I filed for unemployment for the first time about a month ago. It’s hard for me to say that out loud because of how desperately I do not want to be unemployed. The reason I am not employed is no-fault. I’m not here to rag on myself or on my former employer. I’m just saying that there’s nothing that really makes you feel poorer than the unemployment web site. The good news is that it’s stupid simple to navigate and takes about three minutes a week.

I use the money for two specific purposes; the obvious one being that Dana and I need the money for bills, food, etc. The not-so-obvious is that it gives me a tiny little cushion to get my writing career off the ground. Do not write this off as a pipe dream. It will hurt me beyond belief.

I do not believe that this web site can support me, but what I do know is that I cannot be at an interview every moment of every day, so why not lay the groundwork while I’m at home? What could be a better example of trying to prove self-sufficiency than trying to make your talent work for you? It is so much easier to make a career on your own terms than having to work for someone else, and having a little part of that is better than nothing at all.

Dana and I had the most interesting conversation last night. The rundown is that basically she didn’t think I knew how to work for someone else, and not because I don’t have that skill set. It’s just that trying to fit MY brain into other people’s boxes doesn’t work very well, because the moment they try to define me, I’m a new iteration.

She basically told me to stop working for other people and lead them, because that’s where my talent lies. My talent is not in carrying out other people’s visions, it’s implementing my own. It was a way of saying, not so subtly, “stop hiding your light.” My wife gives me the courage to be myself, because if it weren’t for her, I would still be trying to fit whatever clothes society wants to put on me, and they are ill-fitting.

At the same time, though, I can’t live my whole life in the clouds (or as an IT person, in the cloud, I suppose). I have to put shoe leather into something. Whether it’s cooking, cleaning houses, bartending, whatever, I have to have something that feeds my talent. Writers that live in glass towers see experiences and rarely have them.

Those two ideas are constantly struggling within me, and in a way, it feels perfectly balanced. I have the opportunity to get my needs met in the short-term, and the ability to get my wants met later.

But while I’m working all of this out, would you mind going to Safeway and picking me up some COLA and a box of Hydrox?

You’re a peach.

Yesterday, I literally worked on my web site until I was damn near blind. This is because I am starting to get popular, and I need to have the framework in place before even more people start arriving. I did some UI (User Interface) corrections, as well as adding a PayPal donate button and a Facebook page that is my hope for the Fanagan Forum. I’d like to use it for discussion groups, sharing links, and just generally causing mayhem. That’s the one part of this web site that is completely yours. Impress me. Gross me out (well, try). Make it where on this web site, you make me laugh. I cannot uphold all this awesome by myself.

The Paypal donate button is not necessarily for huge donations- I know that some bloggers use Paypal to offer subscriptions for a year and stuff like that. I don’t want there to be a set amount that you have to pay in order to get access to content, but if you find something you really like, a buck or two would be great.

See, a lot of people don’t know this, but I’ve never made any money off my writing. None. So to put a dollar in this donation box is to turn me from an amateur writer into a professional one.

In short, give me a job. It doesn’t have to be fancy. I will adapt to the title of Communications Director or Organ-Grinding Monkey.

In any case, enjoy it here. This is your house. Turn off the light if you’re the last one out.

I wake up at 8:00 AM, because that’s when Dana has to get ready for work. I have made a commitment to start around 9:00. I have kept that up the entire time I’ve had my blog, and it’s made a world of difference. Not only do I have the capacity to think overnight while I’m dreaming, I have the ability to remember it long enough to write down.

I don’t intentionally write blog posts. Most of the time, they are letters or journal entries which I’ve adapted for publication. I don’t leave anything out about myself, but I camouflage my friends because I had a blog years ago that was extraordinarily popular with strangers and my friends were on the warpath. For that reason, I try to write about memories so old that the statute of limitations has run out, but even that isn’t truly safe.

I focus a lot on my childhood because it’s where I began learning how to be an adult, and there are few people where I live now that lived near me at the time. It seems relatively safe to spill secrets that would rile up my family while I’m 1800 miles away, because they do not know that this blog is so much bigger than they are now. I’m not writing for myself and my pen pals. I’m writing for the world. I’ll give you an example. Today alone, my web site has had visitors from the United States, Canada, Malaysia, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and Peru.

I’m not making me laugh, I’m making the world laugh. It took a while to get used to the idea, because I have a tiny ego, and the idea that I could be making people all over the world roll on the floor is simply beyond me.

So I go back to the practice of writing with a name in my mind. Sometimes it’s Dana, sometimes it’s you. I write personal essays that reach out to you individually because I can’t think of you as a global audience yet. My head would explode.

Boom.

I wrote this song a few years ago, and I’ve wondered if it was publishable. There’s no music yet… I’m just the velveteen librettist. This goes out to all the women in my life that have defined time, and they all know who they are.

