Category: social media

I Got My Mind Made Up

Woke up to a new year! How exciting….although it doesn’t feel any different than yesterday, other than I don’t have to go into the office today, which is awesome. And of course, as soon as I signed into social media, I saw DM’s and posts asking me if Paul and I were “okay”, which was puzzling, so I went to NOLA.com and I guess there was a terrorist that attacked Bourbon Street last night, driving his truck into the crowd and shooting at police officers? I just saw where the attack occurred–Bourbon and Canal intersection–because I was wondering how that was possible since all the blocks are blocked off to traffic all night, so I knew it had to be an intersection on Bourbon Street, as those are only places on Bourbon you can have a car, or drive. How terrible–and I bet they lock the whole city down for the Super Bowl; shades of the 2002 Super Bowl here after 9/11–when I was coming home from training a client and was stopped at Poydras Street so the military (complete with tanks) could parade from the river to the Superdome in an act of theater designed, no doubt, to make us feel safer; it had the opposite effect on me. It just made me think about how I missed the days where we couldn’t imagine something like that happening.

Yeesh, indeed.

My New Year’s entries are generally about my goals for the new year, and I always explain why I have goals instead of resolutions–everyone inevitably breaks their resolutions, so I’ve never felt they were as important as setting goals for the new year. I don’t always achieve those goals, but they have been enormously helpful in the past and it really feels like I’ve done something when I accomplish one of the goals, or the goal makes positive change in my life, which is always very pleasant. One goal is to continue not participating in the legacy media, by never clicking or putting eyes on their broadcasts or articles. I will never subscribe to the Times or the Post ever again, and I do feel this goal is one that can be set and is completely attainable.

Another goal is to not do any emotional labor for anyone or anything that isn’t Paul, Sparky, my dad, or myself. I’ve been pretty good about that throughout 2024, and it is definitely one of the better things I did this past year was close myself off to other people’s problems. I am going to continue to not attend mystery conferences and conventions this year, and one of those important goals is to not financially support places that allow rampant homophobia and then do nothing when things are reported to them. I’m certainly not taking shit from anyone ever again in this community, so my decision to stay away and not participate in the community anymore is probably for the best for all y’all, because I’m calling this shit out now whenever it happens and since most straight people prefer no conflict, my calling shit out and calling out people for trying to gloss over outright homophobia from now on isn’t going to be fun for people anyway. Heaven forbid the racists and sexists and homophobes be made to feel uncomfortable, but it’s okay for us to feel unwelcome, uncomfortable and unwanted. Maybe we can start calling them convocations instead of conferences and conventions, since keeping Klan attendees is more important than keeping the people they target. FUCK ALL THE WAY OFF. And racist Bouchercon attendees? Feel free to go be racist on Bourbon Street at one in the morning and see how that ends for your skank ass. And for the record, hate is what leads to things like the attack on Bourbon Street last night, so by all means let’s keep encouraging that kind of behavior by glossing it over and acting like it’s not a big deal and it’s just “free speech” until someone is killed. American hatred, I swear, is like kudzu.

The most important goal for the year is to focus more on my writing career and give it the energy and the oxygen it’s always deserved but never got from me. I’ve always felt like I’ve always made my writing the lowest thing on my priority list, and that juggling between day job responsibilities, life responsibilities and the writing itself (let alone the promotion side of things) has always ended with me feeling like my writing isn’t a priority; part of the problem I have always had with saying no to people and to doing things is that fear and anxiety so controlled me and my actions for so long that I’d always end up making it the lowest priority–and “friends” who’d blithely dismiss my “well, I have a book due” with “you always get it done” aren’t really friends; any friends who’d want you to put aside one of the most important things in your life to do something for them aren’t really friends. Writing is what makes me happiest, and not writing always makes me miserable. Part of the depression of the last year or so was enhanced because I wasn’t writing–and whenever I tried, it was hard to get words down and they were terrible; I did some pretty terrible writing this year (as I am finding as I edit these first six chapters of the next Scotty; I did some work on that yesterday after work which was cool) and plan to do some more today, too. I need to get the ebook of Jackson Square Jazz edited and sent to the formatter–BIG priority, especially since it’s the twentieth anniversary of the trade paperback and its Lambda nomination (the hardcover came out the year before). I need to get my website finished, and I need to learn how to do promotion in the digital age, don’t I? Kind of sad that I’ve been doing this for twenty three years this January 20th, and still don’t know what I am doing. I also want to push myself more with my writing going forward, too. This Scotty is a tricky one, since I want the entire thing to take place between the arrival of a hurricane’s first bands and have the story finished before the final band passes and the storm is completely over.

I also need to be better organized going forward, and need to stay on top of things better. I need to file as I go and clean as I go–thanks again, McDonalds, for burning that into my head–and that includes cleaning out the attic and the storage space so I can stop paying for it. My memory is pretty much gone these days, so I need to be better about making lists and consulting them (they don’t do any good if you never look at them), as well as doing things when I get home and I am still in work-mode from being at the office. It doesn’t hurt to feed Sparky, file stuff, do dishes and so forth before writing or reading. I also need to be better about reading; if I read for an hour or so every day I’ll gradually get through that TBR pile for sure. I also need to be better about keeping house.

I know I say this every year but I am going to be healthier this year, and by that I mean taking better care of myself. After Mom died, I intended to be better about all this stuff, but I’d also injured myself so I couldn’t go to the gym either. And I did get some of it taken care of–I got hearing aids so I can hear better and finally spent the money to get my teeth fixed–and of course I needed about a full year to completely recover physically from the surgery. But if I stretch every morning when I get up, and if I go to the gym two or three times per week, and take walks on the days I don’t go to the gym–I’ll get healthier. Sounds easy, doesn’t it, but the reality is much harder to stay on track. I’ve also noticed in the last few weeks that I am not as groggy and tired as I was getting up so early for such a long time; I think I am finally adjusting to it, and I am not always tired when I get home from work, either.

All attainable and doable, I am pretty certain. So on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines and get some things done around here so I can head over to the gym. I am going to read until it’s time to go to the gym. Have a great day, Constant Reader, and I’ll check back in with you again at some point.

Double Vision

Well, 2024 was a shit show of a year, wasn’t it? Then again, haven’t they all been pretty bad since 2015 and the golden escalator? It was, however, also a year with a lot of clarity for one Gregalicious; when I woke up to certain realities about life in general and started centering my own self in my life. So, for personal growth I’d say it was a good year; as for everything else in the world, maybe not so much. I didn’t publish anything in 2024; one of the few years since I started writing professionally where I actually had nothing–not even a short story–on my publications list. I did no volunteer work anywhere for anyone, and I just focused on my own recovery, my own self-discovery, and my own investigation into who I am and why I am who I am. It was a year in which I continued looking back, something that began in 2023 when Mom died, and came to a lot of realizations about myself and my history–and made peace with a lot of things that used to make me angry to remember and think about. I can reflect on some of those things now and not get angry. This was also my first full year on my anti-anxiety medication and the loss of anxiety from my life (and everything that branched out from the anxiety) has made such an amazing difference. It’s nice not having my anxiety controlling everything I do, and it’s also very interesting to see how many automatic coping mechanisms I had put into place to manage the anxiety, or at least keep it sort of controlled–especially when it comes to driving.

