Tag: dailyprompt

Well, There’s This

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What activities do you lose yourself in?

For $5.00, I can get lost for years. This is because $5.00 is about how much it takes to by “Droid Edit,” a full-featured coding notepad for Android. The free version of “Koder” on iOS seems to fit the bill nicely, but I would get the pro version if it was more like Notepad++ and Microsoft Visual Studio Code (my personal favorite because now it runs bare metal on all operating systems, even Fedora and Ubuntu. It should also be able to run on Android with those specs. Get your shit together, Microsoft. Do you think I like coding without the Dracula Official Theme? Monokai is not going to cut it, my friend.).

I use the term coding loosely, because really the only things I do in my HTML files are add italics and special characters, maybe a link. For some reason, if I do more than that, WordPress will scrub out the HTML and tell me it can’t recover the block. I need a real solution that’s completely open source, but I like WordPress. I made the decision 20 years ago to stop coding and only be known as a writer…. why my setup is simple and hopefully easy to read.

I end up using the WordPress reader included in the Jetpack app because it’s in dark mode. I rarely read my own work on my blog itself. I like dark mode. My fans don’t. They’re older and they have more insurance.

And in fact, the most sweet and vulnerable moments between Supergrover and me are when I need my Jessica Tandy, and Supergrover is absolutely as beautiful as she always was. It is not lost on me that I’m a preacher’s kid and she’s a Bee Charmer. In effect, we are “Fried Green Tomatoes,” because that movie showed deep companionate love without showing romance because of the time. Because they held down the madness with the romance, it actually fits Supergrover and me better than if they had. Of course Idgie and Ruth were best friends who ran a business together and not this torrid love affair that lasted a million years, which it absolutely was in “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café.” Just devoted and never stopped loving each other until they died.

But female friendship is absolutely that strong and resilient, so both the book and the movie are priceless to me. In short, I felt like Idgie when she was young, with Supergrover being every bit the power,grace, and style of a young, married Southern woman. I was absolutely just a lovesick puppy dog for a couple of years, and then I realized my place in the world. “Love her anyway. Help her anyway. She may not accept you in person, but she’ll always come back here.” I am not writing for her. I am not writing to her. These are all the memories I want to be able to read when I am 70 and nothing more. I want her with me, helping to craft the narrative, but it is not necessary. It is the process of letting go and letting God, my words for going into deep discernment. My personality divides and I argue it out with my rabbi, essentially. However, I know that it is me talking back. I do not think of a relationship with God as external, but the omnipotent third eye present in so many Eastern religions.

It’s why I don’t care about semantics, I just want the protein.

I feel like in a way, all of this has been me trying to explain to her why we need to open the Whistle Stop and move on, rather than her always feeling guilty. Just start working together and having fun rather than both of us being up shit creek all the time.

Without a paddle, obvs.

So many messages that didn’t get through. Me thinking about the future and throwing ideas out there to remind myself that this was grounded and real came across as being unwilling to accept the demands on her time. This is categorically untrue. I have dealt with the boundaries on her time since day one, and our relationship has lasted over 10 years now. If I really had problems with her priorities, I wouldn’t have stuck around this long. I also don’t think that I’m all that and a bag of chips, but 10 years is a long time to feel like this relationship is fake with her insisting that it’s not.

Now, I really believe it wasn’t. It was as real as a heart attack. But that’s because I’m not going to get that message through placation. I’m going to get that message through truth. The longer you put off telling the truth, the angrier I get. I don’t want to handle someone else’s avoidance, I want them to realize they’re being avoidant because I’m not an entitled prick who wants to tell you how to run your life until you’ve stomped on my feelings so hard that we’re going to have to have it out. Go drive someone else up the wall because I am struggling.

It’s one thing to be on the bottom of the totem pole for a year- two or three. But after 10 wouldn’t you be furious that you never got airtime? Especially when we have this strong pull towards each other that also has its limits? It’s a dramatic tension that could be solved in an afternoon. I don’t understand keeping that weirdness in place all these years. I think I could solve a lot of her problems with me in one beer….. most notably that our relationship might not translate.

We are not guaranteed to bond just because we like the same Instagram influencer. But thinking we are both sides of Fried Green tomatoes, the Idgie and Ruth and the Idgie and Evelyn is the journey we’ve taken. I don’t know what compelled her to come, but I think it was my thu’um. When a dragon hears its name, it is not bound to respond, but always will out of curiosity and competition. I should give her a word of power, but Snow Wing Hunter is better than anything I could come up with on my own, and she has definitely carried me to Skuldafn many times to meet my Alduins.

I get lost in the flight.

I only get lost in the fight when the adrenaline comes down. It’s not her responsibility to keep it up. I would like it if she’d take on the responsibility of telling me up front the timeframe with which I’m dealing so it calms my anxiety that she’s not always mad at me. It’s hard to feel secure on three words.

What I loved about her letter the other day was twofold. I fell in love with her prose about her family, the everyday life she leads while also being powerful, the dynamic that Lindsay and I have so I could relate on a spiritual level. What it takes to be superhuman at staying awake, because she’s on call a lot of the time (as is Lindsay- news breaks). What it takes to be a big sister in her family. Or, what she wants it to take and I can feel her emotions regarding it from a million miles away. I know the particular pain of losing a mother and finding yourself as the new matriarch suddenly….. especially not being prepared in any way to do so because I feel like it’s my responsibility to be providing for her. She’s the little sister that could. She’s just so sweet about giving me experiences I never would have had otherwise while totally cheering me on as a writer.

That’s been Supergrover’s role in my life as well. I think one of the pricks on my skin that won’t heal is saying that I portray her as a villain as often as I do a friend and rages about it……. while also raging that I paint her as a “Flat Stanley.” I feel that the ups and downs make her a 3D character. Everything she sends me that shows me a real feeling, I include it, because since it’s her real feeling, it’s my real feeling, too. I have said this line before, but I will remember it forever. I didn’t know who “Flat Stanley” was, but I told her that “Flat Stanley has a history of amazing topography.” She is a 3D character, but she isn’t if you take every entry individually instead of reading me like a book. Start in January of last year and read forwards and a 3D character will emerge no matter who it is in my life.

Most people trade the forest for the trees. As I have told her, I feel like my years are so much more important than my days. No one has ever loved her the way I have, and not in terms of depth. In the way that love is executed every day. I became a journalist from the day we met, tasked with telling my own story while not revealing my source. Any misstep on my part feels like a little betrayal, and Supergrover doesn’t talk to me about my writing, so I have no idea how close to the line I am or how I can protect her more in the future. She said that I mentioned something she wanted to keep quiet, but I have no idea what it was that she wanted to keep private, for instance, so I couldn’t go back and fix it.

I want to know what touches her, because everything I write about her is something I’ve gotten lost in, because it was kind of like meeting The Oracle and finding out I’m Neo. My mind went into hyperdrive, and I began to think differently, and on as big a scale as possible because all of the sudden I knew I was capable of it. I’ve realized that I would be happy in a think tank if that were a thing that could happen, mostly because I’m a “plant,” the employee who comes up with great ideas by synthesizing information in the room and building off what other people have said until there’s a consensus.

But I never would have believed that I belonged at that particular table until Supergrover told me I was too smart for my own good.

I get that a lot, but I didn’t believe it until 2013 (a typo when I said that the Argo message came in 2003, I remember). She’s not the president, nor elected to anything, nor can I tell you whether she’s private or public industry (except that she and Zac both speak “acronym.”). What I can tell you is that her compliment had a lot of power behind it. Her CV makes me constantly wonder who she’s met all over the world, especially movie stars.

I miss her pithy comments on my entries, because when she was an e-mail subscriber, instead of commenting here, she’d just forward me the e-mail and flip me shit. She can say so much in so few words, even better when they’re teasing directed at me or our favorite Instagram influencer. Speaking of which, we need to talk about that, too, beautiful girl. It’s probably nothing, but it’s a “how dead am I?” sort of question. Another thing that whether this makes her land on my desk to my thu’um is up for grabs. What is important is that I will remember exactly what this means for a hundred years because all of these feelings are burned into my brain.

The rhythm has calmed, but we still have to dance. I’m not trying to be her partner, I’m trying to be her co-author unless her husband also writes. Maybe she’d rather collaborate with him if that’s the case, and I don’t have any ill will toward that. And it’s not that I have this desperate need to write about her because she’s a powerful person. It’s not. It’s that she became a big part of my story personally, and not of her big shot mess ever mattered.

I love the absolute smallest part of her, because that’s the part I love about everyone. I like vulnerability because I can make accurate decisions on how to behave next. The only reason I spiraled out with her is that I was medically falling apart and I want to throw up every time I think of that time in my life because it cost us so much trust and time. To think that she thinks all of this is her fault is horrible because I’ve been trying to make amends for so many years and it has come across as accusation.

She did indeed throw a bomb over her shoulder and walk away. The truth hurts. But it wasn’t the bomb that hurt. It was walking away and not dealing with the fallout. It showed the ultimate disrespect to me because it was like “I get to tell you whatever I want and then not care how it makes you feel.” She says she’s not responsible for my reactions. No, she’s not, but if she wants to stay my friend she better well be willing to clean up her own mess, because I didn’t ask for it. I’m not guilting you (universal), I am holding you to the standard of being a good friend. How is it anyone’s right to leave the other person so much worse than they found them by listening so closely at first that we were breathing in the right direction……… then holding a wrong over my head for so long that we never moved back into safe space for her? She lost the ability to be a decent friend, her words, not mine.

Then she opened up and told me that my guesses about her behavior were right on target and also that it was too late while also saying “story for another day” while also writing me something so beautiful I’m still chewing on it days later. I don’t know what to think, but I know what I see, and it is a spectrum. We’re better writers as a team than we are alone.

It just depends on whether writing means as much to her as it does to me. It doesn’t have to be blog entries because I’m an audience of one, and the same goes for me- the safe space where I sandbox.

She’s not the love of my life where I get lost in her beauty, wishing like a lovesick puppy for just one hug or what the fuck ever. She’s the love of my life due to writing being the only real partner I have. And she’s the brain that comes with that package, because I feel like she whipped my ass into shape by editing me and giving me feedback on letters as well. I miss that relationship, because it exists outside of time and space. I’d be happy if it always did, but my mind sees so many futures that it’s hard to decide and I’m grateful to also have enough closure to let go. Just because she let her walls down once doesn’t mean she has the strength to do it all the time, and that’s what I need from her if she doesn’t want to meet me in person. I will never be able to pick up subtext if I don’t because I won’t be able to read it in her voice.

I take everything literally, and I’m a “get off my lawn” personality. I rarely apologize for it, but it’s an important flaw in my character in this relationship. But I’m not “get off my lawn” years old on purpose. I’m autistic and lecture as such. I become an overexplainer to avoid awkward silence, of which there has been a lot.

It’s not awkward silence anymore, because she told me she loved me in two different ways. The first was “if I hear your call, I will always come…. because I love my girl.” It was the ending of my letter to Michael writ large. I was right on the money, dear reader. I cannot believe it. Seriously. She swooped in with all the big sister badass no bullshit love I’ve come to know. She doesn’t have to say a word. She said that she was constantly overwhelmed because I was demanding, when I was dreaming. The second was letting me know she things about me all the time, the thing that would have calmed me the most.

I don’t want to be around anyone who doesn’t want to be around me, and I got my answer. Maybe. As it has been for 10 years…… and where I get lost.

I Will Try to List Everything I Remember

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What movies or TV series have you watched more than 5 times?

I have seen “Space Camp” at least 25 times since it came out. I was in love with both the camp itself AND Leah Thompson/Kate Capshaw. I don’t want to be an astronaut anymore, but I do still love women. Therefore, at least one lesson took. It is important to learn everything you do not want in adulthood as it is what you do.

Two or three years after “Space Camp” came out, I went to a science and math magnet in Houston called “Clifton Middle School.” I’ve actually spent time at NASA on more than a field trip. I was intimidated by science, fascinated by the way people have to teamwork up there. It’s all creativity whether or not you started with creativity in your wheelhouse or not.

Music gets under my skin faster than television, so I have not watched all of “Westworld” or “The Good Fight,” but I’ve listened to the themes on YouTube for days at a time. I feel that way about a lot of television themes. I have never seen Peter Gunn, but I have blasted the music at top volume screaming down 95. It’s especially fun hearing the vamp and inserting your own rendition of “Dope Nose” by Weezer.

