Tag: Christianity

The Devil Went Down to Georgia

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.

(Our Love) Don’t Throw It All Away

A cold Saturday morning in the Lost Apartment. My doctor’s appointment went well–all my vitals were at appropriate levels, my lungs are clear, and all medications appear to be working properly, which is lovely. I came home from that appointment to do chores and make the house orderly before we headed out to Metairie for Paul’s appointment, after which we went to Costco. You know, for the first Friday of parade season, it wasn’t that terrible. It was crowded, yes, and there were times I had to wait for inconsiderate assholes who were blocking aisles thoughtlessly (a regular occurrence at the grocery store, a rarity for Costco) and the check out lines ferociously long, but it didn’t take us long to spend a shit load of money (Paul also ordered a new pair of glasses and our membership was also due for renewal). I was a bit concerned about parking when we got back, as it was closer to parade rolling time that I was comfortable with. I had noticed there were a lot of cars parking in the neighborhood–unusual–when I left for my appointment, and there was also a lot more traffic on the roads I usually traverse. Understandably, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to park within a mile of the house, but once we departed for Metairie/Costco I realized why everything was the way it was–they’ve turned the side of St. Charles people can drive down1 while parades are rolling into an obstacle course2. This is, I imagine, for crowd safety precautions after New Year’s, but damn…it’s going to make negotiating St. Charles and the neighborhood about ten times harder than it is usually is.

Thanks, asshole terrorist. I hope you’re roasting in hell like you deserve.

I also spent some time with Lev AC Rosen’s marvelous The Bell in the Fog, the second book in his Andy Mills detective series set in early 1950’s San Francisco. It’s an interesting period to read about: after the war but before Stonewall, when sodomy was still an enforceable crime and the hatred of queer people was so intense they were targeted mercilessly and no one fucking cared.3 Lev is a terrific writer–I loved Lavender House–and this one starts out really well. It’s very reminiscent of the old masters of crime/noir/hardboiled–Hammett, Chandler, Cain–which is why he gets nominated for awards so regularly.

I also have apparently sold another short story. I had sent something to an anthology at some point last year and completely forgot about it, to be honest; yesterday I got an apologetic email from (I guess? It has been a while) the editor saying they want it if it’s still available. That was a lovely bit of news, to go along with the terrific feedback from the other anthology that asked me for one. I am going to finish writing another one this weekend (if it kills me) so I can focus on finishing my book. I’d forgotten–as it has been a hot minute–how nice it is to get positive feedback from peers. And rather than questioning or explaining it away in my head (just being nice, etc etc), I decided to accept it and feel good about it, which is a lovely new approach to my career. In the moments when I allow myself to go down the natural path of current events (my publisher will get shut down, my books removed from the bookseller websites–it galls me that they’re on Target’s website, although they probably make very little me off me–and my career shut down completely in the de-queering of the country), I find it ironic that my stress, anxiety and depression didn’t allow me to ever enjoy my career very often, and that now I am finally beginning to enjoy myself and the nicer side of publishing/writing, it could all be stripped away from me. (For the record, straight people, losing our writing careers because of our sexual identity is something we have to think about all the time. Do you? So, fuck off with your I’m-an-ally-as-long-as-it’s-just-words-online bullshit. DO SOMETHING.)

But yes, I am feeling like I definitely need to get back to producing work, and that feels good for a change, you know?

Sparky also let me sleep late this morning, the little darling, and even curled up in the bed with me rather than trying to get me up. I think he waits for my alarm like Pavlov’s dog; I’ve trained him to react to the sound as well as his stomach. We watched LSU Gymnastics win at Kentucky last night, but they didn’t have a great meet–a bit of a letdown after defeating Oklahoma last week in Baton Rouge and a packed house–but it was fine; they hadn’t won in Lexington since 2016, and this year they did despite a bad meet. We then watched the premiere episode of Season Three of Reacher, which is based on one of my favorite Reacher novels, and am loving it. (I also like that his portrayer, Alan Ritchson–whom I’ve liked since I first noticed him on Smallville–is a devout Christian and not a cosplay one; he calls out the evangelicals and their false prophet regularly. He recently gave an interview to GQ in which he talked about Matt Gaetz, whom he went to high school with, and just ripped him to fucking shreds. You see? I don’t object to Christianity when people actually are real Christians.) We also watched some Arrested Development, too, before going to bed much later than we should have.

Overall, Friday was a pretty good day. I am going to get some reading and writing and cleaning done today–I need to unload the dishwasher and refill it at some point; and there’s always organizing and cleaning to get done. I also need to answer emails–I no longer have to stick to my old rule of “no emails on the weekend”–and I need to get some more newsletters written and finished to send. I’m trying hard to not deluge people with my newsletter; I am very prolific, as has been pointed out in the past repeatedly, and who wants to read my thoughts, views, and opinions on a daily basis? Even though I didn’t publish anything–not even a short story last year–I still produce a prodigious amount of writing all the time.