This was the year I turned against the legacy media, and frankly, I’ve not missed it in the least. I was worried about the election, not going to lie about that, but I also thought it was incredibly shitty they all decided to go with the “Biden is too old” narrative Trump and Fox were pushing on everyone, reporting it breathlessly like it was actually news while completely ignoring the fact that his opponent was a sun-downing narcissistic piece of shit. There have been two different sets of reporting on politics since the 1990s: the lies and demagoguery of Fox News, followed by the legacy media’s reporting on the lies Fox told like they were absolute facts. The positive glee with which the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC reported, rubbing their hands with excitement as they basically committed election interference for the Right yet again, shivving President Biden in the process; has anyone done a wellness check on that shit stain George Clooney yet? He’s managed to keep a low profile since he did Trump’s bidding for him. I do not miss legacy media, and hope they all circle the drain and fail. Maybe then, and only then, will we get the kind of media we deserve in this country and not the failing legacy media. The way they are slanting the Luigi Mangione story is also out-of-touch and offensive; why hasn’t the New York Times sent a reporter to a rust belt diner to see how those MAGA voters feel about Mangione? Oh, no, we don’t care about those viewpoints anymore. No, the legacy media thought they’d help MAGA return to power and then lead the resistance, like they thought they did in the first term. Newsflash: you didn’t.

Has there ever been a pundit class that believed the smoke they blew up their own asses like our current batch? Well, I am not watching them anymore. I follow some pundits on Youtube that I enjoy, but to be honest…I don’t feel like I’m missing anything, to tell you the truth, Constant Reader. I’ve always loved and cared about my country, even as I looked at it very clearly as more and more myths fell the older I got, but I also don’t feel like I need to follow the news everyday or participate in all of the partisan, pro-corporate, pro-rich let’s turn politics into a reality show bullshit. We deserve better.

As someone who witnessed Watergate and everything that followed, I bought into the mythology of journalistic integrity and the importance of truth; wasn’t that why his creators made Superman’s secret identity a journalist? I had planned on being a journalist myself when I went to college, and my intro class was all about integrity and honesty, which I also took as gospel for years, like a fool. Why did I ever think modern journalism had left the days of yellow journalism, of Hearst and Pulitzer, behind? My naive outlook, no doubt, and belief in American mythology. Journalistic integrity–which was beaten into our heads by every sitcom that decided to have one of the characters become a reporter for the school paper–was always for sale and never could be depended upon. So I happily bid adieu to thumb-on-the-scales journalism, and Constant Reader, I am never going back.

As for other things from 2024, let’s see. I fought with my health insurance company over a medication I need for seven months, thank you for that, bottom-feeding scum-sucking health insurance companies. This affected the rest of my care, and forced me to go even further into debt in the new year for medical treatments and so forth, and I am not entirely sure when exactly I will be able to recover from this financial distress. Yay for health insurance, and the entire health care industry. But at least it was straightened out, and the medication was approved through 2030. I also got some people at the insurance company in trouble. Too bad, so sad. Womp fucking womp, trash.

There was a lot of stress for me this past year, which was made even more interesting by the change in medications. My brain didn’t experience either stress or anxiety or even depression this year; my moods stayed fairly level all through the mess, but it definitely weighed on me subconsciously, just like delaying dealing with the holidays for a year didn’t really work the way I wanted other than pushing it back a year. Well done, dumb-shit. Ah, well.

What a strange, strange year it’s been.

And on that note, we’ll be hurtling into the abyss of 2025 at midnight. So, until tomorrow morning, I’m heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely lovely eve of the New Year, Constant Reader.

Dance the Night Away

I actually had to turn the air conditioning on yesterday. Once the storm passed, the sun came out and the temperature climbed up into the seventies, so everything evaporated and thus the air was heavy with water and thick. When I turned the air conditioning on, it was almost seventy-seven degrees inside and yes, that’s a bit warm when it’s humid. It looks less sunny this morning, but it’s likely to be a nice day again. I have some errands to run today, in addition to a bunch of other things I’d like to get done–including writing–but we’ll see how that goes. I spent most of last night after work picking up and doing dishes and so forth; I have more of that to do today as well.

I spent a lot more time than I needed to yesterday laughing at the MAGA Civil War, provoked by the Techbros’ insistence that more H1B work visas were needed to bring in engineers and so forth to help the Techbros get even richer. The racist anti-immigrant branch of the MAGA coalition, which doesn’t want any immigration of any kind, flipped out in the person of troll Laura Loomer, whose presence at their foul lord and master’s side this past summer was deemed “problematic” and so she was banished…and she’s been spoiling for revenge ever since. (Loomer, if you’re unaware, is the MAGA version of the Manson girls.) She went apeshit apparently on Twitter over the holiday and now there’s a full-scale battle over this “betrayal” of the movement by Elmo and Vivek Ramaswamy1, who’s been getting another dose of “we want your vote but you’re still brown” from the movement he belongs to but whose rank-and-file only see him as a useful tool. I went deep into this wormhole last night, laughing and cackling and having the best time–even going so far as to watch MAGA videos about it (and destroying my Youtube algorithm for the foreseeable future) and laughing and laughing and laughing. Yes, who knows how this is going to play out (for me, this is the FAFO his supporters need and deserve; guess what, he doesn’t need your vote anymore so you no longer have any value to him, period) and of course, it hit me last night shortly before I went to bed that this MAGA civil war is actually a class war; the rich Techbros who want to get even richer and can’t understand why MAGA doesn’t understand that–this is their reward for their support, and they have money. Who do you think Shitler is going to listen to? He’s never cared about the working class, ever. You all were duped, and the entire country is going to pay the price for your bigotry and stupidity.

And I, for one, will never ever let you forget, ever. And I will be beating the cost of eggs into the ground at every opportunity in the next four years, so buckle up, buttercup.

I also love that Ramaswamy criticized American culture, too. His complaint about Americans celebrating “mediocrity” by idolizing the jock instead of the Math Olympiad champion made me actually laugh out loud, as it sounded like the plaintive whining of a nerd from high school who can’t get a date. And good luck with that. I hate to break it to you, Vivek, but a lot of athletes/jocks are actually smart, and how are they mediocre when they excel at something we as a society have always celebrated? It also made me wonder if Ramaswamy’s interest in politics is some kind of Revenge of the Nerds fantasy. He did have a point; we should celebrate intelligence and creativity and logical thinking–but MAGA is, if nothing else, an anti-intellectual movement, denying science for the most part–how does that work in his idea of our brave new world?

How does the cognitive dissonance of pushing for intelligence while at the same time participating in a movement that is, above all else, anti-intellectual?

Ah, it’s raining. More of a drizzle than a New Orleans gully-washer, but rain nevertheless. I think I may head over to make groceries early this morning–after I finish this and make a list–and run the other errands later. I am glad to get errands out of the way so all I need to do is write and read and relax around here. I slept super well last night again, and slept a little later this morning despite waking up the first time just before six. I feel rested and relaxed this morning, which is nice. Once I get cleaned up, I am sure I’ll feel even better. Yay! So, I am going to make groceries in a moment, and then run the other errands after putting the groceries away, and curl up with my edits and my book that I’m reading and that I hope to finish this weekend as well. This week is broken up by a holiday on Wednesday, which is kind of wild; I probably could have taken either Tuesday or Thursday off, but I am being a bit more jealous of my paid-time off this coming year. I am also thinking about my goals for this upcoming year. Sigh. At least this year I am in my right mind, sort of; last year I was still doing physical therapy and recovering from the surgery. That does seem like a million years ago, doesn’t it? (The rain just turned into a gully-washer, by the way.) So 2025 is going to start with one Gregalicious in better condition, at any rate.