I have seen “Argo” more than 25 times, but the difference between it and “Space Camp” is that by now, “Argo” lives in my brain and I can quote from it at will. The only lines I don’t know are in Farsi, but I still do the sounds and the hand motions. 😉 If someone starts a line from the dialogue, I can finish it. There aren’t any YouTube videos or articles I can stomach called “Things Even Real Fans Don’t Know About Argo,” because I could have made a better one and I know it. If that sounds too confident/arrogant of me, Jonna Mendez knows who I am, and Tony would have had I met him before he stopped doing public appearances (he once taught an entire room of people at The International Spy Museum how to forge Putin’s signature). It’s not Jonna’s story, but she did help write the book with Tony after the movie came out because there was such a demand for it. I knew that she was an uncredited writer on it, so I think she was surprised/pleased that I asked her to autograph my copy. So, my copy of “Argo” is unique, because it has both their signatures on it….. if I can track down Matt Baglio, I’ll have him sign it, too, because he’s the person that’s helped both of them on all their books. I think we’re friends on Twitter? I don’t know. Jonna hasn’t said where he lives, so I don’t know if he’s local or if they work together electronically.

For instance, I’ll bet you didn’t know that if you watch the busy airport scenes in Argo, Jonna and the kids are in it.

I told you I could make a better video. 😉

In terms of TV series(es), I do not have HBO. But if I did, my two comfort shows there are “Six Feet Under” and “Homeland.”

I was so shocked by the end of Homeland that I felt like someone shot me. My nerve endings just all went to shit. Now that the show is so old, I’ll just spoil it so I can tell you what I didn’t like about it.

Carrie was a bipolar mastermind working on the side of the United States. THEY FUCKED WITH THE FORMULA. She could always pull it out in the end. She could always make things go her way. And then all of the sudden she started working for Russia? GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE. Yes, I realized she replaced our Russian asset there, but that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works. You don’t get to betray the US and then get a “get out of jail free” card after you’ve already screwed us to the wall. Saul’s face looked like he was pleased at the end. Why he didn’t burn that bridge is beyond me.

She self-destructed and shouldn’t have had any friends at the agency left. The great part about the show was seeing a bipolar person doing the work of five case officers because she could think outside the box. The ending was a shitshow and I will hate it forever because it just shows that CIA was right all along not to trust her, and it adds to the exact stigma that the show was trying to erase.

“Six Feet Under” still resonates with me because my family worked a little bit like a family who runs a funeral home (I was a United Methodist preacher’s kid). I remember talking with my friend Meg about this, because she grew up in a house with a funeral home like the Fishers and our lives were not dissimilar. It’s also my “Lindsay” show, the one thing that both of us are always in the mood to watch.

As she says, “Leslie, you’re David. I’m Claire……. and there’s a little bit of Nate in everybody.”

I have found over time that I’m actually more like Keith, uptight like a cop and also rushing in to take care of everyone. It’s an accurate description of INFJ/Autistic, physically reacting at people breaking the rules and holding taking care of people above all of them.

Wait. I have to say that to myself again. I think it’s one of the biggest truth bombs I’ve ever uncovered about myself:

I’m physically reacting to people breaking the rules, and holding taking care of people above all of them.

In order for me to love people the way they need to be loved, I have to keep my autism at bay. I have to keep physically reacting to other people’s problems the way I do my own. I physically reacted to one of Supergrover’s issues so hard that she thinks I’m out to get her, when I’m actually empathizing with her. I don’t know what I did to give her the message that what she told me was bad. She’s been having a fight with me that is in her own head, really, because she thinks I want to make her feel guilty when I am telling her the reality of how her behavior affects me….. and that we should talk about it.

She starts from the position that I’m out to get her, which means she won’t open up. That causes me physical pain, because I know that what she thinks is not true, and I cannot fix her problem for her. She accused me of wanting to rush in and fix everything in someone else’s life, when that is exactly what we both want to do to our friends because we’re both big sisters. She just does not like being the younger one. At all. In any way. That means she’s blind to the fact that I’m doing the same thing to her all the time that she does for everyone else. She thinks I’m out to get her while I’m trying to do the same thing for her that I do for all the people I consider brothers and sisters. It’s a fundamental breakdown in communication, the can we’ve been kicking.

Media helps me to understand all of this, but I learn about emotions through intelligence movies and TV better than anything else because they’re procedural, even if the procedure is completely made up. I can also tell you the exact moment I switched procedurals in college. I used to like detective shows, and then there was “Alias.”

I’ve watched “Alias” many, many times. I still return to it when I want to be with those characters- something about it won’t let go of you. Jennifer Garner is so cute, the perfect balance of sweet and “I can kill you in 57 different ways, none of them pleasant.”

I’ve been trying to find a new character like hers to love for years, so I have gravitated toward intelligence shows ever since. I know they’re fake as FUCK because the CIA cannot tell everyone their current methods and sources. I don’t care. Emotionally, they’re all written the same way.

The way you get an accurate depiction of intelligence is to write about it in a time period where those operations are declassified. Those documents will tell you exactly how they did what they did without sugar coating anything. Dialogue can be accurate because there’s no reason for smoke and mirrors 40 years later…. or however long it takes for your interest to declassify, which may be a lot longer.

It is why I like the founding years of CIA the most, their origin story. OSS/early CIA operations are declassified, essential for an author if I want anything to sound real. The easiest stories to make true to life are now science fiction, I believe, because there is so much more information on how those intelligence operations actually ran between Russia and the US in the 50s and 60s. The way we got to the moon first was largely due to a war between CIA and KGB, because we had real chatter they were going to put nukes on the moon.

Speaking of which, I got to see Vince Houghton at Jonna’s talk the other night. So good to see him. Vince was the host of “SpyChat” before Dr. Andrew Hammond took over. His non-fiction book about intelligence is called “Nuking the Moon,” which is what made me think of him. 😉 I don’t think Dr. Hammond was in the audience, because I would have known his Scottish brogue anywhere. And yes, it is like James Alexander Malcom McKenzie Fraser does Spycast.

I will be taking no further questions. 😉

Vince was actually on a PBS documentary about intelligence at Bletchley Park, and it focused on women. Of course Alan Turing is important, but he wasn’t the only operative there, either.

I find now that people’s true stories matter more to me than television and movies. I reference old media because I watch YouTube most of the time. That gets me Frontline and all the other PBS shows, plus videos about people making things. Live bootlegs are also exciting because they come in video now.

I just can’t think of channels that I subscribe to that would be that well known, and I’m always trying to use universal illustrations because my audience is all over the world.

I should start looking for an intelligence show to watch while Zac is busy, because I love “Slow Horses” and I could never cheat on him. That way, I will at least have some updated references and shows that aren’t 20 years old that still appeal to me.

I started one on Hulu that has so far been outstanding called “The Lazarus Project.” Go into it blind. It’s a rabbit hole with a great payoff.

I can already tell you that “Slow Horses” is going to be one of my new comfort shows. I’ll give you the basics.

River Cartwright blew up a bunch of people by not stopping a terrorist…… in a simulation at MI-6. It is taken every bit as seriously as if it had really happened, but they can’t fire him; his grandfather used to be “C” or something…. unclear, but a higher up (my prediction is that this is going to be Tinker Tailor and that the grandfather is a puppet master. I have only seen season one. Please don’t spoil).

Anyway, since they can’t fire River, they place him at “Slough House,” which is where all washed up MI-6 go. Then, it becomes a story about a team who everyone thinks is shit flipping the script. If I had to compare it to an American movie, it’s “Moneyball,” and the writers are just as good as Aaron Sorkin. They take everyone’s imperfections and they blend…… because River is every bit as smart as his grandfather and he is able to lead others. He made a mistake in a simulation, and Mi-6 isn’t prepared to accept the fact that River is the real deal, or they know exactly who he is and have to keep him out of the way. Unclear, and a brilliant plot device. Is his boss disgusted with him or proud of him? The audience knows. River doesn’t.

I love Gary Oldman, who plays River’s boss. If I had a picture in my mind when I watched the video of Jonna calling herself “a real hardass at CIA,” it was Lamb.

I also love Jack Lowden, as well. I’ve gotten to know him through watching Graham Norton. It was great because I knew who Jack was before I got into “Slow Horses” at all.

“Killing Eve” is another one of those shows I’ve watched over and over, but I haven’t seen the end. I just keep rewatching the first few seasons, thinking I’m going to rewatch the whole thing and giving up. The pilot is the best episode of them all, anyway. It is a fight within me over whether Carolyn or Eve is my favorite character. Oh, wait. No. There’s not. I love Carolyn. It’s my mother’s name, as well as her character being an archetype I happen to love.

She kind of reminds me of Jack Bristow in “Alias,” except Jack had a bigger heart. Eve Pulaski is a lot like River Cartwright.

I used to love the show “Whiskey Cavalier,” because it was a very lighthearted look at CIA that didn’t suck up all the air in the room with drama. It was often ridiculous and therefore, well, fun.

I don’t always want as much realism as possible. Sometimes, I just want to be able to let go and laugh.

In a Word? No.

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Are you superstitious?

I am not superstitious because I can read a room. I don’t do rituals to try and keep things from happening, because nothing can stop the random dice from rolling. I do feel all the emotions in a room at once, though, which feels like ESP. A lot of the time, I can pick up the undercurrent of a couple’s relationship before they announce their breakup publicly. I didn’t know it, I felt it. Energy swirls around me and it comes in the form of being able to see relationship dynamics while being in a crowd. I take in most information by sight, and my body reacts. My nerves can sense when I’ve walked into a room with a couple who is in an argument, for instance.

Those moments are when my autism blossoms. It’s not my pain, but my pain signals are going to tell me to hurt, anyway. This is also not license for anyone to walk on eggshells around me. I actually take Tylenol to turn that sensory input down. Tylenol dulls both emotional and physical pain signals, in case that is a thing you needed to know. It’s my responsibility to manage me, and I’m sorry for every moment I haven’t been able. Processing disorders and mental illness are so hard. This is not to garner sympathy, as if any of it excuses my behavior when it is genuinely bizarre. I’m saying it as a patient. Mental illness is so hard. It’s relentless. Every feeling I have has to be thought, then analyzed to see if it’s real or not.

As in, “is this my real emotion, or is this my depression telling me a lie and I’m falling for it?” This is when I am talking to me about myself. I am generally good at picking out what is going on with everyone else. Generally bad at saying anything helpful or useful because I’m autistic. Likely, you’re not going to hear what I say due to the translation layer…… and whatever it is I think you need right now, it’s not an autistic amount of it. Other autistic people will probably laugh at that, because we all know what it means to think about something “an autistic amount,” and how that is so exhausting for other people. We learn to laugh about it, but it’s yet another thing that makes me too much for most people.

I don’t have communication issues in terms of receiving the emotions under what people say and I can predict group dynamics early. What I cannot do is then imitate it successfully so that I can convey to you that I understand (or don’t). I know what’s going on by the way it makes me feel, but fail in the execution at describing those feelings to other people.

People get so, so, so angry at me for things “everybody knows.” All of the feelings that I should have had in advance because of the social rules I should know. I am not a sociopath, who doesn’t have emotions and just imitates them, my blog a slam book because I don’t care about anyone else’s feelings. I’m autistic, which means that I feel every bit as deeply as you, I just process it differently….. and the way I process it is to write it out. I often don’t know how I feel about something until I’ve had a chance to take a step back from my emotions and craft the narrative that is going on in my head by squeezing out all the noise to find pure signal.

I create my own future by looking at my past. I don’t know how to predict other people’s behavior, but I’ve got 10 years of entries telling me everything that made them blow up previously. If someone won’t take the time to explain the rules, I will explain them to myself. I’m often wrong, but I’m not afraid to be wrong. I’m afraid to be unheard.

I sent Zac a message asking him for a scenario I could work from, like, “take a real conflict and make it fictional by changing around the countries or something. Just bare bones………” I haven’t gotten it yet because I said “everything goes to shit in a paragraph,” and he’s 1350 words in….. apparently I sparked his creativity when I asked him to spark mine. However, he could come up with eight of these scenarios before breakfast, so I don’t think it’s a competition. I think I just said something that stuck in his head, and I’m glad to be there. It honestly means more to me that I said something I said really resonated with him. If this turns out to be his magnum opus, I want you to know that I am entirely responsible. If it doesn’t? Totally his fault for not putting the material in more qualified hands…… laughing….. we’re not competitive, mostly because we can’t be. The kinds of writing we do are so different that there’s no comparison.

It’s just nice to have someone in my life who is also dedicated to the craft and understands that push/pull. Do I want to be with my friends or do I want to be with my characters? You pull yourself into your own world and at times struggle to resurface.

I notice more of the worlds inside me than I do my outside environment- I only understand the former, with no ladder to the latter.

The Meese

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Which animal would you compare yourself to and why?

I have decided that I am a moose. This is because I have spent a lot of time thinking I was a squirrel. Yes, “Rocky and Bullwinkle” has fed my love of intelligence for many, many years….. as has “Inspector Gadget,” “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego (I even have a retro t-shirt), and strangely, Jeopardy!. A lot of the time, the answers will contain intelligence operations that I’m interested to look up, because those questions come in lots of areas. Geopolitical, CIA’s affect on the United States’ reputation, etc.