When you turn your eyes toward me
it gets harder to control
the longing to belong to you
to kiss from soul to soul

If only you could see
what lies beyond my eyes
to see your life unfolding
to watch you grow toward endless skies

Your passion lights my fire
a drive from deep within
to be a better woman
than I was when we began

But I don’t wanna cross your path
Until we finally agree
I bring out the best in you
’cause you bring it out in me

It’s been hard for me to Wander,
Lonely as a Cloud…
Wondering what I’d say to you
if my voice was strong and loud

Enough to cut through metal
The barbed fence around your heart
You’re so afraid to take it down
When I try, I’m ripped apart.

Miles will give us courage
to get through this Kind of Blue…
our hearts meander thoughtfully
down a path we hope is true.

One we hope releases us
from this cycle we’ve begun
The one where you say you love me
as you rev up for the run

But I don’t wanna cross your path
Until we finally agree
I bring out the best in you
’cause you bring it out in me

Originally written in Aug. of 2006. I couldn’t bring myself to post it until now, and you’ll see why as you read. Now it’s been long enough that I don’t really care about the consequences. I’m old now, and this was in my 20’s. That should be self-explanatory enough. I also need to say for the record that I was not drinking at the concert, and I did this of my own free will. I whored myself to meet Jimmy Norton.

Even though I find the Opie & Anthony show to be crude, crass, repugnant, and all of those things, I cannot help but be in love with it. Their show is so entertaining that I’ll even listen to reruns. There are actually three “characters,” Greg “Opie” Hughes, Anthony Cumia, and Jim Norton. I have been listening to the three of them since 2001, when they were broadcasting out of New York and one of the stations in DC picked it up… and it’s all Randy’s fault that I have been falling all over myself to find them in the other various places I’ve lived. Now that they’re on XM, I’ll never have that problem again- as long as they don’t get fired. They were released from their contract in Boston because for April Fool’s Day, they told everyone that the mayor was dead and it caused Mass Panic. In New York, they were let go because they broadcast a couple having sex on the air in St. Patrick’s Cathedral on some kind of high holy day (I don’t remember which one). For years they’ve had this bumper sticker promotion called WOW, which basically means “Whip ’em Out Wednesday.” That means if you see the bumper sticker, you’re supposed to pull up to the car and flash them. The show is completely insane, and I don’t know what I’d do without it.

Jim Norton, or Lil’ Jimmy, as he is sometimes called, is extremely funny and I adore him. He’s got such a little boy quality to him, because even though he’s just as crude and crass as the rest of the boys, he eats oatmeal for breakfast. He worries about his looks and his weight. He thinks he’ll never get a good relationship. Etc. Etc. Etc. He seems a little bit more human, I suppose.

I have wanted to meet him SO BAD for the longest time, and when I found out that he was coming to The Improv, I bought tickets immediately for both my friend James and myself. Now, James is quite a character. His sense of humor is so dark/blue that sometimes I need a shower afterward. Consider this joke he wrote:

I was baptized Catholic and my wife is a Baptist… so we compromise. Now we go to the Methodist Church, but the minister is a pedophile.

The first time I heard him tell it, I laughed so hard I thought my appendix was going to fall out on the floor. So I just knew that James would appreciate Jim Norton as much as I did. I was not disappointed. He laughed like a hyena the whole time.

One of Jimmy’s hobbies is getting photos with celebrities, and he always tells the stories of obtaining them with particular gusto. My favorite was when he was at a party and met Mike Tyson. He asked him for a picture and Tyson said no. Jimmy looked at him with near-tears in his eyes and said, “but you’re the champ!’ He said he’d never felt more like a yuppie douchebag. That’s my Lil’ Jimmy. 🙂

So Jimmy comes to the point in his act where he’s talking about the celebrity photos, and at one point it got kind of quiet. Now keep in mind that I wanted to meet him really, *really* bad. I took the few seconds of silence to yell as loud as I could, “JIMMY!!! YOU’RE GOING TO WANT A PHOTO WITH ME!!!!” He looked totally and completely shocked for a second and then he said, “Why? Are you nice looking? Come into the light and let me take a look at you.” As I was walking toward the stage, he said, “Are you gonna WOW the audience?” I thought for a second. My internal monologue was running thusly:

What have I got to lose? Is my mother going to find out? Do I have any hickeys? Would it matter if I did?

In the end, I decided that if it got me any closer to Jim Norton, then I would do it. So I unbuttoned my shirt halfway down, and my boobs WOULD NOT COME OUT OF MY BRA! I practically had to break it in order to WOW the audience, but luckily, the crowd went wild with applause that fed my ego mightily.

After the show was over, a reporter from The Pulse grabbed me and told me that she was a friend of Jim’s and that what I did was funny as shit. She took down my information and asked if she could interview me for the magazine. I said, “of course,” and then she grabbed me again. “I’m going to take you to go meet him.” I grabbed James’ hand so we wouldn’t get separated and we sped through the crowd and up to the table where Club Soda Kenny was selling Jimmy’s merchandise. I bought a t-shirt that says “you stink and I don’t like you,” which is a paraphrase of Jimmy’s *one* line in Spiderman. Then, the reporter hands me a thong for Jimmy to autograph, and it is priceless. You turn it over and on the part that goes up your butt it says “PU, Jimmy Norton.” The openers signed it, too, but I don’t remember their names.