And on that note, I am going to get another cup of coffee and get cleaned up and hope that it stops raining before I leave to make groceries. Probably no such luck, right? I may be back later on today, one never can be entirely sure of these things, but if not, never fear: I will be back tomorrow morning with a report on today.

’til then, adieu.

  1. The irony that the South African is on the less racist side this time has not escaped me, either. ↩︎

The Boss

Work at home Friday! I didn’t have to go into the office today after all; the person I was covering for didn’t need me to cover for them after all, so I get to drink my own coffee and do some of my work-at-home chores in my pajamas–including my team meeting. Yay! Yesterday was a gray, rainy day, the kind that is also cold so you get that lovely cold dampness that goes right through you to the bone. I ran my errands on the way home, and I don’t have to leave the house at all today unless I so choose–and I am rather leaning towards choosing no definitively already. I woke up the remnants of a thunderstorm; everything outside my windows is wet and dripping. Yeah, definitely not leaving the house today if I don’t absolutely have to–I can run errands and make groceries tomorrow. I am going to do some chores this morning when I need a break from the computer–dishes, laundry, picking up, etc.–but thanks to the midweek weekend we enjoyed because of the holiday, I am not as far behind on housework as I usually am. Sparky let me sleep late this morning, and was a little cuddlebug before I did get up. It’s not even about getting more sleep anymore, it’s more along the lines of way too comfortable for me to get up. Paul was at the gym when I got home from doing some minor errands after work last night, and then after he came home he went upstairs to work for the evening, leaving me and Sparky to entertain ourselves downstairs, which is why I did some picking up and cleaning last night. Looking around this morning, I can honestly wonder why I didn’t do more last night. Hmmm.

I worked a bit on a Substack essay last night, too; the one I worked the most on is about outing and speculating about celebrity sexuality. Many of the essay drafts I have saved on Substack were triggered initially by something that happened in the world; this one “”Johnny Are You Queer?” was inspired by Shawn Mendes having to address all the rumors and speculation about his sexuality, and how that made me feel. It was the second time a celebrity had to do this recently, the other being Kit Conner from Heartstopper. Both instances made me look at the subject in an entirely new (and more empathetic) light, which was frighteningly staggering; I thought how could I ever speculate about a celebrity’s sexuality, when I personally know what it feels like to have people speculate about you that way–and I was never a good-looking hot young celebrity, either, which would be exponentially worse. This led me to how “outing” originally started; it was a political act of protest from a community that was dying and no one cared, and a way to strike at closet cases who were actively harming the queer community (remember anti-gay Aaron Schock and his Downtown Abbey congressional office? He’s now an A-Gay living on the party circuit, and much happier than when he was a closeted anti-gay politician. I’d say that worked out pretty well for him in the long run, wouldn’t you?). Outing eventually got out of control and more of a tabloid monster, far from its original intent, but I’m also thinking about privacy rights now a lot more than I ever did when I was younger–which I am trying to explore in more detail in the essay. I am also writing one about organized Christianity, but it keeps getting longer with more examples because cosplay Christians are always going to cosplay with their full chests while denying Christ with every breath they take.

I generally don’t pay too much attention to celebrity drama, mainly because I don’t care that much about celebrities; as I’ve gotten older, I care less about entertainment news and the celebrity gossip machine. I remember the Blake Lively thing from last summer when that movie was released, and how she was getting a lot of press for being, well, a difficult bitch on set. I did think it was strange–I generally can’t avoid celebrity gossip, despite trying very hard because it’s fucking everywhere–that if she was that awful, why were all her co-stars and everyone else involved with the movie backing her? Now, I’ve thought Justin Baldoni was hot since his days on Jane the Virgin, and I even bought his book about being a male feminist; because I’ve really been thinking about masculinity and what it means to be a man, which is what the book is about. I’ve not read the book–I still might, just to see what it says; even if he’s a hypocrite, that doesn’t necessarily mean he doesn’t have a point about some things–but of course the story exploded everywhere again on Christmas Eve when Lively sued Baldoni, claiming he hired a PR team to destroy Lively’s reputation so her concerns about inappropriate behavior on set by Baldoni wouldn’t be taken seriously–and she has receipts. Celebrity fan culture in this country really is something, and it really is out of control; I don’t know why so many people think being a fan of an artist entitles them to know everything about that artist (see above paragraph about speculating about celebrity sexuality), not to mention the horrors of being a celebrity on social media. Yikes, indeed. All I will say is that Hollywood has always had fixers; the only difference is that now they are guns for hire rather than salaried studio employees. Jordan Harper’s Everybody Knows explores the horrible world of Hollywood PR and what they cover up, and how they spin damage away from their client to someone else, even if that someone else’s life or career is destroyed by the spin. (Read Jordan’s book, seriously.) There’s a decent show on Prime starring Anna Paquin in which she plays a spin-doctor-for-hire, Flacks.

It’s also why no one can ever completely trust celebrity news; it’s literally the prime example of fake news.

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader. I may be back later, one never knows. If not, though, I will definitely be back in the morning tomorrow.

Yea, he’s handsome and has an exceptional build, but Zac Efron is more talented than he gets credit for.

We’ve Got Tonight

Who needs tomorrow? Well, it’s Christmas tomorrow, Mr. Seger, so I’d say we could all use a little Christmas this year, couldn’t we?

So it’s Christmas Eve in the Lost Apartment, and Sparky and I are the only things stirring. Paul is sound asleep, and I am going to let him sleep as long as he wants. I am going to order our pizza around twelve, I think, and I am going to go to the gym in a little bit first, methinks. I am going to take today and tomorrow off from anything other than light chores (unless I get a wild hair) and just read and relax and watch things on television and cuddle with Sparky. I can’t think of a better way to spend this holiday, can you? Sparky seems to have that same secret superpower of inducing sleep in us by simply cuddling up and going to sleep on or near either of us that Scooter had. I took two short naps this past weekend, and I blame that entirely on having Sparky sleeping on me–I never take naps! When I got home from work, he’d been cuddling with Paul off and on all day, and he spent the evening going back and forth between us. We finished The Day of the Jackal yesterday night, which was really fun

I was correct about yesterday being an easy day at the office. We were on a skeleton crew, most of the managers and supervisors were out, and thus I was able to focus and get a lot of my work done. It was marvelous. I was able to leave early, and when I got home I even figured out what short story to write for this queer anthology I’ve been invited to participate in, and I’m working on this other one for another anthology I’ve agreed to write for. I am going to take some characters from another project and write a short story about them…I think it’ll work, and then I can just plug the short story into the longer manuscript, which seems rather genius to me. I mean, why not make your work work for you? I’m a firm believer in that–even if I always worry about recycling plots. This morning I am going to clean the kitchen, drink my coffee, and read for a bit. I am intending to have a very relaxing two days off. Maybe I’ll do some work, maybe I won’t. I did finish my Substack essay on the blatant and horrific racism in the original edition of The Hardy Boys adventure The Mark on the Door, too.

