I’ve always felt that Tuesdays are worse than Mondays. Sure, it sucks to get up on Monday morning and go back to the office, but at least you’re coming off the weekend. Tuesday means you’re not even halfway through the week and you’ve already worked the day before. Horror of horrors! I felt this way even in high school–which is where and when I started wishing my life away, as my mom always used to say. Of course, she didn’t start saying that until she stopped working and became, for want of a better word, a housewife. Such an ugly and weird sounding word, isn’t it? But it’s better than “tradwife,” which just might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard–and the whole “tradwife values” thing just kind of turns my stomach ever so slightly.
I do want to write about one, of course. I also want to write about one of those horribly creepy “boymoms.” Straight people are so weird…
But this morning I feel rested and good. I ran some errands after work last night, which was not as painful as I might have expected, and I have to run one tonight when I leave the office. I finished revising my short story and send it in (it’s for a queer crime anthology called Crime Ink), which felt really good (the story is an excerpt from Never Kiss a Stranger called “The Rhinestone”), and I did work on the book a little around Sparky’s intense neediness. I think Paul is moving into the Monteleone tomorrow, so after tonight I’ll be home alone with a super needy cat, which will be challenging. I also need to figure out my schedule for the weekend’s Festivals. I am moderating a panel for the Pinckley Prize tenth anniversary celebration, I know, and I have to do the anthology launch Saturday night, and I am in the Dorothy Allison tribute reading. There’s also a panel on Sunday I am on, and of course both the opening and closing parties. Sigh. I get tired just thinking about it, you know?
But it’ll be fun and invigorating intellectually, and it’s always inspiring to be around wonderful people who love books and writing.
Remember the author I talked about who created a firestorm by writing and publishing that dreadful book where the man fell in love with his best friend’s three-year-old daughter but waits until she was legal before doing anything (as though the pedophilic grooming wasn’t bad enough)? She was arrested yesterday and charged (in Australia) for possession of, and intent to distribute, child pornography. The copies of her own book was the evidence they needed for the arrest! I don’t know what the laws are in Australia, but quite frankly, arguing that it’s a “slippery slope” to be arrested for “dark romance” writing? Dark romance actually requires consent, otherwise it’s rape. You’re trying to ban queer books in the US, yet people are trying to defend the principle of free speech about a book that is 100% about grooming? Yeah, miss me with that. Child rape is child rape, period; and I think the fact so many people missed the real point of Lolita and think it’s a “romance” is why no one should be writing about child rape like it’s just another style of “dark” romance.
And who would ever think to themselves, “I’m going to write a dark romance about grooming!”
Someone I wouldn’t let around kids, that’s who.
Not all speech is protected–which no one seems to understand, which isn’t surprising since they don’t understand their own protected right to free speech and what precisely that means. We really are the dumbest country. This whole “let’s share classified intelligence with a reporter in a group chat” thing would be laughable if it wasn’t so fucking terrifying. IMAGINE EISENHOWER SENDING THE D-DAY PLANS TO A REPORTER, or Truman accidentally telling the Washington Post about the plans to use the atomic bomb on Japan the day before?
Americans have never appreciated our system, or they’d have learned how it works better when they were younger. (I wish I had a quarter for every time I had to explain the Electoral College to smart people–or people I’d thought were smart previously–in 2000 I’d have retired years ago.) So, we kind of have the government we deserve right now.
And on that grim note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely day. Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again at some point.
Monday morning and back to the office with me this morning. I slept well again last night and had no trouble getting up; I am neither groggy nor tired as I sip my coffee and eat my morning coffee cake slice. It was a nice, if not terribly productive weekend. The Festivals are this weekend, so Paul will most likely be moving to the Monteleone on Wednesday, leaving me home to deal with a lonely, needy kitty in the meantime. I do have a lot of work to get done this morning at the office, so pray for me. I’m taking a long weekend for the Festivals–Friday and Monday, mainly for the recovery aspect–so hopefully next week isn’t too terrible. I also managed to blow off my taxes for the entire weekend, so I need to get that done this week as well.
Sounds like a to-do list is in order to me, don’t you think?
Spring is here! It was gorgeous yesterday when I walked outside to take out the trash. Paul had to go to the Quarter for the annual Stanley/Stella shouting contest at Jackson Square. I couldn’t justify going and taking the afternoon off from chores and writing (should writing be considered one of my chores?) for the day. Maybe next year I’ll remember that I don’t need to be turning books in during the first third of the year. Meh, fall is football season so there’s always something else to take me away from it, isn’t there? We did finish watching Paradise last night, and it really is quite excellent. It’s also one of the best produced and written shows I’ve seen in a while. The acting is stellar, and the writing is very clever and everything that happens in earlier episodes matter in the later ones, so everyone really needs to be paying attention. It’s also incredibly smart, and I am sure any parallels to our current world are purely coincidence and unintentional.
I also watched a documentary–a short one–that explained how the creators and writers of the Game of Thrones show didn’t stick the landing and ended up ruining one of the greatest television programs ever made. Like most everyone, I didn’t much care for the final season, and especially not the last episode…but I put everything aside for the pure pleasure of watching the spectacle–and it was a spectacle. Everyone watched Game of Thrones1, didn’t they? Everyone at my office did, and we always talked about on Monday morning, sometimes re-watching the episode in the upstairs lounge of our old office on Frenchmen Street. There were some incredible cinematic moments on the show, and of course, the acting was always topnotch. Every so often, when I think about it, I’ll go in search of clips from the show on Youtube, which is what I was doing when Paul got home yesterday afternoon with Chinese food for dinner. (I was not one of the people who had a problem with Daenarys going full-on Mad Queen and destroying Kings Landing.) I don’t know, but I can’t help but think a re-watch and a full-on binge of eight seasons could be fun. I know the weekend after the Festivals will most likely be one of those “can’t get off the couch from exhaustion” weekend, so perhaps that is the right timing for a massive binge.