Finally, Jimmy said that he wanted a picture of me, and Club Soda Kenny got out a camera. Now I have a picture on my mantle of Jimmy and I hugging each other, and we’ve e-mailed back and forth a little bit. This all went down last Friday night, and I still haven’t recovered.

***Just a note about why Kenny is called “Club Soda Kenny.” Kenny used to be a roadie/bodyguard for Andrew Dice Clay, and whenever Dice wanted something to drink, he’d yell “Club soda, Kenny!” After a while, everyone on Dice’s tour started calling him Club Soda Kenny, and the name has carried over to O&A.

After reading this article on baptism, I realized that I have a ton of stories in the same vein. They are a mixture of things that happened to my family, as well as things that happened to my dad and mom while they were in ministry before I was born. Because I was not there for all of these stories, I will preface this piece by saying that it is as factually accurate as my memories allow.

1. My dad thought it would be a good idea to let kids bring in their own objects  for children’s time. He got a little red felt bag and gave it out on Sundays. If you got the bag, it was your job to bring it back full. After a while, my dad had to start saying things like, “nothing alive… or dead.” Afterwards, he’d make a children’s sermon out of whatever was in the bag. The only one that I remember from my own childhood is that a kid brought his mother’s pantyhose. The congregation howled, and I wish I could remember what he said. That part has faded, much to my dismay.
2. June is both my mother’s birthday and one of the church members at Naples UMC. He was known for being an absolute cutup, so when we celebrated their birthdays during the service, some joker put relighting candles on their cake. This ol boy didn’t miss a beat. He blew on them a couple of times and then put them out in the cake.
3. At St. Mark’s, a little old lady brought the entire congregation to a screeching halt when, in the middle of my dad’s sermon, she stood up and said, “David?! Have you lost your mic?!” You could have heard a pin drop, and my dad paused for a couple of seconds. Thinking fast on his feet, he said, “Oh my God! I thought you said MIND!” The congregation was in FITS.
4. When I was in second or third grade, I was cast as Mary in the First Methodist Naples nativity play. Joseph was a classmate in which we had a love-hate relationship. I wanted him for my boyfriend all my own, but this was in jeopardy as we were sitting in the manger. I want to say FOR THE RECORD that he started it. He thumped the baby Jesus (my Cabbage Patch doll) on the head and I was extremely offended. We started elbowing each other, hard. I will leave you with that image because as that scene unfolds, whatever you’re thinking, it was worse.
5. My dad was giving communion one day, and he noticed that everyone was walking away, their faces scrunched up in the pain of having eaten something so horrible that you can’t control your facial expressions. We’d started to run out of grape juice for the chalice, so one of the little old ladies mistakenly filled it up with Hawaiian Punch Concentrate.
6. An associate pastor that my dad knew told this story on himself. The senior pastor asked him to grab the baptismal font and bring it over to the other side of the sanctuary. What he meant was, “there’s a little bowl of holy water inside the baptismal font. Could you bring it to me?” Cut to associate pastor trying to drag a 3,500 lb granite baptismal font along the floor. Hilarity ensues.
7. The ushers at our church in Naples were relentless. If the Cowboys were playing at noon, they would start throwing the football in the narthex around 11:45. During the Olympics, they held up score cards for my dad’s sermons.
8. The back row of the choir at Naples was equally incorrigible, to the point that my dad had a rear-view mirror installed on the microphone of his pulpit.
9. During a memorable children’s sermon, my dad invited all of the kids to take a look behind the pulpit. He told us to describe what we saw. I, absolutely without thinking, said, “it’s a big mess.” My dad leaned into the microphone and said, “we’re going to have a looooong talk when we get home.” It was in this moment that I realized I knew how to work a crowd. 😉
10. During an even more memorable children’s sermon, my dad talked about priceless treasures and took up the arm of his robe to show us kids his watch, his own priceless treasure. My sister wasn’t buying it. She looked straight at him and said, “NO IT’S NOT! You got it at Burger King for $2.99.” It was in this moment that I realized my sister knew how to work a crowd.
11. During our time at Naples, a chapel was built in the education building, and the nursery was right above it. I was watching Lindsay and she was being a holy terror at that particular moment. My eyebrows were going over my forehead when Lindsay opened the door and started running. My dad was in the middle of the pastoral prayer (one of the quietest moments in a Methodist service) when he heard my booming voice. “LINDSAY!” I was livid. “GET YOUR BUTT UPSTAIRS!”
12. When I was 16, my job became bringing Lindsay to church, because my dad usually finished up a few things before the service (*cough* sermon *cough*), and my mom was in the adult choir.That meant that Lindsay and I could do what we wanted, because we had wheels. I think she was 11, maybe just turned 12, when the offering plate came around and she put in all the money she had. Afterward, she leaned into me and said, very quietly, “can we go to Subway when this is over?” I nodded yes and she leaned even closer… “Leslie!” she said “You have to pay for lunch because I paid for church.”
13. I hope my mom doesn’t mind me telling this story, but it is literally one of the reasons she is my freaking hero. At St. Mark’s, our organist fell down the stairs to the choir loft during choir practice, and had to be rushed to the emergency room. My mom is a pianist, so she was on deck to accompany us. But as any pianist knows, the piano and the pipe organ have very little in common. To add insult to injury, our friend David was turning the pages for her and when she modulated from one of the hymns to the Doxology, David turned the page and it was in a different key. Instead of panicking, my mom TRANSPOSED THE CHORDS IN HER HEAD. It’s not the funniest story, but it shows that my mom is literally grace under pressure.
14. In the summer between 7th and 8th grades, I had the best boyfriend in the world. How did I know this? I met him at band camp. The first time he ever approached me was less than 10 minutes after the first time I shaved my legs, and I was bleeding. This beautiful boy looks at me and says, “Hi, my name is Ryan Darlington. You look like you could use a band-aid.” What does this have to do with church? It was a sermon illustration. Glad to be helpful, dad. 🙂
15. My dad and I had this game we played when I was younger. I would say two words and if my dad could incorporate those two words into his sermon, then I owed him a quarter. Best win? Aluminum siding. Like a boss, dad.LIKE A BOSS!

