Bold of You to Assume

September 21, 2023September 21, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

What would your life be like without music?

Bold of you to assume that I would have the life I have without music at all. I accidentally got an arranged marriage out of it because we told each other we loved, admired, and trusted each other to a level that it’s been a disaster every time we’ve tried to separate. I got this “job,” not unwanted, just problematic and have had it for 10 years. Being together and separate creates a different set of consequences, so the music I listen to varies by what I have to say and how I know it’s going to affect me. For this entry, it will be “Nobody Knows,” by The Tony Rich Project. It expresses our problems greatly, and also explains why she’s the woman I think of when I hear “Short Skirt, Long Jacket” and “Love You Madly,” and that last one is to reclaim it from another face due to pain. She’s a 3D character. 😉

Additionally, I’m sure Mel is upset that I haven’t finished my food entries, because they cut deep (due to tapping into my work history) and I want her to think they’re good. It would help if she heard Beethoven’s ninth symphony instead of the blues (not that there’s anything wrong with the blues, but if you hear it after you cook, you’ve probably fucked up).

If I can impress both of us, then I’ve impressed the rest of our clan because I’m American and she’s Indonesian (living in the UK).

However, I need to process and I’ll tell you the music I listened to at the end and how it inspired this. I’ll say it first and then I’ll say it again. Sometimes you accidentally create a right-hand ring and resent it. I want to be her Lord John Grey and I’m totally her Frank. I want to describe what that’s like in detail for myself in another 10 years. I don’t write about what I do know, I write about what it’s like for me not to get it.

My food entries get more attention than everything else because it’s more universal, but everything else explains a relationship between adults where both are traumatized in different ways and how they act toward each other as adults- when the abuse happened in childhood. My friend Donna wrote a book called “Never the Same,” about kids who lose parents and siblings. It could be a title for abused kids as well. These pages are more important than anyone will ever know, because if I could be more specific, I could reach even more people in the shit with this kind of bond in a more specialized way. It’s a different thing to love someone with a power imbalance this big, because priorities are ironclad out of necessity. You will never be number one on the call sheet, and if you have different romantic partners, you won’t be number two, either.

Even more when the person who is more powerful pretends the imbalance isn’t there until she just can’t anymore because she can’t plan a future, either. Isn’t mindful that though she has a partner, kids, parents, and siblings, our situation is unique to theirs by a wide margin except her partner. Dana and I weren’t a team on this, and neither were they when I actually needed Michael more than her, because only he would know what was up. She has entrusted me and hung me out to dry. I deserved it, and we still can’t get around the facts. The only one that can help me is the one who least wants to do it, and not even because I was an asshole. She doesn’t make me a priority because she can’t.

She’s not a fixer/pleaser in her work life, but she is at home because she feels guilty and no one can lift it. Her power imbalance with herself is the same one she has with me, so when she digs deep, there’s no one to tell her to release them and find more small joys. I need her to have solid memories of everything good about her life so that when she gets hard on herself, she can see how much people love her.

Even me, the one that gets passed over. In part I think that’s because she can’t, because I’m not part of her inner circle and she’d have to figure out a reason she’d need to be in Washington at hours she doesn’t need to be there, because she’s not very good at it…. and now she can’t joke with her husband that she has to go see her sidepiece because she wouldn’t think that was funny, because it’s been long enough for me to resolve those issues and apparently not enough for her. I used to joke that we were having an affair under everyone’s noses, because you can’t imagine how much truth there is to that.

To Michael:

I was only using a euphemism for the adrenaline and dopamine rush and I have been the whole time.

She never did anything inappropriate in case you haven’t been reading over her shoulder. If you had been, I still would have been an absolute jackass because my brain chemicals still would have been turned up to 11, but when I came down you would have realized immediately that I was no threat. I was just high, like other people in your lives except the drugs were street legal. If it didn’t happen to you, too, I can’t imagine why. Seriously. We could write a book together that we couldn’t publish. I asked her if she needed a book like it, but didn’t take in that my part’s done. If you divorce her, no you didn’t and make that clear.

Don’t ever make anything blow up in her face and let her believe that you mean it, the lecture you would have given me that I should have thought of on day one. I said it in the heat of the moment. I never want either of you to think that because I’m a blogger, that means I’m a threat. And even then, I threatened to call for help. I am not trying to be threatened or threatening, I am trying to handle/fix it in myself without hurting her, and I don’t know when I’m leaving breadcrumbs, because I only need 15 minutes to establish what’s okay and what’s not; I’ve realized that my promises to her are bigger than yours by nature of what we do, not who we are to each other. I will promise to keep her even if she doesn’t promise to keep me.

God help your soul no matter how she and I play out, because if we stay apart and I find out you guys divorce, there will be dragon fire because mine is getting stronger every day. If we reconcile and you guys support me the way I support you, then you’re really fucked because then you have to deal with both of us simultaneously. I already know we’re a handful jointly and severally. But, according to the prevailing wisdom, she’s a handful on her own and you’re capable. Good luck and God bless. But know that I’ll love you in a very concrete way until I die, because she’ll let you know what her emotional needs are when she can’t let me for reasons.

The “honeymoon phase” doesn’t last long in most relationships, and we accidentally created a habit where we needed to lean on each other like we were using each other as furniture and both felt threatened enough to run at every chance it was available. I threatened to blow up her life because she blew mine to hell and wouldn’t deal with the fact that she affected my life’s course without accepting that it had played out with an anxious attachment style trauma bonded to an avoidant attachment style. It’s how most people who are abused cope. They don’t know their own attachment styles and love languages because to dive into that means you realize that you’ve been protecting yourself by dealing with everyone else’s bullshit while ignoring your own. It’s too hard and it hurts too much.

When you completely lose who you are, your reality break will dictate how you sway. When your reality breaks as a child because you’ve been sexually or emotionally abused, the abuser and the child form an anxious/avoidant attachment style because the power imbalance is absolute. You’ll search for it all the time, wanting the push pull of being abused and not learning to accept more. I had higher emotional standards for friendship, but not time together. Quality over quantity. When Supergrover got my letters, she read them as “you’re a bad person and that’s why I don’t like you.” I wasn’t judging her, I was making a case. I felt like I had to keep making it over and over because I saw our pattern for what it was and knew it would never break on its own. If you doo what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve allready got.

She couldn’t answer without anger because forgiveness was the story she was telling me while also holding in a lot of anger because she thought she couldn’t trust me anymore & I proved to her beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was the most important person in my life because of what I do, and it didn’t help because her presence doesn’t help her, because she doesn’t think I think she’s wonderful despite all her flaws and failures. The failures are just where we need to resolve conflict, not where we need to beat up on each other.

I opened up about her so we could resolve everything and move on. She thought I was lecturing her on what a bad person she was. Who would want to get close to someone like that? Love has to be built when you’ve both been thoughtless.

She doesn’t take in that my anxious attachment is causing me pain, I get angry at being ignored for years on end.

Because she can’t take in that I’m a Christian and she’s not, she doesn’t take in that I’m trying to be the peace that calms her by praying for her and she thinks I’m trying to make her life hell.

She ignores the fact that I use her face when I’m praying just to put a personal spin on what God is, the place in me where I can talk about my most epic fails and rise from the ash. Therefore, I am trying to find the place where the peace inside her is also her. I dig into myself to teach her how to love me, trying to lead from the back by laying out all my worst flaws first. One of my valleys of vulnerability is where she’s the choice woven into me like the Impossible Girl on Doctor Who, while also feeding The Master.

I sent her a whole ass essay on why this was, and she thought I was saying she was a bad person. That was the day I listened to Bolero on repeat to slow my heartbeat to a manageable level. I know without a shadow of a a doubt I am more important than her family in some ways, and I’m not knocking any of them. I’m playing on a unique field, and I feel like a goalie who doesn’t know which team she’s playing this week.

I saw a meme that made me laugh for this very reason….. a little kid who was jealous of the other team getting to change colors every week and his mom had to explain to him that they were, in fact, different teams.

(If you can’t handle me at my Supergrover, you don’t deserve me at my Bourdain. I am laughing uproariously. I don’t care what stuff of mine you read, it’s just funny because I hold myself to the same standard. Unfortunately, I’m not that great a writer and I still have to read it.)

It happens more often than any other pattern. The person who holds everything back is attracted to the one who can emote, and the dance of intimacy is fighting with someone you’re completely addicted to in a literal sense. You can’t separate because the brain chemicals when you’re together. It’s not a sweet waltz. It’s the Habanera with emotional guns blazing because the swings are extreme. Those extremes don’t settle any if the relationship is platonic. You can fight with your siblings this way, too, because generally you shut down after abuse and your reactions are that way with everyone no matter how close you are.

I have broken my streak of 60-odd days just to listen to music, sleep, and relax. My body can’t lean towards insomnia forever, so I caught up. My body has a binge/purge relationship with sleeping, so I use music to help me stay awake AND asleep. They’re just different moods.

The alarms on my phone are NI**as in Paris (Kanye and Jay-Z) and Rap God (Eminem). I love both those songs, but the rhythm gets into my head and I can’t go back to sleep, especially when Em gets into 32nd and 64th note patterns while still being able to make out what he’s saying. It’s incredible. I couldn’t do it at gunpoint. I can’t do 64th note melismas while I’m singing without oxygen in the middle, and he did so well he published it and that song is famous across the world. Eminem is the modern-day Bach in that one album, because you cannot tell me that word-based melismas are easier than the ones in Mass in B Minor. Not possible.

If you have gotten to this point, thank you for reading. Each paragraph flowed into another as I was processing out loud the enormous difference between my ideal future and the one I’ve created. INFJs always search for the ideal and generally want relationships where the other person is also interested in it………….. yet will settle for being unhappy because so few people are like us and we don’t know enough to find them. I’m an INFJ. Daniel is an INTJ. Both our realities are broken for different reasons, neither more important than the other.

Daniel said that he had been in love with me for 36 years. I know why, but this is conjecture. He knew to want love from someone who’d give it to him in the way he could hear it, even when Supergrover has needs that trump his, because he knows what it’s like to desperately need help with stories you have to hold inside you while also popping smoke. He would understand when I joked that I was having an affair with Michael’s wife. That she and I share a more important bond so it is what it is whether he likes it or not.

We’re a handful, and he’s capable.

