I did an overnight stay in Rockville, to go see my classmate Bill Wirths do his Reverend Billy Wirtz act at Hank Dietle’s on the Pike. He does an amazing Blues/Boogie-woogie piano act with the history of Blues and his own story in it mixed in. I don’t know which is more fun…his music or his stories. 

His act is a lot of fun and he travels around the country so if he’s in your neighborhood you should catch it.

So I went down to Rockville, and since I figured I’d be sticking around for a while to explore my old neighborhood, I rented a room at a hotel next to the Twinbrook Metro station. I’ll go into my explorations in another post…things have changed So much that what little hasn’t changed just makes your heart ache. Or mine anyway. But I just want to note one Very happy change I saw next to the hotel.

You may recall this post from June 2021, where I shared the news that a certain despicable cool young people only nightspot was going under the wrecking ball. Some weeks later I ventured down to hopefully watch and get some shots of the pile of rubble it had become, only to see that it looked like it would be spared after all. The entire rest of the site had been leveled, but not that one building. I was unhappy about that, but so it goes.

So the morning after the Reverend’s performance I woke up early and decided to wander around. First thing I did was walk over to the site of what was once upon a time Fritzbee’s (later Fuddruckers) and see if the building still stood.

The massive new project they planned for the site turns out to be a art-deco-ish high rise apartment building with shopping and a Wegman’s at street level…

That’s almost all of the land that was once occupied by the old Radio Shack, some strip shopping (I used to get my art supplies at the Visual Systems store there) and a big parking lot. Some years ago they blocked off Fishers Lane where it connected to the Pike and made it all one big block. This new apartment building is sitting right over where Fisher’s lane used to be. Before I went to bed at the hotel next to it, I grabbed some night snacks at the Wegman’s and thought how nice it would be to live in a beautiful art deco apartment where I had a Wegman’s and the Matchbox across the street, and an easy walk to the Metro. But I am not going back to renting if I can help it.

So I took a wander to explore my old neighborhood, but first see what had happened to Fritzbee’s. It was all the way in the back of that block, almost to the train tracks. Last time I saw the old building it was close by to the new Metro parking garage and fenced off for construction.

It was Gone!

Even better…the site was now a dog park!

I had wanted the site to be sewn with salt. But covered in dog piss and shit is even better! Or to give my post from 2021 a slight rewrite…

Turn the uncool away as a matter of policy, to cultivate the shallow beautiful people, and eventually they’ll flit away to the Next Big Thing and what’s left are all the customers you might have had if you hadn’t pissed them off. And now it’ll be pissed and shit on until Rockville decides to put something else there.

I had an odd vivid dream this morning about being in photographer mode for a while. It was odd in some of its detail, which is not unusual for a dream. It was encouraging because I’ve been wanting to see that part of me awaken since the beginning of the year and so far it won’t.

That part of me feels exhausted. Like I’ve said everything I wanted to say with a camera and now I have nothing more left to say. It’s all Been There, Done That. Since the start of the year I’ve taken multiple trips with one or more of my cameras to go find things to explore and, then come back home without so much as touching them. Now they just sit unused. I’ve thought about selling some of them, but I’ve a collection of good ones now and it’s almost for that reason alone I won’t. Instead of looking at my cameras as a photographer, I’m seeing them now as a collector. I feel like something inside of me is just draining away.

So the dream last night was welcome in a way. Oddly, in the dream I am a younger guy, but I was also aware that I’m working part time now, not fully retired anymore like I was. So I couldn’t just flit away and go looking for things to explore with my cameras. I’m driving the little green Prism., not the Mercedes. And I’m living in the apartment with mom, but it’s located in some new neighborhood I don’t recognise, but with easy access to the interstate. And my bitter abusive maternal grandmother is still living in the apartment with me and mom, and one reason I’m out and about is I’m getting away from her.

I really wish she would stop appearing in my dreams. But I suppose it’s she did a lot of damage and even at age 71 I’m still trying to recover from it.

It seems like it’s not quite the end of winter, but warm enough for shirtsleeves instead of a coat outside. I’m trying to think of where I can go when I only have a few days off. In this dream I consider driving to New Orleans, but it’s too far and I’ve done a lot of the points down south. I think I should go north, but there is still snow cover up north. I have an urge to just throw it all off and drive all the way to California. But no…I have to be back at work after just a few days.

So I go north, into Pennsylvania, and at a highway food stop I suddenly see something I want to get with my camera. What I have with me just then is the black Nikon F with the photomic FTn light meter head. It’s a really good shot. This highway food joint has as its trademark a pair of cowboy boots, and this particular one has a large fiberglass pair of them on a pole high up above the roof, sorta like how McDonald’s has their golden arches, and Bob’s Big Boy has that kid in checkered overalls. It’s the incongruity of that huge pair of cowboy boots on the pole standing watch up against the sky with the sunlight hitting them just so and the clouds in the background that are just right that attracts my attention. As I said, a vivid dream.