I didn’t get nearly as much done this weekend as I would have liked, and while that is a consistent issue for one Gregalicious, it’s also one that needs to stop being an issue. It’s very easy to get distracted and lose time down a wormhole, especially when I start doing my researches on-line. It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around the concept that the 1970’s were actually fifty years ago; my fiftieth high school reunion is in three years. (No, I am not going if they have one; although I am a little surprised that the majority of my classmates, I think, are still alive.) I told Paul last night that I was watching World War II videos yesterday morning, and I realized, to my horror, that the war had only been over for slightly more than sixteen years when I was born, which had never occurred to him before, either. YIKES. Certainly made me feel every second of my age, let me tell you! But it was true. My maternal grandparents were born before the Archduke was assassinated; so when they were born, Austria-Hungary was still a thing, the Germans had a kaiser and the Russians had a czar. The war was still in recent memory when I was a kid, and I grew up in a neighborhood of Chicago that was full of war refugees and post-war immigrants. A friend’s father had numbers tattooed on his inner forearm. The past was still very much the present when I was a kid, and we were also still in that post-war “America is the greatest country EVER” glow, and we were all taught white supremacy, obedience to the patriarchy, and American exceptionalism…but even when I was a small kid things seemed a bit wrong; committing genocide on the natives never sat well with me as a kid, nor did the fact the way US History was taught (and written about for kids) to justify everything we did as a country as “right” and “pure” and “moral” seem correct to me…and I’ve spent a lot of my adulthood recognizing and correcting the fallacies and bald-faced lies and justifications I was taught and groomed to believe.
We were all groomed to be good little citizens who obeyed and never questioned authority. Yeah, that worked, didn’t it?
And on that note I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back later or tomorrow morning.
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Which proves the point I am always making about history not being taught or presented properly to students. George R. R. Martin drew from European history for his story (clearly the incestuous Targaryens were based on the Ptolemies; and he pulled from both the Wars of the Roses and Maurice Druon’s series of novels about the end of the primary line of the Capetian dynasty in France, The Cursed Kings), so why can’t history be taught in a similar way? I mean, you can never go wrong with basing fantasy on actual history; so why not teach actual history the way you would a fantasy novel? ↩︎
Saturday morning and I got up early; I went to bed last night at my usual time. I was kind of worn down yesterday after I finished my work at home duties, so I just kind of collapsed into my easy chair to watch some documentaries because my brain still felt fried. I hate that for me, and I hate not being able to get things done that I need to. I was able to get chores managed and completed, which was nice. The kitchen is pretty much in good shape this morning, so there isn’t much to do around here this morning major, but I can do little things to made things tidier around here. I also have some business to take care of this morning (hello, IRS!) as well as writing to get done. Paul’s going to be at the office for most of the day, but hopefully he’ll be home in time to watch the SEC Gymnastics Championships tonight. LSU is in the night group, so that also gives me all day to write and clean and read and the taxes and other chores that need to be done. Whew. That’s a day, isn’t it?
It is indeed.
Well, here’s hoping that I have a productive day, at any rate. I am easily distracted these days, as I imagine many are, by the current events that pummel us into insensibility and rage every goddamned day. There are times, I swear, when I think the Christians’ “rapture” has already happened because all we have around these days are the faux kind, the ones who cosplay at being Christians but have no interest in actually being Christ-like. Nothing is more irritating that someone who is arrogant in their faith–especially since their Holy Book firmly establishes in the first part that God despises everything other than humility from humans, and the second part is all about being kind and helping the sick and the poor and feeding the hungry. All of that, of course, was ignored for centuries by the established European version of the religion, which really came to be about earthly power and the accumulation of wealth. Men pick the pope, after all–and men are capable of corruption, and no man is as capable of being corrupted as someone who has chosen the path of religion for money and power. Jesus would weep at the corruption of his faith, and at the false miracles invented to reward humans with godhood1, the way the Romans did with their emperors?
And how is that not heresy and/or blasphemy?
But that’s not my job to figure out. But I feel pretty confident that people who are performative Christians–the ones who pray loudly in public, who proclaim themselves to the world as saved and so forth, and who proselytize and weaponize their faith (I don’t think there’s anywhere in the Bible where Jesus ever says to the faithful to use their faith to bash and beat down anyone; the message of Christianity–of religions in general–is to be a good person who cares about others and cares about the world–but not its rewards. It saddens me to see that religion has grown so corrupted and worldly, the way false prophets can pervert the word to make themselves wealthy while they do nothing for the faithful or the poor and unfortunate.
Can you tell I had an encounter with a cosplay Christian on-line the other day whose arrogance and pride is antithetical to Jesus? That always makes me laugh about religion, and think about it some more. I was raised that way, and it is very ingrained in me. I also noted the hypocrisy of the denomination I was raised in; the mealy-mouthed “amens” during the service and the piety they claimed to espouse…while being liars, adulterers and thieves while judging others for their sins…and those sins are usually things so little considered in the Bible that you really have to look for them. Three misinterpreted passages about homosexuality, but literally hundreds about lying, cheating and stealing…that they never bring up.
Remove the mote from thine own eye.
