augustus 2008 Archives

In a supreme irony, the Republicans are eminently grateful for having in place a woman’s right to choose what happens to her own body.

Sound strange? I suppose, but only at first blush.

Now that the Republicans are parading around their newest canonical Pro “Life” (yeah, right) hero, Sarah Palin, I have to admit even I am surprised at how grateful the right-wingers are in having in place the right of women to choose their own reproductive destinies.

It begs the question: how many new supporters does the McCain/Vagina 2008 campaign have in place for no reason other than that Democrats and other Progressives have long fought for Choice? Probably quite a few.

The fact that none of them are willing to admit the benefits (to them politically, be they male or female)? Probably none of them. This is quite telling.

Even as all these misguided right-wingers (Department of Redundancy Department Alert!) cheer on the choice that Sarah Palin made to carry to term her pregnancy despite horribly unfortunate results of prenatal genetic testing. The fact that none of them is willing to thank the actual legal ability to choose whether or not to carry to term bespeaks the simplistic, cartoonish lack of thought processes going on when it comes to abortion. Their unwillingness to give credit where due rings of extraordinary cowardice and duplicity.

I see the word “evil” used in many places—and this is only from a smattering of supposedly well-intentioned blogs. Abortion? Evil. Pro Choice movement? Evil. Pro Death Penalty? Evi—oh, wait.

The mindset on display in this 2D dog and pony show betrays a genuinely scary pattern: There is Good; there is Evil. Nothing more and nothing less.

Experts of basic logic will quickly point out the either-or fallacy standing on end with its neck broken: logic is Evil, after all, because it attempts to usurp God and Her Followers.

But there are no Evils and no Goods. What’s Evil to you is of benefit to those who supposedly perpetrate it. What’s Good to you, personally, can intrude on your person and your ability to be happy…even down to your ability to feel equal and free.

Right-wingers think they’re doing Good Works when they spend so much money on “protecting marriage” which, well, could be better spent invested into the so-called “faith-based initiatives”. “FBI” is gonna come back and bite them on the ass one day, you’ll see.

When you vanquish Evil, does that mean that what comes of its defeat is necessarily Good? When you stop Evil, does Good spring up in its place? Not necessarily, of course: there are plenty of things out there which are neither good nor bad. A victory over Evil results in a lack of Evil.

Does the Lack-Of-Evil == Good? No, of course not.

Pro Birthers are quite fond of referring to abortion as murder. Murder is a legal thing, so on the literal level, they’re lying (if you assume they know that abortion isn’t illegal). Are there news stories out there celebrating McCain’s not having murdered anyone today?

What it all comes down to here is that the Right-wingers champion Sarah Palin for choosing not to abort. In doing so, they’re abusing the rights that liberals have worked so hard to preserve.

If abortion were not legal, Palin would not be getting celebrated for having chosen “correctly”.

My opinion on the Choice question? I have no idea what it’s like to be a female when it comes to reproduction; no male does. I have heard every Pro Birth argument in the world and none sway me. I invite any Pro Birther to make a science/biology case for their opinion. Just expect to fail—there are finite arguments based on science to justify removing reproductive rights and I’ve heard all of them. I’ve even made them, but that was years ago before I pulled the stick out and started looking at the whole thing with human compassion and decency and admitted my limits and failings.

So be thankful today, Pro Birthers, that Palin didn’t abort. Give real thanks by giving real money to researchers of Down’s. Help make it a thing of the past by helping to develop techniques that would correct genetic defects.

Or would that be wrong because then “91-93%” of Down’s births would never happen?

Seemingly figuring that it’s finally not in the advantage to be a white male with a white male running mate in the 2008 Presidential Election, John McCain has apparently consulted with the Exec Producers of the maudlin-yet-effective the 2004 Republican National Convention to find a 2008-suitable candidate.

Now, if you’re asking why a 2008 candidate is looking to 2004, just consider the party in question (questionable?): any first-order direction they set sail for is going to point backwards.

So the Exec Producers seem to have come up with a winner! Yes, seemingly so!

• it’s a woman (ish)!
• it’s no so much a person as a true Phenomenon!
• while not in the running in 2004, she was effective in helping a lame candidate become a lame duck!

Who is this marvel of a woman(ish)? Her name: Nina Leven.