Editor’s Note:

This entry was inspired by Jason Moran’s complicated rhythms on “Ten,” because it helps me make connections faster than Tony Rich. I also listened to Wynton Marsalis’ “From the Plantation to the Penetentiary” and “Let the Bright Seraphim” with Kathleen Battle. It was like listening to a symphony in terms of odd numbers in movements vs. even. I enjoy making the playlist, and she enjoys running to Eminem and blasting Cake. Waking up to Rap God isn’t an accident, and I’ve set it for every morning.

Michael and I are toast (in a very funny way). We know it like the backs of our hands, because one of us forgot our real books because of ADHD and his is coded because he’s a normal person….. and even if I could read from it, I’d have to transpose.

Every Day

September 16, 2023September 16, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

How often do you walk or run?

I do not have a car, therefore I take the bus or the Metro everywhere. This leads to a good deal of walking, but I prefer it to driving. I didn’t think I’d like it at first, but I love all the guilt-free reading and writing time. I carry my Fire tablet and my Bluetooth keyboard everywhere, and it fits perfectly in my lap without making me take up more than my fair share of room. Plus, mobility is great for creation. My ideas come faster and more furious when I’m walking, and I’m grateful.

I never take walking for granted, although I will say up front I’m bad at it. I look untrained in the ways of walking sometimes because I have a mild case of cerebral palsy that affects my movement and balance. It is still preferable to what my life might be like if my CP was worse. I have empathy for everyone who struggles with physical issues, and there is no such thing as competitive suffering. I have perspective. I suffer much less than people with walkers or in wheelchairs, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t suffer at all.

I prefer walking when my friends are with me, because it’s ok for me to hold onto them when I need it. In fact, I think Zac prefers it. 😉 CP is not the only thing that makes me need to hold onto others. I don’t have depth perception, so sometimes I don’t lift my foot high enough for a step and trip. Sometimes I don’t judge the distance from the doorjamb to my shoulder correctly and hit it harder than one might think. I also have an alternating field of vision because my eyes don’t track together, so the worst I’ve ever been hurt is when I haven’t seen a step down. This is because my reflexes aren’t generally fast enough to save me. It is not unusual for me to have a scrape on my face because of it. I am generally covered in bruises, only some of which I can explain because it’s just too time consuming to walk back through my day and post-mortem.

When I’m exhausted, all of these issues get a hundred times worse.

My friends are helpful. Strangers are not. I have fallen and hurt myself to the point that my pants are ripped, my knee is skinned up, and there’s blood on my face…. yet no one has ever offered to help me up unless they already knew me. I do not expect strangers to help me, I’m just surprised because it’s hard for me to see other people in pain and not stop.

I would like to continue being surprised about this rather than jaded and bitter. No one is just like me, and few people are as empathetic, and I don’t mean this as “I’m all that and you’re trash.” I mean that my personality type, INFJ, is only present in 9-15% of the world’s population. We are the pastors, counselors, and social workers of the entire population. We are not all religious, but we are all spiritual. The reason we’re the empaths of the world is that we’re relentless in self discovery. We want to find us so we can find you.

People only understand each other to the level that they understand themselves, because when someone tells another their story, the listener is filtering it though all their life experiences. Whether the other person’s experience is good or bad is based on the listener’s first family, the partner they have with their family, and the way they have always operated.

I have been walking and thinking about this for 10 years now, because 10 years ago I had an experience for which very few people have filters. I didn’t know shit from Shinola™ and made a ton of mistakes. I grew from them, but I’ll never be the same person I was, either. It’s one of the reasons I love Doctor Who. We all have many lives, we just don’t change faces to do it. I never want to forget that story, nor the ones that proceeded from it. They are more beautiful to me as I age, because I never want to forget this version of me.

I am writing a story; I want it to be a good one in the end.

Right this moment, it is not good or bad. It is not time to choose. It is time to reflect, give myself distance, and pick up the pieces. My routine has changed greatly, and I am thankful for it…. most of the time. At others, the situation and people are so irreplaceable that it feels like I will never get over losing it. I set the ball in motion for all this happening, and that makes me even more prone to bouts of deep grief, because it’s harder to forgive yourself than anyone else.

If I do forgive myself, it will only be by putting one foot in front of the other, forging a new path…. without becoming so bitter and jaded that I’m unable to forgive and forget. Not only do I not want to close the door permanently, it would be incredibly unfair of me to do so considering how many times I’ve walked away and reneged. I just don’t want to go out of my way to fix things anymore. Eventually, you start noticing when a relationship has no return on investment, because we were not checking the story we were telling ourselves. It was off to an enormous degree. It hurt that my arguments were always shut down; that I was not allowed to need anything while she was allowed to ask for everything and receive it, no questions asked. The imbalance was okay for a while. Too long, actually. The last straw for me was the person who brought those circumstances into my life disagreed with me for many reasons, and wouldn’t tell me what they were.

We fought tooth and nail, when that wasn’t my goal at all. Depending on the day, we were each trying to hug a cactus. We would be able to complete each other and celebrate our differences if we were both willing to slow our roll. Our adrenaline ran too high, and we crashed. Neither one of us has it in us anymore.

But even when I’m angry, she’s still my favorite person. I call her Supergrover because even when I think she’s acting monstrous, she’s still cuddly, adorable, and blue. Ok, maybe not that last one. But she does have a double master’s in irreverence and profanity. We are so much alike that it’s easy to see how we got here. People generally hate things in other people that they hate about themselves.

We are sitting back to back, unable or unwilling to simply turn around…..

And walk back towards the other.

Absolutely, with Caveats -or- 1800 People

September 15, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Do you see yourself as a leader?

I am not a traditional leader, and I never will be. I have had the best examples of leadership in the entire world, and my process was stopping feeling inferior to them. My way of leading is just different because when the Internet went large scale, into personal computers when it was military-only before, I was an early adopter. I disappeared into that world because I’m a better writer than conversationalist, and other people wouldn’t say that about me at all.

It has everything to do with how comfortable I am writing alone and in front of people. Other people do not perceive this about me, it’s my own observation about myself. I feel happier writing alone because focusing on social propriety gives me nausea. I don’t feel relaxed in a crowd.

I lead by seclusion because I don’t have to organize events and ask you to be here. Everyone just drops by and takes what they need. Sometimes they talk to me. Sometimes they stay silent. It all matters.

For instance, I know I have roughly 1800 people between Facebook and WordPress that choose to receive updates every single day. My web stats, meaning people who visit the site without a notification from me, are exponentially larger than that. I have an awareness that I’m not Elvis or anything, but if I say something, i need to know people are listening. I don’t think of my words as innocuous. I don’t have that luxury. I shouldn’t even have the luxury of leaving in typos, but I do. That’s because I don’t have the courage to write and edit. If I go back to fix something before a piece is published, I will get so bogged down in my own insecurities that I won’t publish at all. Nothing is ever good enough when there are 1800 people receiving your words the *moment* you hit “Post.”

I think of it as power for good and evil that all of these essays are written in one shot, don’t even look at it. Part of it is erasing imposter syndrome. I don’t “want to be a writer someday.” I am a writer now. My audience never has to get any bigger for me to feel validated, because I know that if I had been a pastor instead of a writer, I would be an even bigger deal in my community because people would see me getting up in front of 1800 people every Sunday morning. I “preach” every morning like it’s Sunday and I am ridiculously happy about that because I like the feel of leadership without having to attend any committee meetings. The other part of it is that if I hit post before I read something, I get to be a fan, too.

I like looking at myself as if I don’t know me. I love me like I love The Bloggess. I love me like I love Wil Wheaton. I love me like I love Dooce. No one can tell me I’m less talented than they are. it would have been amazing to have us all in one room. I’ve met Wil, but not Jenny and Heather (Dooce). It destroys me that I’ll never meet Heather, because we would have had the same witty banter I had with Wil. It’s a unique crowd, because we were the first wave of bloggers…. or at least, Wil, Heather, and I were.

Jenny started a little later than we did and I’m so happy for her success, because our content deals with the same stuff. Sometimes even the same mental health issues. In fact, she was just talking about how she made a coloring book for adults and I asked her a question I thought needed asking. “Have you thought of writing a children’s book about Beyonce?” For the uninitiated, Beyonce is Jenny’s giant metal rooster, though I think Jenny would do a bang up job on a children’s book about Queen Bey. Of course I do. We’re all Texans.

Because I am comfortable with the level of notoriety I have right now, I am not focused on driving engagement. Engagement has become self-sustaining. I don’t have to constantly advertise because other people will tell their friends to read me. I hate advertising myself. I’d rather keep my head down and let others do the talking.

I am not trying to fit into another person’s reality, shoving content into their faces. I am inviting you to mine. This is my weird little world. I own it. I wrote the charter. By thinking of my web site as me and one other person- all of you boiled down to a singular “you” in my mind), I don’t have to feel the anxiety of preaching, singing, or playing an instrument in front of a crowd. I have no social anxiety when I’m writing. A ton of anxieties, to be sure, but none of them having to do with being in public. My reactions are my own, tightly controlled. By that I mean I will cry and scream and beat the wall and tear my clothes and all of those things, it’s just in the privacy of my own home.

I tell you things I can’t tell anyone else, because I don’t force conversations to go my way, either. I don’t mean my desired outcome, I mean the path the conversation takes isn’t entirely dependent on me in public…. here, it would be a disaster area if I couldn’t hold up my end of the conversation while you’re not in the room…. and that’s how I think of our relationship. We are very close, even if you don’t know it.

Honestly

September 14, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s your favorite word?

The reason “honestly” is my favorite word is that it rhymes just for me. If you ask me what I mean, I will tell you that I can’t do that. It only rhymes for me. It’s not even an inside joke. It’s music only I can hear…. a waltz, and Strauss is about to bring in the horns.

I love music honestly and completely, the most pure thing in my life because there’s nothing a choir and orchestra can’t fix. In my head, anyway. When I’m sad or angry, two things happen. The first is that I sing it out. The second is that I conduct it out.

The last time I had to conduct about a problem, it was Desplait. Alexandre Desplait wrote the score to “Argo,” and conducting anything on that album is a full body workout. I am a terrible conductor. Just terrible. I don’t do it to get better. I do it to get exhausted.