And on that note, I think I am going to head into the spice mines–more accurately, I am going to repair to my easy chair with my book for a while before I actually start getting things done around here–and I may be back later. I am trying not to do more than one post here per day…but anyway, have a lovely Saturday, and I’ll be right back here tomorrow.

Screenshot
  1. I’ve always marveled that one side of the neutral ground is for the parades and the other side is open to traffic heading uptown. St. Charles is a major artery of the city, and they usually have to keep that side open because everything inside the parade is blocked off–and people do need to get uptown. Not really sure how this obstacle course drivers need to negotiate will work, or if they are going to take them down every night and put them back up again before the parades start–which means shutting St. Charles down for however long it takes to set up. Sigh. ↩︎
  2. I’ll try to get a picture of it at some point. ↩︎
  3. Straight people have always been awful, and the white ones the worst of all. ↩︎

Time Passages

Saturday morning in the Lost Apartment, and it’s Super Bowl Eve; aka a mere forty-eight hours or so before New Orleans gets back to what usually passes for normal around here. Sparky got me up early this morning, but after a sluggish start I did get up and now, after my first cup of coffee, am starting to wake up. I did sleep well again last night, which was lovely–it’s always lovely to sleep on freshly laundered bedding–and after I finished my remote work duties yesterday, spent the rest of the doing more cleaning and organizing and did some writing. This morning I have some things to do around here as far as cleaning and organizing are concerned, and a couple of errands to do this afternoon, and then it’s back to the safety of the Lost Apartment for the rest of this Super Bowl weekend. I have literally zero interest in the Super Bowl; the removal of the end racism from the end zones by the NFL–an organization that makes the majority of its money off the bodies of Black athletes–is the kind of capitulation to tyranny one can expect from the ultra-rich. They’re getting their tax cuts, and their money is more important to them than anything else. I think that an oligarchy was always a danger to a capitalist system; the great irony is that was the preachings of false prophet and disgusting hypocrite Ayn Rand; it is impossible for ethical conduct in a country that prioritizes the dollar above all else. Capitalism has even infected Christianity, but that religion has been a rotting hulk for centuries already by prioritizing political and earthly power over spiritual.

It really is lovely having a working garbage disposal and a clean apartment; Paul and I even talked about how weird it is that such a little thing makes such a difference. The plumber also fixed the sinks so they drain properly and repaired the bathtub faucet so it no longer leaks, and just those little changes make such a huge difference. My kitchen is galley style, so counter space can be pretty limited, with the Keurig, the microwave, and my computer printer on the counters. The garbage disposal not working also meant the dishwasher didn’t drain, so I couldn’t use it–nor could I let anything go down the drain with the disposal because it would wind up backing up into the dishwasher. So, I needed counter space for the dishes to dry, and I needed to fill a stockpot with hot water to rinse the soap off them when I washed the dishes, cutting down on counter space because I had to put a beach towel down for them to dry on. This snowballed, made me feel like the apartment was getting smaller and closing in, and that it was pointless to even try to keep the house neat because it didn’t take very much for it to look like a disaster.

But finally–we’re getting it back together and it feels quite marvelous, in all honesty, to come downstairs to a clean, empty sink and nothing on the counters.

It’s been in the upper seventies/low eighties this entire week–which says everything about New Orleans weather; just a few weeks ago we had a blizzard and the city shut down for like three days–but here we are, having great weather for all the tourists here for the Super Bowl, which I am not going to watch. We did watch LSU Gymnastics defeat Alabama last night, and after that we watched this week’s Prime Target, which we are really enjoying–but we should have waited until we could binge it, as my short term memory problems mean I easily lose the plot thread from week to week. I hate losing my short term memory like this, but what else am I going to do but deal with it and come up with work-arounds? (LOL, I am realizing now that I have anxiety medications that my life has always been about finding work-arounds!) But I am feeling better these days, and here’s hoping that will continue as we move forward and despite the dumpster fire the country is gradually turning into. Thanks again, MAGA voters! But today I am going to clean and write and run my errands and try to finish reading my book and get things checked off my to-do list. I’m hoping for a good day, like yesterday was, and I don’t think that’s a whole lot to ask, you know?

And now I am taking my coffee and my peanut butter toast to the easy chair to read for a couple of hours. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back, either later or tomorrow.

Suspicions

Thursday, last day in the office blog and while I am looking forward to the three-day weekend, I am dreading Monday–for obvious reasons–and will instead try to get shit done while taking the occasional moment to study Civil Rights some more, maybe even read my current nonfiction tome, White Too Long, about how Christianity and white supremacy have been intertwined for so long. But the week thus far has been a good one, and productive; almost like returning to the gym kicked something else into gear physically. I’ve not been physically tired (stiff, yes) or sore much since going back, and I’ve been feeling more energetic and empowered, too. I’m sleeping better, too–rarely waking up during the night or opening my eyes before Sparky gets into the bed with me right around when it’s time for me to get up. I don’t know if its the endorphins awakening everything up again, but I am more than happy to take it; I’ve certainly missed the joy of endorphin highs. I also got some amazing work done on the book last night, and that also felt good. I am doing the things that give me pleasure again, and turns out that makes me happier and more fulfilled and I enjoy my life more than just endure it.