True, at one point she was a remarkably evocative creature. Everyone rallied around her to the point of truly (albeit temporarily) overriding bipartisanship. At one point, everyone had a profound respect for her. Many even feared her. Whatever the reaction, the point is that everyone had a reaction to Nina Leven.

What McCain seems to have forgotten (she is as big as a house) is that you really can’t dip into the same well twice. Or 78 times…depending on if you count RNC 2004 as a single instance or single out every mention of her name.

The Exec Producers must have already told McCain that she’d been whored out for the sake of Bush & Cheney 2004, but McCain doesn’t seem to listen. I guess he prefers to remember her when there was respect towards her.

Sorry if I’m ruining the surprise for everyone, I know there’s a huge (rolling eyes) build-up of suspense to McCain’s choice of VP. I just have to do my patriotic duty and do the expansive, decent thing and help McCain avoid a huge pitfall in spite of the fact that I’m voting for not-McCain Biden Obama and remind him how his predecessors whored the fuck out of her.

I remember an old joke about how to recondition an old whore, but it’s not very kosher.

SCENE: Quahog “Cryobank” sperm bank.

Lesbian couple walk in.

BUTCH LESBIAN:

My partner and I want a vial of sperm and an applicator that looks like Jodie Foster’s knuckles.

FBI arrests blogger accused of leaking Guns N’ Roses tracks

FELONY. FEDERAL.

For allegedly leaking a recording of a has-been rock band from the 80s.

How does the RIAA get this special treatment? Oh yeah, corrupt Congresspersons and lots and lots of lobby money.

How are they so rich? Screwing over the public for decades.

Last night I went with Paul-Boom to see the Mortified SF show.

Not only was it a further extension of the weird and wonderful linkage of coincidences starting with Yen Tan reading DogPoet and finding my blog all the way up to one of the stars of Ciao, Adam Neal Smith leading the band in the show called Mortified down in LA.

The gist of the show: people volunteer to read their childhood-teenage journals, diaries, speeches, plays…any kind of writing they did back then. They read their actual, original pieces. This is not about memories, it’s about reading actual documents from back then, whenever “back then” happened to be.

It’s a strange set of emotions when you’re sitting there being entertained by someone exposing their childhoods to you. You sympathize—maybe even empathize as well—and you laugh at it both at the same time. It’s like laughing, feeling guilty about laughing and the laughing at having felt guilty. In any event, it’s exhausting laughing so much for 90 minutes.

Mortified, if you follow that link, has expanded in a grass-roots kind of way to SF and a bunch of other cities. If you’re lucky enough to be in one of those, get your ass there for the next show. Srsly.

It’s even funner to go with someone whose got an out-sized sense of humor. Y’know, like Eric.

So go. In San Francisco, it’s held at the Makeout Room near 22nd and Mission.

When I chose to go away for college back in 1982 (yikes!) it started an era that my parents usually described as “showing them the world”. They’d designated me as that guy.

My parents aren’t that literal. I haven’t flown them all over the world, but I did introduce them to many things…foods, people, places, cultures, minds. Play that against the generally static background grid by which many people measure difference, time, space, in northeastern Pennsylvania, it’s even more of a contrast.

Marie (mom) has been surprised over the years that I’ve learned a lot of the kinds of things that contribute to a personal body of wisdom, learned them a lot younger in life than they had, that some things I’ve experienced have informed their own wisdom. I remind her that these are the kinds of things that come along in a life lived.

She stops me, usually, because she needs to pause for it herself. That’s when I know she’s going to mention all the “wonderful” (her word) things I did in order to take care of Allen throughout our relationship, that I was never too proud or too stubborn to ask for help (mom’s a nurse, I needed caregiving help, I asked for it). Neither she nor my dad have had to live through the death of a spouse—thank the universe—but they both lived through the deaths of both their parents. My mom lost her mom when she was only 30 years old. I was 31 when Allen died. His death wasn’t at all unexpected; her mom died suddenly of a heart attack while she was on her hands and knees scrubbing a floor. Mom’s mom was only 56.

