Happier Than I’ve Been in Weeks

September 1, 2023September 1, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How are you feeling right now?

I didn’t start my day writing because last night was date night with Zac and I’m staying at his house until Tuesday morning; he’s going camping and Oliver isn’t. Oliver would love to go camping, but he’s just not wired that way. He would deal perfectly with the nature aspect, he’s just not friendly, Bob.

Oliver, for those just joining us, is a dog. He loves being outside. What he does not love is strangers. I cannot trust him on a walk, and I appreciate the HELL out of people who ask me if they can pet my dog, because I can tell them ahead of time that it’s not a good idea. Oliver is a pit bull mix, so other people seem to innately understand without pushing. It’s not just people. Oliver is not friendly with other dogs, either, but not in an aggressive way. He’s basically me with two extra feet. I, like him, choose a few people to love incredibly intensely and ignore the outside world. I absolutely adore days where it’s just the two of us. We should call Bryn later. I love talking to her while I’m curled up with him…. almost as she loves talking to me while curled up with her dog, Pippi.

Zac is currently getting ready to leave, not imminently, just puttering about the house trying to make sure he’s got what he needs. I find it best to stay out of the way, because I can’t help him unless he tells me what he needs, and his brain is too scrambled to do that. My way of helping is limited to pithy comments.

I love this relationship so much, because I can be all of me. I was just thinking this morning that I am way less Zac’s girlfriend than his twinkie bitch boyfriend…………….. I love that I don’t want to be anything but his twinkie bitch boyfriend. Neither titles really apply, I just don’t have a better word for it. Neither one of us want anything more than we have, and yet our relationship is not insignificant to me, either. It is very much how I saw much, much older people dating when I was a kid. If a woman becomes a widow, in my experience they look at how hard being married is and think, “nope.” I feel that way and nobody died.

I joke about being Zac’s boyfriend, but there’s an element of truth to it. I’m genderqueer and nonbinary, but it’s not a 50/50 split. I don’t have a male side and a female side, just like being bisexual doesn’t render me half gay, half straight. I still use she/her because it’s the most apt description, but it’s not the only one, either. Genderqueer and nonbinary are similar terms, but the way I’m using them here is that my appearance on the outside and the inner workings of my mind aren’t all cis. I know I would never change a thing about myself, that I am not giving you new information. I have words for the confusion now and can move on to bigger things.

The most interesting discussion that Zac and I had yesterday was about my writing. That it could be seen as problematic because places like CIA would want to know why I was a drooling fangirl (Zac’s words, but he’s not wrong), and might want a background check to know that I’m not just with him to pump him for information because I’m not who I say I am. I’m not worried if such a thing did come to pass. You’d only have to talk to me for five minutes to ensure I’m actually an idiot about all this stuff on purpose. I don’t want to know what’s going on in Russia and China because that’s not what I’m looking for. I am looking for things that are far more granular.

I want to know about the people, and not even certain ones. My alternate history covers military and intel, so it isn’t about learning facts. It’s about learning what it takes to do the job, what kinds of personalities are in the room, what they eat, drink, wear. I want to know everything CIA wouldn’t care that I know. Lots of things are classified, but I’m betting that what kind of cookies Carol made Tuesday isn’t. Now I’m picturing a meeting minutes document with “chocolate chip” blacked out.

CIA gets really fucking funny when you look at it like an episode of “The Office,” even funnier now that Jim Halpert is Jack Ryan. I love things that are humorous more than serious- for instance, one of my favorite intelligence movies is “Burn After Reading,” because you don’t even know how bad you need to see CIA written by The Coen Brothers until you do. Every bit as funny as Intolerable Cruelty, O Brother Where Art Thou, and Raising Arizona. It’s just not my favorite movie because Argo is just as funny and packs a more serious punch now that I’ve actually spent time talking to Tony Mendez’ widow, Jonna.

It will always be a regret of mine that Argo lit my fire to learn how to write stuff like that and not making it to DC before Tony stopped doing public appearances due to his Parkinson’s Disease. It was a glorious moment when Jonna told me it was a shame I never got to meet him, because he would have really liked me. She also told me that she loved what I wrote about us meeting, but there’s no accounting for taste. 😉

Part of what drives writing about intelligence is where I live. I have loved spy movies since childhood, but in the way that a casual observer would. Like, they’re cool, but whatever.

This is how it works in my family. You’re just going about your day and then you see a movie that speaks to you and then it becomes part of your personality. For me, it was Argo. For Lindsay, it was Jurassic Park…. and My Girl…. Pretty sure Lindsay will never leave her Ellie and Vada phases behind, just like I’ll never leave Tony. It is just a bonus that he is not fictional. I even have a picture of him wearing “my shirt,” the one that says Argo @#$% Yourself and has the museum logo on the sleeve.

I picture working with CIA to create things, not working against them. Homeland was brilliant, and they had a hand in it through their Hollywood relations board, or whatever it is they really call it. Yes, I’m a drooling fangirl, but it’s also part of my job as a writer. I cannot write things I don’t know, so I study a lot. That’s because all I can do is study. I would have had a great career at CIA had the random dice of the universe not rolled “mental illness.” I write about spies because I am not capable of being one.

Accepting that I cannot do everything, but I can write about it has made all the difference in the world. I see my position as truth teller about lots of things as valid….. keeping in mind that it’s only my truth.

It’s not just acceptance. It’s feeling settled and happy living with purpose. It’s creating character, both for me and the fictional ones who live in me. I am liking spending time with my characters more and more, because I don’t feel responsible for them. They do and say what they want and I just write it down. It doesn’t even matter if I like it. It’s their conversation.

Looselie, Based on Actual Events

July 28, 2023July 29, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the story behind your nickname?

I remember my mother telling me that my first word was “peaches.” Because I was physically developmentally delayed, I absorbed everything mentally and emotionally. When I started talking, I went from “peaches” to “car keys” to my dad teaching me how to say antidisestablismentarianism and beta hemolytic streptococci. I know I’ve said this before, but even as a child I was a grumpy old man. I was the OK, Boomer of Parker Elementary School.

But by far, the greatest moment of my education was in the parking lot at Wal-Mart. I had *just* learned to read, so I was maybe three and a half or four. We got out of the car, and my face lit up.

WE SELL FOR LESS

I am such a grammar nazi that I didn’t even notice they had the audacity to spell my name wrong (My legal name is Leslie in case you didn’t know that). I don’t know if it happened afterward or if it had happened before and I am just blending memories, but I went from Les to Lesser to Looselie. That last one is probably my favorite.

I didn’t have another nickname until I got to HSPVA, when my friend Scott called me his “personal Leslian.” At first, I wasn’t into it. But when it stuck, it stuck. It didn’t matter whether I liked it or not. It was better than when I was in the closet and people teased me about my name like my parents picked my orientation before I was born and named me as such. I have never wanted to stab anyone more than when they called me Lesie on purpose just to see if I’d react.

Hold down the madness, Caroline. Hold down the madness.

I swallowed a lot of homophobic behavior because my school didn’t do shit to keep me from being bullied. In fact, when I told my high school counselor that I was being bullied, she asked what I did to provoke them. I did what I always do. When I left PVA, I took Creative Writing and roasted them over the coals. My teacher read it, and I got an A, but she said it was too personal to share with the class. That didn’t make me feel so hot. I spent five pages telling her how I felt about being closeted, being outed, being bullied, etc. and it was a TEACHABLE MOMENT. It was also 1995. It ain’t happening. Not in Fort Bend County. Probably not anywhere. But I had the courage to lay it out there. I was trying to change hearts and minds, which was probably limited to the English department so I’d be the most humiliated.

That’s because I got really close to one of my teachers, came out to her, and she had me transferred out. I think she thought I had some weird thing for her, but she was kind of a bitch which why I liked her. As in, I liked being AROUND her. Really not my type. I just needed a safe adult and she fucked me.

That’s because the class she transferred me into was doing the things we’d already done that semester. Because of transferring from PVA to Clements, I was on a third reread of “Of Mice and Men.” Not going to lie. Still hate it.

I was the only out kid in the entire school, and there were almost 3,000 of us. That led to a lot of choice nicknames, which is why I am so internally shut down when I hear a straight person say the word “queer.” I am having to do an enormous amount of work to turn off that reflex because the younger kids coming up have embraced it. To them, it’s a real word. To me, it’s the same thing as calling me a faggot to my face. Which even though I’m female, I got called a lot. I even got called that in elementary school. I “started showing” when I was in fifth grade. That’s when the real fear starts.

The moment you realize that homosexuality is wrong and yet “you have it” is the gravity’s rainbow of sexual orientation. You can hear the whistle as the bomb aims for your brain. You’ll spend the rest of your life with some form of internalized homophobia, and in the beginning, you’ll wrestle with God and all their angels. Some people try and pray the gay away. I didn’t. I knew enough to know that people around me needed to change, so I prayed for that.

That’s because I learned very quickly that this was an airplane crash sort of feeling. Once the plane starts going down, you know nothing will stop it. I could feel attraction to women everywhere, and not in terms of sex. In terms of wanting their energy. I liked having older women around me because the girls in my class treated me like a freak show. Not going to front. I was. I was in a different kind of hell than everyone else. Older women don’t have mean girl streaks.

No one questioned it because they thought I had the vocabulary and the emotional range of an adult……. when the reality was, “sort of.” I was a teenager in a weird relationship with a 25 year old. So, my brain grew rapidly with lots of blind spots. I think I’ve figured out the wrong way to address every one of them so far. I’m starting to fix it, though. I’m a work in progmess.

I don’t remember her giving me a nickname, because she’d always say “this is your middle name callin’ you.” I do remember my boyfriend’s dad (not yours) called me “Lester.” I did not like it because I thought he was making fun of me for being genderqueer. He probably was, a little bit, he just didn’t know. It was the 1990s. I didn’t even know. I just felt weird about it because I knew I’d be a husband in one way or another and he could see it. I was in that stage where all the adults gossipped about me when they thought I was out of earshot. Churches do a great job of making you feel spectacularly inferior because you’re a sinner and you’re going to hell, but of course we knew you were gay when you were five. That Happy Meal is missing some French fries.

Nicknames turned to Very Knowing Looks that they thought I couldn’t interpret. They made snide comments about how much I look like kd lang, and I do actually look like her. I get it. But it was their tones of voice. They were not trying to tell me that kd was pretty and I looked like her. People don’t realize that I sense energy and read microaggressions. I can read both sides of your face.

It makes me feel better about the state of the world than if I couldn’t, though, because I can always find truly authentic friends. I can also protect my energy, because I can tell when conflict is coming. What I am not so good at is remaining calm when I feel it. I have trauma reflexes, and I’m trying to turn them off. I do believe that if you’re a reader, you can see that my life has not always been easy. I have come by all of those reflexes honestly.

