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

Good thing this little life blog doesn’t get a lot of traffic, especially from anyone I ever loved.

I swear it’s the biggest joke or comedy or tragedy or whatever of my life that the one guy out of all the other’s I’ve ever loved, who turned out to possibly be the best match, is the straight guy. He was visiting briefly on his way here and there and in that short time we talked as I’ve never talked with any of the others, and felt a deep soulful synergy as I’ve never felt with any of the others. And I can see clearly now that none of the others were really a good match. We never talked like that. We never shared ourselves like that. And he’s straight.

Maybe that’s not entirely true. I know I talked lots with the others. Strike one and I talked for hours on the phone after we reconnected…for a while…before others began listening in. We would talk for house past closing time at his place of work. But that had to stop too. Strike three and I lived hundreds of miles apart and would talk on the phone for hours between visits. Before cell phones strike three and I would talk so long the batteries on our cordless phones would die and we’d have to switch to the wired landline. The cordless phones were a godsend. We would talk for hours while we each went about our household chores, untethered by a wire, like we were there together. But then it stopped and I got dumped.

It always stopped. I never stopped wondering what was wrong with me.

For a moment, for a few short hours, I had it back with number two. It was wonderful. My heart sang. And he’s straight.

Good thing I’m an atheist, because if I died right now, right this moment, and there actually was an almighty god creator of the universe, I’d spit in its face. But there is no god. So it’s all good.

This year on my 71st birthday, I signed the letter I got from HR at the Space Telescope Science Institute offering me part time work. I am happy to return to the office. No…delighted. I am part of the space program again.

Part time was initially what I wanted to transition into instead of belly flopping into full time retirement, but I was told at the time that it was not a possibility. Then a couple months ago my project manager contacted me and asked if I was interested in coming back part time after all. So whatever the difficulties were they’ve been worked out now and I’m back starting late next month.

I did an interview onsite with my project manager and a co-worker who’d been bumped up the ladder and while I was there people I knew would wave and smile and made me feel like I was home again. Everyone was happy to see me again. It was a great feeling.

I’ll be basically doing what I was doing before for James Webb, but now for the next space telescope, named after Nancy Grace Roman. I’d done some work on that one just prior to retiring so it’ll all be familiar ground. I’ll have to reestablish all my clearances probably, and get all new access cards and security tokens, but that’s all familiar ground too. I’ll have the same benefits and since I’ll be getting a paycheck I can stop feeding from my 401k and just let it grow. Social security and an annuity take care of the gap between a part time paycheck and what I was making before I retired.

At my age I’m pretty sure I don’t have the stamina anymore for full time work but I feel now like I can do part time indefinitely. And this puts some structure back into my life. You retire and you suddenly have all this free time you didn’t before and you think about all the projects you want to work on, but eventually you become a bit aimless and unfocused. And at this age being able to take a nap any time you want is a dangerous thing. I’m single, I live alone, and the solitary life wears you down without a place of work and the human contact that comes with it.

It felt so good to be wanted back.

Yesterday afternoon I took a walk to The Space Telescope Science Institute building on the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus to be interviewed for a job there. I haven’t done that since the week before Thanksgiving in 1998.

A few months ago the project manager I had when I retired asked if I would be interested in returning to the Institute to work part time. I told him yes, definitely. That was the way I wanted to retire initially; not belly flop into full time retirement but gradually, starting with part time work. But at the time my project manager said that part time work wasn’t a possibility. So I retired full time. Now it seemed it was on the table and yes I was still interested. Very much so.

So then he and I talked on several occasions about my coming back part time. We would meet for lunch or dinner at one of the local eateries. He indicated that part time work was something they were working on setting up and was I still interested. It would be, he said, for the same work I was doing before I retired, but mostly for the next generation space telescope, named for Nancy Grace Roman. I’d already done some initial work on that project, coding a progress report in python, that was to be sent to NASA.

For a while I heard nothing, and began to wonder if the idea had been shelved. Then about a month ago I was informed that a part time position I could apply for was being posted, doing basically the same work I had been doing when I retired. There was also a full time position of the same kind opening. So I applied for the part time position.

About a week ago I got a call from HR to schedule an interview with my project manager and another co-worker who’d been bumped up the chain. That was the interview I had yesterday. It went very well.

