I am the detestable one, the despised one, the other.
It is all my fault.
No excuse, no forgiveness.
I feel shame, guilt and fear.
And that is used against me.
This is my life,
And time is running out.
Friday, November 17, 2017
Alone
Alone in a universe trying to kill me,Among a species always looking for a scapegoat.
I am the detestable one, the despised one, the other.
It is all my fault.
No excuse, no forgiveness.
I feel shame, guilt and fear.
And that is used against me.
This is my life,
And time is running out.
I am the detestable one, the despised one, the other.
It is all my fault.
No excuse, no forgiveness.
I feel shame, guilt and fear.
And that is used against me.
This is my life,
And time is running out.
Monday, September 18, 2017
The Benefits of Age
Next week I turn 52, and although growing older is no picnic, there are some silver linings. It’s easier for me to be an older male than it was for me to be a young one.
No one expects me to go to war. I came of age in the mid-1980s, and the memory of the draft and Vietnam lingered. Boys were expected to register, and those who didn’t were ineligible for college financial aid. It was also against the law not to register. Not only did the thought of being in a war frighten me, but I wasn’t like other boys, so the idea of living in a hyper-masculine environment was enough to cause me to experience panic attacks. I’m not exaggerating. I lost sleep thinking about being in the Army.
No one expects me to engage in fist fighting even if I were to be physically threatened. If someone were to punch me in the face the next time I go into a bar, no one would expect me to reciprocate. No one would ask me, “Why did you *let* him do that to you?” And I was most certainly expected to be prepared to violently defend myself at the drop of a hat when I was young in West Virginia. Boys were expected to protect themselves, and if you needed or asked for help, you were deemed unworthy.
No one expects me to play rough sports anymore. When I was growing up, I was regularly asked when I was going out for football. My father played, so many expected me to follow in his footsteps. I had no interest. I didn’t relate to the urge to run at other boys and slam into them at full speed.
It all left me feeling uncertain. I wasn’t a girl, but I couldn’t live up to the expectations placed on me as a boy either. It made me question my identity and my worth, and it put me in danger.
I grew up in fear. I feared rejection, and I feared physical assault. I’m glad the threat of those things are no longer as immediate. But I don’t want to forget. Living in fear for so long has taken its toll. And I don’t want to give even the slightest impression that I think what was done to me and other boys is necessary, acceptable or excusable.
Thursday, August 10, 2017
Who Is Michael?
I Am Michael is now streaming on Netflix, and I watched it last night. Like many, I found the film perplexing and frustrating. There wasn’t much insight provided as to why Michael Glatze would be drawn into Religious Right anti-LGBT beliefs. To me, Michael came off as disturbing and unhinged.
We learn that Michael’s father died suddenly of a heart condition when Michael was 13, and then his mother died a few years later when Michael was in college. Just before he abandons his friends and boyfriend and denounces LGBT recognition, identity and rights, he has a string of panic attacks, which he fears are symptoms of the same heart condition that killed his father. When he’s given a clean bill of health, he takes it as a sign.
So he had an existential crisis? That isn’t rare. Many have trouble facing their own mortality. Many wonder about meaning and purpose. Many find comfort in religion and spirituality. But why would Michael choose Christian fundamentalism? It doesn’t make much sense. It’s not like he wasn’t aware of other points of view. And his parents didn’t foist fundamentalist beliefs on him. His father was an agnostic, and although his mother identified as Christian, she wasn’t Religious Right Christian, and she hardly ever talked about her beliefs. She didn’t take Michael to church.
One thing I noticed was how Michael always wanted to be out front. He wanted to lead. He wanted followers. He wanted to be the preacher. He was always going to the extreme. When he went to San Francisco with his boyfriend, he immersed himself in fast lane urban LGBT life. He joined a magazine and became an activist. Then he wrote a guide for LGBT youth. Then he started his own LGBT magazine. After becoming a fundamentalist, he started writing inflammatory blog posts that drew a lot of media attention. When he went to Bible school, he started telling his fellow students they needed to listen to God and not the instructors. Many seemed to be listening to Michael. Finally, he became the pastor of his own church. I got the impression he was an attention whore who was basically empty inside. He was absorbed by a particular subculture. He studied it. He learned to mimic. Then he wanted to take over. I suspect he has some kind of personality disorder, maybe borderline. There doesn’t seem to be a center. No one is really home. And the attention seeking and the adopted zealotry might be his way of compensating.
We learn that Michael’s father died suddenly of a heart condition when Michael was 13, and then his mother died a few years later when Michael was in college. Just before he abandons his friends and boyfriend and denounces LGBT recognition, identity and rights, he has a string of panic attacks, which he fears are symptoms of the same heart condition that killed his father. When he’s given a clean bill of health, he takes it as a sign.
So he had an existential crisis? That isn’t rare. Many have trouble facing their own mortality. Many wonder about meaning and purpose. Many find comfort in religion and spirituality. But why would Michael choose Christian fundamentalism? It doesn’t make much sense. It’s not like he wasn’t aware of other points of view. And his parents didn’t foist fundamentalist beliefs on him. His father was an agnostic, and although his mother identified as Christian, she wasn’t Religious Right Christian, and she hardly ever talked about her beliefs. She didn’t take Michael to church.
One thing I noticed was how Michael always wanted to be out front. He wanted to lead. He wanted followers. He wanted to be the preacher. He was always going to the extreme. When he went to San Francisco with his boyfriend, he immersed himself in fast lane urban LGBT life. He joined a magazine and became an activist. Then he wrote a guide for LGBT youth. Then he started his own LGBT magazine. After becoming a fundamentalist, he started writing inflammatory blog posts that drew a lot of media attention. When he went to Bible school, he started telling his fellow students they needed to listen to God and not the instructors. Many seemed to be listening to Michael. Finally, he became the pastor of his own church. I got the impression he was an attention whore who was basically empty inside. He was absorbed by a particular subculture. He studied it. He learned to mimic. Then he wanted to take over. I suspect he has some kind of personality disorder, maybe borderline. There doesn’t seem to be a center. No one is really home. And the attention seeking and the adopted zealotry might be his way of compensating.
Monday, July 31, 2017
We Americans
by Gary Cottle
We are quiet and gentle
As much as we are brash.
We are communal
As much as we are individuals, rugged and refined.
We work in the morning for ourselves.
We work in the afternoon for our compatriots.
We dream, hope and pray at night.
There is no conflict.
Our country is large.
We spread out, body and mind.
We claim this country, body and mind.
We will not be dispossessed.
We give thanks for our bounty
As we acknowledge our wrongs.
There is no conflict.
We can be proud, grateful, humble, sad and sorrowful
As we laugh and dance with joy.
We know how to do all of these things,
We Americans.
We honor the cowboys and the cashiers,
The astronauts and the accountants,
The teachers and the custodians,
Star gazers, bird watchers, dancers and athletes,
There is no conflict.
Our country is large.
We are boys who go down on our knees
In basement rooms for men we do not know.
We give pleasure.
We walk with Jesus.
We are angels.
We are girls who speak out,
Sing, build and lead.
Taoists who have found the way.
We are male and female, both and neither.
We love male and female, both and neither.
There is no conflict.
We speak English, Spanish, Hebrew and Hindi.
We are brown, black and beige,
Writhing together in pleasure.
We hyphenate and assimilate.
Our country is large.
We march to the beat of our private drummers,
We pursue our ambitions
As we care for the sick, dying, afflicted and young.
We teach the children.
We take in the homeless and feed the hungry.
We do not ask who is worthy.
We are all worthy,
We Americans.
We believe in the Big Bang,
The Big Crunch, the Great Spirit,
And the Great Pumpkin.
We believe in love, hugs, smiles and handshakes,
We believe in open minds and open hearts.
We do not build walls.
We do not exclude.
We are not fearful of our neighbors.
We will not cringe by the threat of hell.
We claim this country.
We will not be dispossessed,
We Americans.
We are quiet and gentle
As much as we are brash.
We are communal
As much as we are individuals, rugged and refined.
We work in the morning for ourselves.
We work in the afternoon for our compatriots.
We dream, hope and pray at night.
There is no conflict.
Our country is large.
We spread out, body and mind.
We claim this country, body and mind.
We will not be dispossessed.
We give thanks for our bounty
As we acknowledge our wrongs.
There is no conflict.
We can be proud, grateful, humble, sad and sorrowful
As we laugh and dance with joy.
We know how to do all of these things,
We Americans.
We honor the cowboys and the cashiers,
The astronauts and the accountants,
The teachers and the custodians,
Star gazers, bird watchers, dancers and athletes,
There is no conflict.
Our country is large.
We are boys who go down on our knees
In basement rooms for men we do not know.
We give pleasure.
We walk with Jesus.
We are angels.
We are girls who speak out,
Sing, build and lead.
Taoists who have found the way.
We are male and female, both and neither.
We love male and female, both and neither.
There is no conflict.
We speak English, Spanish, Hebrew and Hindi.
We are brown, black and beige,
Writhing together in pleasure.
We hyphenate and assimilate.
Our country is large.
We march to the beat of our private drummers,
We pursue our ambitions
As we care for the sick, dying, afflicted and young.
We teach the children.
We take in the homeless and feed the hungry.
We do not ask who is worthy.
We are all worthy,
We Americans.
We believe in the Big Bang,
The Big Crunch, the Great Spirit,
And the Great Pumpkin.
We believe in love, hugs, smiles and handshakes,
We believe in open minds and open hearts.
We do not build walls.
We do not exclude.
We are not fearful of our neighbors.
We will not cringe by the threat of hell.
We claim this country.
We will not be dispossessed,
We Americans.
Saturday, July 8, 2017
So much more than a mere depressive
“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”
—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
I finally got around to The Bell Jar. I had been interested in the novel for decades. It’s about a young woman’s battle with severe suicidal depression. Because of my own battles with the disease, I was a bit afraid of the novel, and it is often suggested that Plath was unrelentingly gloomy. I bought into this negative image of Plath, but I now know that portrait of her is unfair.
***SPOILERS***
It is widely known the novel is, more or less, a roman à clef. The protagonist Esther Greenwood is really Sylvia Plath herself. In the beginning, Esther is not unlike many young people just about to leave school. She’s insecure. She feels alienated. She has doubts about the future.