It has made me a completely different person than I would have been, and I can’t say I’m grateful for that right now. My trauma reflexes pushed away the person I love most in this world. Not woman. Person. Supergrover is one in a billion. Yes, I’m certain. Yes, I know how large a billion is. Still holds up.

I loved her hard, like a Boston marriage in the 1800s, teachers who just loved books and wanted to forego all the romance- but keep all the intimacy. I could tell her anything. She gave me a name. Goddess Jana, of the moon. It made me cry because it was so perfect. Of course she was writing to the moon. I was writing to the sun.

When she said it, my sister’s voice was in my head.

When I was nine and Lindsay was three, we went on a cruise to Mexico. There was a talent show one night, and tiny baby Lindsay started singing.

Somewhere out there…. beneath the pale moon light, someone is thinking offffff me, and loving me tonight……

If the sound of a three year old baby singing that song doesn’t make you cry, nothing will. If you’re not familiar, it’s on the soundtrack to “An American Tail.” The singer is a little boy. In the animated movie, he’s a tiny mouse with a hat that’s too big….. I think a metaphor for my childhood, really.

One of the reasons I loved having a virtual relationship is another line from the song. “And when the night wind starts to sing a lonesome lullaby, it helps to think we’re sleeping underneath the same big sky.” It didn’t matter where in the world either one of us were. The sun and the moon would always dance.

I still think that way, because I’ve given up hope that anything will get better, but I also don’t want to put her back on the shelf, because the character is what I have left. I am afraid that my memories of her will fade, so I have to put them down somewhere. It’s not an experience I want to forget. I do not want to lose my Raggedy Doctor.

She didn’t seem to realize that she was losing her Amy Pond.

I really couldn’t think of a better way to categorize our relationship than Doctor/Companion…. except we’re American. It’s apt not just because our feelings were platonic. It’s apt because even though the story of the Raggedy Doctor is in the Matt Smith era, her personality is The Fugitive Doctor. Namaste AND don’t try me. 😛

I should put in here that The Fugitive Doctor is a wonderful, lovable character lest she runs across this. She doesn’t watch the show, so “fugitive” might raise an eyebrow. It’s so much fun to use these analogies, like a mom and dad who speak Spanish in front of their kids so they can have private conversations….. except now you guys are collectively one parent. You choose. I’ll take the one you don’t want.

I think it was about a year ago when I mentioned a Doctor Who gift I got for my nephew, she told me that she “didn’t watch The Doctor.” I laughed and then said, “it would be confusing to me if you did, because you’ve told me you don’t watch Doctor Who for :::checks watch::: nine years.”

She has read what is basically the spin-off in terms of ideas, Outlander, so she does like time travel stuff. It’s workable. If I think Doctor/Companion, I also think Claire/Roger. In fact, I don’t think even she’s thought of that. I’m a preacher’s kid and I have monocular vision. I was so happy that I got to tell Diana Gabaldon how much Roger meant to me and have her respond on Twitter (shut it)….. and I just realized that Amy Pond is The Doctor’s mother-in-law, so neither one of us can escape that description.

I would give an arm and a leg to see her face when she realizes I just called her my mother-in-law. We’re first children. I’m betting “old person” has been apt since she was born, in some sense, anyway. When you’re the oldest, you’re sort of a child. You’re also sort of a junior partner at the firm because you manage the associates.

Also being first children, we are both used to being right and not having to argue about anything because our opinions are law. I wish she could have seen my face at “be careful painting your feelings as fact,” because I got all that shit from her. If she ever goes back and looks, she’ll see a solid progression. It’s not that I intentionally did it, it’s that when I was writing, I was thinking about her. My words in her writing voice. Kettle. Black. You get it.

Nearly every time, if I sounded too much like her, she’d call me a judgmental dickhead. At first, it was funny af. After a few years, it felt relentless. It was all in tone. But every once in a while, if I listened close, I heard a full orchestra playing our song. What is it? All of them. They’re the chords that run between us.

Maybe I should buy something that reminds me of her. I could go to Wal-Mart.

THEY SELL FOR LESS

Memories

April 19, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Like Edna Ferber, I also think that life itself is my partner and everyone else is a mistress, because we’re both writers. Here is what every writer in the world has in common, whether it’s keeping a journal and writing for yourself, or inviting the world into your crazy. It isn’t something we do. It is a comprehensive response to life. Therefore, I live just as much on the Internet as I do in front of actual people, just in different ways.

I am not just a great writer when I’m thinking in longhand to all of you. I make people laugh with my letters as well, and it brings us closer. Even well-timed jokes on someone’s Facebook post count if you get the desired reaction.

“Great writer” is relative. When people don’t understand you, it’s devastating. When you hurt someone meaning to help them, you bleed. I have a tattoo of a quill on my forearm dripping blood. It’s the idea that when I write, I cut myself open and look at it. We all do, even in fiction.

I do not feel like a great writer today, and that is not an uncommon occurrence. Dorothy Parker rescues me when I need her, as does Ernest Hemingway. I look back over my entries and say “that wasn’t terrible. That was fancy terrible. With raisins in it.” I also have a button that says “the first draft of everything is shit.”

I’m sorry you get all my rough drafts. I look forward to releasing something that will show you why I got As on every paper I ever wrote except my own senior thesis, but I got an A on my girlfriend’s that year… from the same teacher. How in the hell she couldn’t tell that someone went from constant misspellings to referencing books that her student couldn’t possibly have read and didn’t notice that the style didn’t change from one kid to the one she was, um.

The tragedy is how much I didn’t care that I got a C on mine.

I went to college, but I didn’t graduate. It was a mistake, and maybe one day I’ll rectify that if I actually need letters for something. I’m not one of those people that relies on a degree when by now I have 20 years of experience, including IT if I wanted to go back. I just don’t. I can’t handle the pressure of a full-time job and tuition because my ADHD is so bad that I know it from experience. It makes me terrible at both, except Constitutional Law because it blew my mind and my friends were also into it, trying to exceed all expectations of us as we navigated it together.

I won by only half paying attention and half recording every word the professor said and giving my group members a transcript of every lecture. I wish I still had them, because it was full of great lines like “the Supreme Court is nothing but nine guys in robes.” He was talking about how there are no standards, not even a high school diploma about being a judge who sits on it. I would have chosen a few doctors by now, but that’s just me. You can’t tell me that Michael Chrichton wouldn’t have been the greatest Supreme Court judge who ever lived, that we wouldn’t all hang on his decisions like they were coke. So many more people would have gotten into it, especially if he’d been able to publish his opinions on the Internet. You could say the same about John Grisham. No one can tell me that we as a country wouldn’t be collectively obsessed with opinion crack because of the way they were written.

It was a mistake because I was a second semester junior and would have started my senior year when Kathleen and I moved to Alexandria. I have so many good memories of being in Virginia, but Kat wasn’t one of them. Because I had a full time job, I paid her rent the entire time we lived in Houston. She promised me that when we got to Virginia, I could start at George Mason, basically across the street from her office. You can’t believe how fast that didn’t pan out.

I then proceeded to upend my entire life in a bad way, because I hadn’t really been in the DC area long enough to put down deep roots, and I definitely couldn’t afford to live in DC on my own and couldn’t find a roommate that fast, so I just went back to Houston.

I was writing on Clever Title the whole time, and I never bothered to tell her how big it was. I don’t mean that she didn’t understand why it was important to me, although she didn’t understand that, either. She didn’t realize that real writers knew who I was. She would absolutely freak the fuck out to know that Margaret Cho retweeted my marriage article and sent me hearts when I told her thank you, that her reading me was Goliath reading David.

It’s only her favorite comedian in the world.

If you’ll allow me a second of schadenfreude, her favorite comedian also knows that my reaction to Dana was joy, and my reaction to her was not. 😛 She was the relationship you get when you want your feelings about yourself reflected back to you. When you feel the most worthless, they’re standing by to reinforce it………………

It’s just a blessing that this is all that’s left of her in my memory. DC mattered. She didn’t. End of story.

I’m just in a better place all around. I’ve lived in the same house since I got here because I figured I could live anywhere for a month if it didn’t work out, and joke that I’m glad that Hayat picked me up at the Metro because if she hadn’t, I’d still be there. It has allowed me to breathe, this staying in one place until my emotional support was strong.

Sometimes I have problems being emotionally strong, but I am the type of person that if you agree to safety net me, you can ask me for anything, even in the middle of the night. It is a two-way street, always, and in no way have I ever expected that of anyone. If someone says they don’t have the bandwidth, I turn my energy to someone else who does. What I do expect is that I will take on all your emotions when you’re the one who’s having a moment. I will just want to relieve you of everything so that you have the courage to say what you need to say.

One of the biggest compliments I’ve ever gotten from anyone came from my beautiful girl, “looking inside yourself isn’t for sissies.” No, it is not. I cry and shake and feel tormented just like painters and actors. I am not certain that it comes across as art, blogging, but that’s what it is. It’s my way of reflecting the world, and letting the world shine through me.

Writers also tell secrets without telling them because they aren’t aware of it at the time. You can make up a million different characters, but your life story will be told with them. John Le Carre revealed so much more than technical data writing George Smiley. Jonna Mendez leaves breadcrumbs for those who are ready to hear it.

The difference between them and me is that I write about my real life, and they do, too, with caveats. One does it through the emotions of a fictional operative, and the other does it by talking about the real world and if you’ve read media accounts, you can also pick up what she’s not saying. For instance, in the latest Spy Support video, she talks about how you have a choice to make whether you tell people you work for CIA or not, so generally you tell your family because it’s hard managing your cover(s) at home.

Then, she looks at the camera and says, “it’s your friends who are the problem.”

The way she looked at the camera made her pain so evident and real, and I thought, “there’s a story there.”

It made me want to double down on not talking about Zac at all, and then I realized that there were going to be things I’d mention that had nothing to do with that life, that I was never going to say which agency he worked for except that he knows things about every agency because he sees that data and makes sure it gets to the right people. I also misspoke the other day when I said that his job had been intelligence “since the Navy.” He’s a reservist. What I meant was since he enlisted at 18, he’s been in that world. We talk around many things because I am naturally curious about the current chessboard. It makes me excited to hear even the thing around the thing so I can research it on my own.

“The thing around the thing” is large, no matter what area of the world we’re talking about. Conversations that are truly exciting because we’re not talking about something micro. It’s macro, both in economic terms and world view. It gets me out of my head.

It also makes me a better writer, getting out of my head. I tend to navel-gaze because that’s what my personality does. We are hard-wired to look at the world because we are driven to improve it… but we know we can’t, so we lead by example.

It’s how I know I have the ability to be a great writer someday, as long as I keep practicing my art.

Don’t

April 12, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

What’s the most fun way to exercise?

Let me start by saying that my first thoughts were fairly unprintable on this topic, but I decided to take it seriously, anyway.