I raise my camera to my eye, turning on the light meter and taking off the lens cap as I do, only to discover I don’t have the right lens on it for this shot. It’s the 50mm and I almost always shoot with a 24. In my haste to get out of the apartment I only took that one camera and the lens that was on it.

So I attempt to back away to compose the shot I want of the thing I am seeing, and there is outside seating at this place so I have to navigate around the tables and other people eating there. And a young woman asks me about my camera and we get into a conversation about cameras because she has one too but it’s a different make and she wants to know more about the Nikon.

And I go into my speal about how I’m not really a Nikon person but a Canon person but sometimes I like taking the Nikons out because they have a different mechanical feel…and I wake up.

What was so encouraging about this dream was my photographer’s eye opened up for a while in it and I saw something I just had to get a shot of. That hasn’t happened in almost a year. But I don’t know if I can make it happen again in real life. As I write this I’m afraid that if I go somewhere with my cameras again the same thing will happen and I’ll come back empty handed because I can’t feel that part of me inside.

I’ve been thinking lately of putting up a new photo gallery on the website, a Best Of gallery where I put what I think is are the very best images I’ve managed to make over the years, the stuff I’m super proud of. Maybe working on something like that will reawaken that part of me inside. Or at least give it a good send off.

I learned several smallish lessons yesterday while trying to go out and do some photography, and maybe get my mind in some semblance of balance. I’ve been a bundle of stress ever since last November. For some reason. What I learned yesterday was, Firstly, I have to drive much further out to stand any chance of getting my art photography eye opened. The local territory is just too familiar now. Going forward, camera trips will need to be further away and most likely overnights. But Secondly, and more burdensome, it’s too damn hot to be wandering around anywhere with my camera now. So most outdoor activity, let alone camera trips, are postponed until further notice.

Sigh. This isn’t good for my mental health but I’ll try my best to cope with it because I’ve not the kind of money it takes to maintain both summer and winter residences, or that little house in Oceano I once dreamed of retiring to. People may not notice anything amis with me in person, but I am a bundle of stress all the friggin time now, and a good part of that is artist’s block, which when you (over) think about it is a kind of feedback loop that just keeps getting worse if you don’t make an effort to break free of it. Also the news from Washington. For some people stress makes them cranky and irritable, and I get like that too, but mostly it just takes the energy out of me and I just want to lay in bed and cocoon. Then I don’t get anything accomplished, especially not in the art room, and I feel guilty and that stresses me out more.

So yesterday I determined to break out of it and go find someplace to explore with my cameras. But that is not so easy.

I’ve pretty much done all my nearby muses to death. The new rowhouses down the street from me. The old mill structures around Woodberry light rail.  Falls Road. Hampden. The part of the city core I feel comfortable walking around with expensive camera equipment hanging off me. York Pennsylvania. Rockville. The DC Gayborhood. I’ve so thoroughly explored, with 35mm and medium format cameras, and different films plus digital, anything interesting within walking distance or an afternoon drive from the house, that I’ve nothing left to say about any of it now. Places that are less than a day’s drive away feel the same. Been there…done that. It’s making me feel suffocated inside.

So I figured I’d do a quick little overnight trek, and yesterday I packed my small Briggs & Riley suitcase with just enough for an overnight stay somewhere, plus the Leica M3 and the Canon F1N, and set out to find someplace to explore. I had no specific destination in mind, I just wanted to travel and explore, and get back my interest in making art, which has been suffering lots lately. Ever since last election day as a matter of fact. But also, age, heart trouble, and singletude.

I got almost to Sunbury PA, and gave my friend Peterson Toscano a call but he didn’t answer, and I don’t like popping up at anyone unexpectedly. I figured if he wasn’t home or interested in a visit I could just wander around Sunbury, because it’s one of those places that always gives my cameras something to love, and it’s far enough away that I haven’t done it to death already. If you look for hotels in Sunbury you don’t see any, but across the river there are several good ones and a Texas Roadhouse. I figured I’d stay overnight at the Holiday Inn Express, which is one of my go to places to stay while on the road.

So as I said, I got almost to Sunbury. I parked at a Sheetz to get some road snacks and got out of the car. My nice, climate controlled, decadently comfortable Mercedes ‘E’ class diesel sedan. And it was 100 degrees. I didn’t even have to get out of the car. The moment I opened the driver’s side door it hit me like an oven. And I knew in the instant that heat touched my skin I was not going to be wandering around Anywhere with my cameras that day.

So I pointed the car back towards home. And then I realized what it meant. Not that day, or any day it is that hot. Which it is now. Lots. Let’s hear it for climate deniers!