Esther is a smart girl with a passion for literature, poetry in particular. She is used to doing well and winning prizes and accolades for her academic and artistic accomplishments. She won a scholarship to go to college, and the summer after her junior year, she was allowed to work at a women’s magazine in New York for a month. This was the summer the Rosenbergs were executed, an event that troubles Esther. Esther is put up at a women’s hotel, given expensive clothes and sent to parties and fashion shows.
The trouble is, Esther is rather put off by her experiences in New York. She finds the young women around her to be vapid and conformist, and she isn’t interested in fashion. The only thing she seems to enjoy is the chance to eat expensive food in a nice restaurant. Esther pigs out, and the scene is rather comical. Yes, I found myself laughing while reading Sylvia Plath. Imagine that. Unfortunately, the rich dinner gives Esther and the other girls food poisoning.
Esther’s supervisor at the magazine has a frank talk about her prospects. Esther imagines herself becoming a poet and a professor. But she knows that she can’t support herself by writing poetry, and advanced degrees and a teaching position seems a long way off and not at all guaranteed. So she tells the woman that maybe she could work in the publishing industry, but the editor informs her that the business is quite competitive, and she needs to be sophisticated, worldly, and she needs to speak several foreign languages. Esther doesn’t know any foreign languages, and even though she’s intelligent and a good student, she’s naïve and inexperienced. While in New York, she orders random drinks because she has no idea what she might like.
Esther can’t rely on her family to support her while she figures everything out. Her father died when she was 9 and didn’t leave any insurance. Her mother has had to support Esther and her brother by teaching typing and shorthand. Esther’s mother is supportive, but she wants Esther to be practical. She’d like Esther to learn shorthand so she’ll have a marketable skill after college. Esther can’t think of any job she would want that would involve shorthand.
Nearly everyone, including Esther’s mother, expects Esther to get married and have children. But Esther can’t imagine being a mother and a poet. Esther does have a boyfriend, and by the standards of the 1950s, he is a great catch. Buddy is handsome and athletic, and he’s in medical school. Buddy is going to be a doctor.
Buddy, however, doesn’t take Esther’s enthusiasm for literature seriously. Like many literal science-minded types, he doesn’t relate to artistic expression. He tells Esther that her poetry is dust, and she’ll lose interest once she becomes a mother.
Esther decides to break up with Buddy after he tells her he had a sexual relationship with a waitress the previous summer. She isn’t jealous. In fact, she understands Buddy’s desire to engage in sexual experimentation. But she resents the fact that he has been presenting himself as pure and a great believer in traditional values. Esther wants to have sex, too. Not because of lust. She wants the experience, and she wants to be Buddy’s equal. However, in 1950s America, it was permissible for a “nice” boy to have sex, but a girl who had sex before marriage was a slut.
Before his confession, Buddy gives Esther a tour of medical school. Esther is exposed to death and disease, and she is also allowed to watch a baby being born. The mother is in terrible agony, but Buddy tells Esther she has been given a drug which will make her forget the pain. Esther doesn’t like that. She thinks women should be allowed to remember the pain so that they’ll know what they’re in for the next time they’re pregnant.
Esther goes out with a couple of men with the intention of gaining sexual experience. The first man is nice, but he is uninterested in sex with Esther. The second man hates women and attempts to rape Esther.
Esther wants to take part in a summer writing workshop after her job in New York is over, but she’s turned down. Esther is forced to move back home with her mother for the rest of the summer.
This is when Esther’s depression really kicks in. She stops eating and sleeping. She stops taking care of herself, and she loses interest in everything. She can’t even read because she can’t concentrate.
Esther is sent to a psychiatrist, an attractive young man who isn’t really interested in Esther. He tells her how all the girls at her school are “pretty.” He prescribes electroshock, but the treatment is poorly administered, and Esther is wide awake during the procedure. Esther wonders what she could have done to deserve such a punishment. (And remember, Esther has been worrying about the Rosenbergs.) After the procedure, the psychiatrist once again patronizes Esther by telling her all the girls at her school are pretty.
Esther thinks psychiatry and the shock treatments are like the drug given to pregnant women. They cover up the pain rather than address the underlying problem.
After the treatment, Esther becomes suicidal and eventually nearly succeeds in killing herself, but her mother finds her in time, and she’s sent to a private hospital where she’s treated by an understanding doctor. This woman supports Esther’s literary ambitions, and she understands Esther’s desire to engage in sex with men she doesn’t necessarily love or want to marry. She assists Esther in attaining a diaphragm. Esther is given insulin and more shock treatments, but this time the treatments are properly administered, and Esther recovers from her illness and returns to school.
Esther has a lot of stress in her life. Few people understand her, and she is pressured to be someone she isn’t. She’s young and inexperienced, and her family doesn’t have any money, so Esther will soon have to support herself. But Plath wants us to understand that it is the disease that pushes Esther over the edge, not Esther’s mother, or Buddy, or sexism, or 1950s conformity, or economics, or traumatic events.
Seventy years before Plath wrote her novel, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper in which a woman is driven insane by the expectations and constraints placed on her as a woman at the time. Plath directly addresses the expectations and constraints placed on Esther in 1950s America, but Esther’s illness isn’t a literary device. It’s a real disease that comes on top of everything else, and not all professionals can be trusted to help. In fact, some might do more harm than good.
So what is the bell jar in this context? That is Plath’s remarkably accurate way to describe clinical depression. It comes down over you, blocking you off from the rest of the world and distorting your impressions of it. Even after the depression lifts, the bell jar continues to hover overhead, and it might descend on you again.
Plath finished college and won a Fulbright Scholarship. She married a fellow poet, taught for a while, got some of her poetry published and had two children. Sadly, she found herself trapped in the bell jar again on February 11, 1963. She suffered from depression, but she was so much more than a mere depressive.
—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
I finally got around to The Bell Jar. I had been interested in the novel for decades. It’s about a young woman’s battle with severe suicidal depression. Because of my own battles with the disease, I was a bit afraid of the novel, and it is often suggested that Plath was unrelentingly gloomy. I bought into this negative image of Plath, but I now know that portrait of her is unfair.
***SPOILERS***
It is widely known the novel is, more or less, a roman à clef. The protagonist Esther Greenwood is really Sylvia Plath herself. In the beginning, Esther is not unlike many young people just about to leave school. She’s insecure. She feels alienated. She has doubts about the future.
Esther is a smart girl with a passion for literature, poetry in particular. She is used to doing well and winning prizes and accolades for her academic and artistic accomplishments. She won a scholarship to go to college, and the summer after her junior year, she was allowed to work at a women’s magazine in New York for a month. This was the summer the Rosenbergs were executed, an event that troubles Esther. Esther is put up at a women’s hotel, given expensive clothes and sent to parties and fashion shows.
The trouble is, Esther is rather put off by her experiences in New York. She finds the young women around her to be vapid and conformist, and she isn’t interested in fashion. The only thing she seems to enjoy is the chance to eat expensive food in a nice restaurant. Esther pigs out, and the scene is rather comical. Yes, I found myself laughing while reading Sylvia Plath. Imagine that. Unfortunately, the rich dinner gives Esther and the other girls food poisoning.
Esther’s supervisor at the magazine has a frank talk about her prospects. Esther imagines herself becoming a poet and a professor. But she knows that she can’t support herself by writing poetry, and advanced degrees and a teaching position seems a long way off and not at all guaranteed. So she tells the woman that maybe she could work in the publishing industry, but the editor informs her that the business is quite competitive, and she needs to be sophisticated, worldly, and she needs to speak several foreign languages. Esther doesn’t know any foreign languages, and even though she’s intelligent and a good student, she’s naïve and inexperienced. While in New York, she orders random drinks because she has no idea what she might like.
Esther can’t rely on her family to support her while she figures everything out. Her father died when she was 9 and didn’t leave any insurance. Her mother has had to support Esther and her brother by teaching typing and shorthand. Esther’s mother is supportive, but she wants Esther to be practical. She’d like Esther to learn shorthand so she’ll have a marketable skill after college. Esther can’t think of any job she would want that would involve shorthand.
Nearly everyone, including Esther’s mother, expects Esther to get married and have children. But Esther can’t imagine being a mother and a poet. Esther does have a boyfriend, and by the standards of the 1950s, he is a great catch. Buddy is handsome and athletic, and he’s in medical school. Buddy is going to be a doctor.
Buddy, however, doesn’t take Esther’s enthusiasm for literature seriously. Like many literal science-minded types, he doesn’t relate to artistic expression. He tells Esther that her poetry is dust, and she’ll lose interest once she becomes a mother.
Esther decides to break up with Buddy after he tells her he had a sexual relationship with a waitress the previous summer. She isn’t jealous. In fact, she understands Buddy’s desire to engage in sexual experimentation. But she resents the fact that he has been presenting himself as pure and a great believer in traditional values. Esther wants to have sex, too. Not because of lust. She wants the experience, and she wants to be Buddy’s equal. However, in 1950s America, it was permissible for a “nice” boy to have sex, but a girl who had sex before marriage was a slut.
Before his confession, Buddy gives Esther a tour of medical school. Esther is exposed to death and disease, and she is also allowed to watch a baby being born. The mother is in terrible agony, but Buddy tells Esther she has been given a drug which will make her forget the pain. Esther doesn’t like that. She thinks women should be allowed to remember the pain so that they’ll know what they’re in for the next time they’re pregnant.
Esther goes out with a couple of men with the intention of gaining sexual experience. The first man is nice, but he is uninterested in sex with Esther. The second man hates women and attempts to rape Esther.
Esther wants to take part in a summer writing workshop after her job in New York is over, but she’s turned down. Esther is forced to move back home with her mother for the rest of the summer.
This is when Esther’s depression really kicks in. She stops eating and sleeping. She stops taking care of herself, and she loses interest in everything. She can’t even read because she can’t concentrate.
Esther is sent to a psychiatrist, an attractive young man who isn’t really interested in Esther. He tells her how all the girls at her school are “pretty.” He prescribes electroshock, but the treatment is poorly administered, and Esther is wide awake during the procedure. Esther wonders what she could have done to deserve such a punishment. (And remember, Esther has been worrying about the Rosenbergs.) After the procedure, the psychiatrist once again patronizes Esther by telling her all the girls at her school are pretty.
Esther thinks psychiatry and the shock treatments are like the drug given to pregnant women. They cover up the pain rather than address the underlying problem.