They still have some people to talk to, but I think I’m in a good place to get the position because it’s doing stuff I was involved in when I retired, so I won’t need any training on any of it, and a lot of the work will be tweaking code and systems that I either wrote myself or helped to build. I know the culture at the Institute and how things are generally done. I think I’m a pretty good fit.

But nothing is final yet, and so I was told, most likely won’t be until possibly end of September to mid October. But this felt good. In fact, I’ve felt more alive since the interview than I ever have since retiring.

Retirement has a lot of perks, but I’ve found it to be very confusing too. There is always housework to do, and I can travel more freely. But some days I just don’t know what to do with myself and at this age that isn’t good. I don’t think I have the stamina for full time anymore, but part time is good. They say it’s a permanent, not temporary position. I could see working it all through my 70s if the position stays viable that long (space work is always at the mercy of the Federal budget) and my health stays good. Maybe even longer. And I keep getting excellent reviews from my cardiologist so there’s that.

It’ll mean no more months long stays in California anymore, but I’ll still get vacation time so it’ll be more like it was all along when I was working. And supporting two different living spaces on two different coasts was starting to stress my budget. It’ll also mean I can stop feeding from my 401k and just let it grow which is Very Good. They’ll be making contributions to the 401k again and I can make my own as well. And I’ll still be getting social security and my annuity to make up the difference between a full and park time check.

And I can enjoy a morning walk to the office again, weather permitting. Not having to deal with commuter traffic was one of the best perks I worked out for myself by getting this house so close to Hopkins.

So we’ll see. I think I’m a pretty good fit for the position but I’m not going to count my chickens before they’re hatched. What I’d really like is to be working on Space Stuff again, and having that purpose and structure back in my life. It was a great trip. I could take it again.

“That was Percy Faith and the 101 Strings playing Holiday In Cambodia, and you’re listening to WGAY, 99FM, Washington’s beautiful music station…”

I’ve been systematically removing my artwork from Facebook whenever a “Facebook Memory” presents it to me, because I’m disgusted with the way its automatic censor handles other people’s artwork, as well as mine at least once. But I think I’ll leave this Work In Progress note up…

…at least for another year maybe…and also put it here too…because I don’t have any other copies of this particular piece in progress. And I’m still very happy with how this one-off turned out. I called it The Rain, The Park, And Other Kids, riffing on one of the ultimate 60s songs by The Cowsills (The Partridge Family TV show band was modeled after them). The cartoon about growing up gay in a world that refuses to acknowledge that gay kids like you exist, and you end up mentally changing some pronouns as you’re listening to the radio, so you can imagine the songs are speaking to you too.

Because those teenage feelings are pretty universal…

It is an old stereotype, that homosexuality has to do only with sex while heterosexuality is multifaceted and embraces love and romance.
-Vito Russo, author of The Celluloid Closet

…but the world around you tells you that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. And there you are anyway…crushing on a classmate, listening to all the pop tunes about being in love, and on the one hand those songs are making your heart sigh, and on the other they’re telling you that your feelings aren’t real because you’re never in them. At best you maybe got a few gender neutral songs. Eventually you gravitate to female vocalists who could sing songs about being in love with a guy and nobody thought anything about it and you could imagine yourself into those songs. Stevie Nicks. Carole King. Carly Simon. Janis Ian singing At Seventeen.

I’m certain The Cowsills never intended anything like that about their gay and lesbian audience. They were just writing and singing songs about their own lives as artists do. It was the music industry, and the culture at large, that decreed back in the 1960s that songs about gay love and romance were unfit for the airwaves. That said, The Cowsills did do one song that hit me so hard I wore out several 45 rpm copies playing it over and over: In Need Of A Friend.

While I was working on this cartoon I decided to do something out of the ordinary for me and try to get it published. But it seemed then that nobody was doing a gay comics anthologie like the one Howard Cruse began a few decades ago. I asked Howard if he could point me to someone who was and he graciously gave me a pointer to someone I could ask. He would give me lots of encouragement on A Coming Out Story. But when I asked the person Howard pointed me to about submitting this one, they politely told me to go away (just self publish it). So I ended up putting it on my website that nobody reads. It’s okay…at least I got it out of me.