I am giving up fighting this heat to be outdoors. It’s too damn hot! No camera strolls. No putting on my hiking boots and hitting the trails. No just wandering around on foot with my camera, or just my two eyes taking it all in. Not while there are these these heat domes sitting on my little patch of Planet Earth. There are periods of time in the early morning and after sunset I can get in my walks and maybe hit one of the good eateries nearby. But this heat is killer and I don’t think that’s just my age talking. I do not remember it being like this when I was a young boy, let alone a teenager in the 1960s/70s, and the first apartments I remember mom and I living in had no AC. Yeah it got hot, I remember getting heat rash, but not hot like this and not so persistently. So I am staying inside during the day until things get a tad cooler.

Well at least now I know that some people get it.

In my current issue of The New Yorker, Paul Bloom, Critic At Large, writes about how A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness and That’s A Problem. How, you ask, could that possibly a problem given the hellish internal prison chronic loneliness is, let alone all the medical and health consequences associated with it. Well even before I cracked open the article, I had a few hunches, but I wanted to see what the Manhattan cultural gatekeepers thought the problem was too.

He gets it. At least, to a degree…

Loneliness, everyone agrees, is unpleasant—a little like a toothache of the soul. But in large doses it can be genuinely ruinous. A 2023 report issued by Vivek Murthy, then the U.S. Surgeon General, presented evidence that loneliness increases your risk for cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, and premature death. Persistent loneliness is worse for your health than being sedentary or obese; it’s like smoking more than half a pack of cigarettes a day.

Even the psychological pain can be hard to fathom, especially for those who have never truly been lonely. [emphasis mine] In Zoë Heller’s novel “Notes on a Scandal,” the narrator – Barbara Covett, a connoisseur of the condition – distinguishes between passing loneliness and something deeper. Most people, she observes, think back to a bad breakup and imagine that they understand what it means to be alone. But, she continues, “about the drip, drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don’t know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the launderette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can’t bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. . . . I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing to the ground.”

If that kind of loneliness feels foreign to you, you’re lucky—and probably below a certain age.

And probably heterosexual. Or at least somewhere close to a Kinsey zero. Probably. I began feeling it when I was a young adult, some years after my first high school crush vanished from sight, and my second disastrous crush on a straight close friend blew up in my face, and I began to perceive that eternal long dark night of the soul that was ahead of me. I read a story back in the day about a gay man who turned 30 and still never had a boyfriend, and I swore I would never let that happen to me. I’m 71 now and I have still never had a boyfriend.

A bunch of near misses, sure. That’s probably a common story among gay guys of my barely post Stonewall generation. You start getting close to someone and next thing you know the righteous step in to break it up, because they need the broken pieces of our hearts to make their stepping stones to heaven out of. Or if not the righteous, then the contemptuous.

If that kind of loneliness feels foreign to you, you’re lucky…and probably below a certain age. And probably heterosexual. And probably not the sort of person who can be easily satisfied with a series of sexual one night stands. For these there were always the hookup spots, and more recently hookup apps like Grindr. Finding that heart and soul other is difficult under the best of conditions, and gay males do not enjoy the best of conditions, much improved though they are now. But there are those of us who just seemed to be condemned to the darkness right from the beginning.

You began to sense it every time you were last to be picked for a team game, or never invited to sit with the others at lunch. And like the kid born into poverty, you never really noticed how different your social life was from the others, because it was always thus. Normal was not getting invites. Normal was you had to ask if a someone wanted to go to the park with you, or a movie, or just hang out, not being asked. You weren’t a creep to everyone, you were that polite and friendly if scrawny kid with the puppy dog enthusiasm, a homely face, unkempt hair and clothes that were clean if not well fitting and fashionable, and you lived on the other side of the railroad tracks with your divorced mother, and you just assumed that everyone has to work at being included. But no…not everyone.

Then you reach a certain age and a need for something more than a friend to pal around with awakens within. But you’re need is different from the others around you. Different in a way that sets you apart not just from them, but it seems from the entire world around you.

From A Coming Out Story – What I Learned About Homosexuality. . . And Myself (Part 2)

And now, on top of being the kid who gets chosen last, now you’re afraid. But you’re as human as all the other kids, different only in the detail, and you’ve come of age and have to try. But you have to roll models to show you the way, only every dirty joke you’ve ever heard about homosexuals. And the thing is the objects of your affection are just as afraid as you are.

My first crush and I recognized something in each other. But it was 1971/72. 