After the treatment, Esther becomes suicidal and eventually nearly succeeds in killing herself, but her mother finds her in time, and she’s sent to a private hospital where she’s treated by an understanding doctor. This woman supports Esther’s literary ambitions, and she understands Esther’s desire to engage in sex with men she doesn’t necessarily love or want to marry. She assists Esther in attaining a diaphragm. Esther is given insulin and more shock treatments, but this time the treatments are properly administered, and Esther recovers from her illness and returns to school.
Esther has a lot of stress in her life. Few people understand her, and she is pressured to be someone she isn’t. She’s young and inexperienced, and her family doesn’t have any money, so Esther will soon have to support herself. But Plath wants us to understand that it is the disease that pushes Esther over the edge, not Esther’s mother, or Buddy, or sexism, or 1950s conformity, or economics, or traumatic events.
Seventy years before Plath wrote her novel, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper in which a woman is driven insane by the expectations and constraints placed on her as a woman at the time. Plath directly addresses the expectations and constraints placed on Esther in 1950s America, but Esther’s illness isn’t a literary device. It’s a real disease that comes on top of everything else, and not all professionals can be trusted to help. In fact, some might do more harm than good.
So what is the bell jar in this context? That is Plath’s remarkably accurate way to describe clinical depression. It comes down over you, blocking you off from the rest of the world and distorting your impressions of it. Even after the depression lifts, the bell jar continues to hover overhead, and it might descend on you again.
Plath finished college and won a Fulbright Scholarship. She married a fellow poet, taught for a while, got some of her poetry published and had two children. Sadly, she found herself trapped in the bell jar again on February 11, 1963. She suffered from depression, but she was so much more than a mere depressive.
Saturday, May 13, 2017
Tree House Kiss
I wouldn’t say Closet Monster is a coming out story because high school senior Oscar, played by Connor Jessup, doesn’t really come out. It’s more of a coming of age story.
***SPOILERS***
Oscar’s parents split up when he was about 8, and he continues to have issues with both of them. His mother left, married another man and formed a new family. Even though Oscar spends time with his mother and has his own room at her new home, he still feels abandoned by her. On the other hand, his father can be a bit nuts. For instance, Oscar isn’t allowed to have a key to his own house because his father is afraid someone will steal from him, so if Oscar comes home from school or work when his father is out, he has to retreat to his tree house in the back yard.
Oscar witnessed an especially brutal gay bashing when he was a kid, so now when he starts thinking about having sex with guys, he experiences flashbacks and associates intimacy with violence.
He wants to be a makeup artist for the movie industry, and he’s especially interested in the horror and fantasy genres. He has pinned all of his hopes on attending a specific school in New York City, and he plans to share an apartment with his best friend, a girl whom his father assumes is his girlfriend.
Oscar gets a job at a home supply store, and there he meets Wilder, a lanky pretty boy brimming with self-confidence and social ease. One day, Wilder surprises Oscar in the employee locker room when he asks Oscar if he can borrow his work shirt. Oscar is coming off of his shift and informs Wilder that the shirt is sweaty. Wilder doesn’t care and puts it on anyway. Oscar is instantly smitten.
Oscar and Wilder become friends. They hang out together, go to a party together, and one night, they share Oscar’s bed in the tree house. It becomes awkward for Oscar when he accidentally reveals he’s attracted to Wilder. Wilder, ever the cool dude, kisses Oscar and gives his crotch a squeeze. But Oscar doesn’t feel anything because Wilder doesn’t really mean it. He’s merely indulging Oscar. Wilder leaves town the next day.
I thought a tree house would be a wonderful place to lose your virginity, and for it to happen with the boy you’ve been longing for… Wow! That’s a story you could happily tell for the rest of your life. But things don’t work out the way Oscar wants them to. He isn’t accepted at the school in New York, so he has to quickly make alternative plans.
Even though the story ends on a down note, we get the sense that Oscar is going to be okay. He’ll find another way to get the training he wants, and he’ll be better prepared the next time a special boy comes along.
***SPOILERS***
Oscar’s parents split up when he was about 8, and he continues to have issues with both of them. His mother left, married another man and formed a new family. Even though Oscar spends time with his mother and has his own room at her new home, he still feels abandoned by her. On the other hand, his father can be a bit nuts. For instance, Oscar isn’t allowed to have a key to his own house because his father is afraid someone will steal from him, so if Oscar comes home from school or work when his father is out, he has to retreat to his tree house in the back yard.
Oscar witnessed an especially brutal gay bashing when he was a kid, so now when he starts thinking about having sex with guys, he experiences flashbacks and associates intimacy with violence.
He wants to be a makeup artist for the movie industry, and he’s especially interested in the horror and fantasy genres. He has pinned all of his hopes on attending a specific school in New York City, and he plans to share an apartment with his best friend, a girl whom his father assumes is his girlfriend.
Oscar gets a job at a home supply store, and there he meets Wilder, a lanky pretty boy brimming with self-confidence and social ease. One day, Wilder surprises Oscar in the employee locker room when he asks Oscar if he can borrow his work shirt. Oscar is coming off of his shift and informs Wilder that the shirt is sweaty. Wilder doesn’t care and puts it on anyway. Oscar is instantly smitten.
Oscar and Wilder become friends. They hang out together, go to a party together, and one night, they share Oscar’s bed in the tree house. It becomes awkward for Oscar when he accidentally reveals he’s attracted to Wilder. Wilder, ever the cool dude, kisses Oscar and gives his crotch a squeeze. But Oscar doesn’t feel anything because Wilder doesn’t really mean it. He’s merely indulging Oscar. Wilder leaves town the next day.
I thought a tree house would be a wonderful place to lose your virginity, and for it to happen with the boy you’ve been longing for… Wow! That’s a story you could happily tell for the rest of your life. But things don’t work out the way Oscar wants them to. He isn’t accepted at the school in New York, so he has to quickly make alternative plans.
Even though the story ends on a down note, we get the sense that Oscar is going to be okay. He’ll find another way to get the training he wants, and he’ll be better prepared the next time a special boy comes along.
Friday, May 12, 2017
Regarding American Crime: Season 2
I found the second season of American Crime streaming on Netflix last weekend, and I just finished it. I was interested because the sweet and beautiful Connor Jessup played a gay boy. I first saw Connor in Falling Skies, and for a while, I didn’t think he could act. He seemed wooden, and he had a pronounced Canadian accent. Nothing wrong with having a Canadian accent, of course, but it wasn’t right for the part, and doing accents goes along with acting. Well, he apparently worked on his accent and acting skills because by the end of the series, I thought he was pretty good…not to mention adorable. However, he really showed he can act in American Crime.
***SPOILERS***
I was right there with Taylor, played by Connor, when he admitted to his mother he had gone to a party and had a beer, but he swore he had not indulge enough to explain the pictures of him that appeared online. The photos showed him passed out by a pool of vomit with his pants down. He tells his mother that he believes he was drugged and that someone did something to him.
What follows is a terrifying, complicated examination of the worst of human instincts. This series is like a film noir because no one comes out smelling like a rose. A lot of people get their comeuppance. As Terri, a fiercely protective mother who is forced to look at herself in the mirror, says, no one is coming after us; things are catching up. However, at the end of the story, Taylor is the one sent to prison, and Eric, his rapist, is riding off into the sunset with some guy in a muscle car.
My first reaction to those last scenes was anger. Taylor had made some horrible decisions, but the whole mess had been set into motion by the angry, self-hating Eric. However, once I began to think about it, I saw that Taylor was setting himself free by taking responsibility for what he did. And he didn’t allow his rapist to play the hero and save him from prison. Eric, on the other hand, is still running from the truth. And that man in the muscle car offering him a ticket out of town, he’s probably an abusive asshole who wants to use Eric for sex.
***SPOILERS***
I was right there with Taylor, played by Connor, when he admitted to his mother he had gone to a party and had a beer, but he swore he had not indulge enough to explain the pictures of him that appeared online. The photos showed him passed out by a pool of vomit with his pants down. He tells his mother that he believes he was drugged and that someone did something to him.
What follows is a terrifying, complicated examination of the worst of human instincts. This series is like a film noir because no one comes out smelling like a rose. A lot of people get their comeuppance. As Terri, a fiercely protective mother who is forced to look at herself in the mirror, says, no one is coming after us; things are catching up. However, at the end of the story, Taylor is the one sent to prison, and Eric, his rapist, is riding off into the sunset with some guy in a muscle car.
My first reaction to those last scenes was anger. Taylor had made some horrible decisions, but the whole mess had been set into motion by the angry, self-hating Eric. However, once I began to think about it, I saw that Taylor was setting himself free by taking responsibility for what he did. And he didn’t allow his rapist to play the hero and save him from prison. Eric, on the other hand, is still running from the truth. And that man in the muscle car offering him a ticket out of town, he’s probably an abusive asshole who wants to use Eric for sex.
Thursday, May 4, 2017
Offer them hope. Make it real.
I think extremism is likely to take hold during times of economic crisis, and I think there has been an economic crisis taking place in this country since the ‘70s. Massive amounts of wealth are being transferred to the 1%. The middle class is shrinking. The belief that your children will be better off than you is fading. The American dream is dying. Yet too many in power continue to gauge our economic wellbeing by looking at the profits of corporations, the stock market and the unemployment rate. Never mind that corporations can make money hands over fists, stocks can be sky high, and official unemployment rates can be relatively low, and still, ordinary Americans can be struggling. Many have stopped looking for work, so they’re not counted in those stats, and many who are employed have low wage jobs.
The Republicans have done a wonderful job of convincing poor and lower middle-class whites that the reason they’re not getting ahead is because the government is overtaxing the rich, placing too many restrictions on business, and spending too much on minorities and allowing illegal immigrants to steal their jobs.
The only answer to bigotry is to say no to it and to challenge it. But I think the Democrats can do a much better job at offering economic hope. Rather than being a coastal status quo party, or an incremental change party, I think the Dems need to acknowledge the serious assault on the middle class, and they need to offer solutions.
Those who work for a living should not have to work more than 40 hours a week so they can have a life outside of work, and working people should have a decent income even if they work at Wal-Mart or deliver pizza. Education and training should be accessible and affordable. Medical care should be a right, not a privilege, and you shouldn’t fear poverty if you become too old or too sick to work, or if you can’t find work. That last bit is more important than many realize because it’s not really other people who are taking away those storied factory jobs of the 1950s, it’s automation. We have to convince working Americans that lower taxes on the rich and fewer regulations will not bring back those factory jobs. We can’t return to the past. Most of us wouldn’t want to even if we could. We also can’t count on perpetual economic growth. There comes a point when there is already enough goods and services available. Then the problem becomes a matter of distribution, not scarcity.
