didn’t want to see what was coming out of me. But also, I had lost interest. The urge to get it out just wouldn’t come. When I looked inside, there was nothing there.

The late 70s and early to mid 1980s were a dark part of my life. In 1973 my first high school crush, strike one, suddenly moved away and I had no idea where he went but I was certain I would never see him again. By 1980 I was coming off of a disastrous crush on a straight classmate, strike two. Then I made it to my 30s, which I was told was over the hill for gay guys, without having found that significant other to love and be loved by. That period of time was Reagan/Moral Majority/AIDS time when hostility toward gay people was hot and venomous. I began to believe that I would never have a lover, that I was somehow cursed, too ugly, too weird to be lovable.

Much later in my life some gay guys I’d regarded as friends told me essentially that no, I’m not too weird, and no I’m not cursed…I’m just too ugly.

I was mostly unemployed, save for the random Manpower job. I spent my days walking aimlessly in the neighborhood, and my nights in my bedroom in the apartment I shared with mom, blasting my mind with pot and alcohol, listening to music and staring off into nowhere, long past midnight.

I came close to suicide several times. Once I sat on a bridge over the railroad tracks waiting for a train to come along that I would jump in front of. Some part of my mind wondered what that would do to the engineer who saw it and I backed away. But I kept thinking of ways to do it that would be instantaneous and not involve anyone else. Thankfully I was not in that creative place just then where I could actually think of one. In some ways, oddly enough then, the emptiness may have spared me. I didn’t care enough about living to even figure out how to end it properly, artistically.

I don’t remember much about this period in my life. Sitting here now It’s hard for me to even to get the timeline right. All I remember, is darkness and sitting alone at the foot of my bed. I created no art because there was nothing inside.

In retrospect the pathways out of a darkness like that can seem strange and random but also somehow preordained. There are times I wonder if some kind spirit in the great beyond looked kindly on me and put some lucky breaks in my path. I regard myself as a man of science, and I am an atheist, but I am also an artist and sometimes I can’t help but wonder.

I would spend nights listening to my shortwave radio, as if tuning in signals from a planet earth I could only listen to from light years away. With the money I made doing random jobs I bought an inexpensive Commodore C64 to pick up radio teletype signals. There was a kit you could buy with a software cartridge and tuner box you’d connect to the radio speaker. It would translate the bleeps and chirps of RTTY transmissions into characters on a screen. I discovered teletype news and weather services I could tune into and read.

Then I learned about computer bulletin boards and bought a modem and software to connect to various BBSes. That led me to some gay bulletin boards and FidoNet echos and I began tentatively reaching out to other gay folk on them, and I began to feel less alone. But just a little. Nobody I ever wanted to get close to wanted anything to do with me. One said I was too intense. Another was willing to let my cameras give him some love, but not me.

The Commodore’s user interface was its BASIC interpreter and I began experimenting with writing programs. Later I learned that Commodore PET Basic was written for Commodore by Microsoft.

One day at a HAM fest, while I was looking for tubes for one of my shortwave radios and a stereo preamp I owned, I discovered I could buy parts to build my own IBM PC compatible computer. Building one was easier than the Heathkits I used to build because it was just a matter of buying the right circuit boards and plugging them together with a power supply and case. I got it working, and began surfing the bulletin boards with it. Then I bought a copy of Microsoft Quick Basic I began writing computer programs as I had done with my C64. It drew me in.

I discovered a world that had its own sterile beauty…one of logical structures, cold hard steel and chromium algorithms. I discovered I could build logical structures whose beauty I could admire and love without needing to go near the parts of my heart where I didn’t want to go anymore. It was a kind of art I’d never known existed. The art of pure logic. I dove into it. I got good at it.

It was the time of the dot com boom and anyone who could make the little microcomputers do tricks was in demand. I did volunteer work for a local gay BBS and made a program to distill the file a fellow user who worked for a wire service provided that contained news about the community you almost never saw in print anywhere. We were a people not fit to print in family newspapers. The program I wrote in Basic would separate the articles into individual files formatted for the BBS software we were running and create the menu items for each. Then another program I wrote would upload them into the correct directories on the BBS server.

I got better and better at teaching micro computers to do tricks. I developed and wrote a membership support system for a local gay activist organization, that had a backend user database in dBase 4. Among other things it generated welcome letters for new members, and reminders about upcoming dues.

All of that was unpaid volunteer work, but eventually I began getting temp contract work making very good money teaching those little computers do tricks for various businesses. I got work at a contract job agency and my first worksite was at Baltimore Gas and Electric Home Products and Services writing report software for their work measurement system. It was the lucky break I needed right when I desperately needed one, because by then mom had retired and moved south, and I was living in a friend’s basement with no prospects except maybe to end up starving on the streets someday.

Because of those little computers I soon had my own apartment. Then a new car…a little Geo Prism. I hopped from one contract programming job to another, each time gaining more experience and new skills that made me even more marketable. My income rose. Eventually I landed a contract, and then full time employment where the Hubble Space Telescope was operated. I thought I’d somehow died and gone to heaven. I still had no boyfriend, but I had work I was good at that I enjoyed doing, and it came with a good income and benefits. I still had no love life, but I began to feel less empty inside.

One day, while walking around the campus, I saw them setting up for student spring fair. Seeing that reawakened something inside of me, and went back home, grabbed my camera and some Kodachrome and began wandering around the rides they were setting up, taking art pictures again for the first time in over a decade.

I revisited my photography equipment. By then I’d bought a small rowhouse near enough to the campus I could walk to work. I established a tentative darkroom in its basement bathroom. Back in high school I used to commandeer the bathroom in the apartment I shared with mom to develop film and make prints. So this was another reawakening. The smell of photo chemicals took me back to a happier time.

I discovered I had enough income I could buy all the camera and darkroom equipment I ever wanted but could not afford when I was a teenager. I bought lenses I could only dream about when I was a teenager for my Canon F1. I’d bought that camera on fast food work money the summer between my junior and senior years, but I could not afford the good lenses for it, so I bought generic low costs ones. Now I could buy the good ones. Then I found another newer second hand F1 body in a camera store and bought that. Eventually I bought the Hasselblad I’d always wanted but considered a dream only.

I bought a good film scanner and revisited my film catalog. Now I had a computer with photographer workflow software on it to help maintain the catalog. I created the 20000 series numbering to account for the before and after time. In my refrigerator I’d kept a large tray of exposed film I never got around to developing during the dark time. I’d kept that film refrigerated because while I’d lost interest in the art I could not bear to let it and the images I’d shot deteriorate into nothing. That was probably some thread of interest in life keeping me alive during the dark time. I began to develop and examine what was on those rolls, and rediscovered something of the life I had before the darkness that I’d forgotten. At some point a 11000 catalog series was established to account for the rolls I shot in the before time but never developed or cataloged during the dark time. 