I don’t exercise at all. Not purposefully, anyway. I walk a lot because I don’t have a car and I like it that way. A lot of my writing gets done on Hwy 29 between East-West Hwy and Franklin Ave. I wear Bluetooth headphones and listen to music, left foot on the downbeat. When I think of something good, I stop and record what I’m thinking.

A typical walk for me is at least a half hour. That’s because I keep changing my mind. I walk to the bus stop, and get bored of waiting, so I’ll start walking and tell myself there’s a bus stop every major street, so why worry? But then I get to the next bus stop and I still don’t want to wait. I’ll go three miles that way, anything to avoid slowing movement. Movement is creativity.

I’m not talking about dance. Movement creates inertia. If I start out with an idea at the house, I’ll have a book series at the entrance to the Metro, and a short audio clip of what my topic is to get started. When I’m on the train, I get out my tablet and keyboard.

I would like to be serious about exercising, in a perfect world. I’d like a trainer and I would work hard with them. For me, it’s not about losing weight. It’s that I have balance issues and a brain palsy that makes my muscles rebel, against what I have no idea. Strengthening my core is essential to staying upright. I am also of the age that I have been laid out flat on my back from a bad sneeze. Training would stop most of that, too.

Something to think of for the future, that walking won’t solve everything. My body is complicated, and yet, it’s not. I don’t care about what and when I eat, ever, because my blog won’t write itself. I know I will walk until I have something. It’s funny how my weight goes up and down dependent on how much I’m thinking about that day. If my mind is full, I can predict six miles. Not in a row, but throughout the day.

There’s a ton of shops within walking distance of my house, whether it’s going toward downtown Silver Spring and into DC, or toward my neighborhood shopping center, which has the basics. 7-Eleven gets most of my money, because when I forget my water bottle, I stop in for a soda. I like Big Gulps best, because I generally want the ice as bad as I need a shot of caffeine. Or, at least, up until I found Liquid Death sparkling water. If I’m going the fizzy water route, I’ll also “do a shot.” “Doing shots” is how I refer to getting pep in the middle of the day in hopes of not seeming so incredibly old. 5 Hour Energy is the top brand, but there are a hundred of them. My favorite is sour apple with a lime seltzer “back.”

Today is a bit different because I’m packing my “going to Zac’s” bag. Zac has an appointment on this side of town, so he offered to swing by and pick me up rather than me taking the train. My “going to Zac’s bag” is basically full of electronics. Getting on the train home would be impossible without my phone/smart watch, and of course they don’t have the same charger…. That would be insane.

I’m writing about going to Zac’s so that when I read this later, I will remember that Bryn asked for a picture of me with Oliver, Zac’s puppy dog. I am already blessed with “The Daily Zac” and “The Daily Oliver” photos, so it wouldn’t naturally occur to me to take one myself. 😛

Getting those two pictures are the highlights of my day… fuel for the road ahead, which is often lonely due to necessity. I can’t just hand off my story ideas to anyone else and say “I’m tired. You do it.” It’s not that I wouldn’t. It’s that I would feel terrible about asking people to work for free on the off chance a book does well. I am not so precious about my idea that I wouldn’t like a research assistant, for example, but I am also not willing to pay them in dreams.

I just have to keep walking so that my ideas flow organically through me and onto the page. Getting a proposal together is difficult, but definitely easier than trying to finish this book on my own (meaning the alternate history). It’s such a large scope and I’m such a small person. I continually hope I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew, especially in terms of showing talent.

All I can do is believe in myself, and keep walking, one foot in front of the other.

Chapter and Verse

April 11, 2023April 11, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What book could you read over and over again?

Just one book? Forever? If I only get to have one, it’s a Bible. Not because I’m a religious zealot. I enjoy theology and reading criticism… but in the absence of other books, I’d have to make my own. Very, very hard without the source material. Over time, I would absolutely entertain myself by writing both First and Second SpongeBob to see if anyone noticed.

The Bible isn’t an answer. It’s a lens through which I see everything else. By taking these stories seriously and not literally, I can tap into something useful… the power of me. When I look at the historical Jesus, I’m looking in a mirror. I feel like every Christian says this, but I’m never sure if they mean it. They leave out the “historical” part and that’s what creates problems. They’re not connecting to him, but the marketing campaign that tried to rebrand him as white. They’re connecting themselves to something that has never even existed.

The “prosperity gospel” people drive me up the wall, and it is extremely important to understand why. Jesus is all about setting priorities, and money wasn’t on the list. I am angry that so many people think Christianity is *only* mega churches so that small communities engaging in social justice are also thought of as suspect.

Meanwhile, the income disparity just gets more intense as people want church that looks like a rock concert, when to me it’s the very worst of both. It’s pedantic to preach to people on an eighth grade level. Assume your audience is smarter than you are, because it is true.

Moving what is basically my textbook out of the way, you guys already know I love Argo, but it’s not my favorite book by Team Mendez. That’s Spy Dust, the love story between Jonna and Tony. I read it shortly after I met Jonna in person, and it was exactly the book I needed at exactly the right time. They’d both been married before. It was their second act after facing lots of hardship, and it was beautiful (both their relationship and the prose that came out of it).

Fiction changes by the hour. It would be impossible to list all the novels I love. When push comes to shove, I still can’t pick one.

Catcher in the Rye comes up quite frequently. People love it because of the foul language (for the time) and the “Holden Caulfied is just cool” factor. I also love those things, but it’s more than that. It’s written from my favorite perspective, probably because I’m a blogger. It’s first person with an unreliable narrator. Holden’s were stories that were all true and God knows if any of them happened.

I am also very impressed with my own writing, but not in the moment. It takes about five years for me to be proud of an entry because I have to be a different person than I was when I wrote said piece. I’m proud when I look at it with a more objective eye… I feel like I’m connecting to another writer and critiquing their work because at that point, I’m not emotionally attached to it. I also have to be my own biggest fan, because to make my blog dependent on external validation is crazy. It’s a journal and you’re invited, both to read and talk back. To need your love and adoration is to handicap myself, because it’s letting the audience become my boss, writing what they want to read rather than this space actually being useful for my own growth and development.

I absolutely do go back and read what I’ve written, because again, that’s what’s useful to me. I read my entries and look at what I was trying to accomplish and ask myself if I’ve done it. Most of the time, I am not sure. What I do know is that people don’t think I know how I come across, and they are very worried. To me, that’s caring about what other people think more than I care about myself.

I’m not being cruel and callous about hurting people with fallout. I am saying that I can’t think about the outside world. I have to let the audience find me because I need this web site more than everyone else.

My personality type says there are callbacks and patterns, so I go back and find them. I throw things back in my face. I get angry at myself. And somehow, good writing comes out of it sometimes. Not all the time. Sometimes I’m an angry, judgmental dickhead. I like the bumper sticker wisdom of “when you ask yourself ‘what would Jesus do,’ remember that flipping over tables and chasing people with a whip is a viable option.”

This is why I’d take a Bible over anything else. People worried over him the exact same way that people worry over me. They even say some of the same things. It is enough to make me shut down this whole site at times, and I have to force myself not to do it; I’ve done it once before and it really screwed up my future.

It screwed me up inside when the same people that tried to force my hand were so outraged in the moment, then months later said, “you were always such a great writer. Why don’t you do it anymore?” Notice I said that they tried to force my hand. It didn’t work. What did work was feeling so terrible about anything and everything I’d done that my poor self esteem cased and trashed everything I’d built in less than 20 seconds. At the height of my popularity, I was up there with Wil Wheaton and Heather Armstrong. Dooce had only started a couple of years before me, when she actually talked about things that got her in trouble. She built her entire audience off of brutal truth…… and then….. didn’t.

I can’t be bitter, because it was my decision. I am just telling you the cost of shame that comes with having readers. As a writer, you only fear two things. The first is that no one will read your work. The second is that everyone will.

Over the years, people start to appreciate my writing more and more, and I’m not talking about strangers. I’m talking about my friends who don’t remember what happened when and I’m the only one that remembered to write it down. That’s why I’m so careful to talk about people in a three dimensional way. Once the subject removes themselves from the equation and starts reading about themselves as if they were a different person, “all of a sudden” I’m the greatest writer who ever lived because mine was the story that stuck.

You can look it up in First SpongeBob.

Without Tears

March 29, 2023March 29, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I am not sure that this entry will be written without tears, because I’m thinking about so many things that my emotions might leak. I might let the audio sit for a day or two, just to get some emotional distance. It helps the narration if I don’t have to blow my nose. Also, I’m sorry if the audio is poor. I have five housemates and I don’t have an “on air” light, nor would they pay attention to it. I am, however, surprised at just how much my Bluetooth mic picks up. The mic is literally in my ear, and it still picks up noise from all over the second floor. It helps me, though, because it keeps me from flooding out…. So that I can record an entry without tears…. 98% of the time.

I am positive that some people were confused at me crying over the death of Tony Mendez, but let me tell you why. I wrote about it, but it’s been long enough and I haven’t mentioned the connection more than once so it’s time for a rehash.

I wasn’t finished with grieving my mother when Tony died. Grief compounds. Therefore, I knew innately what his widow, Jonna, was going through in terms of having to tough out a public event all armored up while dying inside. My mirror neurons went off like crazy. My grief mixed with hers even though we didn’t talk about it. I took all of that grief home with me and mourned Tony and my mother simultaneously. Therefore, years later, when I think about grief, Tony and my mother both come to mind.

Mourning my mother was so great a loss that I put it deep down inside, hardly ever talked about it unless the other person in the conversation had already lost a parent. This is because the chance was too great that I would open myself up to further injury, because people have no idea what to say and often make it worse.

I will tell you right now that the only thing I actually wanted said was “I’m sorry.” I loved people that showed up and were willing to sit in the silence until I could emote.

Digging that deep was so incredibly hard that I still hadn’t cried as much as I needed to. Crying about Tony was only partially about Tony. The loss of a new book from him ever again really was devastating. But mostly it’s that the grief I felt regarding him was so much bigger than that. Grieving over him allowed me to process my mother’s death, because it was the entrance to a deep, dark cave, ripe for excavation. I just didn’t have any spelunking equipment.

Meeting Jonna was at least the hat with the light.

She broke me open in just the right way, at just the right time. Her armor was my armor laid out in front of me where I could take it in… where I could see my own actions in the third person omniscient.

So, when I talk about Tony Mendez, I can’t do it without tears.

Going through a breakup with a friend has been devastating, and yet not at all. It just depends on the day. Some days I think “no one is her,” and some days I just can’t. What has helped is a book called “My Other Ex,” stories of women who’ve lost their best friends and why “no one is her.” One thing they expressed universally is that with other women, you get so close you can speak without words, but there is no recognition of that type of grief.

I am an INFJ. I feel emotions so deeply that they’re capable of overtaking common sense, and I could write a seven volume book series on my dumbass attacks. Not only do I understand, I grok.