I have another one like it in the works, but it’s a struggle to get it out of me now. I just don’t have the energy I used to. And if I am honest, the interest. I haven’t touched my cameras or the film I still need to develop in almost a year either. Grant Snider, who is light years better than me at getting his stuff out there, has one with Dickens three ghosts, only they’re the ghosts of creativity. The last one, the Ghost Of Creativity Past, is telling him “Nobody will remember you unless you make something lasting.” I saw it just now, right before I saw this Facebook Memory, and it kinda hit me.

Fear of being forgotten is not why you make art of course. that’s just another way artists have of tormenting themselves. Social memory is a tricky thing and often what is remembered isn’t what actually was. But it would be nice if the artwork has a life after mine. Probably it won’t, and I’m getting too tired to make more.

I take a retrospective look at some of my stuff (there’s a bunch of it here on the website) and I see that I was actually pretty good at it. Then I regret not making more of it. But I had no focus, and dragging an emotional ball and chain around with you all the time doesn’t help. I needed a friend. A boyfriend. I never found one.

I did what I could.

I went to the little whiskey bar just off The Avenue yesterday evening. It would be a favorite place except it’s only open Friday and Saturday evenings. But in a way that only helps it maintain a speakeasy vibe. It’s halfway below sidewalk level in the Bluebird Lounge building, and it has some of the same menu items as the Bluebird. The bartenders there make the best Old Fashioned I have ever had.

As I’m sitting off to the side in one of the nice leather club chairs, two skateboard kids come in and sit down at the bar. They’re served drinks so they must be at least 21, and otherworldly though they are they look kinda cute to my eye. I say “otherworldly” partly because of the tats (arms and legs), the hairstyles (man bun on one, long, very long dreadlocks on the other), the t-shirt logos, and the stickers all over their skateboards. They live in a different world from the one my inner 20-something still lives in. Generally I am not in favor of tats. Naked skin has it’s own mysterious beauty. But these two are very cute. I wonder if they’re a couple.

I keep trying to remember to bring a book to read with me when I go to this place. Cellular reception down here below sidewalk level is very bad. But I don’t want to be distracted by social media today, so I do something I’ve done ever since I was a small boy; I withdraw into my own private world. I have some artwork I want to think about, and some stories I want to eventually write. I sit there savoring my old fashioned and think about what I need to do to get my darkroom live again. I think about the process of downsizing all the Stuff in my house. Do I really want to get rid of all those Microsoft Developer’s Network CDs I have. Maybe I should put that old IBM PS2 Model 80 in storage, along with the PowerPC Mac Pro. Am I ever going to boot either of those up again?

Occasionally I pop back into the real world to sip my old fashioned, look the bar menu over again (am I hungry now?), and steal some glances at the two younglings at the bar. Every now and then I see the one with the bun stealing a curious glance back at me. Probably I strike a very weird old man drinking whiskey and staring off into nowhere vibe. Actually I’ve probably carried that vibe with me all my life.

I see them chat easily with the bartenders and other Bluebird staff that come and go. So they are either regulars or friends of the staff there. Scruffy as they are I can tell they’re not homeless street kids. Their clothes have that clean but tattered look that is too deliberate to be the result of poverty. It is style. Their skateboards are well worn. Probably they were at the skateboard park across Falls before they came here.

Then the kid with the bun takes down his man bun…and a full head of long, luxurious hair flows down around his neck and over his shoulders. I’m stunned. What the hell are you doing tying all that up into a bun for chrissakes! You’re beautiful! Don’t do that to your hair! Let it be free! But that’s not the world they live in. And I can only observe from outside.

Kids these days…

I could swear I saw a ghost just now. But no…for one thing I’m pretty sure ghosts aren’t real (good props for story telling though…). No…most likely just a striking resemblance to someone I once knew long, long ago, in a Rockville far, far away…

Stay golden George…

Just in moderation. 