I established an art room in the basement of my rowhouse with my drafting table against one wall, and my art room computer and film scanner against the other. I bought a tabloid size flatbed scanner so I could scan in my cartoons and other artwork and put it up on the website I now had where I could display my photography and my cartoons and other art for the world to see.

I still had no boyfriend. In fact by this time strike three had entered, exited, and then re entered my life giving me another false hope, only to be dashed later on. But having that job in the space program lifted me out of that darkness enough that I could endure that. I was making art again. I felt alive again.

For twenty-three years I worked that job and made art in my spare time, putting some of it on my website. I started a weekly gay centric political cartoon that got me the notice of the editor of Baltimore OUTLoud, a local gay community newspaper. He invited me to contribute my cartoons to the newspaper, and that eventually led me to becoming a member of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. Cartooning was the first love and it felt like another dream come true.

I started a cartoon story about my first teenage crush and how I came out to myself. I did it mostly to try and understand what had happened to me back in high school, and how it influenced the adult I eventually became. Then after 34 years of searching, and after being dumped by strike three, I found strike one again.

We began talking. And occasionally, flirting. But he was married and I didn’t want to interfere, just be friends again. Maybe. Hopefully. Eventually I was to discover we were never really all that compatible to begin with. A big cosmic joke. In a better world where gay teens could date and find out who was good for them and who was not, I’d have figured that out and had a good cry over it back then, not 34 years later. We had an argument and he ordered me to stop speaking to him, which I was completely fine with because I was angry at the things he said to me. Logically. But my heart I felt the darkness coming back. I ignored it.

I still had my art and I could use it to get the grief out of me. But grief like that never goes away, it just becomes part of the background noise. He was the first, but it was more than that. If you read A Coming Out Story, what you see is a very confused teenage boy who was fed all the usual myths, lies, superstitions and playground jokes about homosexuals, trying to come to terms with why he was crushing on a male classmate, then suddenly realizing that he’s in love…that wonderful terrifying confusing exhilarating first love…and it told him like nothing else could that everything he’d been taught about homosexuals was a lie and there was nothing wrong with him. There are gay kids who were driven to suicide by that self realization, but it was by loving him that I knew there was nothing wrong with me.

And then he told me to go away.

If I’d had that happen back when I was a teenager I’d have been crushed but eventually I could have got over it and gone on with my life. In theory now that I’m an adult with an adult’s life experience under my belt I should have been able to get over it even easier. But the way it happened then and now just made it worse.

I coasted along with it, and with the knowledge that came with it, that I’d tried to find love and failed all my adult life. Strike one, strike two, strike three, and all the almosts, and nearlies, and could have beens in between. Deep inside after that argument I knew it was over for me. There would be no boyfriend, let alone a spouse to have and to hold. But I buried it and just kept walking.

At age 69, I retired.

I’d had a heart attack a couple years previously, but it was not a serious one. Just enough to remind me that I was getting a lot closer to the grave then I fully appreciated. I got myself to the hospital in enough time that my heart didn’t suffer much damage at all. But after that I was put on meds for blood pressure and heart rate and after an initial bounce up I began feeling tired all the time. So I retired in order to give myself some time to enjoy that was completely my own, and work on the art projects I was now fully engaged in again.

The first year of retirement was wonderful. I had all the time in the world. I could go stay with my brother in California for months at a time. I could world endlessly on my art. I could take a road trip and explore new places with my cameras anytime I wanted. By then I had my dream come true car…a Mercedes-Benz diesel sedan. I drove it for days and days from one end of the country to the other. It was and amazing time. But I was still just coasting along with an understanding I didn’t want to look at…and then it wasn’t wonderful anymore.

In the second year of retirement I began a downward spiral of inactivity. And once again I began to lose interest in my art. You can only coast for so long.

Last summer I spent several months in California with my brother. Knowing I wanted to retire back to the land of my birth but could not afford to, he kindly made a room for me in his house. The part of California he lives in is stunningly beautiful, and my cameras would give it lots of love every time I visited. But last summer I could barely manage to touch my cameras while I was there. I told myself that it was I had covered that ground so much there wasn’t anything left to say about it photographically. But that’s bullshit. When what I think of as my photographic eye opens and I take a camera walk I am always seeing new things to work with. Last summer I could not see anything. The eye would not open. I felt empty inside whenever I tried.

I began to feel fatigued all the time. I spent days out there barely getting out of bed, often taking walks, mostly to my favorite Mexican restaurant where the margaritas and the food are excellent. I would go for walks in the evening, cigar in hand, imagining stories I could write, thinking about places I might drive to on the way back home, pondering ways I could finally move back home to California, thinking about anything except how I had failed at finding love. One day I got so fatigued and dizzy I went scared to the emergency room, but the nurse and doctor there could find nothing wrong with me. I eventually came back home to Baltimore with just a few rolls of film I’d shot and nothing to show for the drawings and cartoons I was working on.

Now there are rolls of film in my darkroom waiting for me to develop them and I can’t find the energy to do that. There is artwork on my drafting table, and in my iPad that I’ve no energy for completing. 

That first period of darkness came about, I’m pretty sure, when I was approaching and then turning 30, still had no love life, and was beginning to think it might never happen. The thought of that scared me and I pushed it down. Of course I’d find someone to love. Everyone does. But no…not everyone does, and I was no one special. I failed and failed and failed again, and it was just too much. But then this was the world I came of age in.

Now I found myself entering another period of darkness. And lo and behold, who comes to pull me out of it…a second time…?

A few months ago my project manager at Space Telescope asked me if I was interested in coming back to the Institute part time. I said Sure! I loved that job, the working environment was wonderful compared to the bottomless pits I’d worked in previously. And it was doing work I was good at, and for the space program. We are adding text to the textbooks. We harvest light from near the dawn of time and bring it to the world to study and learn from. How many times in a lifetime do you get to be part of something like that. Of course I’m interested. No need to convince me. And actually transitioning to part time work was what I’d initially wanted to do, but was told it wasn’t being offered then.

So we had lunch, and we talked, and we talked. And I went back to the office for a new round of talks and interviews about the part time position they had an opening for. And while I was there I was greeted happily by people I’d worked there with previously. Hi Bruce…nice to see you again…  I felt wanted, I felt needed. Those are good things. And I signed the paperwork and later this month I go back to the Institute part time.

And I’m pretty sure this keeps me from falling completely back into it, like it did before. Just to walk around that campus and know that I’m a part of everything going on there will be a wonderful feeling. And at some point I know I’ll be back to doing my art in my spare time, and using my cameras again. And since I’ll have vacation again I’ll be taking new road trips and seeing new sights, and visiting the land of my birth again in a better mindset.