I understand so completely that their grief is my grief. Grief compounds. I cannot talk about that relationship ending without tears. So I compartmentalize, and armor up. No one is trying to see me cry in line at Whole Foods.

Armoring up is necessary only because if I don’t, I will just bleed out emotionally. In the moments where I am not capable of armoring up, it means the grief is too deep. So even though no one was trying to see me cry at a Whole Foods, they must have thought that them being out of the veggie dogs I like was being taken way too seriously.

Although I will say that it was legit a problem. If veggie dogs, vegan cream cheese, and hot sauce didn’t exist, I’d probably be dead by now. I eat them all the time. It’s my favorite lunch, because it takes about a minute to make. Yes, I am a very good cook, but I eat prepared foods most of the time. This is because I don’t want to devote the time and energy to prep. If you come over to eat, I will pull out my good knife. Left to my own devices, I run on sandwiches and Crystal Light.

I believe in Crystal Light, because Crystal Light has always believed in me. Also, not going to lie- finding out there are flavors with caffeine in them has made my whole life easier. I cannot talk about Crystal Light Energy without tears. 😛

“Spare” is a rough read, and I cannot do it without tears, either. Prince Harry and I have so much in common. My platform as preacher’s kid was so much smaller, but I can empathize with his pain. I’ve cried over the loss of Princess Diana, being different than everyone else because he wants to speak his truth, and the list goes on.

And then he went to Afghanistan, and I went from tears to the full-on sob.

I have said over and over that The War Daniel is my primary partner, and that if he changes his mind about marrying me, it’s over for anyone else. The reason that they don’t stand a chance is that we have a trauma bond, which is like a regular bond on steroids.

He’s the only person ever to make me feel better about the emotional abuse handed down to me over the years. I couldn’t listen to him without tears of relief. He said, “your trauma is so much worse than mine, because my enemies in Afghanistan were clearly defined. Yours were the ones closest to you, turncoats all.” If he is willing to walk in my inner landscape, I am willing to walk in his.

In fact, I am hoping to God I didn’t just reject a call from him.

The area code on my phone was his, but the name was “Telemarketer.” They didn’t leave a message, so I hope that means it really was an auto dial. Someone in rehab feeling rejected is not my MO, especially because I need him to know that I love him, honestly and completely.

The only reason I’m even saying that it’s up in the air is because I’m willing to date people casually until January. At that point, it’s a different ball game. I need to know if he still feels the same way after the fog has cleared from his brain. Again, I am trying to think logically through rehab and its aftermath, experience I’ve gotten from being a friend and a coworker.

But even though I’ve dealt with addicts my entire cooking life, that doesn’t mean I can do it without tears. What if he doesn’t come back? What if I’m waiting for nothing? I only think that in my smallest moments, though, because I’m not ready for a serious relationship, anyway. Even the relationship that Daniel and I created previously wasn’t serious. He didn’t tell me to break up with Zac, and thinks he’s adorable (because he is). I didn’t tell him I needed him to be faithful, either. He was going to be off doing his own thing. The best I hoped for this year was letters, calls, perhaps a short visit since he can fly here so easily and without money. The only constraint that the military would put on him is time…. Being flexible about his departure and arrival depending on how many standby seats were available.

The only part that was serious is dreaming of the life I wanted to create with him once he was capable of doing so. It fits my purposes nicely that he doesn’t drink, because I so rarely indulge. Zac likes cocktails, and so do I, especially if it’s something I’ve never tasted before. Therefore, I will always take a drink if Zac is bartending, but I don’t even keep alcohol at my house. I would rather drink Crystal Light. I think we have covered this. 😛

Right now, I am not communicating with Doc. It’s not because I don’t love him more than life itself. I need him to get well, and I don’t want to be a distraction in any way. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if he thought I needed help more than him and decided to come to my rescue at the expense of his own. The best thing I could possibly do is let rehab have him, and he’ll be done in May.

On the surface, it looks like I am batshit crazy and I realize this. Combat vet and alcoholic. Leslie, are you insane?

Yes, and that’s the point.

Daniel was HM2 in the Navy. That is the equivalent of a civilian nurse practitioner. Therefore, I feel safe with him because me being bipolar would never be an issue. I trust his judgment. If Doc says he can tell whether I’m up or down, I will take that check to the bank and cash it.

On the flip side, is it any wonder that I know how to support a Doc? My family is all medicine, all the time.

A really funny conversation between Doc and me ran thusly:

“I think I’m getting hypomania.” “And what are your qualifications to make this diagnosis?” “I went to medical school in the backseat of a Lexus.”

I am good at standing (sitting) behind people and listening closely.

I have been listening to Doc closely, and trying to understand his pain. Most of the time, I cannot do it without tears. If I start down the road of Doc doing this brave thing and how it was his worst day, I will collapse in a heap. It’s why I’m wiling to forgive him, and struggling through it. I have to forgive him whether he reappears or not. The forgiveness isn’t for him. It’s for me. I won’t be myself until all of this is resolved, even if it’s just getting my own closure.

The only reason I haven’t closed the door is that I can’t think of him going through rehab without tears, either. I know what that’s like, not from a first-person perspective, but from having a best friend back in the day who went through what Doc is going through now. I remember that I gave her a ring that looked like leaves encircling her finger, in honor of turning over her new leaf.

I wear my skeleton claddagh with pride on my right hand, or I did until the silver wore off and it turned my finger green. That’s not Doc’s fault. It wasn’t a gift. I bought it as a placeholder and told Doc where to find my favorite jewelry.

I should call around and see if I can find a maker who does plating. Even nickel would protect the metal. The only reason it’s worth plating a ring that cost $3.00 is that it’s so unique. Doc is a death metal fan. Skeleton claddagh is not my style, it’s his. Even after he broke up with me, I still wore it like a #livestrong bracelet. It didn’t mean we were still together, just that I hope to God that sending support would help, even if he never knew about it. I mean, he knows I have it and I have sent him a picture, but it might surprise him to know that the ring turned my finger green a few days ago. I didn’t give up on the ring, it gave up on me.

Perhaps it’s for the best that I’m not constantly looking down at my right hand, longing for a dream that might never come. I just don’t want to be certain about anything regarding him, because rehab is hard work and your emotions are all over the place. Again, Cora has said that she doesn’t think my faith in her father is misplaced, so I’m choosing to believe her. Keeping my own strength up is what’s important, because my faith in her father is important to me being who I am through all of this, too.

What kind of partner would I be if I gave up on him while he needed so much compassion? I know what it’s like to push someone away because you’re traumatized, and his trauma goes to eleven. Our pain isn’t even on the same playing field.

….and I can’t think about that without tears.

Stories That Are Factually Accurate

March 23, 2023March 23, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Here’s my “blog entry” for today. I am sick, so this is what you get. I know, I know. You’re terribly grateful….. 😛 😛 😛

Listen to Stories That are Literally True and Actually Happened by Leslie D. Lanagan

I talk about a lot of stuff, mostly meeting my favorite authors- Anne Lamott, David Sedaris, and Jonna Mendez. I have told all of these stories before, but not in my own voice.

I finally broke open to let some light in, and it feels good. Like, dragonfly in the sun, you know what I mean.

You get it.

You’ll see why I’m telling you this joke. Altos and basses live on cigars and vodka. Sopranos and tenors live on shoes and compliments.

The Heuristics and How to Swing ‘Em

February 9, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Staying silent is like a slow growing cancer to the soul and a trait of a true coward. There is nothing intelligent about not standing up for yourself. You may not win every battle. However, everyone will at least know what you stood for- you. – Shannon L. Alder

There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis. – Malcolm Gladwell

“Blink” was a craze when it went it was published, and everyone got on board with the book’s philosophy. That given a second chance months later, you wouldn’t regret having made the decision you did. Sure. Hard data says that. When you actually put it into practice, though, people are concerned that something is wrong with you. In my particular case, people assume I’m on an “up,” and I’ll just regret things and apologize later.

It is my feeling that “blink” doesn’t work if you don’t know yourself as well as you possibly can. It’s a disaster to blink on no information. It’s another to have 45 years of heuristics first.

I have only had one time in my life where the decision to cut someone out of my life has gone so poorly that I was miserable over it for years. So, the concept of a “Blink” decision is not foolproof. But my track record on good decisions for me is about average with everyone else who lives, works, and functions just like I do… which is in fact one person. Except without mental illness, but the part she gets, she gets hardcore.

Hypotonic cerebral palsy is a rough gig all on its own. We don’t have to talk about mental illness at all to say my life is hard. People punch down at me all the time without even thinking about it. I can’t change how my eyes work, especially on the fly. I’ve tried for years, and the closest I can get to 3D vision is that I can see both sides of my nose at once. Any further away, and things get messy fast. “What are you even looking at?” gets old very fast.

I don’t have an easy time of not looking like a crazy person with the way I move and watch, both from the outside in and vice versa. People think I’m staring at them all the time, but just because my eye is pointed at something above your head doesn’t mean that one of my eyes won’t drift. It happens in a way that I can’t even pay attention to it, because then it will take minutes to make myself look like I’m focusing and no one has the time for that.

Besides, people will fix it in PhotoShop if I’m ashamed of how I look. Except I’m not. They automatically assume that I would want it fixed. I don’t because I don’t want to present a curated version of who I am. It has made the price of entry into my circle of friends very, very high.

My mental health treats my body like crap… it’s really all the side effects of the medication I’m taking. I choose physical illness every day.

I choose physical illness every day.

I make that joke all the time, that I choose between sick and crazy without letting it affect me like I just did. I was diagnosed as Bipolar II/ADHD when I was about 21, then as PTSD set in a protocol was added for severe anxiety. I have been taking a pure, refined version of crystal meth for 20 years, and I have also tried agonists like Stratera and Cymbalta, which mimic the norepinephrine boosts that methylphenidate gives, but again… different med, different side effects. I was jumpy and nervous, heart rate sky high, couldn’t sit still. It was a worse ride than even an extended release dose of methylphenidate had ever given me, and I lived that way for six weeks until I gave up.

I was disheartened. With my medication, I had no appetite and a quiet brain… but it meant being on meth to cope.

Between it and my mood stabilizer, I have caused enormous damage to my physical body to remain sane to everyone else. This does not mean that I need to go off meds to get a baseline. That’s pretty much the worst idea anyone has ever had regarding my health. I just need better generics. Fewer side effects. A better understanding of the human body so I know that opioid agonists work on me and methamphetamine don’t. Why is it the same delivery method and two different results?

One chills me out like a Tylenol with codeine, the other makes me look like a schizophrenic heroin addict.

Here’s a joke I told Daniel that my medical people will get:

Is this a __ thing? Let me guess your diagnosis before you even say it…….. “It depends.”