The point here is that everyone has experiences. You can’t not live and not get them, unless you find yourself a social cocoon, an employment cocoon and a cave to live in. Life is different than you are. Life brings in the outside (if you let it). Life puts you in the thick of things, where sorting it out is required, where conflict happens and thus are new worlds born. Worlds you get dropped into the thick of. Worlds that need sorting. Worlds that bring new conflicts. And yes, new resolutions if you dare to work towards them.

I think what Marie is getting at is that I bother to share the lessons. And knowing my parents as well as I do—I’ve known them practically all my life—I know how to talk to them in order to communicate as effectively as possible.

They both say these things to me and there’s a tinge of wonderment in how they talk about it, as if I was smarter or wiser or possessing of some kind of sagacity that had passed them by at my age.

What they don’t realize is that wisdom is one of those faculties that scales. By that I mean that is simply this: wisdom imparted is wisdom learned. You can’t impart wisdom like you can transfer a kidney or a property or a mobile phone plan. If I carry wisdom I can’t wrap it up and hand it to you with a bow on it. No one can. What I can do is live within my wisdom in order to help another live in his. Nothing more and nothing less.

It was the very fact of having two parents each brimming with vastly different shades and textures of wisdom and perhaps more importantly their willingness to share it all. Wisdom without application is another cocoon: one at the top of an inhuman ivory tower.

I gather wisdom at the rate and quality I do because of the care and effort of my parents showing me how they gathered theirs.

So when my parents recently offered that they’ve learned that just because personal histories with other people have intertwined and overlapped, there is no obligation to maintain that intermingling. More important is: do those persons add to your own happiness and fulfillment or do they subtract from it? Do they do neither? My parents’ answer: in the absence of immortality, time is better spent with those who add to your happiness and enrich your lives. They no longer have time for those who are “downers” because they don’t like how they feel when they’re around those types.

Did listening to them move the sentiment directly from hearing into memory? No, of course not. Wisdom isn’t just a memory. What did happen, was that they helped me to arrive at the same conclusion. Different people, different reasons, different places, different times: and different remedies.

Without their wisdom, my own faculty might be less probing. Might be more simplistic, or even just simpler.

The beauty of wisdom is that isn’t immeasurable.

My own personal wisdom let me to their same conclusion: choose to be around the people who make you feel more like you. Disgard social bonds with those who insist you feel more like them.

Tonight I spent several hours with long-time friends of mine who I hadn’t seen in a long time. Doing so wasn’t wisdom, it was a choice. Ignoring the past, the length of the span of time, and setting aside possible awkwardnesses because of…that’s wisdom.

I’m sooooo happy that it’s going to be Joe Biden on the ticket with Obama!

Even though it feels like Senator Obama made the choice so that he could have someone else do the dirty work while the good Senator keeps himself squeaky clean.

Kinda cowardly.

But the fact that Biden will have a high soapbox for a few months on a national stage makes me very, very, VERY happy.

I love that man. I think he’s the best chance of bringing candor into the mix. And I think that’s the only way to escalate far past the pitiful (oh, am I allowed to say that to a saint veteran?) John McCain.

Who really believes he’s all for anything but keeping the status quo? You really think someone like that is all for alternative energy? All for technology? (I heard he learned how to google something a couple of weeks ago).

I think Joe Biden will aggravate enough people on the other side of the aisle that we’ll finally see some gloves come off and there will be enough slips of the tongue from them that their xenophobic backwards asses will be exposed. Remember “Barney Fag”?

Go Joe!

Now I actually have a proactive reason to vote for Obama. Y’know, instead of just “he ain’t McCain”.

The Summer Olympics have never been quite as interesting to me as the Winter Olympics. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I paid any serious attention to the Summer Games.

Not so this year. I’m not sure why, but I was ready to see it even before I knew much about Michael Phelps.

I think it was because I was curious about China. Not so much the controversy because of China’s Human Rights violations, because I new that was coming. Spielberg chose on the side of boycott. Me? I think communication, open and available, is always better. The rest of the world isn’t going to be sanctioning or (goddess forbid) militarily threatening China any time soon. Silence only lets existing reality continue, gathering dangerous momentum.

The more that China participates in the larger universe, the more likely it will begin to find parity with the majority opinion of how human beings should be treated (for that matter, maybe the USA will find parity, too. Thanks, W.!).