A Coming Out Story – What I Learned About Homosexuality – Part Three – Aftermath

Mad Magazine, #145, Sept 1971, from “Greeting Cards For The
Sexual Revolution” – “To A Gay Liberationist”

I’m pretty sure it was after we made plans to go to Great Falls and stroll the towpath with our cameras, and I called to say I was coming over and one of his older brothers intercepted the phone call, that he got told to stay away from me. And being the obedient son, he put a distance between us, and that summer the family moved away, and I didn’t know until I saw the for sale sign on their empty house. 

Here’s something I found online. Whoever wrote this, gets it.

A psychotherapist specializing in military rehabilitation once stated in a lecture that the deepest truma isn’t loss.

Loss is a fact, Someone left, died, or vanished. There’s pain, but there’s also a definitive end point. When you’re not chosen, however, an unending void remains. It’s the crushing feeling that you were there, you tried, you invested, but ultimately you were deemed superfluous. Not the worse, just “not the one.”

This experience pulls more powerfully than betrayal, because there’s no explanation in being rejected. The other person simply decided they didn’t need you. Not because you did something wrong, but because you didn’t captivated them, inspire them, or align with them. And your mind begins to frantically search: Where was the mistake? Where was the moment you could have pleased them more, loved quieter, walked more patiently?

This is where the insidious feeling takes root: that something is wrong with you. Not the situation, not with the other person, but with you. You are insufficient.

This is the trauma of unchosenness. Not because love wasn’t present, but because the choice wasn’t about you. And in that place where you weren’t chosen, you begin to doubt your right to exist.

My situation is different, but only slightly. There was the added pressure of homophobia making it difficult to nearly impossible for gay guys of my generation to make a romantic connection. But I know other gay guys of my generation who were successful, who did find their other half and made a life together, despite the hostility of the world around them. So it wasn’t just homophobia that kept me from finding my other half. And so I find myself in this exact situation anyway. Where was the mistake? Where was the moment I could have made a difference, and had a different outcome? Could I have been more patient? Or more forward, less afraid? Every time I tried, I failed. What is wrong with me?

There is not a night I don’t go to bed thinking about it, and then imagining alternate universes where gay kids could find love, and I was one of them. But only in my dreams.

Why am I never the chosen one? Well…except for big guys who think I have a cute butt and just want to fuck me. I used to get “Nice ass” lots from them. And also the occasional heterosexual woman. I got a butt squeeze in Kayenta from (I assumed) a young Navajo woman who walked up behind me and then quickly walked away. I took it as a complement, probably because there was no sexual baggage in it for me, but from other guys it just feels off putting at best, probably because there is.

I’m what the kids these days call a demisexual. 

DEMISEXUAL demi·?sex·?u·?al
feeling sexual attraction towards another person only after establishing an emotional bond with that person.

Now, that’s not quite it with me. My low energy libito can readily feel sexually attracted to the right guy on sight. But to actually go through with it I need that emotional bond too or nothing is going to happen. Sex without any sort of love feels a little more than vaguely disgusting at best. There has to be romance. There has to be love.

Which is why despite chronic loneliness I’ve never availed myself of a sex worker, and I’m pretty sure an A.I. boyfriend won’t do it for me either.

Five years ago, the idea that a machine could be anyone’s confidant would have sounded outlandish, a science-fiction premise. These days, it’s a research topic.

You know what I wish were research topics? Homophobia. Or at any rate, how to get them to leave the rest of us alone. Maybe in a better world we teach gay kids the emotional and intellectual tools to stand up to bigots and see themselves as the perfect and whole human beings that they are. And…coupling. I have tried multiple gay dating services and I have to conclude they are mostly scams that prey on lonely people. There needs to be some science here. In the better world of my imagination, there would be not just sex-ed classes, but courses in flirting, dating, non-judgmental understanding of your own romantic and emotional needs, the better to know what sort of person is likely to match up with you. And how to let someone down graciously. That was a Big roadblock to getting myself in situations where I can meet random guys who might be compatible. Because I know how picky my libido is, and I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings because I know how it feels to be rejected. I know how it feels to be told, by other gay guys no less, that people who look like that want people who look like that.

A.I. companionship might be okay for some, but not for the likes of me. I have already walked through an adult life alone, in the most intimate sense. And despite what others have told me, I tried, I really tried. And those helpful others were really just telling me to go get laid and then I’ll feel better. But no. I was the unchosen one. Always.

I’m not anxious to leave this life just yet. But I won’t be entirely unhappy when death taps me on the shoulder either. I think my last thoughts might be something like Thank goodness I won’t be lonely anymore…

And no more trying to explain the trauma of how it is to live an entire adult life with that constant drip, drip, drip of heart loneliness, to people who think they understand, because maybe they were lonely and heart broken for a little while themselves, but really are light years away from getting it because they have never experienced that empty void of chronic loneliness for themselves.

Some may say it was my awful diet that caused the heart attack. I was actually being careful before then to keep my weight down because I liked how I looked. Some may say it was the dozen or so cigars I chain smoked right after I realized he’d retired and what it meant. But those were just symptoms.