You could have heard a pin drop in my mind when Jonna Mendez said MK Ultra came out of her office, and she walked past those drugs every day for 30 years because the refrigerator was from the 1970s, meaning it will outlive all of us. I’m sure that eventually, the science officer was made to destroy them, or the rest of the department was able to wrestle it away from him at some point. But, it was the first time in a long time that all the blood drained out of my face.

The truth is stranger than fiction, especially when it comes across in news spin and not data.

For instance, is it fortunate timing that we are now sending Palestine more aid, or did Biden specifically keep that little chestnut for the State of the Union address? I was telling a friend the other day that I think this whole thing revolves around having not to hate what Israel has done. That we really can’t stand what they’re doing, and also can’t afford to cut off intelligence from Mossad. It’s trickier than you think. Intel from Mossad is valid. Info from Palestine may or may not be valid because they don’t have government checks and balances. They don’t have a government because they’re not a state. It doesn’t have anything to do with “we don’t like the Palestinians.” It’s that they don’t have people in the room.

The answer is getting the Palestinians in the room. Most Israelis want this, too, because the neighborhoods are so integrated. Palestine comes across as a terrorist group because “they don’t have a flag.” It’s not that it’s not there. It’s that it can’t be recognized anywhere in the world as a sovereign nation because the Israelis absolute do not want that….. coming from the top. This is not a bottom up resolution, but top down. I swear to you, Netanyahu wouldn’t think twice about killing his grandmother if she was Palestinian. He also doesn’t care how many Israelis die because they’re just collateral damage.

And people think this is about Judaism and claim anti-Semitism when I don’t give a fuck what religion you practice, and neither does he. If he’s bombing integrated neighborhoods, he doesn’t care what religion you practice, either. Notice there aren’t many surgical strikes. It’s kill everyone.

They aren’t fighting over religion like they did in ancient times, they’re fighting to keep Palestine from getting an equal shake in things like NATO, or anyone else who could help them.

If you sided with the rebellion in Star Wars and you aren’t standing up for Palestine, you are not admitting what’s really going on here. Netanyahu and Putin are both trying to keep countries from recognition by taking them over.

Except Putin doesn’t care how many people he kills, either. So, whether you’re a Ukrainian fighting for your country or on the Russian side of things, you have an equal chance of dying, because Russia will just send in more cannon fodder.

It’s not about people’s lives, it’s about winning.

And now we want that kind of totalitarianism to come to the US by electing Donald Trump again, or at least, a huge minority that’s threatening to provide undertow to the fall off Rome. A good bit of the military is conservative as shit. What happens after the next election? We all of the sudden have two armies. January 6th will look like child’s play, because apparently the right to be a bigot is a huge ass deal here. Just like it is in Ukraine, and just like it is in Israel.

The only thing is that the Russian and Ukrainian people probably got along before Putin shook them up like ants. Finland is worried now, and it’s opening a very old wound. Sweden just joined NATO, so there’s something. We at least have one country over there in the general vicinity of Finland until they join themselves.

It’s all a mess. It’s all protecting the world from fascism. I don’t think we want it here, but if the Republicans win, it will be ushered in…. ballet service for pablum. Keep us occupied and we won’t revolt.

Reminds me of the old Apple commercial for the Macintosh (clever). Something about buying the computer is not making “1984” into 1984. And then they invented the iPhone, so clearly they didn’t mean it.

How much Facebook absolute shit do you have to wade through to see the few things you actually wanted to see? Who doesn’t respond immediately to their notifications unless they can disconnect long enough to put on “Do Not Disturb?”

“You can’t do that. We live here!”

Et cetera.

Suzy Izzard has the answer to everything.

I’m sure that relationships with countries evolve like relationships between adults. After all, it’s actually individual personalities and patterns move the same way as specifics. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but as a preacher’s kid I constantly noticed little things writ large.

Again, I grew up as a preacher’s kid and I’ve had lots of pastors as an adult. I have been to many, many committee meetings as an adult, just armed with a lot of back channels to be able to understand the bullshit games running in the room. I didn’t even have to call my dad, and most of the time, didn’t. I called friends who were either theological giants in their own right, or students who’d been taken under care by our church (what it means to be in discernment/seminary because you need a home church to be able to support you in some ways….. why it’s called “being taken under care.”

The Methodists do it differently than the Congregationals. In a Congregational church, like a Presbyterian or an Episcopal church, you are called by the individual church. With the Methodists, you basically function independently from step one, which is how my dad ended up pastoring two churches (called a “Circuit Rider,” a term created where ministers traveled by horse). Here’s the rest of the story. He was 19. I am sure some days went better than others, and he’s got more class than I do, so I’m not sure that he said “fuck” every day, but it wouldn’t have been a bad idea.

My dad could deal with enormous tragedies as he got older because he saw them all as a pastor.

My personal moment of pastoring was when we had a couple give birth to a baby who was only at 24, 25 weeks at most. She survived, and I became her babysitter. We bonded because I was eight weeks early. I was 14 or 15, and I wanted the parents to always ask me to come back because I’d imprinted on her. They called me often. I still remember her name was “Peyton.” Being up in front of people and preaching is 10% of the job at most. The rest of the time, it’s dealing with parents who have lost children, children who have lost parents, spouses who have lost spouses, and all the intimate conversations you have with a pastor leading up to it. If someone was going through a thing and at our house or church a lot, I got used to seeing them and took on all their pain by osmosis, because I don’t go looking for other people’s feelings. They come to me quite naturally, as if by a magnetic pull. I can open up to people, which gives them license to open up to me.

So, I feel like I don’t have the ability to stop caring about anyone, because those feelings flow through me all the time. I remember people’s stories from 40 years ago. That’s the two things that stopped me from starting a church. The first is that I burned out on pastoral care already. The second thing is that my mother died and two things happened. The first is that I needed her as my music director and she died. I didn’t want to work with anyone else at first. We were building a church. We weren’t to the stage where we can invite major musicians to play, and I assure you, my mother has sounded amazing with the best of the best. Google “Sylvia Danburg,” my concertmaster at HSPVA. They did a duet at my church when she was 14 that still lives in my memory…. not the melody, but the way it made me feel.

Being that empathetic and that neurodivergent cost me, because I’ve always been too intense for everyone. It’s why I spend so much time alone. I don’t have to hear it. If people think I’m too much, I am not threatened. I got shit to do.

I think bigger than most people because my personality type is very rare….. and all the comorbidities with my mental health make me astoundingly curious.

It’s a lot.

For instance, now I’m thinking about looking up the history of the moose. Because I am no longer a squirrel. I admit that I still have a “deer in headlights” look on my face a lot of the time, but at least I’m not tiny. I’m taller than I thought. More muscle mass. I can protect my brain from a lot of things, even rejection, because everything comes from me. I needed to develop a thicker skin, which I have now. I didn’t so much in the early days of my relationship with Supergrover. I believe she thought that she was more hurt than I was. We both overestimated our own pain and underestimated the other’s.

So, I hope that if Supergrover knows nothing else, she knows that this is not a cat and mouse game. We have both stopped playing, and it remains to be seen whether she agrees with me that getting real was a good thing.

I found it interesting that she said I knew nothing about her life, when everything I said about her attachment style turned out to be a double bullseye. I cannot speak to how she treats her family or her friends, but our particular dynamic was toxic at times, merely inauthenic at others. We’d reached the “merely inauthentic” phase long ago, and I could feel it on my skin.

I saw the writing on that particular wall, and wrote this weird letter in which I know I invalidated her feelings and I’ve apologized for it, because that’s not what I meant to do. What I meant to do was call her out on her bullshit so we could move on. Yet again, taken as an attack and swept under the rug so that my feelings were always invalidated and she thought that me telling her once or twice was a problem? How am I supposed to react when I open up to you and you say nothing, yet you have a shit ton of feelings about me and you’re telling someone else. I have never been wrong about that, either, until I sent her an e-mail on a related topic and she finally yelled at me……. and owned her shit like a boss.

I don’t want a relationship with someone who will string me along for years at a time. I want a relationship with someone who’s fiery and not afraid to stand up to me. I had that, and over time, I didn’t.

She said something about painting things as fact that I didn’t have the right to do. Yet, I have no idea what she’s talking about. It’s confusing, and not something we should avoid. The clearest way out is through. I just couldn’t convince her of that because she thought I was playing a cat and mouse game, or she was. Unclear.

What was clear is that we have such an incredible friendship when we’re not putting up walls that it was worth fighting for, even if I lost. That’s because the message I sent her was that I needed her anger at me. That her anger is so pure because she hasn’t been telling me what she really needs from me for a long time. Now, what she needs from me is grace and peace to think. Or, at least, I hope that’s what she wants from me. However, I did ask her if there was anything she wanted from me, including talking about our real issues now that we’re on the same page. It didn’t seem like playing games anymore.

And now I’ve explained the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Palestine has an anxious attachment to the world because they’ve never been given the safety and security of a two-state solution. Israel is avoidant because Netanyahu is not going to give up anything he’s not willing to give. It’s an impasse, and one that probably won’t get solved in my lifetime just like it didn’t get done in my mother’s. The conflict is too large, and the Americans shouldn’t do anything but send humanitarian aid to both people. Food. Medicine. Blankets. Doctors Without Borders (MSF). Those are the teams we should be sending, not military aid to a leader that will certainly unleash hell on everyone if it means he’s going home with a trophy.

This has nothing to do with Judaism. I’ve been to temple on Friday nights before, and it’s always been one of the most moving experiences I’ve ever had. When my grandmother died, I actually read The Kaddish through transliteration, because even though I’ve studied Hebrew, it’s in the context of dictionaries, not conversation. I’ve sung Hebrew before. Judaism is one of the cornerstones of my faite because just like “Little Mosque on the Prairie” (my favorite Canadian TV show), we had a church and a synagogue sharing space. The best part is the Episcopalian minister and the young Imam, because they do a kind of Denny Crane, Alan Shore thing by talking about their lives in pastoral care and they both have ALL the same problems. I could have walked onto the show and made people laugh just as much as they did, I assure you.

Here’s my favorite story in life. I will not tell you the name of the minister, because he has gone on to local television (and is a genuinely good guy). I don’t know if this story would make him laugh or make him mortified. My dad will know who I mean instantly, and that’s all that matters.

So, ministers, imams, and rabbis all have ways of marking someone as a child of God. For Christians, it’s baptism. In the Methodist church, this is not as extreme as a dunking in the river.

We just use a bowl of water and sprinkle it on the baby’s head…. what probably prompted me to wet all over the bishop, in retrospect. Sometimes it’s not easy to hear or feel rain when you’re about to burst. This is universal…… or at least, that’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

So, the senior minister asked the associate if he would go and get the Holy water in the baptismal font. He was not specific. What he meant was, “get the bowl and bring it to me.” It was in a 3,000 lb granite sacristy, and he tried to drag it across the floor. In the middle of the service. Which may or may not have been recorded.

I’ve told this story before, I think, but one time my dad did the wedding for a retired New England Patriot and his fianceé. The boys got a little too drunk the night before the wedding, and all of the sudden my dad feels who is basically Refrigerator Perry to him start leaning forward. I’m going to leave you with that image because the imagination is even better. He was woozy a long time….. but frankly, I only remember that someone ended up throwing up at at the wedding, but I’m not sure it was the groom.

Life as a minister is, as you can see, so glamorous.

The funniest stories are about the things that went wrong, not right. For instance, this little old lady we all adored because she gave absolutely no fucks stood up in the middle of worship and said, “David, have you lost your mic?” That is because it sincerely made my dad wonder how to respond and the room went still. Finally he figured it out and said, “I thought you asked if I had lost my mind.” That joke never would have been as good had it not been the “no fucks given” woman. Plus, it wouldn’t have bothered any of the four of us to be accused of losing our minds every day….. with no idea how they ever participated in the crazy because it would have been inappropriate to tell them. You’re as buttoned down as any therapist. You cannot say what you know. You cannot say at 11 years old that you know why they’re mad, and it doesn’t have anything to do with me. It’s your whatever relationship that’s getting you in trouble because my bedroom was next to my dad’s office. Yet I’m as much of a lockbox as he is, or I was until I became a blogger. Other people’s secrets were weighing me down, because I stopped putting my own opinions out there. Pleasing other people was not a choice for me, because Show Mode™ is relentless when your parent is a public figure.

You don’t have the choice whether to emote or not, because you cannot trust anyone. Is this a safe adult to talk to, or is this a way for them to get information on my dad to create a “gotcha” question in a board meeting?

My dad and John Grisham told me the most about life early on. The first, from my dad, is that people who don’t have power anywhere else will unload their frustration with this in church meetings. Their ego comes out quick, and they perhaps get more aggressive than normal. From John Grisham, “the hardest part about being a lawyer is having to convince 12 K-mart clerks you’re right.” Being a mediator becomes an impossible task at some church meetings because tempers are all flying high and you have to be the one that sits back and takes it because you’re the pastor. It’s your job to mediate them through the middle of the mess. You don’t get to have feelings, because you’re impartial- even though those decisions affect your parent the most.