Anyway, being a gay man and knowing other gay men, the obvious cat-calls happen and it turns out that that’s the primary opinion others have of the Olympics: men in speedos! big-upper-body boys doing gymnastics!

I’m guilty of that somewhat: I admit that the male water polo players are…compelling.

But my favorite event—diving—is different to my favorite athletes: Kerri Walsh and Misty May-Treanor.

Those two women are incredible to watch. I’ve been fast-forwarding through a lot of the shows, skimming the events that I don’t really find accessible. Motocross, fencing, etc. No disrespect to those athletes, but I’d burn myself out—and get nothing done—if I watched 8-hours-a-day in real time.

I can’t stop watching May-Treanor/Walsh. Well I can, I guess, because they just won the Gold!

There was a human-interest story about Misty. Both her parents were successful athletes. Dad was in the ‘68 Olympics; Mom was a tennis and volleyball star. Misty’s mom died five or six years ago, and in the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece, after they won a gold medal, Misty took a small amount of her mom’s ashes and spread them over the sand after they won. I cried.

Today, she did the same. More of mom’s ashes, now in Beijing.

What a beautiful thing. Her mom is in Athens and now in Beijing.

Just beautiful.

Oh, and for the record, it was the team’s 108th consecutive victory.

No, not saying goodbye in any way, shape or form. I’m too mouthy and too verbose and too loquacious for that. My writing is timeless because I never shut up.

Tonight I was out in the Castro for the first time since….well…Since.

No large group of so many directions that there’s no cohesive anything. Just a couple of friends—and some of their friends—together at a small table and conversations that were enjoyable and even funny, but the good kind of funny…the kind that adds to us instead of taking away from others. Random sightings of others that were his or his or my friends, or combinations thereof.

Just….great.

Today I took my ailing AirPort Extreme Basestation to an Apple Store.

Somewhere around the time I updated its firmware to version 7.3.2, the Basestation would randomly (every hour or so) restart itself. During the restart, of course, the internet connection is severed and the wireless goes silent.

Frustrating, that’s what it was. I made the appointment on Thursday evening for this morning (Monday) because I didn’t want to have to get in a longer queue. You’d be surprised how no-line it is 30 minutes before the mall opens on a Monday morning.

Friday I’d gone to Best Buy to get an interim router (or not so interim if things didn’t go well at the Apple Store). It was a Belkin. I love Belkin. But the router was at the low end ($34.99), but it did do 802.11g (no n) and it had three ethernet ports.

It took me hours to get going. If it wasn’t one thing it was another, and most of those nothers were related to the fact that it appears my cable modem has no reset switch (you should reset a broadband modem every time you switch out the device to which it’s directly attached), pulling the plug and restoring power didn’t help out the Belkin router either.

After looking further/deeper, I saw that the telephone jack never lost its connection. Turns out there’s a battery in the thing (to keep the phone connection alive in a power outage). I unplugged it, yoinked the battery out for a moment and put it back, and then plugged it all in.

After at least 90 seconds, nothing was going on so I went to get a drink of water. When I came back, the router was working!

You could blame the cable modem, but my lovely, lovely AirPort Exteme didn’t need such cable-voodoo nor did it need so much time to sync and establish a connection.

Anyway, the new router is/was sssssslllllooooowwww. Oh, it was plenty fast once a download started, but for some reason it is dog slow when it comes to DNS lookups. Doesn’t it cache any?

Back to the Apple Store. I went to the Genius Bar and immediately there was a genius there. I told him that I’d covered every possible contingency when I was debugging the whole shebang, told him I’m actually good at this kind of stuff, told him that problems started around the time I updated the firmware to 7.3.2.

He’d also seen on the net that some AEs ended up corrupted after that update. He excused himself and came back with a brand spanky new AirPort Extreme!

In and out in under ten minutes!

Man, that just made my day. I went from worrying I’d have to spend money I didn’t have to having a fresh start with my router. It’s back, it’s beautiful and although it’s equally functional on Mac or PC, it does things it can when it can. I prefer that to having to wait for Windows and Microsoft.

Oh, and PS: Noelbear? You probably should have ignored this entry because we “church folk” are so tedious. :)

When one is unable to find a settled point of view full of sympathy or sadness after being attacked, unable to let the initial outsized reaction pass through and within after being attacked, unable remove from conscious thought those words used in the attack, opposing forces of attack and push-back create a storm front which rains a river which separates the forces on the banks which remain solid and unchanging while the river carries time away from both.

