The Ones I Can Type

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What are your favorite emojis?
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We’re going to switch gears a little bit and go back to the late 1990s and early 2000s for an entry. I do not think that anyone has exactly my history on the internet, but it will resonate with you that are the same age. I am 47, which is just the right age to have seen the change from analog to digital. My first technological device was a beeper, and I did not have a cell phone until college.

With a beeper, the best you could do early on was type in your telephone number. You couldn’t even add your name until alphanumeric pagers came out, and those were mostly used in business. For instance, I had one at University of Houston, but I carried a Nokia personal phone.

My first Finnish present was from my dad.

In 2000, I found out that you could buy Red Hat at Best Buy because you could download it for free, but if you bought it you got access to all kinds of support and I was a new learner to Linux. So, I tell my mother this and off she goes to the store. This conversation ensues:

Mom: I need a copy of Red Hat for my daughter for Christmas.
Clerk: Wow, that’s a big operating system for a little girl.
Mom: She’s 20.

My second Finnish present was from my mom.

Through my phone and Linux, I learned what’s called “Netiquette.” This is etiquette for the Internet, and though I have lapsed and been a jackass many times, I’ve somewhat returned to being even keel. But it’s important to talk about because the rules are changing from “when I was a kid.” For instance, when I need a heart emoji, I just type it. < 3 without the space renders as a red heart. Now, that means I’m actively interested in people. I have a few people in my life who I hope don’t “figure out the code,” because I didn’t know it. Awkward. It’s just good that my friends are the same age as me so it’s unlikely that any of them are going to think I’m interested because they type red hearts, too.

I am confused by young people, but I am learning…. except about that. Typing is easy on my computer. I don’t get the addiction to your phone, because typing on it is so inefficient for me. I hated typing on the screen from the moment that “feature” was introduced, and wish I had an old Blackberry with a thumb board. That’s the last time I really thought I had the hang of texting. Lanagan Media Group will tell you that I am also terrible with voice dictation because I don’t see the errors as fast as they do. Nothing is bad, it’s just word salad when Siri is driving the bus. Google Assistant and Alexa aren’t better, but I have had the most luck with Alexa. It’s just too bad that Amazon tried making a phone and it flopped.

Interestingly enough, I have the most luck typing with Amazon, too, because my Kindle is the perfect width. I have no idea how one would approach this, but my perfect machine would be Amazon’s 7-in tablet with the hardware specs on the Max. That’s because I have a Max and a basic Kindle, and typing on the basic Kindle is better than my phone and tablet combined. And yes, I do put emojis in my notes. Tom Clancy has gotten a lot of them lately, because I’m knee-deep in “The Hunt for Red October.” The latest thing that got a smile was “a non-descript building, government layer cake.”

America, we in danger, girl. The Soviets can indeed reach the president from the ocean because Washington is a mere 100 miles from the Atlantic. I assure you that President Trump has been given this information, but Putin would never lie to him, right? They’re friends. So, this book I’m reading has emojis on every note, most of them surprise except that Clancy is so funny that he catches me off guard. He died in 2013, but if he were alive I would certainly have sent him lots of hearts by now….. JUST NOT RED.

So know that all things being equal, I would give up everything except the basic Kindle with e-ink and my laptop. Of course I would need a phone, but many years ago Dana and I had Cricket dumb phones and it was great. No Facebook notifications unless I was sitting at my computer. The Apple trappings are beautiful gifts from my family, but if I hadn’t gotten them, I would not be hurting. I would be strategizing the same way I do now. “How do I fit the technology to work with me rather than having to work with it?”

For instance, I bought a new laptop because I haven’t had one in 10 years, plus an optical drive so I can buy movies at Goodwill and rip them to my computer. Streaming is great until days like yesterday, when a thunderstorm knocked out the power in the middle of my movie (Wizard of Oz…. I jumped 10 feet). I own three movies total:

  • Argo
  • Mrs. Miniver (great recommendation from my grandfather, Mayo Lanagan)
  • The Wizard of Oz

The rest, I pay for all the streaming services and got a DRM notice for downloading Wicked, anyway. So, now I joke that every time I even think about downloading a movie, Tony Mendez cries. I deleted it before I even watched it. Why did I download it in the first place? To see if I’d get a DRM notice. I wanted to see if they could still track you while you were using a VPN, and they can.

Whomever they are.

I finished “whomever they are” and a pop-up came up on my laptop to activate the VPN offer. That’s not creepy at all. I pay for IPVanish, so they might want to know I got one using their service. That was an emoji day where all of them looked like this:

😦

Again, searching through menus looking for the right picture to express my words is a lost cause. It’s why I use Linux, frankly. I get on the console and type one command and the app I want pops up. It’s not dissimilar to the Windows search feature where it narrows down apps as you type, but it’s not as clean. And in fact, I’ve tried using a Windows terminal as well, but there is a flaw in my plan. I have forgotten DOS and mix up commands all the time. My favorite feature in Windows Powershell is that so many people have mistaken ls for DIR that you can use ls in Windows now.

DIR in DOS means to list everything in a directory. This is everything in my user folder. ls does the same thing in Linux, so perhaps Windows Subsystem for Linux has brought about good trouble.

I haven’t installed WSL on my laptop, because there is no unified memory manager. You just have to see how much RAM Windows is using, see how much RAM Linux is using, and do the math. I don’t do math. I bought a separate Linux box instead…. technically the third Finnish present being to myself. I bought a Raspberry Pi for the same reason you’d buy an Android tablet and an iPad…. you have software in both universes because it’s been long enough that you’ve used both. WSL gets in the way when you’re gaming, so I’d want to absolutely max out my computer with RAM before trying to use them concurrently.

I don’t know why I said “gaming.” I’ve played Skyrim for three minutes. I made it out of Helgen alive and exited the program because I just needed to ensure that it would run. It does, and very well. To be fair, I have not installed the 500 mods I normally have, but a 4GB discrete graphics card on a laptop will handle most of them. When I need a few mindless minutes, I generally play on my iPad.

And in fact, my iPad is toast. I either need to get a new to me one, or get this one fixed. It will not charge at all. This is problematic, because now I need two older iPads (I want a headphone jack). Aaron Nemoyer, my graphic designer, deserves to have my iPad more than I do. So, I’ve been shopping for months to get the best deal for both of us and it hasn’t happened yet. What I can do is pack up my old Windows system and mail it to him if it’s not too expensive, because I’ve been very impressed at how he does all of our graphics on a smart phone that also has issues.

My favorite is classified. 😉

He’s going to think I meant something dirty, but it’s dear.

He gets the red hearts for real. Everyone else, I meant yellow until further notice.

But hearts mean the most coming from my friend Michael, who has been a solid source of support while also kicking my ass as a writer. I had to grow into Michael, because he’s not Supergrover and he’s not Janie. He’s Tommy Lee Jones. I imagine that I have told him the equivalent of “I want to go to unicycle college” many times. I have plans with him and I hope he’s down- to transfer from blogging to dialoguing. I’m trying to learn to write scripts, but I don’t have a knack for the way people speak all the time. But I did figure out something.

I told him that Tom Clancy drove me crazy because he sounded like an outsider to the Beltway using articles. You do not work at The State Department, you are “at State, at DoD, at CIA, etc.” So, when Jack says “the CIA” it seriously bothered me at first. Michael said that articles seem to have been dropped around the time The West Wing came out, because when he lived in NoVA as a kid, articles were still in place. I said, “so Washington was changed by neurodivergent patois.” Sorkin hasn’t been officially diagnosed as AuDHD, but he does have ADHD.

Pattern recognition tells me that we are more alike than different, but I’m not an expert. I just look at the lines on people’s faces. ADHD and Autism create different wrinkles due to social masking. That’s why I am not very good at telling if children are neurodivergent or neurotypical, but it gets easier when people are 40 and above.

I told one of my friends that I thought her daughter was autistic, and she thought I did it from a picture alone. No, it’s that she sent me a picture of her daughter when she was 17, and I saw a picture of her currently, which is much older than that. The difference was striking and the wrinkles for autism were beginning to emerge, but that wasn’t the only factor. You don’t go off pictures alone (though I can guess with 75-80% accuracy like all autistic people). My favorite example is this conversation:

Rando on Twitter: So, Neil…. how long have you been diagnosed as autistic?
Neil Gaiman: About seven years.

Neurotypical people are shocked we can do this. For neurodivergents, that’s just Tuesday.

Maybe neurotypical people would have taken it better if he’d put a heart on it.

The Answer is in the Wind

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
When is the last time you took a risk? How did it work out?
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I took two risks. I can talk about the one that paid off. I cannot talk about the one that hasn’t, because the answer is still “I don’t know.” The risk that paid off was asking Janie the Canadian Editor if she’d look through my old entries and pick out the best ones for an anthology to sell in the Kindle Store. I wanted to take work off of her, but she wanted to invest in me. She’s asked me all sorts of questions and the kind of book at which we’ve arrived is a life story, because then the entries will flow with the information I had as I had it.