In retrospect the pathways out of a darkness like that can seem strange and random but also somehow preordained. Maybe some kind spirit in the great beyond is still looking kindly on me, still putting random lucky breaks in my path. I had a meeting with my project manager a few days ago to get some detail about what I’ll be working on when I return, so I can hit the ground running. Afterward I met a couple of my co-workers who asked me in a friendly but curious way why I was coming back out of retirement. They themselves are probably getting close to it and cannot wait.

I explained that having so much time all to myself turned out not to be so good for me and they made a few friendly jokes about it but I can appreciate how they wouldn’t totally understand. They have families, they have kids, maybe even grandkids now, and wives they love to keep them company and keep them engaged and active when they retire. I had a lifetime of failure at the one critical task of adulthood to look back on, and nothing to look forward to. And now I have this wonderful adventure in space exploration to look forward to. And I feel alive again.

I’ll keep working it for as long as my health and congressional funding hold out. It’ll be a good life. Not the one I was hoping for, but a Much better one than I had any reasonable expectation of having. I had enough money in my retirement accounts, and in my social security benefit since I waited two years to claim it, to live comfortably until Death tapped me on the shoulder.  And now you know why I came back out of retirement instead.

When you walk through a storm
Keep your chin up high
And don’t be afraid of the dark.

At the end of the storm
Is a golden sky
And the sweet, silver song of a lark.

Walk on through the wind,
Walk on through the rain,
Though your dreams be tossed and blown.

Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart,
And you’ll never walk alone!
You’ll never walk alone

I got a notice the other day that Harlan Ellison’s Last Dangerous Visions was finally being published. So I just now ordered a copy. I kinda figured it would take his dying before Last was ever published. It’ll be interesting to see their take on why he never got it out.

It was originally announced for publication in 1973. Over the decades, like the Flying Dutchman, Last Dangerous Visions had become a legendary ghost book. Sightings would occasionally be reported but eventually all were found to be mirages. This lead to more than perpetual fan disappointment. The writers who submitted to this collection did so on the basis of how fantastic the previous two were, and they gave Ellison their best stories…never to be seen again due to the contract they signed preventing them from publishing elsewhere before Last Dangerous Visions was published. Ellison eventually, so I’m told, released some of them from that contract after decades, but it created a lot of bad feelings. Not that Ellison was ever afraid of creating bad feelings. But some of those writers have since died.

I have the first two volumes and I’m really interested to read what’s in this one. Finally. But even more so to understand what the hell happened.

I should add to this, something I posted on Facebook that I neglected to post here after Ellison passed away, about why I like the works of Harlan Ellison, “controversial” and infuriating though he could be. This is the closing narration from the Twilight Zone version of Paladin Of The Lost Hour, a story that’s also part of his Angry Candy short story collection. It is a story he said, capped his preoccupation with themes of friendship, ethics, courage, responsibility, and the gaining of wisdom.

“Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment. A blessing of the 18th Egyptian dynasty: ‘God be between you and harm in all the empty places you walk.'”

That could pass for a good epitaph for Harlan Ellison. Yes I’m quite sure he earned much of the anger directed at him in his life, but also the love. None of us are of a single weave of thread. And those of us who have walked in those empty places knew after we’d read him, that we were not alone. He walked there with more bravery and clarity than most of us could bear, so we could find our way. He could stare down Nietzsche’s abyss, and the abyss would blink first.

I was reminded the other day, while in the ER, that there is a non-trivial likeness in the experience of being gay and of being atheist. I’m in the ER because I’d become so weak and unable to balance myself it was getting scary, but I am visiting my brother in Oceano California and I don’t have a local healthcare provider here. So I checked with my insurance to see who was in my network and it turned out the local hospital is.

Long story short, they found nothing that could be causing my problem. All the tests they ran not only came back good, but excellent for my age. So I will need to go over all this further with my cardiologist and my new GP (the previous one retired) when I get back to Charm City. That said, I am feeling much better now so maybe it was just a passing infection of some kind.

While in the ER, a technician came to do some paperwork on me. I say “paperwork” but it’s all in digital form these days, and then you get a paper printout when you are discharged. One of the questions she asked me was did I have a religious affiliation.

I said no, and for the briefest of moments, hesitated. I could have left it at that but it felt like I was closeting some part of myself. It didn’t feel right. It felt like I was ducking. So I added “I’m an atheist.”

No problem. She simply nodded and took it down. And that was that. But I took note of how much it felt like one of those little sudden moments a gay guy gets periodically when you are asked some innocuous question but it pertains to your relationship status and out of the blue you have to make this snap decision, do I duck or do I come out.

I am proud to say whenever this has happened I’ve dug in my heels and come out. But it’s always a bit nerve wracking. You never know what to expect. I blogged about a particularly bad outcome Here. Karma there was the guy who fired me and insisted it wasn’t because I am gay, was later arrested for not being able to keep his hands off young girls.

There’s a scene in Howard Cruse’ magnum opus Stuck Rubber Baby where the main character Toland Polk, describes his coming out during the memorial services of an openly gay friend who was lynched, and his lover in present day New York City avers “Say it once in public and the grapevine’ll take it from there.” Yes. But no. Probably within your own community and family that’s true, but you will find yourself coming out of the closet again and again all throughout your life in these little unexpected sudden out of the blue moments of truth.

You come out not simply to assert your own personal truth, and not just simply to stand up for yourself and your right to live an honest life, but also to be living testimony to the stereotypical falsehoods of who people like yourself are supposed to be. Yes I am a gay man. Yes I am an atheist. Whatever you thought that makes someone I’m a living example of one such and you have now been gifted with a small slice of truth, a living fact.

You’re welcome.

The thing about good fantasy fiction is it’s modern myth making that you can appreciate on many different levels.

I watched the premiere first two episodes of Percy Jackson and The Olympians on Disney Plus as soon as they were released, and all throughout the story I felt an intense kinship with the characters in it and their struggles, so distant in time, age, and circumstance though they were to me. I’m a gay man who came out to himself in December of 1971. I know how it is to become a target for monsters of the human kind when I reached a certain age. I know how it is to be part of a minority that is not safe in the world.  And I know how vital it is for us to have our safe spaces. And given my family background, I know just how it is to feel estranged from my own dad, although he completely accepted me once we were allowed to be together. I didn’t have to fight my way to it like Percy does. But my own dad had…his own issues. Like Percy, it was my mom who raised me, loved me unconditionally, and set a good example for me. At the end of the second episode, I knew just how he felt.

I came to the Percy Jackson books by way of The Sun and The Star, which is about the same sex couple Nico and Will. I began reading the books, in a backwards kinda way, to find out more about the couple, how they met, how they have navigated the world Rick Riordan created. This production feels very much like the Riordan books that I have read so far, and the production values are top notch. Definitely watching the entire thing.

