…is my favorite winter activity. We just had a band of pretty fierce snow flurries pass through Bawlmer hon. Moderately large flakes being driven horizontally by the wind. Seems to have stopped as I’m typing this. Forecast is for a bit more snow this coming Tuesday.

When it snows I enjoy hanging out at home in just my cutoffs and a t-shirt, drinking hot coffee or tea with the heat turned up a notch. Yes it adds a tad to the heating bill but I keep the heat low most of the rest of the time and I can afford it. Heinlein said to budget for the luxuries first. I budget for the utilities first. I suppose there’s some overlap there.

From our The More Things Change The More They Stay The Same department…

Facebook helpfully gives me a memory from 2017 that involved a letter to the editor that I should have noted here too. So let me correct that now, and also for a few certain someones I know on both sides of the Gay/Straight divide who still don’t get it.

It was the first thing I saw in my custom Google LGBT news feed. It was an editorial, but more like an extended letter to the editor, in the Michigan Daily Journal titled “I’m Not Gay, I’m Normal”. It’s from a gay guy proudly proclaiming his normalcy against the great Gay Lifestyle of sex, drugs, glitter, and dance clubs. Wow. I hadn’t seen one of those in a while, and seeing this one that morning was almost kinda reassuring. In a time when proud of itself ignorance and laughing knuckle dragging jingoism are strutting around everywhere en mass, it’s oddly comforting to see the common everyday little jackass stupidities are still dutifully carrying on out there.

Listen to me: normal, in the sense you are using it, is a mirage. It insists that it’s something real but it is completely relative. Your Michigan (the writer’s) accent might seem perfectly normal in Michigan, but plop you in the deep south and everyone will notice that you talk funny. Suddenly you are not normal anymore. And yet, you are still you. Go back to Michigan, presto, normal again. Think you dress normal? Maybe for an American. Long hair? Short hair? Beard? Clean shaven? Christian? White? If normal was a point on a compass it would change directions every time you took a step.

And here’s the thing: if your problem with urban gay club culture is it seems shallow to you, consider that conforming to a chimera of normalcy is just as shallow. Taking your measure against something you are not is the embodiment of shallow. Never mind who you aren’t.

When I was a wee lad, just starting to take an interest in painting and drawing, I had an intuition that style was something more related to how your hand is wired to your brain than anything else, and to just let mine happen on its own. I worry about the mechanics of drawing, perspective, light, anatomy, that sort of thing. To the degree I worry about composition it’s how mine flow and what sort of emotion is evoked. My style is what it is.

That works for more than art. Your style of living has a lot to do with how your brain is wired, plus the experience you gather as you walk through life. Experience changes us, but it does its work on the bedrock of our flesh and blood biology. Forget normal. Be a decent person and let your style be whatever it is. And never forget that normal is just a passing coincidence. It’s not important. Decency is important.

I’ve seen this I’m Not Gay I’m Normal argument in one form or another over and over and over and over since the ’70s. And as someone who experiences being in a scene like it’s an itchy sweater, I can appreciate expressions of discomfort, even resentment, over being given one default scene you either fit into or you don’t. But that’s an illusion of choice. There are many scenes. Infinite variety. You will not fit into most of them. That’s okay. If you’re worrying about what scene you fit into you are worrying about the wrong thing.

Some weeks ago this Times Article came across my news stream and provoked some thoughts…even some visualizations…

Many People Have a Vivid ‘Mind’s Eye,’ While Others Have None at All

Scientists are finding new ways to probe two not-so-rare conditions to better understand the links between vision, perception and memory.

Dr. Adam Zeman didn’t give much thought to the mind’s eye until he met someone who didn’t have one. In 2005, the British neurologist saw a patient who said that a minor surgical procedure had taken away his ability to conjure images.

Over the 16 years since that first patient, Dr. Zeman and his colleagues have heard from more than 12,000 people who say they don’t have any such mental camera. The scientists estimate that tens of millions of people share the condition, which they’ve named aphantasia, and millions more experience extraordinarily strong mental imagery, called hyperphantasia.

I would probably fit pretty well in the latter category. I can almost completely zone out into a daydream that’s almost like a vivid dream in its detail. And I can do that at will. It’s a two edged knife. And I think I’ve met people who have no mind’s eye at all. They’re the ones that mystify me when they tell me that they don’t dream.

When working on a cartoon, be it a political cartoon or an episode of A Coming Out Story, I do next to no preliminary drawings. I might draw out a figure just to make sure I can actually draw it the way I want it on paper, but I already know how I want it to look on paper. I can visualize it clearly, in detail. I think out a cartoon or a painting, sometimes off and on for days. I can see it vividly in my head. By the time I sit down at the drafting table to actually start drawing it I know exactly what I want to put down on the paper. It’s very rare that I have to change direction once I begin to see it on paper.