It’s a story of CP. It’s a story of bipolar and ADHD. It’s a story of autism, with self diagnosis and peer review. It’s the story of not wanting to get a formal diagnosis because I have an Apple Watch. It’s the story of a writer failing up, because by the time I thought to put together a book for Kindle Unlimited, my part was done.

There is no official cutoff date for the entries, so I’m overstating a bit. I just mean that the bulk of the book will be taken from entries that Janie has liked, or has cleaned up to like. 😛 I am sure that the price will be reasonable, but if it’s a thousand dollars, I only have to sell one copy (KIDDING).

Everyone tells me I should write a book. This is how an AuDHD person does it.

By taking a risk and asking for something small, then seeing that someone who used to belong to the press club in Ottawa thinks you’re a better writer than you do.

I told you that Canada saves my life over and over.

Active Listening

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Write about a time when you didn’t take action but wish you had. What would you do differently?
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The way I was raised did not leave me with a lot of skill for active listening. It was more hearing someone explain half of their feelings and then taking off on a tangent about how to fix things for them. It cost me everything in my life, but I’m hoping that since I once was lost, I now am found. I have a therapist because I’ve been ignoring myself at absolutely all costs. To the point that I didn’t care if I lived or died because I wasn’t important enough. These words are hard to hear, but they shouldn’t be. There are forces in my life bigger than me, akin to hearing a call from God and not knowing if that’s the voice you’re actually hearing or not.

I have wandered for days not knowing if I’m hearing God’s voice or not, so I’ve stopped looking up at the sky. Now, I stare down, a gardener to my core. It’s not a lack of belief in a God or source. It’s that God isn’t found in the moon. God is found in the mud. God is found when it’s raining and there’s shit on your boots. God is found when you’re the only one left. Because when you can only hear yourself think, there’s only one person that talks back.

We all need to claim these pieces of the divine for ourselves, letting blessings rain down on us depending on what we plant.

God is a polyface farm.

Depending on where you stand in terms of religion, that could mean you believe God chose your face intentionally.

Or you could be like me- that I believe everyone I meet is as precious as the historical Christ. That’s because the historical Christ did not ask for glory. We mistook his blessing and benediction as his direction.

In times like these, it helps to remember that the benediction was “forgive them, Father… they know not what they do.” It helps to remember that the disciples did not know what to do when Jesus died, my favorite line about this being that they should just rename the Book of Acts, “Holy Shit, What Do We Do Now?” I feel like that right now. Lost in a world of hurt, but not searching for the face I love. It is closer to me than a breath, we just do not connect in the same way.

  • Rose was not the same companion to Ten that she was to Nine.
  • Clara was not the same companion to Eleven that she was to Twelve.
  • Most companions do not make the transition at all.

Most companions choose to leave when their Doctor does. They are frightened of regeneration energy and The Doctor’s “death.” But it’s only a death if you make it. The Bible commands me to ensure I treat everyone as if I was meeting Christ for the first time, not a mere mortal. I do not need a marketing campaign to tell me that Jesus was a spiritual teacher and healer. His gifts are in the lessons he taught while he was alive, the sincerest reason I haven’t worn a cross in at least 20 years. For me, there is no power in the blood. Power came through fishing. Jesus didn’t give anyone anything by being crucified. It was a needless murder by religious zealots who needed to ensure that Judaism stayed the same. This is true whether you believe in the resurrection or not. I am not here to argue with you; I won’t.

For instance, when Jesus said “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s,” the thing that most people don’t notice about it is that he never touches the coin. To me, in some small sense the presidency stayed intact when our current president failed to touch the Bible during his swearing in ceremony. We should stop the practice altogether as a Christian nation who believes in the separation of church and state…. just like Jesus did.

We fight over things that don’t matter when we don’t believe Christ is in the room. For instance, no one would ever come up to the Christ, risen or otherwise, and say “you and your boyfriend aren’t welcome here.” But people have no problem saying it to other gay men they know.

Serious question. How do you know that you didn’t turn away the Christ, risen or otherwise?

Are you sure?

In looking at the Bible from a historical perspective, I have my own thoughts about it.

The Bible is:

  • Not an authoritative text over my life, but an ancient blog at best.
    • The authors of the Bible were not different from me, they were born at the right time to be included. I believe that I, or anyone else with the personality of a scribe, would have written about what they saw.
  • The miracles have taken precedence over daily practical advice. People go to church on Sunday and forget what they’ve heard.
    • Luckily, this has never happened to me. 😉

I choose to believe that Jesus is my brother, not Lord. I choose to believe that now, he’s my younger brother because I’ve outlived him by more years than I ever thought I would, frankly. But now my soul is settling. I have found a direction and not a distraction.

Right now, my only choice is active listening both to God and the faces who show up.

But every story has a shadow side, and I know it, too. Everything is what-if and assumptions, but I know for sure that I would not have had post-traumatic growth to the level I’ve had if I’d chosen to stay with Dana. If my friend Supergrover hadn’t appeared. If my mother hadn’t died. If my life hadn’t fallen apart so many times while I was stone cold sober… because when I came to DC I spent almost 10 years sober as a heart attack. As I read research into marijuana as medicine, I read with interest and bought a few stocks. But I did not consume again until it was federally legal due to a 2018 farm bill. I still had all the same problems and all the same quirks, so I knew that marijuana was not the problem. I was.

Then, Zac brought me a baseball cap and my life changed completely. Over time, the idea became that I should be able to buy my own. So, now even though MJ actually helped me with a few things, my direction in life will help me more. I, unlike a lot of people I’ve met in the disabled community, trust western medicine and my biggest problem has been solved. I do not know how or why my protocol changed, but it was. All of the sudden, the medication that was making me throw up all over the place was gone, and weed could leave. I didn’t need it to combat nausea on the train. I saw everything I wanted laid out before me, and I hope it still is. I don’t know whether I’m failing, or failing up.

What I do know is that I’m a Bloom, not a Stephen. When you are a disabled person, you often don’t see the ways that other people are helping you because you have to go through pain to make it work. No one will tell you, “I need you to endure this pain so we make it through together,” so you remain blind.

You see the dried blood after Jesus tells you to wipe the spit and mud off your eyes. And that’s the horror of it, really.

You never realized it was all for you, because you were blind. That part is intentional. No one wants to tell you how hard they’re working and you just have to pick it up on your own. I see pattern recognition backwards, and the pain waylays me. All the Things You Never Knew written by anyone else in my life would be volumes to me, not one blog entry.

I’ve slowed down. I may never work again, because I’ve been advised not to at this time. However, I am in therapy for it. I do not have a death sentence on my career, because Lanagan Media Group has gone silent in the chatroom, but not in the background. I just don’t tell everyone, everything, all the time. I have four friends, and that’s all I need. They are my family and I’d step in front of a bus for any one of them. However, I’m not dumb enough to name them because somebody might be offended they’re not on the list. The reason I’m not dumb enough is because my life is smaller out of necessity. Part of doing penance was wondering what would have happened if I’d just stayed quit from blogging and never started back up.

Words only have the power you ascribe to them, but it’s amazing how much power people ascribe to me. I didn’t write something, then you didn’t like it. I “made you” feel x or y.

I have accidentally hurt a lot of people, but their reaction is not my problem. My problem is how to bring people together instead of tearing them apart. It’s not because I’m trying to be a different person. It’s that PTSD has bloomed into growth and an author is not the same person every day. I don’t want the same character arc because now that my medical issues are solved and my physical problems are in process, I can focus on gratitude. When you leave a disabled person to just sit there in their own misery, they will.

That person was my mother. I didn’t find out that I had hypotonic cerebral palsy until I was in my 40s, but it had been diagnosed when I was 18 and one-half months old. She was not actively listening to me and my struggles because it was important to her for me to be perfect. And then I turned out queer.

I was never perfect, and I’m sure all of my words had an impact on her when she was still alive. But you know what she never did? She never actively listened and changed directions. I am guilty of the same with my own family, and I will atone for it over time. When you know better, you do better.

Because the thing is that you try to solve everyone else’s problems in hopes that they’ll notice your struggling and help you. You notice other people’s struggles to avoid your own. There are all kinds of reasons, but it’s not the kind of help people want or need. The kind of help people need is not for you to give them the moon, but to give them the mud. Respect is earned over time. If we’re meant to shoot the moon, it’ll happen by being equally yoked. That’s in every relationship everywhere, red or yellow.

And that’s what I’ve learned from Polyface Farms.