It’s honestly why I believe that a church cannot be run by committee all the time, and I’m glad that even the congregational churches have denominational support. There are reinforcements to bring in so that there are more neutral parties; the pastor can have feelings, too. They don’t have to be the strong one anymore because there’s someone above them to take on the objective role and mediate.

When pastors tell you how they feel about something and try to sway a vote one way or the other, that’s picking favorites and trying to get them to vote the way you want. It’s rule 101 of being a pastor as something that will not work out well for you. The people on the outside are going to notice they’re on the outside.

You become your own nuclear bomb in which the congregation schisms because you can’t find your way to objectivity with a map and a flashlight……. which is exactly why my church fell apart and the new pastor sweated through every stitch to put us back together. I’m not sure that she knows I think that, but she’s entirely responsible for the congregation being healthy because it’s welcoming of all and not your inner circle.

This also says a lot about world politics while describing very small things. It’s applicable all over the world to different conflicts. It also depends on how you react to the pressure. Are you going to compromise or double down?

Maybe I’m a moose and a squirrel. A moose’s personality in a squirrel’s body, at least. Between Bullwinkle’s ineptitude and Rocky’s smarts, it feels a lot like the spectrum I inhabit. But part of being a moose in a squirrel’s body is learning to walk a little taller.

We may not beat Russia today, but I do hope we prevail. They need our help the most in terms of world balance, because the longer the rift goes between the US and Russia, the closer they get to China. They decide to hedge their bets and go with the other guy. Then, we keep ourselves wide open to Russia bombing the oilfields in Alaska…… because we’ve never had to face Russia and China at the same time, but I’m not thinking we’d like it. Sounds like a crazy idea, but I’m not trying to invent a conspiracy theory. I’m trying to present that the United States is up against a superpower and a former superpower banding together against us. That’s because we’re not the sun, as much as we’d like to think we are.

It takes us so much to be able to stop those kinds of things before they happen, because even if I’m not right on the money, I know I am describing a situation that could potentially happen in the wide realm of possibilities. If we got intel that Russia was about to blow up our oilfields, we’d probably burn them down before they could get to them. You don’t like us? Ok. Here goes all your oil, all the projects in Sakhalin to bring you fuel, the Alyeska pipeline, all of it. Just try us. If we can’t use it, neither can you.

But that’s why conflicts move as slow as they do. No one wants to interrupt American industry….. even in China, for the most part. Another delicate balance until China discovers they don’t need us anymore.

They’ll realize it a lot faster if we put a Russian “useful idiot” (UI) in The White House.

And then team up.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

And that describes relationships between two people as well as it does war. Do you react more when you’re hurt, or whether your friend is hurt? When you hurt someone, they’re likely going to confide in someone else about it, possibly someone who didn’t like you, anyway. Then, the original person has two enemies.

Russia and China are talking behind our backs like bitchy little mean girls, while inviting Kim Jong WTF for tea. I know most Americans don’t see this, because they don’t work in systems like I do. They don’t create scenarios that are fictional, yet just real enough. I wouldn’t have included details that sounded a bit scary if I didn’t genuinely care how this election went. It is a disaster for CIA to re-elect Trump. Neither White House nor intelligence officials will be allowed to tell you anything real. We will continue living in a fractured society with two different realities for far longer than necessary.

No one needs your version of the Bible, where the line between heaven and hell is only a hair’s breadth, making your people live in fear. No one believes Jesus, that the message is power with, not power over. No one likes a God of promise at either end of the spectrum because one has poisoned the other. When atheists meet me, it’s at first like I’m some sort of mythical creature that I can interpret scriptures for them off the top of my head that doesn’t sound like an absolute lunatic story because I know everything in the Bible is figurative and not literal. It can’t be literal. It wasn’t written down until long after it happened. Mistakes were made.

Most atheists haven’t heard of feminine or queer theology, that takes the message they’ve heard their whole lives and flips it on its ear. I don’t evangelize, I just talk like I talk. I’m not trying to change them and they know it. I allow them to take off their armor because I’m a resource if they want to know something but not an entitled dickhead who thinks they ought to know it whether they want to or not.

Even Jesus didn’t evangelize that way. It was, “I have something people want. Follow me if you want it, too.” The modern interpretation of this is somewhat alarming. Basically, you just say what you want to say and if they don’t want to hear it, you move on. That’s why they traveled. They didn’t take anyone who didn’t want to hear the rest.

We of the United States have not had that policy very often. That’s due to Evangelical Republicans twisting the meaning of Christian so badly that I cannot stand saying I am one, because it instantly brings up all the wrong images. Everything I stand for is concentrated into venom towards the limitations that that sect has put on me. I am a very flawed individual. The teachings of Jesus help me deal with that. What they don’t do is tell me to bother my friends when they’ve already stated their beliefs, and the most I’ve ever said is “if you’re looking for a church, come with me.” She did come, but wasn’t ready for membership.

Now she’s the accompanist, and I told her that if I could play inside baseball, I’d tell her to do a jazz arrangement of “Joyful, Joyful” as the postlude. I once watched her play Janis Joplin on stage, and her band (Twisted Whistle) used to play at my pub all the time.

I think she can handle it.

My purpose is helping people to be stronger in themselves by laying out my fears and dreams first. It makes it easier to come clean with yourself when you’re already in a vulnerable place from reading. I lay out my fears. You lay out yours, to yourself. And we both allow ourselves to feel nourished. The writer/reader connection is as unbreakable as hearing Bullwinke say, “hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!”

I love cartoons, especially when they remind me of me.

Dear Very Old Leslie,

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Write a letter to your 100-year-old self.

I’m starting to think that we’ve made it. We lived eight years past our grandfather, which I never in a million years thought would happen. I thought I was too unstable to last this long. But, thanks to our emotional growth in our 40s, we gained the will to live and to fight back. No one likes blowback. No one. I don’t like it about my writing, my people don’t like it about anything. People in general get defensive at blowback. I know I do. But it hits different when I emote and get punished for it. They emote and expect me to lie down and agree with them all the time. They’re not the jerk for the way they behaved. I’m the jerk for writing about it…. as if they’re not affecting my life at all.

When they affect my real life, they affect my story. I don’t make shit up. If we work through a conflict, people will see it in real time. Sometimes I wonder if Supergrover thought I was stirring up shit. I never was. I was expressing my real feelings about how her actions affected me. She’s been gone for roughly 15 years now, because she hit 100, too. We had a hard road the entire time, but it was worth it. Just wait it out. Eventually, she’ll read something that moves her and she’ll be back on your radar. I thought for many years that I wasn’t loved, and then found out I indeed was, in a very particular way and separate from her “real life,” but it wouldn’t have lasted our whole lives if we hadn’t had an absolutely horrible knock-down drag-out in 2023-2024.

We stopped being polite, and started getting real.

It was the thing that needed to happen to get us back on the same page, and not the asynchronous relationship we had before. Reading and drinking coffee at different times affected the story as well. What kind of mood were we in when we read each other?

I also needed to stop thinking of her as a fictional character, which I did given how much she dropped in and out of my life. Now, I don’t. But what I said last year became true. “I’m going to pour the love I have for you into the character because I cannot pour it into you. You have said that you do not accept it.” So, my character and I went on a journey and left her out of it, because she said that’s what she wanted.

Come to find out, she did not, because she didn’t see what the fictional part actually was because she didn’t ask me about it.

In retrospect, it was “the very best bad idea we’ve got sir. By far.” There is an “Argo” quote for every occasion. (I mine Bryan Cranston, John Goodman, and Alan Arkin for lines all the time).

If I had to pick a favorite line from Goodman, it’s when his assistant brings him a telephone and says, “Kevin Harkins for you, sir.” He picks up the phone and says, “hey, Tony.” He’s smoking a cigarette and laughing to himself. I’ve never seen a chuckle like that before. It was great.

In 2003, Supergrover sent me a note that said “Argo” was on TV and it made her think of me. You cannot imagine what a big compliment this was, because she’s not an intelligence peon like I’d like to believe I am. 😉 Our relationship expanded to fit both of us. She will also listen to my overtures while trying not to yawn.

I am still a lot.

Admitting that the storyline was a bad idea is great. But we had to work for a long time to come up with the right one. One that showed us both after we’d come into our power and stopped nitpicking each other.

I’m proud of you. Desperately, enormously proud of you. You’ve had a lot to deal with while struggling through this world not built for you. If there’s anything you should keep in mind, it’s that you’re not irregular, so your friends aren’t, either. I loved when you learned to stop trying to placate everyone else and started standing up for yourself, instead. It gave you hope and a future, just like Jeremiah predicted.

Because when you look at the future, you have to look at the past.

Yours, literally.
Leslie

Wandering Around the Amazon

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Where would you go on a shopping spree?

If money were no object, I’d outfit my room with a new desk and chair, plus get some serious electronics to go with them.

First, I would like a gaming rig because they’re easy to use for audio/video production. I love my computer now, but I need to see if it will support an external GPU and not run like a three-legged dog……. or whether I would be better off getting a new motherboard so I can add a PCI graphics card…. but then I’d need a new chip, a new everything. It’s a lot, and the graphics card I’d want to put in it would be at least a thousand dollars. Going that high end would also allow me to have an income stream, because I’d try my hand at mining crypto or something equally lucrative in distributed computing.

If I had an unlimited amount of dollars at Amazon, I’d be able to build a computer that would serve me for more than a few years at a time. It’s expensive not to have money for things like that, because you end up replacing them so often. The iMac I had at the Bob White House in Houston is still viable in 2024. I am absolutely kicking myself for not bringing it to DC. That’s because the hardware was plenty fast enough all on its own, and upgradable back then. It was also an Intel Mac, so it could have run Windows 10/11 flawlessly. I’m an idiot who doesn’t think things through, with both UNIX and Windows in the palm of my hand and I let it go.

That’s because they don’t make an M version of Windows. Any Mac I got now wouldn’t run it on bare metal, there would be a translation layer. It would make a $4,000 (or whatever) laptop seem like it was 2015, so forget about Triple A titles….. which I probably wouldn’t even play because I’ve been playing Skyrim for 10 years and I haven’t even finished a quarter of it.

With mods, I haven’t been through a tenth of it.

So, regardless of how we all feel about JK Rowling, we’ve all read the books (or at least, a majority across the world has so this will be universal). Returning to Skyrim over and over is returning to the comfort of Hogwarts. Getting to know characters you love rather than constantly changing books. I have, in effect, been reading the same story over and over, which explains a lot about my blog, I think…….

There become lines you will not cross because you love characters. I will not kill Alduin AND Paarthurnax. Paarthurnax has been sitting on top of a mountain for a thousand years or something like that. He’s constantly been alone for a thousand years. That’s punishment enough for his war crimes…. again, a thousand years ago when he already sacrificed of himself and gave the mortals a shout that would kill dragons. He is the Christ figure in the story, not the villain.

I will not let the Stormcloaks win the Civil War, because they’re racist bastards. I play Dunmer (Dark Elf, which doesn’t mean nefarious, just better at magic than a Nord without practicing). However, even if I was a Nord I would think they were full of shit. Other people run on pure emotion. They replace Jarl Balgruuf when they win the Civil War and instantly regret it. They get a huge “fuck around and find out” tax, but them’s the brakes, kid.

Or, in the words of Will Hunting, “how ya like them apples?”

I learned all this from reading reddit posts on the story, not by watching it play out in front of my eyes. I’ve watched so many people regret their poor decisions and reload a previous save.

By now, I’m head of the Thieves Guild, the Dark Brotherhood, and the Dragonborn. That’s three quest lines out of about a thousand. I also find it calming as a gardening and beekeeping simulation, because potions I create from my garden are quite valuable, just like I’d be very wealthy if I sold pain medication, essentially.

In Skyrim, you have to go to traders yourself all the time. With mods, you can set it up so that your employees do all that stuff, you just get the money. I have a home called Silverstead that sells everything, because I’ve expanded it into a whole town. There’s even an inn with a bard. I wish it had full game integration, so I’d see the people I normally see in my own pub. But that’s harder to do with a mod, so they normally only integrate the guards’ dialog.

Which often results in funny things.

Like, even in my own house, where I’m basically a laird, I hear, “SPEAK, elf.”

However, it does have follower barracks, so they all live with me and makes the town look a lot bigger. It’s more like bringing home with me than home being a specific place by now. I used a mod to marry Serana so I get all the perks that come with being married as well as a follower marked essential so she can’t die. The only thing the mod doesn’t do is give you a wedding at the Temple of Mara. It’s a very wise trade, because Serana is a powerful magician.

