…only the targets ever change, and then only for a while.

So there is apparently a new survey MAGA is waving around that shows a decline in the number of people identifying as transgender. Elon Musk and Matt Walsh are celebrating it as a victory over “transgenderism.”

Oh really?

I was drafted, not entirely against my will, into the gay civil rights struggle ever since I fell in love back in my teen years, and I have seen how this game is played over and over. The idea is to minimize our numbers, as if that makes our demands for equal rights seem unreasonable and excessive. Oh you don’t want equal rights, you want Special Rights. But when you question people for a survey about sexual orientation, in a climate of hate, you are unlikely to get a lot of honest answers. Combine that with people’s own misunderstanding of their sexual orientation because they’d grown up with nothing but myths, lies, and superstitions about it, and a good many of your respondents will give what they think is an honest if completely wrong answer. Then add to that the spectrum of sexual orientation. There’s a reason Kinsey’s scale goes from zero to six, not zero to one.

I would have answered incorrectly about my sexual orientation if asked, before I realized I was in love that first time and saw that everything I had been taught about homosexuals was wrong, even though I was crushing madly on the object of my affections. I was 17…what did I really know about it back in 1971? And even knowing I was gay at that point, I would have been unlikely to publicly identify as that, in a time when almost every state had a sodomy law on its books, and you could be discriminated against in jobs, housing and services. I’d like to think mom wouldn’t have thrown me out of the house had I identified, but lots of gay kids had that happen to them.

What does it mean to Identify As? Being willing to stand your ground and say publicly Yes I Am…or is it a private Yes I Know.

So no surprises, they’re doing the same playbook now against transgendered people. This from comments in a thread about the new survey…

“It’s raw data of those who took the survey. Going just on that, it’s much more probable people are less likely to say they identify given the hostile politics. And when it’s actually weighted correctly, the data shows a 9% increase, not a decrease.”

There is nothing complicated about this. Transgender people start coming out of the closet and asserting their own true identities. A vicious backlash ensues in the commercial press, political campaigns, and social media. Hostile billionaires throw tons of money everywhere they can to demonize transgender people. And then transgender people find themselves facing a torrent of threats against their lives and livelihoods. And surprise, surprise, they start ducking for their own safety and mental well being. And the bigot industrial complex declares victory when their surveys show a decline in the number of people identifying as transgender.

My people have been there too. We know how this game is played.

And understand this: they don’t think the actual number of transgender people has declined. What this survey is telling them (which it actually fucking isn’t) is their expensive hate mongering is working. Transgender people are afraid.

Victory.

I had to defrost my frostless refrigerator overnight. 

Defrosting the fridge is an operation I remember from kidhood, when most refrigerators in rental apartments didn’t usually have that auto defrost cycle feature. But it’s something these days I’ve come not to expect having to do. The little chest freezer in the basement, yes. But I don’t think they even make frostless chest freezers since the defrost cycle bounces the temperature up and down somewhat. And the small cube fridge I used to keep in my STScI office before I retired (the first time) and which now I keep in my den. The mid Atlantic states are very humid and without a self defrosting feature they will ice up fairly often.

Some time ago when the fridge that came with the house began to fail I opted to buy a smaller, simpler new one. The one I have now is scaled for a solitary grocery shopper and is simple enough mechanically that it has the old style radiator on the back of the unit, which means you can’t push it up against the wall, you have to give it some space for air flow around the radiator. They all used to be designed like that.

This makes the thing simple. All there is to it mechanically is the compressor and a thermostat to maintain temperature. The frostless designs add a small heater near the evaporator coils and a timer that periodically turns off the compressor and begins a heat cycle to melt frost off the coils before it starts to accumulate and block them off. That’s one of the things that happened to the fridge that came with the house, a too large for me GE (the previous owner of the house seems to have had a thing for GE appliances…everything in the house was GE except the InSinkErator).

Thing is, in the frostless refrigerators the cooling coils are usually hidden behind a plastic panel and a fan blows cold air from the coils into the freezer. So when the defrost cycle fails and the coils get blocked off with ice you have to disassemble the area around the back of the freezer to get to them. I have a blog post about how the fridge that came with the house failed and a photo of the coils totally, I mean totally bricked in with ice. I was stunned.

Yesterday I began to suspect something like that was happening to the fridge I have now, when I pulled a bottle of ice tea out of the fridge and it wasn’t very cold in my hand. So I checked the thermometer in freezer compartment and the temperature there was right where it should be. I hand checked some bottles in the lower compartment and they didn’t feel cold enough. So I put the thermometer down there and instantly it began to rise out of the refrigerator cool zone. Last time that happened with the previous refrigerator, it was a sign that I’d need to buy a new one at some not distant enough day. I’m still paying off my December California train and Disneyland tickets.

Dear German Who Doesn’t Read My Blog…Disney should be paying you a royalties…

So, anyway, something was wrong with the fridge, but not with the evaporator coils since the freezer compartment was okay. So I looked deeper into it.