The public theater of the Luigi Mangione trial–which is going to be reported on breathlessly by a media completely out of touch with their audience and will probably last throughout 2025, serving as a distraction for the people who cannot with the news from Washington anymore; Romans had their circuses to entertain the populace and keep them from rising; we have our modern media. What’s even odder to me is the disconnect between Luigi’s followers and the vastly smaller amount of law-and-order proponents (mostly in the media, for the record) castigating and moralizing about “condoning murder.” I have never been a fan of scolds or people who primly climb into their saddle atop their moral high horse and lecture everyone else about their moral failings. For the record, I do not respond to being lectured or scolded or condescended to very well–especially by people I do not know on the Internet. I don’t owe you space, I don’t owe you a platform, and you do not know me well enough to talk to me like you’re my mother. She’s dead, for one thing, and I didn’t even let her talk to me like that. You think you matter more to me than my mother? Arrogant much? Maybe have all the seats before coming at me as a fucking straight white woman of a certain age? I blocked two people on Facebook yesterday–one a priggish morally superior straight white woman who came onto my page determined to make the stupid faggot aware of her moral superiority; the other a gay man I’ve never met who did the same. I do my usual test of moral superiority with other strangers that I always do: hmm, what do I think you were doing during the HIV/AIDS crisis when gay men were dying by the thousands? And is you’re so law-and-order, that means you were probably being horrible about ACT UP and all the other in-your-face activism that needed to be done back then, some of which broke laws, which means you folded your arms and scolded rather than actually doing anything while people are dying.

Kind of like you are defending health insurance companies. You cannot be morally superior if you are defending the death panels. To me, that means you’d be a German who turned away during the holocaust and pretended it wasn’t happening, even though you lived in a village near a death camp and could smell it.

Also, slavery was legal in this country until 1865. So you would have supported that? Jim Crow was also the law, Ms. Black-and-White-Binary, and so were the eradication of the natives of this land and the Japanese internment camps in the 1940s and I could go on and on and on. Your lack of nuance is very telling.

And for the record, I never said I condoned or condemned the murder; all I’ve ever said is that I understood the mentality behind it because I have been there myself. I don’t share my own horror stories about health insurance–because all these people do is fold their arms and wrinkle their brows (think Susan Collins) and scold anyway. It’s also amazing to me that people will barge into one of your posts when they do not know you, do not know your situation, do not know your history, to smugly inform you how morally superior they are to you. With that fucking profile picture, bitch? Right before Christmas? Literally, go fuck yourself with barbed wire, skanky bitch, and take the morally superior gay man with you. It’s very easy to judge people (I’m doing it right now) without knowing the full story, but I also shouldn’t have to explain why I feel the way I do in order for other people to consider my opinions valid–that’s dehumanizing, and if you came running up to me at a conference or in a public space and started screaming at me (which is basically what you are doing, dear Ms. Morality), I wouldn’t stand for it, and I will not stand for it on-fucking-line. 1

For me, this case fascinates me, and what is even more fascinating is how this is being reported. There’s definitely been a slant to the coverage of the case, and there has been since it first happened. It was very shocking–a CEO being mowed down like a dog in the street on his way to an investors’ meeting–and very daring, very well-planned. It was, very much, intended as a political assassination; a protest against our incredibly broken health insurance industry. The fact that it was the CEO of United Healthcare immediately raised my eyebrows; they aren’t my insurer, but I work in a clinic for the under or uninsured and believe me, I have never heard a single person with United Healthcare who actually liked their insurance carrier. It’s always horror stories, and believe me, I’ve witnessed some myself. United Healthcare is garbage, it’s expensive, it has high deductibles, and they refuse coverage over 30% of the time.2 Their clients have no recourse, either; none of us do when our health insurance companies deny coverage (a favorite of mine is the bait-and-switch; “we’ll cover all of this, no worries” only to find out later that “oh, no, you owe for this and this and this and this.” (That was my experience with my shoulder surgery last year.) I had a surgery that was, over all, about 95% completely covered by my insurance–but that 5% almost bankrupted me. So, miss me with your “sanctity of life” bullshit. Brian Thompson had no concerns about the sanctity of life of his clients, to the tune of billions of dollars of profit last year. I didn’t cry or feel bad when Reagan or Kissinger or Limbaugh died; I won’t feel bad when Anita Bryant or Maggie Gallagher or Donald Wildmon dies. The media also tried to paint Thompson as a “family man”–not that he was estranged from his wife and kids–and couldn’t find any on-line pictures of the family, which is kind of telling. Who doesn’t have at least one family picture on-line?

No one deserves to be murdered in cold blood, but our system is so corrupted and rotten to the core that most people feel helpless in the face of it–that’s the real story no one is reporting in this case, which is also very telling about the news media, how they report stories, and the narratives they try to shape–and feel like they need to step up for the good of everyone. (They were the ones who convicted the Menendez Brothers, after all.) Rather than think pieces and editorials about how “horrible it is that people are cheering for a murderer”–why isn’t anyone exploring or reporting or even considering why people are cheering for a murderer? Everyone was rooting for him before anyone knew what he looked like, and the fact that he turned out to be attractive? Made it a much harder sell for the media, so of course they ran with that–people only support him because he’s attractive, which again, is one-dimensional and offensive to the core. Ever since I walked away from legacy media last July, it’s so much easier to see the narratives and the spins they go for–both sides, really. MSNBC’s breathless reporting, along with their butt-buddy CNN, on the narrative from Fix and OANN and Trump that Biden was senile and dying ensured a Trump election, and I said it at the time and that’s why I walked away from it. The great irony that I agree with the right that it’s all “fake news” has not escaped me. They were right, but only half-right; they think Fox is honest, and they aren’t. The copaganda perp walk? How much money and how many resources did the NYPD waste on their “manhunt,” which accomplished nothing because he was caught by a tip called in? So, that was absolutely copaganda: see how seriously we are taking this, oligarchs? Keep approving our massive budgets which are a waste of money and time. Um, you didn’t fucking catch him, and it’s interesting that the NYPD will mobilize for a rich man’s murder and divert everything to catching the killer, while crimes go unsolved and uncared about on the daily in New York City.

We should be talking about about the health care insurance scandal in this country, and talking about how to fill loopholes and make insurers pay claims, rather than “you only support him because he’s hot.” I’m fucking sixty-three years old. Just because someone is hot doesn’t mean I either like them, support them, or want to fuck them (Zachary Levi? Mark Wahlberg? Nick Bosa?). So stop fucking condescending to me.

And don’t come on my social media scolding me. It won’t end well for you.

And on that note, I am going to get into the holiday spirit by going to my easy chair with Sparky and watching Auntie Mame, my favorite Christmas movie.