Our ancestors would likely be amazed at our abundance, but they would also likely be disheartened that so many are not allowed to share in that abundance or live in fear of going without. We’ve allowed Republicans and the Religious Right to exploit that fear long enough. We have to be the ones who offer a shining city on a hill. We have to find political candidates who can speak to the people, listen to their concerns, and offer soaring, inspirational goals for the future. We need to take emotion into account and use it. But we have to make sure our rhetoric isn’t empty or manipulative. Our shining city will be real.
The Republicans have done a wonderful job of convincing poor and lower middle-class whites that the reason they’re not getting ahead is because the government is overtaxing the rich, placing too many restrictions on business, and spending too much on minorities and allowing illegal immigrants to steal their jobs.
The only answer to bigotry is to say no to it and to challenge it. But I think the Democrats can do a much better job at offering economic hope. Rather than being a coastal status quo party, or an incremental change party, I think the Dems need to acknowledge the serious assault on the middle class, and they need to offer solutions.
Those who work for a living should not have to work more than 40 hours a week so they can have a life outside of work, and working people should have a decent income even if they work at Wal-Mart or deliver pizza. Education and training should be accessible and affordable. Medical care should be a right, not a privilege, and you shouldn’t fear poverty if you become too old or too sick to work, or if you can’t find work. That last bit is more important than many realize because it’s not really other people who are taking away those storied factory jobs of the 1950s, it’s automation. We have to convince working Americans that lower taxes on the rich and fewer regulations will not bring back those factory jobs. We can’t return to the past. Most of us wouldn’t want to even if we could. We also can’t count on perpetual economic growth. There comes a point when there is already enough goods and services available. Then the problem becomes a matter of distribution, not scarcity.
Our ancestors would likely be amazed at our abundance, but they would also likely be disheartened that so many are not allowed to share in that abundance or live in fear of going without. We’ve allowed Republicans and the Religious Right to exploit that fear long enough. We have to be the ones who offer a shining city on a hill. We have to find political candidates who can speak to the people, listen to their concerns, and offer soaring, inspirational goals for the future. We need to take emotion into account and use it. But we have to make sure our rhetoric isn’t empty or manipulative. Our shining city will be real.
Saturday, April 22, 2017
The Haunting of Randall Loveless
by Gary Cottle
A branch scraped the side of the car as I made my way down the long wooded drive, but I didn’t care. It startled me, but once I realized what it was, I didn’t give it another thought. The Honda was bought used, and it was already beat up. I was excited about the weekend, and it was going to take more than another scratch on my old car to bring me down. I giggled at how jumpy I was and felt a rush of adrenaline as I anticipated the thrills to come like a kid waiting in line for a carnival ride.
When the abandoned Straub house came into view, I gasped in awe. It was a large, stately red brick place built about 1910, after the Victorian era, and sort of a cross between Prairie School and Craftsman. There were two floors capped by a hip roof covered in terracotta tiles with a dormer window in the center. Eric claimed it had nearly five thousand square feet of living space, plus an attic which could be used as a “bonus room” and a full basement that could be finished if the new owners wanted a family room without altering the footprint. It was going on the market the next week, but that weekend it belonged to me.
My friend Eric was a realtor, and he had left the back door open. All he asked was that I not mention his name if I got caught. Eric knew I liked architecture and old houses, but that’s not the reason he offered to let me stay in the Straub house. It had a history, and I was a big fan of horror movies and ghost stories. Minnie Straub shot her husband Clarence in one of the bedrooms and then killed herself in 1945. No one knows why. Some say Minnie caught Clarence cheating with the maid. A few claim she caught him with the yardman. Their daughter Edith was sixteen at the time, and she continued to live in the house after her parents died. A maiden aunt stayed with her for the first few years, but then she died. Edith was a quiet woman who kept to herself. She never married, and she only went into town twice a week. On Saturday afternoons, she went grocery shopping, and she attended church on Sunday mornings. She stayed on at the old place until she died the year before. Distant relatives inherited, but they had no use for it.
When I walked across the threshold, I suddenly felt like a trespasser. I stood there a second half expecting someone to pop out and challenge my presence. “Hello,” I said, trying to sound as innocent as possible, but, of course, no one answered.
I couldn’t come until I finished my shift at Kroger, so it were late in the day, but there was a couple of hours of light left. There were no draperies on the windows because the house had been stripped bare. Everything had either been sold at auction or thrown away. So I could see well enough. I took the opportunity to explore. Spooky scenarios gave way to appreciation of the simple elegance. Edith had not changed a thing. The house was a perfectly preserved specimen of its time. There was a large living room with a fireplace, a formal dining room, a good sized study with another fireplace, a big kitchen and a maid’s room. The master bedroom upstairs had its own bathroom and dressing room. Two other bedrooms shared a bath. Wood paneling was everywhere. I could see myself moving in permanently. I’d feel right at home.
Before it got dark, I sat up camp in the living room. I brought in a cot with a thick foam mattress, a couple of blankets and pillows, a camp chair, a folding table, a camp stove, a box of food, a cooler and a couple of five-gallon containers filled with water. I also had my expensive backpacking sleeping bag in case it got too cold. It was mid-October, so there was a chance the temperature could drop into the thirties.
I invested in a bunch of overpriced backpacking equipment when Ryan came into my life. He was twenty-five, athletic and outdoorsy, and I wanted to keep up. I tried backpacking a couple of times. Then I decided to let Ryan do that with his younger friends. I bought more car camping equipment, but Ryan said that kind of camping was suburban and lame. This was right after I got the promotion, so I could afford to buy a five hundred dollar sleeping bag, along with cars for Ryan and myself, and a brand new house. At fifty, I finally had the life I wanted.
I slipped off my shoes and pulled on my National Geographic fleece vest. I could no longer zip the vest because I had regained all the weight I had lost before meeting Ryan plus an extra twenty pounds. Thankfully, the pizza I had brought with me for dinner was still warm. After I had my fill, I put on my headlamp and began reading Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. It was a great distraction, but I kept thinking of how it would be nice if someone were there to talk to. I decided to go to bed early. It’s surprising how sleepy you get when there aren’t any electric lights or bright screens around. As I was drifting into slumber, I wished I had the money to buy the Straub house. Just five years before, I could have. Even after I lost my job, I might have been able to keep the place by renting out the spare bedrooms. I pictured a couple of fit young college students running downstairs for breakfast in their underpants.
I slept soundly that night, but I woke with a start. I heard a car pull up in front of the house, and I thought I had been busted. I jumped up and dressed, but when I looked out the window, I saw it was only Eric. He brought coffee and bagels. When I went out to greet him, he hugged me. It felt good to be hugged. It had been the first time anyone had touched me in months. We sat on the stoop and ate.
“Sleep well?”
“I slept great.”
Eric lowered his head and looked at me with a conspiratorial glint in his eye. “Anything unusual happen?”
The question embarrassed me a little because I was a man in my mid-fifties, and I was ghost hunting. “No. If the Straubs are around, they don’t seem to want to have anything to do with me. I got a little lonely last night,” I admitted.
“Ah. Well, I would have asked Chad if he was interested in doing this with you, but you know what his answer would have been. You know how he is.”
Chad was Eric’s husband, and yes, I did know how he was. He claimed to be a stone cold rationalist, but horror movies and ghost stories, anything like that, made him piss in his pants.
I shook my head and said, “I wish Ryan were here.”
Eric sighed and said, “You’ve got to let that go.” Then he added, “Chad saw him the other day. He just got back from London. Apparently, Jeffrey Belmont is his new Daddy Warbucks.”
Eric could not have stunned me more if he had thrown his coffee in my face, but I tried to hold it together. Jeffrey Belmont was even older than me, but he was a dentist, and dentists aren’t downsized. His parents had left him some money, too.
“I tried to warn you.”
“I know,” I said with an undercurrent of hostility.
Eric sized Ryan up the first time he met him, and he freely expressed his opinion the next time we were alone together. We had a falling out over that. I didn’t talk to Eric for two years.
“I’m sorry, Rand. This isn’t the time for I told you sos. It’s just that I think you deserve better.”
We were silent a moment. Then Eric said, “When an older man has a relationship with a younger man, people often worry about the younger one, but it’s been my experience that the older one is more likely to get hurt. I mean, if it doesn’t work out. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it, but I’m always skeptical of a young guy’s motivation when I see him with someone old enough to be his father. When you’re young, you have time to bounce back. Guys our age are running out of time, and if our financial resources have been drained, too…”
When Eric left, I took my camp chair out into the yard and continued reading The Haunting of Hill House. When I was finished, I moved on to We Have Always Lived in the Castle. In a way, I enjoyed myself, but I kept thinking of Ryan. I had foolishly entertained the idea that Ryan would come back to me, but Eric had ruined that little fantasy. I wouldn’t have that to fall back on anymore. I was fifty-five and alone. Five years before, I had felt age creeping up on me, so I decided to join a gym. Within months, everything seemed to turn around. I felt trim and fit for the first time in years. Then I got the promotion and met Ryan. Now what did I have?
Later in the day, I decided I should give myself a sponge bath before it got dark. I sat on the edge of the cot and bent over to wipe off my feet. That’s when I saw it. The sun was low enough to shine directly through the living room windows, and a beam highlighted the back of my left calf. There was a mole back there that had expanded and turned purplish. For a moment, I couldn’t move as my heart flopped in my chest. I knew it wasn’t anything to get excited about. I’d make an appointment on Monday, and the doctor would cut it off. That would probably be all there was to it. However, I knew someday, something like that might be the beginning of the end.
I didn’t sleep as well that night. After rolling around in a stupor for a few hours, I decided I needed to sit up for a while. I wrapped myself up in my expensive sleeping bag and went outside to sit on the front steps. Immediately, I had a flashback. Six months before, I got up in the middle of the night. This was a couple of weeks after we had moved into the trailer. I found Ryan sitting at the kitchen table.
“Anything wrong?”
“There’s something I need to tell you. My therapist and I decided I needed to be honest with you.”
I had a vague notion of what was coming, and it pissed me off that Ryan was going to use the therapist as a crutch. I was still paying for those sessions even though I could no longer afford it. But I sat down across from Ryan and let him have his say.