I’ve heard so many stories, particularly among the gay folk I have hung out with, of devoted deeply in love couples who died close to each other. One goes and not long after that the other. But nobody wants to hear the stories of the single and lonely. We decay slowly, out of sight, out of mind. 

I’m pretty sure these days that my heart (the actual one, not the philosophical one) would not be in the state it’s in now had I lived in a better world and found my other half. But that was not to be. The stress of being a gay kid in a world that threw hate at you from every direction, plus singleness on top of that, did it’s work. A few weeks ago I had an overnight hospital stay because my heart was dancing wildly in my chest. Atrial Fibrillation they call it.

Atrial fibrillation (AFib) is an irregular and often rapid heartbeat that occurs when the heart’s upper chambers (atria) beat out of sync with the lower chambers (ventricles). This can reduce the heart’s ability to pump blood effectively and increase the risk of blood clots, stroke, heart failure, and other complications.

They were going to give me a procedure to shock the upper chambers into sync with the lower ones, which they assured me would be painful. But thankfully overnight my heart went back into normal, what they call sinus rhythm, and so they called it off and sent me back home with a new pill to take that supposedly would keep the afib in check. It did not.

For four days after my hospital stay the afib was gone and I thought the new pill was working. They’d told me it only worked in 75 percent of patients, and sure enough it eventually came back. But I wondered what was going on in those four days that it Was working. Well, that was after my hospital stay where I’d had no coffee.

So I went cold turkey on coffee and the afib went away. Next I tried some decaf. I’d been resisting decaf coffee ever since I noticed that drinking it in the afternoon made my insomnia worse. But I could not see the point in decaf so I just stopped drinking it in the afternoon. Now it seemed plain to me that caffeine was aggravating my afib so I had to give it up and that pushed me into trying decaf. And being the geek I am I had to research how they took the caffeine out of coffee. Turns out there are two processes, one that uses solvents and the other just water. In fact the water process was the first to make decaffeinated coffee beans, and it was discovered accidentally when a shipment of coffee beans got waterlogged on the trip to the buyer.

I gave Peet’s water process decaf a try and found it tasted no different from regular…just you’re not getting the caffeine hit now. This was something I was going to have to adjust to. But at least decaf was enjoyable.

That mostly fixed the afib but it didn’t go away completely and I wondered if there wasn’t something else in my diet contributing to it. The only thing that stood out for me was the artificial sweetener I started using after I reconnected with my high school crush and decided I needed to lose weight. Prior to then I was mostly getting a sugar jolt in the afternoon snarfing down candy bars, and it was when I stopped doing that I switched to getting my wake up your tired self from coffee. But I was using Splenda in my coffee so it wasn’t costing my waistline anything.

I did some more digging discovered that afib was a possible side effect of constantly consuming sucralose, which is the ingredient in Splenda.

“…studies from the American Heart Association journals, have found that people who regularly consume artificially sweetened drinks may have a higher risk of atrial fibrillation (an irregular heartbeat) compared to those who consume fewer such beverages.”

According to what I read those studies are not definitive, but suggestive. My own experience recently is, yeah it does.

I drink constantly, all day long and somewhat through the night. I have a glass or a mug of something next to me all the time, at work and at home. If my co-workers ever saw me in a meeting without my coffee or ice tea mug next to me they might ask if anything is wrong. And ever since 2006 all those drinks have had sucralose in them instead of sugar because I wanted to keep my weight down, and I liked the way having a narrow waistline made me look.

I stopped caring about that March 6, 2016. And yeah…it shows now. But I have no reason to care anymore. So I gave up on Splenda and started sweetening my coffee and ice tea with sugar. The afib went away. Or at least it declined to the point I couldn’t feel it happening anymore.

Yesterday I went back down to DC to hang out with a friend who lives there and to hit Alero for some of their good mexican food and a Godfather margarita. That was also a test to see if I could have a drink every now and then without waking up the afib. That morning I tried sweetening my decaf with Splenda, also as a test. I was hoping maybe I can just go with decaf forever and still use the Splenda that I still have a lot of in stock. The afib came back almost right away and I had to lay down for a bit. By the afternoon I felt good enough to take the Metro into DC and try a margarita. I had just one and it was no trouble. Back home I stuck to my sugar sweetened decaf ice tea and had no trouble with afib all night long.

So I think the Splenda is out now too. Alas I have a lot of it to give away. Also a bunch of K-Cups with Kirkland Medium Roast coffee in them, and all the bags of coffee beans I got at Baltimore Coffee and Tea. Things like Splenda and K-Cups I tend to buy in bulk at Costco because it’s cheaper in the long run. So it goes. The sugar I still have lots of is still good because that stuff does not go bad if you store it carefully. I kept that around for guests that didn’t want Splenda.