  1. The difference between me and so many people is I am exactly who I am on line. It’s not a persona. I don’t reveal everything because I only choose to share certain aspects of my life and who I am, and I don’t have to, either. I am not braver on line than I am in person; if anything, I tolerate more bullshit on line than I ever would in person. ↩︎
  2. How awful for me to empathize with all the people going bankrupt paying for health insurance coverage that doesn’t cover anything! How fucking dare me! That man’s life was sacred. ↩︎

Love Song

Sparky let me sleep later this morning, which was greatly appreciated. I have work to do today, some errands to run, and I am just going to push through it all today. There’s no football on television today (or if there is, I don’t care about it) to distract me from working and reading a bit. I want to drop another box of books off at the library sale, and I’m planning on going to the gym later on and getting back into that habit. Yesterday was nice and relaxing, too. I got all my work-at-home duties done and we went to Costco, which is always a joy. I don’t know why I love going to Costco (probably because Paul always pays), but I do. We watched some more of Black Doves last night, which we are really enjoying, and finally went to bed a little later than I would have liked. I slept well and woke up to a sunny day in New Orleans; it’s going to be in the low seventies high sixties today–which means I should think about washing the car, too, or at least cleaning it out. I do have a hand vacuum, so I can just do that. Excellent plan, Gregalicious!

I also picked up and cleaned up around here both Thursday night and around work-at-home duties yesterday, so the Lost Apartment is actually in pretty good shape this morning. There are some dishes that need to be done, but the laundry is finished for sure and all that is left is the floors. Yay, me! I even did the filing yesterday, too, which is all kinds of awesome. I hate it when my desk is a mess and my inboxes are loaded down with paper and other shit. I also decided on the opening of the new Scotty; this time I am going to parody the opening of The Lords of Discipline, and it came to me yesterday how to make that work and be funny. So I even managed to get some “writing” done. No wonder I woke up in such a good mood; yesterday was truly a good day for me. Paul’s going to his office today, so I’ll be home by myself this afternoon, and so there’s no reason for me to not get everything done today that I want to get done. I also want to read some more today; that’s what I’ll most likely do this morning before I run the errands; probably do some picking up and book-pruning, too.

I’ve been doing that “twenty books that influenced or stayed with you” thing on one of the social media channels (I am on Bluesky and Threads; not sure how long I’ll stay on Threads, since Zuckerberg is a fascist collaborator) but I can never remember where I post things or reply to people since I left Twitter (whenever I do these things, the list is often different; some books make the list every time). Most of the people I enjoyed engaging with on Twitter (I will never fucking call it X; fuck you now and forever, Elmo Mush) have migrated over to one or the other, so people I was initially missing in the beginning have gradually turned up on one or the other. I have also taken the Bluesky/Threads methodology of just preemptively blocking annoying people to Facebook now–I told a friend I call it “reclaiming my time”–and thus far, it’s enormously freeing. I block early and I block often, and I wish I would have just done that everywhere from the beginning. Likewise, I’ve always required that anyone commenting here has to be approved by me before anyone else sees it–so there are any number of trolling commentary I’ve spared you all from. It’s the least I can do. Sometimes it’s a homophobic piece of garbage, or a MAGA troll, and I don’t owe you a fucking thing, let alone a forum for your ignorance and hate. However, I also keep those comments saved as unapproved, so I may eventually use them on here. Hey, you wanted it in a public forum; but I am not required to give that to you in the way you wanted. Instead, I can call you out on here while you gnash your teeth in impotent anger at my restricting your so-called freedom of speech (hey, it’s not my fault you don’t understand how the government or the Constitution works; you should have paid more attention at your free public education and taking advantage of the opportunity to be smarter and more intelligent–it was a free gift from the taxpayers. I already paid for your education once; I am not a teacher and therefore it is not my job to educate your stupid ass). Sucks to be you, doesn’t it? Better you than me.

The Luigi Mangione case continues to dominate social media and the news, as the news–ever in thrall to their corporate masters–tries to convince us we’re terrible people for being on Luigi’s side. The legacy media, of course, always do the bidding of the corporate masters (which is partly why we are in the situation we are in; they’ve been betraying the country for decades and doing the bidding of the right–we should have never forgiven them for helping perpetrate the lies that led to the Iraq and Afghanistan quagmires, or for patriot-washing Bush/Cheney for eight years), and the scolding from people who think “How can you support a murderer” isn’t landing the way they think it should–in fact, it actually makes me question your morality. Do I think killing CEO’s or executives who’ve made and implemented policies that put profit over people’s health care when they aren’t really medical professionals? Of course not, but I don’t have any sympathy for the dead man or his family or his evil company which isn’t going to change the way they operate.

That’s always the thing that has gotten me about health insurance; they operate under the assumption they know more about a person and their health and their needs than their actual doctors. Since the introduction of capitalism into medicine and health care–the profit motive–the quality of care and the quality of life for most Americans has declined. I have any number of my own horror stories with health insurance (no, he doesn’t need to have that precancerous lesion removed! It might be benign now, even if that might change, but we need to wait to be sure!) and the horror stories of my clients in the clinic that I have to listen to every day. I would shed no tears for any health insurance CEO, frankly; and I remember what it was like before the Affordable Care Act1, when my pre-existing conditions required me to be raped repeatedly by Blue Cross/Blue Shield. I was so happy when the ACA took effect and I was able to change to my job’s coverage. (Now, alas, we are back with BC/BS–and there’s a reason the acronym includes “bs.”) If my lack of sympathy for the health insurance CEO’s and their cronies makes me a bad person, well, I don’t care. I save my sympathy for the people denied care and their families.

And it’s very privileged to react so moralistically about people not being on Luigi’s side. It doesn’t hurt that he has pretty privilege, and the general reaction to a pretty young man shooting a health insurance CEO because of his shitty corporate policies (how can corporations have all the rights of an individual but no accountability for criminal behavior? If a corporation can’t go to jail, then it’s not a person.) is bound to get support from all the people who’ve had a shitty experience with health insurance coverage. It took me seven months of doing without before I could finally get BC/BS to pay for a necessary medication for me. Seven. Months. When I had BC/BS before, they declined to cover a medication to help me quit smoking; I paid out of pocket because I wanted to quit smoking, but it was infuriating. They would have rather I kept smoking and hoped I’d die before they had to pay too much for cancer care. Think about that–a health insurance company refusing to cover something that would make a customer healthier. The three months of the drug cost me $300 in total. They refused to pay $300 to save money in the long run.

Insurance is, and always has been, one of the greatest scams perpetrated on the American people. Don’t even get me started on auto insurance, which is even worse than health insurance. I will never be shamed into feeling sympathy for health insurance employees–and when people say “but it was his job!” do you have the same energy for the camp guards and workers in Auschwitz? They, too, were just doing their jobs. How many people suffered and died from policies set and approved by that CEO? How can someone who has the power of life or death who chooses death for higher profits be worthy of sympathy? How is denying life-saving treatment and care for people not calculated, premeditated murder? And that doesn’t even take into consideration how much we fucking have to pay for them to deny us care.

And if you’re okay with THAT, yeah, you don’t actually have any moral high ground to stand on. But congratulations on judging mine!

And on that note, I am going to go to my easy chair to read before I run my errands. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and I may be back later. Stranger things have happened!

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  1. Yet another example of the lack of memory in Americans: people can complain about the ACA all they want to (and yes, it’s the same thing as Obamacare, trash) but health insurance before the ACA was so much fucking worse, and the insured were completely at the mercy of the corporate bean counters and the CEO’s pushing them for more profits for the shareholders–and the shareholders who profit from these policies are just as evil as those working for the corporation. ↩︎

I Care

How is it only Wednesday? It feels like it should be at least Friday by now, doesn’t it?This has been the longest week, seriously. It’s cold again this morning–in the forties–and the rain has stopped. The bipolarity of winter in New Orleans is something I don’t think I’ll ever get used to, no matter how long I live here. I don’t feel tired this morning, but the cold does make me want to get back in bed again and burrow beneath the covers. I was all kinds of warm and comfortable under my blankets this morning when the alarm went off, and by the second beep Sparky was up, trying to get my attention to get up and feed him. I don’t feel worn out, but I don’t think I’ll make it through the afternoon without my energy flagging. Ah, well.