It’s the only way I really fall asleep. I have never slept much, and people kid me all the time. “Do you ever sleep?” is popular in my crowd, but it’s true I don’t need much. Most of the time I go to bed at midnight and wake up at 0500 unprompted. This week it’s a little different because I can tell that my mood is swinging upward, and I don’t know that because of mood and behavior. The only real side effect that I have consistently with hypomania is insomnia. I feel lucky that it’s not worse, but it’s like getting my period. I am tired and in pain all the time because of brain race. Why can’t I sleep if I’m so tired? My body is not running the show. If my brain says it’s an all nighter, my body will fight it tooth and nail. When that happens, I can take 75 or 100mg of Benedryl and it won’t do a damn thing.

I’ll have to see a doc about it eventually, but I’m a writer so I hardly notice. Have I been writing for three hours or three days? It is always a mystery when I’m finished writing as to the date, day, and time. Luckily, I can look it up quickly. I just notice that finishing writing is a lot like waking up in the morning- discombobulating because you don’t know where you are after writing, either. But that’s what makes writing worth it. If you are a writer, fiction or non, you get to live in three worlds instead of just waking and dreaming. The characters and research turn into plot and setting. You cannot see anything outside of it while thoughts are pouring forth. A bear could rip out the back wall on my house and if I was writing, I wouldn’t even notice. I don’t even need headphones most of the time.

I’m not saying that my process is any different because I have it wired and other authors don’t. I am explaining a universal concept. All writers are more than one person. Even with non-fiction, there’s your writing personality and your physical space personality. Sometimes those are the same. Sometimes they’re not. I hope Karen Slaughter is a “not.” 😉

I take responsibility for everything I write, because I know that I’m influencing culture. My platform has gotten bigger over the years, but so many people have repeated the things I’ve written/said as their own that I hear my own words out of someone else’s mouth a lot…… particularly when they’re forgetful because I have the memory of an elephant for what I read. I can remember conversations with Supergrover nearly verbatim because being friends virtually meant I had to read everything to respond. That’s the way I take in information the best. So, part of the reason that she thinks I’m judging her is that I’m actually using her words and she doesn’t remember that she said them. I don’t mean that in a “gotcha” kind of way. I remember everything she’s said, not just the words that hurt. That’s because she’s a great writer and I try to quote her as much as I can because the way she said something fits an occasion perfectly and I got nothin.’

I can’t talk about my writing without talking about my inspiration.

Honestly.

There is No Such Thing

September 11, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Describe your ideal week.

There is no such thing as an ideal week for me. My life is too up and down to predict. What I do know is that an ideal week is spent balanced between my close friends/family and my writing. Enough isolation to satisfy me because my friends remind me why I don’t want it. I’ve had some incredible experiences over the last couple of days. It is a combination of things, mostly being able to say yes to things I said no to previously; it had the potential to make me avoid feeling bad about myself, and Timeless Children don’t do that. If there is blame to be had anywhere, we’ll find it. That is because we are used to being the cause of conflict because our abusers have told us that if we say anything, we will be. We don’t do it to protect us. That’s a side effect. We do it to protect you because we know you’re the adult and we’re not. You’ll be believed and we won’t.

I write to avoid a lot of that stuff because I don’t have the bandwidth to think about relationships on that level all the time, and I don’t pay as much attention to relationships in which I’m not in tune. I know when I’m not, I can sense it by the other person’s energy. Writing causes isolation and it feeds me, so I lose track of the world around me. It’s using my mental illness for fun and profit, really. I’ll never be The Bloggess, but there is a solid chance I’ll be Leslie Lanagan.

I put down my worries for a while and went to a bar that had an arcade with Zac, who then proceeded to treat me to Chinese-Peruvian fusion in a restaurant he was flabbergasted I didn’t know because it was a Jose Andres…. and I’d said that I love any excuse to throw Jose some money. Picking that restaurant in particular was part of the gift. It was eating amazing food, and supporting World Central Kitchen, which I believe is right up there with Doctors Without Borders in terms of reputation.

Today I’ve been shopping around on Amazon because I got a gift certificate. I ended up with a henley and three long-sleeved t-shirts because they’re essential in the fall. I basically spend all winter dressed like Sheldon from “The Big Bang Theory.”

I saw a t-shirt with a hammer and sickle that said “totally not a Russian spy” and I thought about it. I’ll have plenty of time to think it over in the future because Amazon will remind me I looked at that t-shirt once a week until I’m dead.

Tonight, Lindsay is taking me out to dinner (a bonus birthday gift because we’re going to a concert at the end of next month). She’s staying in Falls Church, Virginia, so we’re trying to work out where. I am just glad that I am getting a second night out in a row. I’m not sure that’s happened in years. I like it, because my appetite is suppressed most of the time and I eat more when other people are eating with me. Eating and drinking are very much alike that way. Not as much fun to eat or drink alone, whether it’s the glass of wine together after the kids are in bed or the coffee together before they wake up.

Those are the moments I live for with my friends, because the conversation is generally more intimate and I don’t do well with small talk. It doesn’t register, so I stop paying attention. The friends I love the most feel free to say whatever they want, when they want. That’s because they allow me the same courtesy.

It’s what makes every week an ideal week. I always have room to be me.

This Might Be Short…. Or Not

September 10, 2023September 10, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Name the professional athletes you respect the most and why.

Before we get started, today is my birthday and tomorrow Lindsay is taking me out for dinner because she had a meeting and was able to swing it. I love that we manage living in different cities so easily because she works here. I’m not the only reason she fits in. She knows the city better than I do. Also, I did write yesterday. It was just so bad and rambled off into nothing that I thought, “I don’t even like what I think today. This blogger sucks.” It helps to focus on elite athletes and people who think like them.

In a lot of ways, this city knows Lindsay better than I do, because I do not walk in her circles, often rarified air. She and I are perfect for each other the way Supergrover and I are in that we can be objective about what’s going on in the other’s life because it doesn’t affect our friendships at all. I have no official Washington power and wouldn’t use it if I did. Therefore, either one of them could say anything to me and it wouldn’t be boring. Lindsay drills down into policy all the time, and I’m neurodivergent and a paralegal in the state of Texas. I can hang, and I can nerd out just as far as she can. I just don’t get paid to do it. I can advise without being involved. I would be very happy working for Lindsay’s organization in DC, but I wouldn’t have the relationship that I have with her if I took the job. Same with Supergrover. Better to listen to her than to think I can do a thing. Since they both suit up to play, it’s fun being the opposite side of them. That reminds them taking a minute to enjoy a nice meal and an expertly made cocktail is a good thing.

Lindsay and I have this great relationship where her interests and mine line up, so we get along like we’d just met yesterday. At the same time, when I look at her I see every iteration. I see her inner child and try to remind her of it when she’s stressed out from all the things it takes to be her. We have a very West Wing relationship in that she used to be Charlie, the body man, for Annise Parker and I would be great at being hers…… or I think I would. I would probably end up getting fired. I’m good at being the Charlie she only talks to over the phone. 😛

Explaining how I feel about Lindsay explains how I feel about Supergrover in a nutshell, and not because I mean my loving words less toward Lindsay. It’s that Lindsay and I don’t have a hard out, so I can use Lindsay’s concepts for feelings that are very much the same with both women. I already have three sisters, so it’s no hard leap to feel love that intense for Supergrover as well. I honestly don’t remember how my mind worked before she unlocked all my doors. It was like a scene from The Matrix. If I’m Neo, she’s The Oracle.

Those who think they know everything are annoying to those of us who do, which seems to be a mantra for all three of us depending on the situation. We are all in agreement that this applies to the orange gelatinous shitbag. We could all out-think and out-maneuver him easily.

I don’t really know anything about sports, and they do. They’d be better at answering this question than I am, but I do look to them for inspiration. I just don’t watch games that much. I absolutely love two things. The first is looking them up on YouTube to see what makes them great. I don’t want to be a bandwagon fan, I want to see them defy physics and decide on my own. The reason I have to look them up on YouTube is that I love the story of what it takes to be an elite athlete, so I’ll watch a documentary on ESPN about them and fall in love with their public character rather than their play. I can tell you about David Beckham’s early life and family ties better than I can tell you how he played.

I can tell you why it’s exciting and induces tears for me to watch Trinity Rodman play because since I’ve seen what a powerhouse her dad is, I imagine what a proud father he must be and it’s like a long distance commercial up in here.

Everyone loves Michael Jordan, but the “character” that resonated with me most in “The Last Dance” was Scottie Pippen. He was truly the unsung hero of the operation, its Ginger Rogers to Jordan’s Fred Astaire. They both made each other better, and I don’t think Jordan is appreciative. He comes off like a narcissist whether other people agree with me or not. Scottie has the heart of a journeyman cook who will occasionally blow your mind. Experimental, brave, crazy, also knows and copes with the fact that he’ll never be chef. So he’ll be the best damn sous this restaurant has ever seen.

We don’t have to talk about it. Just eat it. Scottie should have gotten loud in salary negotiations, and I’m not berating him. I’m just agreeing with him. His relationship with Michael was very much Aaron Rogers and Jordy Nelson. I’ll pick ’em up if you put ’em down. Shake……. and BAKE!

The trick is learning to be respected instead of famous. If you focus on the attention the star is getting instead of you, then you miss out on the best part of getting to be an elite athlete. The people who know the game will see you differently. It’s not the same as having millions of bandwagon fans.

It resonates with me because I’m a Scottie. I’d rather be a speechwriter on a campaign than a candidate. I’m Leo in that if I worked for a candidate, I would hope for the friendships that Lindsay got with Annise Parker, Nick Lampson, and Peter Brown (the Houston candidates Lindsay worked for before she started lobbying).

It takes an elite athlete’s courage to be Lindsay and Supergrover. Supergrover actually is an elite athlete, which I’m sure goes a lot into what she does because she’s been mentally preparing to the level she does now since she was all-State three years running in high school. Six letters and she even stopped to wonder why I wanted to wear that jacket. 😉 Now, our relationship feels the same as mine with Lindsay because I only want to drill down into policy.

I had to grow into that role with both women because I didn’t want to seem like a dumbass when they talked about their lives, because to them the things they say are completely normal and mundane. I stand there and feel like I didn’t get the assigned reading.