I got Disney Plus a bit over a year ago so I could watch The Mandalorian and the documentary about Disney song writer Howard Ashman. It’s been worth the money to me.

My annual reminder of why the various faiths and secular peoples celebrate Solstice this time of year, under various names. Or as I wrote some years ago: …because a friend is uneasy about saying “Merry Christmas” this year. There was more to this post but I won’t repeat it because it’s irrelevant. However it began with a slam at Andrew Sullivan via Matthew Yglesias who noted that Sullivan seemed to think holiday cheer is a liberal conspiracy. Why not say “Happy Christmas” (it’s an anglicism apparently) Too much diversity. “Don’t despair. It will all be over soon enough.” Just shut up Andrew. There’s more to it than the trappings of any one religion. Something deeper, more ancient, and more reverent. Something perhaps only those of us in the high northern latitudes get to appreciate this time of year…

(The following is edited a tad from previous versions…)

The holidays have always been a semi-solitary time for me. Being an only child probably made the holidays in my house quieter then most. After present opening I basically sat on my hands the rest of the day. I was always told it was impolite to call up my friends to play. They were supposed to be spending Christmas with their families. So for me, the best day was always the day after Christmas, when all the neighborhood kids would get together and compare our loot. That’s still basically the way it is for me. I get together with friends and family before and after the holiday, but the day itself is my quiet time.

I am not a misanthrope, but a hate phoniness. I dislike advertising, intensely, and especially when that advertising takes something real and wonderful, like love and sex, and turns it into a gimmick to sell cheap junk no sane person would want in their house. Every year of my life I have watched the holidays become more and more commercial. But this one time of year I make an exception. I will never hate the Christmas trimmings, the Santa Clones, the plastic holly, shopping mall creches, plug in candles, and mass marketed holiday spirit. For this one time of the year I am willing to let it all in, and even relish in it.

I remember one Christmas day when I was a kid, while my folks prepared dinner, I walked way out past the apartments into a field by a small creek. I wandered further then I normally went and sat down by a big rock. It was cold, and gray and there were no other kids outside because they were all inside doing whatever they did with their families that day. There weren’t even any birds or animals that I could see. The temperature was something like in the teens and nothing moved. The only sound was the wind which was gusting very strongly through the trees; even when it wasn’t blowing in my face I could still hear it howling somewhere not far by, as though it was looking for something.

The trees surrounding me were bare wooden sticks held against a grey sky. Their fallen leaves on the ground had been compacted by several rains and at least one snowfall that had only partly disappeared. There were some ice patches left on the ground and the creek was frozen solid. I was a very slightly built little kid and even now being warm when I’m outside is something I take care about. I turned my face towards the sun and I couldn’t feel the slightest shred of heat.

I remember thinking that if I was a caveman who had never seen the likes of this before, I would be sure that the world was dying. I had a pretty good idea then of how the motion of the Earth worked to produce the seasons; I tried to block that knowledge out and think of what it would be like to experience winter without knowing, to watch everything get colder and colder until there was nothing left but the wind restlessly looking for something else that moved. I think I understood then why some people are such sourpusses, and why I wasn’t one of them.

Solstice are the most ancient of rites for a reason. I don’t mind the plastic lighted Santas or the relentless Christmas muzak in the shopping centers, or the wire reindeer with motorized heads. I don’t mind the relentless crowds of shop til you drop shoppers. I will even accept manufactured exuberance side by side with the heartfelt joy of total strangers this time of year. I walk among it all, drinking it in, taking time to find something, some little gift or card, to give to the ones who make my life sweet, even if it means wading through forests of vinyl pine. Tell yourself that it is tradition and all in good fun if you want, but it is really nothing less than an ancient reflex that arises when the earth grows cold and still and the sunlight wanes and you are surprised by how quickly the night comes, to be good to your neighbors, and tell the ones close to your heart that you love them, and blaze defiantly into the night.

When I was a kid, the comic books that attracted my attention mostly had science-fiction themes or they were humor titles. But I had to be careful. My bitter Baptist grandmother threw a lot of them out when I wasn’t there to protect them from her. She would say they weren’t fit for children, but I’m pretty sure it was I thought they were fun and the son of Bill Garrett wasn’t allowed fun. I had a bunch of Scrooge McDuck comics that would be collectors items today if she hadn’t put them in the trash. But then, so I’m told, a lot of kids of my generation have similar stories. Thank you and rot in Hell Dr. Wertham.

My only interest in anything Super was the TV Superman played by George Reeves, but the Superman comics of that time were hit and miss with me. I only have a few left from those years. Oddly, so it may seem, the early Batman comics struck me has having a kind of science-fiction element to them because that character had no super powers, but he had a lot of futuristic gadgets. Back then DC would publish Annuals, which were thicker reprints of much older stories, and that’s where I came to know that golden age Batman and Robin.

I had high hopes when I saw the first TV ads for the series by William Dozer. But it almost completely ruined the character for me. I realize it’s still enjoyed by a lot of people for it’s campiness but Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey (who also did Action Philosophers) in The Comic Book History of Comics really hit it on the head in their chapter on Pop Art. In it they describe how Dozer, a TV producer was given the job of bringing the character to TV by the network. So he bought a few Batman comics and his initial conclusion after reading through them was that putting Batman on TV was nuts.

But then he had the idea of going so over the top with it, making it so square and so serious, that adults would find it amusing. And it was a hit. The network’s market research showed that it was a hit with small kids who took it seriously and loved the colorful POW ZING, and also with adults who thought it was hilarious comedy. But teenagers Hated it. Van Lente and Dunlavey suggest that it was because that age group realized their culture was being mocked by it.

That was me. But back then I stayed tuned for the gadgets and that cool Batmobile, and also watching some big name guest stars ham it up. But it quickly became tiresome and I stopped watching. Worse, by then the comics had become infected with camp too, and I stopped buying, except for my usual science-fiction titles. And Mad Magazine, which did a killer parody of the TV show. I still have that issue. Yeech!

Time passes…the universe expands…and none of the later Batman and Superman movies and cartoons did anything for me. I’m sorry, not even Chris Reeve’s Superman movies did either. I’d say he was the best of the lot, but I just could not get into the stories. And I began to realize that part of the problem with bringing those characters to life was they needed to be set in the timeframes they were created in, because they really didn’t make much sense in the here and now.

Then Batman The Animated Series came out, and I was wowed.

It was Miller’s Dark Knight (which I liked the first couple issues of and then hated the rest…don’t get me started on Frank Miller…) meets golden age Batman…and they set it in an art deco Gotham City that seemed as if it was still 1930s/40s but also today. The art direction was pitch perfect: it set the character squarely in both its time frame and ours, which I didn’t think was possible. But you can do things with animation you can’t, or can’t easily with live action. I still think that the Gotham City they created for that series was among its most stunning achievements. But the voice actors they got for it was another.