Go fucking figure. No notes, highly recommend.

I really can be remarkably ignorant sometimes.

But the book is, as I said, coming along swimmingly. I’m starting to get into a rhythm, and I’m starting to hear Scotty’s voice again. I need to buckle down and focus harder on getting the book done–not going to be easy with Carnival on the horizon–but I’ve handled these kinds of situations before (a deadline right after Carnival) and I think as my writing muscles stretch and flex and rebuild and wake up again, hopefully I’ll be able to get back into my high productivity gear again. I know I want to start reading Bemused, maybe even as early as tonight, and spend some time with it this weekend as well.

I am also petty enough to enjoy seeing that Dollar General Anita Bryant, aka Carrie Underwood, is still getting dragged for the piece of excrement that she is. Really funny how some (straight white) people think we need to unify behind white supremacy is a serious tell, y’all. I never forgive bullies and I will never forgive Anita Bryant or her modern day iteration, either. I will never forgive people who think I should “rise above” being a target of hatred, bigotry, and prejudice and join hands with my oppressors. You want to be a doormat for the patriarchy, that’s fine–just know I will never forget or forgive, and I will point and laugh and mock for the rest of my life.

Choices.

It rained all day and all night, and it doesn’t feel that cold this morning–maybe I’m getting used to weather in the forties? AIEEEE! But we have nasty weather (as does everyone else) coming next week. It’ll be a little colder–in the thirties, but the wind chill factor will make it feel like single digits… which could bring us…gulp…snow. SNOWPOCALYPSE!!! I really do have to write about a murder on the day of a snowstorm in New Orleans. Obviously, the city freaks out and shuts down almost completely. I imagine I will have to go into work regardless–we rarely close–but a snow day could be fun, too. It’s going to be horribly cold everywhere on Tuesday, as hell is apparently freezing over. Not very subtle there, Mother Nature, but oh so apropos. Looks like the Senate Republicans are going to knuckle under and do what their Fuhrer demands to approve his terrible cabinet picks–never ever bet on Republicans having a spine or a love for country over party–so, yeah. The future’s so bleak I imagine a terminator is going to be arriving from the future at any moment.

Oddly enough, despite that horrible long dark tunnel the country is entering on Monday, I’m also getting excited about writing my next book, which has me champing to get this one written. I feel confident again, and it’s nice to think hey this is good rather than all of this is garbage why do you even bother? I love having creative thoughts and ideas running through my head all the time again. Researching pop culture and the news from the early 1970s has been fun and interesting, and has brought back a lot of memories. It’s amazing what you’ve forgotten about completely but with a reminder, will have a rush of other memories associated with that one. There were so many magazines in the 1970s, about everything. One of my teens is a car nut rebuilding the engine in a junked car since he can’t afford to buy a new or used one, and he basically wants to work on cars when he grows up, despite his parents’ wanting him to go to college, and oh my God how many car/hot rod magazines existed? How many magazines about the music industry? There were so many magazines you could actually have a comfortable freelance writing career, and when Playboy used to pay $5000 for a short story. Five thousand dollars for a short story. I’d weep with joy to get that kind of payday for a short story.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Thursday, and I may be back later. One never can be sure.

Sorry, bud, if you’re serving me my morning coffee you need skimpier shorts.

Somewhere in the Night

Monday morning and the last few days of 2024; won’t be sorry to see this year end, but also remembering to watch 2025 with a wary eye. Bad years have often been followed by worse years before, after all, and there’s never a guarantee that the new year will be any better. It’s cold here in New Orleans this morning, which didn’t exactly have me leaping out from under my warm pile of blankets. I’ve pretty much decided not to shave until New Year’s, just to see how white my pathetic beard will come in now. Usually it drives me crazy with the itching, but so far so good. Yesterday I ran my errands, did some chores, and then watched Hysteria! on Peacock, which is very interesting and clever in how it’s done (more on that later). Basically, I took the weekend off from pretty much anything except chores and errands, and why not, really? I’m kind of glad New Year’s is in two days; it’s a clear line of demarcation, and I can revamp my life beginning then, while lazily sliding into the new year. LSU plays its bowl game tomorrow, and I imagine I’ll have the football playoffs on in the background on Wednesday while I do things. I don’t really care about them, mind you, but at the same time I have an idle curiosity. I don’t really care about any of the teams that are in the play-offs, nor do I care at this point who actually wins it all this year. My money is on Georgia, frankly, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if it’s someone else. I don’t really care.

And of course, Twelfth Night is just around the corner and we can have King cake again! I’m not sure how much of it we’ll have this year, but I’ll definitely buy one to ring in the new season. Paul wants to lose weight in the new year, and it’s not a bad idea for me to try, either. One thing at a time, though–getting a normal gym routine in the new year is way more important than losing weight for me right now.