I do everything I can to combat that. I know for sure Lindsay is going to be in the newspaper no matter what job she has from here on out. She’s responsible for introducing a lot of legislation that makes people mad af and they pay her the big bucks not to back down. The Texas legislature is going insane regarding trans healthcare and its lack of support for it. And Supergrover would never be in the news on purpose. She’s the most private person I know, which is why it’s so unfortunate that our careers rub up against each other. It’s a constant source of ire to the point that she is the only person that could get me to tear it down and almost did to take care of the problem because she was worth it in a way no one else was. If she reamed me out for saying something sensitive, I wasn’t going to be the blogger that didn’t hear her. It was too important.

What was too important on my end was being able to use this space to process our relationship when I felt I couldn’t go directly to her…… but I could. It wouldn’t take long for her to get over what I said that she thought was negative because she loved the lines that were specifically crafted to adore her in public. To let her see how I talk about her behind her back. How every story is true to my limited knowledge and ability as a writer, but it is my superpower the way her work is to her. I just don’t think she realized that she was setting herself up to be a character when she befriended me and how her world would bleed over into mine.

In these pages is a magnificent story of two people who met by chance, one much more powerful than the other, which attracted us in a stranger on a train sort of way because nothing we said would get back to any of her friends or colleagues. This became the lie we told ourselves very quickly, because I could be honest with both her and Dana and say “this is a lot to manage and I need to work it out on my own.” The hard out made my decision for me in all kinds of ways, ranging from her not thinking about the consequences to me actively trying to destroy what we had built because she flipped me out mentally with her story and hasn’t really taken responsibility for hearing what it’s like to be me and adjusting to it, because she created a new reality for me. The disconnect between my real life and the one I present here is enormous, but it’s because I’m good at using small things to represent the big things. It’s just too much to handle for me if I slip up. I could accidentally ruin her life by accident, and the consequences would be dire no matter what happened as a result.

I don’t want to be that writer for her. I feel like I’ve done what Tony Mendez calls “falling in love with your asset” in “The Moscow Rules.” It’s an emotional shorthand for being so close to the subject that it takes away any impartiality, something we crafted by not normalizing everything by picking up the phone. Two sides to that coin. The first is that we would have stopped being as emotionally intimate with each other and that was the drug that kept us taking hits all those years. The second is that it really would have taken talking in real time, because I don’t know about her, but a few voicemails doesn’t convey everything that could have been avoided by hearing each other’s tones of voice.

Platonic love hit me harder than I’ve ever been hit in my life, and I’m sapiosexual and bipolar. One line bled into the other, and the butterflies in my stomach hit harder as well. Getting rid of them was enormous and had to be done to save our friendship, because I didn’t want to live without her unless I absolutely had to…. it just mixed me up so much inside because I’d lay out all these thoughts and feelings thinking she’s sitting there thinking I’m a judgmental dickhead when she’s just busy and needs more time. Then, at others, she really does treat me like a judgmental dickhead so there’s no way to know which person is going to show up. Is our situation dire enough to stay together at all costs, or do I only know random factoids about your life today? The highs and lows were too big because of the medium, and yet they were exciting. It was a thrill ride.

Because she’s Michael Jordan. She needs a Scottie Pippen. So, she got into my head and made me believe I could be that for her. If nothing else, because she was in my head, she taught me to think like an elite athlete as well. That if I was going to be Scottie Pippen, I was more than capable. I grew to be wildly impressed with me. To love me like I love her. It’s wild and wonderful because I am.

Six letters, though.

SMDH.

Filler

September 8, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If you had to give up one word that you use regularly, what would it be?

I write exactly like I talk, so I tend to ramble the way I would in person without the need to feel aware of how long I’ve been talking because you’ll stop reading when you get bored or you’ll stay til I’m finished and either way it’s cool. No hard feelings. I know I’m a lot. 😉

But I hate filler, so if there’s one word I wish I could take out in conversation, it’s “um,” and preferably all the other nonsense that comes with thinking before you speak because you cannot see implications and speak simultaneously without tripping over your words….. or at least, I can’t. I’ve tried to be slower about responding so that I can work through the complications of what I’m feeling on my own and decide what to say. The closer you are to me, the longer it takes for me to speak. That’s because I care about what some people think because I don’t want my words to make a problem worse. I am trying hard to keep our relationship healthy by not reverting to who I was when I was younger. When I was younger, I was programmed to be a preacher’s kid, so I have that Southern pastor vibe. I also have a crippling need to take care of everyone else first. If I had money, I’d go broke, so I go for broke emotionally. I love taking care of my friends that way, being the one they call to discuss issues because they know they’ll get an opinion that’s genuine.

I wanted to learn to be an eloquent speaker, and I think in these pages I am- in person I do not have a delete key to go back and take out anything. It is frustrating to an enormous degree. Conversation is like cooking at home and writing is cooking in a professional kitchen made to help me move faster.

This is entirely due to my generation. We’re the ones that didn’t have much technology in our lives as children and became obsessed with it when we were older. That means our first Internet relationships started in high school and we’ve been doing it a long time. We all have friends we’ve never met and are comfortable with it. Sometimes it crosses over and sometimes it doesn’t, because what people write isn’t all of them.

I isolate in person, but not online because it’s the medium with which I have the most dexterity in conversation. I can pull information and make connections at an alarming rate in this medium that doesn’t come through in the physical space. I have shown myself the best and ugliest parts of my personality, and because it is in writing, I have a very good idea of how not to go wrong again. You don’t get that with conversation, because your memories bend and blend. You can’t do that when you can go back and just look at what happened. You don’t have to rely on what you understand happened, because it may not be accurate at all.

People fight over memories too much because they don’t go back and read them. Everyone has a text history to a certain degree or another and it helps you to keep perspective, but not when you don’t have the energy to scroll up once in a while.

In a sense, now everything in life depends on knowing which people in your life will scroll up for you and who won’t. It doesn’t have anything to do with you. It’s the extent to which someone wants to know the objective truth of what happened and who wants to live in the story they told themselves even when it’s false information.

It’s a lot easier to be humble in any relationship when you can go back and say, “I’m sorry. Dick move on my part.” You get stuck in a relationship faster when you think your memory is more accurate than someone else’s while also refusing to look it up. We made the choice to put more of ourselves into this medium, not being published but texting to our families and friends more and more. We need to act like it. There’s proof of everything you do, and you are not the main character in every story. It helps me to think of it this way. In every situation I encounter, I ask myself whether I am speaking Spanish in front of Karen or whether I am Karen. The revolution will be televised.

I hold myself accountable to my e-mails, text messages, and blog entries. It all matters. But because I am in touch with my emotions, I don’t go back and try to justify my behavior at all costs. I don’t have the black hole of need clawing at me that says I must be right or I’m not a good person.

I am definitely a good person, but it’s because I acknowledge that I have done bad things, but my actions weren’t the entirety of me. I just don’t want a relationship where anyone holds me to my worst mistake, and I’m not going to be the person that does it to someone else.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, is a glorious mess.

I want to be able to say that clearly, without hesitation or subtext. But in person, there would have been a lot of spaces and, um….

No, I Just Hurt

September 7, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Are you holding a grudge? About?

I am not a person that holds onto things. There’s a part of me that would love a day with any one person from my past whether they’ve wronged me or not, with one glaring exception that I wouldn’t have thought would come in my lifetime……….. but I’m not even holding onto anger regarding that situation. I’m just angry about it in my writing because I do not want her as the kind of fan who thinks she can reach out any time she wants, because that would destroy me…… for a bit. There’s no one alive who ever really gets over anything. It just moves from a place of pain to “this is something that has happened,” but if the situation comes back up, the feelings you had then are still stored in your body. Even if the same thing isn’t happening, it will feel the same way.

I would like to see the look on Supergrover’s face if and when we had to have we had that conversation, because my beautiful girl is a monster on a leash…… that she carries in her mouth and will let you hold if she thinks you are worthy of lifting Mjolnir. My mind bent like a pretzel when she decided I was. If you try to hurt me, you try to hurt us. It won’t go well for you whether it’s her or me that made your hackles go up. That one fan coming up into my yard would set us both off, I don’t care how pissed we are at each other, the enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that crap. It’s the same way on both sides. When someone comes after her, I want to jump between them. It’s just not possible, so I hope it’s the thought that counts.

There is such a thing as loving someone until you die while also knowing you aren’t good for each other, and either you need to correct the problem or move on. It might be hell in the moment, but love doesn’t go away. If I found out that something was going on with her I could actually fix, it would be done already. It doesn’t mean I should sit and wait around until she needs me. It means that no matter what happens between us, I’ve made promises that I intend to keep.

I think it’s cute that she’s a boss ass bitch and I’m basically “Player” from Carmen Sandiego. It makes our perspectives wildly different and thus easier for us to call out each other’s bullshit because we’re objective and uninvolved with any of the people the other might talk about.

That part I really did like about our relationship, and I’ve made other friends that way. I am not as close to them because it hasn’t been as long, but still the same feeling of two people in wildly different situations that can listen to the other because they don’t care about anyone but the person they’re talking to in the moment.

I don’t have to care what their husbands do, what their kids do, what their friends do because I am not trying to maintain a relationship with any of them, therefore I don’t have to balance my emotions because if I say something about one, it affects my relationship with the other. Conversations are sacred, and so is trust. I’ve learned everything about how to do virtual relationships the wrong way, so I’m adapting to make it better. I found someone that made me think so hard about myself that it was sink or swim. I could deal with the fact that me being in love with her was a pipe dream and move on, but nothing can be unsaid and I’m a writer. I don’t have the safety and security of knowing when I’m close to the hard out because I want to be seen as the loving friend I said I’d be….. after I was a total dick, of course. Rejection sucks, but it doesn’t last forever and I am not the kind of person that believes in the friend zone. There was never going to be a time where my ruminations meant that if she said no to me, her friendship didn’t mean anything to me. It would be the opposite. I know how we work. She’d fire me in a hot second, probably due to annoyance alone. But I’ve always wanted to know the things that don’t mean anything, like I said about Zac’s work colleagues the other day. She’s unique in a different way, but the concept is the same. I liken it to Cyrus and Olivia from Scandal, after hours, when it’s just them and wine and popcorn.

One of these days, she most certainly will wonder whatever happened to me and look it up. If the stars align, I hope it’s at a book table…….. where I’d gaze lovingly into her eyes, and ask her to sign my book.