None of it would have worked without the great writing, and none of those stories would have worked without the voice artists. I had no idea that Mark Hamill was voicing the Joker, but the voice he gave that character was perfect. There’s a YouTube video of Hamill at a convention panel somewhere and he’s asked to give that Heath Ledger Joker line “Why so serious” but in His Joker voice. And he does and the audience roars with cheers and applause.

All of the voice actors who worked on that series were perfect. The characters weren’t campy clowns mocking the audience anymore, they were integral parts of the story that made the stories make sense.

And especially Kevin Conroy’s Bruce Wayne/Batman. The series rescued that character for me from Dozer and camp, and Miller and his bitter strongman fascism. He made the character larger than life, because those characters have to be that, and yet his Bruce Wayne/Batman was so very Very human. In it’s way as amazing an achievement as the art direction. It all worked, and Conroy’s voice acting was a big reason why the character worked, and why everything else worked.

And now he’s gone and I feel the loss of it, because he did so much for those of us who really wanted to like that character and his stories but just couldn’t for all the stuff the studios had done to him.

And now I understand more how Conroy could make that character come to life in a way nobody else could. This is from a Facebook gay superheroes page I follow (Gay League). Representation matters…not just to us, but to everyone. Because our stories resonate deeply in the human status. Everyone benefits by hearing our stories too.

 

I cried a little today when I heard Kevin Conroy had exited the stage for the final time. His death is the second time he’s elicited tears from me and I’m generally not much of a cryer, especially where celebrities are concerned.

A little background ( and by little, I mean a lot. Hang in there. It’s worth it):

I have to admit, I was never the biggest fan of Batman. I’d seen and loved Tim Burton’s “Batman” in 1989. But, even that was not enough to make me care for the character much.

Of course, I liked Batman as a mainstay of the Justice League. But his inclusion in their exploits (and reruns of the 60s era television series) was pretty much where my interest ended.

It was 1992 and I was visiting my aunt who had the television on for my younger cousins.

I had my head buried in a book, much like I always did, when I first heard the iconic theme song of “Batman, the Animated Series” and Kevin Conroy’s distinctive, “I am VENGEANCE! I am the NIGHT! I AM BATMAN!”

And. I. was. hooked!

Batman, the Animated Series was my new jam. I was obsessed with finding and watching every episode I could find from then on.

If I had to pick a favorite episode from the first season, undoubtedly it would be “Beware the Gray Ghost” featuring my other favorite Batman, Adam West, as the titular Gray Ghost – Gotham’s first crime fighting vigilante in the continuity of the show.

Conroy would go on to portray the DCAU Batman for over two decades in “Superman Adventures”, “Justice League” and “Justice League Unlimited” as well as many other projects featuring the character over the years.

I truly hate when fans claim a character in this way. But, in this case it must be said: Kevin Conroy was MY Batman. When I think of the Dark Knight Detective, I think of Conroy. Every time without fail. All other Batmen are measured by his standard.

It’s always his voice I hear in my head when I read the comics. Kevin Conroy (and Bruce Timm, natch) made me like Batman way more than I ever would have otherwise.

The stories he starred in made me actually care about this privileged orphan boy millionaire who had a fetish for dressing in a leather bat suit and beating people up accompanied by a pre-teen boy wearing little more than a domino mask and a cape, little green undies and elf shoes (okay, when they finally introduced Robin in the show, he was wearing pants and boots, but you get the idea).

When Conroy was briefly featured in the Episode 2 of the WB’s live action Arrowverse “Crisis on Infinite Earths” crossover event as Bruce Wayne, I cheered!
This was *the* man!

The only actor I feel who ever brought true depth to the character was reprising his role -LIVE ACTION- even if only for a single scene and I. Was. There. For. It.

I never knew until recently why he resonated so much with me, why – out of dozens of portrayals over the years, some by the biggest, most sought after actors of their time – Kevin Conroy’s Batman was the only one who ever caught my interest.

And here, those who have followed from the beginning of this screed will be happy to learn, is where my first set of Conroy inspired tears were made manifest.
Earlier this year, shortly after Kevin Conroy came out publicly as a gay man in his 60s, DC Comics published their 2022 Pride Issue which featured a number of Queer characters in their stable.

I have mixed feelings about those sort of things because on the one hand I am very wary of non-Queer people who profitize and corporatize Queerness into a commodity.

But on the other hand, I understand how vitally important representation in such things can be for young Queer people grasping for something – anything – which make them feel less an outcast, less a misfit, more accepted for who they are and more loved by those around them.

I usually hold my nose and buy the Pride issues anyway despite their exorbitant pricing and dubious quality as a “special edition” (whatever that is) because I know DC will only keep making Queer interest material so long as it sells.

This time around, the yearly Pride issue contained a story about a hero we hadn’t heard from in a completely Queer context before.

Kevin Conroy – MY Batman – had written “Finding Batman”, a biographical comic at the end of the issue exploring the trials and tribulations of coming of age during the height of the AIDS epidemic, of being a closeted actor in an environment which was completely unforgiving to gay actors, of the many times someone casually called him “faggot” as if that were acceptable.

He spoke about living a double life, being one thing in private and another in public, hiding who he truly was to protect himself while watching practically his whole generation of gay men succumb to AIDS while the world just…watched.

It was a story of growing up Roman Catholic while watching his world fall apart around him. It was a story of a young man whose parents divorced as his father succumbed to alcoholism and eventually death.

It was a story of watching helpless as his brother was taken away inch by inch by schizophrenia at the same time friends and colleagues were wasting away in hospitals dying of a disease no one wanted to talk about.

It was a story of survival and a story of triumph.

Finally, the masked cowl could come off and he could be seen as who he really was: a phenomenal actor who inspired an entire generation of comic and animation fans-who, as it happened, was also a gay man. Finally, he could openly embrace who he was, his own story fully without fear.

Suddenly, this man who had always played a role in both his personal and professional lives could take off that mask and be who he wanted and needed to be.

As the short narrative drawn by the excellent J. Bone came to a close, I shed a few bittersweet tears as I thought about my own journey, my own “secret identity”, my own experience with AIDS both as a gay man and a person living with HIV.

Suddenly, I got it. I knew why Conroy’s portrayal resonated so perfectly for me when Hollywood heartthrobs the like of George Clooney, Val Kilmer, Bruce Willis, Christian Bale and Robert Pattenson looked good in the suit but ultimately fell short.

In fact, I feel like all of them were adept at playing either Bruce Wayne or Batman consistently but couldn’t quite nail the other. But, not Kevin Conroy. He could do both flawlessly and made it seem effortless.