I originally wrote this on September 11th, 2007. I’m re-posting it here because it says more about me than my About page… as well as tying directly into my posts about sex and marriage.

I’ve gotten the second interview at Planned Parenthood, and therefore, I’m pretty certain I’ve got a shot at the job. Dana and I were a tiny bit baby crazy before we started talking about Planned Parenthood on a daily basis, and now that we have, we are biological clock explosion hazards. It’s ridiculous, but in a completely serious kind of way. Like, in the moment, we are so focused on each other and these little lives that we want to create that it seems just as real as say, the cat who lives on our stereo. When the ether has cleared from our brains, we realize that we have a bit to do before we can start inseminating. We may be dreaming, but some of the most tender moments between Dana and I have come with us curled up on our bed, reading about what we need to do to get ready.

If I were you, I’d be sitting there thinking, “what the fuck are they doing? They’re not even married. They haven’t even been dating that long. Seriously, are they INSANE?” Yes. Yes we are. My drive to have a baby isn’t rooted in reality anymore. It is rooted in the same baby-crazed feeling that I went through when I was 24. There was no rhyme or reason, just this drive to procreate that outweighed anything else going on in my life. The reason I know that we have crossed over from merely talking about one day having a child to that special part of my brain turning me into a stark raving lunatic is that physically, I am TICKIN! TICKIN! TICKIN! I am sexually insatiable- my body has no idea that Dana’s sperm count is so low. It feels similar to that hormonal rush of “QUICK, I’M GOING TO LOSE THE EGG!” that every woman has the night or two before her period… except this has lasted much, much longer.

And while that sounds wild and crazy and fabulous, I suppose the sex part is. The biological clock shit is rough stuff. My body does not realize what’s going on in my head, and it doesn’t really care. What my girly parts see is that This. Is. It. Dana is the fulfillment of whatever it is that uteruses need to just go batshit crazy. I sort of get it emotionally from the standpoint that relationships all go through three distinct phases. First, there’s romantic love. It’s giggly, sexy, and fun. Then, when you’ve been giggly and sexy for as long as you can take it, you develop companionate love- that part of you that doesn’t feel complete unless the other person is around. It’s not particularly sexy because discovery is over. Then, after a while, sex comes back into the picture and it’s soulful. You’ve got history together, you see so many more reasons to love each other than just the shallow initial attraction. You know what turns each other on and instead of it being a grind, it feels good to KNOW what’s going to get you a standing O… and when Dana and I got together, we skipped over phase one and two. We’d been friends for so long that we already had a companionate love that was putting our other friends and even our then-partners on the back burner.

So I see very clearly that my uterus has a different timeline than Dana and I do because my uterus doesn’t realize that for as long as I’ve loved and trusted Dana, being in love and having a kid is a different kind of love and trust.

Or is it?

Maybe my inability to differentiate is helping to feed the baby craziness. Sometimes my head and my heart are confused- have Dana and I been together almost three months or almost three years? Just because we weren’t having sex hasn’t meant that we weren’t having intimacy (which Harville Hendrix rightly called “into-me-see”). So where do I draw the boundary in that kind of knot to untangle? Ultimately, it’s our call, which will probably mean that we get married and have kids a lot sooner than anyone else thinks we should- not because we’re trying to be stark raving mad, although we’ll never stop being that. It’s because visually, we’ve only been a couple for a few months. The kind of intimacy that we share goes way, way, WAY beyond that.

There is one picture of Dana that I have in my head that I look back on and think, “how did I not know? How did I not know it would be this good? How did I not know that Dana didn’t love me, that she was in love with me and there was more of me in love with her than I would ever admit? How did I manage to keep our boundaries so strictly in place when if I’d just opened my eyes, I would have seen that we were falling for each other? How did I let everyone else know before I did?”