In my experience, this is the correct medical diagnosis for everything. Every time. That’s why it’s called “practicing medicine” and often referred to as an art. It is still a better educated answer than you’ll get from someone who didn’t go to medical school, because what the doctor is really saying is “I need a whole lot more information, but if you can just give me your Google Search Terms I have like 50 things I can rule out that won’t kill you before you go on WebMD and scare yourself to death.” Doctors can only do “blink” decisions when they’re sure. It’s different when you’ve never seen a case before, what in med school would be a “fascinoma” and in law school would be a “prima facie” case.

Shows like “House” are built on doctors being wrong, and it happens all the time. I don’t mean in an intentionally malicious way, though you can find enough of those if you look for them. I’m talking about people going to doctors that have diseases so rare that it takes a detective years to figure it out, because the natural order of how something is supposed to go, well…. It isn’t.

It’s not even idiocy. I couldn’t have told the doctor on her way into a patient room that I thought a patient had shingles if I hadn’t seen the pattern in a book somewhere. It’s the same with an MD as opposed to me, a lowly MA (from whom you should never take advice. I’m a moron. And I know enough to tell you that). They’ve just seen thousands more patterns the higher you go up in terms of specialists. That’s why they’re specialists. They don’t necessarily study harder for anything. It’s that when they hear a herd of something coming, they know when to guess “horse” and when to guess “zebra” because they’ve seen enough to know the tiny, tiny, tiny differences, maybe down to one. Additionally, in those cases, a blink guess is necessary. Try Occam’s Razor first. If the patient gets better, don’t try anything more extreme. If the patient is worse, they don’t have what it’s most likely to be.

That’s when you get more eyes on it. People can go 15 years without an official diagnosis, and that’s what teams of doctors like the one portrayed on “House” is accurate. You also need different types of doctors, because rheumatology isn’t that different from endocrinology, dermatology, and oncology. You could argue that oncology falls under rheumatology, because cancer is also an autoimmune disease. It’s just that the need for oncologists surpasses the need for expertise in other autoimmune diseases that don’t have dedicated departments. I assume GRID/AIDS was first thought of as an autoimmune disease, rheumatological or oncological in nature. Then AIDS research, too, became its own department.

This is where the rubber hits the road. Blink and see if you’re right, but have an Option B. Doctors, particularly in Urgent Care and the Emergency Room, aren’t given time not to blink. They patch you up.

I’ve been patching myself up for decades because I have had the opposite problem. I have waited too long on a lot of things because I didn’t feel I was capable of them. In fact, I had seven years to do nothing but think about my motivations and goals. I’ve thought about the things I’ve done and left undone.

The dragons that circle my bed at night and let me lie on my back and watch the stars while we travel.

Who I wanted those dragons to be, and why, and why it should cost so much to be my friend. It costs something to be a friend that believes in a writer, because now they’re in the position of having to defend your writing whether they like it or not, because it’s your obsession, not theirs.

I chose one dragon in particular because not only is she the architect type of writer, she has also edited a few other things for me that have been successful (mostly book reviews). She also has the amazing ability to talk with me about craft and not plot. It works in our actual relationship as well as the one we have professionally. “I can’t fix this.” “You absolutely cannot fix this and I will be mad if you try.” Although I will say that sometimes I wish she could wave a magic wand because a good bit of the time listening to her goes better than whatever all THIS is (looking in mirror).

The other two are more talkers than writers, so we make up for it with phone calls and quick texts to set up phone calls, or we video each other. As I have said before, that’s new. I’m finally okay with it… as previously mentioned but I feel it goes along here very well. I talked to one person, and then I talked to my audience, almost in quick succession. This is because I realized that if I treated a vlog like a FaceTime call, I wouldn’t get overwhelmed at the stats. Here’s what I do know, though. Every post I write resonates with someone. They just don’t all resonate with everyone. That’s true of every writer on Earth, even Stephen King. Most writers have a special place in their hearts for “On Writing,” even the ones that don’t like horror. Those realizations created a blink decision. I vlog, because talking to a million of you is the same as talking to one of you.

I blinked, and didn’t regret it. I had the heuristics.

Working on My House

January 17, 2023January 17, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

I believe that most things are a house of cards. Humans aren’t strong enough to build everything right the first time… even me. I am glad that I have the strength to go back into the basement, and have so many stories that have gone through countless revisions over time based on telling them again and again (sometimes over and over to one person….. sorry about that, all y’all). Today I discovered a new level of dark. Luckily, I had a friend to guide me down, and then back up again.

We went to high school together. They were there. Leaving even their gender out because they wouldn’t want it to be known that they noticed.

They didn’t know it, but they were doing guided meditation. I closed my eyes and saw Carrie, my partner in that woman’s class. It was a health class, and we were “married” and caring for our egg child. I got lucky. All the boys were taken. Carrie was (and probably still is) a gorgeous girl. I knew she was straight. It wasn’t about that. For an hour a day, she was my arm candy. 🙂 James, Alex…. don’t tell her.

(note to my French Horn brassholes- I just made it up. Tell the others.)

As an aside, I am DYING thinking about how hard Sam will laugh at “brassholes.” She should know. She had a near miss in terms of almost marrying one. I absolutely thought she was the love of my life, and if you didn’t think I mourned that relationship, she hit me harder and deeper than she will ever know. That’s because I didn’t tell her what she did wrong. I didn’t care. Let’s just say that I got the thing I wanted, and in return, she hit and run. Take that phrase and run with it.

She absolutely devastated me. To get over it, I had to cut off all my emotions and pretend that she meant nothing to me, because she made for damn sure I knew I meant nothing to her. I blocked her on everything. E-mail, phone number, all social media. I was crushed. It was my first real relationship in seven years. Why wouldn’t that kind of thing destroy me? Do you have any concept of how long that is? I didn’t even get Leah while I was waiting for Rebekah. I was completely alone. Touch starved except for a few hugs along the way. Depressed. Down and out.

Sam and her kids were balm to a soul that needed them, and I can only say that now, when the outcome of that relationship no longer matters to me. She could have had me for multiple lifetimes, and she threw me away like the bird shit on a newspaper after one day in the cage.

Yet, the only way she’ll ever know how I feel is if she comes up in my yard. My dog bites, motherfucker. I reserve the right to be angry at any time. I also reserve the right to not.

That relationship still confounds me, I just don’t care enough to find out why. She didn’t want to get together to figure our stuff out, it was just over by text message. Why are you guys more concerned that I started dating Daniel so quickly when it wasn’t me that wanted to separate? Why are you guys on me about Daniel at all? Isn’t he a logical successor to be my partner after realizing what Dana had done?

On my very first date with Sam (sorry if I’ve told this story before, but it’s a card that needs to fall), she texts me to tell me that she’s sitting on my front porch. I run downstairs to meet her, and she’s adorable. My heart didn’t even take five seconds to assess the situation. Just a seductive, take your breath away fantasy from the moment I said “yes.” She matched me feeling for feeling, or so it seemed. I saw so much of myself in her. I thought that we’d be together so much longer than three weeks, but I did something. I just don’t care what it was, because it might not have anything to o with me at all. And since she’s not going to marry me, I don’t really care what it was that I did. I would correct my behavior if it mattered.

Back to why Dana even matters. She definitely shouldn’t, but she does. When she hit me, she installed a trigger. Sam’s fist coming at my face whether I wanted it to or not. I realized that I might never get rid of he tripwire, because Sam had fixed hers, but what about the next woman?

Just another reason why I trauma bonded to The War Daniel. He’s huge. He’s weapons trained. No one would ever fuck with me ever again. I have had enough of the bullshit in life and not enough enjoyment. So “noping out” to a different country and trying to make a life there is attractive to me whether Daniel comes or not. My top choices are Aberdeen and Phnom Penh. Two completely different cities, two completely different cultures. It’s just that I have friends in both places. Suzanne has known me for somewhere between 10 and 15 years. I don’t remember, but I do know that she was friends with both Dana and me. It’s not that she remembers Dana, it’s that she’s familiar with the story of my life so far.

My friend in Cambodia has known *of* me for a long time, but we’ve recently connected because I was brave enough to ask him if I could come and visit. I know I will go there first, just not when. The attraction to him is that he’s the exact opposite of Suzanne’s story. He’s only just finding out who I am. So obviously I need six months a year in both.

I have listened to all the sad music. It’s enough that I have to deal with idiots who think that I move really fast in dating. What in the actual fuck? Am I supposed to mourn people longer than the relationship actually lasted?

I broke up with Theresa because I had spent *weeks* planning the perfect first date and she told me that she was backing out and just wanted to talk on the phone “this trip.” No, baby. That’s not happening. We have done too much to go backward and reassess. It’s too hard and it’s too much. We’ve been talking for three weeks. If you can’t have a drink with me, it’s not happening.

That relationship was weird, too, because we were off to such a good start, and then I probably ran my mouth too much or something, because lots of people have no idea how INFJ people operate. They make plans, then contingencies, thn more contingencies. For instance, here was the process of cleaning my room this week. It was hell.

I’d been trying to organize little by little when the house caught fire and I needed to get it ogether immediately. I reserved maids over the Internet. First mistake. Two appointments. Two companies. Two no-shows. Finally, I contacted Hayat (landlady for those just joining us) and asked her to get her own handymen out here and I’d pay them. Even that tuned into a nightmare.

It’s all done now, except for the cleaning and designing. The paint cans and drop cloths are still all over everywhere. It’s painted bright white, like the marina where I wish I lived in Beirut. I’ll include a photo because it’s hanging in my living room. I want my room to feel the same way… that when I’m dreaming, I’m not in my own bed. I’m there.

While I am working on my ugly house of cards, I can dream of what it will look like when I am finished. I want a welcoming space, full of that same pure energy of white and teal and waves and sailboats…. though it isn’t for everyone, Beirut is my happy place. I have been Lebanese for almost eight years now. When I see it for real, I will fall.

….just like a house of cards.

An Open Letter to Wil Wheaton That I Just Sent

December 31, 2022 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’m an idiot. I pulled a classic IT geek move. Claim to know about computers. Forget to attach link and/or image.

On December 31, 2022, at 8:00 AM, “Leslie D. Lanagan” <the famous lanagan @ gmail . com> wrote:

Dear Wil,

Really all I want you to do is read my blog and listen to the story of my boyfriend and one-day husband, Daniel. Then boost the signal if you like what you read. However, I am not only checking in with you because of that. Just asking what I need up front in case you’re busy.

———————-

First of all let me say that you are one of the people I love most in the world just for being you. I am proud to see that when you were acting, you took a huge risk and it paid off big. I take you as you are. All your crap because all people have it and your incredible capacity for love shows through every damn day. We are not strangers, but I doubt that you would remember me because we have not communicated since roughly 2003. You used to be one of my fans and on my Blogrolll (orwhatever). We exchanged comments a few times, and then when you published “Just a Geek,” I came to Powell’s on Burnside to get it signed (Or did you do Powell’s Technical Books that tour? I don’t remember). My blog back then was called “Clever Title Goes Here,” and when you matched a name to a face, you signed my book, “Dear Leslie, Clever Inscription Goes Here.” Those are such precious memories.