I even left work early yesterday for my podiatrist appointment, and the good news is the toe has healed perfectly and he was most pleased with not only how quickly it healed but how properly as well. His absolute delight when he looked at was very clear. (Apparently, I am some kind of medical marvel of healing; Paul heals pretty fast, too–how many people are discharged the same day they get a hip replaced?) But that’s a good thing, and there was some callus where he’d cut the nail and the scab had been, so he got rid of that with an exacto knife (it didn’t hurt at all) and then I was done and walking out to head home. I wasn’t even super-tired when I got home, but I worked for a while and that wore me out enough to finally put it all aside and relax for the rest of the evening. I hate that I am not catching up as quickly as I would like to, but that’s life, you know?

I also keep forgetting the Super Bowl is here in February, which will make getting around the city so much easier. Yay. And of course, there’s a massive facelift (or at least temporary patchwork) being done to New Orleans to get ready for it, so you never know what detours lie in your future.

I also watched Matt Baume’s documentary about Lance Loud, the gay son of the first reality TV show, An American Family, from the early 1970s on PBS. we didn’t watch it, but everyone was talking about it, and I remember hearing about the gay oldest son, and how the marriage ended in a divorce. I think my parents thought being filmed for a television show was exploitative and kind of gross? My mother certainly wasn’t one to get into reality shows–she even stopped watching soaps about twenty years ago. I was never really sure why, but Dad has told me over and over again about how deeply conservative she was (trust me, I knew but it still came as a surprise–I always thought it was Dad and she was just trying to make him happy. Ah, the things we are led to believe as children but never really give much thought to…Dad became more conservative because she was so conservative), so I have to assume the soap thing (I used to watch them with her when I was still in school) might have had something to do with that? I know my sister stopped watching them because they encouraged you to root for adulterers. My grandmother also used to watch them when I was a kid (I actually think she was the one who got me and my sister started on Dark Shadows), but also stopped. Anyway, it was an interesting documentary, and I learned a lot more about Lance Loud than I’d ever really known before, other than he was the gay son on that show.

The tale of Robin Hoody keeps getting more and more interesting the more information that comes out about him, and I keep being more and more amused at the way the country has almost completely united (see what I did there?) behind him. That really should tell everyone about the mood of the country, shouldn’t it? I keep being amused at how the story is being reported, and how much resources the NYPD expended on searching for this person while no one is even talking about the immigrant stabbed to death by racists on the same day in the same city, and certainly the NYPD isn’t making that a top priority. I’d love to see the price tag for justice for a health insurance executive, and why the NYPD and the media made this into such an insane priority. Yes, by all means, do tell me about how everyone is equal in the eyes of the law! And of course, the more information that comes out about both shooter and victim, the more noble the shooter sounds and the more awful the victim was. The media was certainly unprepared for the way people reacted, and the fact that the media so completely misread the mood of the country makes you wonder, again, just how shitty they are at their jobs; and the right-wing grifters attempt to frame this as a right-left issue blew up their faces…as some angry Americans slowly began to realize the media they consume manipulates them to make money, and people saw it as more of a class war kind of thing that apparently everyone has just been waiting for to happen.

And that’s what has the elites and their puppet media terrified. They cannot allow the country’s division to heal and anyone who is not an elite must be persuaded to fight a culture war when the real problem is and has always been the class war the billionaires have been waging against everyone else since Ronald Reagan was sworn into office in 1981. I also think a lot of the angry people are recognizing that they voted in the rule of an oligarchy and are not very happy about that, either. For the record, I don’t have any sympathy for those who voted for this and now have regrets. Too little, too late, too bad, so sad. You voted to make people suffer, and sadly, you’re also one of those. I can’t even begin to tell you how horrible those people were before the election, and how they absolutely refused to listen to anything anyone had to say.

And the newspaper coverage and most editorial commentary has shown how deeply out of touch they actually are from everyday citizens, and how they prop up the elites at every possible turn. Imagine if the media hadn’t gotten sucked into the cult of Trump in the 1980s and started turning him into a celebrity for no good reason. Seeing them trying to lead ‘the resistance’ after doing everything they could to reelect him (so much for that “liberal media bias,” right, Richard Nixon?) is not only craven, but disgusting and people are starting to see very clearly what our “news media” actually has become: completely incompetent and not good at their jobs. The news shouldn’t be a for-profit business, just like health care should not be.

And on that note, I am bundling up and heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Wednesday, Constant Reader, and here’s hoping the rest of this week flies by.

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I’m Not Through Loving You Yet

Sunday morning here in the Lost Apartment, and how are you doing , Constant Reader? I feel good this morning, actually; a good night’s sleep and a rest day always seem to have this effect on me. I guess the new reality for me is being worn out by the end of the work week and needing a brain-dead day of rest. I feel good this morning and my coffee is hitting the spot this morning. Yay! I hope this means a productive day around the house. I have work to do that I do need to get done, after all.

I was tired yesterday, both mentally and physically. I managed to get the errands run; made groceries at two different stores (!), dropped a box of books off at the library sale, and picked up my copy of Alter Ego by Alex Segura, which I am very excited about. I loved Secret Identity, and there’s no reason to think Alter Ego won’t be better; reviewers are loving it all over the country, and I’m probably going to move it up on the TBR list to the on-deck position behind my current read. So many good books! Which is, as always, a delightful problem to have. Whee! I am very excited about this. I am going to get back into reading fiction, now that I’ve finished The Demon of Unrest–my. new non-fiction read is probably not going to be as smoothly flowing a narrative (White Too Long). I have so many great fiction reads to get to! A plethora of riches to be sure. I am going to work today on some things, and I am going to work on the house some, too. It always seems to be a mess for some reason which is beyond me, but go figure, right?

We watched some of the Grand Prix of Figure Skating finals, which saw US skaters win gold medals in three disciplines–men’s, women’s, ice dance–which I don’t think has ever happened before? This bodes well for the World Championships in March, and it’s been awhile since anyone could say that, really.

I also wound up watching some football games idly, while I read short stories for a contest I am judging. I guess if you were pulling for either team, the games were exciting; Georgia beat Texas in overtime; Clemson needed a desperation field goal in the closing seconds to beat SMU; and even Penn State-Oregon was dramatic. Now on to the bowls and play-offs, which is going to seem very weird. I’m not really sure how I feel about this entirely new, semi-pro look college football is going for, and how it really has always been about greed. Which is a shame–but it always was a farce when it came to all that “amateur athlete” bullshit anyway. Players always got paid, and colleges always looked for ways to justify it or cover it up or exploit loopholes in the rules. It was also interesting seeing SMU in the ACC title game, too–SMU was the only school under the old rules to ever get the death penalty for too much cheating, and it killed the program for decades…so the NCAA became reluctant to use it again. (Ironically, the next college that would have–should have–gotten the death penalty was ALABAMA in the 90’s–and they weren’t ever going to do anything to Alabama that might kill that program.)