I have been writing an essay, off and on, for nearly thirty years, about religion and morality, and how difficult it is to break the Christian conditioning we are groomed into, and how that grooming often includes the stuff Christianity has been corrupted into targeting–gays, minorities, trans folk, etc. Call it what it is: grooming. Children aren’t given a choice about religion, are they? And it’s very hard to shake that training off. I haven’t set foot in a church for anything other than a wedding or a funeral in over forty years, going on fifty, and while I don’t consider myself to be a believer anymore…I can’t say I’ve broken through the training completely, but I no longer believe the Bible is literally true nor do I believe the Earth is less than six thousand years old. I do not believe the entire world was flooded and every living thing except what was loaded into an ark made of wood perished. The actual teachings of Jesus–particularly the Sermon on the Mount–are something I try to adhere to, not always successfully, as a guide post for my life.2
I also refuse to believe that you can be a horrible person all week but will go to “heaven” so long as you go to church every Sunday and perfunctorily go through the motions of the devout. If the ritual is that important whereas your regular behavior isn’t, what kind of god is that? And I’ve never understood why anyone would believe in predestination, which is antithetical to Christianity itself because it removes free will, which is kind of the cornerstone the entire faith is built on?
I also owe a friend a letter. I am a little worried about writing said letter because, obviously, I’ve not written a letter in decades. I was a faithful letter writer when I was younger, and moving so much…I did try to stay in touch with people I thought were my friends after moving away, but they would never write back quickly, if at all, and the correspondence would always die when they owed me a letter. I always wrote people last…which was a very early lesson in out of sight, out of mind as well as they weren’t really your friends which is another reason I stopped trying to stay in touch with people whenever I moved. I was always the last person to reach out to anyone, so it’s always funny to me when people from my past–especially the far distant past–will act like they’re sorry we fell out of touch, and much as I always want to say “you stopped responding to ME”, I never do.3 But my friend typed out a note and mailed it to me, and rather than emailing (which is a most sorry substitute for writing a letter or getting one in the mail) I am going to write a letter back. I am oddly excited about it?
I am awake and feel good, and feel like I can get things done this morning. I am going to post this, and then go read in my chair for a little bit before getting cleaned up and heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and I may be back later, one never knows!
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No one will ever convince me that the saints aren’t anything other than a continuation of the pantheon of Greek/Roman gods and demigods and other mythic creatures. There’s a patron saint for everything that you can pray to—just like the Greeks/Romans had a god or nymph or something that they prayed to. ↩︎
Which is why I am so fully aware that one cannot be both a Christian and an adherent of Ayn Rand, Republicans. ↩︎
And there are very few of those people from my past that I’ve let have access to me again that I didn’t regret later. ↩︎
Thursday and my last day in the office for the week. Huzzah!
I am a bit tired this morning, but not from the week. I woke up around three in the morning and couldn’t fall completely back asleep…so when Sparky started trying to get me up before the alarm, I was able to have some fun with him. Usually I bury my face, hands and feet under the blankets so he can’t claw or bite them (swipes and nips, designed to wake me up–but the claw in the face is a bit much); this morning instead I’d grab him and cuddle him and hold on to him until he squirmed away and tried again….so I grabbed him and made him cuddle again. He really is such a sweet boy. When I start putting on my sweats he’ll run to the stairs…and then come back wondering what is taking me so long, and then runs ahead of me down the stairs. Every morning when I leave, he walks down along the back of the couch to the living room window and watches me go…and he’s always right there at the door when I get home to greet me (and beg for food and attention). I’m so glad we got another cat.
I did some writing last night, but was very tired both physically and mentally. I did get the laundry finished, so tonight I need to empty the dishwasher and refill it. I may have to stop on the way home tonight to get some things, but I can do the Rouses in the CBD as opposed to going all the way uptown, which can wait until Saturday. I have some things that need to get done between now and Monday–short story revision, more work on the book, reading The Get Off, which I’ve moved to the top of the TBR pile–as well as cleaning up the house some. Working on the book last night was difficult, primarily because I realized how shitty the work on the current chapter was, and I also realized I have ten characters to keep track of in the Diderot House during the hurricane–not very easy, and means I need to pay a lot closer attention. I am enjoying the writing, though yesterday’s being tired meant it was more of a slog than anything else. I am physically tired this morning but not mentally fatigued, which is a lovely thing. My synapses aren’t all firing properly this morning–I got confused about something I should know like the back of my hand, which was a little alarming, but once the coffee kicks in I should be able to make it through the day.
And the SEC Gymnastics championship meet is this weekend, too, which will be fun to watch. GEAUX TIGERS!!!
The world is continuing to burn to the ground as I type, and every day it seems to be a bit worse. That slippery slope they always warned us about when it came to the Second Amendment? Turns out the entire Constitution and all of the institutions and systems put into place to preserve liberty and freedom was also a slippery slope, and now we’re at the bottom of the slope, having slid all the way down into authoritarianism. It has always amazed me that racists would rather lose all their freedoms and liberties instead of sharing that with everyone else.
And the rebranding of the new party from the left that will rise from the ashes of the once great Democratic party? It should be called the Liberty Party. Go ahead and call us libs, racist garbage, just know that from now on I will be hearing that as “pro-liberty” instead of “liberal.” Fuck off all the way, Cons. I’ve never understood why we never called them cons, in all honesty. They are the party of con artists and convicts, after all–and in the instance of “pros and cons”, again, a negative connotation for those three letters. At some point I will write about the decline of the American Right–but did it really decline? Weren’t they always the pro-Fascist party? And moderates can also go fuck all the way off. They’ve been surrendering to the Fascist Right for so long it’s their second nature.
Sigh.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Thursday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again tomorrow.
Ah, Wednesday and it’s all downhill for the rest of the week, isn’t it? Huzzah! I feel good this morning, too, more rested and alert than I have been for most of the week. So, this week feels back to normal in that weird way of feeling better later in the week as my body again resets to getting up early every day. I was fatigued again last night when I got home from work, but I wrote for a little while once I was home, and did some chores (the kitchen looks presentable again) before zoning out with The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and the news last night. I also ran an errand after work, picking up my copy of Christa Faust’s The Get Off, the third and probably final book of the Angel Dare series. I loved the first two (Money Shot and Choke Hold), and nobody writes like Christa. If you’ve not read Christa, and love noir, you really can’t go wrong with reading this trilogy. It really is fantastic.