I believe in fairy tales. I would never hold a grudge that meant we couldn’t fix it in the end. There’s a solid reason we should be friends, but she thinks I need too much when she hasn’t said what she needs from me and how we could establish boundaries that made us both happy. Believe it or not, I do not enjoy being ripped a new one for my crafted pages and having them called lectures by a judgmental dickhead. She never knew how my responses would have changed had she told me honestly how she was feeling and focused on the good things I was telling her, or asking me about things she thought were negative so that I could tell her if they weren’t.

Because our ways of showing love are so wildly different, neither one of us were getting what we needed from the other. I tried to correct that problem, and she bailed. But she didn’t take back her friendship. She said that nothing was ever going to change and the way she treated me blew sometimes and was incredible at others. I tried to love her in a way she could hear it, and sometimes she did. Sometimes she didn’t. It was very confusing for both of us and she didn’t have time to mull it over. I got tired of so often being responded to when she thought I was trying to fight her and not when I was telling her that I thought she was the greatest human being I’d ever met. Poll ten people that know her. We all agree, even if nine of them work for her.

I don’t dwell on my negative feelings because to me, the things that I’ve written about her combine to make a truly intimate portrait of our relationship all the way through, and it means something. Even now, I know it means something. Even if Michael and me are the only people who ever read it, it doesn’t matter. We’re the ones that will need it the most if she goes before we do, which I only say because now that my mother died so young, I can’t be sure of anything. The dice of the universe will roll one way or the other. I don’t have to focus on what might happen, I feel happy that I have prepared something that will last longer than all three of us. One of these days, WordPress will be an artifact. People will want to know how we lived, and a blog is a good example of writing about daily life. Sometimes I feel like I’m a column in a small town newspaper.

Not feeling guilt or remorse over any relationship once I feel enough time has moved forward to have closure is essential. I don’t want to be the type person that spends her life wishing things were different and not actively trying to fill my time with new opportunities.

But you guys have read every day what I’ve dealt with in all of this. How it’s painful and glorious, but there’s no problem that is not solvable if we both want to work on it. I’m just okay if she doesn’t, because my memories are enough. It’s pointless to hold a grudge, because it will do more to hurt you than they will ever care.

Hell….. with Beads

September 6, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Share a story about the furthest you’ve ever traveled from home.

A friend said this about New Orleans, but this is how I feel about travel. It’s a full-on parade of thought; I’m excited until I’ve been away from home for an amount of time that’s never enough to settle. It’s why I’d like to do Air BnB. It would be great to spend a month in Paris rather than a few days in a hotel and at a better rate. Paris is a city that in order to understand it, you have to adapt. You’re from the United States. Your rhythm is not the same. That cognitive dissonance takes time to resolve, so I like trips that are long enough to make you forget your other reality and stop comparing things to it. When I’m in Mexico, what takes the longest is flipping my brain into Spanish. Having conversations where you are both processing thoughts and emotions while translating is exhausting, and Mexicans are so kind about it. The French are not, or at least not the ones I’ve met because I’ve only been to Paris. It has less to do with the fact that I only know a few words and they’re frustrated and more with the fact that Paris is like New York and London. They don’t have time for you not to know what you want, just like if you need something from someone on the tube in London, say the bare minimum and move on. Talking to strangers isn’t their thing in either city. It would take me a long time to adapt to Paris, but “my wife” says that when she reads me, she sees colors of David Sedaris.

That wasn’t flattering at all, JFC.

It makes me feel comfortable that David is the kind of person that if I ran into him in Paris, we might be able to strike up a friendship because I would remind him of the time we met in Frederick without hounding him for anything. I have so many creative friends in my life that fame doesn’t faze me. I just want to sit at the table if they think I’m worthy of it. Writers don’t give other people their time if they don’t think that person can keep up with them intellectually. They have so much fun and devastation on their own that it takes a lot to get through to them. You have to prove that your company is better than “the characters they keep.” Nothing is more important than complete isolation when you’re writing. For me, that looks very much like the classic image of a coder because I did web development for a long time. My favorite tools are text editors that color code and I type with all the lights off and my editor in dark mode. I’m just not doing the HTML because WordPress does that for me. I mention the way I work because it leads to the fact that the story of the farthest I’ve ever traveled includes times where I haven’t left my house.

I have lost myself in this world where I spill out everything in order to lead from the back, and it has fed me in every way that’s been missing. I love feeling confident in the fact that I can express myself, and don’t mind that my archetypes are Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Mr. Robot. I also have to accept that the virtual world is not the physical, and to be responsible with relationships. For instance, I don’t know if my new writer friend knew how I felt beforehand, but it made me feel good that when I asked to friend her, she really saw me as an actual friend because when she messaged me, she sent voice notes instead of typing. It just normalized everything, and she’s got a gorgeous voice Yes, we’ve sung for each other, and now I know a karaoke night would be in order if I was in the ATL or she was headed to Air and Space.

I have to remember the fact that other people don’t have the archetype of Mr. Robot and don’t write like they’re coding into the night, one thought pouring into the next at a frantic pace, made more urgent by the sound of their own typing. I get going and I say things that are over the line without truly thinking of the consequences. The separation of being virtual heightens everything, and I don’t want to feed into it.

I don’t want “my wife” to feel like I am wandering from who I really am, and she can be a better judge of that by hearing what I mean in the way I meant it. Her voice notes were just a good reminder to keep it real, and we’re having a good time. She’s not only an actress starring in a play right now, she’s a recovering attorney who went to school in the DMV and does conflict management in the ATL now. Endlessly fascinating and we haven’t found a lag in conversation yet. It’s what really examining how far from home I was willing to go has meant to me over the last 10 years. It’s been the journey to hell and back with someone because I caused the root of the conflict. Losing someone is one thing. Being responsible for it is another.

It’s why I’m glad there’s medication to help me cope with all my silly ruminations, and ironic that the more I spill them, the more you gather. My medication just introduces upper and lower limits. It guides the direction of my compass, the only thing that matters when sailing foreign seas.

Midvale School for the Gifted -or- Push/Pull

September 2, 2023September 2, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Today’s writing prompt was a waste. Something about interviewing someone. I am not calling someone at 0700 on a Saturday for anything, a lot of the time because my friends live in other time zones.

I call my dad too early a lot of the time because I’m high energy in the morning and it just does not compute sometimes that not only is it early, it’s an hour earlier for him. I do not feel as bad about it as I probably should, because when I lived two hours behind him, he had no problem calling me at the ass crack of dawn. I wish he’d call me at dawn here, because as a restaurant employee I was not as flexible about it as I could be now. 😉

Making an interview a daily writing prompt is just not that great because I am looking for a jumping off point inside my own head without making me dependent upon waiting for other people’s input. It’s standing there in front of the “pull” door and pushing with all your might. I mean, this prompt does have some barrier to entry, anyway. In order to get it done, I need two things. The first is the courage to ask people if they’d be willing to be interviewed. The second is waiting for them to have time. I need this blog to run on my schedule, which is why I turned it around on my audience. The comments section will eventually become the entry, because maybe someone won’t comment for five minutes or five years, but it will be *something.*

I am sure that Bryn would have picked up if she heard the phone in her sleep, and she’s on vacation so she could just roll over and go back to sleep once we’re done, but it’s 0415 in Oregon. I am going to go out on a limb here and saying that moving on to a different thing to write about is actually saving our relationship. 😛 However, she will attest that among our mutual friends, she would have the least offensive reaction to being woken up. I’m the best friend, and she has priorities. I don’t think I’m the be all and end all for her, I’m just glad to be 1 or 2 on the call sheet, depending on the situation. If the problem is with me, she calls Dave. If the problem is with him, she calls me. Dave and I are all good. I love him because she loves him and that will never change. However, make no mistake. If Bryn decides Dave is out, he’s out. It’s not that I don’t value him as a person, we just haven’t known each other since 1997, so that boundary is pretty firm. Besides, Dave is a good guy and I don’t see it happening. I’m just saying Bryn is my ride or die and Dave gets a seat in the car as long as she’s navigating and controlling the music.. 😉

(In olden times, children, the passengers looked up directions for the driver. It was very 20th century of us.)

If I was really going to turn this entry up to stupid o’clock, it would be contacting Supergrover after many months and being all like, “hey, I know you’re probably mad af, but inquiring minds want to know.” She has absolutely no idea how much people love her, because even if she doesn’t think I write her in 3D, no one else does. That’s because they aren’t taking anything personally.

I think if there’s anything I could ask her, it’s “could you speak more to being written as “Flat Stanley?” This is because what she has said already is that I alternate between lifting her up for being her and excoriating her for being her. I honestly laughed at that slightly, because I thought, “what does she think being written in 3D actually is?”

I think that she thinks me acknowledging there’s a problem means I think less of her when the opposite is true. My love for her runs deeper within me than any river. When we met, she immediately got under my skin. Just made me explode into growth after years of being an arrested teenager. My response was to blow up my whole life because I could not stop vomiting emotions about someone else and say married. This is not limited to emotions about the friendship/relationship in this thing we’ve created and managed (now that I’m over it, “this thing we’ve created and managed” has become stupid funny. If it’s funny once, it will still be funny a hundred times later. Welcome to the Lanagan family, where our motto is “if it’s funny, run it into the ground.”). I was recovering from emotional abuse as a teenager, and picking out all that shrapnel was best done on my own. I should have recognized that and got out of my marriage quicker, because I needed to be introspective and it naturally pushed everyone away, anyway. I could have avoided all of that, and I didn’t.

I don’t expect anyone to forgive me, but I forgive me. If I can’t have compassion from others, I will have compassion for myself. It’s the only thing that matters, in the end. They don’t have to live with me, but I do.

It was really difficult forgiving myself for something entirely relatable when you live in my body, not so much to people who can’t see the thought processes zinging around in my mind. I was too green in a situation I didn’t understand and didn’t handle it well….. immediately. Within a couple years, everything was back to normal on my end, but not hers. She emotionally shut down and blamed me for painting my feelings as fact. I was not trying to be an arbiter/dictator. I was trying to reach common ground and I got tired of doing it all by myself.

I shut it all down for my own sanity, but at the same time, a decade of love tilted at a hundred and crazy percent doesn’t calm down overnight. She is my personal forest fire, and cleaned my clock with it. But it didn’t burn everything down for malice. No. By the time the fire ended, the slap bracelet was an empty field of ash enriched earth. Ripe for planting something self-sustaining when previously the growth stopped in its tracks when I felt anxious and overwhelmed.I also didn’t have any love or forgiveness to give myself before it happened, and afterward it became my mission. My beautiful girl said many times “why do you expect everyone else to fix you?” Two things about that. The first is she was right. I did need to develop inner strength. The flip side of the coin is that if she needed me to step up, there wouldn’t even be two seconds between “I have a problem” and “what can I do?”