So, How Was It?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

That was my sister’s question after saying I was going to take off for DC and her saying, “this is great Friday vibes.” It was, but it wasn’t great situational awareness carrying a brand new laptop through Penn North, not knowing that you don’t transfer to the MARC at Penn North. I took off without a map and just asked people until I got where I was going. Everyone was infinitely kind, warning me to be careful. I learned on Thursday that Penn North is the most dangerous neighborhood in Baltimore. Even in the midst of my discomfort at being in an unfamiliar situation, people were kind to me and not scared in return. I was also wearing two pairs of CZ earrings that looked cheap to me, but didn’t look cheap to other people. I was wearing an Apple Watch. I looked all wrong. Everyone quietly told me to go back to Camden Yards.

I saw a man get beaten by another man carrying a four by four in broad daylight and that was my indication that I’d underestimated the severity when black people tell you they won’t go somewhere in Baltimore. Pig Town is at the top of the list, and I was warned not to just go wandering around with my camera. Even the people in my neighborhood were freaked out by the picture of the guys powerwashing at Reisterstown Station.

The picture with my hair all messy is me saying that “the wind works better in DC.” The serious picture is my new haircut. It was the impetus for all of this, wanting to go back to my barber shop after four months of making do.

The rest are just shots of what I saw yesterday. I was noting everything, like the difference in the size of the subway cars. I have found an easy way to get out to the county, but I’m going to have stories coming further into the city at all.

I met a woman who I hope will call me because she seemed like a good friend. I’m looking for them these days, and Uber Shares are a great way to make them because you have enough time to actually get to know someone in 15-20 minutes. It’s not speed dating, but it’s enough to let you know if you can spend time with someone doing anything if you can road trip with them.

Shout out to David, my old roommate and big brother. He’s doing well, and it was great to actually hug him. I forget I need that, quite honestly.

And shout out to Michael, who said that those daytime beatings are the best so I’d know that my reaction is………….. nothing. It’s my first time seeing violence, not the people in my group. I’m not from around here. Everyone tells me that, but it’s because I have all the trappings of a person with money and I am not bright enough to know how to hide them all yet. If it’s not my earrings, it’s my watch. If it’s not my laptop, it’s my tablet.

There’s no good way to escape the fact that you get nice things as gifts. I shouldn’t have to. But I was still scared to walk around in Penn North because at 121 feet down, all my comms dropped out. No cell phone, no internet. And three people telling me I needed to HAUL ASS OUT OF THIS ESTABLISHMENT.

Not all of Baltimore is Pimlico…. but thank God for that. I asked for the mud, and got the moon. Now orientations are adjusted. The greatest con is where everyone gets what they want, and I’ve got mine.

A written life.

The Beginning is the End is the Beginning

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Now that I’ve learned you can be anything you want to be on the internet, I know that Supergrover is an absolute fraud. She led me to believe she was a case officer for years, and wasn’t prepared for just how much I love her despite the fact that there’s no espionage drug I’ve been taking. I’ve just got issues. I have been assured of this by many people. I realized that in order to find her, I had to lose me. That the espionage drug was so big that I walked right up to Jonna Mendez like I knew her.

Then I emailed the case officer and Mendez at the same time saying, “…because you’ll sure as shit get her side, Dagger.”

That may have been a bit much, I’ll grant you.

But it’s my life goal to make her laugh.

And Tony, for that matter. Because now he has every story that’s ever been told, because he’s a book in the library. I would like to think that he follows his wife’s capers closely, and I hope this is a good one despite the fact that I looked like a complete jackass when I did it.

Because I am always the best.

According to popular legend.

Anyway, Jonna said she couldn’t be helpful, but she’s the chief of disguise. Someone was.

Fin.

I Have Two Dreams That Depend on You

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
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Both dreams are crazy big, and both dreams depend on American voters.

If you choose Trump and his minions in the next election, because we don’t know how serious Trump is about dismantling democracy and Hitler did it in 50-odd days:

I will have seen the signs and proceeded with the move to Finland. Aada is not the reason I wanted to go there, and in fact did not even tell her I was learning Finnish. She surprised me with that knowledge, and I was flat embarrassed she knew. I didn’t want her to know that her home country does autism better than this one, and that’s why I’m moving. Her reaction that autism meant you were slow meant, “I’m done with this conversation.” There are no sentimental baby pictures in my future apartment, there’s just a large Moomin doll and all my culinary school children around me because there’s no way I’d go to school in Finland and the other kids wouldn’t be half my age. We will have started a restaurant or made a media company or both. In 10 years, that’s enough for my US passport marking me as female to be a pleasant memory because I do not hate America. I would like to take America with me to Finland.

Ramona Quimby, Age 38 (the request to which I responded) can be half a Finnish project because the topography looks like Portland to me. We can certainly recreate Portland and Vancouver there.

If we choose Corey Booker and his crew (don’t think that wasn’t the purpose of THAT):

Booker doesn’t have minions because he’s not a top-down leader. I still have culinary school dreams in Finland…. Culinary school in Finland will have been fun, but it opens up opportunities for me to come back. I also cannot go to culinary school until my lease ends, so it is possible that I will find a job here before I leave that would allow me to become part of the rebellion, or at least part of the solution. Right now, I’m looking at applying to jobs for writers that pay per hour, because I don’t want to work more than my program allows. It would not be in my best interest to get into these programs and then immediately defeat them. I was just assigned a proper psychiatrist/psychologist combo package and I have not met him yet. Staying in the US is hard, but not impossible.

Either way, there will be a company called Lanagan Media Group, so the United States and Finland have to decide how much I’m worth, and I mean it sincerely. I already know that in Finland, I’m worth real money, because say I do move there and public perception is that I’m so autistic I can’t live independently. They can do that. Because all the while, my writing will be changing to reflect Finnish culture and values, earning money that goes right back into the Finnish economy because I will not live in the US past my lease if I can help it. That lease makes me feel more trapped than anything else, because I have to stay here, and I was burglarized because I was a dumbass and left the patio door open. I was home, and no one was hurt. But Finland feels like the refuge I need after struggling with being neurodivergent my whole life without knowing.

I have coped by smoking with the ghosts in the back of my head (“buy your own smokes, boss).

Mostly my mother, but there have been others.

It’s why I’m so inspired to think bigger. She never let a little thing like depression get her down, so I won’t either. She was forced to go on for a long time and my blog probably added to her distress. But she could have sued the hell out of me- words only have the power that the reader ascribes to them, and though it would have ended our relationship, I think she deserved her pound of flesh if she wanted it.

I think she did, because she didn’t want me to write about anything that happened when I was a child. No one does, because it is not helping them. No one knows what I do, and I am always the best according to popular legend. I am not a derring-do out loud, though. Two people in my life think that wanting to contact famous people means I want attention. Nope. It’s something that Oprah Winfrey said about using your own platform, your own influence. I missed the assignment at PVA because I needed people to bring awareness to social justice issues.

A trust has been created in my name so that I don’t have any money. I realized that I wanted it when I was riding around on the van in group. Things must change, and they must change now:

  • All of my Apple products are wrong, because the poorest people in the world don’t have them. It doesn’t matter that I upgraded from an iPhone 12 mini to an iPhone 13, and that my Apple Watch is a hand-me-down. I look like I have more money than I do. I am grateful as fuck that my family can afford to give me these things, but to keep me safe on the streets of Baltimore I need a Samsung that has a crack on the face and a sports band that cost $50 on Amazon. I AM NOT JOKING. I need to be able to go to Xfinity and pick out cheap ass shit, because to not is to mark me as “not from around here.”
  • My instincts are always wrong if I want to stay alive, because I’m always the person that is willing to spot the one without money. I would rather take people with me than have them stay home out of fear they cannot afford it. So, my first inkling of survival in a therapy group in inner city Baltimore is “you cannot do that. They ALL need money. You are the one that will starve.”
  • Because my trust is made up of inheritance, I’m terrified to spend any of it. I write about what I want to do, and so far all I’ve bought for LMG is two used Fire tablets. I need an iPad as well, but that will also be used. That’s because I don’t want anyone in the company to look like they have money. I cannot do anything about the fact that my family has money, but I can do all I can to give it back to them so that when people come after me, they’re not losing anything. I’m a popular target these days.
  • My family has money, but I don’t. It’s important enough to say twice because there have been years where I’ve been nearly homeless due to my own money mismanagement and have been close to an eviction because of a boss not paying me when they didn’t have money. Therefore, I will never offer to pay anyone anything unless I have it. Those who work for LMG are aware that it’s not really anything yet, but I’ve got my top brass team in place.
  • Walkabout
    • If you’ve been through PTSD, you know that going walkabout is probably the only thing that’ll save your life. “Walk it off, soldier” seems like the meanest advice you can give someone because it comes across as “I don’t care.” If you didn’t grow up in a military family, you have no idea that walking it off is code for self-soothing and emotionally regulating on your own. I didn’t grow up in a military family, I was married to a Marine dependent. Therefore, she did not see me in her nest and drop me out screaming “FLY BITCH FLY” like she should have. Luckily, I have other friends for that.