It’s especially important if you’re on a tank playthrough, or archery (bashing and cutting everyone, or shooting them with an arrow while obnoxiously overpowered). I try to get followers who can do everything, but start out with the basics. For instance, Lucien was a swordsman, and as I taught him more spells, he began to prefer magic. So, I added Lydia. She began to prefer staffs. So, I tend to have this affect on people, guiding them toward the light, literally. Spells are amazing in caves where it’s dark.

It’s also nice to have a vampire on the team, as Serana is. I get to live vicariously through her rather than having that type of magic myself. I’ve let her bite me before, and it sucked. Even when you drink blood potions, your eyes still burn in the sun and my eyes cannot take it. I’m not speaking figuratively. The screen goes very blurry and it stuns me as much as the character.

I have never become a werewolf because being a vampire lord was difficult on PC and I couldn’t figure it out. I have put off doing The Companions storyline because the vampire lord thing was so difficult that I thought, “I’m not sure I’d like playing as a werewolf any better.” So, mostly I keep doing the main storylines, but adding different followers so the dialogue stays fresh.

If you outfit Inigo in dragonbone armor, he will run out in front of enemies, yelling “I am wearing the remains of a giant lizard!” Although my favorite line is actually from Serana in her quest line. She says something about the Falmer being able to build better traps than bridges, and it cracked me up to the point of tears because I thought, “that’s probably because they’re blind, Serana….” I do what I can to add to the humor.

Lucien is written very posh and shits on himself all the time because his character is not built to progress in confidence as he gets better. So, after a battle, you’ll hear, “WE killed a dragon! Yup. because that’s exactly what happened!” He pretends like he’s been hiding the whole time.

The game is much better with followers that have contextual dialogue, so if there are vanilla players that have dialogue overhauls among the mods, I always add them. For instance, Lydia’s dialogue makes it clear that she is not so trusting of Serana because she doesn’t want a vampire on our team at first, for obvious reasons. Serana could kill us in the middle of the night, or turn us into vampires as well.

So, there are multi-layers to work through instead of just the surface.

I do not like The Blades, because they mettle in affairs they can barely understand. I am ashamed to lead them, so they stay in their little temple, seething that I won’t kill Paarthurnax.

Dude is probably my great grandfather or something.

People spend money on graphics cards to make everything more lifelike, more immersive. I don’t because to me, it looks immersive enough.

My primary goal in a media machine is to be able to edit audio and video. But it’s not a bad thing to make the game more realistic when I needed the resources, anyway. I’m not really a gamer, I just like spending time with characters I’ve known for years.

I like story building, not tearing it down. I want it to be more interesting. I do not want anyone else to be the villain. Yet people are shocked when I write them that way, because I don’t make shit up. You want a better review, compromise with me. I’ll go back to treating you like you earned it in text. What I won’t do is kowtow to people who love my writing….. but only when they look perfect and I don’t.

Probably one of the reasons it’s easy to get lost in the game. I have to have a reprieve. A way to get away from everything like my sister watches “Below Deck.” It’s absolute trash. But it gets her mind of her job. I respect that. It’s what she likes.

I like intelligence and computers. She’s starting to get into intelligence because I like it…. the stories of women who do incredible things. But even if she never picked something to like that I do, it wouldn’t matter. I will watch Below Deck and get interested in it for the amount of time she has to spend.

She’ll talk to me about the Mendez lecture even though my brain is spilling over with information and it’s all I want to talk about. It’s a balance. But mostly because Lindsay was also a political science major, so it’s not like I’m telling her stories that would be uninteresting to her, anyway. I like reality trash TV, just not as much as her. She doesn’t have to like intelligence and Skyrim as much as I do.

Which she doesn’t.

Probably because my brother in law got me into it.

Although I’ve never asked him what race he plays, his play style, etc. I was just watching him play one day (Xbox vs. PC) and thought, “that looks fun.” It’s years later. It’s still fun.

It’s something that makes my autistic brain play, when I’m used to hearing “God, Leslie. Chill!” I think that should give comfort to her and many people.

We have let our relationship grow to accommodate both of us. Even coming to DC is not leaving everything she knows. She works here a lot of the time. So, wanting to move here is not unlikely or unreasonable in the grand scheme of things, because she could end up with a job here literally tomorrow. I don’t think she’s looking, but what I do know is that in Austin, Houston, and DC she is a motherfucking badass and that’s why so many people want her. It’s not that she’s looking, it’s that she attracts energy to her and people ask her to work for them a lot of the time when she doesn’t see it coming. A lot of the time she does and refuses to be poached.

But honestly, wanting her to move here has nothing to do with anything except feeling protective of her. I have wanted her to move here for years, but it’s not because I’m trying to derail her life at all. Her life is also built here, so it doesn’t matter which city she lives in, really, as long as she stays in politics. I am not offended by “nope. I’m happy where I am.”

But even she agrees that it wouldn’t be impossible given her job choices. It would have to be a lucrative offer, like working in The White House. You don’t make much money there, but it’s on your CV your whole life.

It’s what I thought gave Kal Penn the edge on “The Daily Show,” but they didn’t go his direction. Hassan Minaj had it in the bag until that exposé came out about him. Then, Hassan and Roy left at the same time.

Jon came back to right the ship, I’m sure of it. However, I thought Leslie Jones should have gotten it. I have never laughed harder.

Back to my sister. I don’t want to be pushy by any means, but I’m also her older sister and we don’t have a mom. We’re our own moms now, and that’s not the easiest position to be in with a younger sister, especially with 5 and a half years between us. I go instant mom face at everything she says….. and mom face is “come here, let me fix everything.”

The problem is that I can’t, so I play Skyrim.

No One Really Had to Attack Me Like This

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What is your middle name? Does it carry any special meaning/significance?

The moment I saw the prompt, my head began to explode.

I’m feeling all of my feelings right now, and it is not pleasant. But to understand where I am now, you have to understand that absolutely none of this has to do with my mom and dad. I love the name they gave me because it’s mine. Ann Davis’s mother says “Leslie Lanagan sounds like a movie star name.” I’ve smiled about that to myself for 20 years.

The problem is that I can’t say my middle name without my guts twisting up.

It should affect me as much as it does. It’s the tender place inside me that reminds me that I’m smart, strong, and brave to be able to handle everything I’m handling. It is redemption and recovery from a battle with a narcissist in which I lost, but I won the war.

And in fact, I think I’ll write about something else now. If you’re really that interested, I’m sure you can Google it. I don’t feel good about the direction this is going, and I need to give myself some grace. I can see the trails of thought setting themselves up in front of me, and none of them are positive.

But, I am entitled to my feelings, and they serve as a warning. My intuition is tuned. It’s why I haven’t changed it. That, and I tried changing my signature. It does not work…. changing any of it.

What’s done is done.

I’m not being dramatic. Maybe this story will come out another day, except it has. Just over and over. The emotional tendrils a narcissist puts in you are hard to get back out. You need a lot of meat tenderizer and a sharp razor.

My middle name is where the rubber meets the road, and if that’s all you ever know about it, you’ve gotten the important part.

And the fact is, everyone who’s met me from grade seven on knows why. I am sure I’ve even said it before on this blog, because I was a writer long before all of this happened.

My name didn’t change. I did.

It’s as dramatic a change as the time I spent with Meagan- first girlfriend, we were 17- my speech patterns changed from American to Canadian because I say grade seven now rather than seventh grade. It’s a great analogy for so many things, because there are so many Canadian-isms that I’ve adopted. That’s just one example of something second nature to me that didn’t come from my parents.

Having a tortured, nauseous feeling when I think about the fact that I have the middle name that I do? Not given to me by my parents, either.

And that’s its significance.

I Can Hang

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What is the last thing you learned?

There’s been a bit of bending the spoon lately, because I’ve realized that I’m part of the problem in not seeming approachable in terms of talking to me about problems, but I’m not responsible for trying to predict/avoid other people’s avoidance. Just let them go. Stop calling them on it. They know and they don’t care how it affects you. If they did, they’d tell you so. I am not responsible for keeping both halves of a relationship going. It’s going to be healthy or it’s going to die. I cannot predict what someone else is going to do next, and I’ve stopped trying.

People have noticed the change, because I’ve ridden down a lot of rivers in ramshackle boats trying to keep a relationship’s current from dragging me under. I am not, day to day, a strong personality. I seem like it in my writing, but I do not have the strength to just lay it down in front of everyone, especially after I’ve already spent my “emotional energy” spoons here. After I finish writing, it’s the dance of intimacy.

I have the same relationship with myself that I do with everyone else. After a fight that gets emotionally crispy, I retreat to recharge. Writing about difficult things leaves me just as fried as a conversation about something complex. So, it is very true that before I put myself around other people, I have to recover from myself, first.

It’s a lot.

When Supergrover said those exact words the other day, “it’s a lot,” I thought about it for a very long time. She sees that we’re both a lot. Again, what is she reacting to that I’m not? The only thing I can come up with is that she thinks I think there’s a problem with her, when there isn’t. There is a problem we need to work on. It is a group project, and me working on it alone has produced results she didn’t like because she wasn’t in on the story and couldn’t be. I had to have it whether she was here or not……

Because it’s not her story.

There are so many things built up here that are nothing. They got big by continually ignoring them.

I do not want to be a judgmental dickhead, nor do I want to be a dictator ever again. What I do want is to be a decent friend. That’s just not going to come at the cost of inauthentic relationships so I can keep other people from getting mad at me. I don’t care if people are mad at me, because I didn’t cause their anger. They chose to react with anger. In all cases, and a universal “they.”

I am responsible for helping put the relationship back together after a conflict, but I am not the reason you got angry. You are. Just like it’s my responsibility to control/regulate my emotions.

Supergrover could see that I needed that kind of help because I’m on medication for it. It’s easy to tell the bipolar kid they’re being unreasonable. Not so easy to tell an adult who’s got it together that they’re not any better at regulating than you are, for different reasons.

She wasn’t regulating her emotions, she was storing them up until she said she lost the ability to be a decent friend.

She was just going to keep me going like this for the rest of my life if I’d never called her on her bullshit. She was never going to regulate her emotions enough to be able to tell me what she wanted without stuttering and without becoming the princess of mixed signals at every turn.

I didn’t do any better. I just got caught up in her wake and drowned trying to learn to surf.

It became pricks on my skin I couldn’t close anymore, a phrase I could not have crafted and yet love so dearly.

My beautiful girl.

I never wanted that for either of us. I hope we both give ourselves the grace and peace we need.

But the thing that will stick with me in this argument is that she picked up her toys and went home because she thought I was telling her that our problems were all HER fault….. when all this time I have been saying that if I wasn’t a problem, we wouldn’t have any others. I’m the root. I take responsibility for that.

But in my own mind what happened is that she became disconnected from what happened long ago, maybe doesn’t even remember everything, and I am treating it as one entire narrative. She is doing something that’s hurting me right now, but it is in the tumble and roll of our relationship, not “I am right about this and about everything else.”

I do not need the whole world. I am happy with a tiny, tiny piece.

I’m the president of Overthinker’s Anonymous, who needs her VP and is telling the world she is unhappy about that.

It would be funny if it wasn’t so serious.

But learning all of this so recently has prepared me for other relationships. There’s just a sweet side of me that hopes she’ll again come back to me and say “I was licking my wounds,” because when she doesn’t tell me what they are, I can’t really help with the Neosporin, either. I don’t have a right to her thoughts, but I do have the right to insist on the truth when she does talk to me. I cannot survive on carbs alone. I’m going to need protein at some point.

But I didn’t realize she’s been carrying granola bars the whole time. I couldn’t hang because I was working blind.

Now I can.

The Prompt You Were Supposed to Get This Morning

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What is the thing you most hate to be asked?

Are You Lookin’ At Me?

My medical diagnosis is “alternating lateral isotropia.”

What it means is that my eyes do not track together. I do not have 3D vision, which means that I cannot place an object in its environment. I have no depth perception or angle of convergence. The way it is different from a strabismus is that neurologically, by brain switches “cameras,” thus fields of vision, depending on which eye it thinks can see the best…. leaving me with no peripheral vision and also no ability to predict what’s going to be outside my field of vision.

It also makes finding things I’ve just set down extraordinarily difficult, something I’ve struggled with forever…. again, rewarding neurotypical kids for things that are very hard for the neurodivergent. When a teacher notices you lose everything, you lose all respect with them. It affects grades where the letter is an abstract concept, like essays. I wish I excelled at math, because there would have been no fear of rejection with every paper and I could have felt better about myself without a teacher’s approval.

It doesn’t help that the real non-medical definition of my medical condition is “lazy eye.” That irritates me, too. I’m a writer. Why wouldn’t lazy be a trigger for me? Trust me, I may not “work” faster than you (universal) because I don’t know how neurotypicals do it, but I think faster. It’s not because I’m neurotypical. It’s that my entire job here is reacting to life, so I feel practiced at it and more comfortable in my skin. Lucky enough to be as old as I am because the good experiences only start happening after you’ve figured out how to avoid all the land mines first.