When I took the box of books to the library sale yesterday, they asked me if there were any mass-market paperbacks in the box because they aren’t taking those now. They’ve told me that before–and I’ve had to take books out of the boxes before. I still put some in there, just to see if they’ll say no to them, and if they don’t, it does get them out of the house. When did mass-market paperbacks become so anathema to American readers? I loved them when I was younger; they used to be as cheap as seventy-five cents when I was a kid, and I remember their prices gradually increasing until it was silly to not pay the dollar or so mor to get it in trade paperback, which were usually sturdier and more solid editions. Now it’s more along the lines of “the print isn’t big enough” for me, and I suppose ebooks have replaced the mass market editions. I always wanted to write something with my name on the spine in mass market, but never succeeded in getting there–and now they are being phased out completely. That’s a shame.

I was thinking about mass market paperbacks because I was moving books around in the laundry room and came across two editions that are two important books to my younger self; two that I’ve always wanted to revisit as companion pieces to each other: The Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy, and Dress Gray by Lucien Truscott IV. The former is set at Carolina Military Institute in South Carolina (aka The Citadel), the latter at West Point. I read Dress Gray first, living in Kansas and picked it up at the grocery store, I think. It was a murder mystery set at the military academy, and the victim was a closeted gay cadet. I remember really loving the book, and I don’t remember why I picked up The Lords of Discipline, other than I know we’d already moved to California before I read it. I think I’d watched The Great Santini and wanted to read the book, but the Waldenbooks at the mall only had Lords in stock, so I got it instead, and became a huge Pat Conroy fan. I do want to revisit both books; I’ve been wanting to write a crime novel set at an Alabama military high school–that all-male environment I’ve always found so interesting–but that won’t happen for awhile, at least.

The manhunt for the man who killed the UnitedHealthcare CEO continues, and with every new bit of information released he becomes even more of a folk-hero. Some have started calling him the Adjuster, which is funny, but I saw someone call him Robin Hoody yesterday and that, I think, is my absolute favorite thus far. He’s almost taking on a Batman-like lore amongst the American people; few things this century have united the country as much as approval of this murder has. That says something about the mood of the country, and if I were a politician or a corporate executive whose business model is fucking over the working class, I’d be pretty fucking nervous right now. There’s a bit of a sense of 1789 Paris and 1917 St. Petersburg in the air, and now that corporations and the uber-rich have been screwing us all over for decades with no relief anywhere in sight–if anything, a sense they are going to make it worse for all of us–and no, it wouldn’t surprise me if revolts started up, or more murders of the exploitive class.

It doesn’t hurt if the uber-rich begin to understand that it’s actually not in their own best interest to fuck around with the working class, either.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader, and I may be back later; stranger things have happened.

Tell Her No

Saturday morning in the Lost Apartment, and all is well–at least so far, at any rate. I slept super well last night, and Sparky even let me sleep later, which is not his norm. But when he decided enough was enough, enough was enough. Yesterday turned out to be a very needed day of rest after I finished working; I ran my errands and was drained by the time I got home. I did some chores and the laundry, before settling in for some reading as my brain began misfiring again and the tiredness from the week settled in when I walked back into the apartment lugging groceries around four thirty. I settled into my easy chair and read for the rest of the evening, finishing The Demon of Unrest and starting another new non-fiction read (White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity by Robert P. Jones; yes, I am studying the racist history of the country right now), and caught up on Real Housewives (SLC is lit this season, y’all) before going to bed.

Remember a few weeks ago how I finally talked about how sick and tired I was of every form of homophobia, and especially the passive-aggressive bullshit from so-called “friends” and “allies”? Yeah, got one of those comments on here. Fortunately, I have to approve comments (because I do get the occasional homophobic diatribe; I learned the lesson to approve comments with Livejournal over a decade ago), so you’ll never have to see it, but it’s always a jolt. My favorites are always the ones like this morning–couched in language that appeared friendly, but was actually insulting, demeaning, and invalidating me as a human being with lived (and learned) experience. I love when people think their own lived experience as a straight white man is more valid than my own–and their knowledge of my community and its history is vastly superior to mine, despite their never needing to know anything about it and I’ve studied it extensively over the last three decades, but then again–I’m just a faggot in need of a straight person to get my shit together.

It’s always lovely having that kind of shit drop into your inbox first thing in the morning, before you’ve finished your first cup of coffee. This is why I finally had enough a few weeks ago. I’m not putting up with this shit anymore. Sixty-three years of being excluded, made to feel less than, and putting up with all bullshit that comes with being a gay American man born in the second half of the twentieth century. It certainly got my blood pumping this morning, and made me wake up faster than my morning coffee. It’s almost as funny as the lead singer of the Village People claiming that “YMCA” isn’t a gay anthem. Oh, honey, all your songs are gay anthems, and no one needs your permission to say it. The gays made you, the gays made your songs, and the gays kept your songs alive long after their shelf-life had passed, but go ahead and kiss some mango ass, bitch. Don’t let me stop you, by any means.

And if “YMCA” isn’t a gay anthem, it’s only because the community ditched it after it started being played and danced to (by the way, the song is from 1979…) by mediocre, rhythm-less straight white people at sporting events and political rallies. It always amuses me to see your homophobic asses dancing (badly) to a song about cruising other men at the Y. Butt-fucking and blow-jobs, that’s what the song is about. Remember that the next time you decide to stand up and dance at your next sporting event, straight people. At least the MAGA dance to it works, since it looks like the dancer is giving out handjobs with both hands.

And yay, we get to experience another four years of this kind of shit. At least. I don’t know why my sex life–which is no one’s business but my own–bothers so many people; I certainly don’t hold other people’s sex lives against them. It’s also election day here in Louisiana–this is when we have the elections when someone or something didn’t pass outright in the general. I think it’s just amendments to the state constitution, which I am going to have to look up before I walk over and vote. I also suppose I should be grateful that I don’t get more homophobic abuse on here and on-line; which is one of the reasons I never check DM’s on social media and usually will just clear them out in one swoop without looking at them (words of advice: for this reason, direct messaging is literally the worst way to reach me, especially if you need an answer from me right away), but…as I said a few weeks ago, I am not taking it anymore.

This is why I am no longer attending conferences and conventions–this sort of thing, never knowing who you’re going to meet who is a homophobic piece of shit (and there are quite a few of them, spread out over all sub-genres–you know who you are). Until such time (ha ha ha ha) that these events stop allowing and condoning this kind of shit–or not caring that it happens–why would I support them with my money and my paid vacation time? I know, I know, visibility and all that–but I’ve been doing all that for almost fifteen years, and I am tired.

After all, I’ve not been back to Left Coast since that horrible woman was racist and homophobic to me.1

Heavy sigh. I think I am going to get another cup of coffee and will read for a bit. I do have to run errands today–wash the car, pick up the mail, a little bit of groceries–before coming home and getting back to work. I don’t really care about any of the football games today, so I may turn on the SEC title game, or I may not. I don’t really have an interest in who wins it, so why not read, clean, and work during the day rather than watching games? I’m going to barbecue a pork tenderloin later for dinner, which will be nice. It’s sunny outside, but it’s only 48 degrees outside, and the high for the day is fifty-nine. I’m also going to do a German lesson this morning, and try to get a grip on my inbox, and I am also going to try to finish a substack entry this weekend; I have sixteen started (seriously) and they aren’t going to write themselves. I need to get this editing job finished, and I need to get back to work on my Scotty book. I also had breakthroughs on several other books ideas, so I’d like to get some work done so as to lesson the Sisyphean tasks I always have before me.