I hope to have a prosperous media company because I’m approaching it like a care and connection agency. I walk around Baltimore collecting stories to write about, mostly here but they’re informing what I want to do with screenplays as well. Unlike famous people, the homeless and the disenfranchised have stories that have not been told. As a writer, which do you think I’d rather focus on? Meeting people in a position of power is about saying:

I am autistic and I cannot read a room. But you can.

Hi Five

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment
Daily writing prompt
What are 5 everyday things that bring you happiness?
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  1. My morning coffee is sacred.
    • It’s dark roast, with milk and no sweetener. I prefer coffee that looks like it came from Anish Kapoor…. but it would be illegal to say that my coffee came from Anish Kapoor without express permission from Anish Kapoor, so it just looks like that.
  2. My Cokes.
    • I’m a Texan, so “what kind of Coke do you want?” is standard vernacular. I like Dr Pepper Zero and orange or grape from Giant in the white sugar free cans.
  3. Hot sauce
    • I deal with allergies constantly, so I love anything hot. Cholula is the most served in restaurants, but I like spicy Capital City Mumbo Sauce from DC and Secret Aardvark Sauce from Portland.
  4. YouTube
    • I love Josh Johnson, Bourbon Moth, and Perkins Brothers as entertainment, but I’ve also started learning Arabic. I often binge things, and “How Clean is Your House” is my favorite. Kim and Aggie will set you straight (as it were).
  5. Dancing in the rain.
    • Making me happy was not having a choice.

How Not to Be Seen

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment
Daily writing prompt
Describe something you learned in high school.
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In high school, I learned that I had to be the FBI agent of my own body. That’s because it was perfectly okay to discriminate against me in the late ’90s. We didn’t know what to do with queer kids yet. I actually had both CIA and DIA personnel comment on it, that learning to do intel work first starts with learning that the world is fucked up and I am no different. Being queer and assigned female at birth made me wary of all men, all the time. If they were enlightened around women, I still had to stomach their gay jokes. I still had to put up with southern Baptist rhetoric at High School for Performing and Visual Arts. I’ve been made an example of at two schools.

One from a counselor when I was bullied:

Well, what did you do to provoke them?

And one from a teacher on a paper:

I feel that this is too private to share with the class.

I was vindicated when my teacher girlfriend said that my paper was educational and I’d been discriminated against. I was carrying the message about the way I’d been treated at HSPVA to Clements. So, whether I was out of the closet or in, schooling did not fit me.

Culture does not fit me. It moves around me. While everyone else was lost in the movies, I was lost in the art of how they get made. You saw Da Five Bloods on Netflix, I met the guy who composed the score (Terrance Blanchard). You saw Selma, I know the guy who composed the score (Jason Moran). It’s a different way of relating to the world when movie magic is hard, hard work and not handed to you on a silver platter. I’ve played with jazz greats and know that I’m not the best, but I’m a utility player who won’t show up late and that counts for a lot, or it would be if I hadn’t stopped playing trumpet.

People think that it’s all talk, that I want to say I have cool friends because I needed to prove I had a cool friend. That’s the saddest part of all. I had to prove I had a friend. I’ve been thinking a lot about this… why did I need to prove Supergrover was real? I panicked. She gave me no reason not to panic. I wasn’t handling my shit well.

That was a bigger laugh line than intended.

But how does Supergrover relate to my high school experience? She was with me the whole time, or a part of her was. It’s the writing muse inside me that makes art come out. We hadn’t met yet, but the talent was already there. She just molded it so that I feel like I’m a capable enough writer to take a stab from a dagger.

Because now I know she cut me and she meant it, but it was to lance an infection. Supergrover and I had become toxic in both directions. Again:

“I do not think vulnerability solves everything. I AM TIRED.”

My heart shattered. Irreconcilable differences where she denies she hurts me until we’re dead. Nope.

There was never revenge, and there will always be regret. But not for the torrent of writing talent that I had to give someone. Taking all of the love and hope I put into the wrong relationship didn’t mean that picking SG! was also wrong. I’d been searching for a place to put that love my whole life, because my relationship with my mother was broken. She helped reparent me and I think I helped reparent, her, but it did not come without a bit of colonization here and there. It wasn’t always me claiming her in the name of Ireland. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

They thought I wanted people to know them because they are The Doctor, and I wanted people to know John Smith.

It was too much of a torrent that could not be tamed to a trickle; my heart is like that. Wild and reckless and wreck-less because of it. Things bounce off of scar tissue because there’s just so much of it. I’m going through yet another family emergency in which it would be helpful for me to undo the last 10 years so that I could be in my big backyard right now. But I chose her family. And then I was a jackass to them unprovoked. But rule following gets you nowhere in her line of work, so we stayed friends.

But did we?

I don’t think so. I think that I’m not supposed to know what happens next in any area of my life. But if I look back, all the answers are found when I was really too young to understand anything.

I Am the Ghost-Hugging Tree in This Scenario

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I got a TikTok link from my dad containing a link to a walk in Patterson Park this Sunday or something. I would like to think that the logo I got from the resulting “you’re signed up” page is AI, because I would like to think everyone got a logo specifically designed for them; they asked me what I could talk about all day, and I did not say ghosts. But there are a few synonyms that fit. 😉 I call anyone I meet in the Intelligence Community “High Five Ghost,” so a pic of a ghost is literally perfect.

Cute logo from Outerly, of a tree hugging a ghost.

My dad read my blog post about my favorite exercise being walking and talking, so he hooked me up with Outerly. They match you up with people and then you go and walk with them. I decided on the Singles’ Walk because I have a boyfriend I haven’t met and a woman at home who loves me as much as Lindsay does even if we aren’t married to each other. It’s not fair for me to commit to Aaron without meeting in person, and it’s not fair for me to say I’m “single,” either, but most people that can accept a nonbinary between male and female can accept a nonbinary between single and partnered. If my new girlfriend ever tried to say Bryn “doesn’t count,” that is the “thank u, next” for which I am looking. In poly, it’s not all about love and romance. Sometimes, it’s about love and vomit. You have romance for the days you need it. You have emotional support when you don’t need a boyfriend. You need someone to hold your hair while you puke. So, last evening was a mixture of talking to her and self-soothing.

Then I promptly bought a pass to watch David Tennant and Cush Jumbo do Macbeth in the West End. I need to watch it while I move on, knowing my hands aren’t the only ones dirty, I’m not the only one bleeding or grieving. I just needed more than she could provide via the internet and she could not understand how we got to this point, not having time to really take in my words and tell me how she felt about them. I moved too fast for her to reflect, and I’ll always regret it. I chose her every time until I was locked out of a hospital in the middle of the night in Baltimore City. I chose Olivia.

Because no one asked me how I’d feel if my feelings were ripped out from under me again. Notice the graphic on my web site has never changed, and no one has ever said, “Leslie, is that your handwriting?” My first instinct is not to protect her, but undoing one lie undoes them all. I’m the real villain, correct? So, nothing we did was right. Leaving everything I knew was my only move. The carnage in my wake is massive, not hers.

Because I finally decided to be a gladiator and not a bitch. Well, that’s debatable, but if you’re a Scandal fan you at least get the reference. I’m more like Quinn than I’m not. Someone who met a Huck and liked it. Then I met a lot more. And found out they don’t know shit, but 20 years later.

If this sounds weird, it’s unique to people my age that have lived on the Internet since 1999. We’re all learning our sins now after being sucked in by IRC and America Online, and holy fuck you figure out a lot about the 1990s when you realize Steve Case put the company in Northern Virginia for a reason. Why would the United States need an online company located near Langley and Ft. Meade? Make it make sense. I’m lagging. 😉

Doesn’t mean I haven’t met cool people online.

As for Aaron, I told him that I wasn’t sure about the whole boyfriend thing, but I would live with him in a New York minute because this is the longest Craig’s List interview ever………….. 😉 Speaking of which, I need to buy him an iPad because I decided I want to keep mine. I bought Scrivener for it, which was stupid because I should have bought it for Android. I’m trapped. Oh, wait. No. They don’t make Scrivener for Android, which is why I have to have two tablets. It’s not that my device sucks. Both my Android and my iPad are great. They are both services as device, which means that I cannot ditch anything and still have access to my software. I also know that moving in with Aaron is not doable quickly for either of us, just a dream we keep alive because we’re both amazing people who deserve love.