There’s a “Buy Nothing Hampden” Facebook group I can put the unopened splenda and coffee on (I have some downsizing I need to do this year so I’ll probably be hitting that page lots anyway). I think I can still keep my weight down if I just don’t snarf down a lot of candy like I was before 2006. If I can manage the afib with just some diet and lifestyle changes I’d rather do that then go for the ablation and possibly a pacemaker too, both of which won’t necessarily fix the problem anyway so I’ve been told by folks that have had that done.

The gay, single, and old life in the American healthcare system. Broken Heart Syndrome? 71 isn’t that old these days. I wonder lots lately if any of this would be happening to me now and not maybe in my 80s or 90s had I lived in a better world.

I have a postcard I sent to mom long ago, that I keep on one of my bookshelves with a bunch of odds and ends from passages of my life. Oh, and also some books. This particular postcard was one I found among her things after she passed away. Every now and then I take it off the shelf to read once more.

I would have been dating, or thought I was dating, strike three, “K” who was living on Hilton Head at the time. I would have been making a good living as a contract software developer renting a very nice garden apartment in Cockeysville, Maryland.

It was a time before affordable cell phones and the end of long distance charges. He and I would chat for hours on our land lines. The new cordless telephones were a blessing for us. We could chat together while going about our household chores as if we were together. This was a time when long distance rates still applied, so if he called me the plan was, since I was making good money and he wasn’t, that we’d hang up and I would call him and take the charge. We’d talk for so long the batteries in our phones would give out and we’d have to restart the conversation on the corded phones for a bit. I’d make plans to go visit him in Hilton Head when I was between contracts, or could take a long weekend. His place in Hilton Head was less than a day’s drive down I-95 so it was easy to spend time together with him. I was in love…again. This time, I thought, it’s really happening. I have a boyfriend.

But it was more a thing in my own mind than his. At some point I started making plans to move down there to be with him…I’d talked with a recruiting agent with the firm I contracted for, who told me there were jobs down there to be had, though mostly in North, not South Carolina. But it was shortly after that K dumped me for another guy who lived in Massachusetts he’d been chatting with on AOL. That guy eventually moved down there and they began living together. He told me later that he decided to call it off when he heard me talking about moving down there.

Anyway…this is a postcard I sent to mom during one of my visits to K. Mom knew…but we had a don’t ask don’t tell agreement she enforced almost right up to the day she died. So it’s my sad little way in my scrawly handwriting of trying to tell her that her boy is gay and he’s in love with another guy.

She liked K. He was a good Baptist boy from our church. I like to think she’d have reconciled herself to it if it was him. Anyway, she kept that postcard. Now I have it. Every now and then I look at it and remember K and I strolling the beach late at night when nobody could see us holding hands and looking up at the stars.

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.

A few weeks ago I tried my best to roust myself out of the fatigue that’s been plaguing me for way too long, and at least Try to develop some film that’s been sitting patiently in my darkroom. I have several rolls of Fuji Neopan 100, 120 film shot in the Hasselblad (and maybe also in the Mamiya C330), some of which have probably been sitting there for a couple years. I got as far as loading the film onto reels and putting them in the tank. Then the tank sat there loaded for at least two, maybe three weeks. I’ve no idea which. 

This is where my head is at these days. It’s been making me think it’s time to pick out a coffin…except my will says to scatter my ashes back home in California, the land of my birth.  Then the other day I saw a post on Facebook from the Washington DC gay paper, The Washington Blade. It was about a reenactment of Frank Kameny’s historic protests for gay rights in front of the White House…in 1953.

You either have to be a gay or lesbian person of my generation or older, to appreciate how much guts that took back then.

Time was I would not have hesitated to be there to be a photojournalist once more and document that with my cameras. But I’m 71 years old and I’m tired all the fucking time anymore, and as soon as I thought I have to be there, I also thought but I’m too damn tired anymore. 

Something deep inside of me…I have no idea what it could have been…pushed me forward. I took a train down to DC, got a room at my usual hotel, and at the appropriate time I got on the Metro, got off at Metro Center, and walked to the White House. And for the first time in years and did my photojournalist thing, and felt alive again.

I came home and started going through my photos. The plan is to have another sub gallery up in my Life And Times gallery with the shots I got of the reenactment in it. Then I found a roll of black and white with some interesting shots I hadn’t catalogued.

Why my art photography will probably never be well liked…

While working on that I noticed I had a third sub gallery for Sleep Talking God that I never finished, and I also started working on that.

Then just now I finally developed those two rolls of Hasselblad film I loaded several weeks ago.