I know what you’re thinking, “We get it. It’s because he’s gay and you’re gay and blah blah…”

Who TF is telling this story anyhow?

Yes, acknowledging my people for their achievements is important. The fact he’s a gay man is a definite plus. But, it goes far deeper than that.

I’m a gay man, yes. But before I even knew what that meant, I was a comic book nerd and like him or not, like all comic book nerds, I KNEW Batman!
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Conroy may not have had washboard abs or bulging biceps to fill out the leather and latex outfits. But, he did have authenticity of character. He practically was Batman in a way none of the other hunky hunks who played the role could even approach in their clumsy heteronormativity.

Conroy could convincingly play a man with a double life because he had lived a double life most of his life.

He could play a man driven by tragedy and trauma because he *had* experienced loss, tragedy and trauma on an almost daily basis.

He could play a successful man who was awash with guilt and anger because he had survived while his friends and family were not so lucky.

He was believable because that imaginary mask was a reality for him.

As I write this, I’m streaming “Batman: The Animated Series” on HBO MAX and remembering all the times as a young gay man I lost myself in an episode of the series.

As a few more tears escape the near watertight edges of my eyes, I want to thank Kevin Conroy for all the times he was there for me and other kids both Queer and straight when we didn’t have anywhere else to go.

For some of us, no doubt, Batman saved us from our own traumas, our own trials and tribulations, our own masks and double lives and Kevin Conroy was the vessel through which he acted.

I can think of few stories more inspiring than knowing Kevin Conroy-the best, the ONLY Batman – got to take off his mask and be his authentic self after years of hiding his trauma from the world and living a double life for the benefit of his public life and his career. Would that we all could come to terms with ourselves so completely.

I only wish he’d been able to enjoy it longer.

Rest well, old friend.

You are missed.

But never, ever forgotten.

-F. Daniel Kent

 

Throwback Thursday (are we still doing that?). This is from an old Polaroid a friend probably snapped of me while I was sitting on the balcony of the apartment in Rockville (now North Bethesda!) mom and I lived in during the 60s/70s/80s. I would have been in my twenties. I would have still had the Pinto and probably was working at the Best Products just on the other side of the fence between them and the apartments.

I can tell a lot about the timeframe that this was taken because it has to be sometime in the mid 70s, before that awful couple years I wrote about yesterday. It’s in my face. I look at this and see someone still comfortable in the life he has, confident that even better times are just around the corner. A boyfriend. A good job that paid well (I was going to be a newspaper photographer). A place of my own. Everything was still possible.

As to why I had it taken…I’m not sure. This would have been before the microcomputer days, let alone the Internet, so it wouldn’t have been to post to an online profile. This is a Polaroid, I had no scanner then, and getting copies off a Polaroid wasn’t simple. So this was a one-off. I think I had it taken just to have a couple of me that I actually liked. There are a few other poses in the set but I liked this one best. Which explains why it’s a Polaroid: I could look over each one and decide if I needed another.

The problem was always that I didn’t have many of myself that I liked. By then I was well aware that I wasn’t very good looking, but every now and then I saw a good photo of me so I wasn’t overly concerned about my looks at that age. My teeth were very crooked though, and I was extremely self conscious about that. In every photo of me from that period I’m always smiling with my mouth closed. You almost can’t see the smile here, but it’s there in the corner of my mouth. That problem wouldn’t get fixed until I was in my thirties when a friend kindly financed some dental work for me and pointed me to a super good dentist.

This image is from a time before the Internet, personal computers, cable TV, and cell phones let alone smartphones. I’m pretty sure this was before 1977 and Anita Bryant’s rampage on gay civil rights in Dade County Florida. I had listen to my shortwave radio to get the result of the vote in Dade County because none of the mainstream network news companies bothered to cover it until much later. News for and about gay Americans was not fit to print in those days. If I wanted that news, and I didn’t want to drive into DC to the Lambda Rising bookstore, I had to go to a seedy adult bookstore in Wheaton and walk past racks of pretty hard core heterosexual pornography to get a copy of the Washington Blade and The Advocate. The subway wouldn’t be built out beyond the beltway in Montgomery County until 1978 when the station at Silver Spring opened. After that I could drive into Silver Spring and hop on the Metro to get to DuPont Circle and Lambda Rising. When the Twinbook Metro station opened in 1984 I could just walk from the apartment to the subway and it was a straight shot down the red line to DuPont Circle and back.

I was so happy not to have to go past those heterosexual porn magazines ever again. I mean…okay…whatever floats your boat. But…jeeze… And yet, in many quarters of American culture, not just the pulpit thumping churches, but also mainstream news media, TV, movies, and magazines, the youngster you see in this photo was regarded as a deviant threat to American society, family values, and civilization itself.

That is the world you are seeing in this image. TVs still had vacuum tubes, telephones had a wire connecting them to the wall, you got your news from the morning or afternoon newspaper, or the nightly network news broadcasts around dinnertime. Am radio played mostly music or sports, music came on vinyl LPs or cassettes, big box department stores were still a thing, and bookstores and newstands were everywhere, but you couldn’t get any gay publications in them because gay people like the kid in this photo were almost universally regarded with contempt and loathing. But the kid you see there was still pretty confident of his future. Bright eyed and bushy tailed and ready to meet tomorrow. He never found a boyfriend.

I took my morning walk here in Disney Springs. I wanted to check out the Disney stores here just to see if any Pride stuff was still being sold. I began to wonder if Disney wasn’t pulling back on that a bit after I looked in the pin traders store and didn’t see any rainbows.

I shouldn’t have worried…

There was a Pride Collection stand in the Disney Store, right where everyone could see it, and it had customers. I have a card with money on it from points I’ve accumulated and just now I used up a little over half of my Disney Money. 

That mug especially gets to me. This isn’t cheap marketing. I was here a month after the Pulse murders. I saw the shock in everyone’s faces here and in the surrounding community of Orlando. It changed the mindset here.

Yes we are a market. Disney leaves no money on the table. But what happened at Pulse woke everyone up. 49 dead, 53 wounded. I saw how shocked Orlando was. I saw the shock in the Disney cast members. Some, seeing my rainbow Mickey pin (which back then was the Peace Rainbow, not the Pride rainbow…but it was close enough) had stories they told me about friends and co-workers who were either there that night, or knew someone who was. Everyone seemed shell shocked by it. There’s woke for you. After that, the Pride merchandise began appearing. No more take our money and look the other way. Now we are embraced.

We see you Ron DeSantis. We see you MAGA. Our families see you too. And all our friends. We are embraced. We are family. We Belong. You will never change that.

I was strolling around the Disney Springs Marketplace Co-Op and saw they’re busy with celebrating the Walt Disney World 50th with all sorts of call backs to the 70s. It just brought it all back again…that time in my life. I’d forgotten until I started coming back here again how much Disney’s vision of the future had been wired into me back then.