“I’ve loved you, and I don’t want to do any harm, but you have to understand that I need a man who is…financially solid.”
“We all want to live well, Ryan.”
“Don’t belittle me. Don’t make me sound shallow. It’s more important than that. I need to be with a man who has some money to feel safe and loved. And I need to find a man like that before it’s too late for me.” With undisputed anger, he added, “I’m almost thirty. I gave you my youth, and now I’m living in a trailer.”
Remembering those words made me cry.
As I was driving out the next morning, that same branch scraped my car. I jumped again, but this time I didn’t giggle. Nothing happened that weekend. It was the scariest weekend of my life.
A branch scraped the side of the car as I made my way down the long wooded drive, but I didn’t care. It startled me, but once I realized what it was, I didn’t give it another thought. The Honda was bought used, and it was already beat up. I was excited about the weekend, and it was going to take more than another scratch on my old car to bring me down. I giggled at how jumpy I was and felt a rush of adrenaline as I anticipated the thrills to come like a kid waiting in line for a carnival ride.
When the abandoned Straub house came into view, I gasped in awe. It was a large, stately red brick place built about 1910, after the Victorian era, and sort of a cross between Prairie School and Craftsman. There were two floors capped by a hip roof covered in terracotta tiles with a dormer window in the center. Eric claimed it had nearly five thousand square feet of living space, plus an attic which could be used as a “bonus room” and a full basement that could be finished if the new owners wanted a family room without altering the footprint. It was going on the market the next week, but that weekend it belonged to me.
My friend Eric was a realtor, and he had left the back door open. All he asked was that I not mention his name if I got caught. Eric knew I liked architecture and old houses, but that’s not the reason he offered to let me stay in the Straub house. It had a history, and I was a big fan of horror movies and ghost stories. Minnie Straub shot her husband Clarence in one of the bedrooms and then killed herself in 1945. No one knows why. Some say Minnie caught Clarence cheating with the maid. A few claim she caught him with the yardman. Their daughter Edith was sixteen at the time, and she continued to live in the house after her parents died. A maiden aunt stayed with her for the first few years, but then she died. Edith was a quiet woman who kept to herself. She never married, and she only went into town twice a week. On Saturday afternoons, she went grocery shopping, and she attended church on Sunday mornings. She stayed on at the old place until she died the year before. Distant relatives inherited, but they had no use for it.
When I walked across the threshold, I suddenly felt like a trespasser. I stood there a second half expecting someone to pop out and challenge my presence. “Hello,” I said, trying to sound as innocent as possible, but, of course, no one answered.
I couldn’t come until I finished my shift at Kroger, so it were late in the day, but there was a couple of hours of light left. There were no draperies on the windows because the house had been stripped bare. Everything had either been sold at auction or thrown away. So I could see well enough. I took the opportunity to explore. Spooky scenarios gave way to appreciation of the simple elegance. Edith had not changed a thing. The house was a perfectly preserved specimen of its time. There was a large living room with a fireplace, a formal dining room, a good sized study with another fireplace, a big kitchen and a maid’s room. The master bedroom upstairs had its own bathroom and dressing room. Two other bedrooms shared a bath. Wood paneling was everywhere. I could see myself moving in permanently. I’d feel right at home.
Before it got dark, I sat up camp in the living room. I brought in a cot with a thick foam mattress, a couple of blankets and pillows, a camp chair, a folding table, a camp stove, a box of food, a cooler and a couple of five-gallon containers filled with water. I also had my expensive backpacking sleeping bag in case it got too cold. It was mid-October, so there was a chance the temperature could drop into the thirties.
I invested in a bunch of overpriced backpacking equipment when Ryan came into my life. He was twenty-five, athletic and outdoorsy, and I wanted to keep up. I tried backpacking a couple of times. Then I decided to let Ryan do that with his younger friends. I bought more car camping equipment, but Ryan said that kind of camping was suburban and lame. This was right after I got the promotion, so I could afford to buy a five hundred dollar sleeping bag, along with cars for Ryan and myself, and a brand new house. At fifty, I finally had the life I wanted.
I slipped off my shoes and pulled on my National Geographic fleece vest. I could no longer zip the vest because I had regained all the weight I had lost before meeting Ryan plus an extra twenty pounds. Thankfully, the pizza I had brought with me for dinner was still warm. After I had my fill, I put on my headlamp and began reading Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. It was a great distraction, but I kept thinking of how it would be nice if someone were there to talk to. I decided to go to bed early. It’s surprising how sleepy you get when there aren’t any electric lights or bright screens around. As I was drifting into slumber, I wished I had the money to buy the Straub house. Just five years before, I could have. Even after I lost my job, I might have been able to keep the place by renting out the spare bedrooms. I pictured a couple of fit young college students running downstairs for breakfast in their underpants.
I slept soundly that night, but I woke with a start. I heard a car pull up in front of the house, and I thought I had been busted. I jumped up and dressed, but when I looked out the window, I saw it was only Eric. He brought coffee and bagels. When I went out to greet him, he hugged me. It felt good to be hugged. It had been the first time anyone had touched me in months. We sat on the stoop and ate.
“Sleep well?”
“I slept great.”
Eric lowered his head and looked at me with a conspiratorial glint in his eye. “Anything unusual happen?”
The question embarrassed me a little because I was a man in my mid-fifties, and I was ghost hunting. “No. If the Straubs are around, they don’t seem to want to have anything to do with me. I got a little lonely last night,” I admitted.
“Ah. Well, I would have asked Chad if he was interested in doing this with you, but you know what his answer would have been. You know how he is.”
Chad was Eric’s husband, and yes, I did know how he was. He claimed to be a stone cold rationalist, but horror movies and ghost stories, anything like that, made him piss in his pants.
I shook my head and said, “I wish Ryan were here.”
Eric sighed and said, “You’ve got to let that go.” Then he added, “Chad saw him the other day. He just got back from London. Apparently, Jeffrey Belmont is his new Daddy Warbucks.”
Eric could not have stunned me more if he had thrown his coffee in my face, but I tried to hold it together. Jeffrey Belmont was even older than me, but he was a dentist, and dentists aren’t downsized. His parents had left him some money, too.
“I tried to warn you.”
“I know,” I said with an undercurrent of hostility.
Eric sized Ryan up the first time he met him, and he freely expressed his opinion the next time we were alone together. We had a falling out over that. I didn’t talk to Eric for two years.
“I’m sorry, Rand. This isn’t the time for I told you sos. It’s just that I think you deserve better.”
We were silent a moment. Then Eric said, “When an older man has a relationship with a younger man, people often worry about the younger one, but it’s been my experience that the older one is more likely to get hurt. I mean, if it doesn’t work out. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it, but I’m always skeptical of a young guy’s motivation when I see him with someone old enough to be his father. When you’re young, you have time to bounce back. Guys our age are running out of time, and if our financial resources have been drained, too…”
When Eric left, I took my camp chair out into the yard and continued reading The Haunting of Hill House. When I was finished, I moved on to We Have Always Lived in the Castle. In a way, I enjoyed myself, but I kept thinking of Ryan. I had foolishly entertained the idea that Ryan would come back to me, but Eric had ruined that little fantasy. I wouldn’t have that to fall back on anymore. I was fifty-five and alone. Five years before, I had felt age creeping up on me, so I decided to join a gym. Within months, everything seemed to turn around. I felt trim and fit for the first time in years. Then I got the promotion and met Ryan. Now what did I have?
Later in the day, I decided I should give myself a sponge bath before it got dark. I sat on the edge of the cot and bent over to wipe off my feet. That’s when I saw it. The sun was low enough to shine directly through the living room windows, and a beam highlighted the back of my left calf. There was a mole back there that had expanded and turned purplish. For a moment, I couldn’t move as my heart flopped in my chest. I knew it wasn’t anything to get excited about. I’d make an appointment on Monday, and the doctor would cut it off. That would probably be all there was to it. However, I knew someday, something like that might be the beginning of the end.
I didn’t sleep as well that night. After rolling around in a stupor for a few hours, I decided I needed to sit up for a while. I wrapped myself up in my expensive sleeping bag and went outside to sit on the front steps. Immediately, I had a flashback. Six months before, I got up in the middle of the night. This was a couple of weeks after we had moved into the trailer. I found Ryan sitting at the kitchen table.
“Anything wrong?”
“There’s something I need to tell you. My therapist and I decided I needed to be honest with you.”
I had a vague notion of what was coming, and it pissed me off that Ryan was going to use the therapist as a crutch. I was still paying for those sessions even though I could no longer afford it. But I sat down across from Ryan and let him have his say.
“I’ve loved you, and I don’t want to do any harm, but you have to understand that I need a man who is…financially solid.”
“We all want to live well, Ryan.”
“Don’t belittle me. Don’t make me sound shallow. It’s more important than that. I need to be with a man who has some money to feel safe and loved. And I need to find a man like that before it’s too late for me.” With undisputed anger, he added, “I’m almost thirty. I gave you my youth, and now I’m living in a trailer.”
Remembering those words made me cry.
As I was driving out the next morning, that same branch scraped my car. I jumped again, but this time I didn’t giggle. Nothing happened that weekend. It was the scariest weekend of my life.
Saturday, March 18, 2017
Tell Your Story
The book business has changed dramatically in recent years due to the internet, ebooks and Amazon. Book publishing has always been a business, but now all of the big houses are subsidiaries of major corporations, and there’s even a greater emphasis on publishing books that turn large profits. They focus on celebrity books, often written by ghostwriters, and books by established authors. But you now have the option of self-publishing. Amazon, for instance, will sell your book so long as it’s in the proper format, and if you don’t know how to do that, there are people who will do it for you for a reasonable fee. You can find book covers for reasonable fees, too. Amazon will sell both an ebook version and a print-on-demand version of your book. You don’t have to pay them anything up front. They make their money by taking a percentage of sales.
You might think that you’ll never become a well known and popular writer if you self-publish. Well, some have, but the truth is, only a few writers have ever become widely known celebrity authors. Few writers have ever been able to support themselves with their writing. Writing isn’t about making lots of money or being interviewed on TV chat shows. It’s about wanting to tell your story.
Even if a traditional publishing house agreed to publish your manuscript, they would likely only agree to a first run of maybe 500, 1000 or 1500 copies. Very few books make it to a second printing. If you’re a writer who sells a few hundred copies, even in the old-fashioned traditional way, then you can consider yourself a successful writer.