Something triggered me…I have no idea really what it was. And I’m still tired all the fucking time. Maybe it’s just a spring awakening. Maybe I’m getting over regret at going back to work and not diving into my creative arts like I’d thought I would in retirement. I’m regretting going back, much as I loved that job and everything I was able to accomplish being a part of the space program. But things there are different there now, in ways that prevent me from fully engaging in the work I used to love. Right now if I had it to do over again I would decline the offer. But I was on a downhill spiral then anyway, so maybe it makes no difference. Part time retired or not I still have to wake myself up somehow.

This is a start. Hopefully.

Walking back from the grocery store yesterday morning, I chanced across a neighbor walking to their car and we started chatting. Being pretty much in the same age group the conversation took a turn toward the trials and tribulations of growing old. We compared notes. Yes, back in the day we could recover from small injuries pretty quickly. She mentioned her husband once played in a band and still had his drum set in the basement. I mentioned my Alembic bass that I’d mostly taken up because kids of my generation were supposed to learn a musical instrument and I still felt that even though I’m a graphic artist, it would help my mindset if I did.

I guess it was my usual way of making banter, but as she was getting into their car she mentioned that however old I am I still act like I’m young.

It’s not the first time I’ve heard that. After mom died I entered a period of therapy, and the shrink who worked with me told me that I “present young.”

I can tell you it’s not affected in any way. If anything I’ve had to work most of my adult life at allowing me to be me…my school years prior to Woodward were so stifling, plus the constant static I got from my maternal grandmother simply for being my father’s son. And…yes…having to deal with my sexual orientation when that became a thing. Who do I trust? Who can I be open with? Where can I just be me? Those moments when you have to suddenly decide whether to be true to yourself or duck never stop coming. But you learn to handle them…for better or worse.

All I can think is I was always a science kid, and us science kids never stop enjoying discovering things about nature and the world around us. Which means you never ‘grow up” because you never stop growing.

Sure you move into different stages of life…you get a job, you take on responsibilities you didn’t have to when you were a kid…but you stay curious. Life keeps on being an adventure, even in your old age. Yes it can be harrowing at times. Heartbreaking even. But still an adventure. There is always something more to be discovered.

So I present young. It’s just me. I reckon I won’t have that second childhood they talk about old people having, because I never got completely done with the first one.

I see by my Google Calendar that tomorrow (Sunday the 23rd of March) is I Have To Stay Inside My Comfort Zone Day…

The day I asked if we could do something together on his own time and he told me no, “I have to stay inside my comfort zone.” This should be a special day for making myself comfortable.

That’s two Very Special Days in March! I think I shall have dinner at La Cuchara tomorrow…

If only that technology in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind was a real thing. Except…

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

Joel comes to his last remaining memory of Clementine: the day they first met, on a beach in Montauk…

No. No, if that’s what you go through on the way to forgetting then I don’t want to do that.

I’ll live with it if erasing the memories are more painful than living with them.

And make myself comfortable inside my comfort zone.

Aging sneaks up on you slyly. Unless you have a bad illness that ages you rapidly, or genes that do the same, you hardly ever notice that you’re loosing things like stamina and flexibility. Until you pull a muscle doing something you did a zillion times before and your body didn’t complain about it. There’s a character in a Hemmingway novel who is asked how he went broke, and he replied “Gradually then suddenly.” Growing old is like that. At least it’s been like that for me. 

And I’ve noticed I have it good by comparison with a bunch of my kidhood peers. I still get a lot of complements on how young I look for my age (71). But that might mostly be because of something a shrink I went to once told me, that I “present young”. Mindset does affect appearance. In many ways I still have this inner point of view that I’m a teenager or at best a young adult.

So this morning at Disney world, as I’m coaxing my stiff body into my clothes for a walk around Saratoga Springs (I did a lot of walking yesterday and I’ll probably do that again today), that I have to realize once again that I’m Not a young adult. I’m an old man. It still mostly doesn’t bother me, or at any rate I can ignore it most of the time. It’s when I can’t that I wish I had my twenty-something body back again. But this morning I had a thought: what if I actually could be transported back into my twenty-something body again, even if just for an hour or two while I stroll around the parks here. Would it be a pleasant couple hours, or would it shock me to actually see how much aging as taken away from my body over the decades, that I haven’t really noticed because it all happened so gradually?

Maybe its just as well I don’t have that kind of magic.

It’s been a while since I’ve developed film. I can tell by how I had to wash all my measuring flasks before I began filling them with chemistry. That, and all the times I had to look up some figures in my Kodak dataguides because none of it was fresh in my memory.

I discovered something about how much I’ve aged in only a couple years or so. Thankfully the right hand doesn’t have the tremors my left does, but it’s there. I notice it when I’m trying to do some delicate work, like threading a developer tank spool. And the muscles in them are noticeably weaker. Either that or the crimping on the ends of the film cassettes has got tighter. It was a surprising amount of effort to pop them open with the cassette opener I’ve used since I was a teenager.