It’s good I’m still workin’ on that.

But back to this whole “lazy eye” thing. It makes me feel lesser than, and though I know that doctors use it, they should know that for some people it doesn’t feel particularly favorable…. like “MDT” in Appalachia.

If you’re not a doctor there, you’d never figure it out. It’s not really something you can google, only something they’ve seen a thousand times and you probably haven’t. My cousin got his DO in West Virginia. Because it’s local slang for something I feel is pejorative, I won’t say it here. I’ll let them keep it to themselves because it would seem really mean outside of an emergency setting. Mostly because I don’t want people to shoot the messenger, not that I’m not brave enough. I don’t have to live there, but they do.

That was all bullshit. Of course I won’t hold back on you. If they’re willing to use it in a public setting, I don’t care about their feelings.

MDT stands for “Mountain Dew Teeth.” It absolutely will rot everything in your head if you are completely addicted, and that kind of exposure to sugar can absolutely kill you when you wait until it’s an emergency and septic.

People have had this addiction since Mountain Dew was a home brew. Long, long before it developed into a nationwide phenomenon.

There are also lots of other things that doctors don’t want patients to know, but they have to have a black sense of humor to deal with the pressure. It’s not trying to be mean, it’s learning to breathe. Think line cook.

So, I don’t know what doctors say about me behind my back, but I know lots of things they would say when lives are on the line.

Doctors’ hardest jobs are the cleanup from not having universal health insurance. They are bound by the Hippocratic Oath, yet it’s not an easy job when you are starting with fucked up. The ER is full of complicated cases where people have gone to the Emergency Room at the height of their disease. The part where it gets harder and harder to tell people they’ll recover from this.

Death happens at random, but it’s more likely when the odds are stacked against you. You think something is wrong, and wait to go to the doctor until you’re in renal failure. Other countries don’t have this problem.

Having universal heath care would help a lot of doctors’ mental health…. because there’d be so many less emergencies. It helps when you have time to prepare a plan.

I know all of this through talking to doctors when they’re off work, not by being a patient. So, I’m not as bothered when medical professionals call it “lazy eye” because if I’m at the doctor I’m already thinking in clinical mode, anyway. The emotion is not going to affect me, at least not until it accumulates.

People ask me all the time if I’m looking at them, and I don’t fuckin’ know. Your guess is as good as mine, and I am not in the mood for your bullshit ever. It’s always said with this curiosity tinged with “that’s so weird.” That’s why Zac can get away with making fun of me and no one else can. His jabs don’t feel like he’s punching down when he is also disabled, something I’ve never had in a friend or partner.

Disability is a relative term in the military. I don’t mean to imply that he is also unemployed. He’s classified as disabled, but he’s physically strong enough to work. It”s going to make a good pension for him, and I think he’s going to be really happy no matter what he chooses to do after this. It’s cool to be able to stand next to an adult when I feel like I don’t have it together.

Plus, there’s lots of soda in his basement, which adds to his charm.

Today, I’m going home because even though Zac is of and about, I wanted to wake up with Oliver. I wished Zac could have come with me, but the stars didn’t align for that one. I’ll just have to wait for Jason Moran at The Kennedy Center.

Oh, but here’s the best thing I’ve heard in a million years:

Leslie (texting a link): I know you’re not a huge fan, but I thought you might want to read my impressions of last night.

Lindsay: I AM A HUGE FAN.

I….. I did not consider this.

Ooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Awkward.

Perceptions and Reflections -or- Waiting for Mendez, Part II: In Which She Shows Up

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What is one question you hate to be asked? Explain.

I wrote this last night and hit the wrong button. You’ll get today’s writing prompt later. 😉

This evening I find myself caught between reading and writing, because I just got home from hearing Jonna Mendez talk about her new autobiography, “In True Face.” I think this is my new favorite story in life, thus why I wanted to write it down right away.

As I’ve said before, Jonna and I know each other a little bit, and she was bummed she didn’t get to invite me herself- glad I got the message because “you usually come to these things.” But we didn’t speak beforehand, I just gave her a nod; she smiled as I sat down.

She talked about living in Kansas, growing up in her sister’s shadow. Marrying two case officers and living in their shadows, somewhat. I don’t think she would think of herself as living in Tony’s shadow if he wasn’t known the world over as Ben Affleck on screen. a

It’s one thing to see your life, well, in real life. Quite another to see it reflected back to you in media. I have no idea who Tony really was, but here is what I do know.

In all the time that I’ve known her, she’s never called him “Tony” when we were in the same room. I noticed it right away. The telltale sign that she’s hiding something. There has to be something left for her, that only she gets. She has to talk about him publicly. Tony Mendez is as much as she can handle during speaking engagements. That’s because she’s not talking about her husband. She’s talking about his trademark and his tradecraft.

I can’t imagine how hard that is, but I can empathize with the idea of it. I haven’t lost a partner, but I have lost a mother. Talking about what my mother did professionally is indeed the easy part. I see and understand it deeply because I have been there so many times. It gets easier, and it looked to me that she was doing okay. You’re never the same, but it’s only been since 2019. Therefore, we could both feel his presence in the room…. because I moved to DC after Tony stopped doing public appearances (he got Parkinson’s Disease), but have been one of the Mendez’ biggest fans for years. The writer/reader connection is unbreakable, especially for writers like Jonna, Tony, and me. I write every day about my life and they saved theirs up for publication, but at the end of the day it’s all us spilling our guts and trying to make sense of a lot of shit that will never reconcile.

I wonder what was going on in her head when, during the Q&A, a man asked how she responded to (and I’m paraphrasing, here) all the horrible shit that CIA has done worldwide since 1947…. like MK Ultra (my first thought? “Look here, you little shit…”). She disposed of him as quickly as I’ve been taught by my dad. How to de-escalate? Tell the absolute truth.

She said, “you know, MK Ultra came out of my office and it went horribly, horribly wrong. We didn’t want to get caught with our pants down and we didn’t use anyone who didn’t sign up. But we didn’t know all the things about x, y, and z that we do now (I am only giving the gist, I don’t want to speak for her), and that she felt CIA had already owned up to it.

Then we moved on.

Another guy asked her how long there was between John and Tony or some other dumbfuckery. It was like there was a test with some sort of “gotcha” that wasn’t there. I’m guessing those people were from magazines or something, because if you were there tonight, you were a fan. Amanda (Education and Outreach) told us that we were the fan club, and I believe it. Want to know how I know that? I talked the guy’s ear off in front of me and by the time he got to the checkout he also bought “The Moscow Rules.”

Everywhere I go, Jonna Mendez sells books. I don’t know what it is about me. I have never been able to sell anyone on anything else, but my excitement about watching real spies vs. the hyped up bullshit normally on TV seems to resonate with people. The truth is that people believe CIA is associated with all that Bond hero shit, and that’s fine. I’m not here to take away their fantasy.

But I am here to tell you that through Jonna Mendez telling her own story, I know what it feels like to be eye to eye with Bin Laden… or at least, that high value a target. She wasn’t specific. Probably won’t be, because I don’t think those ops will be completely declassified for a long time.

I wondered what it had been like to carry that burden. What it had been like not to be able to talk about what she’d been through, because I’ve been interested in psychology since university. What does it do to the brain to carry information like that long term?

If we are not doing a very good job at taking care of the military when they come home, I doubt the government is pulling out all the stops for CIA. I am not saying that there aren’t as many resources for case officers as there are for the military. I just don’t know any people in the military that aren’t allowed to tell people they joined. Your husbands and wives absolutely are doing the dangerous shit you think they are if you have even the slightest hint that they’re C/DIA.

What if you had to be next to Putin in disguise so you could take a picture of the document he was about to sign? You have three seconds and it has to be perfect because this won’t ever happen again. Would your hands shake?

Jonna Mendez has never existed at CIA. Ever. I know that while she worked there, her first name was “Faith,” but she did not reveal her middle and last names. But even if she had, it wouldn’t have mattered. I’m sure “Faith” is just one of the many lives she led.

One of her fears was that she would die overseas under her CIA name and no one would ever hear from her again. I would think that someone has found a way to fix this fundamental issue electronically, but I do not know for sure. In the era of printed tickets?

There are many unnamed stars on the wall at Langley, and I wonder how many more there are you can’t count. Again, because I don’t want to worry the mothers or whatever, there’s no way this problem cannot be solved already. I felt it, though, because she talked me through it on the train home as she wrestled it out. How she got to “this is it. I’m going to die alone.” It was not an unreasonable assumption. The terrorist across from her had armed guards. They didn’t make her. The terrorist did. To be clear, he also made three or four others. This was not a mistake in tradecraft on her part. Everyone came prepared for that meeting, except their guys had AKs.

I’ve heard that story from her before, but in the books it is not made as clear as it was to me tonight that who she met was absolutely no joke. It was her reaction. The way she said pure evil. There was a bit of trying to demonstrate how powerful this person was while also trying to keep out a deeper response from surfacing. I know that her purpose is educating the audience, not scaring them so bad they won’t come back. She just described the look in his eyes so perfectly that I knew she was standing in that memory for a nanosecond and stepping out of the pool.

The nanosecond is scarier than anything she could say out loud. No contest. Her real face is the one you’ve wanted to see all along.

What I haven’t said is about my participation in the whole thing. At “The Moscow Rules,” the line for questions was really long. So, I stand up, and not only is there no line, I can’t even find the microphone at first. So, I pretend like this is absolutely nothing at all and not the most embarrassing thing I have done all day and just go stand by the mic and wait. I did not think that this would happen, however.

Someone said, “the first question…” and she finished “is from Leslie.” I get to the mic and she says, “hi Leslie.” I said, “hi, Jonna.” She said, “how ya been?” It was like this unplanned “bit.” So, I thought… a spy wants to bust my identity on YouTube? She’ll do it. I said, “to the extent that you are able, will you play ball with me for YouTube? She looked at me questioningly, yet cautiously optimistic. I said, “I have seen you in another video describing yourself as ‘a real hardass’ at CIA. You talk about things that were done to you (she says she doesn’t want it to seem like a feminist rant)…. but what’s the funniest thing you’ve ever done to your staff? She said, “the only thing I can think of is that I married Tony Mendez. They thought I was insane.” It was the perfect end to a perfect talk for me, and I got exactly what I wanted.

At the book signing, she told me she saw my dad’s stuff, but she didn’t see mine. I told her that I’d gotten a professional author’s page, so you might see her lurking around the Facebook version of Stories, you might not. She asked for it, but when you write it down on a Post-It note, you never know if the person is going to remember or not. The funniest thing about Jonna’s Facebook profile is that it lists her profession as “photographer,” which is, I think, drastically burying the lead.

Oh, and I have never felt a more sick burn. Like, Supergrover sick burn it was so good. I laughed so hard I died for a second, then almost made her spit out her water because she didn’t know I spoke “microaggression.” I told her that some day I’d write something as good as hers, and she said “it’s good you’re still workin’ on that.” I said, “I’m going to laugh about that for three years.” It was to lighten the moment.

I saw her. In true face, I saw her. I said, “congratulations on owning yourself.” I’ll remember that smile forever. When you own yourself, you see others doing the same. Themes repeat themselves in my life and it was the only thing I thought would be in any way eloquent enough for the occasion.

She knew what I meant. Her bottom lip twitched in recognition of what I’d said while the rest of her face didn’t say anything at all.

I will post the video when it comes out.

Honestly, My Situation Right Now

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?

When Supergrover emoted, she gave me two things. The first is closure. The second is the ability to work toward our goals now that all the cards are on the table. It has been a hard row to hoe when she’s only given me the flop, keeping the turn and the river in front of me, out of my reach. This is because all five cards had been revealed before, and they weren’t cards we could put back in the deck.

It reminds me of Plants vs. Zombies, if you’ve ever played that video game. The second time you go through the levels, Crazy Dave picks out three seed packets that are at random, but they’re locked and you can’t remove them- you have to hope that you win based on what you bring to the game.

We have nine seed packets, and three of them are locked. It’s an even better analogy, because Michaels is holding the flop, the turn, and the river because I fucked up. If there’s anything that made me fail, it was me. For Supergrover to say that this is all her fault is ridiculous. If I hadn’t been an asshole, none of this would have happened.

Full stop.

I have been saying that ad nauseam on my blog, not going after her. The constant feedback that I get from my readers is that I am way too goddamn hard on myself. I have never once heard “you’re too hard on her.”

Not once, ever in my life.

But, if people had said that, I wouldn’t have deflected, either. I would have said that they didn’t know the whole story, and that they couldn’t know what went on behind closed doors, and they never would. So, they have to put a lot of faith in me that I am not being too hard on myself, that I own 50% of the problem. Don’t treat me as innocent here, because I’m not.