The picture is of Dana crying simply because someone else hurt me. It hurt her to see me cry, to see me upset, to not be able to magically take my pain away. And it’s more than that, even- because the person who hurt me was a piece of me. Dana knew that. She knew what I was trying to get away from in my hurt and it hurt her. She took on my pain and I let her, because I got the feeling that she understood the magnitude and wasn’t trying to tell me to calm down or even how to grieve. She was just this calming presence and I leaned into her. I can only hope that I am that calming presence when she needs it.

So it’s no wonder that my uterus is calling out to her. It’s no wonder that Dana is the fulfillment of all my little uterus nesting dreams. It feels like no matter what we decide or when we decide it, the love we have for each other will carry us through. So cliche, and yet, for the first time, it’s a cliche I can truly support.

So back to the interview.

Because I knew that I was signing up to be a database administrator in the same complex as the clinic, I asked if it had ever gotten scary around there. They told me they’d had a few bomb threats, but nothing serious (meaning actual bombs, I’m sure). They also had to be careful who they hire- they had one lady that came in for the interview before me and asked if that was where they killed the babies. She didn’t think she could do it.

Database administration is hard.

Future generations will look back on this one and think that we are all batshit crazy… the way we think it’s crazy that people used to be beaten and killed for being left-handed. There are even other similarities. For older left-handed folks, how many of you were forced to learn to write with your right hand even though your left hand was what felt natural? How many of you who were forced to learn to write right-handed stayed with it past high school? For every person who has ever said, “I don’t really hate gay people, I just disagree with their lifestyle. I love the sinner, and hate the sin…” put your goddamned rhetoric behind you and stop KILLING CHILDREN. Fuck your feelings. I’ll clean up my language when every last gay kid is safe. I’m sure that your argument isn’t that these kids were bullied into killing themselves, they chose to. You’re wrong, and you know it. Juries acquit women for killing their husbands due to Battered Wife Syndrome. Military families take months to regroup when a soldier comes home shocked and disoriented from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Is it so unimaginable that a child, with his/her brain not fully developed, would take those messages of hate and internalize them so that they think killing themselves is their only option?

This kid was 14 years old. FOURTEEN. He never got to drive a car, sip a beer with buddies, vote for the President. He’ll never take someone to the prom. He’ll never meet a man with cute glasses who wants to buy matching towels and small dogs.

This is absolutely insane, and if you think I’m mad about it, you’re right. There is no reason why bullying should lead to post traumatic stress disorder. There is no reason for a child to become a statistic. And if you’ve ever said anything about Christianity and homosexuality not being compatible, you have HELPED. You have spread the message to your own sons and daughters that being gay is wrong or bad- you have shades of gray… your children don’t. They take your messages of self-righteous but mild-in-tone segregation of good and evil and turn it into kids being shoved into lockers, beaten to a bloody pulp, and in a lot of cases, rape.

I was bullied myself all through school. I was lucky in that I had a woman I could trust- my own personal “It Gets Better” campaign. But these kids didn’t, and they’ll never know that for every day of absolute hell that is high school, there’s a joyous day of celebration with the one you love when you find them.

I’ve been rough in this essay, and I know it. But for the Evangelicals in my Friends list, you’ve got to know what you’re setting your children up to do to other children when they’re in school. You’ve got to teach them about the love and compassion of Christ, and stop dwelling on the jealous and angry God of the Old Testament. The more you do, the more you give your children ammunition to beat the crap out of someone else. And someday, someone’s going to put it together that bullying causes post traumatic stress disorder and it will cause a prima facie landmark decision that will legally find you responsible if your kid murders another one.

It will happen, and until then, I will be as rough as I need to be, because there is no excuse for a dead child. None.

Good night, sweet James. I want to send you home with the song that carried me through high school.

[sounds of couple obviously having sex]

The following show contains frank discussions (OH! FRANK!) and may not be suitable for a younger audience.

[fade to black]

I am what I am
I am my own special creation.
So come take a look,
Give me the hook or the ovation.
It’s my world that I want to take a little pride in,
My world, and it’s not a place I have to hide in.
Life’s not worth a damn,
‘Til you can say, “Hey world, I am what I am.”

If you were a gay teen in Houston in the ’90s, you know what I mean and you feel it in your neurons. It was midnight on Saturday, and After Hours (link to podcast XML feed) was about to begin. If you were as young as I was (around 13 or 14), then your clock radio was turned down really low and under your pillow so you could listen until you fell asleep. You rarely made it to three, even if you said you did. My parents did their best to just ignore it, but if you think I have a hard time making it to church in the morning *now,* it was even harder after staying up all night just to hear snippets of yourself on the radio.

Jimmy Carper was the host, a man who knows gay history because it is encoded into his DNA. I heard about Stonewall. I heard about Harvey Milk. I learned about the generations of people before me that were whipped, beaten, and arrested in the name of decency, and in a lot of cases, the name of God. Listening to gay history convinced me that there was no way in hell that even if I was a sinner, God would go to such desperate measures just to straighten me out. My God was too loving for that.