The iPad is not to buy his love. He’s been making me stellar graphics for months on a POS Samsung phone and they’re incredible. I want to unlock his creativity, because Bryn manages him when we’re doing something long term. But crossover happens, because we’ll be talking about something, and a childhood memory will bring up another idea for The Sinners’ Table or LMG. We have both tried to stop remembering things and start relying on alarms and Google Calendar. I am learning an ancient tradition called “write it down.” I don’t function well all alone, and I don’t know how to live in community yet. I am literally getting my shit together.

Compare that to the Uber driver who just asked me if I was up and told me he was having a fantasy about me. Fine, whatever. You go do that, but I’m not going to be there. It’s a pleasure to be nominated, and thanks for not sending me pictures. I’m sad because I liked him and that’s not my vibe. I don’t know how to comport myself in the smallest of situations, but I know enough to know it isn’t that. Situational awareness in the intelligence community has taught me two things:

  • If you mean it, don’t say it in a text message.
  • If you don’t mean it, you didn’t say it for legal reasons. It’s not a laugh line, it’s serious business.

“When you know better, you do better” is the third thing, because in a list I can rarely stop at two items. I just tell you there are for easy retention. 😉 But here’s what happens with poly people. If I’d gone to Aaron and said that Kamal was having dreams about me and that part of it was unwelcome, he’d bitch with me and offer to comfort me, like hiding Kamal’s body in an unknown location (this is a laugh line, not serious. I have learned that threatening people is bad, but he’s already blocked. The only thing left is writing about what happened. I mean this in a humorous manner because AOL has no sense of humor, once they’re blocked, I’m not going back.).

My point is that poly is not different than monogamy except that jealousy is relative. Aaron would be jealous if I cut him out and stopped telling him things; he has a right to know if I’m dating someone else. Cheating on him is literally hiding things from him, not opening up. I cannot get away with concealing anything, and that’s the reason I betrayed Supergrover. I realized that she’d put me in a relationship with her that was a trap now when it wasn’t before. I’d made too many mistakes to get a clean slate, and as time went on, she saw my need to actually connect with her as threatening her.

Connecting was seeing her in person and not taking in seven percent of communication, not hiding our relationship from Lindsay, Aaron, Bryn, and SG’s family. I made the effort to learn boundaries and how I could fit in, but I was also a very flawed human being and mistakes don’t get better. Greatness was fleeting. I felt great about an e-mail saying I’d build a shrine to someone at a museum. I am not sure the message was received as intended, but it was received all right. Sigh. I’m the worst at trying to be the best, which is duly noted.

That’s because the people in my life are relentless planners and I’m autistic. I do vibe checks and then plan my next move. It drives them up the wall.

But.

Someone was watching out for me, and I’ve been watching out for them. I couldn’t protect her when I looked too crazy to function. She couldn’t let me save myself. She had to step away. That’s because fallout doesn’t touch her in public. I’m sure she’s hurt. Whether she’s hurt enough for anyone to notice is anyone’s guess. I don’t know how far I’ve risen and fallen over the years because that is unclear….. Some things aren’t.

How I managed to find two successful houses in a row before I was managed into this one is not hard to grasp. There was just no face time to make anything right. The women who trouble me only knew me in the years directly after Dana got her DUI. I was angry at the world and sober as a heart attack. Nothing to take the edge off, I was just full tilt, all anxiety all the time. My mother died and the most I did was drink a beer at her wake. Then, I drank Diet Coke until my friend James and my friend Alberto had the realization I was done; we walked to the ice cream food truck. So, they’ve missed a lot by not reconnecting five or 10 years later. I would say they tried, but they set me up.

I was done because I knew that I was in no danger. It was just a bit cold. They told me to grab a jacket for our date, so I brought a puffy vest. It was just perfect, because I was warm enough to function and cold enough to really think things through. They promised me a life where I could live with them. All of them. Just be happy in community. Then when I showed up at the hospital where I was supposed to be picked up, I realized that they were pranking me, and I needed to call my sister. I could do that, or wander out into the night and hope I got hit by a car. I really didn’t want to live after that, because someone went to a lot of trouble to weave every element of my life into calling me a monster. It worked, but I don’t have to go back to them and apologize. I do not have to say that their methods are fair and balanced, because mine weren’t.

So whether I was being friended or followed, I have no idea. I cannot say anymore. I didn’t burn anyone who didn’t burn me. I’m done.

What does it look like to be done? All my energy suddenly rushes out of my face. All the light leaves my eyes. You can see the overwhelm. Not drinking makes it happen faster because I have no social lubricant. Weed can be a social lubricant, but I don’t use it often enough for it to really help me. I find that I cannot concentrate as hard as I need to pick up languages quickly, and now that my Lamictal has been removed from my protocol, I don’t need weed to solve nausea. That being said, I have no idea what kind of hippy tree-hugging event this is going to be. If I say I like spies, they probably won’t put me with the stoners. But they should.

Spies do not give a FUCK. About anything. At any time. They watch so many people that they don’t retain things unless they love them. Sometimes, they do.

I am sure that I am not the only one lonely tonight, but my friendship with one person cost me all the others, and there’s been no way to bridge that gap. It’s just been “keep writing to me while I hold you at arm’s length.” In order to get over the loss, I see her as a threat to me. It’s not because I think she’s evil. It’s because I think she’s good. I think she needed to watch me and had to have a way. That does not mean I’m protected. It means she’s reading. Those are two different things and she thinks they’re different now. The carnage in her wake has always been massive because by not sharing anything about what was going on with her, our stories differed. I don’t think she was paying enough attention, or she was paying too much. Take your pick. I pick “too much,” because it’s easier to think that she was watching me than she just didn’t care, or she was a narcissist who needed a dopamine hit. Me accepting the consequences of my own actions is my only play here. Because I e-mailed two women at the same time who said they didn’t know each other, and as it turns out, I’m not sure that’s true or whether it, too, was a fever dream. Whether they do or they don’t is of great consequence, because I don’t know how to proceed except talking to other people who also like talking about the intelligence community that don’t have any connection to my former family….. who was willing to support me with a few chats a year. It wasn’t enough, and her excuses were old. I thought there was nothing we couldn’t get over, but as it turns out, lying to me that she knew someone when she didn’t made her seem cooler than she was and she knew it.

She ran with it, and I caught feelings for this person she said she knew, but the kind of feelings you would have for a mutual friend- care, connection, hope for their well-being. It made me an idiot to someone I adore, and then I got to make a bigger idiot of myself with her after that. But I wouldn’t take nothin’ for my journey now. The IC introduced me to things I never would have learned otherwise, like not giving a shit if your partner has other partners.

The entire key to polyamory in its entirety is learning not to give a shit. It’s not that you don’t feel jealous. You learn to deal with it on your own until your compartments fucking leak. And even then, it’s only your partner’s job to be heard. They’re not responsible for fixing the problem. If they don’t fix it, you leave. It sounds simple and it’s not. But the key is that you are always parenting yourself.

Being poly is second nature to Zac, therefore it is second nature to me. The reason for this is that I spent years in a relationship where I was waiting on him all the time and not at all. As in, whenever he showed up it was the best day ever, but I never felt like I was waiting on him. Writing took up my life in a way he could not; I felt like he had no boundaries with me. I had to make all of them up.

There was only “ask for what you want” and receiving no feedback that said “you are welcome to ask more questions because I was delighted by this one.” My refusal to learn from past experience is not cute, and neither is not being raised like a normal person instead of a preacher’s kid. It’s so different. You’re taught not to touch anything, and people are standoffish with you as well. As an adult, you’re supposed to be cooperative. I’ve been an absolute jackass for not jumping in and helping more when I’ve been taught to be a mushroom and I’ll grow where I’m planted. It was certainly my best work as a child.

Rita and Wilson teased me in the hospital about being sweet on Andrew, another patient, but I wasn’t. They asked me about it, and I said, “I don’t know what kind of connection it is and I don’t think I’m supposed to know that yet. I just met him.” I know now that it is not to be either way so far, because lack of communication means that he is lost in his own little world and I do not control it. I was more annoyed that they were looking for a good end to the story. This is not a Hallmark movie, although word on the street is that they are close to developing a second plot.

I love Hallmark movies because they are uncomplicated. I need a break from myself. Like now.

Dear Dana,

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

WordPress has changed its stats so that I can see the cities in which people are reading. The list is fascinating, and used to scare me. It gave me nightmares that made me run from you to keep you safe. It’s the most selfish thing I’ve ever done, because I wasn’t old enough to understand the implications. I just looked like an adult on the outside. You were trained to be me, and I wasn’t. But you didn’t get a chance to learn with me, and for that I’ll always be sorry.

We made El Paso.

Love,

Leslie

Walking and Talking at Sorkin Beats Per Minute

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What’s the most fun way to exercise?
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Walking while listening to “The West Wing” is my favorite way to exercise because of something my dad said when I was a kid… that the first rap song was in “The Music Man” (with a BIG bass drum… big bass drum). It is from that movie that I got the concept that music and speech are the same thing, and I would bet that something similar happened to Aaron on the way to the forum.