If it were in my power to do so, I would wrap her in foam rubber and make everyone keep a six foot distance. That’s not your badass out there in the world.

That’s mine.

People get tripped up on love when there are problems/issues because I am trying to be objective and they think it’s a referendum on them. I’m actually saying that I would love them like a house on fire no matter how many issues there are. We are too old not to believe everything will be perfect for all time. We just have to make our quirks line up. I can do that because she is a 3D character.

As I told her, “Flat Stanley” has a history of exquisite topography.

It reminds me of a scene from “my so-called life.” Rayanne’s mom is talking to Angela’s, and Angela’s mother is not so sure about Rayanne. She literally looks perturbed when Rayanne’s mother says that for Rayanne, the world is black and white. Angela is the only one in color. It’s such a good line that I’ve remembered it since it aired. This is because if you have an emotional connection with me, you become the only ones in color.

Years and years ago, before my handwriting turned into a carpal tunnel pile of garbage, I collected fountain pens. It was never about the pens. It was about bottles of ink from black and espresso to peacock (favorite) and purple. Green, never red. When I changed moods, I changed colors.

But I didn’t change muses.

She is black, espresso, peacock, purple, and pink. Green, never red. She lives in every color.

I just decided to stop pushing on the pull door.

Doesn’t mean she fades to gray.

I Would Have To Pretend to Make it Interesting

August 30, 2023August 30, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

What was the last thing you searched for online? Why were you looking for it?

I Google very little. I absorb news, and expect my audience to look things up if they’re confused. It’s work easily done and taken off me, because I can just refer to a story instead of trying to find the link again amongst thousands I skim. Therefore, most of my Google searches are in support of my very random brain trying to process what it’s hearing. I am also not writing a part of my book that requires things like “please God NSA this is for a novel how fast does someone die with cyanide?

I don’t even have to look that up. It’s seconds, thanks to “The Moscow Rules” by Tony and Jonna Mendez. We had a Russian asset take one by biting into a pen. He was dead before he hit the floor. It’s a completely tragic end, but better than Russian torture and death.

I feel I should say that I am not being gloom and doom here. My dad is all good so far and there’s nothing to worry about. If there was, I’d know it with accuracy.

Because I retain so much information, it’s like I cook. I forget everything I know in relying on recipes and just look at the ingredients I have. When I write, I have Googled ahead of time rather than working toward a point. Clearly. 😉

I have not once Googled myself to see what other people are saying about me. I get enough of that in my own life. Besides, I don’t think anyone is saying much of anything. Life is long, though. Maybe something I write will go truly viral like Dooce, but even if it doesn’t, I am happy with my life right now. I write because I cannot stop, not based on its worth to other people. It’s my outlet, not theirs.

I don’t even care if Bryn and Zac read, because sometimes it’s really nice to have a conversation that’s not based on what I wrote that day. That people aren’t anticipating what I’ll say based on what they understand before our next interaction. I can and often do change my mind between entries, and when I do, I will explain it here.

I figured out why it bothered me so much when my beautiful girl is upset that I write her as flat. It’s that she’s a part of me, and if I’m writing her flat, then I’m coming across as that, too. I march to the beat of my own drum, but the rhythm has changed over the years. Life is in the rests.

That’s got to stop, obviously. However, it won’t change unless we do. We will see each other as part of ourselves because our conversations are not out loud. They resonate deeply because of lack of tone of voice. It’s a lot different when you’re always making up your own and it doesn’t match up.

I could not say the things I say about anyone out loud (unless I was working a crowd and it was innocuous enough not to be offensive) because my neurodivergent urge is to just run and hide, but be clear in my communication when I don’t want to be in front of people. My social battery varies from Oprah to Harper Lee.

I take a lot of things people say way too seriously because I want them to know that what they’ve said has resonated and I’m listening. That’s because most of the time their words are echoing through my filters and I’m hearing something different than they’re saying. We do it to each other all the time in conversation, it’s just quicker to correct a mistake.

Even Zac and I are good at this- saving up conversations for in person face time. The reason I say we’re good at it is that tabling a discussion doesn’t make it go away. He’s better at circling back around than I am.

It’s a balance because sometimes I feel I express myself better in writing, sometimes in speaking. Either way, I am better at connecting with people in a public forum than one on one. That’s because if people hear you speak live, they are less likely to take anything personally because I have good boundaries and they know I won’t embarrass them. I’m a good person to ask when you need someone to speak at a wedding reception or a funeral. I’m really funny, I promise. I’m just a grump of a writer. We all are to some extent. Hard exterior from years of self abuse because not only do we think we’re not that great, neither does anyone else. People say that they respect authors. Most of the time, they respect fame.

I find it easier to express conflict in writing and love in person, so if you only know me in one arena, you’re getting more of me in one area and less of me in others. I don’t mean that I am always on fire about everything, it’s that I can be conflict avoidant in person, but tell them how I feel under no pressure to respond. I will tell you how long I think is reasonable to keep checking in to see if you are listening, but I am not goading you to respond, I am telling you my boundaries. I will disconnect, but I will express unhappiness easier because I’m not taking it personally. I focus on the people who show up.

It’s the only healthy thing to do, because you know for sure that you’re in the right relationship when you don’t feel like you have to do anything to get love. That you won’t always get when you need, but you’re allowed to be you and bitch about it until we can agree. Nothing is worse than feeling more lonely in a relationship than actually by yourself.

Show up for the family and friends who don’t make you feel lonely because they accept all of who you are. Who alternate between lifting you up and not making you the main character in every story so that you can see I accept you no matter what. That there’s nothing on earth that would make me run from something feeding both of us.

The last thing I Googled something that really meant a lot to me was stories about losing your female friends. One was a reddit thread, one was a book I bought called “Your Other Ex.” I thought it was so hard to explain our bond when there are legit millions telling this same story. Some of it goes back to childhood. I think it really is as hard as a breakup because losing Supergrover was losing the two things that mean the most to me about our relationship. The first is that she’s the bridge between my old life and my new one, and she’s been that for two moves now, not just one. Her feelings are probably about the same given that she’s now offered to hide several bodies under her pool. But it would be nice to hear it out loud. I’m not so much of a judgmental dickhead when that’s the energy I feel coming off you. I pick up on aggression just as easily as she does, but she did not like me trying to work it through or de-escalate. It came off as condescending when I was trying to not be “that guy.” The one who tells you to calm down. I thought I was telling her that I heard her rage and to have it out, but don’t run when that makes me feel rage, either. Sometimes I can keep my lid on. Sometimes I am not smart enough to take the high road.

We used to be great at taking care of each other, but then we both told each other things we cannot take back ever at all. Instead of continuing to take care of each other, we turned away. We shouldn’t have done what we did for all sorts of reasons because it made logistics complicated. I needed to have a real life that accommodated time travel, basically. Meeting her was like gaining a dual processor, and not even a basic ARM. I mean top of the line Threadripper.

That has way more than two physical cores, but you get the picture.

You have to give room for lag given our senior citizen appearance in tone of voice.

But it’s also a complicated construct, because our issues aged both of us in different ways, and yet it feels no different than fighting with another little girl when I was eight. Still that primal scream when you lose someone really important at that age. No one tells you that it’s just as hard having a friend from toddlerhood to junior high disappear as much as it is from age 35 to 45. On the young end of the spectrum, she saved me in a way that I will never pay back. On the end, she ignored my attempts to try. Our relationship got so fucked up from not changing mediums when we didn’t trust each other that it was great she was here if she wanted more, but it’s better for me that she doesn’t. Because here’s what could happen if she’d let it. We could forgive ourselves and each other and accept this new reality rather than slamming each other to the ground when there’s a problem.

I regret everything I’ve done to make myself seem like an untrustworthy friend, and find it useless to jump up and down trying to prove it now…. that DC has been home in my head since I was 23, not because we met. That I was correcting a mistake instead of trying to get to her, because I was writing down all the ways it changed me. I didn’t think it would ever change her mind about anything. I just love it here. I went to the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington on a whim from a text. That kind of thing doesn’t happen in Houston.

I don’t think any of that came through as clearly as I needed it to- that I was leaving for DC to be a better friend and not a worse one, because if I’d stayed in DC and regretted moving to Portland, I would have missed meeting her at all. The opposite was true. I liked having the TARDIS land on my lawn. Who wouldn’t?

It does affect the way I think, though. I am hesitant to have a relationship that is all virtual again. There are too many traps to fall into, mostly that I think I’m not asking a lot when I write to someone in order to be heard and it fails. Then what do you do? You start fighting tot distance yourselves when it’s not really possible.

Whether I’ll consider being a virtual friend to her is based on whether the internet is helpful or hurtful, whether I can capture real feelings and so can she without sacrificing humanity and focusing on individual divinity.

If there’s anyone I don’t want to write flat, it’s the voice I hear when I type. It’s just a shame I made it up.

Because I don’t Google normally.

Right Now- 0500

August 28, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s your favorite time of day?

Most of my audience is overseas, so they actually wake me up most days now. That’s because my watch starts getting notifications before my alarm goes off, generally regarding the entry from the day before. I sometimes start writing right away, sometimes I go downstairs to grab a cup of coffee first. But this audience is my first thought of the day because the Pavolvian urge to grab my tablet and keyboard when someone likes an entry is ingrained. I’ve been on WordPress a lot longer than I’ve done Facebook, but it’s that kind of vibe.

This morning, I wrote out the title of the entry, then promptly decided I needed something to drink and by the time I got back around to picking this back up, hours had gone by. It’s ADHD in a nutshell. Every new promise in the morning must be followed, even ahead of the five promises you’ve already said you’d explore. I have a lot of new beginnings because I have trouble finding middles and ends. ADHD is particularly talented at making you feel like a dumbass. and being a writer is a way to cope. Having a record of what’s happening is a way to keep track of progress… or not. Writing is such a wonderful tool to give yourself therapy when you can’t afford it or can’t get a doctor right away. Even when you do get a doctor, they still can’t spend more than an hour a week with you. Getting better takes so much more effort than that.