This post is probably going to distress some of my friends who would really wish me to quit smoking my cigars for the sake of my heart. But since I had that Hoyo de Monterrey Jose’ Gener the other day, the first cigar I’ve had since coming home from California last month, I’ve been thinking. Which usually means a blog post. It’ll probably be self justifying and full of excuses but it’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

The seductive thing about nicotine is it calms you down but it doesn’t dull your mind. And in some circumstances it can actually help you think more clearly. Yes, there is science that backs me up here…

Nicotine stimulates the release of the chemical dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is involved in triggering positive feelings. It is often found to be low in people with depression, who may then use cigarettes to temporarily increase their dopamine supply. -Smoking and Mental Health – The Mental Health Foundation (UK)

Preclinical models and human studies have demonstrated that nicotine has cognitive-enhancing effects. Attention, working memory, fine motor skills and episodic memory functions are particularly sensitive to nicotine’s effects. Recent studies have demonstrated that the a4, B2, and a7 subunits of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) participate in the cognitive-enhancing effects of nicotine. Imaging studies have been instrumental in identifying brain regions where nicotine is active, and research on the dynamics of large-scale networks after activation by, or withdrawal from, nicotine hold promise for improved understanding of the complex actions of nicotine on human cognition. – Cognitive Effects of Nicotine: Recent Progress – National Library of Medicine, Institutes of Health

Nicotine improves cognitive functioning in smokers and psychiatric populations, but its cognitive-enhancing effects in healthy nonsmokers are less well understood. -Effects of Nicotine on Attention and Inhibitory Control in Healthy Nonsmokers – NIH

So on the one hand it helps you think clearly and relieve depression. But it is also bad for your health and highly addictive. That is especially true when it’s being delivered via cigarettes, but any tobacco is a health risk. It can cause cancer. It can lead to heart disease.

In my case, I’m pretty sure the binge cigar smoke I did at the cigar shop in Disney Springs back in September 2019, was what lead to the heart attack I had the following October. Normally I would sit down in their little leather chair lounge section and people watch as I smoked a Padron. Normally just one and I’m done. That vacation I smoked one after the other after the other until my head was spinning. That kind of chain smoking is so rare in me I can’t remember any other time I did anything like that but I’m pretty sure why I did it. I was depressed and miserable after learning I would likely never see a certain someone ever again, even just to scowl at each other over dinner.

Love is mysterious. Go figure.

In retrospect I don’t think I actually had a heart attack, just the build up to one, which could have been fatal for all I know had it not given me plenty of warning and I was already in the hospital. The pain came and went, came and went, came and went, came and went, and it got bad enough that I had to check myself into the ER. But it never really stopped coming and going, even while I was in the emergency room. As they were wheeling me up to the operating room I was actually feeling fine. Maybe it was an indecisive heart attack. Do I want to kill him now or wait for a bit longer? Decisions, decisions…

After the angioplasty I was told there was so little damage to my heart that it could not be detected by the usual means. So I was lucky. Instead of slamming me down all at once and killing me then and there it just kept coming and going, coming and going, all the way to the operating room. But the message was pretty clear. Among other things: Stop smoking.

That’s relatively easy to do when it’s cigars. Cigarettes are to nicotine as the needle is to heroin. They’re basically a nicotine delivery system. Cigars are something you savor over a period of time…you take a walk and reflect and think, you don’t just wolf one down and then light up another…

…unless you’re depressed and just want that dopamine high, and like me you could never get cigarette smoke into your lungs.

You don’t inhale a cigar. Twice in my life I’ve tried to inhale a cigarette. First time I was a kid and a bunch of us found an unopened pack in a construction area behind the apartments we lived in. We passed them around. I could not get past the first puff. For the rest of my childhood I wondered why adults smoked them. Then I became one. Second time around I was in my 60s. I was feeling depressed and miserable and decided to try cigarettes again. I bought a pack of unfiltered high octane ones because why not just go for it. That time I made it to two puffs. Then I almost hacked my lungs out. So…no more of that.

By then I was used to the full bodied flavor of a good cigar and I am still wondering about cigarette smokers because cigarettes taste to me like you are smoking a piece of cardboard.

I have enjoyed cigars since I was old enough to buy tobacco, graduating almost instantly from the drugstore brands that are machine rolled with the intake port ready made, to higher quality hand rolled boxed labels you need to cut the ends off of before you light up. At some point I found myself perusing the walk-in humidor of an upscale cigar store, tried one of the expensive ones just to see if it was worth the money, and had an epiphany.

The downside to those top shelf brands is they can be hard on a budget. 35 bucks for just one cigar did you say? Hahahaha…some even sell for hundreds. My saving grace is I have always been, except for that one time in Disney World, a casual smoker. Well…except late in my term at Space Telescope, when the stress got serious. For that I would buy a small tin of mini cigars and take a smoke walk around the parameter of Wyman Park. That was when I began to understand why the mainframe guys I worked with some decades previously called their cigarettes “programmer’s candy.”