I complain about the changes going on around here, and Chapek’s seemingly bottomless need to squeeze the guests. But tell you what…as long I can walk into the parks knowing I’m with (mostly) other Disney kids, and it’s still a small world after all, and there’s a great big beautiful tomorrow shining at the end of every day, I reckon I’ll keep coming back.

My inner Mouseketeer, geeky, socially awkward, gay, knows he belongs here. It’s a small world after all.

There’s the baggage you carry that’s yours, that got dumped onto you at some point in your life, and then there’s the baggage you carry that belongs to others. Oftentimes you will be told that you don’t have to carry someone else’s baggage too. But letting go of theirs is not always easy, let alone possible. More often than not it’s easier to let go of your own, because that’s something you have control over. 

I retired last February, spent some time with my brother out in California, then came back to my little Baltimore rowhouse and began the work of integrating what was in my office at the Institute into my house. In my previous post, Walking Through Hell To Get To Heaven I mentioned that after working for 23 years and a few weeks for the Space Telescope Science Institute I’d managed to get a few awards and recognition for the work I did, along with some photos with the astronauts, and that now I was trying to find a place for it all on my den walls.

It’s been going through all that, seeing for myself the evidence of work I did on Hubble, James Webb, and Roman, over the course of nearly half my adult working life, that I think I’ve finally shaken off the low expectations laid on me when I was a kid. I’ll be 69 in a few days. It’s taken that long, and seeing that I might not have enough room on my den walls for all my awards and certificates.

I’m still the weird art kid I always was, still the techno nerd, still the guy in the conversation who can pull out all sorts of strange references out at a moment’s notice because he sees a connection others probably just find…you know…Weird. It’s taken me this long to allow myself to be that and not let that Weird Geek Kid baggage attach to me anymore. I’m retired. I don’t care. You get this close to the end of the road and it improves your perspective about things like that.

Homophobia for example. For most of my adult life I believed that I avoided a lot of internalized homophobia because it was falling in love with a classmate that woke me up to the reality of my sexual nature. But while I never hated myself, never felt the least bit of shame about it, the cultural hatred and contempt still left its mark. You get the boot from one workplace after another when they find out they hired a faggot and eventually you come to expect it. Low expectations again. And I have met lots of gay men who were smart, kind hearted, hard working, thoroughly decent people living well below their potential because striving for something better just hurt too much. 

All my adult life I searched for someone to love and cherish and make a life together with.  Someone decent, honest, responsible. Someone that in a better world I might have met at a church social or youth retreat or a coffee house like The Lost And Found. But the good boys of my generation were terrified. They didn’t want their parents to hate them, the didn’t want God to hate them. And should their parents have found out anyway, and told them to pack themselves off to a therapist or a nice ex-gay ministry, they’d pack their bags and dutifully headed to the nearest one. Yes mom, yes dad, I will put my heart and my soul and whatever fulfilled and contented love life I might have had, put them in this little coffin and bury it. Because I am your good son.

They talk about sin. I don’t think they really get the concept. Sin is telling a kid they’re worthless and making them believe it. Sin is poisoning a kid’s ability to love and accept love from another right at the cusp of their adulthood. 

We all carried that baggage to some degree back then. And still do. For many in my generation it will always be a time before Stonewall. But the painful thing to realize is we carry each other’s baggage too. I carry your baggage, as well as mine. In our solitude. In our loneliness.

This Twitter thread from user Electra Rhode (@electra_rhodes) was actually very good for my heart…

Tube on strike, I dawdled to Paddington on Friday. Passing the old wrought iron sign for Pizza Express, I was reminded of an event 30+ years ago, when I got caught up in a drama that resulted in a divorce, two marriages and many changed lives.

It began with a heart attack

Like Friday, I was ambling along the Marylebone Rd.

Coming towards me are two guys, one a bit older than the other, nicely dressed, laughing, backs of their hands brushing occasionally, as they walked side by side. It’s 1pm & I assume they’ve just had lunch or are on their way.

The older man stops in the middle of the pavement & clutches his upper arm. And drops to the ground. The other guy shrieks, I might do too. I’ve just done a first aid course. I throw my jacket on the ground, kneel down, fish out the mouth guard thing we’d been given & start cpr.

I keep going with heart attack guy (his name’s Tom, btw). His friend, (Tim) wails at our side. In this distance I think I can hear sirens, but it might just be my own heart beating faster than is ideal. Bystanders comfort Tim, someone definitely calls an ambulance.

It feels like 6 years, but only 10 minutes later a paramedic nudges me aside. Good job. He says. I struggle to my feet. Tim and I cling to each other as we wait to see what’s coming. Tom’s loaded into the back, and Good Job Jeff tells us which hospital they’ll go to.

Tim & I are left at the side of the road. The looky loos disperse, & I ask Tim if he wants me to come to the hospital. Better not, he says, they’ll call his wife. Tim isn’t the lover I thought him to be, he’s Tom’s assistant at a fancy merchant bank. Oh. I say. Yes. He replies.

We swop addresses, me because I want to know if Tom makes it, Tim because he’s been snotting up my best cloth hankie which I’d forgotten I’d given him, and he’d like to return it. We pause then. On the corner of the street, at all kinds of crossroads.

Maybe tell him, I say. Maybe. Tim replies. Neither of us checking in on what exactly that means.

Three weeks later there’s a hankie in the post. Washed and pressed. A little note inside.

He’s ok. I told him. We’ll see. Xx T.

Alright, I think. We’ll see.

A month later I get a letter in the post. This is Sheila, Tom’s wife, and boy is she pissed. Legitimately.

She got my address from Biff, who got it from Tom, who got it from Tim. Who, if you remember, got it from me. Wait. You say. Who the hell is Biff? He was best man at Sheila and Tom’s wedding. Back in the day. I find this out three weeks later after a flurry of post goes each way.

So. Tim has told Tom he loves him. Tom has told Sheila he might love Tim (sorry and all), Sheila has cried at anyone who’ll listen. And now Biff has written to me. He loves Sheila, do I think he should say? I ask him if there’s a reason why he shouldn’t. I wait. And wait.

Roll it forward a year. Apart from a Christmas card, a bunch of birthday flowers & a postcard to my pa (idk, it’s a thing) it’s gone quiet. I think no more it except when I walk down the Marylebone Road or blow my nose.

Then a wedding invite turns up on the mat. Sheila & Biff.

The wedding is fancy & I buy a new hat (dark blue velvet, thanks for asking). It matches my best shoes. Tim & Tom give Sheila away & pay for the champagne & flowers! So, that’s a better surprise than the last one they gave her. Biff says, hey the best man finally got the bride.