I was very sad to hear that Jimmy Carter finally passed over the weekend, at the age of one hundred. Carter is the first president whose term I really remember a lot about (I don’t remember much of Johnson; Nixon I only remember Watergate; Ford wasn’t around for long, so Carter was the first time I actually paid attention to what was going on in the country, and what he was doing as president); I remember his election and how wholesome he seemed. He was the only president about whom I can remember thinking his faith is absolutely real, and absolutely Christian. It was during the Carter administration that my own faith began to flail and fail, and it was also when I realized an actual practicing Christian’s faith isn’t the best thing for a president to have, because ruling through faith simply doesn’t work. I didn’t vote in 1980, the first time I was eligible to vote, and I’ve always regretted not voting that year–I didn’t even think about it, and really, my wasted vote didn’t matter to anything other than to me. I voted in 1984 for the first time, and I’ve not missed an election since. I always liked Carter, to be honest; he was one of the few presidents we’ve ever had who was actually a good, totally unselfish person–and he went on proving that for the rest of his life, dedicating himself completely to philanthropy (walking the walk, not just talking the talk). He also was responsible for the Camp David Accords, the only lasting peace in the Middle East (between Israel and Egypt). Who knows what he might have managed in a second term? (Don’t even get me started on the 1980 election.) So, of course, since Carter was a Christian whose values and beliefs guided his judgment as president, evangelicals despise him1. Go figure.

Not really a surprise there, is there? Evangelicals hate nothing more than Christ-like behavior.

The MAGA war goes on, with a lot of “I didn’t vote for this” takes left and right and everywhere you look…but au contraire, mon frere, this is exactly what you voted for. We tried to warn you for ten years, but…we’re just sheep, right? Or hate America? I don’t know what the latest insult MAGA’s love to hurl at the rest of us might be, nor do I care, but I do know I’ve been sneered and jeered at for decades by the so-called “real Americans”–who are actually nothing more than the rebranded Confederates. (One of the most interesting things to me about The Demons of Unrest was how much sympathy there was for the slave-holding South amongst the Union loyalists; which made me wonder about whether the stories about Union sympathizers in the South might be true and not just revisionist, we weren’t all horrible people after the fact apologia–and something I am going to write about someday.) Lots of leopards eating faces on the right over the last few days, for sure….but the one thing that is going to get me through the next four years (assuming everything doesn’t go to hell and the economy and the country don’t completely collapse) is knowing that no matter how bad things get, I didn’t vote for this, and the pleasure I will derive knowing that those who did are not only suffering the way the rest of us are but they also will have to live with the knowledge they voted for it, gleefully.

I feel so pwned, don’t you?

I was curious to watch Hysteria because I really liked the concept and thought it was clever; it plays off the old Satanic panics of the 1980s (which I really want to write about); the murder of a teenager in the town of Happy Hollow leads a small metal band in the town to pretend to be Satan-worshippers as a way to promote the band. Great premise, right? But there’s so much more to it than that, and Bruce Campbell plays the sheriff, and Julie Bowen plays the mom of the band’s lead guitarist. There are several different plots running at the same time, and the way the writers have the stories/plots cross and how those stories only serve to make the other ones seem real…it’s very, very clever, and hard to get across without spoilers. Part of the pleasures of the show is discovering, bit by bit, just how deceptively clever it actually is. We have two episodes left, so they could easily ruin the whole thing in the last two–but we’ll be watching those tonight and will be getting back to you about the show tomorrow, most like.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely New Year’s Eve Eve, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back at some point, most likely tomorrow.

  1. Ironically, as a born again Christian who liked to talk about his faith, evangelicals originally turned out to elect him 1976. Republicans saw that, and went for the evangelical base–and the country has been the poorer for it ever since. ↩︎

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.

Silver Bells

So this is Christmas.

It’s very still and quiet this morning. Paul is asleep, Sparky has been fed and has curled up to sleep again somewhere, and I am finishing my first cup of coffee. It’s hitting the spot, too, I might add. My coffee addiction really is something, isn’t it? I had thought about getting out the Espresso machine and making myself cappuccinos this morning, but went to bed last night without thinking about anything and thus didn’t. The kitchen is also kind of a mess this morning. Maybe I’ll do something about it, maybe I won’t. It’s Christmas, after all. We had a lovely day yesterday; I spent the morning rereading some old Scotty books with the intent of rereading/editing that I have done on Hurricane Season Hustle, but after I ordered the pizza and drove out to Metairie to get it–it was fucking fantastic, too, I might add, with leftovers for today–I just kind of zoned out for the day. We watched La Palma, a truly terrible disaster mini-series, on Netflix (cheesily enjoyable in that over-the-top and rather dumb disaster move way), and then watched Kings of Tupelo, which was insane…but again, Jake, it’s Tupelo. I went to bed late and slept late, and feel good today, if weird that I have to go back to work again tomorrow. We’re driving out to Elmwood to see the afternoon show of Babygirl today, and that’s really about all I care about for today. Maybe we’ll stream some movies tonight, or start a new show to watch or something. It was also sunny and warm yesterday–today looks gray, maybe rain–and once I finish this, I will probably do some straightening up in here before repairing to my easy chair to read for a bit.