People wait to do therapy until they’re in a couple, and I had a thought about that. “If you don’t have time to fix yourself, why do you think you have time to fix someone else?” I’d rather be healthy before I get in a relationship because it keeps conflict to a minimum. I don’t have a problem saying what I mean and meaning what I say. I can give what I require.

I don’t have time for people who don’t have time to fix themselves, because it makes them want to fix me. If there are problems in our relationship, it’s not always going to be 100% my fault. I don’t want to be in a relationship with someone who is so defensive that they think it is because they cannot acknowledge their own humanity.

It’s good now that I know what I’m looking for, because maybe I can avoid that trap in the future. I seem to enjoy people who don’t emote, probably because I don’t want to deal with it….. while also being frustrated that they can’t deal with my emotions, either.

Looking for healthy patterns in which we both have each other’s backs is very important, as well as taking all the lessons I’ve learned over the last 10 years and not making the same mistakes. I have a clean slate in this regard. I am no longer holding onto the past as if I can make it better for the future. I am realizing that those are going to be two very different things and the trick is not to be threatened.

I am threatened by everything, to a certain extent. I already know I don’t fit in most places, and I am sometimes fearless, sometimes a wallflower. I make room for all of those moods, but I don’t expect everyone else to do so…… which is mostly why I write my reflections here. Then, they’re just an open secret because if the people involved want to see how their characters are playing out, they’re welcome. But they’re not required, and I will write them out just as easily as I wrote them in.

The writing reflects life, not the other way around. When I talk about knowing where I’m going on this web site, I’m talking about knowing what emotional changes I have to make within myself because so many times I’ve reread things I’ve written and thought, “that probably sounded better in my head.”

I’m still reeling that my beautiful girl thought I wrote her as a flat character, when I can see every emotion I’ve ever had about her in these pages, more in the words you don’t read.

The urge to write about her has faded except for batting cleanup.

I never could get through to her that her good parts and her bad parts come together to make her the purest person I’ve ever met. That I didn’t hate her for what she’d done, I made my life bigger to accommodate her. That I was in it for the long haul if she was, because I had prepared.

She thought I was saying that I wished our relationship never happened, and I cry at that thought even now. In trying to make it better, I made it worse.

That doesn’t mean my thought process was wrong, it means that she didn’t get the intended message. I’m not sure how it got turned into the complete opposite, but that’s not my call. I don’t have to love it, I just have to live it.

What does feel good is knowing two things. The first is that I cannot un-know or un-say anything. It might lead her to look at my writing in a different way when temperatures aren’t running so high. I do love her in a way I cannot even understand, it runs so deep. But I will have that whether I have her or not, so I have not lost anything in the transaction.

I told her that I poured my love into the character because I could not pour it into her. She has said too many times that she does not accept it. She doesn’t really accept that I have a different reality than her, so I cannot expect her to understand her way around the whole problem. I cannot even do that.

But what I can do is make sure that she knows I was never coming from a place of destruction. That we had to be in the shit for a little while to create something new that we both would enjoy. Like, why should she be the only one that gets to make fun of me and Michael? I am sure that all three of us could make each other laugh with witty retorts.

I just don’t hold out hope for that dream anymore. I told her that if she started acting like she actually forgave me, then she’d be allowed back into my circle. If not, I will know I just chose the pattern I love the most. That it was always about trying to find someone to please. I know that is true on my end, and she has a choice to make as to whether she tells me how she feels or not. So far, the answer is “not,” but I do not think this is a permanent state. Mostly because life is long and it isn’t over. I know that if I’ve been able to keep up these wild and crazy feelings for 10 years, it has never been a game to me. I do not believe it has always been a game for her. I believe as she does that no matter what, we have a past, present, and future. We just have different ways of getting there and cannot seem to jump into the chasm where objective truth is found.

But there’s another part of our relationship that has nothing to do with her at all. Over the last 10 years, she has not only become my real friend, but the one that puts me in the mood to write. When I say she’s my muse, it’s that she’s the one that when she says it’s a good line, I can take it to the bank and cash it. She’s gotten me published professionally by being my editor for the last five years. She’s told me that she’ll edit my book if I wanted, and I know it was a bad career move to walk away from that, but there was so much more to it than that.

It’s because editing my book is her love language, and that part of our relationship is as strong as epoxy. That glue holds us tight. Where we fail is speaking in my love language, because communication is a two-way street. She thinks that I’m the only arbiter of what friendship is and isn’t. I don’t think of it as that at all. I think that I lay out my thoughts and feelings and she thinks she can’t argue with me, get me to see things differently, change me as easily with her words as I change her with mine. I just didn’t think it was fair that we always spoke the way it meant the most to her, and not the most to me.

I think she thought that I needed her to do something so far out of her comfort level that she just didn’t have time and didn’t want to try. The opposite was true. Could you just change how you talk to me when we do interact? I am tired of you thinking that I am goading and provoking you when I am asking for your input? You think I’m asking for too much when you don’t understand the question.

Because she lives in my ink and talks inside my head, echoing in my chest, she’s part of my lifeblood now. I can feel her words coursing through me when I receive them, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re sweet or angry. They are all small pieces of artwork in a tapestry…. or one of those landscape photos made up of individual faces.

She has a beautiful face. It’s the one I look to for love, and have for years. I cannot do that if she doesn’t want it, so my work now is to take everything I’ve written about her and look at what I do want from it and what I want to leave.

What I know is that you can’t change anyone else with your own words, and you need to be prepared for relationships not fulfilling you and not worrying so much about getting out of them. Yes, everything feels new, but in a good way. A life where I am free of past mistakes in their entirety, and not because I wanted it that way.

As Kristina Mahr has said, “I took the tags off this love before I knew I was sure I wanted it. No, that’s not right. I took the tags off this love before I was sure you knew you wanted it.” I know for sure that even if my beautiful girl was interested in women, we would make horrible partners to each other. We cannot even make our love languages work with deep female friendship. I do think we could make friendship work, but because we have distance from each other. I can’t tell a partner to go home, but I can tell her. 😉

That’s because she would understand implicitly that we are both interested in socializing until the battery is dead. Please leave by nine. A group of people is a “no thanks.” We joke that I am the president of Overthinkers Anonymous, and she is the VP because president is a public-facing office. I still can’t get over that one, it’s so funny.

My last witty retort to this was “what a day. Need to find a meeting except there’s only one chapter and it’s really only us. We’re not friendly, Bob.” I said her real name, but “we’re not friendly, Bob” is a quote from my favorite Robin Williams movie, “RV.” You just have to see it to believe it.

Anyway, if you are also a member I will be holding a drive in late September. We’ll pass the hat for dues and coffee. No Folgers, and I get to make it before every meeting. “Leslie, you have one job.”

The point in all of this is that I learned a lot, and God I love her more than anyone or anything on earth, mostly because I’ve had 10 years to get used to the idea. She knows she’s it for me, in some sense, because even when she’s not in my life, she still lives in my ink.

I will look forward to the day when I can take all these life lessons and pour them into someone who wants them…. including her, but she has to show up. I’ve learned to celebrate the people who do. It’s why I think of Bryn and Zac as my partners in crime, both of them, because they serve different roles and I’m happy this way. Maybe it will change, maybe it won’t, but I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth.

I feel that it’s important to take guilt off of everyone when they don’t show up, and just do my own thing. I cannot make other people’s calls for them, especially on the telephone.

I’m not friendly, Bob.

Writing a Letter

August 27, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

Mel told me that she looked forward to my food entries, and I told her that’s because I’m writing her a letter in every single one of them, because even from across the world, she can catch what I’m throwing. She is a chef, the level above me, which means that if I put down a steak, she’ll stand at the expo window and bitch at me even though she knows that a steak takes 13-18 minutes and the ticket was just put in 30 seconds ago please for the love of God make it stop make it stop…….. Kidding, of course I’m kidding. But in the ballet on the brigade, she’s an artistic director, caught between letting me play and impressing the owners before we do a new menu rollout that will hopefully have something I created on it.

So, since every food entry is a letter to her, here’s a real one.

Dear Mel,

I remember that summer is the worst. My first job was in Portland, Oregon where it is both hot and wet in August. There was no air conditioning in the kitchen, and we kept the back door open all the time. Our customers were so bold they’d try to go through there no matter how often we told them it was illegal, even more after they’d already been drinking. If a fight was going to happen at the pub, it was going to happen in front of us, because the back door faced the very tiny parking lot. I was always so glad I worked there, because it was a guaranteed parking spot if you showed up for your shift instead of trying to come in later just to hang. Of course it was my favorite bar. That’s where I actually got meals that someone I knew cooked and it wasn’t me. However, if I hadn’t been drinking, I could go back into the kitchen. If that was the case, every cook knew it.

I’d order something and I would hear a yell from the back…. even from my ex-wife, which made it funnier….. “LANAGAN! Come cook it yourself!” Busted. I figured out that ploy real quick. Clock out and go IMMEDIATELY to the bar and take a shot of something. Anything. Quick, they’re coming! I want a burger and I am not going to stand there in no air conditioning to get it. Do it yourself, Cat Cora.

That was the restaurant where I learned the most, because I was in the kitchen with people I trusted both as coworkers and guinea pigs. If I came up with an idea, Drew would improve it and so on.

When I was at the pub, I did brunch almost every weekend, where there I made pancakes the way you make them. Light, airy, except with a bit of hazelnut fluff. It’s the closest I’ll ever get to pastry, I assure you.

If you ever do come to DC, I have to take you to Milk Bar CCDC. It was a concept built by the woman who, I believe, is the best pastry chef in the world and if you have a chance, come study with her. She’s called Christina Tosi, and she’s one of David Chang’s best friends. Dave had already had success with momofuku, and gave Christina the money to start Milk Bar. Therefore, in both New York and City Center DC, they’re right next door to each other and Milk Bar supplies momofuku with desserts.

Their cereal milk soft serve is divine- not too sweet because it’s made from plain corn flakes.

I am certain that you can get Milk Bar delivered for cheaper than you can come here yourself, but nothing tastes better than a fresh ice cream cone, and I’m not sure they ship in in pints, anyway.

Milk Bar also makes some of the best cakes on record, but they also make a corn pie that’s the most popular thing they sell. To be honest, I’ve always been obsessed with the ice cream and cake aspect. I haven’t had time for pie. But I know Christina’s work well enough that I will shove anything she made into my face no questions asked.