As a general rule, I simply watch the antics of “”book social media” from a removed, slightly bemused distance and don’t get involved, other than a comment about how jaw-droppingly insane the latest controversy on those sites are, and these controversies usually involve the actions of a problematic author and/or publisher. I have my thoughts and opinions about each and every topic in those hashtags and posts that grow heated (remember the fun days of American Dirt? Good times!) but I don’t contribute to them because I don’t see any point. Are there authors that write bigoted, uninformed work that is questionable at best and horrifying at its worst? Are there readers who will embrace those works because said stories confirm their prejudices and values? 100%. Are they all, authors and readers, awful people? Certainly. Will arguing with them on social media do anything other than raise my blood pressure and wreck my day? Not likely. Personally? I don’t want to ever unintentionally offend anyone (unless you’re MAGA, in which case you shouldn’t be reading my work in the first place because you are not my intended audience but if you are reading it, suck it up snowflakes, and fuck your feelings); and I constantly question my choices in my work. My go-to is always if I question it, best to remove it. (Sidebar: I bet the American Dirt author–Jeanine Cummins?– was really happy about the pandemic because it made everyone forget about her and her shitty racist book.) There have been some tempests in this week’s (and last’s) social media teapots1, haven’t there? Sheesh. There was an explosion (again) of homophobia in the m/m writing community, which got people riled up (I love when cishet straight white women inform gay men that books with two men falling in love aren’t for us.) There was another kerfuffle where a romance writer gave her main male character an HEA–just not with the female lead, but another man. Horrors! Needless to say, that also triggered an on-line meltdown, and I am reminded again why I never want to write romance…just like I eschew the y/a publishing community, which is also a snake pit.
I’d rather jump into a piranha-infested river, to be honest. Or be forced to be on a Kardashian television show.2
And yesterday, the “Tori Woods” groomer romance situation blew up on the Internet–and her book, about a “romance” that begins when an adult male is attracted to a three-year-old “but waits for her to grow-up so it’s not child sexual abuse”, is from the same publisher as the last author who wrote racist books and was “canceled” (whatever the fuck that means) deservedly for being a racist piece of shit. Sounds like a publisher issue to me, doesn’t it? I think the publisher has also published problematically racist books before, too. There was some historical romance writer who also outed herself as a racist pos–apparently, people of color only existed in the past to be enslaved or rescued by noble white people–and seriously, how did RWA take so long to burn to the ground in the first place?3
Don’t get me wrong; I still want to write a gay romance novel at some point–and maybe even more than one, honestly. But I’d really rather not get dragged into that on-line community, if I can. (I saw yesterday that someone is publishing a grooming romance–and the grooming started when the girl was THREE. Um…yeah, no thanks.) Did not trying to be a part of the on-line y/a community probably, possibly have cost me some sales? For sure, but at the same time I am really grateful to have my peace of mind.
Peace of mind is priceless.
I also got my assignments for Saints and Sinners/Tennessee Williams Fests, and I am going to be hopping all weekend, it looks like–panels, a tribute reading, the anthology launch–and I will have LOTS of friends in town, too. But this year I took Monday off, too, so I can recover from the weekend and get things done around the house. I’ll also be commuting back and forth so Sparky’s not alone for the whole weekend, and someone needs to feed him, anyway. He is not going to be happy. Paul went to the office yesterday and wasn’t home when I arrived, so Sparky was especially cuddly and needy. I don’t mind, but clearly he doesn’t like being left alone–or puts on a good show after he has been.
My Youtube algorithms, always an interesting mystery, have recently started showing me videos about the classic scifi television program V. I loved V when it originally aired, but when it became a regular weekly series in the 1980s, I stopped watching because I lost interest. I did love the rebooted series, which was fantastic and again ended on a great cliff-hanger. And of course, once I watched one video, it started showing me more. This of course is because I’ve been watching videos about the rise of fascism in Europe between 1918-1939, World War II, and the “America First” movement of that period (newsflash: conservatives were Nazi-adjacent until Pearl Harbor)…and that’s the allegory at play in the series–the Visitors are stand-ins for Nazis, etc. I had grown up believing that it could never happen here…but watching this show made me realize how incredibly easy it is for people to side with their oppressors. It’s something, sadly, that is very human. I also remember a school did a social experiment with fascism, which was made into a TV movie called The Wave, which was again the same thing–the way we can so easily slide into being “good Germans.” I read Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here during the reign of Bush II: Electric Boogaloo, which cemented it even further into my head. I’ve talked before about writing a book that I originally got the idea for in the 1990s, where the queers fill in for the scapegoated minority…interesting, though, that my video research into fascism triggered the algorithm to remind me of V, which was also probably, along with Red Dawn, the biggest influences on that idea.
And on that grim note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a wonderful midweek Wednesday, and I’ll probably be back later or tomorrow.
Although I am really hoping the move to cancel Kim Kardashian and her odious family really takes this time. ↩︎
Please, God, let this be the end of all things Kardashian. Haven’t we suffered enough? ↩︎
Racists working with a gay white man (racist) brought RWA down, remember? ↩︎
Here we are on a Thursday morning. Everyone is arriving in Denver for Left Coast Crime, but I don’t have any FOMO. Sure, there are people I would love to see and spend time with, and I always have fun at conferences, but…there are also other people there. I thought I would really miss not going to Bouchercon in Nashville last year, but…I didn’t. I’ve always been a FOMO person, scared that I was missing out on a good time, but I didn’t the entire time it was going on, or even after. And the local ones are next weekend, anyway.