What do I want for Christmas? World peace would be nice–hell, single-payer health insurance would be terrific, too–but neither of those are possible as long as this country remains enthralled to billionaires and corporations. That’s been the case for most of my adult life, and as far back as the 1990’s I was noticing how the direction we were heading into as a country economically, both at home and abroad, was firmly setting us on the same paths that led to the French and Russian revolutions and the Great Depression. I wrote about this a lot in my journals from back then; I’d even thought about writing a novel based on those observations, but after the fall/collapse. Do I have any answers? No, not really. People will always vote against their own self-interests because they have been convinced by the mythology of the American Dream that they, too, will someday be rich if they work hard (or smart) enough. I was told repeatedly as a child that if I worked hard, I too could become wealthy. Stories of people who went from rags-to-riches proliferated in the fiction stacks (and movies, too, for that matter); almost every “epic saga” was the story of some impoverished immigrant who seized opportunities–sometimes lied, cheated and stealing–that would make them rich. We’re essentially groomed by our art and culture to aspire to wealth and that the richer you are the better of a person you clearly must be, because you accumulated wealth. The great irony of that, of course, is that Christmas (and Christianity, too, for that matter) teaches us to take care of the sick and the elderly and the poor, and to always be empathetic to those less fortunate. Christianity and Capitalism are antithetical to each other, and the influence of capitalism on Christianity has not been a good thing. The prosperity gospel is a heresy, and the worst kind of heresy because it goes against everything Jesus taught in the pages of the New Testament. Everyone celebrating Christmas today–and the “birth” of Jesus–by spending a lot of money and a lot of excess?

Hardly “the reason for the season.” Put Christ back into Christianity, for your own sakes.

I’ve always loved the messaging of Christmas above what it actually is in reality, to be honest. I can remember watching A Charlie Brown Christmas as a kid and seeing that I was looking past what Christmas was supposedly about and approaching it from a greed perspective. (It’s still my favorite Christmas story.) That was filmed in the 1960s, and was about how the season was being exploited by an orgy of spending and excess, which was never the point of the holiday. I am as sentimental about Christmas and what it stands for as a child; Christmas decorations and trees make me smile and feel warm inside. I even like most Christmas music, even if I am heartily sick of some of them (looking at you, Wham!). I love driving down St. Charles Avenue or Prytania Street at night to see all the houses decorated and lit up. I love seeing how much kids enjoy it all. I even watched a couple of Christmas-themed rom-coms this season. I tend to not write about Christmas, because it is so easy to fall into the cheesy Christmas-miracle and all’s right with the world clichéd trope so many stories of that type inevitably fall into. I did have fun with Royal Street Reveillon, which was simply set during Christmas season but that was all–and even then I found myself trying to take the story in that direction a few times.

Sigh.

And on that note, I’m going to get some more coffee and go sit in my easy chair and see what’s going on in the world while doing some reading. Have a merry Christmas today, everyone, even if you do not celebrate; at least enjoy your day off at any rate.

Woman to Woman

I love history, and I especially love French history.

I’ve noted before that my favorite centuries (not in this order) are the 1400s, the 1500s, and the 1600s, with the 1700’s and the 1800’s pretty high on the list as well. It was the Renaissance and a time of enormous change. The Eastern Roman Empire finally fell in 1453, when the Ottomans took Constantinople, changing power politics in Europe forever and creating a significant degree of upheaval and fear across the continent. There was the splintering of Christianity and the wars of religion that raged for centuries, that started in the early 1500s when Martin Luther nailed his theses to the cathedral doors. Henry VIII tore England out of allegiance to Roman Catholicism after defending it vigorously for decades. Spain united and drove the Moors out–even though the Spanish nations remained independent, united only in the person of their monarch. Charles V presided over the largest world empire of all time until the British Empire rose after the final defeat of Napoleon. And the sixteenth century, which opened with Queen Isabella the Catholic of Castile proving that a woman could rule as wisely as a man–and could lead an army just as well, too. The sixteenth century saw the highest concentration of royal power being welded by women in history–and a lot of them were Hapsburg women, descendants of Isabella who always looked to her as a role model.

France was no exception in this century of powerful women–beginning with Henri II and his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, and after his death, his widow Catherine de Medici took power. Her youngest daughter, Marguerite de Valois, is one of the forgotten women of history. She too was a queen–Queen of Navarre, married off to the Huguenot leader in an attempt to make peace on the religious question, but her wedding also kicked off the ST. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. She was also a power player in French politics from the time of her marriage on, but she isn’t really remembered much–and if she is, the calumnies about her sexuality were always used to demean and diminish her, and most of it was slander. She is perhaps best known because Alexandre Dumas wrote about her in Queen Margot. I had a Dumas period as a teen, and I loved Queen Margot.1 I had also read about her in Jean Plaidy’s bio of her husband, Evergreen Gallant, which also painted her as a horny slut controlled by her lusts and passions. I’ve never been a fan of slut-shaming–if men could be promiscuous, why not women–and so was always interested in her, just as I was interested in her mother.