  1. I can honestly say I never expected to hear the slur terms for biracial in casual conversation, let alone directed at me. Live and learn. And for the record, this is why racism is so insidious; no one is actually safe from it. That experience also made me wonder if sometimes when I am treated badly by service staff, it has to do with racism? Because they think I’m biracial? And for the record, my brain never jumps to bad treatment = homophobia; I just think the person is a dick. But now I have something else to wonder about. ↩︎

Shake

Well, yesterday was a good day for one Gregalicious. I didn’t get as much done around the house as I would have preferred, but c’est la vie. I did have football games on all day, mostly as a break from monotonous silence, but I did get to see the Florida upset of Mississippi, and surprisingly enough, LSU beat Vanderbilt last night to stop their three game losing streak…but have to play Oklahoma next, who managed to not only upset Alabama last night but beat them pretty soundly. After the LSU game I caught the end of Auburn-Texas A&M, which Auburn finally won in quadruple overtime. What a crazy year this has been in the SEC, has it not? Now the winner of Texas-Texas A&M will play Georgia for the SEC title. #madness.

But one thing I remembered finally is that I usually read during games I don’t necessarily care about, and so I finished The Reformatory by Tananarive Due at last yesterday, and what a read it was. I’d say it’s one of the best books I’ve read in a very long time, and I read a lot of really good books, so that is really saying something. I’ve added Due to my list of “must-read” writers, and she has a substantial backlist I am looking forward to exploring. It took me a very long time to get through this book, because it was so powerful and the horror in it was so completely real, but more on that later. I am going to go out on a limb and call it a masterpiece for now, and encourage you to read it if you have not. Today I am going to start reading Lavender House by Lev AC Rosen, whom I’ve met and found delightful, and whose career I’ve been following avidly. I’ve yet to read one of his books, but I am very excited to read one of the most acclaimed queer mysteries of the last few years. I’m also kind of thrilled to be reading fiction again. Today I am also going to read a couple of short stories a friend sent me to read, and probably will do some writing, either short story, essay, or the book, today as well. I went to get the mail and made a grocery run yesterday, so I don’t have to do anything errand-like today, but I should probably make it to the gym later this morning. The weather has been wonderful, and one thing I am determined to do this year is drive around the city taking pictures of Christmas decorations. I definitely want to write a nice essay about Christmas this year, and the essay I worked on briefly yesterday, “Recovering Christian,” is one I started working on about twenty years ago. The lovely thing about Substack is I now have a place to post those essays, and share them with the world. I do have to make more of an effort to post content there at least once a week.

I do wonder if all the readers I picked up there during my ranting about homophobia post are expecting that kind of content all the time? I don’t know, but in some ways I am thinking that the Substack (also a place to publish short stories, too, if I so choose) is kind of a good place to write about my life, and explore issues of being a queer American writer, and my thoughts and opinions about systemic bigotry, and all the things I was miseducated about as a child. (American Mythology, hello?) That way it will live up to the name it shares with this blog, “Queer and Loathing in America.” I also want to write essays about my gay life, and the lessons I learned the hard way, as well as writing. I’ve been unpacking my past ever since Mom died–the first time I’ve ever allowed myself to look back–and while I am not sorry I never did this before, I am also learning a lot more about myself and why I do things and why I react the way I do and how much of my life was controlled/driven by anxiety. I was fine at the party the other night, but too many people in spaces still makes me uncomfortable and uneasy, but that’s okay. The claustrophobia might be anxiety related, or it may be entirely it’s own thing, but the primary difference was that there was no adrenaline spike or spiraling. I was able to relax, and kind of enjoy myself more.

And that is what I meant when I said I was pulling back from the crime community and centering myself. I want to focus on myself, on Paul, and our needs and what we need to do and handle and take care of, and I don’t want to do emotional labor for anyone else anymore. I’ve been watching a lot of Youtube and TikTok videos about cutting MAGA voters out of your life, or at the very least setting boundaries, and I saw one that really made a lot of sense to me: we don’t feel safe around them, but we don’t have to cut them out entirely, we just have to stop giving them emotional labor. Go get sympathy from another MAGA voter, since you’re all so empathetic and sympathetic to the concerns, fears and rights of other people. It’s why BlueSky has been flooded by Twitter trolls, now that the genius has killed that platform (but hey, let’s put him in charge of government!). They don’t enjoy talking to each other, so they have to “pwn the libs.” But they just get blocked, so they’re the ones who wind up in a echo chamber. Hell, I block people who annoy me. It’s my space, my experience, and if I don’t want the aggravation of annoying people or giving them time or energy, well…no one can make me engage with people who steal my peace.

I also don’t think people understand how casual homophobia, so easy for straight people to slip into with their excessive privilege, makes us feel when we hear it or hear about it or (in some cases) read about it in screen shots. Not only do we no longer feel safe around you, we can’t count on you to stand up for us when the chips are literally down. There’s been some slightly viral conversation about some Jewish lesbian who voted for Trump and has been cut off from her friends and kicked off a team. “I wouldn’t do this to someone who voted for Harris,” she cries her crocodile tears, as she sits down with right-wing podcasters and plays victim and martyr. She voted for Trump because of pro-Palestine lefties…or so she claims. So she aligned herself with someone who actually had dinner with a Nazi, and has been embraced by American Nazis. Who ally themselves with the Proud Boys and other ant-Semites (who precisely are the voters who chant “Jew will not replace us” again?), and now wants everyone to feel sorry for her and pretends ignorance. Sorry not sorry, bitch–your new buddies and the Karens posting on your instagram talking about how horrible it is that queers actually can see this quisling bitch for who she is? Those bitches will be the first ones to turn you into the SS, moron. It’s especially egregious because my education in feminism and social justice was at the hands of lesbians; I’ve always thought lesbians, of all people, would know better than this bullshit. And this bitch is talking about “how we all need to have these tough conversations”–no, we don’t, honey. The time for tough conversations was before the election, and trust me, there’s not a single tough conversation I could possibly have where I’d be willing to come to an agreement or compromise with people who cheered the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 80s and 90s. You don’t compromise with the Klan. You don’t compromise with Nazis. You don’t compromise with people who’s starting position is “you don’t deserve any rights, and you really shouldn’t exist.”

Feel free to pound your head into that wall until it’s pulp, Benedictine Arnold. Enjoy the lonely life of celibacy you’ve set up for yourself.

The funniest thing about her is she is a butch lesbian–short hair, masculine clothes, the whole ball of wax–and you know she is going to get challenged going into the ladies’ bathroom or changing room.

Good. Enjoy what you voted for. I have no patience with queer remoras attaching themselves to the sharks circling the rest of us. I certainly have no forgiveness in my heart for the future informers and camp guards. She showed us who she is, and we believe her.

And on that note, I am going to head over to my chair to read for a bit before I get to work around here. I slept really well again last night, and feel pretty good this morning. I also want to work on my review of The Reformatory, and get some other things done. Have a great Sunday, Constant Reader, and I may be back later on.