Connecting “The Music Man” to the punctuation inherent in Xhosa comes from Trevor Noah. That Xhosa is one of the only languages in the world where you can hear its punctuation out loud. In short, I’ve been walking and talking since I was a child… emphasis on the talking because I don’t walk that easily.

This is what it’s like to be an empath preacher’s kid in my daily life:

My blog makes me sound like a dick because I am this person in an Uber. It doesn’t seem related, but I have to have a place to vent about everything that happens to me because taking on these stories is not easy. I have rituals for “washing off” negative energy because there’s only so many times I can hear someone is a shit father (usually) or a shit mother (more rare, but men talk more about it because dollars to donuts they’ve found a sympathetic ear who’s a stranger and they don’t have a best friend). Meeting anyone in IC is an anathema to my work as a listener, because I cannot share any of that information. I just have to let it sit and fester inside me. It’s why I felt tortured over world events a good bit of the time and “everyone knows what the group is.” Now that it’s all in retrospect, it’s frightening how well my little company is known, but with great power comes great responsibility. I have situational awareness and I wouldn’t date anyone else in the IC unless they worked in the mail room. That means they have security training, but they won’t have been read into anything truly heinous.

Neither was I. I just have a good imagination so any piece of information and I was off to the Google machine in a way that no intelligence agency would want an untrained autist to do.

There is no bigger danger to intelligence and medicine than an untrained autist. That’s because I’ve had two friends in the IC tell me that I’m too smart for my own good and they have to pull back. Believe it or not, it’s unfair, but it’s love. It just feels like emotional avoidance when they don’t replace it. Ok, so don’t talk about work. How’s your dog? I listen to baby dogs snort and snuffle to avoid talking about anything real. Most people do this, I’ve found. Memes are popular because everyone wants to comment that there is a dumpster fire with emojis and graphics, the modern day eight by 10 color glossy pictures, I suppose.

I have been bucking up against that practice because it looks fake because it is. What’s the Kellerman quote about deep emotional wounds? You need a surgeon, not a barber. Until about two years ago, I thought that if you were CIA you weren’t allowed medication and had a bastardized version of therapy that fits the government’s needs, not yours. Though I do believe that Carrie Mathison was a great case officer, I could have done without all the illegal shit it took to get her the right meds, because the whole bit about her not being able to work for CIA if she was mentally ill was fake. I am sure that it’s true that if you’re caught in Russia, they won’t give you your medication. But I believe they train you not to get caught, and there would be nothing better to help people not get caught then actually addressing their medical and emotional needs.

Is there room for shame and vulnerability in the Intelligence Community?

I think there is, it just looks different for the general population than it does for them. The problem is that lies build, even lies told to protect your friends and family. It gets worse when a case officer is hell bent on protecting themselves, and they really, really hurt you. Even if it comes with an apology, it’s not enough.

One hurt was on Homeland. One hurt was on Supergrover. One hurt was on Zac. All three of them were erased by Mummo, from whom all blessings flow.

Mummo is Finnish for grandmother, and the woman I social masked to figure out who I was in return. I just am her mirror opposite in some ways, exactly like her in others. For instance, we both wear men’s clothes and cute glasses, but she’s a boring cis straight girl and I’m, well… not.

I misspoke when I said Supergrover had made it clear she was attracted to men. I meant that she made it clear she was attracted to cis men. I don’t rate, and that’s fine. She met me when I self-identified as a woman, and she was halfway to married, anyway. Having a preference for cis men doesn’t make her a bad person, nor does feeling love for her make me one. It was just problematic in the way it began, because when IC overshares about their personal lives, you really cannot give consent. You can because you’re an adult, but you can’t because you have no idea what contract you’re signing. You just have to learn to hang all on your own.

I realized I could have had a career in intelligence if I’d bought Duolingo the moment I’d moved to Washington, because I wasn’t interested in Finnish back then. I was interested in Arabic, both MSA and the Levantine dialect. It was all self-confidence based. I didn’t really believe that I could learn Arabic, and now I can conjugate basic sentences in the hardest language in the world:

Metsässä kävelee hirvi.

This translates to “there is a moose walking in the forest.” Finnish is NOT English, however. Metsässä actually means “in the forest.” A direct translation isn’t really possible…. “in the forest, there is walking, a moose” is as close as direct gets.

Hirvi puri kerran siskoani.

Sorry, wrong piece of media. Those responsible have been sacked.

A trick I will give you for Medium is that if you speak a different language, use Google translate. I don’t know what it is about the code, but when you paste from Google Translate into something else, the AI on Medium knows it’s a different language and will read it that way. If I just type, then the AI sounds like it’s lagging, because Finnish is light and quick. It’s probably all the kahvi.

I realized that I needed more to write about than what has happened in the past, so the way my past is affecting me now is starting Modern Standard Arabic on Duolingo. Here’s my Facebook status for today:

Now that I have done several languages on Duolingo, I can tell you that the language support for Swedish and Arabic is better than the other languages I’ve tried. I will have to get on my tablet to see if AI support is offered in MSA, but it is in Swedish and it’s invaluable. Where AI comes in is voice recognition. You cannot pass a level until the AI can understand you. MSA on Duo actually starts you like a kindergartener, learning the vowel clusters and not full-on words. It also teaches you to read by making you identify those vowel clusters in Arabic. Marvelous.

People think I’m interested in MENA so I can walk the Bible. This is indelibly true. Preacher’s kid is who I am. But it is also true that I want to walk John Brennan’s “Undaunted” as well. 😉

I thought I wouldn’t be good as an intelligence officer when I was young enough to get into CIA or the military at all. I have proved myself wrong for my own pleasure. This represents almost two months of Very Finnish Problems, plus Swedish, Spanish, Russian, and Modern Standard Arabic. MSA is how I got the level up to five. I realized that because of imposter syndrome, I’d never tried to learn it when there was someone living in my house that could have taught me for 10 years. But, she doesn’t speak MSA, either. She spoke the Levantine dialect. I’m interested in both, but MSA is what they use on the BBC in Cairo…. which I need to watch…. because I’m a sharpshooter. 🙂

I got Sharpshooter level one a long time ago, then got frustrated with Spanish because I already know it. If you already know a language and you’re like me, the way it teaches will drive you crazy. Once I immersed myself in Finnish, Swedish, and Russian, I got the flow.

Duolingo is worth every penny, but you have to know what it’s designed to do. It absolutely cannot tutor you. It can build your vocabulary while you are waiting to be tutored. My friend Randy taught me that (quote o’ the moment? “is that big oil Randy?” Yeah, I’m not that bright. I’m sure he didn’t know anything about MENA 25 years ago when I was actually IN HIS OFFICE EVERY DAY, JFC).

An autist’s pattern recognition makes everything work backwards. I could have had everything I wanted with the right information, but no one was forthcoming or forthright. Things We Do in the Shadows proved correct, except someone let me in on a few things and then left me there, shining her light on someone else. This is not to say she did anything wrong. She was protecting herself from me. It does not render either of our stories invalid. She’s just not a writer, and I am. It’s funny that it never occurred to her before this week, because she didn’t buy me any fonts.

She didn’t know I was a writer, obviously.

She didn’t make a choice to become enamored with a blogger and then burn them when the flame burned bright on both sides.

Or she did, but that’s not my story.

My story is that everything makes sense. Working for ExxonMobil and focusing on Arabic instead of my wife would have led to better results, but I’m the partner that props up her man. It’s sickening to watch, apparently, because the partner in question doesn’t even have to be male. I react like the minister’s wife, not the minister. That’s problematic because she was not the model I’d like to be in the world, but she’s not not that, either. It’s a process of separating the wheat from the chaff, slashing and burning what isn’t good for me and keeping everything that can stay.

Intelligence can’t, because it twists up my guts. Arabic can, because when I’m walking the Bible, I expect to go to integrated neighborhoods if it’s safe in my lifetime. I would also work for the new inevitable Palestinian intelligence agency once they are a state with verified intel, why we cannot just wash our hands of Israel.

But what could I do at 50 or 55 besides translate documents? Pffff. Like that’s helpful. 😉

Turns out, I never really wanted to be intel. My heart bleeds too much. I want to be where I’ve always been… in my office, holed up, listening to people. Apparently, air conditioning is very important in Palestine. I would also like a pool. No one will come visit me if I have neither of these things except Bryn and Aaron, because they know what contract they signed. I’d never bring them anywhere dangerous; I just mean that they love me and moving to Palestine would complicate things, but it’s not a dealbreaker.

And if you think that my life would be different in MENA vs. here, remember that I could live in Georgetown or College Park. I live in Baltimore City.