If you believe certain words, you believe their hidden arguments. When you believe something is right or wrong, true or false, you believe the assumptions in the words which express the arguments. Such assumptions are often full of holes, but remain most precious to the convinced. — Frank Herbert

The contending forces of keeping to one’s self the hurt and anger versus requiring external validation for it all tends to be the fundamental energy draining activity in a given dust up, demanding so much time that the only way to justify it all is to elevate it to principle. Write and wrong, true or false, self or world+dog: these are the things at stake when you’re stuck in that local minima in your mind.

The wiser course of action of course is to avoid the internal contention and the way you do that is to wick off the negativity before it gets out of hand. Find the bigger, broader view of things and you’ll see witness the relative unimportance.

[H]umans tend to think of everything in a sequential, word-oriented framework. This mental trap produces very short-term concepts of effectiveness and consequences, a condition of constant, unplanned response to crises. — Frank Herbert

Only through experience (i.e., practice over study) of dispatching of conflict in the shorter term (i.e., argument, which is a dialog intended to change the nature of truth) can keep you out of the gravity wells of prolonged dissent. The obvious Catch-22 is that it takes experience in conflict resolution to be able to resolve a current conflict!

I can throw out some aphorisms, “nip it in the bud”, “practice makes perfect”, etc., but it really comes down wherewithal, and the desire to return to harmony and the unwillingness to settle for an enforced peace.

The unplanned response to a crisis is nothing more than running about and putting out fires instead of addressing the source of fires in order to prevent them.

A learned ability: entering conflict despite hesitation & fear with the goal of vanquishing the conflict, not the person.

The unpracticed person will deal with conflict by “putting it behind us” instead of sorting through it in the moment because the unpracticed person never developed the chops to stand up, arms out, and let the unpleasantness pass within, where the mind then must deal with it. It makes you vulnerable, but even that can be ameliorated by the very admission of vulnerability (I don’t like to think about that too much because, like recursion in software development, paradox is magic. Besides, the truth can suffer from too much analysis: better to accept the axiomatic and move on).

So how can you spot the unpracticed soul? Pay attention to the not-his/her-usual-self behaviors, word and deed. In the face of dissent the unawareness reacts, throwing whatever it can to avoid conflict: lies, misrepresentations, reversal of blame, distance, silence, lobbed bombs over self-made walls.

And what to do when you face the unpracticed soul? Absorb the bile, because likely it’s not bile (for that is an intentional force), absorb it and then let is pass, because deep-down you know it’s not representative of that person’s core. It’s panic: ugly, banal panic. It’s a duck-and-cover freak-out.

Instead, be the other person as best you can and inhabit that. Be alone with that and understand, for we’re all the same, all theme and variation. Ciao illuminated the beauty of that point of view for me. And when you’re alone and trying on the emotions of another, ask yourself what you might do?

The measure of a man’s real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out. -Thomas B. Macaulay

Would you protect the lies? Would you see your “self” diminished by secrecy? Would you be inured to it? Would you prefer the unspoken? Would you wish yourself unburdened by the rusted wreckage of past sins of commission? Of omission?

Put it all back, situate it back into the original person and look at him/her again. How can you fail to understand that none of your impressions could be correct? How could you continue to think you know the happiness or misery of another? How little does being right or superior even come close to the simple humility of the unknowable?

Anyone who could claim they know if another person is happy or sad—unless it had been told explicitly by that person—is too unpracticed in the art of candid conflict and resolution thereof to engage and thereby all hope of healthy dispensation must be belayed, in which case another art must be practiced: Spannüngsbogen, the bend of the bow. To fly an arrow one must first pull back, wait until ready/prepared.

In other words, delay further action until you’ve got it all just right and ready.

I wrote to my good friend Vince because I was struggling with understanding of something specific:

I have been thinking for a while now that given a choice of allegiance to the truth/facts or allegiance to a friend (who lies and you know it), I’d choose truth every time. Consequently, I try to be the kind of person who doesn’t make friends choose between me and fact.

Anyway, do you have any advice for allowing the high despisement I feel to pass over & thru, so as not to give the ego any attention?