But my usual routine is have a cigar after dinner, maybe at the end of a week, take a walk and savor it. So I could afford the top shelf cigars because I didn’t smoke them that often. Now I’m at a stage in my life when I probably shouldn’t be smoking them at all, but in my defense my intake these days is a fraction of what it was previously. And my little cigar walk yesterday with that mild Hoyo de Monterrey, my first cigar since coming back from California, was a revelation.

Thing of it was, after the heart attack I was afraid, but I didn’t want to give cigars up completely because I knew they helped me with stress, and unlike alcohol they didn’t dull my mind. If anything they sharpened it and perked me up. But fear is not a good motivator. It just makes you keep avoiding a problem instead of really looking at it.

I’m looking at it now. I’ve been sluggish and morose all month long. The occasional margarita only made it worse. I was feeling my age like I’d never had before. I could see all the pleasures of life walking away from me. I was avoiding the box of Cubans I’d brought back from California because I was so tired all the time and miserable and I was afraid. I figured one of those would only make it worse, maybe provoke another heart attack. I kept telling myself maybe later, maybe later.

Eventually the misery got to a point I didn’t care anymore. So the other night I flipped misery the bird and decided to give a Hoyo de Monterrey a try. I’d heard they were top notch premium Cuban cigars and I’d only known the brand from the boxes I saw in drugstores.

I went for a cigar walk around the neighborhood at twilight. And I swear I could feel my mind awakening. By the time I got back home I felt a lot more perky and did some work around the house instead of just flopping right into the bed.

The next morning I noticed a definite improvement in mindset and attitude. And energy. Lots more energy. Got a Bunch done on the backyard and in the house. Didn’t even need my usual afternoon nap.

So, dig it…I smoked one cigar late in the day…a mild Cuban…and the next day I did not smoke at all and yet I had more energy, clarity of mind and a much better attitude. I felt great, just coasting on that one cigar from the previous day. It’s two days later as I write this and I’m still feeling the boost I got from that one cigar.

Before the week is out, I’ll probably have another. But at age 70 I can also feel the toll it takes on my body. I felt it while I was smoking that Hoyo de Monterrey and I had to let it go out when it was only two thirds done.

I listen to my body, and when it says stop I stop. It’s something I’ve learned to do with alcohol too. And…gardening. And moving luggage from the car to the hotel room. And really anything that makes me exert myself. That twenty-something body I had once is in the past. Also the thirty-something body…the forty-something body…and so on. I’ve got the 70 year old model now and when it says stop I have to stop.

It’s because cigars aren’t the nicotine delivery system cigarettes are I can stop and take a break for a few days or weeks. Everything I’ve ever heard about cigarettes, everyone I’ve known personally that smoked them have told me this, that they are incredibly addictive. I read a story years ago about addiction in returning soldiers from Vietnam and one of them said that quitting cigarettes was much harder than quitting heroin. I am so glad I never got myself hooked on them. I advise people to stay the hell away from them. I really don’t think that’s hypocrisy.

I think about the people I knew who smoked them that later died of lung cancer. And I would feel really bad if someone reading this who was trying to quit cigarettes, decided that maybe just one or two every now and then wouldn’t be so bad after all, because nicotine has it’s beneficial side. No. The cigarette seems insidiously designed to prevent moderation, also any pleasure apart from satisfying an urgent need for more nicotine now, right now.

That said, I know cigars are a health risk too. So maybe this is my hypocrisy. They can give you cancer and heart disease. Ulysses S. Grant was a heavy cigar smoker and that gave him the throat cancer that killed him. But they’ve been a part of my life ever since I was a young man and I’m pretty certain now that I’m not quitting them entirely. Just…never do that chain smoking thing ever again!

Yes I do other things to relieve stress…I make art, I go for walks, I hike a trail, I drive some roads. All of these require energy and for a while this month I was flat out. Now I have some. And a better mindset. Tomorrow if the weather is as lovely as it was today I might go hike the NCR trail for a stretch.