Roll it forwards another few years, when equal marriage comes in, and there’s another invite on my mantelpiece. Tim and Tom.

It’s a glorious day. I wear the same hat, but I’ve got new shoes. Biff and Sheila fund the drinks and flowers. A gay men’s chorus turn up and sing.

More years pass. The hankie is getting tattered, so I stick it in a clip frame on the wall. Occasional postcards still turn up. Then there’s a lull.

I still think of them though, when I walk past that wrought iron sign. Once or twice a year. Or if someone asks about the frame.

A while later, there’s a black edged card in the mail. Tom’s heart finally did for him.

Tim says, we got almost 30 years, because you learned CPR on a first aid at work course, that your boss made you do.

Thanks, El, he writes, for saving all our lives.

Wow.  Just…wow… Thanks, El, for reminding me how good life can be after all…how good people can be after all.

A certain someone once told me to stop living in the past. The present he said, is a gift, that’s why it’s called the “present”. Ha, ha…yes. I’ve often wondered where he heard that one. But I know what he was trying to tell me.

It’s just the geek in me has to consider these hory old bromides seriously. The past is the foundation of the present,. We are where we are, because of how we got here. For better or worse, our past is what we have to build all our tomorrows on.

But a house without a foundation at all can never be stable. It’ll get blown away at the slightest bit of wind.

I revisit my past often, to better understand the person I am. I’d advise A Certain Someone to do the same, but I suspect he had it pretty bad back there, whereas bad as mine sometimes was, in retrospect I had it golden compared to other gay kids of our generation.

I had a dream about my high school early this morning. It was very painful. Not to start with though…

In this dream I am a young adult. I’m bicycling around the old neighborhoods. I find myself in front of the main entrance of my high school, Woodward, across the service road where the school buses park. There is some sort of event going on…lots of people of all ages going inside, tables and banners and colorful flags out in front of the doors and the auditorium.

I have an urge to go inside and look around, but I feel as though I’m not allowed inside and everyone would know that. But I want to look around, and maybe take a few reference photos for A Coming Out Story. So I walk my bike across the street to a nearby bike rack.

I realize I don’t have a bicycle lock on me. But then I notice there is one, in a holder in the bike frame. It’s an odd type I’ve never seen or experienced before but in the dream it all makes sense. It’s just a small chrome plated block of metal that rests in a holder in the frame. There is a key lock at one end and I pull a key for it out of my pocket, and remove it from its holder. It fits into a slot in the front wheel yoke when the wheel is turned all the way to the left, and blocks the front wheel from turning. The theory seems to be that a thief can’t ride off with the bike if the front wheel is stuck to the hard left. Of course one could always just throw the bike in the back of a car or truck, but in this dream I don’t think about that. I’m in a hurry to get inside.

My dreams often geek out like this.

I figure if I just act like I belong there nobody will notice me. It’s behavior that has served me well as a photographer. I walk inside and see that people are gathering in the cafeteria. There are also a lot of people walking around in the hallway leading to the cafeteria. Just like outside, there are tables inside, colorful flags and banners. It looks like the tables are selling or giving away souvenirs and keepsakes for whatever event is happening today. There is no text on any of the banners, just splashes of color everywhere. Everyone is happy. Everyone is having a good time. Smiles and happy conversation all around.

Inside the cafeteria it looks like a catering company is providing the food, as the kitchen area is empty. There are tables of food and various juice and soft drinks. It’s all high quality stuff. I’ve done wedding photography where it was like this at the reception. The dress code today seems to be everyday casual, so it’s not a very formal event whatever it is. People are sitting at the tables or standing or milling around. Everyone is chatting amicably with someone near them. This is a happy crowd.

The hallway outside, I notice, is much Much bigger than I remembered. Wider and taller. It’s become a grand hallway, but still keeping that 60s modernist flavor. I will always love that architecture. I step out into it, and walk toward the classrooms. I want to see the art rooms again. Every hallway, every staircase, has been greatly enlarged, made grand, but here there are no people and all is quiet. As I go up the stairs I can see sunlight from outside shining in and creating huge spaces of beautiful light and shadow. I reach for my cellphone to take some photos, and realize I left it back in my car.

Yes, somehow, and dreams do this to me all the time, the bicycle has become a car. My little green Geo Prism specifically this time. I’ve no idea why that car specifically, but it might have some dream connection with the fact that it was my first new bought car when I started making good money as a contract software developer, and I could live on my own for the first time in my life, and not in anyone’s basement. The Prism (I named it Aya) is a touchstone, a marker at point where my life took a turn for the massively better. The life I have now is nothing like the life I was expecting to have. I run out to the car, see the cell phone on the passenger seat, grab it, and run back inside.

But now all those grand spaces around the classrooms are full of people wandering about. The event, whatever it is that’s happening here, has grown in size.

I begin snapping some shots of the grand spaces inside. Like downstairs the hallways have tables and colorful banners and flags and people either selling or giving out keepsakes. I don’t look closely at what they are, I am focused on getting my shots.

I wander into the art rooms. Inside instead of all the art tables and stools, there is a big merchandise counter with friendly looking youngsters selling or giving out I can’t say which, more keepsakes and souvenirs. There are people of all ages looking the stuff over, and also milling about enjoying themselves.

I take a few shots and mutter to myself, “Well I guess that’s enough.”

An older man nearby gives me an odd look (I’m still a young adult in this dream). I suppose without context what I just said is strange, so I explain. “I just wanted to get some reference photos for a cartoon I’m working on…”

…and then I realize.

“…because this place doesn’t exist anymore. They tore it down.”

Now the man is looking at me like I’m crazy. But a younger man standing next to me speaks up.

“He’s right. They tore this place down. It’s not here anymore.”

And then it all fades away around me, and I’m standing in the middle of a field of wrecking ball art. Concrete blocks and bricks and twisted steel beams scattered all around me, none of it recognizable as having been anything in particular.

And I begin to cry. And cry. And cry. Like my heart is breaking.

And I wake up. It always surprises me when I wake up from dreams that do that to me, that my eyes are perfectly dry. I’m breathing pretty heavily though.

Because they bring a measure of unselfconscious joy and beauty into the world…and we can’t be having that.

I’ve written before about how many years ago Montgomery County allowed you to go read your school records…basically everything your teachers wrote about you for the other teachers and administrators to see. So I went and looked and there wasn’t much there I didn’t expect to see. But what did tickle me was my first grade teacher who Did Not like me or mom one little bit wrote that little Bruce “takes excessive interest in personal art projects.“

I had two art teachers who got me, and they encouraged me and that really helped a lot. But some teachers when they see the slightest hint of artistic interest have some sort of allergic reaction and do their damnedest to kill it in a kid. I suppose so they don’t have to see how stone cold and dead their soul is.