Vince, being both learner and (excellent) teacher understands me when I speak using this kind of framework.

His response?

Well, often times we set ourselves off as “separate from” others… “I am like this, they are like that…” What I find most useful is to remember that They are me, I am them. We are all suffering, some in different ways than others, but all the same…[…] It really helps me to remember I am not really all that different or separate from anyone…

If that isn’t helpful, you did start the process by recalling the ways he might be suffering? Having compassion and building your compassion is a great practice. Often referred to in the Theravadan tradition as Metta Practice, it’s to really focus your attention on the well being of those who may have hurt us.

Completely ass-backwwards to “common wisdom”, no? But it makes sense: I do have a grasp (however tenuous) on what he’s saying. Still, if I didn’t, if nothing else, it provides a mindspace which is relative instead of absolute: dissent is never about facts. Argue facts and you’re on your way to offering proofs and evidence. Understand that we all “inter-are” and you see a wound and set about finding healing. I don’t mean mending, necessarily.

So many faces in and out of our life, some will last, some will just be now-and-then. — Billy Joel, “Say Goodbye to Hollywood”

We live, we understand. Singly only we know our happiness, collectively we should add more to the general good will than we take. Thoughts of another are unknowable. Deeds are knowable to all, attempts to cover up out of fear, anger, loathing, shame to the contrary.

In the end, do you want to win or do you want solace?

A gay male student, age fifteen, was shot and killed by a fellow student, in all likelihood because he was gay. Or just different. Or both.

So what's a mom and dad of a now-dead son have to say about it? They’re suing the school for allowing the boy (their son) dress in a “feminine” way (the boy also wore makeup to school).

Never mind that their own son is dead. Never mind that a fellow student pulled out a gun and shot their son dead. No, they’re pulling the equivalent of “dressed like that he was asking to be shot and killed.

And from that assumption, the parents are suing the high school for not enforcing a dress code.

You stupid fucks. I’ve never come closer to hating anyone than I am right now.

Eventually I’ll calm down and realize the parents are simply misplacing their extreme emotions and lashing out at everyone. I really hope I’m right, here.

It’s nothing short of piling tragedy upon tragedy when you realize that the justice system is taking better care of things than the boy’s parents: they’re going after the killer. Novel idea, I know.

I’m very sorry for the parents’ loss. I cannot even begin to empathize there, though if I had my own children—something that I’ve thought about my entire adult life—I suppose I could begin to.

Do the parents think that in death everyone becomes an ideal of their former selves and that they’re just helping to guarantee that happening by erasing the child’s aberrance? Are they that misguided about a child’s sexuality that they’re being politically correct about their priorities right now?

I suppose it’s a lack of empathy again, living here in my historical and emotional idyll, where upon coming out to my parents, they took their shock, their feeling of loss (they had expectations for me, as I did myself. In fact, I think the most difficult thing to cope with in admitting to yourself that you’re gay is having to discard most, if not all, you’re own expectations of how your life will proceed from a given present), their struggles with religious and societal inveighing against their own egos, and simply (but not easily) chose love over all that. Period.

In fact, if they’d never offered me promises and also demonstrated such, it would have taken me much much longer to own my sexuality and accept it as part of the gestalt of self.

Parents of that boy: your behavior is appalling. The implications present in that behavior are doing nothing but preserving the hateful mentality that people are less because their sexuality is non-hetero. You’re suggesting that your own son somehow deserved to die because he was different. You’re suing a school because they didn’t make him dress ‘normal’ instead of suing the school for refusing to protect their gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer students.

I hope you find an authentic means of unburdening yourself of grief instead of this nonsense. And I hope you find true peace and not just this illusion of it.

This is not one of those “Hey, Check This Out!” kind of linky-blogs, but Hond Dichter posted a short and extraordinarily funny entry.

Click Here.

Reminds me of a coverstation with Mr.Viking Lighting from a few years ago. We were talking about maybe creating a Bear Dance Bar in the Castro where The Patio used to be.

ME: So what would make it a ‘Bear’ Dance Bar?

HIM: Dunno. Snack machines by the Dance Floor?

There’s been a giant pile of tech stuff in the back room of my house. Like, for a while now. There just hasn’t been any place to put anything.