You might think a traditional publisher will promote your novel, but the truth is they probably wouldn’t. They use their publicity budgets to push those celebrity books and books by established authors. It’s up to everyone else to promote their own books the best way they know how.
The greatest thing a traditional publishing house will do for you is to provide you with a highly qualified editor. You might think your book doesn’t need any editing, and you might pride yourself on being a grammar Nazi who would never let a mistake slip by you. Well, my advice on that score is to get over yourself. The creative aspect of writing is hard work, but so is the physical process of writing out the words. If you write a book that’s 300 pages long, you’re going to make mistakes and a lot of them. And you’re not going to see half of them no matter if you self-edit a thousand times. But if you don’t publish in the traditional way, and you can’t afford the services of a professional editor, there are things you can do to improve your manuscript. You can have friends read your manuscript. It’s great to have a friend who notices typos, errors and inconsistencies. You don’t want a blue shirt mysteriously turning red, and if your protagonist breaks down outside of Albuquerque, you don’t want the tow truck to pick her up outside of Phoenix. A friend might ask you if you meant to tell your reader four times that your protagonist’s mother had an extra toe. There are programs available that look for mistakes, but they’re likely to miss your inconsistencies and redundancies. They look for typos and grammar errors and overused words. That can be highly valuable. You should self-edit over and over again, run your manuscript through one of these automated systems, and then give the manuscript to a few trusted friends. If you really want to do your story justice, and you can afford to spend several thousand dollars on a professional edit, my advice is to go for it. You might not recover that money, but storytelling is about storytelling, not making money.
My dream of being a writer began when I was in my teens. I imagined that I’d finish school, have a career, and then retire at age 35 or 40 after my first book was published. Well, that didn’t happen. But I have written three novels, and I’ve sold well over 1500 copies so far. For years, I tried to find an agent and get published the old-fashioned way, but no one was interested. Several agents told me my stories sounded interesting, but gay characters aren’t moneymakers, so stories about gay characters are a hard sell. Well, okay then. I want to tell my stories, the ones that burn inside my imagination. I don’t want to make up shit that will sell just for the sake of being popular or marketable.
Putting your stuff out there can be scary. There are always going to be people who don’t like your stories, and they won’t be shy about saying so. If you agree with their criticism, you can use what they say to become a better storyteller, but if they’re looking for stories about giraffes, and you write stories about goats, what can you do? You can’t please everybody, and some will take delight in knocking you no matter what you write. Those people need to feel superior, and it’s the easiest thing in the world to write a nasty review. But if you put forth an effort to tell your story well, some will appreciate it and tell you.
If you have a story to tell, I urge you to do it. And don’t hold back. I came across a good bit of advice from a writer a few years ago; write as though your parents were dead. That sounds harsh, and it is, but what he was getting at is you should be honest about your story. Try to be truthful about the story in your head, not respectable. Respectable is flat and tedious. Good luck!
You might think that you’ll never become a well known and popular writer if you self-publish. Well, some have, but the truth is, only a few writers have ever become widely known celebrity authors. Few writers have ever been able to support themselves with their writing. Writing isn’t about making lots of money or being interviewed on TV chat shows. It’s about wanting to tell your story.
Even if a traditional publishing house agreed to publish your manuscript, they would likely only agree to a first run of maybe 500, 1000 or 1500 copies. Very few books make it to a second printing. If you’re a writer who sells a few hundred copies, even in the old-fashioned traditional way, then you can consider yourself a successful writer.
You might think a traditional publisher will promote your novel, but the truth is they probably wouldn’t. They use their publicity budgets to push those celebrity books and books by established authors. It’s up to everyone else to promote their own books the best way they know how.
The greatest thing a traditional publishing house will do for you is to provide you with a highly qualified editor. You might think your book doesn’t need any editing, and you might pride yourself on being a grammar Nazi who would never let a mistake slip by you. Well, my advice on that score is to get over yourself. The creative aspect of writing is hard work, but so is the physical process of writing out the words. If you write a book that’s 300 pages long, you’re going to make mistakes and a lot of them. And you’re not going to see half of them no matter if you self-edit a thousand times. But if you don’t publish in the traditional way, and you can’t afford the services of a professional editor, there are things you can do to improve your manuscript. You can have friends read your manuscript. It’s great to have a friend who notices typos, errors and inconsistencies. You don’t want a blue shirt mysteriously turning red, and if your protagonist breaks down outside of Albuquerque, you don’t want the tow truck to pick her up outside of Phoenix. A friend might ask you if you meant to tell your reader four times that your protagonist’s mother had an extra toe. There are programs available that look for mistakes, but they’re likely to miss your inconsistencies and redundancies. They look for typos and grammar errors and overused words. That can be highly valuable. You should self-edit over and over again, run your manuscript through one of these automated systems, and then give the manuscript to a few trusted friends. If you really want to do your story justice, and you can afford to spend several thousand dollars on a professional edit, my advice is to go for it. You might not recover that money, but storytelling is about storytelling, not making money.
My dream of being a writer began when I was in my teens. I imagined that I’d finish school, have a career, and then retire at age 35 or 40 after my first book was published. Well, that didn’t happen. But I have written three novels, and I’ve sold well over 1500 copies so far. For years, I tried to find an agent and get published the old-fashioned way, but no one was interested. Several agents told me my stories sounded interesting, but gay characters aren’t moneymakers, so stories about gay characters are a hard sell. Well, okay then. I want to tell my stories, the ones that burn inside my imagination. I don’t want to make up shit that will sell just for the sake of being popular or marketable.
Putting your stuff out there can be scary. There are always going to be people who don’t like your stories, and they won’t be shy about saying so. If you agree with their criticism, you can use what they say to become a better storyteller, but if they’re looking for stories about giraffes, and you write stories about goats, what can you do? You can’t please everybody, and some will take delight in knocking you no matter what you write. Those people need to feel superior, and it’s the easiest thing in the world to write a nasty review. But if you put forth an effort to tell your story well, some will appreciate it and tell you.
If you have a story to tell, I urge you to do it. And don’t hold back. I came across a good bit of advice from a writer a few years ago; write as though your parents were dead. That sounds harsh, and it is, but what he was getting at is you should be honest about your story. Try to be truthful about the story in your head, not respectable. Respectable is flat and tedious. Good luck!
Friday, March 17, 2017
The Need For Solitude
The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel tells us about Christopher Knight, a man who lived alone in the woods of central Maine for 27 years. If you look up Christopher on the internet, be sure to add the word “hermit” in your search, or you’ll be swamped with links about another famous Christopher Knight, Peter from the Brady Bunch.
Christopher was born on December 7, 1965. I was born on Sept. 28 of the same year, so I’m about 10 weeks older than he is. Just as I suspected when I discovered the book, I identify with Christopher’s need for solitude. I found him to be a bit prickly and sometimes judgy in a way I don’t like, but he admitted to Finkel toward the end of the book that some find him to be arrogant, and he doesn’t mean to come across that way. Maybe he states his opinions a little too strongly due to a lack of social skills. If that’s the case, I can relate to that, too.
Christopher was a shy, nerdy boy, but according to classmates, he wasn’t in any way freakish. He was simply quiet. He was smart, but he kept to himself. A few recall that he had a sense of humor. He grew up in rural Maine, and nearly everyone in his family was pretty quiet.
He got a job after graduating high school, and he bought a car, a Subaru Brat. But in 1986 when he was 20 years old, something snapped. He abruptly quit his job and drove his Brat all the way to Florida, and then he turned around and drove all the way back to Maine. He claims he didn’t have any kind of master plan. It all happened spontaneously. He drove the Brat along narrow, disserted roads until he was almost out of gas. Then he stopped, threw the keys down and walked into the woods with nothing other than the clothes on his back.
He ended up at North Pond, which was only about 30 miles from his home, but he didn’t know where he was. He felt comfortable there, so he stayed. He camped at various locations over the next several months, but then he found the perfect hiding spot. It was a small clearing surrounded by dense undergrowth, and the area around his camp was rocky, so it was unwelcoming to hikers and hunters. His camp was only a three-minute walk from a driveway, and yet he was able to live in this spot undetected for 27 years. He claims he only spoke to one person in all that time. He passed a hiker on a trail in the ‘90s, and the two men said hi to each other. His family never reported him missing, and no one ever reported finding the car. He was little more than a kid. He had no close friends. He was still a virgin, and he had never been on a date.
Even though he was taught how to hunt and fish as a boy, he did not attempt to live off of the land. He didn’t plant vegetables at his camp. He survived by stealing food and supplies. North Pond is surrounded by about 100 small cabins. These aren’t luxury vacation homes, but humble, rustic dwellings owned by ordinary people, teachers and plumbers. Many of the cabins have been in the family for generations. Christopher avoided breaking into cabins when they were occupied, and he never smashed panes of glass or broke down doors. He jimmied locks and climbed through windows, and he tried to cover up any trace that he had been there. He stole food, camping equipment, clothing, propane tanks, batteries, bedding and books. He never stole anything expensive.
He made his supply runs in the middle of the night, and he only went out when it was icy or about to rain or snow so that he wouldn’t leave any tracks. He was always freshly shaven, and he wore clean clothes when he left his hiding spot so that if anyone saw him, they wouldn’t find his appearance unusual. Once he was snowed in for winter in November, he stayed at his camp until the spring thaw. He nearly died every winter, but he was determined to stay in his little clearing by himself.
He kept up with current events by listening to the radio, and for a time, he had a small, portable TV that he powered with car batteries.
The cabin owners eventually noticed that things were disappearing. At first, some thought they were losing their minds, but they started talking to each other, and they realized someone was breaking in. It’s estimated that Christopher committed over 1,000 burglaries. Many cabins were broken into dozens of times. The legend of the North Pond hermit grew.
Since Christopher never threatened anyone or stole anything of great value, authorities didn’t spend a lot of resources trying to catch him. But one game warden became obsessed with the case. He borrowed some sophisticated equipment from border patrol and finally nabbed Christopher one night as he was pillaging the pantry of a camp for disabled children. Christopher surrendered without putting up a fight, and he readily admitted to his crimes. He never defended himself or offered any excuses. He was remorseful and claimed he felt great shame. He also said he was scared to death every time he broke into a cabin.