I am less interested in being a pastry chef than knowing a pastry chef. 😉

The closest I’ve gotten to pastry is pantry, where I helped make ice cream bases (bacon, cafe au lait, banana putting, buttermilk [which was actually aciduated milk and froze up like cheesecake], creme brulee, and beignets. It was Cajun food, but a very French execution because my chef and sous were classically trained.

The one exception was the jambalaya, which was served as a risotto and so good it would make you cry. It makes me cry to think that the restaurant doesn’t exist anymore, because it was one of the most exciting times of my life.

One Monday night my coworker, Trina, and I got a comment card that only said “Hot. Lady. Chefs.” And of course you know now my life is complete. No additional compliments necessary for the rest of my life.

Cooking has also been an intro into meeting people I never thought I would meet, because powerful people don’t want to talk about power.

They want another pancake.

Maybe one of these days we’ll take over the world as line cook and pastry chef. Until then, we will have to settle for fantastic food conversations and reminiscing about “the life.” I hope you do get back in the kitchen eventually. I will live vicariously through you. I can even teach you how to flip shit.

I think your dishwasher’s about to quit.

Love,

Leslie

The Moral Arc

August 26, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

“The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today I went to the reflecting pool for the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington. I couldn’t hear well enough to distinguish speakers, but I’m going to use an idea from one of them and I wish I could give them credit. It made me stupid for a second as my internal computer lagged trying to process the moment.

They said, “the moral arc doesn’t bend itself.”

I was glad I was sitting down.

Raphael Warnock said much the same thing on Rachel Maddow the other night. He said, “pray with your lips and your legs.” I grew up with much the same idea… that if you’re going to pray, put on your shoes. You don’t feed people based on whether they deserve it, you feed people because they’re hungry. Then you pray about it and do it again.

Christianity at its best focuses on self-improvement, and social justice is a wonderful way to point groupthink in the right direction. You are bettering yourself with other people trying to better themselves through the common activity of standing up for minorities, both the ones you are and aren’t. Trauma has many basketball courts in one gym. All minorities have it. Jesus would have been subject to those same things, because of course he was Jewish, but his government wasn’t. The Sanhedrin was very much the governing body for Jews, but the Romans had control of everyone.

I wish more people would take in what a radical socialist Jesus was in his day and time. I wish more churches would take in how much their prosperity gospel is embarrassing. It is not what was ever intended by a group of radical Jews who went their own way. What people tend to forget if they aren’t interested in theology is that Christ would understand exactly nothing about what was said in the New Testament because they weren’t written down until 80 or 90 years after he died. The whole thing is a game of telephone. The Nicene Council approved international standards for the Bible, but Jesus still thought like a Jew. Jesus does not give a fuck about your abortion. I guarantee it. The Talmud is sane in this regard.

We were marching for all of it. Black lives matter. Female bodily autonomy. Black trans lives matter. Queer people matter.

Today, the moral arc of the universe did indeed bend toward justice.

But it didn’t bend itself.

I remembered that Laura was a preacher’s kid. What I did not realize is that both her parents are retired from the United Methodist Church, albeit a vastly different kind from my dad’s because I was in Texas and she was in New England. But, this woman catches jokes that no one else in the room would understand, and it cracks me up. I felt the same way about her mom. I said, “my dad was a pastor, but my mother was more the ‘smile and play the organ’ type.” Without missing a fucking beat, she says, “oh. That’s more typical….. as IF THEY HAD A CHOICE.” I died for a second. If my mother had been standing there, she also would have been struggling not to fall on the ground laughing.

It was great to feel at home with both of them right away, instantly translating from virtual to physical as if it meant nothing at all. I think people our age do it better than most, because we’ve spent more years chatting online than older people have, yet we’re still young enough to remember life before the Internet… we’re basically the first generation of people who have connected for years virtually because we could.

It would be impossible to keep up the rate with which we contact each other if we only had letters and phone calls. Therefore, the transition is much more difficult. It’s easy to continue a conversation when you can talk right up until you find each other in front of the Washington Monument.

Turns out, I can look forward to seeing more of Laura eventually because even though she lives in Boston, her aunt lives in Alexandria. So, it’s not impossible that we’ll run into each other, especially for days like this. In fact, Laura is only here for 12 hours, and her mom flew in yesterday. It made me feel like part of something very historic- I knew it was, obviously, but that it also meant a lot to all Americans because people had traveled so far for it.

I also didn’t hear about it, strangely enough, and I say that because I read the news all the time. Both Laura and her mom said that it was hard to find information about the event and that even they had to do some guesswork. All of us thought the crowd would be bigger, but it was great seeing everyone, including the Kings and the Sharptons.

Part of being there was just enjoying the moment, even when I left to get water and couldn’t find my way back to where we were sitting. I got lost in the moment when Sasha Baron Cohen was speaking about the collaboration between blacks and Jews. I did not know that it was historically black colleges that opened their doors to Jewish students when they were rejected from other American schools. It makes sense. Trauma sees trauma. Both have been tortured by the same people.

It’s the same type people that would torture me. Never in American history have any minorities been truly safe from persecution. Black people didn’t have rights in England, so why would they here? We forget the Founding Brothers were English just like we forget Jesus was Jewish. The Founding Brothers suffered under the weight of white supremacy Jesus and the country still won’t give it up. To the majority of Christians, what I am saying is blasphemy because the picture in their heads is as white as they are. The picture is every bit as infectious as the Coca-Cola Santa Claus, yet neither are real. The historical Jesus, in my head, looks like Reza Aslan (He’s the author of “Zealot,” about the historical Jesus).

Black people have held onto their Christian faith because they saw the real Jesus like no one else…… they saw him for who he really is.

They saw a man broken by the system who rose up and rescued himself, bringing us all with him. White supremacy will be the end of Christianity as Evangelicals drive more and more people away who leave church altogether instead of joining a liberal congregation fighting against the system. They’re so done with the hypocrisy that they just won’t come back unless a relative is singing, preaching, getting married, or dead.

If you insist on treating your very modern members like they’re failing at life because you’re making them terrified of ancient rules and regulations, you’re doing it wrong. Jesus was not a professional Christian superhero.

He was a man broken by the system, as all minorities are at one time or another.

The problem is when your church doesn’t talk about it.

11:00 on Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour in America.

Not just by race, but also perspective. When you think of Jesus, you think of you. So, if you are the majority, so is he. You are upholding a system that has gone back thousands of years, new generations picking new people to hate. How Jesus’ message became so twisted is easy to put together when you look at it that way. As Reza Aslan said in a famous YouTube video, “God doesn’t hate gay people. You hate gay people.”

It makes the march come together, this feeling of solidarity. If we ban together and include women as minorities, the minority is the majority. We have protested in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Now it’s time to protest, and soon it will be time to vote. If you’re going to pray, put on your shoes.

The moral arc of the universe is long and bends toward justice…… but it doesn’t bend itself.

Laura

August 26, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Tell us about the last thing you got excited about.

My friend Laura contacted me yesterday to ask if I knew anyone going to the march tomorrow. I said, “first of all, I didn’t know there was a march tomorrow. Secondly, if you’re inviting me, I’ll come.” I don’t know Laura at all. She’s a Facebook friend of a Facebook friend. We’re both the nerdy Biblical scholar type…. she came up with one of the best lines ever…. I said something about Jesus being hilarious and she said, “it’s a dry humor….. they’re desert people.” So, if Laura is inviting me to anything, I’ll go. In fact, the last text message I got from her was “boarding. Talk later.” I believe she is coming from Boston (Logan) to DCA.

Her mother and aunt are also along for the ride, and I’m looking forward to meeting them as well. It’s been a long time since I just lightened up and agreed to do something outside my comfort zone. I don’t even know what I’m protesting today, but I mean it.

In case you’re wondering, this is what Bible nerds do. Jesus was marginalized, a person of color murdered by the state. Jesus taught women when it just was not done. He gave away free health care to poor people without asking whether they were his countrymen or not.

One of the biggest moments in Christianity is often overlooked, and it is the key to unlocking my faith.

It’s when the woman comes to Jesus to ask for a blessing and he says no. She says “even the dogs are worthy to gather crumbs at the Master’s table.” You can see it register on Jesus’s face. It’s written straight, but that thought process must have cooked his noodle. Jesus changes his mind. From then on, he is not just the savior of the Jews. He is the savior of the gentiles as well. Now, I know we cannot make this lesson look perfect in today’s world, but we can make it look like the miracle it actually is. Progress was not a one-way street. Jesus was changed by those around him, too.

That’s what I’m doing. I’m allowing my thoughts to be changed by those around me, because I know that no matter where I’m going today, it’s not going to be somewhere I don’t like.

The only thing I know at this point is that the march starts over by the White House, 17th and something. I have looked through the Post trying to find a link, but I got nothin.’ I am willing to be led because I trust in my friend. What we’re protesting is almost secondary to a day out in the sunshine when the high is only 89 degrees and not 104.

I get angry and sullen on this web site because it’s the space where I’m allowed to be that when I feel it. Sometimes I don’t think I do a good job of expressing when the world flattens me with wonder. I am going to walk where Martin Luther King, Jr. and Raphael Warnock have walked. I’m going to walk where Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug walked. I’m going to walk in the footsteps of other people advocating for desperately needed change, because that is what my faith calls me to do. It doesn’t tell me how to vote. The stories of Jesus do that.

To see Jesus as he of “the cross and the lynching tree” instead of “awesome cosmic power, itty bitty living space” is to understand that he didn’t change anything by revolutionary acts on a grand scale. He and the people around him decided what was worth fighting for, and decided that was more valuable than fighting amongst themselves.

Coming together for a common purpose is what groupthink does when it’s pure. It just so rarely happens when people are determined to believe they’re the main character instead of seeing the cause that way.

I love things that help me remove my ego, because with protests, neither Jesus nor I have any dog in the fight except letting people who don’t have voices be amplified. That the least powerful among us should also get what we need from a corrupt government.

He was also pro-government to the level that people needed to interact with it. Of course you should pay your taxes…. “render unto Caesar,” just don’t let the picture of the man on that coin be the one who holds your soul.

It’s not the last thing I’m excited about. That concept is what excites me about everything. There is a way to both fit in and stand out. It seems that Washington, DC is the best city in the world for it. We are gathering for a common cause, not a common person. We are changing each other collectively instead of making a person’s picture the authority on our lives.

Not even Jesus would want that.