Except for that one time I have always smoked in moderation. And since the heart attack I have cut back. Mostly that was out of fear and I might bump it up a notch now, depending on what my body tells me. Usually I don’t smoke the entire thing anymore anyway. I can feel my body saying “enough” and I just let it go out. I have to overrule that waste not want not mindset I grew up with but that’s getting easier now that I’m also trying to downsize the house.

So. I have a humidor full of some of the best Cubans down in the basement art room. They are the real thing, not knockoffs. I may not need to buy any more for years at the rate I’m smoking them. They calm me down. They relieve the eternal stress. They sharpen my mind. They perk me up. They have been a part of my life since I was a young man. And I would rather not shuffle sadly into that good night, let alone go quietly. Maybe they do kill me in the long run, even if I moderate. But in the longer run I’m dead anyway. I made it to 70. Don Juan said all paths lead nowhere. Take the path with heart and it will make for a joyful journey. I like a good cigar from time to time.

Definitely T-shirt and cutoffs weather here. I really need to be careful wearing sandals out in the sunlight here with these pale white feet of mine. Also the rest of me.

I joke that I’m a Californian exile, but it’s not all that bad. I’ve lived in Maryland nearly all my life and Maryland has been good to me. Much Much better than anywhere else mom was likely to resettle after the divorce. Either Pasadena where I was born, or Oceano where my dad’s side lives, would have been nicer for a gay kid growing up, but had she been able to go back to her former home in Pennsylvania I might have been driven to suicide once the hormones started percolating. 

And now I’m back in my little Baltimore rowhouse after another extended vacation in Oceano, and if it’s taught me anything it’s that trying to split my time between Maryland and California just won’t work. Either I move out there, which I can’t afford now because both renting and owning there on the coast are way beyond my means, or I stay here in Baltimore in my little Baltimore rowhouse with an easy mortgage payment, where I can walk to everything I might need on a daily basis, and just visit California for a few weeks at a time, but not for months at a time.

The pro of staying in California…somehow…is I get to spend time in the land of my birth, a place I’ve always felt deep down inside is my true home. It calls to me in a way nowhere else does. But I’ve lived for so much of my life in Maryland can I really say I’m a native Californian anymore? Technically yes, I was born there. Culturally it’s another thing. I notice the difference in mindsets and attitudes all the time while I’m there. I feel comfortable among them, at least the coastal Californians. I would be happy to spend the rest of my life among them. But in a way it’s like living here in Baltimore after having grown up in the DC suburbs. I’m comfortable living among the people here too. I enjoy their company. And the local food here is delicious. But I know deep down inside I am not one of them.

That might be that perpetual feeling of otherness that comes with being a barely post Stonewall gay kid in the late 60s/early 70s. Plus the constant static I got from my bitter Baptist grandmother for being my father’s son. But there is a truth there too. Baltimore has its own culture, as does coastal California versus central Maryland, and I am more Maryland than California.

Maryland has been good to me. It was one of only two states that gave same sex couples the right to marry by popular vote. Even California couldn’t work itself up to that. I blame the central valley. I got a very good public school education here in Montgomery county. I made many lifelong friends. I had good jobs once I got into micro computer programming, managed to buy a nice house within walking distance to everything I need including my office at Space Telescope. I have my dream come true car. I can spend my retirement here comfortably. I could wish it were different, but given how good Maryland has been to me it seems ungracious. 

So I think the die is cast. I can’t afford to move to California, I can’t afford to stay there months at a time and maintain my home in Baltimore too, and I’ve got it so easy here in Maryland now, both financially and situationally, it would be foolish to throw that advantage away. I can go visit California from time to time and be immersed in the land of my birth. But Maryland gave me a home.

There’s a line from the poem The Man On The Bed by Debora Greger that keeps tapping me on the shoulder ever since I first read it in an issue of The New Yorker…

If the heart is a house, he thought, it is rented to strangers who leave it empty…

I was unaware the moment I left Space Telescope for the last time as an employee, how the combination of details of my life just then, being a heart patient, approaching seventy and having an aging body, plus living alone in my little Baltimore rowhouse, would impact my mental well being. But I see now that it is killing me.

I still have many of the friends I made back in high school, and in my twenties. But they are all scattered to the winds now. Most of them living in California, where I had once hoped to retire to. One has late in his life, resisted being pinned down to any one place and is travelling the wide world over, as though to become the very definition of that saying, that not all who wander are lost. We socialize via the Internet tubes and social media things. But as human contact it is second hand at best.