Many of the cabin owners despised Christopher, and they wanted him to be sent to prison for the rest of his life. It wasn’t what he took that was the problem. It was the sense of violation that upset them. The cabins were supposed to be retreats from the troubles of the world, but some say they never felt secure or safe at North Pond. No one had ever seen Christopher, so he could have been a psycho armed to the teeth for all they knew. Some of the children were terrified of him. Some were afraid to sleep in their cabins alone. Christopher scared the crap out of one young man. He decided to go up to his parents’ cabin one weekend, but he drove a large truck for his work. The truck wouldn’t fit in the cabin’s driveway, so the boy parked it about a half mile away. Assuming the cabin was empty since the place was dark and quiet and there wasn’t a car around, Christopher broke in when the boy was sleeping. The boy didn’t have a weapon, and he was afraid the intruder meant to harm him. He reacted by screaming threats and obscenities at the unseen stranger in the house. Christopher quickly withdrew without saying a word. I can understand why the cabin owners would hate Christopher.
Christopher was sent to jail. He wasn’t granted bail because he was a flight risk. He was in jail for 7 months while the case was being sorted out. Finkel interviewed him several times while he was in jail. The judge decided not to send him to prison. His punishment was a fine, probation, therapy and time served. His mother was still alive, and he moved back in with her. His brother gave him a solitary mechanic’s job.
Some have speculated that Christopher might have a mild form of autism. Others thought he might have a schizoid personality disorder or that he might suffer from depression. Finkel talked to several mental health professionals, and they agreed that Christopher displayed some symptoms of all of those things, but he didn’t neatly fit into any category.
Christopher told Finkel that he simply felt out of place and uncomfortable around other people. Christopher followed all of the court’s directions to the letter, and he appeared to be reintegrating back into society about as well as could be expected. But the last time Finkel spoke to Christopher at his mother’s house, Christopher admitted that he wasn’t doing well. He said everyone treated him like a child. He couldn’t stand it, and he wanted nothing more than to return to the woods. Christopher cried, and that made Finkel cry. He asked Finkel if he thought he was crazy. Finkel said he didn’t think so. I don’t either.
Christopher was born on December 7, 1965. I was born on Sept. 28 of the same year, so I’m about 10 weeks older than he is. Just as I suspected when I discovered the book, I identify with Christopher’s need for solitude. I found him to be a bit prickly and sometimes judgy in a way I don’t like, but he admitted to Finkel toward the end of the book that some find him to be arrogant, and he doesn’t mean to come across that way. Maybe he states his opinions a little too strongly due to a lack of social skills. If that’s the case, I can relate to that, too.
Christopher was a shy, nerdy boy, but according to classmates, he wasn’t in any way freakish. He was simply quiet. He was smart, but he kept to himself. A few recall that he had a sense of humor. He grew up in rural Maine, and nearly everyone in his family was pretty quiet.
He got a job after graduating high school, and he bought a car, a Subaru Brat. But in 1986 when he was 20 years old, something snapped. He abruptly quit his job and drove his Brat all the way to Florida, and then he turned around and drove all the way back to Maine. He claims he didn’t have any kind of master plan. It all happened spontaneously. He drove the Brat along narrow, disserted roads until he was almost out of gas. Then he stopped, threw the keys down and walked into the woods with nothing other than the clothes on his back.
He ended up at North Pond, which was only about 30 miles from his home, but he didn’t know where he was. He felt comfortable there, so he stayed. He camped at various locations over the next several months, but then he found the perfect hiding spot. It was a small clearing surrounded by dense undergrowth, and the area around his camp was rocky, so it was unwelcoming to hikers and hunters. His camp was only a three-minute walk from a driveway, and yet he was able to live in this spot undetected for 27 years. He claims he only spoke to one person in all that time. He passed a hiker on a trail in the ‘90s, and the two men said hi to each other. His family never reported him missing, and no one ever reported finding the car. He was little more than a kid. He had no close friends. He was still a virgin, and he had never been on a date.
Even though he was taught how to hunt and fish as a boy, he did not attempt to live off of the land. He didn’t plant vegetables at his camp. He survived by stealing food and supplies. North Pond is surrounded by about 100 small cabins. These aren’t luxury vacation homes, but humble, rustic dwellings owned by ordinary people, teachers and plumbers. Many of the cabins have been in the family for generations. Christopher avoided breaking into cabins when they were occupied, and he never smashed panes of glass or broke down doors. He jimmied locks and climbed through windows, and he tried to cover up any trace that he had been there. He stole food, camping equipment, clothing, propane tanks, batteries, bedding and books. He never stole anything expensive.
He made his supply runs in the middle of the night, and he only went out when it was icy or about to rain or snow so that he wouldn’t leave any tracks. He was always freshly shaven, and he wore clean clothes when he left his hiding spot so that if anyone saw him, they wouldn’t find his appearance unusual. Once he was snowed in for winter in November, he stayed at his camp until the spring thaw. He nearly died every winter, but he was determined to stay in his little clearing by himself.
He kept up with current events by listening to the radio, and for a time, he had a small, portable TV that he powered with car batteries.
The cabin owners eventually noticed that things were disappearing. At first, some thought they were losing their minds, but they started talking to each other, and they realized someone was breaking in. It’s estimated that Christopher committed over 1,000 burglaries. Many cabins were broken into dozens of times. The legend of the North Pond hermit grew.
Since Christopher never threatened anyone or stole anything of great value, authorities didn’t spend a lot of resources trying to catch him. But one game warden became obsessed with the case. He borrowed some sophisticated equipment from border patrol and finally nabbed Christopher one night as he was pillaging the pantry of a camp for disabled children. Christopher surrendered without putting up a fight, and he readily admitted to his crimes. He never defended himself or offered any excuses. He was remorseful and claimed he felt great shame. He also said he was scared to death every time he broke into a cabin.
Many of the cabin owners despised Christopher, and they wanted him to be sent to prison for the rest of his life. It wasn’t what he took that was the problem. It was the sense of violation that upset them. The cabins were supposed to be retreats from the troubles of the world, but some say they never felt secure or safe at North Pond. No one had ever seen Christopher, so he could have been a psycho armed to the teeth for all they knew. Some of the children were terrified of him. Some were afraid to sleep in their cabins alone. Christopher scared the crap out of one young man. He decided to go up to his parents’ cabin one weekend, but he drove a large truck for his work. The truck wouldn’t fit in the cabin’s driveway, so the boy parked it about a half mile away. Assuming the cabin was empty since the place was dark and quiet and there wasn’t a car around, Christopher broke in when the boy was sleeping. The boy didn’t have a weapon, and he was afraid the intruder meant to harm him. He reacted by screaming threats and obscenities at the unseen stranger in the house. Christopher quickly withdrew without saying a word. I can understand why the cabin owners would hate Christopher.
Christopher was sent to jail. He wasn’t granted bail because he was a flight risk. He was in jail for 7 months while the case was being sorted out. Finkel interviewed him several times while he was in jail. The judge decided not to send him to prison. His punishment was a fine, probation, therapy and time served. His mother was still alive, and he moved back in with her. His brother gave him a solitary mechanic’s job.
Some have speculated that Christopher might have a mild form of autism. Others thought he might have a schizoid personality disorder or that he might suffer from depression. Finkel talked to several mental health professionals, and they agreed that Christopher displayed some symptoms of all of those things, but he didn’t neatly fit into any category.
Christopher told Finkel that he simply felt out of place and uncomfortable around other people. Christopher followed all of the court’s directions to the letter, and he appeared to be reintegrating back into society about as well as could be expected. But the last time Finkel spoke to Christopher at his mother’s house, Christopher admitted that he wasn’t doing well. He said everyone treated him like a child. He couldn’t stand it, and he wanted nothing more than to return to the woods. Christopher cried, and that made Finkel cry. He asked Finkel if he thought he was crazy. Finkel said he didn’t think so. I don’t either.
Saturday, February 18, 2017
Two Cents
Conservative David Brooks wrote about how deeply divided the country is in a recent column. He went on at length about how unhinged the Trump administration is, how 65% of us are horrified, and how 35% are loving every minute. I suspect, or at least hope, that Trump’s hardcore supporters are closer to 25% rather than 35, but I think he’s right about the sharp divide.
Brooks has been critical of Trump since the beginning of his campaign. He would clearly prefer a more moderate Republican in the White House. But he turns a blind eye to the reality that the reasonable Republicanism he admires has been dying since the 1960s, and Republicans are the cause. Republicans decided they were going to be the anti-Civil Rights party and courted the votes of southern racists who had been avoiding Republican candidates since Lincoln. They went on to embrace the Religious Right, which has roots in southern white evangelical racism, and the Religious Right uses Jesus to justify prejudice against and fear of women, LGBTs, Muslims and other minorities. The Republican Party has become America’s white nationalist party.
Republicans, with the aid of Right Wing media, have been telling their base they are victims for 50 years, and nearly every problem they have, real or imagined, can be blamed on minorities and liberals who use government to oppress them, steal from them, and give free handouts to their enemies. Meanwhile, they have cut taxes on the super rich and have done everything in their power to minimize regulation of banking and industry.
We now live in a tyranny of the 1% + 25% or 35%. Those hardcore supporters are dyed in the wool believers, and they’ve been attending the church of hate all of their lives. A snappy comeback or a meme on Facebook won’t dissuade them. You can’t appeal to their humanity either. They truly believe they are the ones suffering, and the problems of others are either fake or self-inflicted.
So how do we overcome this? Well first, I think we need to assess the situation and accept the facts. These hardcore Republicans are out there, and they’re not going anywhere. They might eventually die off, and minority groups might eventually outnumber them, but in the meantime, we have to accept that they’re there, well organized and vote in a solid block. We have to accept that the way our system is set up, the votes of rural voters count more than the votes of urban and suburban voters, and we have to accept that the Republican base is mostly rural, and they have found a way to work the system to their advantage.
I believe that the Democrats need to expand their base. We need to flip some of these red states. To do that, we first have to believe that such a thing is possible. Yes, the Republican machine is operating at full capacity in these rural states and counties. But even so, not everyone who is voting is voting Republican, and there are a lot of people who aren’t voting. They are unmotivated because they don’t think their vote will make a difference. Many feel abandoned because they have been. Democrats have all but given up on rural voters.