In episode 19 of A Coming Out Story, I made reference to my ability to disappear into my own alternate worlds…

My daydreaming really is this vivid…

I used to think everyone can do this. And there are times it’s helpful in a practical way. Like when I’m thinking out a home repair job, or something I want to build for myself. But it can also be a trap. As I point out at the end of episode 19.

Bunch of friends tried to help me get a vaccine appointment today. I got leads on almost half a dozen possible locations/companies/mass vaccination sites. I love my friends!

Were any available where I was pointed to? Not a single one. It seems by the time knowledge gets to me, however it does, they’re already booked solid. But I really do appreciate the thought.

I’ve had some almost excessively good luck in my life. But there are these recurring situations where I am always falling through the cracks. My love life for example. Mental health not being so great, but not so bad as to warrant any support. Not artsy enough to be taken seriously as an artist, and not nerdy enough to be taken seriously as a computer professional. I tend to bore people and I get talked over a lot. I feel most of the time like I’m some sort of misplaced inventory. Like I’m really not supposed to be here. This seems to be another one of those things.

This came across my Facebook stream today, forwarded by a gay friend. It had resonance for both of us…

Elgin Park from Animal on Vimeo.

The man, Michael Paul Smith, is the creator of dozens of magical photographs that seem to be images from another time long in the past. But they aren’t. He’s following in the method of the great special effects artists Howard and Theodore Lydecker, whose work stunned audiences all through the 30s through the 60s. While others also used scale models in their effects, the Lydeckers perfected a technique of forced perspective and filmed in natural sunlight. Smith is masterful at it, and his images have attracted fans all over the world.

It really resonated with me on one level, because the scenes of him working on his models brought the memories back. Modelmaking was a childhood hobby. Throughout most of my grade school years I had shelves in my room full of the models I’d made. Most were from plastic kids when I was younger, but also things I made from scratch. When I was 7 or 8 I watched my first episode of Gerry and Sylvia Andersen’s Supercar when mom took me on a Florida vacation and I was immediately hooked. But no Supercar toy was to be found in the stores so I began making my own from paper and cardboard. After the show was syndicated back home my model became a hit with the other neighborhood kids and I found myself making them for everybody.

Later in my life all the things I’d figured out how to do with models, plus the things I’d learned teaching myself how to paint in oils, led me to a job as an architectural model maker. So the scenes of Smith working…all the tools and tricks you could see him employing…it brought the memories back. But its how he came to be doing it that resonated deeply with me.

In the video he says..

“I was bullied in school, and I was bullied because I was different. (wheew…) I think I’m still…dealing with that, still struggling with what that means and all that. I don’t think about it a lot but it does bubble up.”

I know that feeling. More than I care to. And this one…

“I come into this reality at a slightly different angle”

I found myself thinking as I watched this, Oh gosh that guy is so much me. His experience with being gay and being different…not just different because you’re gay but different on top of that because you come into this reality at a slightly different angle…and the bullying that comes with it. I knew that too. How recognition when you finally get it after going through all that makes you very uncomfortable. It brought the memories back, and all the feelings that come with those memories.

I still have my modelmaking tools but it’s been ages since I’ve used them. I moved on to a different thing. I had to because the modelmaking jobs suddenly dried up when the savings and loan scandal in the 1980s killed off many of the firms I made models for, and I was back to job hunting again. And that’s the other thing about this video that I really related to. He talks about all the jobs he had before, and how his resume looks like “what’s available in the job force.” I could say the same. He goes through and lists all his jobs and and then he says…

“Everything you do you will learn from it and you’ll use it later on in life.”

Yes…so much Yes. Time was I really hated how I kept having to go from one job to another, often when my employer found out he had Teh Gay working for him. Looking back now I have to realize that haphazard pinball ricocheting here and there path through the work force gave me a lot of intellectual tools I can still call on whenever I need them. Sometimes I catch myself doing something…maybe it’s at home maybe it’s in some other context…and I remember where I first picked up that odd bit of knowledge I was using just then and it takes me back for a moment and I find myself thinking…yeah, I guess it was worth it after all. Time was I’d have given anything to have had the comfortable life others did. Now I count my blessings.

The weirdo, the outcast, if they survive the wilderness end up having seen so many things others haven’t, and knowing how to navigate through strange territory others can’t. Because they had no choice. And sometimes because of that they end up doing pretty well. Sometimes.