In older refrigerators, the ones I grew up with, the evaporator coils formed the freezer shelf and cold air from them just fell into refrigerator half (and you had to be super careful defrosting them!). In the newer upright refrigerators, the evaporator coils are tucked away inside a panel (it is actually laying flat between the freezer upper and lower refrigerator compartments) and a fan blows air across them into the freezer compartment and another fan blows into the refrigerator compartment below it. Thermostats connected to knobs control the fans, and how much air goes into which half of the fridge, and also the compressor cycle. Since the freezer was maintaining temperature and the lower compartment was not, I figured it had something to do either with a fan not working or something, probably ice, blocking air flow into the lower refrigerator compartment.

I dug into the freezer compartment. And here’s the thing: I had it stuffed full of recently bought food most of which, in retrospect, I should have just put into the chest freezer when I got it home. I have a sort I do when I get back from the grocery store: stuff to be kept cold but not frozen goes into the refrigerator, frozen stuff that needs kept frozen long term goes into the chest freezer (that’s usually bulk stuff I get at Costco, but also items I buy for long term storage), and frozen stuff that goes into the fridge’s freezer compartment because I am likely to use it soon.

I had the refrigerator’s freezer compartment nearly full for some reason I can’t recall now, but most of it was stuff I’d bought at Trader Joe’s just to try out and see if I liked. I don’t usually keep the refrigerator freezer that full. When I started looking into it I saw that all that frozen food was blocking air vents I hadn’t really noticed before, and they were frozen over with ice.

Okay, thinks I, here’s the problem. I tried chipping away at the ice but that’s risky business if you don’t know exactly where the evaporator coils and refrigerant lines are, and in the newer units all of that is tactfully hidden away from the owner in favor of how it looks to the eye of the buyer.

So I took everything out of the freezer and put it in the chest freezer downstairs. Having a plan B when the fridge is giving you trouble is one reason to keep even just a small chest freezer in the house. Then I took all my freezer packs I keep frozen for travel and emergencies, put those into my travel coolers and put the “keep refrigerated” and the “keep refrigerated after opening” food into them and what was left of the ice from the ice maker on top and closed them up.

Then I unplugged the refrigerator (I’ve never seen one with an actual on/off switch) and opened the freezer compartment door, figuring I’d just let any ice in the way of air flow warm up and melt off.

That was yesterday afternoon. I kept tabs on progress until I went to bed, and at my usual early morning insomnia hour and checked again, decided it looked completely clear of ice, turned it back on and went back to bed.

This morning everything seems back to normal. Both halves of the fridge are maintaining temperature. But I need to get another fridge thermometer. I had two, one for each compartment, but when I bought the chest freezer I moved one of them into that, which left the fridge with only one that I kept in the freezer, figuring if anything went wrong I’d see it there first. But…no. So I need another one for the refrigerator compartment.

The ice in my coolers is still solid so I figure the food in there is still good. I will restock the freezer compartment, but not so much it blocks those air vents.

Adventures in home ownership…

I have strange vivid dreams sometimes. And sometimes they become scenarios for stories that I will likely never write because while I’m pretty good at imagining stories I just don’t have the head of steam to write all of them. Plus whenever I do and I put it out there I get no feedback anyway. Which leads me to believe I’m actually pretty crappy at it. But it’s baked into me to do art and get this stuff out of me somehow someway.

This is cobbled together from a dream I had the morning of October 11, 2025. In it I dreamt I was working in a beautiful but old Victorian mansion that was converted to office space. Lovely wood carved walls and richly patterned wool carpeting. Office desks were beautiful and solid old wood. We seem to have added more comfortable modern desk chairs but made them look like chairs from the period. The computer workstations looked like something out of a steampunk graphic novel.

I had to be careful which doors I used to go in and out because if I wasn’t I might find myself back in the days of Queen Victoria…where it was not a good time for gay men, I would look way out of place, and I couldn’t use my credit cards to buy food anyway.

Sometimes I would see office workers walking around in the hallways who looked to be in period costume, but they weren’t ghosts, they were in their own time and the building just had phase issues with the two timelines that it was touching.

I remember looking out a window to see if the outside was my time or the building’s time…and I woke up.

So I wrote this scenario out of it. I give it to you. Make something out of it if you want…I probably won’t.

It is London, during the reign of Queen Victoria, but in a different timeline from our own. A moment of time compassing Oscar Wilde, Sherlock Holmes (in this timeline he is an actual person, as is Watson), Tennyson, Dickens, Darwin, Faraday.

A three floor brick and stone building located somewhere in London is home to an old and well established company (the exact nature of the business need not be specified, only that it employs many men and women as clerks and secretaries in multiple offices). It is a beautiful old Victorian building, with intricate wood carved doors, banisters, and carved wood paneled interiors, solid floors covered in richly patterned woven wool carpeting.

The business seems prosperous on the outside. But unknown to the public and its investors, it is slowly falling into hard times. Profit margins are down. Competition has denied them new opportunities to grow. If they cannot find a new source of revenue, they may eventually have to declare bankruptcy. Not soon, but eventually if the trend is not reversed.

A letter is received asking for a meeting with the board of directors, to discuss a proposition that might prevent their falling into bankruptcy. The board is alarmed. The financial state of the business was a closely guarded secret. The letter asks if they agree to the meeting to post a notice in the Globe personals, addressed to a Mr. Peabody from a Mr. Sherman.