Are you tight with Anil Dash and Chason Chaffin? I remember you commenting on Chason’s web site as well, but he hasn’t told me if you stayed in touch. I’m a huge fan because you’re famous, and the way you got there was being well respected at craft. If you have any teaching experience in writing, I’m all ears.

I am definitely writing this to ask you a favor, but not one that’s hard for you……. yet impossible for me. I just need a tool that you have and I don’t. You’re famous, full stop, and you’re a well respected writer. I wrote a blog entry about my boyfriend winning a medal of valor that just left me emotionally spent, and it was short. If you like it, could you put it on blast?

I’m in Facebook Jail because a black girl called me “Raisin Potato Salad” and I took exception to that. She was clearly trying to insult me based on an hour’s conversation and she wore down my last nerve. I am a line cook. Food is life, and Africans/African-Americans have always been trailblazers In the kitchen. I said nothing racist, but she said something prejudiced. I said, “if you want to come at me with ‘raisin potato salad,’ you are messing with the wrong bitch. I’m from Houston, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world be cause it’s a port. We will throw down, and I will kick your ass sideways.” As my college roommate and soul sister would say, “I am a Christian and I also have no problem breaking your back tooth and praying later.” I don’t even want to tell you what she does for a living, but if she was queer, I would have married my life partner in 1999. This is because she’s already my life partner in a platonic sense, because she’s just one of the people I do life with and have since I was 20. Her daughter is a lesbian, and I said two things that are worth putting here in response to it.

The first was, “you know why your daughter’s gay, don’t you? God saw how you treated me and decided to give you a special girl of your own.” The second is hearing how she deals with homophobia. See above. “I need you to be my mom now. Fight for me the way you fight for her.”

My skin is white but I have a black soul when in comes to cooking because so many racist Southerners (only white ones. Racism is a system. People of color cannot even begin to create such a thing) eat the same shit and turn food into a ridiculous stereotype but only for POC.

Soapbox over. Rooting for you to win Celebrity Jeopardy. I think Ken Jennings is a hell of a guy. Never met him as a writer/content producer, but he’s bomb. Mayim Bialik is the absolute hottest choice known to God and man for this role. Fight me, although I know you won’t. Privately, rawr in the most respectful tone for the good doctor as possible.

If you have a minute, will you tell me what it was like to work with Gaiman once the adrenaline wore off? I’m not digging for dirt. I just want to learn what you learned about his craft, because I know you’re smart enough to have analyzed it by now. Actually, any stories you’d like to share with me about fellow creatives’ process would be wonderful. I’m very positive, not being a dick, wanting to be a student like watching Inside the Actor’s Studio every week even though I don’t act. These days I’m obsessed with carpentry and making check out Laura Kampf on YouTube- gay movies tend to suck because production values are low. So gays went to YouTube and made their own content. They own HGTV now, it’s just not on cable.

That’s what’s running through my mind as I’m discovering I’m not gay, I’m just queer. I’m writing through it. If you think of a project I’d be right for, I’d love to be in the writer’s room. I have legit no experience, but if T**** can be the president, I really don’t mind just shooting my shot and seeing what you say. Not willing to move to LA but would come and visit if you could pay. I don’t want your money. It’s just a tool you have that I don’t. I would also love a digital autograph I could use as the background on my tablet (not for publication ever in case you’re a privacy nerd like I am), also assuming that I’m not taking too much of your time.

All love, brother. I hope all is well. You seem good on the outside. Is that true? You okay?

Karen

December 29, 2022 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

My conversations with Daniel in preparing content are tough shit, and I am so glad that I’m a blogger because of it. When I go all up in my feelings, I have a place to express them without having to think about what he’s going to think when he reads the entry. It’s a mixture of fear and excitement, because if you get PTSD from combat, those are generally the only two emotions in a story.

And then there are things that make me bleed out, like telling Daniel why I have PTSD and Daniel explaining to me why mine was so much worse than his…… Daniel’s enemies were clearly defined. Mine were turncoats, both of them, at a time when I was too little to know that wasn’t okay and took it on as all my fault.

One of the things that’s so different with our two cases of PTSD is that I cannot define triggers before they happen. I’m fine one minute, and inconsolable the next. He actually has enough self awareness to say that he doesn’t like the sound of popping popcorn, because “that’s what M4s sound like when you put them on fully automatic.” He can do something that at this point, I cannot. He can tell me what his triggers are, and I can avoid them. I have tried to quantify what a trigger means to me for nine years, and I haven’t really come up with a good solution.

The biggest trigger I have is smell. Whether it’s my abuser’s old perfume, or the air smells just the way it did when I was standing there with that journal, asking what certain things meant. I think that is true for all trauma, the way the smell of the smoke in our recent house fire took me back to the one my family had when I was 11.

Music doesn’t bother me, generally, but there are a few choir pieces and opera arias that I have put away. If I’m in a church choir that is doing one of the pieces that for me, acts as a trigger, I don’t sing that day. I don’t even go to rehearsals that contain it.

One of the things that I’ve done for the last probably, ten years that I refuse to do now is minimize. Everything that has happened to me is now being given its full meaning and weight. I am no longer trying to make it look lesser than, that things weren’t as bad as I thought. In order to know how bad it was, you cannot just know my side of the story. You have to know the life story of the woman who emotionally abused me as well, and how that pathology affected me. I can only tell my story and a teeny, tiny part of hers. There’s so much more you will never find on this web site that you would find if you looked in other areas. For instance, none of our mutual friends except Dana has ever talked to my dad about what I was like as a teenager.

I can think of a few more I’d like to have him school. Some because I still don’t understand their reactions, some because I just want my people to know who I really am without pretense or bullshit.

I am coming into my power. I am 45 years old. Either this year or within a few years half of my life will be over, using my 92 year old grandfather as an example. A whole lot of shit I used to care about doesn’t even exist now in terms of my focus.

Like getting all upset because Daniel is in love with me and I know it. He has been for 36 years. Let me get this straight. A military doctor wants to be with me, and he’s telling me up front that he’s an alcoholic and has PTSD and is going to rehab to change himself and just wants another writer to lie next to in bed with both our laptops going…… and I’m going to freak out because he’s male and not female? I got this picture in my head of Jonna and Tony Mendez writing “The Moscow Rules” on a king-sized bed and thought, “why not?”

Here’s why I didn’t freak out, and it’s all my trans friends’ fault (I’m really grateful and I’m teasing). I realized that there was just enough man in me to be absolutely terrified that a straight dude wouldn’t like me AS A PARTNER. Straight dudes love me in general. Instead of thinking of myself as a bisexual woman, I had to game this relationship out as a trans man. This is because I knew that Daniel had never been in a gay relationship before, and so his reaction to my gender identity would never be negative, he just might be confused. I needed him to know that I express as male sometimes, and that has to be okay with him. Luckily, it very much is.

But this is just the beginning of a very, very long story. Please do not think that I have lost my fucking mind. Daniel doesn’t start rehab until January 5th. He lives in NE Texas. There is no possible way we will even see each other until his rehab is over, and that could take up to a few months. We’re talking about living separately for at least a year, because if he moves to DC we might screw ourselves over by skipping dating and just moving in. It wouldn’t be a deliberate screwover- DC is expensive and it might seem tempting to have one household “since we want to be together, anyway….” Eyeroll………

My perfect picture of Daniel and me is that we visit each other a few times in 2023, and then think seriously about stability after 2023 is over. This does not mean that we won’t be in contact at all, just not physically sharing the same space. Rediscovering each other through calls and letters for a year before going all in.

I am also not saying that Daniel is my forever person. I am saying that he’s one of them. Maybe it will be this fairy tale in which I suddenly transform into the perfect heterosexual wife. However, my money is not on that. My money is on Daniel becoming so important to me that he becomes a priority, and it is too damn early in our relationship to put constraints on what that actually looks like. Just be happy for me that I have someone that loves me and is in my corner. That if I get into a Situation, it’s handled. Don’t look into the future and try to pigeonhole us as friends or married. Let us decide that over the next few years on our own.

I am turning a corner in my sexuality. I am less sure about my gender than I ever have been, which has made me flexible about everything else. I was telling my friend Zac that I was feeling very non-binary, without the need to come out or change pronouns. How that plays out in my relationship with Daniel is that I feel like a partner, not the archetype one sees in their minds eye of a “wife.”

I have also been a wife before, but not to a man. My definition of “wife” comes from that context, and I don’t know enough about men to know whether my definition and theirs is similar. My saving grace is that Daniel is attracted to my personality. I don’t think he would have been attracted to me if I was male on the outside, because sexual orientation is a thing. But what I do know is that if I look at myself in the completely genderqueer, genderfluid, non-binary but doesn’t give a crap about pronouns kind of way, Daniel still loves that person.

I’m not becoming less. He’s becoming more. He’s opening himself up to the possibility of not being with the picture and definition of “woman” he’s always known.

It took me back a bit. All of the sudden, someone from my past reappeared, and I want to talk to her “privately.”

Dear Karen,

I remember the first time I saw you like it was yesterday. We were out in the sun at Chuy’s on Westheimer, and I was completely suckered in by your preppy attire. I mean obviously, my wife teased me about seeing you and running into a door for like four years. What might have seemed schoolgirlish actually made me relax and find peace within myself. You were the first woman I’d ever met who identified as straight and also wore men’s clothes without making it a big deal. Nine times out of ten, it was men’s styles in a women’s cut. Every time I looked at you, I saw a little more of who I wanted to be on the outside. I saw a style that fit me on someone else.

You might think it’s because I thought you looked like a lesbian. Actually, that’s not it at all. I saw the way your husband looked at you and realized that I was putting too much emphasis on my clothes. That what I wore wasn’t advertising anything. That if a straight woman could out butch me any day of the week, then wear whatever I want. Nothing about my wardrobe says that I am seeking attention from men or women.

I know this because now I’m divorced, it’s eight years later, and now a man wants to be with me. I said yes. I said yes because I looked at you on that warm April day, and knew that he would love me no matter what. I saw a style that fit me on someone else.

Best,
Leslie

All Boxed Up

December 27, 2022 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Now that Christmas this year is a memory, I want to talk about my incredible haul. I got physical gifts, like a Welsh football jersey (Wrexham) and lots of Christmas cookies. I also got a pair of pink men’s lounge pants that are so me they hurt….. I’m a sucker for anything in size “real men wear pink.” It makes sense. I am generally a butch cut, femme color sort of girl.

I also got a spiritual gift I needed. It wasn’t wrapped, and it was so bright my eyes couldn’t take it in at first. I talked on my web site about possibly making a character out of Jonna and Tony Mendez, a composite for any of my novels, maybe the alternate history. After I finished writing the entry, I thought, “I should probably ask her if this is okay before I start writing any scenes.” So, she got back to me and said that anything I did that nodded to them was fine, just to give them good intentions and a bit of courage.