So Stork suggested that we each go through all the crap—some of it from our Pittsburgh days! In case anyone’s counting, that’s about ten years for him, and about (gulp) seventeen years for me.

Yeah, it’s time to clean things out. My younger brother and my mom will be doing cartwheels—they’re near-psychotically obsessed with throwing things out (I dunno, you tell me!). Turns out that I only got most of the way through things. There’s still a small box to go through and also a head count of devices around the house that I have to match power cords to.

Now, it wasn’t only tech stuff in these boxes like I thought. In a hurried move of much stuff in order to accommodate Sam’s stuff, things got…stuck.

So going through things presented some surprises. Some good, some bad, some baffling.

First the bad, because I want to dispense with that right away. There was a lot of Sam’s stuff in there, pictures and what-not. And given that a misunderstanding between Sam and me exposed some stuff that I didn’t want to see, and that a “friend” counted on being secret. Never count on secrecy to hide a thing, because that’s tantamount to betrayal no matter how you slice it. The few things I saw in that box were nothing major, except to locate me in better times, times before the world went pear-shaped. Step gingerly in a mine field, kids.

The baffling next, because positivity is the most important thing in my life right now. Positivity tends to diminish internal unawareness because it produces the kind of elixir that has kept me on the sunny side of the street throughout the last three and a half years of horrific circumstances. No mean feat, but I’ve been largely successful. I found in a box under some consumer electronics (two VCRs, an upscaling DVD player and an old-school Class A amplifier) many articles of clothing I’d forgotten I even had, including a black 100% wool sweater that I bought at Kirkwood many years ago for a staggering amount of money. Four or five of the same would total a month’s rent. Zoinks.

Now the good. I didn’t expect to find anything Allen-related, but not only were there pictures of Yog, but a few strange personal affects as well: several pairs of glasses (both sunglasses and eye glasses), glasses with impossibly huge lenses. As was the thing back then (late 80s, early 90s) in West Texas. I also found a couple of watches that we’d bought in 1994. Well, he bought them, but he didn’t wear two at a time, so I often “borrowed” the one he wasn’t wearing. They’re only Timex watches, but he did have awfully good taste. One is dark red—almost purple— with gold Arabic numerals. The other has a squared-off face in black, with silver numbering. Also Arabic numerals because I have a thing-thing about clocks with Roman numerals. Is there an official phobia for that? Well, there should be. In particular clock makers can’t seem to decide on whether a four should be rendered in the standard IV or the apparently-more-pleasing IIII. I don’t care because I hate those clocks.

I also found his CA driver license. It had to be gotten late 1994, because he was already looking gaunt and his physical attributes were listed as Height: 6’3, Weight: 165. His weight had dropped to 143 at one point, but he’d gained some ground against that after the TPN bags every night.

Immediately I inhabited the back-then. Things that he’d said that surprised me, amazed me, made me laugh, made me cry, things he said that assured me how much he loved being with me. Back in a more genteel time when swift and completely inappropriate objectification wasn’t the norm. When he said things like that there was always an element of hilarious irony, for neither of us let too much of the “culture” in between us. There was too much “us” for that stuff to contravene.

I also found a tennis shoe. Yes, just one. The left one. Size 10 1/2 so I knew it wasn’t mine. Orange, with brown trim. Stylish back then even though I always thought they were hideous. Back in style now. And still hideous.

I threw it away, trying to remain the thrower-outer I’ve never been able to sustain. But I did snap a photo of it on my iPhone. Then I looked at the iPhone and began to think of all the things he’s missed that he’d find wondrous.

He’s also have missed how gray I’ve turned—especially in these same terrible last three years. I glanced again at his driver license and realized that the poor man never had a chance to become gray.

Have you ever had to shave another man’s face? Near the end I had to help him into the platform tub here, and shave his face while he sat in the warm water. Like I said in my last post, intimacy came to us in many forms:

I didn’t need sex. I needed intimacy, always intimacy. And thanks (thanks?) to Allen and I having found other ways of being intimate after sex was no longer part of the equation, I had no need for sex with others. I just didn’t want it. The after-times are incredibly lonely, the part that’s beyond the ejaculation is what remains, and that’s all about what was missing.