A discussion ensues…there is worry that a criminal enterprise is making a move on their business. But it is agreed to meet with this Mr. Peabody, and learn what his proposition is.

At the appointed time a gentleman is ushered into the boardroom. No, he says, my name is not Peabody, it is Smith. He tells them he is a time traveler from the distant future.

After the laughter dies down, he pulls out a tablet computer, and proves it to them.

Time travel in the sense that it is depicted in the pulps is not possible, he tells them, and relates the paradox of the grandfather. What the time travelers of the future, or more specifically of our timeline have discovered he says, is what appears to be time travel is actually a kind of sideways jumping into alternate universes. Anything I do in your timeline he tells them, does not alter what happens in ours, nor does anything we do in ours alter yours.

We come from a timeline, he tells them, far forward in time from yours, in which London has become very prosperous. So prosperous in fact, that office space in the heart of London is now almost impossible to find, let alone afford. We desperately require more office space in London, close to our customers so we can grow our business. So we have a proposition for you. We would like to rent your building, in a time swap.

He explains: During your business day you will occupy your space in this building as usual. Ten hours per day will be yours, after which your people must vacate the building…which is usually the case anyway. Then, at a predetermined time, we will swap out your business for ours.

All your business property, the contents of your desks, file cabinets and safes, will be swapped out. We will not have access to into your private business matters in any way shape or form. It will simply exist in a null space between our timelines, perfectly preserved. Then our business property will be swapped in…the contents of our offices and desks, our file cabinets, our safes. Our people will then occupy this building for ten hours.

From the outside your building will seem dark and unoccupied the entire time, but no one must go inside or they will find themselves among our staff, and in a world of tomorrow unknown to them.

At the appropriate time the process will be reversed, such that when your people enter the building the morning of the following day, all will appear as normal. They need not even know this is happening. But you must tell them not to try and enter the building after business hours, or before normal business hours.

To our people it will also seem to be a normal day. They will not be working in the dark of your night, but in the daytime of our own timeline. Though our current office space is very small, we can manipulate the view outside every window of your building to reflect the view outside in our timeline. Our personnel will seem to be working in a lovely old Victorian building, with plenty of space. They of course, will not be allowed to go directly outside until their day is done, otherwise they will enter your timeline. But they will be completely aware of what is happening. This sort of time travel is well understood in our day and age. We will provide our staff the means to reenter our timeline to meet with our customers as needed, and for lunch breaks and other needs.

The important thing for us is we will then have enough office space where we need it, in the heart of London, near to our customers, and in what many in our timeline agree is a beautiful victorian office building (it really is very lovely). From the outside in our timeline it will appear that we have but a cramped one room office in a narrow building among many others, where once long ago this magnificent structure stood, but was demolished in favor of more modern and up to date (and in the opinion of many, sterile) offices. Many regretted deeply when this building was torn down, but money talks in every universe it seems. Once our staff enter that little office place they will be transported here to do their work, in a much nicer place.

We get ten hours each. This will leave four hours every day for your housekeeping or ours to do their work while our staff are away. We can discuss ways and means for that later, if you agree.

We will need to upgrade some of the infrastructure of this building, to make it suitable for our purposes, but this need not be visible to you. The electrical service will need much improvement, but we can do that such that it is unnoticed by your utility company and your staff. There will be vastly less risk of fire with our improvements. Also the plumbing and sanitary services will need refitting. Our staff would want better heating and cooling, and also for our computers…

Computers?

General purpose tabulating machines that in our time have been pressed into multiple uses. All of these improvements will be discreetly hidden from view. Your staff will notice no changes whatsoever. We can instruct certain absolutely trustworthy members of your staff as to what is going on, and what changes we have made in your building’s infrastructure, and the hazards of untrained staff attempting to utilize them. If your staff were to notice anything, it would be how much more comfortable their working conditions are.

Here, Mr. Smith passes a small slip of paper to the chairman of the board.

As to the rent we shall pay you for the use of your building, here is our offer for a ten year lease.

The chairman’s eyes grow wide. He passes the paper around to the others at the table and they see it will put the firm on solid ground for the entire decade of the lease.

Mr. Smith provides the chairman with an envelope containing many papers.

Here is the full text of our proposed agreement. Please look it over. If you agree to the terms please post another notice in the Globe to Mr. Peabody from Sherman.

Thank you for your time gentlemen.

And he takes his leave.

They eventually agree, with minor tweaks to the agreement. And for years it works to everyone’s benefit.

And then one day a clerk who has forgotten something enters the building late at night, breaking the rules and hoping not to be noticed…and enters a world of tomorrow…and is seen by another clerk working in what is his office during normal hours.

This is just a background story for a possible series of stories about two businesses in two different timelines occupying the same building back in the days of Queen Victoria, and what happens when one of the worker bees from that time, discovers others from the distant future also working there. And they fall in love with one of them…

[Update…] Thinking about this a little more…actually this could be a setting for any number of short stories and/or novels, along the lines of C.J. Cherryh’s Gates of Hell stories or Robert Asprin’s Thieves’/Myth World stories, or Don Sakers’ Carmen Miranda’s Ghost Is Haunting Space Station Three.