I believe Democrats need to stop lumping everyone outside of metro areas together. I lived most of my life in rural West Virginia, and I’m probably more liberal than the average city voter. The racist bigots have the loudest voices out in the country, but country folk don’t all march to the same drummer. To assume they do is to indulge prejudice. And if you want a national party capable of winning elections, writing off half of the electorate and turning your back on huge sections of the country is foolish.
Politics is about addressing needs, and if you want more rural voters on your side, you have to address their needs. And they do have real needs. There are real worries out there about economics, healthcare and education. I hear some of my liberal friends dismiss the needs of rural folks. They say they should just move to where the jobs are, but that’s not a reasonable solution. It would be a disaster if millions of people began moving to metro areas. Housing costs in metro areas are already high, and there aren’t that many jobs to be had there. I hear some of my liberal friends throw around the word “privileged” a lot. They abuse that term, and some of these rural people are living in dilapidated housing and dying in their 40s, 50s and 60s. To call them privileged is absurd. Imagine if you were out in the sticks. You work at Wal-Mart. You live in a 30-year-old trailer. Your father died at age 54, and you’re worried the same thing will happen to you. Election time rolls around. You wonder if you’ll vote this year for the first time in 20 years, so you start looking into the various candidates, and you notice that many of the supporters of the Democratic candidates speak contemptuously of you and relentlessly insist that you’re spoiled and privileged. And if you try to tell one of these Democratic supporters about your worries and problems, they tell you that you’re imagining things, blowing things out of proportion, or your problems are self-inflicted. Well, doesn’t that sound familiar? Meanwhile, not a single Democratic candidate comes within a 100 miles of you to ask for your vote.
Economic problems are real, and millions are living close to the edge, millions of all races, and these people are everywhere…the cities, the suburbs and the countryside. Massive economic growth can’t be counted on to fix the problem. The kind of growth we experienced in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s is not likely to be repeated. But despite slow growth, there’s still enough to go around. But we need progressive policies put in place to make it happen.
Japan’s post-war economic miracle was even more extreme than ours, and it ended in the early ’90s. But life in Japan is still pretty good. It’s politically stable, the standard of living is high, life expectancy is high and crime is low. But they’re better at income distribution than we are.
The crazies are out there and in numbers, and they vote. But the majority is less likely to roll over and play dead if we provide for their basic needs, give them hope and give them something to fight for.
I hope politicians with a strong understanding of these problems and have solid, workable solutions come to the surface. And I hope we rally around those who are capable of connecting with voters across the country, politicians who are just as comfortable talking to someone who wears jeans and speaks with a twang as they are with someone who graduated from Harvard, someone like Ann Richards, for instance.
I think it’s important to keep in mind that human beings are feeling beings who happen to think rather than thinking beings who happen to feel. I think our candidates have to have some charisma. When we choose to support a candidate, it’s not enough to settle for the one who we like best. We have to find candidates who have wide appeal. Then we have to push them past their comfort zones so they can charm Americans from coast to coast.
That’s my two cents for today.
Brooks has been critical of Trump since the beginning of his campaign. He would clearly prefer a more moderate Republican in the White House. But he turns a blind eye to the reality that the reasonable Republicanism he admires has been dying since the 1960s, and Republicans are the cause. Republicans decided they were going to be the anti-Civil Rights party and courted the votes of southern racists who had been avoiding Republican candidates since Lincoln. They went on to embrace the Religious Right, which has roots in southern white evangelical racism, and the Religious Right uses Jesus to justify prejudice against and fear of women, LGBTs, Muslims and other minorities. The Republican Party has become America’s white nationalist party.
Republicans, with the aid of Right Wing media, have been telling their base they are victims for 50 years, and nearly every problem they have, real or imagined, can be blamed on minorities and liberals who use government to oppress them, steal from them, and give free handouts to their enemies. Meanwhile, they have cut taxes on the super rich and have done everything in their power to minimize regulation of banking and industry.
We now live in a tyranny of the 1% + 25% or 35%. Those hardcore supporters are dyed in the wool believers, and they’ve been attending the church of hate all of their lives. A snappy comeback or a meme on Facebook won’t dissuade them. You can’t appeal to their humanity either. They truly believe they are the ones suffering, and the problems of others are either fake or self-inflicted.
So how do we overcome this? Well first, I think we need to assess the situation and accept the facts. These hardcore Republicans are out there, and they’re not going anywhere. They might eventually die off, and minority groups might eventually outnumber them, but in the meantime, we have to accept that they’re there, well organized and vote in a solid block. We have to accept that the way our system is set up, the votes of rural voters count more than the votes of urban and suburban voters, and we have to accept that the Republican base is mostly rural, and they have found a way to work the system to their advantage.
I believe that the Democrats need to expand their base. We need to flip some of these red states. To do that, we first have to believe that such a thing is possible. Yes, the Republican machine is operating at full capacity in these rural states and counties. But even so, not everyone who is voting is voting Republican, and there are a lot of people who aren’t voting. They are unmotivated because they don’t think their vote will make a difference. Many feel abandoned because they have been. Democrats have all but given up on rural voters.
I believe Democrats need to stop lumping everyone outside of metro areas together. I lived most of my life in rural West Virginia, and I’m probably more liberal than the average city voter. The racist bigots have the loudest voices out in the country, but country folk don’t all march to the same drummer. To assume they do is to indulge prejudice. And if you want a national party capable of winning elections, writing off half of the electorate and turning your back on huge sections of the country is foolish.
Politics is about addressing needs, and if you want more rural voters on your side, you have to address their needs. And they do have real needs. There are real worries out there about economics, healthcare and education. I hear some of my liberal friends dismiss the needs of rural folks. They say they should just move to where the jobs are, but that’s not a reasonable solution. It would be a disaster if millions of people began moving to metro areas. Housing costs in metro areas are already high, and there aren’t that many jobs to be had there. I hear some of my liberal friends throw around the word “privileged” a lot. They abuse that term, and some of these rural people are living in dilapidated housing and dying in their 40s, 50s and 60s. To call them privileged is absurd. Imagine if you were out in the sticks. You work at Wal-Mart. You live in a 30-year-old trailer. Your father died at age 54, and you’re worried the same thing will happen to you. Election time rolls around. You wonder if you’ll vote this year for the first time in 20 years, so you start looking into the various candidates, and you notice that many of the supporters of the Democratic candidates speak contemptuously of you and relentlessly insist that you’re spoiled and privileged. And if you try to tell one of these Democratic supporters about your worries and problems, they tell you that you’re imagining things, blowing things out of proportion, or your problems are self-inflicted. Well, doesn’t that sound familiar? Meanwhile, not a single Democratic candidate comes within a 100 miles of you to ask for your vote.
Economic problems are real, and millions are living close to the edge, millions of all races, and these people are everywhere…the cities, the suburbs and the countryside. Massive economic growth can’t be counted on to fix the problem. The kind of growth we experienced in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s is not likely to be repeated. But despite slow growth, there’s still enough to go around. But we need progressive policies put in place to make it happen.
Japan’s post-war economic miracle was even more extreme than ours, and it ended in the early ’90s. But life in Japan is still pretty good. It’s politically stable, the standard of living is high, life expectancy is high and crime is low. But they’re better at income distribution than we are.
The crazies are out there and in numbers, and they vote. But the majority is less likely to roll over and play dead if we provide for their basic needs, give them hope and give them something to fight for.
I hope politicians with a strong understanding of these problems and have solid, workable solutions come to the surface. And I hope we rally around those who are capable of connecting with voters across the country, politicians who are just as comfortable talking to someone who wears jeans and speaks with a twang as they are with someone who graduated from Harvard, someone like Ann Richards, for instance.
I think it’s important to keep in mind that human beings are feeling beings who happen to think rather than thinking beings who happen to feel. I think our candidates have to have some charisma. When we choose to support a candidate, it’s not enough to settle for the one who we like best. We have to find candidates who have wide appeal. Then we have to push them past their comfort zones so they can charm Americans from coast to coast.
That’s my two cents for today.
Wednesday, February 15, 2017
Needy Hunk in Making Love (1982)
What I remember him for is a bit part he played in Making Love (1982). He was a lovesick youth pining for hard-to-get, use-them-and-drop-them Bart, Harry Hamlin’s character. Michael’s character came up to Bart in a gay bar and practically begged him for attention. There is a strong suggestion that Bart has already had Michael’s character, so he’s no longer interested, but he doesn’t want to be openly rude to the lad. Michael stood out for me because I recognized him. I guess I had seen him in a TV show. At the time, it was surprising to me to see such a hunkish young man not only play a gay character, but one that was needy and obviously submissive. I suppose if you got a taste of Harry Hamlin, you couldn’t help but become his sex slave.
I’ve been watching Making Love again for the first time in many years. It’s aged a bit. Looks more like a made-for-TV production than a feature film. The acting can be a bit stale. The writing is often flat. But I think it does capture something of the mood of the time and gives a glimpse of how terrifying it was to come out in 1982.
Tuesday, February 14, 2017
Grade School Valentine
Just like nearly all kids across the country, I exchanged cute, simple little Valentines with my classmates when I was in grade school in the 1970s. When I was in first grade, my package of cards came with one oversized card for someone special. It had a big picture of a puppy on it. I chose to give it to a girl named Lesley. She was a nice girl with long, beautiful coal black hair. People made too much of my decision, and assumed I had a heterosexual crush on Lesley. This embarrassed me, and it was hard for me to talk to Lesley after that.
Our middle school was much, much larger than our grade school, and I hardly ever saw Lesley when we got older even though she was a neighbor. Then when we were about 13, I heard Lesley had leukemia. I can recall standing with several boys by one of the side entrances of the school when Lesley walked through the parking lot with a couple of her friends. She had a scarf wrapped around her head. Her flowing black hair was gone. That was the last time I saw her.
I always think of Lesley on Valentine’s Day. I suspect we might have been good friends if adults had not misinterpreted my attraction to her.
Our middle school was much, much larger than our grade school, and I hardly ever saw Lesley when we got older even though she was a neighbor. Then when we were about 13, I heard Lesley had leukemia. I can recall standing with several boys by one of the side entrances of the school when Lesley walked through the parking lot with a couple of her friends. She had a scarf wrapped around her head. Her flowing black hair was gone. That was the last time I saw her.
I always think of Lesley on Valentine’s Day. I suspect we might have been good friends if adults had not misinterpreted my attraction to her.
Wednesday, February 8, 2017
Pooh Saves the Day
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