Cosmos

A few days ago I started watching Cosmos on Netfix. I had forgotten just how wonderful the series is. Carl Sagan had a special way of condensing and explaining scientific discoveries about the universe. He was a gifted storyteller as well as a brilliant scientist. His prose style may have been a bit over the top. I remember that it became fairly common back in the ’80s to make fun of his phraseology and his nerdy enthusiasm for astronomy. All you had to say was “billions and billions” and most knew immediately that you were referring to Carl Sagan. I have to admit that I sometimes wish he had used a little less syrup.

But then again, who am I to criticize. He got his point across very effectively. He made you contemplate certain things in a way that helped you get past the abstract. When he got into his pretend spaceship and talked about the vastness of space as he showed you the most exquisite images of far away galaxies, you got a sense of just how huge the universe really is. We know that it’s huge, but I don’t think most of us really think about it much. Our whole galaxy is really just a little hole in the wall, but most of the time we seem to think we’re the main attraction.

He helped us contemplate the vastness of time by compressing everything from the Big Bang to the present into a single cosmic year. The Big Bang occurred on January 1. The planet Earth appeared four billion years ago sometime in September. And human beings have been around for the last few seconds of December 31.

When you lay it all out there, let it all sink in, it’s hard for me to imagine that our opinions and beliefs matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. And the idea that this giant show was staged just for our benefit… It seems absurd to me.

Recently I discovered that a friend of mine died. I had known this person for several years. It was the film Brokeback Mountain that brought us together. When I showed up at the discussion board at IMDb in the fall of 2006, Shasta was already there. I never met her in person, but we were in regular contact for a very long time. We exchanged messages online, sometimes long, personal messages. We sent cards to each other, exchanged Christmas gifts. And I’m not the only fan of Brokeback Mountain that she befriended. She reached out to dozens of us. So after the shock of discovering she was gone, another shock hit me. None of her Brokeback Mountain friends knew she had died until I thought to look for her obituary online. By the time I found the obit, Shasta had been gone for more than a month.

Shasta started complaining of serious pain in the summer of 2011. She said she had started putting her “affairs in order” then. She made a list of things she wanted to her cousin to know if something happened to her. So why didn’t the cousin or someone know that her Brokeback mountain friends would like to have been informed when she was put into hospice care in early September and when she died later that month?

Shasta knew I had become very active on Facebook. I often invited her to become a Facebook friend, but she seemed to show little interest Facebook. So we continued to communicate through a small message board. And then after I found the obituary, I discovered that she did in deed have a Facebook account. She was on Facebook before me.

Shasta was from Arkansas, and she was very active in her church, and she taught English at a private Christian school. And it dawned on me that like so many LGBT people, especially from rural, conservative areas, Shasta, a straight ally, was, in a sense, in the closet. She spent hours online, almost every day for more than five years, communicating with her Brokeback Mountain friends, but apparently she couldn’t tell anyone who knew her in person that we existed or that we were important to her. Maybe she was afraid she would be shunned. She may have even been afraid she would be fired. I just don’t know.

It’s ironic because the story Brokeback Mountain was about the tragedy of leading an inauthentic life. Maybe that’s one of the reasons she related to the film. Maybe she didn’t feel like she could be completely herself with her loved ones. Maybe life in the small Arkansas town where she lived was too confining to her. Maybe her Brokeback Mountain friends were her fishing buddies.

I grew up in southern West Virginia, so I’m familiar with the kind of environment that Shasta lived in. I know that you can only stray so far before your thought of as an outcast, especially if you make church people your closest friends. I spent half of my life terrified that someone would discover who I really am, and it seems I’m destined to spend the rest of my life recovering from the shellshock.

I’m so tired of trying to manage personal information, of trying to decide who should know what and how much. In the larger scheme of thing, does it really matter what anyone thinks of me? As fat as I am, I’m just a fly speck. And I’m going to be dead soon. Even if I live to be a hundred, I will have been alive for less than a second of the last day of the cosmic year.

So if you really can’t stand that I’m a short, overweight, out of shape, middle aged gay man from a hick state who wouldn’t feel all that comfortable in a restaurant much more fancy than Applebee’s, then just let me go. If you think there’s something wrong with me because I prefer wispy, thin “twinks” to beefy, hairy mature men, then just let me go. If you just can’t stomach the fact that I think Jesus stories are, more or less, mythology and not literally true, then just let me go. If you can’t tolerate my fashion sense, or lack there of, then just let me go. If you just hate the fact that I don’t have a job and that I’m on disability social security, then just let me go. If you think it’s weird that I don’t drive, don’t have a boyfriend, never had a boyfriend, haven’t had sex since the ‘90s and that I’m painfully shy, then just let me go. If all of my typos and grammar mistakes drive you up the wall, just let me go. Rather than trying to shame me and try to force me to hide certain facts about who I am, let me be. I’ve only got a short while to be here, and then I’ll be gone.

P.S. If there is some kind of heaven like afterlife, I hope Shasta will be reunited with her dogs there, just as she wanted.