Could be fun…

Growing up, we didn’t have a car in our household until I was fifteen. So how did we get our groceries home from the store? Mom had a two wheeled foldable grocery cart.

These were pretty common back in the day, at least among our economic class, but also the timeframe. Back in the 50s/60s most households only had one car and that was dads for going to and from work. Seeing mothers with small children tagging along in the grocery store was nothing remarkable, nor is it today really. But nowadays you tend to only see older shoppers with these grocery carts, who live in nearby senior housing.

At the store this cart would be folded up and fit under the shopping cart while mom enacted the ancient rite of hunting and gathering among the isles. She (or I usually) would slide it out at the checkout counter, unfold it, and the baggage clerk would helpfully put the bags into it as they came from the register clerk (grocery stores used to have one clerk to work the cash register and another to bag groceries).

Being the “man of the house” my job was to pilot the grocery cart back home. It wasn’t that much of a chore and I happily dove into it so I could pretend I was driving a car, making sound effects along the way, and thereby fulfilling the line item on a young boy’s job description that reads embarrass mom. Small as I was, the only way a lot of heavy groceries mattered was the inertia you had to overcome to start it rolling. Once you got it rolling it wasn’t much effort to pull or push it along. That said, obviously we didn’t live where there were a lot of steep hills,

Time passes, the universe expands, and now I have a car of my own, and also two Very Nice grocery stores in easy walking distance from my house. But I’ve often thought about that old grocery cart I used to pilot along when I was still in single digits, because I dislike having to use the car just to drive a couple blocks when I knew I was buying more than I could carry. It just seemed ridiculous. The advantage to city life, in a good neighborhood, is you can walk everywhere. I have a good backpack I often use to go grocery shopping with, but even that has its limits. Plus, and alas, some places here have signs on the door saying “No Backpacks”. This is why we can’t have nice things.

I would see folks from the senior housing in my neighborhood, piloting their own grocery carts along and it kept reminding me to look into getting one of my own. But most of the newer ones strangely have four wheels, like a lot of roller luggage now too, and I just don’t grok that. To push one of those along upright on all four little wheels just looks unstable to me, especially when navigating cracks in the sidewalk and curbs. And I suppose all those years piloting a grocery cart way back when probably gave me some muscle memory for the task of balancing things on two wheels. My good Briggs & Riley luggage is like that with wheels that are a tad oversized compared to other makes.

So a couple months ago I looked into it, thinking I might just try to find a “vintage” grocery cart like the one mom had. But it seems these little grocery carts have had some serious rethinking since I was a boy, and I ended up with what you see in this photo… 

This design might be very new since I’ve never seen it being used before on the sidewalks around my neighborhood, and I see the folks from the senior housing here using them lots. But it’s really Really nice. Well made, well thought out.

The bag is detachable, holds as much as I remember mom’s cart holding and folds into a small space, as does the frame which is Way more substantial than the one mom had, or any other ones I’ve ever seen. And that weird arrangement of wheels on it actually makes going up and down steps and curbs a snap.

I’ve used it a bunch since then, and just this morning when I brought back a bunch of stuff I would never have been able to carry otherwise. Now the car can sit peacefully until I need to go to Trader Joe’s because that’s too far to walk.

So goes the voice of The Moody Blues. John Lodge has passed from this life at age 82, suddenly and unexpectedly according to his family. Never assume you still have more time on this good earth, no matter what the doctors tell you.

I’ve no idea if The Moody Blues ever intended it or not but some of their songs really spoke to the gay youngling I once was, and to the love lost adult I became, and I still listen to them longingly.

Beauty I’d always missed
With these eyes before
Just what the truth is
I can’t say anymore
And I love you…

Knock on my door and even the score with your eyes…

I wonder if you care
I wonder if you still remember
Once upon a time
In your wildest dreams…

…and now that voice is gone. But no…it will always be there to sing those songs to us, and the one in my heart. Nobody spoke to it like they did…like he did.

This graphic came across my Facebook feed just this morning. It’s about the rerelease of Goldeneye…a James Bond movie starring Pierce Brosnan, who I always thought made an excellent Bond, though I didn’t watch the movie. I haven’t watched any James Bond movies after the series jumped the shark with the addition of the Sheriff Claude Pepper and Jaws characters. Roger Moore was another excellent Bond though. I’ve always thought his Bond movies could have done with a little (a Lot) less camp. Anyway…friends and readers of this life blog can probably see which part of it caught my attention right away.

No stream rises higher than its source…as Frank Lloyd Wright once said. If you’re wondering why Fleming just had to specify hetrosexuals in that passage, you have not taken a good look at the man or his most famous character.

“Fleming himself had a deeply unpleasant attitude to women,” writes David Sexton in this 2015 article in The Standard, titled It’s no surprise James Bond is a misogynist when you meet his creator. And as usual, scratch a misogynist, find a homophobe…

[Pussy] lay in the crook of Bond’s arm and looked up at him. She said, not in a gangster’s voice, or a lesbian’s, but in a girl’s voice, “Will you write to me in Sing Sing?” Bond looked down into her deep violet eyes that were no longer hard, imperious. He bent and kissed them lightly. He said, “They told me you only liked women.” She said, “I never met a man before.” His mouth came down ruthlessly on hers.

-Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet.

This also works for gay men, as I discovered when some straight classmates dragged me to see The Opening Of Misty Beethoven, which claimed to be a porn/comedy. In it, a call girl is selected by a pornographer to become his magazine’s New Girl of The Season. But to cinch that title she has to go through a series of sexual challenges. And I’m sitting in this theater watching one sex scene after another after another after another, including the obligatory lesbian sex scene, and I’m trying to figure out if pornography really is that boring after all or was it just I’m a gay guy with zero interest in sex with women, when her final most challenging challenge is to cure a gay man of his homosexuality. Which of course she does because this is straight male fantasy and there is no such thing as bisexuality.

Back when Goldfinger came to the theaters I decided to pick up a copy of the paperback. The paperbacks of Fleming’s James Bond novels were everywhere then, even in the grocery store checkout lane racks along with the gossip magazines and tabloids. Back then the secret agent phase of kid culture was in full swing, and I had the James Bond Secret Agent Briefcase and a Man From U.N.C.L.E. pistol-rifle-combination-submachine-gun (it took your usual cap rolls) and several secret agent toys that would probably give adults kittens today if they were sold to kids, like the transistor radio that converted at the touch of a spring loaded button into a rifle, and a pocket knife that likewise became a pistol. By then I was already a voracious reader, escaping into the world of books whenever the world outside my bedroom became too much, and scanned the paperback bookshelves constantly for new material.  I read westerns by Louis L’amour, science-fiction by Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury and Hal Clement, the Lensmen series by E.E. Smith. I read the Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories, mysteries by Earl Derr Biggers and Robert L. Fish. I read the novels of Arthur Healy. But the only cold war secret agent stories I could get into were the ones by Alistair Maclean. His stories really drew you in and kept you hooked. I tried to read Goldfinger and could not get past the first few pages. I scanned a few more, gave up and put it back. It was probably just as well.

Some years later I picked up a Raymond Chandler book whilst browsing the racks at a small local bookstore/newsstand (are there still any of these left?), because I’d heard he was the gold standard in hard boiled detective novels. It was The Big Sleep. Randomly I opened it up and began reading…

“Don’t kid me, son. The fag gave you one. You’ve got a nice clean manly little room in there. He shooed you out and locked it up when he had lady visitors. He was like Caesar, a husband to women and a wife to men. Think I can’t figure people like him and you out?”

I still held his automatic more or less pointed at him, but he swung on me just the same. It caught me flush on the chin. I backstepped fast enough to keep from falling, but I took plenty of the punch. It was meant to be a hard one, but a pansy has no iron in his bones, whatever he looks like.

…and then I put it back.

Yes, that really happened. I just flipped open the book and the first thing I read is this crap. 

It’s a better world for the gay and lesbian readers now, though sometimes it makes me ache for the world I could have had growing up, instead of the one I got tossed into where a pansy has no iron in his bones. There is so much more for us to read now…adventures, mysteries, stories where we are real people in them and not cheapshit bar stool stereotypes.

Here are some young adult books on my To Be Read stack, for the young adult I was once, who had to grow up in a world where young hearts like mine had to build walls around around ourselves to survive. It did its job on me…I never found a boyfriend to have and hold…but I have seen it destroy so many others, so runts like Fleming and Chandler could feel good about themselves. 

Travels With Charley is the book that, at age 13, lit my hunger for taking road trips. I bought the novel in 1968 while on vacation with mom in Ocean City NJ, (relaxing on the beach with a book was something people did before smartphones) and devoured it before we made the trip home.

Then I read it again. And again. That worn 22nd printing Bantam paperback sits on my special books shelf with a few others, including Mary Renault’s The Charioteer and that first Golden Book of the Stars and Planets mom gave me when I was 9 because I spent so much time looking up at the night sky.

California was his birthplace and mine. He moved to the east coast of his own free will and I was dragged there at age two after my parents divorced, but I see a yearning for the land of his birth in this book that is similar to my own. Maybe this yearning for the homeland that was once ours is the wellspring of wanderlust and road trips. I didn’t know until recently that the motivation for Steinbeck’s road trip was his heart was failing and he knew he didn’t have much longer and he wanted to see America one last time. In his book he says simply that a writer who writes about his country should go look at it now and then. I wonder if the deeper motivation was that he wanted to plant his feet in California and Salinas one last time. If I knew I didn’t have much longer to live I would absolutely do one last road trip that ended up in Oceano, and the shores of Pismo Beach. 