I just saw that we are in the path of some massive storm system this weekend that’s going to throw up potential tornadoes in New Orleans, which means we may lose power, which will be incredibly annoying if it happens, but also means I can just light some candles and read in my easy chair. I do want to make some more reading progress this weekend in addition to everything else on the to-do list. We just can’t seem to catch a break down here this year, can we? Terrorism, blizzards, high winds, the Super Bowl, Carnival…sheesh. It’s like we can’t ever just breathe…and we are heading into stinging caterpillar season, with swarming termites not far behind.
We were busy at work yesterday again, with the end result that I was, as I suspected, exhausted when I got home from my post-work errands last night. I collapsed into my easy chair with a purring kitty and was down for the rest of the night. I caught up on my reality show, caught up on the latest news of the great American collapse (or whatever future historians will call the end of the Great American Experiment in Self-Rule), and then went to bed at a fairly early hour. I did run the dishwasher, as planned, but not the washing machine as planned. I am a bit fatigued today–synapses aren’t quite firing the way they should be–so I may not be able to write or read when I get home tonight. I guess we shall see. We’re also busy today, too. Sigh. It’s been a week at the office, has it not? But at least I only need to log four hours of remote work and then the day is mine.
Woo-hoo!
I was, naturally, saddened by the loss of a long-time friend this week, Felice Picano. It’s very strange to think I won’t ever see him again, or get that mischievous kid look on his face when he was about to say something absolutely terrible about someone to me. Felice was the first published writer I ever met. I went to a signing he did for the paperback release of Like People in History at the Borders in Minneapolis that used to be on the corner of Lake and Hennepin. Paul had bought me a hardcover copy as a gift the year before, and I’d loved the book. I was too shy and awestruck to do anything but put my book down for a signature…but when Paul went to work for the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival, they wanted to put together a queer panel and I suggested Felice for it, and I got to pick him up at the airport. That ride in from the airport was my first actual conversation with him, and the start of a friendship that lasted almost thirty years. We always tried to have coffee or lunch or something when he was in town for Saints & Sinners after that, I stayed in his house in the Hollywood Hills several times, and there was one amazing weekend when he gave me a lift to Palm Springs from LA, and oh, how hard we laughed in the car on the way there. I didn’t see or interact with him as much as I used to, but every time I saw him, it was like we’d just seen each other the day before. He meant a lot to me, and the fact that he always treated me as a peer from that first meeting at the airport on meant the world to me.
I just can’t believe I’ll never see him again. The worst thing about getting older is losing people.
And on that somber note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Friday Eve, everyone, and I’ll be back eventually.
Ballerinos have the most amazing bodies–and even more amazing is what they can DO with those bodies.
Monday morning and back to the office with me today. Woo-hoo! I’ll be in the clinic all day today for what is usually my Admin day, but things happen. Woo-hoo, indeed. I do feel rested for the day, which is good. It’s going to also take me a few days to get used to coming to work in the dark again–actually, it’s more gray than dark, but you know what I mean; the sun isn’t completely up before I park at the building. But I do prefer coming home after work in daylight, which is always a plus. We finished watching all of our shows this weekend–Prime Target, The Madness–and caught up on those still airing (Reacher, Abbott Elementary), and did a lengthy binge of Arrested Development. We also watched two documentary series last night–the Gabby Petito one and the Ruby Franke one–both of which were enormously disturbing1.
I didn’t get much done this weekend, other than some writing and finishing reading my book, which will work–no choice there, really–so this week means completely buckling down and ploughing ahead on everything. We’re going to be busy in clinic all week–the week after Mardi Gras, always, just like right after Southern Decadence and Halloween; the gays know when they need to get STI testing done–which will be draining and tiring, but there it is, you know? Wednesday is Pay the Bills Day, and the schedule will be getting easier by the end of the week. I did do a lot of note taking and thinking this weekend, which is always a plus and helpful in the long run…but it doesn’t get the writing done, either. And deadlines loom!
I need to get a lot done this week, so hopefully after work today Sparky won’t be needy like he usually is and I’ll be able to sit in my chair and get some work done. I was thinking about that this morning–Scooter was much the same, if not needier, because he’d been left alone all day. Sparky is needier, because he thinks he’s abandoned when we’re both not home because Paul works at home a lot more since HIS BUILDING COLLAPSED. So now whenever Sparky is home by himself for a protracted period of time the poor needy little boy needs lots of attention and love when I get home. (I do have my laptop and have been working in my easy chair while he hogs my chair–he also always wants to be seated in my desk chair when I’m home, too) What can I say? I’m a cat dad.
The Gabby Petito documentary made me think about an idea I’ve had for quite some time about a book I want to write about a mom like the murderer’s mom (that Burn after Reading note was so horrifying; no wonder the son had little to no moral compass) called Boymom, which has become a thing lately and is very creepy to me. I ran across one on social media the other day that was particularly creepy and borderline incestuous; young women need to avoid that woman’s son like he has bubonic plague. (I really need to revisit the novel Mildred Pierce; I know the film practically by heart and the book is different; I’ve always been interested in Veda’s perspective…) There’s just something about parenting noir that has always intrigued me and I’ve always wanted to write about it.
Probably because I don’t actually have kids.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back in the morning.
Odds this image will trigger the puritannical Meta censors? 1:1.