Meeting Supergrover changed the course of my life for all the right reasons, and we both feel guilty about rushing into this relationship because it wasn’t a problem we thought through together. If we had, we could have avoided a lot of turmoil later on.

I said, “do you think I write about you just for shits and giggles? No, this is my very real inner monologue.” What I didn’t remind her of yet again is how much it takes to be this vulnerable. That I shake and cry through some of these entries, that it’s hard to get my feelings out and yet absolutely essential.

And then I told her what I was really writing and why I was writing it that way. I hope she’s shocked out of her mind, because I think I won this hand.

I just hope she, like me, doesn’t move the goalposts and say my response should have been happier. Because we’ve both been doing it to each other for a very long time.

When we don’t open up to each other, we are no better than we were before. It’s just going to keep being a toxic mess. When we put up walls, we don’t fulfill our purpose in each other’s lives, why it’s always been just her and me. That sometimes it’s nice to have that “stranger on a train” feeling where you can just dump anything and let the other respond to it.

That feeling is exactly why it’s not incumbent upon her to give of herself and her time. I am not asking for more than she wants to give. I think we’d be great comic foils, and have a ton of fun no matter what our relationship looks like in the future.

For instance, I don’t like the lines in this blog where I flip her shit. I’m not as funny as she is, so basically it’s “I set ’em up, you knock ’em down.” I like the response better than I’ve ever liked anything I’ve said. I have gotten a touche once in the history of our relationship, and I cannot tell you what that line was, but I came in Kings full over Aces.

We set each other up to fail. Badly.

But now I can either start moving away from her comfortably, or moving toward her with peace and grace. No matter how she feels about me, I’ll always be hers.

It’s just up to her to see which way we’ll go, because I don’t know whether she’ll understand why I’m doing what I’m doing or not. But like it or not, the important part is that she heard my thu’um instead of my whisper.

And whispered back that I wasn’t on the wrong track.

She’s just hurt and tired….. with me waiting to kiss her boo-boos exactly the way she kissed all mine 10 years ago. I have Bactine, Band-Aids, lollipops, the whole works.

Because our failure set me up for success.

Cool, I Like This Prompt

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 8 Comments

You’re writing your autobiography. What’s your opening sentence?

Most of my life, I’ve had one definition of love…… but I didn’t expand until it did.

Every Day Carry

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What are three objects you couldn’t live without?

I wear my CIA baseball cap most days. Zac knows this. First of all, it was a present from him. Second of all, it’s my comfort item in his absence. It’s a great baseball cap, too, but also it reminds me of him. We don’t get together that often, but I think of him all the time and vice versa. I love that he sends me pictures of himself every morning, pictures of Oliver (who is a dog), and random memes (mostly regarding making fun of religion or linux or both). All of those things are important, and yet not a sensory thing like a piece of clothing.

I wrap up in my Outlander plaid at night. Bryn knows this. It’s not branded, it’s just what I call it because Bryn sent me a Scottish plaid when we were both in the middle of inhaling the book series (I like reading, she likes audiobooks). It’s green and meant to remind me I’m loved- it does, and it has for many years because it was in the box of the first things Bryn sent me when I got here.

I like iced coffee better than hot, so I brew the coffee at night and pour it into a cup with ice in the morning. I got the cup when Supergrover sent me a large gift certificate and told me to have some fun on her. That was long ago, and it’s an every day carry.

Supergrover does not know this.

I was thinking about “choosing to air all this” afterward, and all that really made sense to me is that she was okay with step one, but forgot about steps two through ten. As in, if she started being aggressive in step one, then why would I think she would want to know steps two through 10?

It’s a weird dichotomy, because I think she really did want/need to hear the things I said after we parted, but because every conversation between us made me think she wasn’t interested, I picked up my toys and went home. I tried to take up as little room as I possibly could, because if I tried to emote, I was met with either “I’m too busy” or “you’re too needy.”

She thinks that all of this is her fault, that I have said all of this is her fault. Then, she copped to everything I said she did and apologized for it, then reamed me out for telling the world I was unhappy about her doing exactly what she was doing.

wtf kind of bullshit is that? 😉

So, when her response to me was as angry as I’d ever seen her, I met her with joy. When you get the gift that you’ve been asking for for SEVEN YEARS, you don’t complain about the wrapping. She emoted. She broke down and told me what was really going on. That’s what I wanted. If I had responded with more anger, it would have been moving the goalposts and saying her response wasn’t happy enough. She doesn’t need to be happy with me. She needs to tell me the truth.

But I want her to be happy with me. I just don’t want to be the only arbiter of our relationship. I need her to take up space by telling me how she’s feeling and not covering it up, running away from her emotions, making me do a lot of emotional guesswork that makes me set off land mines I never knew were there.

She’s never opened up about the tender places in her that I couldn’t see, that I really wanted to….. for instance, she said that she has had the chance, countless times, to stop what she was doing and respond. She didn’t, and takes responsibility for that. I could have been an asshole and said “how dare she?,” but the take home message was “I think about you all the time.”

If she’s willing to show up like she did the other day, she’s welcome every day. I don’t want to hide anymore. I don’t want to feel like a secret anymore. It doesn’t feel like a secret anymore, because when she gave me a clear picture, I could see for miles.

I told her it felt like she owned herself, and I loved her. None of this is all her fault. There was no preconceived plan, just fools rushing in. I’m just not the only fool, for very different reasons.

So, she may not have known that “her” Starbucks cup is the one I every day carry…….. because it’s just one of the things I would have told her if I thought she’d wanted to hear it.

That’s what this has all been about. When did we both just stop taking up space and trying not to offend each other?

It is, as she says, a story for another day.

So Many… Just Roll With Me Today

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What experiences in life helped you grow the most?

Last night, I was rereading the long letter from Supergrover (having so much to read helps when she’s out of pocket because of course the second time I read something, a different aspect will jump out), and she was talking about one of her kids’ partners. She told me that the kid’s partner had told the kid that the turning point for them in their journey with alcohol was losing her kid. A tear came to my eye and I thought, “alcohol and bipolar present the same. I am this kid.” Apparently the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Her kid is her, and I have no doubt they have the same type affect on people. It wasn’t the point of the letter, but the things that affect me that she’s written are mostly the things that connect to something deep inside me.

I felt more relaxed than I’d felt in years. Supergrover didn’t understand our pattern, didn’t understand why I didn’t accept certain things about our relationship, me surprised at how conscientious and dedicated she really is at being a friend, and how because I didn’t believe her, I missed out on a lot of things. But the reason I didn’t believe her is that she wasn’t showing up. She wasn’t laying her true feelings on the table. When she got so angry she couldn’t see straight, finally she had the strength to say what she’d been hiding for a very long time. That’s what I mean by “breaking her open.” I don’t care that she was angry. Her tone wasn’t the point. Her offering was…. and that offering was “I’m hurt and tired.”

Now, it’s her job to decide whether she wants to ask me about what I’ve written, or if she’d like her pre-conceived notions as to why I’d write what I’d write stand. She thinks that I continually paint her as a villain and the times I paint her as my friend are somehow invalid. It does not make sense to her that I can love her and be angry at the same time, but yes it does. When she got into full swing, she sounded exactly like me, picking up style and structure, painting her feelings as fact (about other people, but same style)….. and I wondered what the difference was in her tone and mine. What is she reacting to that I’m not reacting to in her?

We often hate the things in others that we hate about ourselves. She learned that I’m sometimes just as private as she is because I don’t want to rock the boat, either…. and didn’t like that I chose to talk about it here because she thought I was attacking her. No, I was reflecting on a long and hard road, which looks different if you think it is at an end. In effect, she was offended by the grieving process, because I think I’ve done my fair share of denial, anger, and bargaining- to name a few. I have said a lot of things that weren’t favorable to her when she wasn’t being any more favorable to me. She called my blog a “Get Out of Jail Free” card to be shitty to her, and I didn’t know how to explain that if she really wanted me to let her go, it was going to be ugly inside myself. That I had a million different feelings to process and none of them had to do with the last 15 minutes.

I had to process 10 years, all without ever really having the input I needed. However, I’ve always gotten what I needed when we were tracking together, and I can’t hope for much, but I can hope that we’re at least back at the same starting gate. Or perhaps we’re on different sides of the concourse, but still both seeing the Nats…. and that’s something.

She said she was furious beyond belief at some entries, and moved by others. I would cut off any one of my limbs to know which entries moved her, because I have heard all about the ones that make her furious.

I had to process the time I wanted to be the partner, to when I knew she had a partner, and going from the friend who would have come to the wedding to the person that would have officiated if I’d been asked. But she didn’t give me the strength for that.

By the time Bryn got married, she was done with our church, so she asked me to marry her instead of her pastor. The wedding went off with a hitch. 😉

In fact, the thing that meant the most to me is that the groom, whom I had maybe all of two days with before the wedding, congratulated me on a job well done, and he said, “I had a lot of trepidation when Bryn said that she had this friend who wanted to do the wedding, because I wanted it to be perfect. And it was.” I don’t think he knew my back story- that I had prepared for this moment unintentionally by learning how to do weddings from the age of five. As I have said, the joke is that no one in my group of friends wanted to wait until I was done with grad school to perform a ceremony I had memorized by nine.

Although the wedding was taken directly out of the Book of Common Prayer; we just took all the religious references out because Bryn absolutely believes in the power of the universe, but I don’t know whether she would translate that to “relationship with God,” as many people do.

The thing my dad taught me that stuck with me is to go through the wedding at the rehearsal without saying the vows. Unless it was just the three of us, if they’d said the vows at the wedding rehearsal, they would have been married AT THE REHEARSAL because there were witnesses. This presented as funny only once. I got confused for a second as the vows started because I didn’t look down at my portfolio and said the groom’s name where the bride’s should have been. Bryn corrected me because she caught it and I didn’t- brain fart- and we laughed and moved on.

The thing that my dad also taught me is that brides and grooms get very nervous at their weddings, and you can coach them to the extent that you can with something like that. If someone gets tongue-tied, I say, “if so, your answer is ‘I do.'” I have never met a couple where if they hesitated during their vows, it meant they had cold feet. Most people are anxious at being in front of public.

In terms of the wedding itself, I missed Dana terribly for two reasons. The first is that I cannot imagine how much fun we would have had visiting our old haunts, and I know she would have loved being a preacher’s wife for a day. It was so fucking weird going to Burgerville without her. Yet, I did not call her and tell her to meet me there because I couldn’t. I never want to get back together with her, but I also really miss being her best friend, the part where we never, ever got angry enough to be physically violent. There was not that kind of emotion tension to create that kind of fight.

I know that this is still, in part, true for her as well because of what she said when my mother died. I hadn’t talked to her in months, maybe a year or a year and a half. The first thing I said was “thank you for picking up. I wouldn’t have called unless it was important.” She said that she would never not pick up because she figured that if I was calling her, it must be important. That is a long way of healing from standing me up at the bank, literally. So, even if she didn’t want to be a preacher’s wife in person, she definitely was the strength I chose to lean on that day. It was like she was my phantom limb the whole time, and I never felt alone, because we were every bit as much of a team as our then-pastor, as Dana, Bryn, and I all met at the same church, and we both folded into Bryn’s family…… even though because I had dated Matt, I could tell he was in a pissing match with Dana and she didn’t notice….. whether she was blind or not is debatable, because someone can present a game to you and you can say, “I’m better off pretending this doesn’t exist because it’s not worth my time to care.”

All of this is to say that Dana, Bryn, and I have a very long history, and it’s why I jumped on a plane to Portland and felt sick when I landed. I could feel my anxiety melting the further we went down 99W, because Bryn lives in Newberg, the 100% insurance I wouldn’t run into anyone I didn’t like. I don’t think we went into the city except karaoke night. I did my usual, “I Feel Lucky,” by Mary-Chapin Carpenter. It fits my voice and after I’ve had a beer my accent gets stronger. If that is true of another Southerner I know up here, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to hear that out of her, either. It’s a more rolling lilt than mine, because for some reason which I will certainly look up on YouTube (linguistics lectures are fire), the Southern accent gets softer during the drive from Texas to Mississippi.

And yes, when I spelled Mississippi, I did say in my head “M. I. SSI. SSI. Crooked letter Crooked letter i.” And I’m a music nerd, so my slowed so I could do the rhythm with my fingers as well. I love that language is music whether or not it comes with notes. It’s why I’m a hard core gangster rap fan, as well as lighter stuff like hip-hop. I am learning to write dialogue, just like I’m learning plot and character from Issa Rae on Netflix.

The reason that I want to learn dialogue like this is think about Amy Sherman-Palladino and Aaron Sorkin. They’ve both made their careers by speeding up dialogue to 33o bpm, and because the rhythm is faster, your brain contains it because you have to strain to keep up not to miss anything….. and the rhythm reinforces it.