Since that first road trip with classmates to the Southwest and California in 1974, I’ve taken more than I can count offhand. I remember Steinbeck’s warning that you don’t take a journey, it takes you, and it starts and ends on its own good time. But at the end of one road trip I am always ready for the next one. I look at my road atlas like I used to look at the annual Christmas catalogues when I was a young boy. I plan my trips to California selecting roads I’ve not yet driven to get me from Maryland to Oceano. I have spoken here before about escaping the gravity of home…

There’s a moment in every long distance road trip that I think of as escaping the gravity of home. Like the Apollo astronauts who escaped the earth’s gravity to go to the moon, there is a threshold you cross on a long distance drive where heading back home to your own comfortable bed is no longer possible, even if you push it bleary eyed into the night. You must bed down somewhere else. Keep going and its two nights. Then three. You’ve left the safe comfortable orbit of home. Now you’re traveling among the planets. At some point, and for me it’s usually the middle of the second day, comes the awareness that no matter what happens, you’re not getting back home any time soon. You and your car are a self contained capsule, scooting down the highway, looking for whatever it is ahead of you that you’ve never seen before…

Friday May 24, 2003

And even when the destination isn’t California, but somewhere else like Ocean City or Disney World and I am on vacation time and I am not going far, I know the vacation begins the moment I am on the highway travelling away from home. 

Next time I’m there I really need to see if I can get up to Salinas and behold his camper truck Rocinante with my own eyes and whisper a thank you.

This XKCD cartoon has been in my thoughts recently…

The other day I discovered to my displeasure that an old friend acquaintance has belly flopped into the anti vax sewer. So just replace the 9/11 conspiracy theories in that cartoon with COVID vaccine conspiracy theories and you have what I had to listen to the other day.

And yeah it breaks my heart because he’s smarter than that. But there’s that right wing talk radio streak in him. I suppose lots of us have people like that in our past. I hadn’t spoken to him at all since the last election because I knew where those conversations would end up going and I’d get angry again and hang up on him again and I just didn’t want to deal with him after that election day.

He’s actually probably not a Trumper, but he is a gun enthusiast to a degree I am simply not and it’s his one and only political issue when it comes to election day. He has the usual other talk radio issues, yes, but that one second amendment issue is the only thing he thinks about on election day and I am not that. I am all for background checks and keeping a tight control over who can and who cannot carry a gun in public. I’m not so much about “assault weapons” which I think is a meaningless term, but I absolutely think high capacity magazines should be reserved only for military and police use. I think our second amendment does give the people the right to own their own firearms and I think it makes complete sense in the context of democracy. But I also think the second amendment gives congress the right to regulate firearms too.

We regulate by law all sorts of potentially dangerous things people otherwise have the right to possess and use. Automobiles for instance. Firecrackers. Poisons. To be an electrician you need a license. To fly an airplane. Building homes requires permits and inspections. Guns are different only in that being dangerous is their purpose. They’re weapons, that’s what they have to be, that’s what they are intended to be, unlike a table saw which by law nowadays needs certain safety features in order to be legally sold. But the principle is the same. Some people should just not be allowed near those things. It’s not difficult to figure out who.

And when they tell you we need our guns to protect us from our own government, the answer is No, the ballot box is how we protect ourselves in a democracy. The first thing is you protect access to the ballot box. We lose that and it won’t matter how many guns you have.

And it’s not our second amendment superfans who generally want to insure that every adult American citizen has access to the ballot box these days is it, and that everyone’s vote counts the same as everyone else’s. 

So…anyway…I had a reason to chat with him by telephone the other day because I have a revolver I think he might like to have and which I don’t really want anymore. I am its legal owner. We can both go through our background checks unscathed, and in fact I recently got my Maryland license to purchase (not carry) a handgun. My police record is cleaner than your kitchen floor so that sort of thing is no problem for me. I was able some years ago to pass a background check to get clearance to do work in the James Webb Space Telescope Mission Control Room. If my old friend acquaintance and I do a deal on that revolver we’ll follow the law here in Maryland. We’ll agree on a price and then do the paperwork and make the transaction through a licensed FFL dealer. Our police records will be checked and then we’ll get a go-ahead to do the transaction. This is Maryland not Texas. SOP.

I wanted to give him the right of first refusal before I put the revolver up for sale somewhere else because we have a shared history in the shooting sports. So after nearly a year of not speaking to him I texted him and asked if I could call. He said I could and we chatted for nearly an hour. First it was about the revolver I want to sell, then it was almost like old times talking with him about this and that, and I was thoroughly enjoying our conversation. But it couldn’t last.

I brought up a particular .45 automatic that he owned and let me shoot every now and then. An all stainless steel AMT Hardballer I liked the look of, and how good the adjustable sights on it were. But it kept chucking its spent brass right in my face. Once one of those spent cases hit my forehead and wedged between my safety glasses and my cheek and it was Hot. I didn’t want anything to do with that gun after that and I said it was a shame because otherwise it was a very nice gun. My old friend acquaintance promptly told me the brass getting chucked in my face was a user problem not a gun problem. He said it was my limp wrist.

It was probably a momentary knee jerk reflex he just couldn’t stifle, and just never mind that I’ve shot other .45s with no trouble ever. But that is such a hoary old stereotype…

Mad Magazine, July 1978 by Jack Davis

I wrote a blog post about that side of him back in July last year, Here. He’s the guy who unfriended me on Facebook because he didn’t want to see “that gay stuff” in his feed.

Truman Capote once said A faggot is the homosexual gentleman who just left the room. This is something that we of the homosexual persuasion all know to one degree or another. As you grow older you come to expect it in certain situations. It never loses its sting, but you find yourself putting up with it, at least in my generation, unless it is so in your face that you have to cause a scene as a matter of keeping your self respect. But where it really hurts is when you suddenly get it coming from someone you considered a friend for so very long, only to discover it wasn’t real after all.