But I got four rolls of Tri-X Pan done. I’ll scan them in later and see how long they’ve been sitting there waiting to be developed.

The weakness and loss of fine precision in the hands is ominous. Maybe I can get some of it back by diving back into drawing. I could fill in some blanks in A Coming Out Story maybe…

I am so easy to manipulate once you have the key. Oh I can come off as a stubborn single minded I Don’t Care What You Think so and so, yes. Also The Brat can be provoked out of me given certain specific events. Just ask a certain German someone. But once someone has that key I can be talked out of or into practically anything.

Obviously I guard that key carefully. It’s why I will often just walk away from a situation I don’t want to be in, rather than talk it out and get dragged back into somewhere I don’t want to be, especially if it’s someone I like, or did like at some point. It’s very easy for me to brush off angry people. It’s super easy for me to take a walk from someone who questions my intelligence after I’ve already taken the measure of theirs and found it wanting. But if you have that key it’s nearly impossible for me to keep my mind made up about anything you don’t want me to keep it made up about.

So just a few days ago I got a shock at work, and that on top of all the changes to the work environment which had to be made for security reasons (the arms race in cyber space between the good guys and the bad never lets up and we have an active mission going on) made me determined to go back into retirement. I was in tears. A bit of software I’d created that I was intensely proud of got snatched out from me with no notice. I was simply cut out of it. That, and the constant security roadblocks I was colliding with trying to do the work I was tasked with, was too much for me. I’m 71 years old and too old for the stress and heartbreak. I had not come back out of retirement for all of this. I told them I was retiring. Again.

The short version of the story is I got talked out of it.

I’m easy.

I’m hoping we’ve all arrived at an understanding that I’m just keeping an open mind. I have not committed to staying. We will, hopefully, work though things and see if the solutions proposed are agreeable to me after all.

But I have my doubts. There is more to me than the computer nerd/software engineer, but all of it centers on the fact that I am (yes I know it sounds pretentious to say so) an artist. I bring that to everything I do creatively. If the work isn’t worth giving my heart to, then it’s not worth doing. You only get one life and let me reach back into the religion of my childhood and say (I mean this) that it’s a sin to allow yourself to do work without heart. It’s like sex without love. Okay…yes…I realize there are people who are fine with that as long as the money is good. I am not. It’s why for most of my young adult life I bopped from one job to another to another. Once my heart stopped being in it, I was tendering my resignation. Although sometimes I got the boot before that when my sexual orientation became an issue. Which I was fine with because I don’t want to be anywhere people like me are held in contempt either.

There is art I have brought to my work that I must continue to be able to bring to it if I am to stay long term. In the short term, there is a Very Important project I am committed to bringing forth, a proof of concept, and I am going to do that however the f*ck I have to, because I agree it is Very Important and I am Going to get it done.

After that…

Details to follow…

I started feeling a sore throat, and having a rasping cough the second day of my train ride back home, and hoped it was just the dryness of the heated air in the train. But no. By the time I got home I was ready to admit I’d caught a flu, despite having had the shot. Not the first time that’s happened to me. Back home I was weak as a kitten, barely able to climb the stairs to get myself into bed. At the age I am now, 71, these things hit me really hard.

Hemingway wrote a passage in one of this stories where a guy was asked how he went broke. The answer was “gradually, and then suddenly.” I’m here to tell you that’s how you get old too. Gradually, and then suddenly. Two therapists I have visited, one when I was feeling lonely and suicidal and the other much later after mom passed away, both told me that I “present young.” I’m pretty sure that wasn’t about my fashion choices, but something about me that, to the therapist, suggested my mindset. And it’s true that, unless I’m looking in a mirror, or more painfully at the skin on the back of my hands and arms, I still see myself as a young man. Catching a flu now, at this age, yanks me out of that mindset pretty forcefully. But not entirely.

I’m not afraid of dying…death isn’t a thing we ever know because by definition if you’re dead you stop knowing anything. So you won’t know you’re dead, or even that moment it happens. But seeing it coming can be unpleasant. It isn’t death I worry about, it’s decaying. I don’t want to go slowly. Especially now that I’m at that senior stage in life where the internal young man mindset gets scary revoked whenever I get sick.

Like now. I’m not even sure it was a flu I had that I’m just now getting over. It only acted like a two-thirds flu. Pretty sure it wasn’t COVID since my blood oxygen levels have been good throughout. Looking over the online information it might have been that Respiratory Syncytial Virus going around. The symptoms I had match except for the physical weakness I was experiencing. But that could just be a function of…well…my age.

Doesn’t look like I’m dying this time. Hopefully I hold onto that present young mindset right up to that last moment…when it comes.