After all this, somehow I miraculously found the spine to continue with the purge of no-longer-needed tech stuff. That is, until I discovered a PhotoCD (remember those?) of the memorial “party” that my good friend Bruce Mayfield (with whom Allen had worked) organized. I told him “no sadness”. He didn’t ask, but I told him that I needed a break from sorrow and “would that be alright?”. I think he started to cry a little. Of course it was alright.

It was at Tuba Garden here in San Francisco, in Presidio Heights, and it was a lovely, lovely place. An old Victorian with a small house in the back of the yard was gutted and opened to house more diners, so that seating flowed through the house, across the beautifully landscaped back yard (that day in the bright sunshine) and up the stairs into the two rooms.

Allen’s boss, the owner of the graphics/print company had offered to pay for everyone. “Everyone” included close, close friends who knew Allen better than anyone else here besides me. Judy was one of them, “Babycakes” I’ve always called her. It was a bit of playful irony. Judy was the one that, a day and a half before Allen died said goodbye to him for the last time—he was already non-responsive. I was standing at the back door saying goodbye to them when she turned around, walked over to Allen there on the bed. She leaned down and kissed him on the forehead and said, “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of Jeff.” Had I not been all cried out at that moment, the Anhydrous Stoic, I would have completely broken down. I’m also pretty sure she’s the last non-blood-related person to have vocalized that I’d be protected/taken care of. Fancy that.

Anyway, in addition to those friends, Allen’s two nurses were there, all of his former co-workers, his former boss and his wife, folks from Compuserve who’d known Allen as long as I had came up from Santa Barbara and from Santa Cruz, other friends from San Francisco and a few others. There were probably twenty of us.

It’s a wonder I got anything done at all. But I did, and Stork will be here in moments so that we can cart the stuff down to the South Bay.

Today the sun is shining. And I’m very glad of it.

It says a lot about you (neither good nor bad) how you prioritize the fallout from the Edwards admission:

• Punishing John Edwards
• Feeling sympathy (or empathy) towards Elizabeth
• Cheering the situation
• Feeling like it isn’t our business because you just don’t know the details
• Feeling like it isn’t our business because it’s private.

Given my personal history (both good and bad), would you be surprised that my first reaction was to feel bad for Elizabeth?

I can just as easily—well, I should be just as easily—want to punish John Edwards (again, given my personal history), but I can’t. Why? I could argue intellectually that he cheated. Period. But my intellect is repulsed by absolutes.

I have known male couples where one was sick—terminally so—and the one who was sick pushed the other to find someone else. Or to go out and have sex (ostensibly so that the other could take care of a physical need) because the sick one just wasn't interested in sex. It's definitely not anything I would have done, even if Allen had given the go-ahead. Which he didn't. It probably just didn't enter his mind. And when his partner before me, George, was sick (at the end he was blind and wasting away) I doubt that he gave Allen any kind of go-ahead. I doubt as well that Allen would have availed himself.

I know the need. I know a lot about it. The temptation. But sit with that temptation awhile and—yes, what a daring thing for a man to do—considered the after-times.

I didn't need sex. I needed intimacy, always intimacy. And thanks (thanks?) to Allen and I having found other ways of being intimate after sex was no longer part of the equation, I had no need for sex with others. I just didn't want it. The after-times are incredibly lonely, the part that's beyond the ejaculation is what remains, and that’s all about what was missing.

Contrary to misguided ideas out there about me, I have need to pass judgment on those for whom sex is something that is nothing but friction and/or an external means to prop an ego: notches on the bedpost are of time immemorial. All well and good and I choose not to participate. And I choose not to be around it. Should I have to be? I also choose to speak my mind when the nature of that (two-backed) beast incurs on my life. And I grew tired of being silenced in a thousand little ways.

I feel bad that people are hurting. I would have chosen (did choose) to go without sex rather than hurt my partner and I certainly wouldn't rely on secrecy as a justification.

I'm glad Edwards owned up to it. I'd like to believe that he'd already confessed to Elizabeth long before today or yesterday.

And I hope she forgave him. She's the only one that can pass judgment. She's the only one who should.

Violating a trust hurts everyone.

Physics. Love it.

Self-annihilating Machine.

Just today:

big white ass He sat down to touch her pussy while. She knew the pancakes.

She fuckin’ knew the fuckin’ pancakes!