For instance, who doesn’t remember the way Alan Arkin said, “How’d you cut your hand, Josh?” They may not remember the rhythm, but it will certainly bring up feelings…… because Yo-Yo Ma was also there.

I asked you to roll with me, and got off on a tangent as per my normal.

I have no doubt that said pastor was mad as FUCK, but I hope that she understood it wasn’t about trying to keep them out, but to keep us in. We are not saying fuck you to that world. We are making our peace with it so we can leave it behind. We are processing feelings that go back to 1997…. about our friendship, about who we are and always have been to each other, and how “for all our mutual experiences, our separate conclusions are the same.”

I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Supergrover would love to meet Bryn, perhaps even more than she wanted to meet me, because Bryn has a story she needs to hear…………. because Bryn has been my friend since 1997, when she was a teenager (and so was I, but I was 19 and Bryn was maybe 14). I am not saying it would ever happen, but I know that Supergrover would roll her eyes at some of what Bryn had to say because it will just seem so very familiar to her, as if Bryn and I are speaking with one voice.

I can’t get them together, because Supergrover and I aren’t there yet. But what I can do is say on my blog that Bryn is coming to visit me in  May, do with that information what you will.

One of the sweetest things about Supergrover’s letter was that she said my words felt like “pricks on her skin that grew into big holes she couldn’t close anymore.” What I thought was happening was happening. Instead of asking me why I’d write what I’d write, she saved it all up until she was so mad she couldn’t see straight, and tell me she was busy. I could tell, and I wasn’t angry that she wasn’t responding to me fast enough. She couldn’t see that what I wanted was for her to open up to me and tell me all the times I’d hurt her rather than kicking the can down the road. I’ve said so many heavy, scary things that I cannot count them. It is why I said that I’ve been naked in front of her so many more times than I have with a lover. It is a different voice for me, that my internal monologue was also, in fact, her external monologue. It is a weird feeling to know someone so intimately through reading their work and not giving that person a hug. It begins to feel like a rock concert, and I mean this on a deep and spiritual level.

Yesterday, I told you that she’s my tuba, or vocally the basso profundo in my life. Not the lead trumpet player, the top note. The base of the chord upon which everything is built. Who hasn’t gotten close to the woofers at Third Eye Blind. Who hasn’t felt the way your chest expands and your skin buzzes? That’s how it feels to have another person (especially one like her, the rock part) inside me, because she’s never been separate from me and we’ve never learned to pick up the other’s social cues. Incidentally, as an autistic person, if we did have a day to day relationship she’d be the perfect person to social mask when my sister wasn’t with me. She doesn’t have time for that, I’m just telling you that the way she has her shit together is what I want.

The worst part is that she thinks she doesn’t.

It’s understandable. She lives on no sleep. I’m not sure she’s had myelin on her nerves since the Reagan administration….. and I can’t tell you the line that told me that, but it was funny.

Again, reading her words, her true feelings, relaxes me and I read to the rhythm of Dave Grusin, because I like the theme to “Three Days of the Condor……. among many, many others. St. Elsewhere is probably at the top, followed by Doogie Howser, M.D. The reason I like the theme is that I’ve never seen the end of the movie. It got weird (like the misogyny in old Bond movies). I think this is fair play because the novel is called “Six Days of the Condor,” so it seems they only filmed half of it and gave up. The difference between our relationship now and our relationship at first was that in the first few weeks, the rhythm was “Your Love is My Drug,” because she’d said some very exciting things. New relationship energy ate my lunch. I have no compunction about confronting people on problems before they happen to establish boundaries, and neither does she. I warned her that this could turn into an emotional affair because of two things. Internet chat creates a sense of intimacy that may or may not be there in real life. That you become disconnected from your body, so sexuality and gender become irrelevant. This is what I meant about saying that I hoped she was going to be Cynthia Nixon, and self-deprecating that it’s because I’m not that good a writer. I was not saying that my writing is my way into her heart and therefore I thought I could change her like when we used to quote Ellen Degeneres about “winning a toaster.” I thought that reading me would change her, because women don’t fall in love with other people’s private parts all the time. This is because sexual relationships with women are built on emotional connection, just like they are with straight women. You can break up a marriage faster than you can break up two women who’ve flipped each other shit since high school.

But I can tell you the exact moment her feelings stayed the same and mine went haywire. I was telling her that her story felt like a drug, and she said, “I’m sure I’ll drink your liquor, too.” Not meant to be a pass or a flirt, but so smooth af that my knees knocked. If you’re lesbian or bi, did I make you do the thing…….. Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ. Her gender and sexuality didn’t fly out the window, mine did. It didn’t matter what she looked like, I wanted more and I was in.

If I could describe our relationship in one sentence that would resonate with my generation, it would be that our relationship on the surface seems like it’s “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” It’s really “Bel-Air.” I feel that way all the time, every day. If you are not familiar with both shows, because “Bel-Air” is so new, let me catch you up.

“The Fresh Prince” is cute, and everyone knows the intro….. which is the scariest event that happens in the whole show (so far) portrayed as comedy. In “Bel-Air,” you find out what happened that day, how he really met Jazz, etc. It’s violent, and even in California you see the real problems in their family. Carlton is an addict because he’s a perfectionist and has anxiety. I identify with him on two levels, because I am both versions of Carlton on the shows, and the actor is from my neighborhood (I don’t know him, he was born after I left).

What I have noticed is that if you want to learn anything from powerful people, you don’t try to be a gladiator trying to impress them. You become the Olivia to their Cyrus, but not when they’re working. When they’re sitting on the couch drinking wine and eating popcorn after having fought gloves off all day. Because the fighting isn’t personal and those moments don’t matter as much as a conversation with a good friend about What Kind of Day Has It Been?

When that involved snuggling in my dreams, I knew I was fuccccccccccked, because I knew my dreams would go deeper than that while I found homeostasis. It was hell on earth, because she wasn’t going through those physical changes and I was. When you know your heart has barked up the wrong tree, you can’t tell your heart just to “snap out of it.”If I could write what really happened between us, you’d read it to the tune of a billion dollars, especially if she was my co-author. It would become a franchise series on Netflix, because our story has never been told before. It is an original idea, one that hasn’t been represented on screen much, if ever. It’s why I hope that those 10 seasons are all here. I don’t want to turn my blog into a Netflix series, I just hope that much story has been told.

That I am at least a good enough writer for that. I want our story to be quiet, yet enormous. There are so many differences between us that make us interesting, yet nothing can tear us apart for a moment of any day.

Let me tell you the day I knew what kind of situation my situation was in. How I fell in love with her the second time. First of all, Ifigured out how that woman who’s loved her friend for 10 years and nothing could tear them apart actually worked, so I was more capable than I was in the beginning. Secondly, it was something she said. She said that once marriage was marriage, it was for life. That it existed great sex, no sex, whatever. That’s how lesbian marriages work every single day. I finally had some words and context I really understood because it was written in my language. Everyone knows that couple that’s been together a hundred years, but they lost interest in each other during about year 12.

So, I know why she was angry I blocked her on Facebook, but I wasn’t. I needed to stop seeing her picture in my feed all day. She blocked me on instagram, and I was so grateful because I can’t see her profile unless I’m logged out. The only time I saw them is when they were referer stats on my blog, because I wasn’t logged in on all web broswers. It gave me some room to breathe, and our entire relationship was based on e-mail, not getting to know each other in person or in a group, which created different outcomes. Our relationship existed in text only between us, and it broke my personality in half. That’s why I couldn’t stay with Dana. I had grown past her and we were on separate paths no matter where in the world Supergrover and I were because Internet. She’s handfasted as my yellow string, and it runs between us. I used to call it a chord, because it worked in both our first languages.

The pleasure of my life was when we returned to them. It’s the life experience that helped me grow the most, by far…….

But what I need you to remember is that though it’s Three Days of the Condor visually, the other three days are in the book.

I just haven’t noticed all the ways not speaking each other’s love language has harmed us, because I could see what she was doing to show me love, but I couldn’t see that she was receiving what I was saying with love. She’s hurt beyond belief at some of the things I’ve written and painted it as fact that I’m out to get her when she doesn’t know the first thing about what I have to say, because I’m not talking about our real issues here. She thinks she’s the villain in the story when I’m saying that we tumble and roll. I am often the villain in this story, and have said as much. She sees how much I try to explain how her choices affect me and chooses to believe I’m being nefarious. I’m being INFJ autistic Doctor Who Malcolm Tucker.

In my head, she could be amazing in both roles.

Oh My God What a Perfect Prompt

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Do you believe in fate/destiny?

What does deep and abiding joy feel like to you? I want you to feel mine, because yesterday a broken heart was sewn.

I sent Supergrover a message because I literally couldn’t think of anyone else because I was going through a thing she’d also gone through. I needed strength to go through this thing with another friend, and I’m sorry I can’t be specific. It’s just complicated and not my story to tell or own, which is why I’m not writing about it. Just my reaction to it.

For whatever reason, I broke her open like a coconut, and not only did she help me with my problems, she opened up about our relationship and told me what was really going on………….. which broke me open like a coconut.

She was exactly the velvet hammer I needed when I needed her the most. She’s the biggest badass I’ve ever known, and the most pragmatic. And then she gave me the sweet side of her, the one that’s open and vulnerable and has the same little girl reactions that I do. She was running because she was hurt. I couldn’t help her because I didn’t know she was hurt.

Because I never knew how much I meant to her. I only knew how much she meant to me. Our relationship will hopefully be strong and comfortable in 20 years, just as she said hopefully we’d be 10 years ago.

I am falling over with laughter…….

We’re halfway therrrrrrrrreeeee. WWWWWoooooooaaaah! Livin’ on a prayer………..

Even though she was fucking furious, she was honest to a fault, and as I told her, all I’ve ever really wanted from anyone- the truth, why and how.

She said that she predicted that my response would be angry, and my response was “this is the healthiest e-mail I’ve gotten from you in 10 years. You couldn’t make my day any better, because this morning was a shitshow and now I’m grinning like an idiot.” The reason I was so goddamn happy is that she opened up to me. She told me her side of the story, and hopefully she’ll realize she’s been as wrong as I have and we’ll move on from it.

I was so overwhelmed I shut down completely, because it’s not every day that you get everything you want handed to you on a silver platter….. and I’m bad at transitions. The reason I was in shutdown mode is that it was too much joy to take in all at once, and this is the first time in 10 years that I’ve felt this safe and secure with her. I hope that I can assure her of my feeling of safety and security so that she receives it as well.

Because we both knew it was our fate. Months ago, she said “no matter what happens, we’ll always have a past, present, and future.” We got to a place where it wasn’t good for either of us, but yesterday instead of attacking she joined me in cleaning up our toxic mess. It was glorious. Her letter made me cry so hard I couldn’t move, because I was so moved. It was the longest, most beautiful, most insightful thing she’s written in a very long time.

Even in her anger at me, the way she phrased it was so well-crafted that it made me feel like I can’t keep up with her. Sometimes I stare at her in wonder (her e-mail or her pic, occasionally), thinking “Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ. Is there anything in the world I’m better at than you?” I know it’s true, and that’s what makes me crave her e-mails. Talking to her feels exactly like I felt the first day of 8th grade band…….. which I got into in 7th grade. When you meet better musicians than you, you tend to stick with them because they up your game.

Supergrover is the brain that ups my game instead of the low brass under me……. and yet, she’s my tuba, and I don’t mean that as a joke. Vocally, she’s the basso profundo of my life. Not the top of the chord, the note on which everything else is built.

I hope she at least knows that, both because of the love and work we share. Being able to say “we share” is the most amazing phrase I’ve ever been able to write on this blog. It’s a more important occasion in my life than the time Margaret Cho and Martina Navratilova retweeted me (they liked the marriage article, btw). Supergrover doesn’t say “I love you” in words. She does it by despite everything, still showing up. It may even be begrudgingly at times, but she’s fucking THERE.

She heard the distress in my voice, and she came right to me, just like I knew she would. What I did not expect is for her to explain her radio silence, essentially writing me a blog entry back.

It’s not that hard to imagine why I’d want to marry that, is it? Someone that opened up to me the way I open up here? Getting all the feelings back into our relationship is what turned the tide, because I told her that “my way is to work through things, and your way is to avoid or lightly move past things. The reason we’re joined at the spine is because our trauma is similar, but we have different reactions to it. We’ll deal with it the rest of our lives, and I’ll do it happily because I accepted her warts and all 15 minutes into our relationship. Or it seemed that way, anyway. That she could have however much of me she wanted, because I trusted her more than I’ve ever trusted anyone. She called me on some bullshit lies I was telling myself back in the day, that I was blaming myself for something that wasn’t my fault and I needed to stop seeing it that way.

It was all transference. I fell in love with my therapist because I’m queer and Will Hunting isn’t. The reason I trust her with my very life is that I’ve never had Robin Williams as a doctor.

And that’s the real story.