Both were disturbing for different reasons; I was appalled by the conduct of Gabby’s killer’s family (the apple didn’t fall far from that tree), and of course, Ruby Franke’s descent into narcissism and religious mania, resulting in the abuse of her children, was horrifying to see. ↩︎
Sunday morning where we’ve sprung forward (I hate Daylight Savings Time) and I feel off, like always when this happens. I’ve never cared for the spring part of it, but must admit I do enjoy the “extra” hour in the fall. I did go to bed early last night, and slept well–it apparently rained overnight, which undoubtedly helped with that. Of course, Sparky’s body clock didn’t change, so he wasn’t hungry enough to bother me until it was actually time for me to go ahead and get up, which was nice. (It’s this fall when he’ll annoy me early, isn’t it?) I have some things I need to get done today, which should be easy enough to do. I finished reading The Bell in the Fog yesterday (my thoughts are posted here) and really enjoyed it; and I am going to revisit an old Ian Fleming James Bond novel, Moonraker1next I think. I may read something new alongside of it, but I haven’t decided which yet. Revisiting the original Fleming Bond novels will also give me something to think and write about on the subject of toxic masculinity and sociopathy. (So many post-war “heroes” defined masculinity so narrowly–and dangerously; Mike Hammer, James Bond…and yes, reading The Bell in the Fog put me in mind of post-war crime fiction.)
I am kind of working on a long essay–I have been since last spring, actually–about gay men and masculinity, and how societal norms and mores about them impact/twist our lives and makes it harder for us to just, I don’t know, be. I just read a great piece on the taboo of the male body that also plays into the paradigm I’m writing about. The societal reticence about the male body, and male nudity, is almost always centered on the groin area; you could depict a male completely nude as long as there was a fig leaf over the genitals. A lot of Renaissance paintings and sculptures at one point had “modesty leaves” placed over make genitals–and why is that? (Don’t even get me started on women…I’d be here for the rest of the year) Because whenever someone sees a limp penis resting on a pair of testicles they go mad with desire and sexual lust? (Although the way websites for gays drool and get “parched” over revealing pictures of influencers, actors, musicians, and other celebrities has always turned my stomach a little bit. I know, I know, but at the same time there’s something a little ‘junior high locker room” about that I find personally distasteful and almost cringe-y. Your mileage might vary and I am only speaking for myself. I enjoy looking at gorgeous men as much as the next gay man or cishet woman; I post one on here with every entry that isn’t about a book, movie or TV show. I like eye candy! There’s nothing wrong with it! I just feel the way the links and emails and so forth are shared, and the language used, is kind of juvenile and pandering and Tiger Beat-esque.)
You see how reading can influence my work? Lev’s got me thinking about writing queer historicals again–not that I was ever not going to write Chlorine, and I am hoping to get that done this summer or fall, finally–but the next book I am writing is Never Kiss a Stranger, which is also kind of a historical, since it is set in New Orleans in the summer of 1994. (An excerpt from it will be published in an upcoming anthology, which is very exciting for me. I also sold an excerpt from Chlorine recently also as a short story, so guess what, Constant Reader? You’ll be able to get a preview of both books soon! How fucking fun is that?) I often think of all the things I want to write–books, essays, short stories–and get overwhelmed because I know I’ll never get to them all before I expire. It doesn’t look like I will ever be able to retire now (fuck you again, MAGA, now and forever and ever, amen), so it really is going to be about managing my energy, being selfish, and being able to continue to write in my free time. It’s also going to make doing research no easier. Sigh. I am starting to resent all the volunteer time I’ve done over the last twenty years or so–not for Saints and Sinners, but pretty much everything else. I used to think I was making a difference, not only in the world but in various writing communities, but the truth is I wasn’t.
I’ve always wanted to make a difference in the world, and the reality is I should have realized that difference I could make would be best served from my writing, not from anything else. I think that comes from a lifetime of never taking myself seriously because no one else ever did. I did learn things about myself, the community, and other people from the volunteering; so that was something gained, and while I hardly consider myself to be a “sage” or even a “community elder” 2, I have been around a long time. I always thought I got started in publishing way too late, but the number of people who published their first novel before forty isn’t that long, actually. But that also means I’ve been doing this now for almost thirty years (I started writing for a queer paper in Minneapolis in 1996, and my how things have changed over the years. I also never really had any desire to be famous; sure, when I was a kid I fantasized about being a movie star or a singer (alas, couldn’t act or sing), but writing was what I always wanted to do, hungered to do, and basically that desire subsumed every other ambition or fantasy. I also never wanted to be a celebrity author, or have the kind of success others have. All I ever wanted was to just write and make a living from that. I don’t need to be rich; I’ve never needed that. I’d prefer to be comfortable, and never have to worry about bills and things.
But the thing with money and success is most people never think they have enough, isn’t it?
Look at Space Nazi, for example. Isn’t he about the right age to be a boy from Brazil?
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader, and I will chat at you again soon, most likely tomorrow morning.
I saw a meme on-line that pointed out how dated Moonraker was–since it’s about a billionaire who moves to England and gets involved in the government with an ulterior motive… ↩︎
I can’t deny I am old, so therefore it stands to reason I am, in fact, an elder. But I don’t think I’m a sage at all. ↩︎
God, how I hate that fucking song. Maybe it was okay the first two or three hundred times I heard it, but now? It sets my teeth on edge and I kind of root for the devil now.
Sparky got me up early this morning, which is fine. I feel a little tired and sore from standing out on the parade route for a couple of hours yesterday (three or so, to be exact) for the Iris parade. Iris is my favorite of all the parades, and always has been. I fell in love with the ladies of Iris that first time I came here for Carnival back in 1995, and that has never changed. It was a beautiful day for parades, too. It was sunny, not a cloud in the sky, and the temperature hovering the mid 70s. I also forget how much fun the parades are from year to year. It is fun out there. Everyone is in a good, festive mood; everyone is friendly; and you meet lots of people out there on the route. The parades always create this incredible feeling of community that’s kind of hard to describe. No one is completely wasted, everyone is just buzzed and vibing and having fun. We got buried in beads like we always do at Iris, and then we came inside and skipped Tucks. My legs feel fatigued this morning, so I don’t know if I’ll be going out today (there are four: Okeanos, Mid-city, Thoth, and Bacchus. Bacchus and Thoth are extremely popular, so it will be madness down at the corner too. I may wander out there, I may not, it depends on how I feel. I took tomorrow off so as not to have to deal with traffic and parking (I’d have to leave the office at two anyway, at the very least), and we’ll be going out for Orpheus tomorrow night. Today I really need to be more active–I need to clean and I need to write and I need to get my act together.