So off to church I would go, bleary-eyed and on the edge of a nervous breakdown (because that’s what happens when you don’t sleep).

There was only one person who could get me out of bed, and only because she was a mirror in which I saw my reflection. If Saturday was about hanging out with the boys, Sunday was hanging out with the girl. I would have hung out with more women- it wasn’t like I didn’t want other gay friends. It was just in those days, saying you were gay in hopes of finding other gay friends was NOT. A. GOOD. IDEA.

It is in this way that I feel I was raised by gay men… and I’m not sure it was intentional. It’s just that we all know those boys who are queer as a three dollar bill, the possibility of them being straight is a negative integer. For a shy gay teenager, it was a sign that I was safe to speak openly. In fact, it was a way to make sure I wasn’t going to get hurt by a raging homophobic idiot. Raging homophobic idiots rarely talk with a lisp.

So I ran to these angels, these men in expensive fabrics and clean-scented aftershave. There was never anyone particular, at least until I got to high school, but I was always watching. If there was a medal for gay-watching as prestigious as those for birding, I would be champion of the world. Because of gay men, I learned that I was going to be ok. I watched them navigate the world with such ease and thought, “if I could be a tenth that confident, I would be queen of all.” (Hell yeah, double entendre!)

I’m writing this essay to say thank you, because I couldn’t be who I am now if you hadn’t been who you were, then.

Thank you for making me awesome.

Love,
Leslie

My friend Greer Feagin, a classmate at HSPVA, was brutally murdered in her apartment last weekend. Her grandmother found her. My essay has nothing to do with Greer’s death. I do not want, in any way, to say that I am speaking about or to her. These are just my observations on death and grief itself.

———-

Before you start reading this piece, it helps to know that I am an incredibly large Doctor Who fan, and even though I was writing about my own life and experiences, Amelia Pond watched me while she was sitting on her little suitcase in the backyard with her little hat and coat, waiting for her precious doctor’s return.

 

I’m thinking about the friends with which we lose touch. Maybe they’re dead or maybe they’re alive. Each is an equal set of pain. For the friend of the person who died, there will always be things left unsaid, and that’s a finite state. With a friend who’s still alive, there will always be things left unsaid, but nothing about that situation is finite. Because they’re alive, there’s a possibility of connection, and the implications therein. It doesn’t matter whether they’re positive or negative. Either way, they affect you. And if you were having an affair with your friend’s wife or something, you’d never have to run into them and be caught totally off-guard in debilitating nausea because awkward is tangible. I’m pretty sure it’s onomatopoeia.

And either way, when you lose someone you love, there’s a part of you that doesn’t want to look back, because it’s just too emotionally loaded. Maybe not because of anything they did, but how you felt when you were with them. When people close to you leave, sometimes it feels like losing a part of yourself, because there’s no one else that brings out those characteristics.

I also think that if you have a falling out with someone, it is much harder to grieve them when they’re still alive. It was the number one reason why my breakup with my first girlfriend was so hard on me.

Then those memories creep back up on you, those inside jokes and those serious moments that only you and the person you lost would say to each other and it’s being kissed and stabbed at the same time because no one else understands the joke. It’s the pleasure of having that person around, if only in your mind, and the discomfort of nothing being resolved except the pieces you’re trying to pick up on your own.

And pick them up you do, because that’s what life does. You can move on, or it will steamroll you every time. You don’t have enough processing power to think about the past, the present, and the future all at once. Your mind will attempt it and falter just when you think you’ve got it nailed. Multitasking only works for so long, and then you will grieve again. But it will be a more shallow well of emotional injury. You break down every so often until all you’ve got left are the good memories, the ones that make you smile when you think of them.

You concentrate on those memories, because they, too, will fade and there will not be new ones to replace the old. You have to get out and meet more people, and you find out it’s easy to get phone numbers for hanging out and hard to get the hanging out to materialize.

You grieve the friend you lost because it would be good to see him right now.

And eventually it doesn’t hurt. You just have a guardian angel on your shoulder, someone to think is watching over you even when they’re not there. Another part of the person actually being alive that is inconvenient, because maybe it’s creepy to think about people as angels while they’re still alive, but it doesn’t matter. It’s just a way to soothe yourself while you’re under stress, especially if you are not a God or angel person to begin with.

And that’s generally where the story ends. You can spend your life being angry at someone for leaving, or you can fill yourself with the happy memories you’ve already had. The choice is yours.

This is a post about the things I enjoy on television, Hulu, and Netflix. This is different than Recommendation Wednesdays because that section is for things I run across randomly and think would make funny little paragraphs- bite-size morsels of comedy. This section is where I list my longest-enduring favorites, which I hope you’ll watch so we can discuss together! Even if you all band together and decide I have crappy taste!