I can’t go live in California, much as I want to. I am tied firmly to my place in Baltimore. It’s not so bad really, in fact logically I have to admit I have it Very Good here. A nice solid little concrete block and brick rowhouse I bought in 2001 for less than ninety grand when I became staff at The Institute, and thus with a Very Easy monthly mortgage payment: a good thing to have on retirement income. The neighborhood is very walkable. In less than ten minutes I can be at the local grocery store, ten more and I’m at an upscale-ish organic food market. There are drugstores, restaurants, bars…just about everything I might need on a day to day basis is close at hand. That’ll come in handy when I become too old to drive. But I don’t want to live that long.

I had not reckoned with how being single, living alone, being old, having an iffy heart and an aging body, would make retirement something like Nietzsche’s abyss. Except I’m not just staring into it, I’m living much too comfortably in it. When I was employed I had human contact throughout most of my workday. And The Institute was such a Wonderful workplace. I actually enjoyed the company of my fellow workers there. Most of them. Some still invite me out to drinks and dinner at some nice place nearby, and there are lots of those. When that happens, I get an evening of intelligent, absorbing conversation. I feel alive again for a little while. Then I come home and go to bed. Alone. City life is invigorating. When you can get outside to enjoy it. 

I never used to really notice solitude. I’m an only child. Solitude is something of a birthright for us. We have to make friends and socialize outside of the home just like anyone else, but we don’t wilt if we don’t have company every day of the week. I could spend my evenings home alone with a good book or an art project and still have the companionship of my co-workers at The Institute during the day, and all the joy and wonder of being a part of human space exploration. I did not reckon with what might happen to my mental well being when that part of my life vanished into the doldrums of being retired. I was looking forward to it. I had so much I wanted to do.

I thought I would have more time to work on my art projects, and to travel a bit. I don’t have the money to do the great world tour, but road trips are something a really enjoy and I have a good car for that. What has happened now is that I’m just tired all the time. I can, and have, spent days doing nothing but napping and taking random walks through the neighborhood. For a while I used the local bars and restaurants as a way of grabbing a little second hand human company. But my heart troubles have put the brakes on drinking…I was never a heavy drinker to begin with…and dining out frequently is too hard on my retirement income budget.

So I spend a lot of time alone in the house, and you’d think that’s perfect for getting on to all the art projects I have in the works. But no. I look at my drafting table, or my cameras, and I have no energy for any of it. I ended up short cutting to the end of A Coming Out Story after I became concerned that death would take me before I could finish it properly, because I had no energy to work on the thing after all, and I didn’t want to leave the story hanging. But I’m not happy with it. There’s a whole lot of stuff I could fill into that story that I have no energy for. Which of course makes me feel even worse, even more like just wanting to crawl into bed and sleep forever.

The solitude, something I’ve been fine with all my life, is too much of my day now and it is killing me. I honestly did not expect that to be something that would happen to me in retirement. I didn’t reckon with suddenly losing that workday companionship, didn’t reckon on what effect that would have on me being a single gay male utter failure at romance. My co-workers and friends who have retired are all married and most of them have families. And this past couple month’s worth of rainy, grey overcast or bitterly cold weather hasn’t helped any. February is always a bad time of year for me, and March isn’t much better…memories wise. Valentine’s Day and March 6 only laugh in my face. I can see better now why retired people go live somewhere warm.

So this week I’m packing my car for another road trip to California for a short visit to my brother and Oceano, and a few more days in Disneyland. I need to jolt myself out of this cycle of solitude. Before it convinces me to pack it all in, stay home all day long and wait for the Grime Reaper to ring the doorbell. Figure a road trip will do it. I need something to wake me up and at my age now it’s unlikely to be a boyfriend. Not that it was ever likely I suppose.

I had my first mock cocktail at Rocket to Venus last week and it convinced me that these alcohol free drinks could actually work for me. I haven’t given up drinking entirely, but I have to be very careful because it really is the case that more than one drink in a week’s time and I will get heart flutters. That said, later this week I’m planning on having one or more of La Cuchara’s lovely Velvet Undergrounds (Ancient Age Bourbon, Angostura Bitters, Orange, Hickory Smoke…yes…smoke…you read that right…) but that’s a break up celebration date and heart flutters seem appropriate for such things.