That is also a choice, and a calculated one. Because I’m a sharpshooter. I’m trying to get relief to the people who need it. Evey Winters and Shane Torres are in. I just need to pick a venue and decide what I need them to do. Evey even said she’d roll up her sleeves and work for me (she doesn’t know how to cook). Shane was FOH at Tapalaya, which is why I want him to represent “The Sinners’ Table.” I want to name it after John-Michael Kinkaid.

It’s not because he died a sinner or anything cruel. It’s that he was going to be the chef of the whole operation when he was tragically killed on the side of 59 South. It has only been since December 8th, and I still feel dead inside at a loss I’ll never get over.

I treat everyone I meet as if they’re John. Because maybe he’s not really gone. Maybe he’ll show up in a different face. Maybe he won’t. But how am I supposed to know that in advance? I don’t. So everyone is John until proven otherwise.

Isn’t that the lesson they teach about Jesus, too?

I’m doing my best, and trying to make up for past flaws and failures. I can do that better now because there is no part of my life drowning in the dark.

The solstice has passed, and the days are getting much, much longer.

My heart is open. I am buying things I need that I have ignored, like clothing. I wouldn’t spend money on myself. Most of it is nice stuff that just makes me look like a jock. It’s designed to be nonbinary with bras built into tank tops, etc. But I did have to honor B’more just a little bit. It’s a Ravens t-shirt with this slogan:

Flock around and find out.

You just don’t realize the power of a murder until it’s coming straight at you. You’re trained to look at every problem… wait for it, Lamott…. bird by bird.

I Was Trying To Tell You Something Without Telling You Anything

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

There is no blame in my story. The buck stops with me. But it stopped 11.5 years ago without anyone trying to further a relationship with me. The longer there was no meet and greet, the weirder my life became. I didn’t feel free to miss a thing, because I felt like something would happen if I wasn’t there. I didn’t do anything, I just talked. And the longer I talked, the more I realized that two people in my life practiced law. The way it was presented to me in the hospital is that I was an experiment based on the 11.5 years it took for someone to fuck me up…. and no matter what the people say, broccoli is our friend. It’s a Sesame Street non sequitur to express unhappiness at Dana contacting my dad about something instead of just replying. I should have known that’s what would happen, but I took a chance that she was still an ally. She does not have to protect me, I was letting her know what was up. Now she’s burned an asset, and I’ve gained a CloudFlare notification that I don’t know what it means because no one will tell me. I am both sicker and more well than I’ve ever been. It’s just that no one will tell me what mine is to write and what’s not. What’s my life, and what’s everyone else’s? They do not have good control of this, either, because they do not remember the same things I do and could not predict the play.

I didn’t play either of their games because I didn’t trust their systems. The law and the government have never helped me.

At the very least, I know one of two things:

She really wasn’t there.

I was told she was there, but she wasn’t.

Both of those things could be true.

That is her question to wrestle with. Why would I remember that name after all these years? Why now? Don’t worry. I need this to stop, too. I’m dying inside. It’s why I’ve done so much to get well. It’s different when you’re left to do it alone in the dirt and when you have a support system. I have done terrible things, and I am sorry. But I am not sorry for the fact that Dana is part of my story. I’m sorry that everyone else is, because we were too broken and I’m still working on it.

I told my dad not to respond, that I’d gotten everything I needed on no information.

Why I Would Think That

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I mentioned the FBI in my last post. That’s what happens when you’re an American who writes about CIA. FBI has eyes on. All I’m saying is that I’d rather work with the publications review board than against them, but my attempts at fiction are weak. I wish I was a fiction writer, but the way around it is to change dates and times. So, we met in any city I’ve ever lived at any time IC said we did. This story is not about that. It’s about the stories that don’t get told. The partners who are allowed to know they work in IC, which is an underserved community because people don’t think of intelligence being as dangerous as being in the military. Fortunately, or unfortunately, my great uncle is the legend in my family because his C and/or DIA helicopter went down over Somalia in the 1980s, which cemented my star on their wall. Strange things have always been afoot at the Circle K.

“Chefs are just spies with better tools.” -Anthony Bourdain

I spent my time in the kitchen, so I already had the patois of a spy in the field. FOH and BOH gather information on customers the same way, and it is just like CIA talking to low value targets. Information passes up to the chef, he is rarely seen on the dining room floor unless you give him five or 10 minutes to put on a clean shirt and a fresh jacket.

I made her cry with posts about marriage and laugh with posts about sex. That part, I hope I can still do. “Those that lie, love their audience.” I am no threat to the intelligence community because I wanted to know the color commentary, not what anyone actually did for a living. It’s more trouble than it’s worth for me to know where and when Zac is, but that’s not why we’re not together. I just mean that I know firsthand what it’s like to be an intelligence officer. What is helpful to know and what is not. I once wrote a marriage article for all people, but if there’s an addendum, it’s “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

I had to learn the hard way that there’s a limit to how much sensitive information you can hold without being tortured by it. Nothing that anyone has ever said has hurt me on face value. I just didn’t want to be an insensitive jackass and say timeout. That is not what the preacher’s kid is built for; it’s not what autistic people are built for, either. I chose people to be around me that were in the intelligence community because I felt lost and frightened all the time. The stories about my great uncle are not kind in terms of how my family was treated post-mortem. Therefore, I have a vested interest in staying frosty, but excited enough to tell you about the cool parts. It’s kind of like Craig Ferguson deciding that he would get rid of his fear of flying by becoming a pilot. I know that I am not cut out for CIA, because I am their mirror image. I hurt too badly for all involved to be objective, when their whole job is objectivity.

I also don’t want to be the jackass that publishes unverified information, for two reasons. The first is that I’m not a conspiracy theorist. The second is that I’m not an asshole. The jury has been out on that one for 11.5 years and I’m sure has been decided in the other direction by the other parties. It’s fine. I don’t have to forgive anyone but me, and that’s harder than forgiving someone who hurt you. She kept saying that nothing was ever enough for me because she used me. She needed me to be the empathy machine and couldn’t return love in that way…. or wouldn’t, I’m not sure. Because I was never sure if she was reading me in a personal or professional capacity. I was never sure how many times I made her throw up both her hands and her lunch at my illness. She knew all of those things about me, but it wasn’t a two-way street.

The truth is that I can write around a lot of things, but I don’t want to; I’d rather have a team of people tell the real story, but have it be the actual people to whom the story happened…. both what they told me happened and what actually did.

I am not responsible for a Virginia candidate dropping out of a race because I suggested an affair, because the person I said that to provided no background as to what she actually meant and I was not poly at the time. Whose affair were we talking about? The story from the very beginning, because I wrote it as it happened, is that SG! doesn’t have feelings for me. She overshared, and it made me react like a boyfriend who wanted to wrap her in foam rubber and keep her safe from harm. I was devastated because there was nothing that could be done about it in either direction to make it a better situation.

  • She has made it perfectly clear that she is very attracted to men.
  • I made it clear to myself that I was very attracted to my wife, and pretty girls are a flash in the pan. It’ll go away.

But, SG! isn’t the Virginia candidate. Who knows what she said to my ex-wife, the one actually from Virginia? At worst, I said something stupid when I was drunk (or they did, unclear) and I’m forgiving myself because I don’t say stupid shit when I’m drunk. It’s not possible when you cannot generally finish a cocktail but once in a Blue Moon.

SG! does know her, though, thus began a source of humor- updates on our favorite Instagram influencer. We just love her for different reasons. For me, she actually has influenced my clothes and glasses frames. I would pay money to see SG! dressed like our favorite Instagram influencer, but I’m betting they’re both a good time in different ways.

She does indeed love me in a “hell no, I will not pick you up at the airport but here’s money for an Uber” kind of way. She just doesn’t know how to show it because she can’t. I’m betting the story is that I’m going to be sued now, but all I want is to get better, anyway. I am hoping that all of these groups add up to the number of hours I’d get for damage inflicted, if there was any. The internet is strange. I don’t have to learn how it works anymore because no one knows.

Truly.

Meta is my favorite company in the universe, and the next MIB movie should be an interworld Facebook. Of course, aliens can communicate online. Online can also be more than it is to its users, and I live by the Gospels of Matthew and Mark.

That would be Mullenweg and Zuckerberg, btw.

Zuck was a dick to a lot of people, but I see a little too much of him in me. Decision fatigue, mostly. Betting he grew a beard to interrupt pattern recognition for neurodivergence. I’m cutting my hair differently. My glasses take up a lot of my face and my hair doesn’t need to compete so much.

I’m finally seeing that no one can fire Cinderella, and I’ve been Hal all along. I’m so sorry.

“She thinks she’s CIA. Has anyone told her?”