Catherine had a rather shitty life until 1559, both her childhood in Italy and the first twenty-five years of her marriage. This colored the rest of her life, when she became ruthless when it came to protecting her family and the throne of her sons. (Afore-mentioned St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, anyone?) She didn’t seem to much care for her two youngest children–Marguerite and Francois-Hercule–who wound up bonding because no one else cared about them. Catherine wasn’t royal, so the French court and people despised her as “the banker’s daughter,” and there was never any question that this marriage only came about because the French needed the money and her uncle was pope2. For ten years she was hated and ignored, constantly worried about being set aside for a princess–particularly when the Dauphin conveniently died and her husband became heir to the throne. But then she had a son, and then had ten more children over the next fifteen years. Henri II’s sudden and unexpected death caught the entire nation unprepared; Catherine smoothly maneuvered the hated mistress out of his life as he died and, once he was in the grave, seized her jewels and best estates and exiled her from court. Her motto was said to be “hate, and wait.” Jean Plaidy, tireless writer of fictionalized biographies of royalty, devoted a trilogy to Catherine: Madame Serpent, The Italian Woman, and Queen Jezebel, in which she tried to be apologetic about Catherine and her decades of misrule, murder, and conspiracies. Catherine could be weak, and always dissembled, cried and lied as she manipulated her nobles, her people and other heads of state–not always successfully. Catherine, niece of a pope, felt no problem allying herself with heretics if it was in her best interest. Her power and influence faded during the reign of her favorite son, Henri III3.

But perhaps the worst thing Catherine ever did was how she treated her youngest daughter.

The book carries the subtitle Catherine de Medici, Her Daughter Marguerite de Valois, and the Betrayal That Ignited a Kingdom.

The betrayal was an attempt, by Catherine, to put an end to the religious strife in France by marrying her youngest daughter to her cousin, currently third in the line of succession, King Henry of Navarre, who was a Huguenot. Neither Henry nor Margot wanted this marriage–despite her mother’s apparent lack of religious conviction, Margot was very much a devout Catholic–and Catherine tried to use the occasion of the wedding to murder Admiral Coligny, leader of the Huguenots and a trusted advisor to her son, Charles IX. She wanted to remove his influence over her son and take out the enemy leader at the same time. The assassination failed, and resulted in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, in which Margot herself hid and saved her husband and some of his friends from the mobs killing Huguenots. This threw Margot directly into power politics, and she never trusted her mother or her brothers again. Once she was involved, she proved herself to be not only smart but a very capable conspirator whose life was in danger from that moment on–until her own brother finally was killed in 1589 and her husband became king of France. They had their marriage annulled, and oddly enough, she became very close friends with her former husband, his second wife, and their children. She bore the honorific of queen for the rest of her life, and she was very wealthy and quite beloved; her mother was so hated her funeral was conducted secretly; all of Paris turned out for Margot’s.

It’s a very interesting period, but as I read this, I did take note that in many cases–all this political intriguing and diplomacy and duplicity? Wouldn’t really make for a great novel, because it takes years for things to happen; they spent most of their time sitting around, worrying, waiting for news. This is why shows like Reign and The Serpent Queen inevitably fail; they have to speed things up substantially to maintain suspense and viewer interest. I encountered this before when thinking through a couple of historical espionage thrillers (one having to do with Catherine’s Flying Squadron, beautiful women trained to be seductress spies for the Queen Mother; the other having to do with the Babington Plot in England); these things inevitably take months because of the great distances and medieval ways of traveling and sharing information. The great adventures of Margot’s life took seventeen years to pass. That’s a long fucking time for a suspense narrative, isn’t it?

The book is quite good. Nancy Goldstone is a good writer; the words all flow together and she arranges her researches in an excellent order for a brisk narrative. (She uses Margot’s memoirs, royal letters of her mother’s, and so forth to tell the tale.) The stakes are also very high–the future of France is at stake as the Valois dynasty slowly but surely dies out in the second half of the century.

One of the more interesting aspects of the 1300’s and 1400’s was that most nation’s problems during those years was too many members of the royal family, which led to strife; while the 1500s and 1600s were marred by royal sterility.

Highly recommended for fans of history and those who might be interesting in two women who don’t get nearly as much attention as they should.

  1. There was even a French language film version, starring Isabelle Adjani at her most beautiful. ↩︎
  2. Same pope who refused Henry VIII’s divorce, and thus lost England forever to Catholicism. ↩︎
  3. The gay one! ↩︎

Hang in There, Girl

Sunday morning and the last day of my little staycation. It began with stomach distress, and is ending on a morning where I feel pretty good and rested. I didn’t do much of anything this entire time, other than chores and some cleaning and filing and organizing, but while not pushing myself to an insane level, I hope to get some things done today. I am punishing myself by not allowing myself to watch today’s Saints game; I am also going to try not to turn on the television itself until after five sometime this evening. Yesterday I ran my errands in the morning and did some more cleaning around the house while listening to music, and then turned on the television for football games. I watched some of Tennessee-Vanderbilt (was really pulling for Vanderbilt), some of the Iron Bowl and some of Arkansas-Missouri, and then watched LSU-Oklahoma for the grand finale of the day. The Tigers won (yay!) 37-17, and there were some upsets–Ohio State lost to Michigan again; Syracuse upset Miami; South Carolina surprised Clemson–so it has, indeed, been a wacky season. I also finished reading The Rival Queens, which was a lot of fun, and started reading my new fiction read (Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden, which I’ve been wanting to read for several years now; lovely man, too) and my new non-fiction read, Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest, about the lead up to the fall of Fort Sumter after Lincoln was elected president. It’s very good–I love Larson’s work–and it’s kind of timely, particularly in reference to the division in today’s country, and it’s been a while since I’ve read a Civil War narrative (the last was Gore Vidal’s Lincoln), so it’s kind of interesting to dive into it.