But now I’ve discovered mock alcohol, and in my quest for the perfect mock alcohol I can now report that “Cut Above” mock whiskey is…horrible. To me it tastes like that stuff they put on microwave popcorn to make it taste like it has butter on it, but served as a drink.

That might be me and your mileage may vary. I’ve learned over the years that my genes play a bigger role in how things taste to me than I would have thought when I was a kid. Cilantro tastes like soap, but others seem to like it. I can eat Durian candy and it tastes fine to me, but to others it apparently tastes like vomit. And I’ve never liked the taste of beer, but others will tell me that beer is the bread of life. I can tolerate a good German wheat beer, but that’s all.

So maybe whatever they’re using to simulate the taste of whiskey in Cut Above is just something that reacts badly with my taste buds. But I ended up pouring that entire expensive bottle down the drain because I simply could not drink more than a couple sips. I bought it thinking at worst it would simply not become a favorite, but there is always worse than worst.

I bought a bottle of Free Spirits mock Bourbon tonight at a spot on The Avenue, and I’m sipping it contentedly now. It’s not a perfect imitation, but close enough that I can tell myself it’s not a top shelf Bourbon but good enough for a nightcap. I can tell they’re using cinnamon to give it that alcohol bite, but it kinda does work.

Second anniversary of being retired. And also time to gather my forms and do my taxes. So naturally I decide to evaluate my retirement funds…and stress out about money.

Yes, Yes…you knew the balance would go down when you withdraw money didn’t you. Didn’t You??.

It’s okay. I’m theoretically good for many many years beyond when the heart unit is depreciated and support is no longer available from the vender. But I have to watch my spending more carefully than I did when I was employed and making six figures. I can do that…I have budgeting spreadsheets I’ve created and some rules about what to spend and when. I have excellent health insurance beyond Medicare parts the A and B. Financially I’m good. Not fabulous, but good. I can pay my bills and generally maintain a lower middle class standard of living. Even take a Disney vacation every now and then. These days that puts me in the Very Very Lucky category. But the ability to stress over Everything is just baked into me I reckon.

At the moment a source of stress is that it’s looking like I can either take the two week Disney Vacation this spring or go to California and stay with family out there this summer…but not both. And those are two things I count on to relieve stress. Ha Ha. But I’m still crunching numbers. I’ll know by the end of this month. That’s plenty of time to either cancel my Disney reservations or tell my brother that a California stay will have to wait for next year.

And the fact is that cross-country road trip is getting very tiring now. I have to stop more often, which means more hotel money for the trip both ways. And the anticipation of driving cross country isn’t as exciting as it used to be. I’ve done just about all the parts of the country I wanted to, and some of it now, like Texas and Oklahoma, feel scary in a way they never did before.

Maybe I just fly out to California now and then for a week or two. Thinking about a road trip doesn’t get me excited, it just makes me feel tired now.

Oh dear…I’m 70 now aren’t I. (Looks at the old man skin on his arms) Yeah. That happened…

Usually I put the dishes in the dishwasher before bed and let it run overnight, then unpack it the next morning. My mornings are usually pretty aimless these days until I am fully awake. Usually that’s after coffee, my morning exercises, and a morning walk. This is my retirement morning routine I reckon.

But a little tick I’m noticing in myself now is whenever there’s a big storm in the forecast I make double sure to get all the dishes clean and put away, and take care of anything else that needs doing in the kitchen, such as make more ice tea. So when I wake up I don’t have to do anything except make coffee and breakfast, and try to figure out how my day is going while scoping out what’s going on outside.

Weather happens, la de da. I grew up in central Maryland, I am familiar with how the sky does its thing over the seasons. Maryland skies aren’t as dramatic as Florida and Kansas skies, but I have watched them all my life. Our weather is mostly pretty bland compared to elsewhere. The big storms are interlopers, exciting, possibly dangerous, demanding more attention than normal. In the morning I want to be ready.

Looks now like the action here in Charm City is late Tuesday and into early wednesday, then it clears out quickly. But then comes another one. This seems like a pattern settling in. We’ve been somewhat lucky these have been happening in warm air. If one of these happens when we’re getting a cold snap it’s going to dump a ton of snow on us.