A running theme on this blog, methinks. Some things never change.
I did get a chance to speak to my sister yesterday as well, and found out that I was correct–we had both had the measles when we were kids (“freedom freckles,” as someone said on Threads yesterday), which confers immunity so I don’t need to get a booster. I thought we had, but wasn’t sure. (She currently has shingles, despite the vaccine, but it’s a much milder case than had she not.) We had the mumps and the measles at the same time (and I just realized how terrified our parents must have been back then, since measles could kill or do even worse damage; I can’t even fathom 1/10th of how much worry they had when we were small kids), and chicken pox by itself at a later date (hence immunity from all poxes). I also remember getting the polio vaccine and rubella; I remember lining up in second grade to get them. So, fuck you, anti-vaxxers, your kids aren’t going to give me anything that could potentially kill me. Can’t say the same for your kids, though. The recent rubella outbreak in Texas? Hey anti-vaxxer trash: why don’t you go ahead and google what happens when a pregnant woman gets rubella, you fucking self-absorbed bitches? Isn’t it bad enough that you’re entire thesis is “I’d rather have a dead child than an autistic one”? All those tombstones for children in those old Alabama cemeteries…interesting how few recent graves there are for children. So, just go ahead and miss me with your Dr. Google research on vaccines, trash. If you want your kids to die, have at it. But why should other people’s children have to die to satisfy your egocentric narcissism?
And miss me with your “pro-life” stance and your Christianity. Suffer the little children wasn’t a directive.
Honestly.
We got caught up on our shows last night, and started watching this new Robert De Niro show on Netflix called Zero Day. It was entertaining enough and has an incredible cast–Joan Allen, Angela Bassett, Connie Britton, De Niro himself–and the writing seems pretty top notch. It’s a political thriller about the aftermath of a massive cyber attack on the United States, and De Niro is a retired president (Bassett is the current), asked to head up a new agency to find out who did it and how to stop them from doing it again. It’s not an action show–De Niro isn’t getting into fistfights and gun battles with bad guys–but more cerebral with twists and turns. (Seriously, the fistfights and gun battles all start to seem the same after awhile, and some of the shows–The Recruit, The Night Agent, Prime Target–also start running together, too. Reacher remains fantastic, though.) Political thrillers are kind of hard to watch now for me–the insanity running the country currently kind of makes them quaint in a way–but here we are, you know? I also saw that Fletcher Knebel’s old thriller about an insane president–Night of Camp David–is making the rounds again (I read it the first time around with this bullshit), but not even Knebel, who wrote a lot of political thrillers, could have imagined a United States where a political party would rally around a sociopathic narcissist, with the media working hand in glove with them to present this as normal and sane. Not even John LeCarré or Robert Ludlum could have come up with this kind of story. (Stephen King foresaw it also with The Dead Zone–a book that I don’t think gets enough appreciation for its brilliance– but even he couldn’t see it winning in the end.)
We’ve taken our country for granted for so long that none of us could ever believe it could come to an end…kind of like the Trojans and the Carthaginians and Rome itself. Everything ends. I had hoped it would last until I no longer had to worry about it, but I guess I lived longer than I should have.
And on that grim note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I will talk to you later.
Tuesday of Jury Duty and parades; Sunday’s parades are rolling tonight, which should make getting home tonight a lot of fun. Jury duty was painless, other than I sat there without being called up to the pool until all juries were seated and they let us go in the early afternoon. I then had to go to work because the slip they gave me was for only five hours, and I wasn’t up for using my paid time off to get to eight for the day, so…there I went. I mostly scrolled through my phone while reading Lev AC Rosen’s marvelous The Bell in the Fog, which I am really enjoying. I do have to report again today, and I hope that’s it for the week. They did say that the city was shutting down at 5 tonight until Ash Wednesday (yes, we do pretty much close the city down for the last week of parades, don’t you wish you lived here, too?), so I don’t think I’ll have to go back after today. But that’s fine. I’ll either go up for voir dire or be let go after the morning, so hopefully I’ll be able to spend time reading my book while waiting to be called or released and that will be the end of it. Sunday’s rained out parades are tonight, so I am going to want to be home well before four. (I did slalom by driving on St. Charles Avenue; they have barricades so no car can get up enough speed to really do a repeat of the New Year’s terrorist attack on Bourbon Street…and it’s kind of fun. Traffic will continue to be a nightmare until after it’s all over. I just need to make it through this week until Friday…
I managed to work on my story last night. I deleted the extra, unusable 900 words, which dropped it down to about a thousand, and am now at a little less than three. Good progress, and I should be able to get it finished tonight. I doubt I’ll go out to the parades tonight–getting up at six every morning certainly puts a damper on that–but I do want to get home before the true madness starts. I’ve been very lucky with parking so far–praise be to the Carnival gods–and I know that’s not going to last through the entire season before the car is permanently parked for about five days Friday morning. I am debating whether to take all of Lundi Gras off, or going in for a few hours and leaving early. The latter makes the most sense, after all; save that time jealously! I don’t want to run out again, and I am actually at the point where I’ve got a nice amount of both (sick and vacation) in my bank now. Woo-hoo! At least I don’t have to worry about the time off I need to use for parade season. That’s a lovely release.