SG! finally picked a TV show I like… she’s darker than me and seems to prefer violent trauma porn in her viewing activities, and I’m pretty sure she’s read “The Murderer’s Daughter” as well. I did not like “The Enemy Within” and I loved “Homeland” until I found out something that made me sick. It was all a lie. You can take psych meds at CIA. That wouldn’t mean anything to the general population, but it would have affected my efforts greatly after having been rejected by the Air Force (I’ve never been huge into the military. I was a trumpet player and wanted to be literal “top brass.”). Intelligence seemed easier because I’d gathered intel on people since I was young, which the candidate proceeded to exploit.

She pretended to be someone who catfished me when I was a teen, when I thought she was actually a very nice girl from Swansea, Wales. Because my great uncle (the brother of the hero helicopter pilot) came onto me when I was 17 by sending me explicit messages, I died and was born again online. I killed “LDLanagan” online until I was an adult. Back then, I was “NoPnNoJn,” the slogan for Winter Park, Colorado…. no pain, no [Mary] Jane…. a ridiculous mountain. I had to reinvent myself as a pro-level skier so my great uncle couldn’t find me out of the other teens he diddled with until he died in prison. Therefore, I’ve always had a hero complex about CIA. That if Foster had been alive, Gene couldn’t have hurt me. Foster did not live long enough to see what his brother was doing, which was retreating to CIA’s jurisdiction. He did not live in Wales, but in England.

The reason I think I’ve always been a monster is that I violently hurt two girls when I was a kid to the level where you just don’t see anger like that in untraumatized kids. I believe something happened to me, and I will never know if I’m right… but the clue is that when I was two, I was terrified of men with mustaches. I would go to anyone else; my mother would exclaim proudly.

I have never lied. I found a memory. I will never know, but I have always suspected.

I Just Picked One…

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What book could you read over and over again?
View all responses

Pinks & Whites

One of the lines that has always stuck in my head from “Spy Support” from WIRED is that CIA can arrange anything. Anything.

Leslie D. Lanagan

Leslie D. Lanagan

3 min read

·

Just now

I have a story, and the people involved didn’t want to help me with it. They decided that only their lives were important and left me to twist in the wind. So, since they’re gone and not coming back, I have two choices. The first is to stay silent and not cause unrest; the second is to cause a lot of unrest because I trust the FBI inasmuch as anyone can because “All Cops Are Bad.” Luckily, NoVA and SoMD are full of cops I like… the ones that can admit they’re complicit in a system. The blessing and the curse is that I am a documented bipolar patient who had “hallucinations” in the hospital… but who knows how many hallucinations were true stories too good to be true? Even I will never know that.

Wicked.

I have been changed for good, and that’s all I can say about that… because I am not sure about better or worse, just like Elphaba. I just know that I cannot go backwards, cannot seek solace in any of my old friends, and just need to live out my life in peace. I’m not cut out for government work, and not because I don’t have the smarts. I betrayed a friend after she betrayed me. She wanted all the benefits of being my closest confidante without any of the hard work. Therefore, it became harder and harder to put in work for her. I know what I have done is permanent, but you would have to read about the last 12 years to know both why I felt betrayed and why it was time to just let go and wash my fucking hands……….

Except I can’t.

“Out, out damned spot.”

I have always put in work for people who put in work for me. Her idea of work was being as remote as she possibly could so that nothing was ever fun or light; I am not the person that can be fun or light in the middle of fighting.

Here is our life together in a series of Jonathan Kellerman quotes, taken from “The Murderer’s Daughter:”

“They deserved more than the pathetic lie known as empathy.”

“Pre-monster happiness was out of the question.”

“In matters of healing, the body initiates and the mind follows. Malcolm had told her that. Only once, but it stuck.”

“Pals and chums and confidantes — what the textbooks sanitized as a social support system — were fine when you stubbed your emotional toe. With deep wounds, you needed a surgeon, not a barber.”

“Caulfield was basically a snide, spoiled twit. The arrival of the Messiah would leave him unimpressed.”

“Since learning of the catastrophe, she’d retreated into an insensate fog, as if locked in a sterile glass bubble where her eyes worked mechanically but couldn’t process and her ears were unplugged speakers. When she took a step, she knew she was moving, but she felt as if someone else was pushing the buttons. Her brain was flat and blank as unused paper. It was all she could do to sit and stand and walk.”

Now, imagine if you felt like that and you were responsible for it.

Snippets

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What book could you read over and over again?
View all responses

I don’t have one book I read over and over, except the year that “One L” by Scott Turow was in my bathroom. Every time I was indisposed, I read about his own shit sandwich and tried to empathize. It was easy after having read “Intern,” by Doctor X. I’m not sure, but matching style I think “Doctor X” is actually Michael Chrichton.

Except it’s not. It just sounds like him.

I looked it up. It’s Alan Nourse, the Mark Felt (Deep Throat) of Harvard Medical. If you like Chrichton, though, it will remind you very much of “Five Patients.” Turow, Nourse, and Chrichton all went to Harvard…. it’s not a big leap in style, and you will love all of them.

I do have lines from books that repeat:

  • “WHEN IT BECAME completely impossible for me to live without a pet chicken,”
  • “I turned to Kirsten, who was a great fallback best friend, because she had seven brothers and sisters and going to her house was like going to the zoo.”
  • “I later discovered that in order to be a good athlete one must care intensely what is happening with a ball, even if one doesn’t have possession of it. This was ultimately my failure: my inability to work up a passion for the location of balls.”
    • I laughed so hard I nearly died. These are from “A Girl Named Zippy” by Haven Kimmel.
  • “Speed kills,” said General Faust, picking up the baton. “It’s nearly impossible to overstate its power. Darth Vader wouldn’t need a Death Star to destroy the Earth—or any explosives for that matter. He’d just need to put a single star cruiser on autopilot and ram it into the planet at a tenth of the speed of light. That would be more than enough to do the trick. If Vader had ever figured that one out, he would have put a lot of Death Star contractors out of work.”
    • Douglas E. Richards is my favorite living technothriller writer, and this is from “Infinity Born.”
  • “They deserved more than the pathetic lie known as empathy.”
  • “Pre-monster happiness was out of the question.”
  • “In matters of healing, the body initiates and the mind follows. Malcolm had told her that. Only once, but it stuck.”
  • “Pals and chums and confidantes—what the textbooks sanitized as a social support system—were fine when you stubbed your emotional toe. With deep wounds, you needed a surgeon, not a barber.”
  • “Caulfield was basically a snide, spoiled twit. The arrival of the Messiah would leave him unimpressed.”
  • “Since learning of the catastrophe, she’d retreated into an insensate fog, as if locked in a sterile glass bubble where her eyes worked mechanically but couldn’t process and her ears were unplugged speakers. When she took a step, she knew she was moving, but she felt as if someone else was pushing the buttons. Her brain was flat and blank as unused paper. It was all she could do to sit and stand and walk.”
  • “How can so many things become a bore by middle age—philosophy, radicalism, and other fast foods—but heartbreak keeps its sting?”
  • “an author too old to be fresh and too young to be rediscovered,” (reminds me of Drew…. too old to be a princess, too young to be a queen. That’s why we’re both duchesses.
  • “What does one ever ask an author except: ‘How?’ And the answer, as Less well knows, is obvious: ‘Beats me!’”
  • “But once you’ve actually been in love, you can’t live with ‘will do;’ it’s worse than living with yourself.”
  • “Strange, though; because he is afraid of everything, nothing is harder than anything else. Taking a trip around the world is no more terrifying than buying a stick of gum. The daily dose of courage.”
  • “Nothing has happened in right field all season, which is why he was put there: a kind of athletic Canada.”
  • “How did they even know I was gay?” He asked this from his front porch, wearing a kimono. (This made me snort and howl with laughter.)

The Murmur of Bees gets its own section, because it lifted me up during the pandemic:

  • “It occurred to him that houses die when they are no longer fed with the energy of their owners.”
  • “He could not imagine how the country would survive if it allowed the rural areas to die, for in spite of all the changes—the emergence of iron cities like Monterrey, all the technological advances, all the marvels of the modern world—if there was one thing that never changed, it was that people, whether of a city or a village, needed to eat every day.”
  • “Simonopio closed his eyes, knowing that a look has the power to attract.”
  • “the true meaning of death: that there is no going back and that anything that was not said in time would never be said.”
  • “The empty hours of the night do not pass unnoticed, because in their unrelenting cruelty, they do not allow one to rest; they force one to think, and they demand a great deal.”

I love “The Murmur of Bees” so much that I heard it was originally written in Spanish. I don’t know enough Spanish to read it. Bought it, anyway just for the poetry. All of these lines are going to sound better in their original language…. most of the reason why I’m learning actual Finnish grammar and not just playing around.

I will update more because for some reason, I don’t have more recent books posting automatically. I know J.L., Evey, and Itzel will want to know what I highlighted. That’s the thing about having author friends.

When we’re together, Less is actually quite a bit More.