I’ve been mostly low key about my sexual orientation over the years, largely because I’ve never had a boyfriend to be proud of, just a lot of near misses and one guy who told me we were just friends with benefits. Otherwise I’d have been pretty loud about it. And all that time among my straight friends, I figured I was giving them a living example of how all the myths and stereotypes of homosexuals they were taught were wrong, and all that time they, some of them anyway, probably figured I was a discrete homosexual and therefor a good homosexual. A bigot’s mind, said Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., is like an eye…the more light you shine on it the tighter it closes.

Once upon a time, back in 1971, I fell in love and it was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me. It really was like one of those romance movies. The sky was a bit more blue, the birds sang a bit more sweetly, and the stars were brighter than ever. I was twitterpated. Just being alive was a better thing than I had ever known. I knew how it was with me then, and I have never felt ashamed since. There was nothing to be ashamed of.

I think at age 72 I’m old enough now to stop caring what anyone thinks or assumes because I am this or that. I own guns, I like to shoot them. I am homosexual, I like a certain type of guy and although at age 72 the possibility of a romantic sex life is in my rearview mirror I still like to gawk at beautiful men. Also, I get my vaccines whenever its time. And I am a liberal democrat. And a man of science. A photographer. A cartoonist. An artist. I paint, I draw, I write stories. I write computer programs, run Windows, MacOS and Linux computers on a common network here at home. I’ve done work for the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb. I am an atheist, but I grew up in a yankee baptist household and I have a bunch of that still inside me. I love the open road. I am a Disneyphile. And easily manipulated by cats. And what you think about any specific one of these things means as to the sort of person I am is probably wrong if that one thing is all you can see. And I have no fucks to give anymore. Especially after the last election.

Anyway… I’d like to file a bug report…

And I need to schedule this year’s flu vaccination. And the new COVID-19 booster…

The Trump coalition is a strange beast. There are the MAGA voters of course, the hard core racists, the fascists. There are the Fox News angry old people. There are the religious right nutcases. There are the tech bros who think democracy has run its course and now it’s time for something newer and better and AI based, and of course one that shovels even more of our money into their pockets. A subscription based high tech government where instead of voting you can click Like, and instead of paying taxes you just give them money and your smartphone keeps letting you buy things like food and shelter. But all those parts just don’t add up to a whole enough to elect a raving dumbass into the white house so they can get their hands on the levers of power. What you need is another piece that is, oddly enough, even bigger than all of those others put together.

You need the clueless. The oblivious. The ones that never start paying attention until just before the election. The ones that only watch the headline news, barely taking any of it in, because their favorite celebrity gossip show or reality TV comes on afterward. The ones that can seldom even motivate themselves to go vote but they will if there is nothing better to do that day.

There’s a whole lot of them and they can be easily manipulated by the skillful, the morally unconcerned, and the Russian. Especially in these days of commercial social media where you find lots of them spilling their guts about every little thing that interests them. Ever notice how those Facebook quizzes (Your Five Favorite TV Shows…The Top Things On Your Bucket List…) always start showing up in your feed more often close to an election? Where before you had to run surveys and host viewer panels to figure out how to manipulated them, now they show you all their buttons that you can push on Facebook and Twitter.

They’re proudly not political. They don’t want to hear it. Politics either bores them or makes them uncomfortable. So they avoid it.

These are the ones that can push your candidate over the top in a close election. But here’s the thing about those voters: you really don’t want them to start paying attention. Your candidate can screw them over and over and over and their general obliviousness still makes them easy to blame someone else for it and look the other way. Up to a point. Or as Abe Lincoln once said…

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.

You really don’t want this generally oblivious subset America paying attention. Because when that start paying attention it’s almost always because they have become angry. And when it gets to that point, they will know who to be angry at.

One good way of getting their attention is taking their paychecks away. 

…because I am not supposed to and/or reluctant to spell it out. Sorry. It seems even on my life blog I can’t always speak my mind these days.

“Never mind what I’m saying just listen to me.”

I’ve always loved that line. Just the way he delivered it. That TV show should have lasted a Lot longer, but too good for TV was/is a real thing.

Anyway…back to vaguebooking…

All is forgiven!

At least…at the present time. Let’s just not go there again…okay?

That was not about any specific person I know, or ever knew. And no, corporations are Not people!

And in other vaguebooking…

Don’t you think it’s a little late to be telling people they might not be able to pay their bills next month?

That was Not about me. Specifically. 

But seriously… Really? Really??

Don’t ask. It’s the new reality!

We are all Schultz now…

One semi pleasant side effect of the No Alcohol restriction I’ve been on since before the surgery (I should write some posts about the surgery I reckon) is I don’t go out to eat at my favorite places very much because they are where I do most of my drinking (margaritas usually). So this is saving me money by mostly eating from my own kitchen. Plus I have a fully stocked bar downstairs I can visit when the restriction is lifted. Restaurant and bar drinks are hella expensive.