The country continues to swirl around the toilet bowl more with each passing day. Yesterday we betrayed NATO and Ukraine at the United Nations, joining with the true axis of evil on this planet–Russia, North Korea, Iran, etc.–and continue to lose whatever moral leadership and authority we ever had (not that we ever had much of anything on that score to begin with); we are becoming isolated, the way we were before and between the world wars…which turned out so well for the world in the end, didn’t it? What happened in Coeur de Lion, Idaho the other day was appalling and recorded for the entire world to see (another black eye for the country); the violent abuse of a woman simply because she was calling out the bullshit she was hearing, while white people (men and women) cheered and applauded and the moderator of the event taunted her from the stage on his microphone, making jokes? That is some seriously small-dick energy, really. It also resulted in the usual social media nonsense, with people on-line responding (especially white women) with the usual lack of self-awareness: “I would never allow that to happen in front of me without saying or doing something!” Newsflash: white people–both men and women– always turn their heads and look away, “not my problem” or “I am not putting myself at risk to intervene” and so on…until it actually affects them. Where was all this energy on November 5th? Where was it for George Floyd or Breonna Taylor? Where is it for trans people, being stripped of their rights every day? Where it it for queer people, ever? Where, after all, were all the Southern white people who were opposed to racism, Jim Crow, and lynchings that I always hear about now, but actually did nothing while it was actually happening?
Not my problem is always the response, but everyone marginalized (you know, the people so many straight white women like to lord it over) is supposed to immediately DO SOMETHING when it’s a straight white woman–and if you point out their blatant hypocrisy…you’re a misogynist. Straight white women LOVE to pull out their “oppression” card whenever a discussion isn’t going their way and they have no defense for the appalling things they say other than “you have male privilege.” Really? My sex life was a crime until 2003. Was yours for the first forty-two years of your life, ma’am? I couldn’t marry my partner until 2014. Did you have to wait until you were fifty-three before you could legally marry the love of your life? I watched all my friends die (twice over!) in the 1980s while most straight white women smiled dismissively and said “not my problem.” Some of the biggest public homophobes of my adult life were straight white women. I know as a cisgender male I do have privilege; I certainly have more than lesbians and trans people, for example. But I have always lived under the threat of violence as a gay man; and before I owned my identity I did not pass as straight.
And yes, gay men also get sexually assaulted–and usually with objects. Gay men also get beaten and attacked, even killed, by straight white men. Sometimes with straight white women cheering them on. You just don’t hear about it up there in your precious lily-white privilege tower because you don’t care. Often assaults on gay white men–just like assaults of straight white women–don’t get reported because the cops don’t care and blame the victims. You don’t care unless it’s a white woman…when white women made sure the ERA didn’t pass; white women got Black and brown men killed all the time; and the Daughters of the Confederacy weren’t exactly gay white men, were they? A Republican controlled US government laughed about AIDS killing gay men.
But do go on with your homophobia, dear.
We all need to do better. It’s very easy to see something appalling in an online video and be very upset at the failures of witnesses to act, and to say “I would never.” But ask yourself this, white people: have you ever seen a white someone being racist to a Black person and said nothing? Have you watched as homophobes come for queer people, in real life or on-line, and did nothing? Do you challenge racism, homophobia, misogyny, and transphobia when you see it, or do you leave it alone? I know what the answer to that question is, by the way, and keyboard warriors who do nothing but talk big on-line sicken me to my core.
And for the record, I will always go on the offensive when some ignorant bitch of a white woman tells me I’m a misogynist when I am agreeing with her–especially when she tells me she’s done more for queer rights than me, using the condescending straight people “honey.” Literally, go fuck yourself with barbed wire, you homophobic bitch. Misogynist enough for you? (She also trotted out the “gay friends” defense–and when I pointed that out she then claimed “I never said they were friends”–oh, so you don’t have any friends but you’ve been to Pride a few times and even marched in a parade once! My God, let’s put up a statue of you in front of Stonewall! WHERE WOULD QUEER PEOPLE BE WITHOUT THE SACRIFICES OF STRAIGHT WHITE WOMEN? I guess I should be glad you didn’t go with the old pedophile/groomer shit, Miss Zero Followers. I screen capped the entire thing before blocking her flat bony unwashed ass.)
Coeur de Lion is now in the “find out” phase, and if we actually had a real government this would be investigated as a civil rights violation by the Department of Justice…but we don’t have a real government anymore. I always wondered what it felt like to be an abolitionist in the 1950s, when the government was geared to protect slavery in the land of the “free.” The company that employed the thugs that assaulted the woman has lost its business license, and it also looks like the grinning douchebag sheriff has been defrauding the LAPD pension fund–working another LE job while drawing a disability pension from another one–so I hope California throws the book at him.
This is what we are. This is what we have allowed our country to become. Even those of us who voted against this didn’t do enough to stop this—and it should have been stopped when it was the Tea Party. Remember those racists? The ones who didn’t want healthcare and the media dutifully reported on everything they said and pushed it breathlessly without ever calling out ONCE the clear and obvious racism? FOTUS climbed aboard the Tea Party train, remember? He started the birther bullshit and promoted it on every network who would let him because he was a “celebrity.”
But no, white people who patted themselves on the back for voting for Obama were very quick to stay home in the 2010 midterms because cleaning up the Bush mess was taking longer than everyone thought it should.
And God forbid everyone get health insurance. The HORROR!
We all own this, you know. Every last one of us white people. And we’re the ones who need to clean it all up–even though we know the fucking assholes we’re saving will knife us in the back again at the very first opportunity. They might regret their votes now–but they would do it again in a heartbeat. They prefer this to having a biracial woman in charge.
This is exactly what they wanted. And we should never let them forget. Letting them getting away with it was a mistake in 1865.
And on that note I am heading into the spice mines. Have a great day, and remember to do your part–even if it’s something you think small or inconsequential. Water wears away stone and the effects may not be immediate.
Queer and Loathing in America 