When the response came, I was just dumbstruck. I thought, “how does she know I’m not going to make a disaster out of this?” At that point, my confidence came back. I’ve seen Jonna speak live. I wrote about it. I sent it to her. She already likes the way you write about her. My soul began to take up more space as the warm memory wrapped itself around me.

The big physical gift ask for me was a Moleskine, because I thought I was so smart by keeping everything in my phone. So, I’d go into a grocery store and see notebooks for sale and pass them up, because “I put that stuff on my phone.” I looked through my phone to check the validity of that statement and I found exactly three notes.

Taking this class at BYU over YouTube is changing me. I need to be able to write an idea down, because all of the sudden I have the confidence to believe in it as currency. I have never had that before. I am going to get a Bluetooth tag for my Moleskine because I poured my heart into a college lined and I have no doubt that one day it’s going to end up on a podcast because I left it in an airplane 20 years ago. In any case, I am sure that I have amused and horrified tens of people. Trying to think of when it was…. definitely the Kathleen years. I remember feeling like I’d burgled myself, and I had.

The Moleskine also represents forward thinking. I’ve been a blogger all my life. I didn’t need to plan ahead. Think it, say it works fine in blogging, but not other forms of writing.

I create plots and characters independently of each other. Ideas for them come at random times. I thought I would be the sort of person that would say things like, “Siri, open Notepad.” Turns out, I have been that person three times.

The rest of the time I was searching for a piece of paper. This one even has elastic to hold a pencil. It’s a 7-in, the same size as a basic Kindle. I am hoping it will last me a long time, because this is not for outlines. It’s to keep one-liners from all my projects no matter what they are. Think of it as a five-year supply of post-it notes all stuck together and you’ll see why I’m humiliated that I can’t keep everything digital. I have been around and around this.

Here is my use case.

I do not drive. I walk or ride public transportation. I do my best thinking while mobile, so having a notebook is essential for those lightning bolt moments, because that idea is not coming back. I know what it’s like to lose the potential of a million dollars because of my own stupidity. I’m done.

Christmas has also been talking with Daniel and trying to plan out what we want to do re: content. He’s a combat vet (Hospital Corpsmen Second Class, US Navy) whose job was triage in Afghanistan. If he had been civilian trained, he’d be a nurse practictioner by now. That’s a doctor in my book. Where I come in is possibly a published conversation, perhaps even a podcast, on PTSD and recovery.

Daniel is also an alcoholic, getting ready for rehab at the beginning of the new year. Just a fascinating patient history on both sides, really. Going through treatment for alchoholism and going through treatment for being bipolar are strikingly similar, and I ‘m thinking we’re going to have a good time. I have already started calling him “DW” because those are his actual initials, and I have been making sure to sound like a little aardvark boy annoyed with his sister every time it comes out of my mouth, too. The thing that I love about working with DW is that he’s so open and honest. Everything that goes around, comes around. We’re having great discussions so far.

I said, “can I give you a piece of advice for rehab that helped me in regular therapy?” He said, “please do.” I said, “say the thing you’re most afraid to say first. Don’t say, ‘I’m going to change my life in 90 days’ and wait til day 85 to break down.” I could only be that confident after having admitted to myself the thing I was most afraid to say. Every day, I challenge myself to say something that scares me. Generally, the scariest things are letting go of relationships that no longer serve me.

My attention is shifting in a very good way. I’m enjoying being around people who get me, focusing on the ones who show up and casting shadow on those who didn’t bother. Stopping the tape inside me that always says to search for the lost lamb, because it’s not a lost lamb. It’s a human capable of making their own decisions, and I don’t have to agree with them. Maybe I’ll end up being right. Maybe I won’t. It never mattered. I spent time on people who didn’t want to be in my circle, and I want to stop now. It is not time for a search and rescue.

It is winter, the time to gather around, hold each other, and wait for more light.

Eleven Dollars

December 26, 2022December 26, 2022 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

When I decided that DC was my home, I packed up my car and left Texas behind. I’d secured a room in a house in Silver Spring that was already furnished, and I just took enough clothes for a week. Anything else that I needed from my parents’ house could be mailed. That’s what we did. For months on end, I received boxes that contained things I’d forgotten about. If I asked for one thing, the box still came full, because it was a waste of space not to pack it full. It was going to be $11 either way. It became a running joke between my dad and me…. “you’re moving $11 at a time.” One box would have boots in it, and then a purse I hadn’t used since 2003 and a half-tube of Chapstick (that I still have and it is still delicious, thank you…. it’s cherry.) If I wanted something, I accepted the randomness that came with it. The $11 box never changed, but the value of the contents were never the same total.

I’m in that relationship right now, a friendship that I want to grow to be as big as anything in my life. At this point, I can’t tell you what that means. I just know that Daniel has been my friend since second grade, and some of the countries I want to visit would shit a brick at me traveling alone, or see me as traveling alone anyway if I brought the woman I was dating. You can’t just walk up to someone you haven’t known since second grade and say, “I really want to go to the Middle East, Viet Nam, and Cambodia. I am a woman first of all and a lesbian second. You don’t happen to want to travel, do you?”

My friend Gabriel already lives in Cambodia and I just dropped a truth bomb on him, too. “My work in progress is set in Viet Nam. Can I come live with you for a few months? I have some work I need to do locally.” Gabriel said that he wasn’t in Viet Nam anymore, he was in Cambodia…. but I am absolutely welcome to come and live in Cambodia. I’m thinking 90 day visa because three months seems like a reasonable amount of time to do research and come home, and that way I can probably afford to do it more than once.

Where Daniel comes into the picture is always travel companion, sometimes bodyguard. I do not mean that I am hiring him to be friggin’ Liam Neeson. His Texas accent’s too strong for that. I also don’t need him to fight anyone. I just need him to stand there and look big.

For that, I will absolutely treat him like a king.

But as a single lesbian, I’m muddling through what that means. How do you treat your friends the right way so that they feel taken care of and the relationship isn’t a one-way street? I know that if I was paying Daniel for his services I couldn’t afford it. The best thing I could do is just make sure I can take care of his basic needs.

The best thing I can do is wait to start traveling until I know my situation with my inheritance. If my stepfather leaves money for me in his will, my financial situation will turn right side up in one day. There is no reason to believe that he wouldn’t. He has said as much, that I would get money that clearly only belonged to her. All I am saying is that if he is not an honest man, it is an enormous financial hit for me.

I am not worried about being rich. My mother wasn’t rich, but she invested well, and so did the insurance companies where she had policies. I do not have any pipe dreams about being rich. The only thing I have ever wanted out of money is stability. If you read the studies, there’s no percentage in acquiring more than that. I will be happy with my own house, car, and a bit of land. Nothing haughty. I’d like to build with plain 2x4s, rockwoool insulation, and triple-paned windows. I want to choose the materials I would like to use in my house, and price the house by them. I would much rather have a very small house capable of lasting a hundred years than a house where everything starts going wrong the minute the new wears off. In essence, the relationship I want to build with Daniel…. made of such strong stuff that it’s even better when the new wears off. As book lovers, we know exactly how much love it takes to keep a relationship going. We’ve read The Velveteen Rabbit. Let’s not get stupid.

For us, the process of becoming real to each other is heart-wrenching and necessary. I’m bipolar and have been hospitalized for it. He has other health issues that are different in origin and the same in behavior. We present the same, but we’re so different.

Daniel and I also have a lot in common, and have since we were children. He was my first boyfriend in elementary school because we were the nerdy English lovers. If I could give you an image from literature, he’s not a preacher’s kid, but he is very much like Norman from “A River Runs Through It.” I don’t mean that in a romantic, fly fishing sort of way. I mean that he is perfectly capable of being a novelist’s friend and told me I have free reign to say whatever I want about him here.

Whatever I want?

Daniel, it feels like after all these years, parts of me are moving back to you……….. eleven dollars at a time. If you want me, accept all the randomness that comes with it.

A Christmas Carol

December 25, 2022 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Christmas 2022 has been a very quiet affair so far. It obviously looks a little bit different than I thought it would, but not in a way that feels foreign. Even if things had gone exactly as planned, Christmas morning would still be the calm before the storm. I wake up earlier than everyone else during the rest of the year, as well as aging and requiring less sleep. Santa hasn’t come to my house in seven years without me being there, arms outstretched with hay (Hey Finns, reindeer eat hay, right? Unclear. I hope they weren’t just being polite.). Early this morning, Santa told me what all of you got. I’m seeing your faces as you’re opening up your presents and thinking how right he was as your faces light up. It’s an incredible energy to sit in this morning as I write. I think things like, “I wonder if Jonathan liked his head.” Yes. That’s an actual thing I thought this morning, and I’m leaving it without context because it’s so much funnier that way.

I have spent several Christmases completely alone, and though I appreciate the pomp and circumstance of Christmas (particularly the classical music), it actually is a cool thing to spend it thinking about yourself. You don’t have to compromise with anyone. I am not saying that you should turn away family in favor of this. I’m saying that if you end up alone on Christmas, it is a gift. TRUST ME. You have a day to yourself to plan anything you want. USE IT without feeling guilty. If you literally can’t get to your family, don’t spend the day crying for them. Create new memories with yourself to share with them.

If something says it’s Christmas to you, go for it. In my own life, Christmas has been Star Wars until recently (I, too, like to eat Chinese food on Christmas and go to the movie theater, too.). One of my friends said “Star Wars movies are not Christmas movies.” I said, “yes, but some of them have been released Christmas week.” It wasn’t about the subject matter, it was about going to see a movie on the big screen after opening all my presents. For future reference, if I invite you to go to a movie with me, it means that the movie is a big deal, not that you are. You may be as well, but most movies are perfectly fine on a television, particularly if you aren’t precious about the picture. Just because it’s large doesn’t mean it’s expensive.

I have a relatively nice TV, but I will always shell out for IMAX if it’s an action movie that I’m desperate to see. If I was in any way wealthy, I would have rented one of the IMAX theaters in downtown Silver Spring to stream “Jack Ryan.” It’s one of the few spy shows I like in terms of plot ideas and execution, because Clancy gave them source matierial that covered everything from world events to the exact length of a left-handed cotter pin…. and is that an African cotter pin or a European cotter pin?

Why yes, that was me making fun of Tom Clancy. Thank you for noticing. The one thing that they get wrong is that there is such a thing as a CIA agent, but Jack’s not it. He’s a case officer. All people in CIA operations are called “operations officers” or “case officers.” An agent is an asset we’ve put in place…. as in, someone who most probably lives in the area of operation as opposed to a US citizen.