1. Doctor Who (BBC America)

Doctor Who is my favorite television program, and I stumbled across it quite by accident. I was looking in the “Recently Added” section on Netflix, and I had heard of Doctor Who before. I’d run across it on PBS as a kid and thought it looked interesting with no real access point to jump in. Then, my choir director at church started watching it and imitating Daleks during rehearsal, so I thought there must be something redeeming. I started the first episode and loved it so much that I thought, “I can’t take this journey without Dana. This is definitely something she’ll want to see.” But The Doctor had me at antiplastic, and I’ve never looked back.

2. Scandal (ABC)

Shonda Rhimes proved her TV mettle with Grey’s Anatomy, but Scandal is in a class all by itself. The reason to watch Scandal is that no one is safe. Ever. For any reason. No, wait. The real reason to watch Scandal is Kerry Washington. Her lips should be their own character (imagine a Family Guy cutaway here).

3. JEOPARDY! (Syndicated)

A lot of people forget to put JEOPARDY! on their favorites list, but that doesn’t mean they don’t watch it every night. I intentionally put it here because it’s the one half hour of television that is just about us nerds. And I didn’t come up with that idea. My friend Hope did. I just ran with it.

4. Spy (Hulu)

Spy is a brilliant show about an average loser guy who is raising a child with his horrendous ex-wife. Both his ex-wife and his son extol the virtues of his loserdom on a daily basis. Things get interesting when he goes to apply for a job as a messenger with the government, walks into the wrong room, and takes the MI:5 exam… never knowing what it is. He gets incredible scores, hilarity ensues.

5. Burn Notice (Netflix)

I think that Burn Notice is still on television, actually, but I don’t know what channel. If you haven’t seen it from the beginning, you’ll want to. It’s the story of Michael Westen, burned spy stuck in Miami with “a trigger-happy ex-girlfriend, a friend who rats you out, and his family, when he’s desperate.” Probably not a direct quote, but close enough. I don’t want to give away any of the story, so my favorite part of Burn Notice is the gadgets and the way Michael explains step-by-step how the action is going to go down. And Gabrielle Anwar is just the most gorgeous thing on television, anyway… except for Kerry Washington’s lips.

 

I honestly believe that sometimes Dana’s only job is to make sure that I don’t miss all the fun that happens in life. Seriously, there are moments when I believe my wife is also my pet monkey because she intentionally does stuff to drag me out of dreadful moods. It’s kind of like having a Life Alert monkey that can talk. Yes. I can go that creepy. You know what else? I spank the monkey. Yup. It just got creepier in here. My work is done.

As an introvert with ADD, it is very hard for me to change subjects; I don’t necessarily mean on the outside. When something is going on inside me, or perhaps another person has said something that hurt my feelings, it just stays in my mind like a worm, and I have trouble letting it go. (It’s a function of ADD called “hyperfocus,” and I can’t explain it except that NOTHING else matters.) I wonder what I could have done to make such a hurtful thing come out of someone else’s mouth, and by the next morning, I will have a list of fifty ways in which I’ve come up short. Dana sees the way my mind works, and is invaluable at punching me on the arm and telling me to snap out of it. I will only take “snap out of it” from Dana. If you are a depression patient, you probably have issues with those words, too. Let’s just leave it at that.

Dana is my court jester, and you never really know you need one until you have it. She makes me more fun than I could be on my own, because I am liable to tell you to get the hell off my lawn.

(Just in case you were wondering, never ask me for anything. Dana’s the nice one.)

So we’re just hiking, Dana and me, enjoying each other’s company because we’re both playing in the water with wild abandon. My court jester, my greatest love.

One of the reasons I enjoy Doctor Who so much is that it explores a level of friendship unusual by American standards. We live in an age where it’s ok not to know anyone who lives around you. It’s perfectly ok to cocoon with your spouse and ignore the rest of the world. It’s good to have a television show anywhere in the world that puts helping your friends above all else. It’s a new societal norm, and one that would be great if we could implement manana.

It’s hard to imagine it happening, however. We have taught each other to be afraid, and taught each other that if you have closeness with anyone other than your spouse, you have already cheated. It’s sad, because it murders one of the most beautiful things about life… instead of one person meeting all your needs, you know you have needs, so you have permission to go and get them met from others. The twisting of that phrase into a sex joke has caused the idea to unrecognizably decay. But here’s what I mean.

Dana could go her entire life without learning how to play Fallout 3, and she would be fine. But I really like playing Fallout 3, so it’s up to me to find friends who also enjoy it. Dana knows I can be trusted for hours at a time that when I say I’m playing Fallout 3, that’s really what I’m doing. The trust goes both ways. In order to make my spouse feel safe about me disappearing with other people, she has to be in on the plan.

But at no time, not now, not a little while from now, not ever, am I likely to hear “can I join your Fallout 3 team?”

Dana and I both care very much for our companions, people we see as an extension to our family that help us make it so… because when we are off with our companions, having fun, we have an opportunity for new conversation, new enlightenment, and not the stifling energy of a meeting of the minds where the sync has already happened for the last five days every five minutes ad nauseum.