I am going to try to do some writing today. I want to reread Hurricane Season Hustle again, and pull everything together on it, as well as to start perhaps revising some of my short stories and to finish an essay for the substack; I have several percolating, but the one I am leaning towards working on is “Recovering Christian,” which is about my relationship to religion and to God, really, and how being groomed to be religious as a child can be very detrimental to that child’s well-being. Ooooh, look at me taking on organized Christianity. ’bout time, as some would say. I remember when, growing up, the rules for polite society and conversation were that you never talked about money, religion, or politics. It certainly hasn’t helped anything that these things have all so much in the zeitgeist, ever since the unholy marriage of evangelical Christianity and the Reagan Republicans. I always took freedom of religion and the separation of church and state very seriously; reading so much History, particularly of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the soil of Europe was soaked with blood over faith (The Rival Queens details that struggle in France after 1559) had a lot to do with it, just as that recent history drove the founders to put up explicit blocks to keep government and religion from being poisoned by each other–which is where we are now. Modern day Christians are driving believers away even as they grasp for more power.

I also figured out yesterday that the reason I was so lethargic on Friday was because it was too cold in the apartment. I was shivering yesterday morning–it was colder yesterday morning than it was Friday–when I remember, d’oh, the heat works properly now so I switched the upstairs and downstair thermostats to heat and within an hour, the apartment was toasty and warm and bearable. It is lovely again this morning (thank you, heater!), but I can also tell it’s cold again this morning–the windows around my desk always let me know how cold it is outside! (When I think about how much we used to freeze around here until the old system died…) In fact, Sparky is a kitty puddle in my easy chair right now, curled up inside the folds of the blanket resting in the chair–he’s always needier and cuddlier when it’s cold. He wouldn’t leave my chair yesterday, even when I’d get up for something to eat or drink–he stayed inside the blankets and waited for me to come back, which he never does. He usually runs ahead of me into the kitchen every time I get up to beg for food or treats or both. He also started trying to get me up around five this morning.

I am not berating myself for using this time off to rest and recalibrate and to get ready to sprint to the end of the year. I’ve got some chores to do this morning, but I am going to read for a bit with my morning coffee first, get cleaned up, and then try to seriously tackle this downstairs, which has been out of control due to my own laziness for quite some time. I need to take these rugs out and shake them, then replaced and vacuumed to within an inch of their life, and I also should do the stairs. Paul will be home Tuesday night (thank God), and then we have a few weeks before the disruptions of Christmas and New Year’s. A new year of horrors is coming; hard to get excited about that, you know? But my role in the resistance this time is to call out bullshit and lies and bigotry whenever I see it or experience it. If it makes me a target, it makes me a target; as a gay author, I am already on a list somewhere, you can be sure of that–my money’s on the Family Research Council, anything that has to do with that fetid Dobson family, and Tony Perkins. So, if they are going to come for me anyway, may as well go down swinging.

And on that rather somber note, I am heading into the spice mines for the rest of the day. I may be back later–I’m debating doing a post on The Rival Queens–but will most definitely be back tomorrow morning before I start my new work week. Have a lovely Sunday, and I’ll talk to you later, Constant Reader.

Hell is for Children

Being Southern hasn’t been as difficult for me as it is for most Southern people, when it comes to forgetting the past and not taking pride in a heritage that includes racism and bigotry and enslavement. Some of the earliest lessons I learned about life in these United States was that I was one of the few people who started recognizing something that I wouldn’t know the name for until I was much older: cognitive dissonance. What I was being told at home was different from what I was being taught in school, and even that, while better balanced, was “patriotism good rah rah rah U!S!A! U!S!A!” all the time, nonstop. I began wondering about how much of an American “hero” Christopher Columbus really was, as all he brought to the New World was genocide, slavery, disease, centuries of oppression and looting the resources of the Americas. I started dealing with more cognitive dissonance as I got older and began seeing the flaws in white American supremacy, the contradictions and conflicts, and I had to think and reconcile all of these differing opinions. As I got older, resolving those cognitive dissonances required abandoning the education I got as a child about our country and its history because it was drenched in white supremacy and American exceptionalism and, well, lies to make white people feel better about themselves1. Reading and studying history made me look at modern Christianity askance–your religion has always been bloody, intolerant and cruel; but I’m supposed to believe the faith that slaughtered non-believers gleefully has changed and learned the errors of its ways?