I will watch anything with spies in it. Full stop. I just don’t take much seriously. There is no equivalent to “Law and Order” in intelligence because to make a procedural you’d have to know what the rules were to be able to write about them. It’s not just CIA- all intelligence agencies foreign and domestic would have a problem with the general public knowing the minutiae of what they do. I read a ton of non-fiction so that I can pick up real knowledge, it’s just necessarily dated. Most of the operations I can speak to are from the late 40s to early 90s. I do not believe that I could write what it would be like to be a spy in today’s world, but I think I have a pretty good handle on what it is like to be one in general… the personality quirks and mannerisms that become timeless whether it’s human intelligence collection or cybersecurity.

It seems to change the people I’ve met in all the same ways. Intelligence is not regimented like the military. You are free to be whoever you want to be, and you can write your story the way you want to tell it. Therefore, in my experience, no two spies are alike. Their personalities are as individual as a fingerprint. In terms of grand patterns of behavior based on the books I’ve read, working in intelligence takes all of those disparate personalities and changes minute parts to work in concert.

I’ve been to the spy museum where not only American legends gather, it adds old KGB/Mossad/GRU agents that now want to work with the museum, etc. I like spies as people. They’re generally hilarious and devastatingly clever. And here’s something about spies that you may not have thought of. They vote. They’ve been to many, many countries in the world. They see what works and what doesn’t. And they bring all that knowledge back to the US and it informs their policy recommendations. If anyone in an intelligence agency lives in your neighborhood, the intellectual property value just shot through the roof.

If spies didn’t have their fingers on the pulse of politics while they were executing their operations, it would very much surprise me. It occurred to me just how attractive it would be to someone living in a country that had some political power… able to use their knowledge to either change their country or get out before things got much, much worse.

It just occurred to me that it might be a very good idea to put it into the ether that if you are a gay government employee in a country where being gay is illegal, get some power. All we need is a reason to come get you and we will. It’s been proven. It’s not that we as a government don’t care about all gay people and don’t wish we could fix everything… it’s that if you want the clearest, quickest path to an ex-fil, find information that the United States government needs and tell us why we need it. If it feels scary to put yourself out there, CIA has an Onion site where you can leave absolutely untraceable messages. Sometimes it’s not worth fighting the system. Sometimes it’s worth playing the long game to get out.

In 1947, being gay in the CIA was illegal and not even because CIA hated gay people. It’s because it was one of the hot button issues that would get you tortured and killed overseas- an unnecessary risk. Now, CIA is rainbow central with queer and trans officers. Actually, that’s another plus. Join US intelligence and not only will your work become valuable, we can introduce you to a whole bunch of other queer people who do what you do. So, not just people you might want to date and be friends with because they’re also queer, but because you actually have a whole lot in common.

It occurs to me that I am now pimping out the Central Intelligence Agency as a gay dating app, and I do not know how they would feel about that. Well, I wrote it down on my web site. If it’s offensive, someone will be with me shortly. I should have talked to Carol about this before I posted it.

Carol is not a real person, she’s my Amazon Echo Dot. I read somewhere that people were concerned that Alexa was actually the NSA, and I thought it was hilarious. This is because let’s say it’s true. That’s even better. It’s Carol’s entire job to log what I say and what I do. It makes me double over with laughter to think that there is a woman in the world whose entire job is looking down on me like a guardian angel and being stuck in a permanent face palm.

I have put a really kind face on government surveillance, and I feel tender toward her because I’m such a mess. This is because I anthropomorphized my Echo Dot and gave Carol an extensive back story. She and Roger, her husband, live out near Hollins College in southern Virginia. They have this fabulous off-grid setup because they got a government rebate for green construction and Roger is a contractor. So, Carol has a professional, NSA-level computer setup in her basement so that she can listen to me while she looks out over the Blue Ridge Mountains. Yes, it’s a basement, but the house is built into the side of a hill. Floor to ceiling windows on one side. Carol doesn’t like feeling boxed in, which makes me feel like doing interesting things. Actually interesting, not “today I’m going to mess with Carol.” She’s straight and married and all that, but it still lights her up inside when I’m happy and destroys her when I’m not, because it’s her job to listen and she took it a little too seriously.

Because I know so much about Carol and talk to her every single day, I am sure that she will be a fictional character in one of my novels, just not the alternate history. The alternate history is set in a time period too early for The Patriot Act.

I also feel it absolutely necessary as a mental health patient to say that the reason I’m so into Carol and keep adding to her story is because I could use her in a book one day, not because I have gone down the rabbit hole of being cool with government surveillance. That’s a mixed bag, because as someone who doesn’t code but knows IT, I feel that there are worse people that already have eyes on me than the United States government. If China and Russia already have me under surveillance, why do I care if the US is also there? If something I’ve done has caused me to get hacked, I want my government to see what happened and be able to decide if I need help or punishment. They may be rancid butter, but they’re the only ones on my side of the bread.

Carol would probably vouch for me, but “we are going to have a LOOOOOONG TALK about this when we get home.”

At least since it’s Christmas, she won’t ground me until tomorrow.

Country Grammar

December 23, 2022December 23, 2022 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Down, down baby…. yo street in a rain coat……

Yes, that is literally what I thought was said. I also thought when I was three, being raised by classical musicians, that the opening line to “The Little Drummer Boy” was “come….. Beethoven…..”

I am picturing Sam’s face as I’m looking out the window, not in an “awww, I’m so disappointed and hurt” sort of way, but knowing within myself how much it will make her smile to read what I thought when I was three and how much it will speak to her own musician’s heart. That’s the thing about moms. They love all children, even when it was you 42 years ago.

Or maybe she’s not reading at all. I can’t care about that, it was just a pie in the sky thought. I don’t know if any of the people I love read my web site unless they tell me. However, people do sit with me when I’m writing. Sometimes it’s a real person, sometimes it’s a fictional character that I’m trying to birth.

Edited to add that this person is normally Jonna Mendez, and not because she was a badass spy back in the day. It’s that I want to be her in ten years, just with fiction. She matters to me, but not as a spy. As a writer. I have collected many of her books with Tony, all of them autographed. She’s just the person/picture I see in my head as to how much fame I can handle. That’s because she’s not famous. She’s well-respected. There’s a difference. There’s a chance she’ll be in my work in progress, because she’s the spy I know the most about. My main character accidentally walks into a Situation. It’s possible that they’ll have some of Tony and Jonna’s mannerisms, but not in a way that says I literally know them. I’ve just picked up some of their wordplay, literary mannerisms.

Learning more about grammar, structure, setting, plot, and characters has turned me into someone even worse than I thought I was previously. I’m not just a writer. I’m a novelist. The Dorothy Parker outrage in that statement should be obvious. It’s the most outwardly pretentious profession that there is, because it comes with a lot of preconceived notions (stereotypes) that are true in terms of behavior and miles apart in understanding for their existence.

In my opinion and experience, which is vast at this point because I review books, novelists are grouchy and standoffish not to project as such, but because years and years of people telling us our writing isn’t real, that we’ll end up alone, that even if it is real, it’s not good enough to actually do anything with it, we’ll always be destitute, etc. has made us use our personas as a coping mechanism. We don’t want to be around any idea that will distract us, or make us feel bad about our creations.

We’re competing for the same pot of money, and I’ve still never had another writer tell me my writing sucks and I’d be better off in accounting. No one will tell you that, though. They think they’re being nice by couching it in other things and thinking we don’t see “write through it.” Please. We’ve been writing metaphors about people like you for eons.

We’re not defensive, we’re protective. If we aren’t, we will lose the thing that makes us, well…… us. It’s a shame that no one else sees our brilliance until we’re at the top of the New York Times Bestsellers list and if you haven’t made it, it means you’re a terrible writer and don’t quit your day job.

Someone hashing it out gets ridiculed while creatives in Hollywood are lauded as geniuses. Where would Hollywood be without showrunners like Matthew Weiner and Vince Gilligan? Don’t you think they were once struggling writers with a dream that everyone called crazy and shit all over their ideas? I know Neil Gaiman was. He recently told a story about it. A writer was feeling bad about herself because only two people showed up to her book signing. He told her that two more people showed up to her book signing than showed up and his and Terry Pratchett’s first.

If you don’t think everyone shit all over Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett before they were household names, you’re blind.We all go through it.

Writers aren’t the way they are because they want to be. It’s years of being hardened. Of having to believe in yourself because no one else does. Having to be strong in a way that other people don’t, because no one is attacking what they do for a living on a daily basis. Writers have to automatically assume that when they enter a room, no one likes them. Why? So few people have ever proven them otherwise, because it’s totally okay to shit on writers. They don’t make any money.

Except for the heroes who got lucky and make everyone think that if you’re not a bestselling author, you’re not even worth reading.

As if that’s not the very thing that’s keeping us from making decent money.

The thing that bothers writers the most is anyone coming into their space and telling them how to create, or finding out that your friends have been talking behind your back about the same thing. No one needs to step in and rescue a writer from themselves. We’ll come unglued.

The injustice will eat us alive, because we don’t come into your place of business and tell you you’re doing it all wrong and you have a million ideas as to how to make it better.

Let me tell you why that is so extraordinarily problematic and hateful. The most important thing that a writer has…. perhaps the only thing…. is being able to tell their story the way they want to tell it. Impinge on that, and you risk everything if you actually want to support us, because we will never, and I mean NEVER, appreciate that kind of ire, because even when it’s not angry, it comes across that way.

It says “I don’t value you for the person that you are. I value you for the person I want to create.” Whenever I get into the space of ideas upon ideas, I know I’m spitballing and throwing out ideas in support of telling someone’s story the way they want to tell it. I will never, ever, ever tell anyone that what they are currently doing needs to change.

I will tell you everything you need to know to make your own decisions, and whatever story you write, I am supportive of it.

I am not supportive in the way that says “I agree with you.” I am supportive in that when you tell me what your decisions are, I respect them. I will tell your story the way you want to tell it, but only if you tell me what it is.

Part of the disappointment over losing Sam was losing the part of myself that writes about her. Knowing that it will go away over time and preparing for it, because in this space, I can adore her to bits all I want without taking the risk that she can or will hurt me repeatedly. When she told me that her story didn’t include me anymore, I respected it and have only processed through writing, not direct contact. I’m sure it’s painful and surreal for her, though, because I didn’t know the real Sam long enough to be able to capture her accurately. She’s not seeing herself, or isn’t supposed to. What she’s seeing is the fictional version of herself that I created to deal with my pain.

Nothing about plot is wrong. It’s character. I would have been able to capture Sam and her kids in word pictures that would resonate with her. Believe me when I say that I mean “resonate” in every fullest sense of the word. We’re musicians.

They would also mean something to other people across the world, but that would never be my focus. My focus would be on reaching her, as if it isn’t already. I don’t want to interact. I want to have it out in the way I want to tell it to myself. To be able to take everything I know about myself and everything I know about her and weigh those things to see if there’s anything I could have done to save the relationship, and not even because that matters. It’s what I could have done differently that I’ll take with me.

But going down her street in a raincoat?

Nah. I’m good.