I only hesitate to use the word “friend” because it doesn’t mean enough. The Doctor is routinely in situations that threaten the lives of them all. What would happen if Rory decided to choose only his wife, and not everyone else? No. Friends count just as much, which is why so many people are missing out on deep relationships with a multitude of people. They decide that they only have the capacity to love one person at a time.

 

 

It is an auspicious day. Today is the day I will post the fiftieth article on this blog. When I started a month ago, I had no idea that by today, I would have written approximately 100,000 words. I’m going to take a break today and let you have the floor. Let’s CELEBRATE!!!!

FIFTY POSTS!

STORIES HAS REACHED FIFTY POSTS!

Let’s party.

Quietly.

Just a Bit of Warning:

If you don’t have time for a really long post, you might want to save it until you do.

Love,
Leslie

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There was a moment last week, and many of you read it on Facebook, wherein the only words to my post were “I’m going to drive out the Gorge on Saturday and I’ve got an extra seat in the truck. Takers, you know how to find me. It’s not like it’s hard.” There’s been a lot of drama swirling in my head lately (which, I assure you, has nothing to with my current reality and everything to do with creating a new one) (Please don’t call me to ask if anything is wrong) (Really). I am working very hard to let money come to me, instead of working for it.

I know that initially sounds terrible, but I don’t mean it in the absolutely white-entitlement way it sounds (Ok, maybe. Thanks for calling me on my shit. You’re a peach). I mean that I am looking for ways of setting up my web site, my Facebook page, whatever to make money for me when I’m not here (like, at my “real job”). I don’t mean “not working” in terms of being lazy. I mean not working in terms of direct trading of services for dollars.

In my family, we call the ability to do that “sitting around, smoking cigars, and owning stuff.” Actually, that’s not what we call the ability. That is the very definition (for the ENTIRE McLanemy clan) of filthy stinking rich. The first time we heard that phrase, the person telling the story had just come home from a middle school friend’s house, where there was an elevator inside. I definitely don’t have to achieve that level of fame.

I will be happy when we can stop buying spaghetti and mushroom sauce at Dollar Tree like it’s going out of style. I will be happy when I don’t have to wonder if I’m spending too much money on Dr Pepper when COLA is so much less. I will be happy when I don’t think about how to come up with next month’s rent instead of having enough money in the bank to do what we really want. Because what we really want is so much bigger than what we really have.

That’s the immediate dream. That’s the dream that can’t take off soon enough. I’ve been writing for long enough now that I’m not intimidated by people like Dooce, Mrs. Kennedy, and The Bloggess. I look at them and I don’t think “wow… they’re so much better writers than me.” I think “I’m every bit as good a writer as those women, so how did they get to the top of the field? Is it still possible to earn a living while blogging, or has that ship sailed?” So many bloggers that would have made it got wiped out by the Dot Com bust, and I’m not sure that the medium has quite recovered in this economy.

One of two things will happen: 1) Your content is so star-spangled awesome (quite an image, Aaron Sorkin) that advertisers come to you and offer you money to hawk their wares. 2) Your content is so star-spangled awesome that a conglomerate like HuffPost, Gawker, etc. will buy you out.

And technically, those are just the two things most likely to happen. There is a third, but it is so rare that you probably have the same odds of winning the Olympics: your content is so star-spangled awesome that a movie or TV writer sees your stuff and offers you a series with William Shatner.

If the web site takes off and this is actually possible, I do not want to go back to a full-time job. I want to earn a living so that I have time to create a vision and implement it. This web site is ultimately not about me. It is about you, and the wonderful things we can do together if we become a community. That’s the vision. Not a web site, but the online place to go when you need a place… you know? I don’t want this weblog to become all about God, but God appears because I’m interested in the divine. But at the same time, I want this community to have the same feel of a church- where we care about each other and ask what’s going on in each other’s lives.

I will say it again: the vision is not for me. The vision is to create something amazing for you.

The good news is that the web site is taking off and I’ve gotten more love in the last month than I thought was possible in a written medium.

And that’s what I’m thinking as I’m busting my hump up the trail.

I have a mantra:

Stronger than I have to be because I need to be.
Stronger than I have to be because I need to be.
Stronger than I have to be because I need to be.

I am huffing and puffing hard because this is the first time in years I’ve been on the trail. But the mantra keeps up with me, over and over and over and over while Sisyphus laughs in schadenfreude.

Stronger than I have to be because I need to be.
Stronger than I have to be because I need to be.
Stronger than I have to be because I need to be.

The switchbacks are long and not really ready for the season. Obstacles in my way everywhere. Boulders, sticks, burrs where you step and you start looking up because it’s been .8 miles and the waterfall is just about to peek around the corner and I’m not going to make it… not going to make it… until I see you, wrapped in your rain jacket because the force is so great. Walking toward you because I don’t know anything in that moment except “I’m going to kiss her under the waterfall.”

The memory is not the kiss itself. Those kisses are long gone, kept in the memory box under my soul for safe keeping. What’s still under the waterfall is the joy I felt in that moment, similar to being born again.

Stronger than I have to be because I need to be.