Likewise, the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing when I was a child, and saw I watched the marches and the horror of the violence on the news. I didn’t understand nor believe the so-called religious justification for bigotry–my view of Christianity was markedly different from what I was learning in Sunday school for sure–but as someone blessed with white privilege I was also oblivious to a lot of what the Black community has dealt with throughout our bloody and horrific national history. My beliefs and values have never stagnated or been chiseled into stone; I appreciate gaining new perspective and examining my own internal biases and prejudices, and changing my mind predicated on the new perspective.

There are some things, however, I will never change my mind about: bigotry and prejudice are evil and have no basis in anything except vile ignorance and emotion.

The “we need diverse books” movement on-line was absolutely wonderful, because it gave me an easy opportunity to find books by diverse authors that either didn’t exist before or did and weren’t given much of a push. I loved the expansion of the crime and horror genres to include these characters and themes and stories; I love their fresh perspectives on society and culture and yes, the genres themselves. Books by S. A. Cosby, Kellye Garrett, Rachel Howzell Hall, Tracy Clark, Cheryl Head, and other racialized authors have not only been revelatory, but so strongly written and brilliant that it’s pushing other authors to better their own work to keep up. I’ve also been reading a lot of non-fiction about the civil rights movement and the history of prejudice and racism in this country, informing not only myself but with my own work, as well.

And in a class almost by itself is Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory.

Robert Stephens held his breath and counted to three, hoping to see Mama.

Some mornings his nose tickled with a trace of talcum powder or Madam C. J. Walker’s Glossine hair grease, and he felt…something hovering over him, watching him sleep. His groggy brain would think…Mama? If he gasped or sat up too quickly, or even wiped the sleep from his eyes, it was gone like a dream. But sometimes, when the June daylight charged early through the thin curtain and broke the darkness, movement glided across the red glow of his closed eyelids like someone walking past his bed. He felt no gentle kisses or fingertips brushing his forehead. No whispers of assurances and motherly love. Nothing like what people said ghosts were supposed to be, much less your dead mama. That morning he was patient, counting the way he’d practiced–one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand–and slitted his eyes open.

A woman’s shadow passed outside of the window above him, features appearing in the gaps between the sheets of tinfoil taped across the glass. In a white dress, maybe. Maybe. Moving fast, in a hurry.

“Mama?”

This book is a revelation. It is without question one of the most powerful books I’ve read in I don’t know how long.

I knew it was going to be a hard read, because I knew what the book was based on. I also don’t remember when I first became aware of the horrors of the notorious Dozier School for Boys in Florida, but it was a horror to be sure. I’ve read some novels based on that story (I loved Lori Roy’s The Disappearing) already, and so was familiar. Reading about enslavement and the Jim Crow South2 is inevitably a hard slog for me, and not just because of the white guilt it deservedly triggers; it just staggers me that in a country that supposedly is about equality and freedom such things could happen, be taken as normal, and changing the system is so violently opposed…a lot of racist Southerners see nothing wrong with that history and would like it to return, so these kinds of stories of American atrocities against its own citizens are incredibly important. The pen is indeed mightier than the sword, which is why repressive governments always go after journalists and writers; a well-told story that illustrates the injustice for the reader and humanizes it can change minds.

The Reformatory is about the Gracetown School for Boys and a young twelve year old Black boy who is sent there for absolutely nothing; an older white boy was sexualizing his older sister Gloria, and when young Robert stands up for her he gets a brutal shove, and he retaliates with a kick. Alas, the white boy’s father is wealthy and therefore powerful, and he wants this “uppity” behavior punished. In a joke trial that’s not even a trial, the corrupt racist judge sends Robert to the hell of the reformatory. Robert’s story doesn’t become about a search for his own justice, but the hell of surviving a place where boys die regularly but never of natural causes. Young Robbie has a gift, too–he can see ghosts–and there are a lot of ghosts there for him to navigate. Gloria’s story becomes about her desperate drive to get her brother out of there and correct the injustice. Their father was also a union organizer, and was falsely accused of raping and beating a white woman, so he fled north to Chicago. So, the boy in custody is also a pawn for the white power structure who really wants to get their hands on Robert Senior.

The warden, Haddock, is a sadistic predator who enjoys torturing and raping and murdering his charges. He also has a special need for young Robbie’s ghost seeing abilities, wanting to rid the campus of the ghosts of his victims. Due manages to make the horrors of that place absolutely real, with some of the most vivid and powerful images I’ve come across in a novel in years.

But the true horror of the book isn’t the ghosts at the school. The true horror is its horrific and realistic depiction of the Jim Crow south, and the lack of hope for change in the Black characters. It was about halfway through the book that I realized, as much as I was loving this book, that there was no happily ever after for Black people under Jim Crow, before civil rights. They might be able to escape a predicament, but there was no escape ever from the system.

Which is absolutely terrifying.

Definitely check this book out, and I am going to look for my next read from Due.

  1. Manifest destiny? I could write an entire book about that bullshit. ↩︎
  2. Someday I will dismantle To Kill a Mockingbird for the racist lie it is. ↩︎