I dine out half for food better than I can make myself, and half for company, which is why I always sit at the bar. I can chat with people at the bar. Table for one just reminds me how single I am. I won’t do table for one anymore. Staying home all the time reminds me of it too, but at least I have part-time work for now.

This is something else I like about train travel. I get to chat with my fellow passengers in the dining car and the lounge car. A certain someone once told me how good I was at getting a standoffish table talking to each other, but that’s because some situations have their own built-in ice breakers. Hi! Where y’all from? Where you headed? This your first train ride? I’ve had some amazing conversations on the train.

My problem with cancelling my Disney+ subscription is I did that months ago when I found out my Disneyland annual pass had been allowed to expire and they never told me that was going to happen.

The theme parks are apparently run as separate entities under the corporate umbrella, and Disney World spares no effort to let me know when my annual Disney World pass is getting close to expiring. I get email notices, letters (big poster card letters) in the mail reminding me that it’s time to renew. Disneyland could not have cared less and when I found out I was heartbroken because it was such a lucky break that I got it at all. Disney hands out chances just to buy an annual pass now like they’re indulgences from the gods above. So in my anger I cancelled Disney+ even though I really Really wanted to watch the next installment of its Percy Jackson series.

But I have many, Many more issues now with Disney and the parks, not the least of which is I just don’t feel safe going down to Florida anymore.

…and if DeSantis’ homophobia wasn’t enough…

‘It’s just scary’: In Florida, parents ponder future with fewer vaccines

Madeline HalpertBBC News

“We’ll end up having pockets of outbreaks of different types of infectious diseases,” Florida’s former surgeon general, Scott Rivkees, told the BBC. “Individuals who are older, immunocompromised adults and children who may have cancer, for example, are going to be afraid to go out into public.”

If Florida goes ahead, it would be one of the first states to officially do away with childhood vaccination mandates, which have long been a fixture in parents’ back-to-school plans. In April, Idaho’s governor signed a law loosening vaccine requirements.

These moves come as Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, a vaccine sceptic, undertakes remaking US vaccine policy, and the nation’s public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is in turmoil.

So, dig it. DeSantis’ Florida removes vaccine mandates for school children and Walt Disney World is full of children and their parents. Pixie dust, magic and disease.

I got talked back into DVC and now I have points in Saratoga Springs (gives me walking access to Disney Springs) but I can rent my points out and get some of that money back. The parks have changed so much since I started going in 2006 it’s not the fun it used to be. The Writer’s Stop is a tap bar now, because I suppose you can make more money selling beer to adults than books to kids. Star Wars has overrun half of Hollywood Studio, The Great Movie Ride is gone, MuppetVision 3D is gone, the riverboat and Tom Sawyer Island are gone, the bar seats are back at the Tune-In Lounge but you still can’t order food. And tickets are worthless if you don’t also make a Park Reservation. Don’t get me started about park reservations!

And…a certain someone is gone. For all I know he’s back in Germany because a green card just doesn’t cut it here now.

I just don’t feel like going anymore. It isn’t fun anymore. It isn’t magic anymore.

I reckon I’ll probably let that annual pass expire too. It’s a shame because I really liked going, and even with all the complaints I just listed I could still enjoy going because Disney World is so big and I can have a great time just wandering around the parks and trails between the resorts. I do a lot of pleasure walking. But it’s in DeSantis’ Florida and I don’t feel safe going there anymore.

Jim Wright today on what happened to Jimmy Kimmel…

Here in Florida, when the governor went after Disney for free speech, Democrats, liberals, the left, and people across the country stood up for the corporation and loudly pushed back against fascism.

Yesterday, @Disney sold all those people out and instead threw their Mickey Mouse hat in with the fascist government.

Disney is the Senator John Fetterman of companies.”

I am one of those people Disney sold out. I’m a gay man and a Disneyphile, and I felt directly attacked by DeSantis and the Florida republicans then. And they’re still doing it to us…

Disney stood up for us, after a fashion, and the Pride merchandise kept coming as did the acknowledgement of Pride month and the fact of our being part of the Disney family.

But this year’s Pride was carefully muted at Disney World…I was there, I saw it. You had to dig to find the references and the merchandise, and there were only one or two new items on display. If you know anything about how Disney markets itself and leaves no money on the table, it was striking. And sad. Very sad.

So you could almost see this coming. I appreciate how difficult a MAGA ruling government can make things for a company that just wants to keep doing business with the America that was. But that America is on its deathbed and if they can’t bring themselves to take the hits, stand up, and fight back, it is gone forever.

You are a media company for chrissake. You have a platform, a bully pulpit. Use it.

Or lose it.

Today, like every day since Trump was re-elected, I grieve for my country. I’ve none to spare for Mr. Kirk, but I am sorry for what his family, and especially his kids are going though now. They did not deserve this. They deserved to have a father raise them, nurture and care for them, love them from childhood into their adulthood. I am sorry for their loss. 

One could wish Mr. Kirk had spent more of his time on loving and raising his own kids, and not demonizing other people’s kids.

This…

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
-James Baldwin

But also, this…

He who fights with monsters, should see to it that he does not become a monster himself. And if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you also.
-Friedrich Nietzsche