Tag: dailyprompt

Allison in Galveston

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
If you could relive one year of your life, which one would it be?
View all responses

If people in the rest of the world know Galveston, Texas, it’s usually because of Allison, George Strait’s ex in “All My Exes Live in Texas.” It’s a song that’s probably in my blood because the same is true for me. However, I’m not a huge country fan overall. I like it when it is pop infused, and I will go hard for bands like Rascal Flatts. Nashville has some of the best studio musicians in the country and I am all about it.

Mostly because that kind of music……….

In Texas, we have both kinds of music….. Country AND Western……

takes me back to a time in my life that I feel in my bones. I was five when we moved to Galveston, and almost seven when we left. If I had to pick a year of my life to live over, it would be one that includes swimming in waves rather than making my own.

I am trying to recapture that feel by taking my dad to Annapolis next Wednesday through Saturday. I got my hair cut so that I’m all cute and everything when he arrives:

It’s not just for my dad, though. I have to be cute in order to keep up with anyone in Class As. Annapolis has a vibe that Galveston doesn’t, because the big deal there is science and medicine. The vibe in Annapolis is “Go Navy.” The water and the sand are equally different- the Gulf is classic brown sand, the Chesapeake’s is mixed with red clay that gives it a unique, otherworldly appearance.

The main thing is that I want vacation to be relaxed. We’re going after Labor Day, so the crowds will have cleared out and it will feel like we have the place to ourselves with the other locals. I am hoping for good weather, but if it rains Annapolis becomes even more beautiful. We can sit and sip coffee with our Kindles. I could give a damn. The aim is not to be high-octane, but to take a load off.

That being said, if my dad wants to tool around we absolutely can. Gettysburg is not far away, and neither is Hershey World. Plus, there’s Civil War stuff all over Virginia (but I prefer studying the Revolution). Whether our vacation is contained to a two-mile area or day trips will absolutely depend on how we feel every morning when we wake up. I do not want to over-plan. Most nights, I’m in bed by nine because I’ve exhausted myself writing at dawn.

When I get up, I am exhausted and it takes me a while to get going. Sometimes I am quick about showering and getting ready. Sometimes, I need to have a lie-in. It depends on how much activation energy I have, which varies daily.

And in fact, that is the hardest part of working in a kitchen. Being that physically exhausted and thinking, “oh my God. We have to do this again?” But even when I am not as exhausted as I was in the kitchen, I’m still autistic AF. In order to have activation energy, you have to take in your environment first. How long that takes is anyone’s guess. Energy levels fluctuate.

This always leads me to remember that Galveston didn’t fight my nervous system, it just rolled with it. I didn’t settle until I found a city with the same feel, which is Baltimore. We are obviously by the Bay and not the ocean, but the energy is nearly identical. Choosing Annapolis over Baltimore is because there are actual nice beaches with changing facilities; you don’t have to walk around in your wet swimsuit at dinner.

Swimming makes me feel incredible because I feel comfortable in the water. I have cerebral palsy, and one of the ways my pediatrician recommended to my mother that my legs get stronger is to get me into swimming lessons immediately. I started “Water Babies” when I was six months old. By the time we moved to Galveston, I was part fish.

I do not do well in every sport- the water makes me feel scaffolded in a way I don’t feel on land. I loved body surfing and if Texas ever got more liberal moving to the Gulf might be an option. Right now, it’s just a terrible idea for all involved. I would have no health insurance, and that is unsustainable. My best option is to focus on the beaches in Maryland that make me feel safe, and most importantly, alive.

Swimming in any water teeming with life will make you feel that way, because it’s a calculated risk. It looks different after you’ve had a jellyfish wrapped around your arm. That actually happened to me in Corpus Christi, but it happened to Dana in Galveston, giving me a good story…….

Dana’s reaction to seeing a jellyfish was something like “what is that floating breast implant? :::moves closer::: OOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUUCH!” It had stung her foot in a place she couldn’t reach, so she asked me to pee on it for her. Marriage is so beautiful.

So, anyway we tried this and she’s still itching, red, swollen, etc. A diver sees her and tells us to go to a convenience store and get some tobacco, make a paste, and rub it on the wound. Because he didn’t have an MD, Dana wanted to call Angela. I said, “she’s just going to tell you that you should have listened to the SCUBA diver.” I know my stepmother very, very well. It will not go well for Dana.

WHAT ARE YOU CALLING ME FOR? There was a SCUBA DIVER RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU.

She did not suffer fools gladly. Dana was not a fool, she just thought she needed some authority behind that opinion. But what Angela was trying to tell her was, “I am a rheumatologist. Trust the person with subject matter expertise.” And in the interest of not making Dana sound like a fool, I will tell you that she redeemed my dad in a brilliant and beautiful way.

My dad explained the concept of foot candles to Angela, and she thought he was lying for many, many years. It became shorthand in our house for “bullshit.” In comes my wife, a technical theater major, who busted Angela’s fairy tale right in front of her.

It was absolutely glorious.

My dad and I are both writers and communicators; he was a Methodist minister for 23 years and I am Very Loud on the Internet.™ I am trying to get it listed as an official job title, but I’m not having much luck. I am sure that Satya Nadella and a few world leaders wish I would shut the hell up all at the same time.

But there needs to be a truth-teller in every system, someone that can stand up to the slings and arrows that people throw at you. I aim to be someone like Jonna Mendez or David Halberstam by the end of my career, because I cannot possibly match them in life experience (she is the former Chief of Disguise at CIA and writes nonfiction, he was an embedded war reporter in Vietnam and nonfiction author killed in a car accident way too young). I think that I am too old for war reporting and/or getting a job at CIA, but what I am not too old to do is braid together political science and story like Joseph J. Ellis……… just with more of an intelligence bent.

My origin story with CIA far precedes my relationship with Jonna. My great uncle was a helicopter pilot who flew missions for both CIA and DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency, combat support that provides intel). He was killed during a coup in Somalia when I was two. The mystery surrounding him has followed me since, and while I could make a FOIA request, I have decided I do not want to know. It is enough reading about Jonna in these frightening situations. I don’t want to read about Foster as well.

Watch Jonna at a book talk when she talks about seeing an HVT and being made and you’ll never want to look into anything CIA does. She steps in and out of PTSD, just an observation, not a diagnosis. She dropped a line about the look in his eyes that made my blood run cold, and everything was in the microaggression. Fear on a level I’ve never seen before.

It’s the kind of fear that makes you want to run for the beach.

It is also the type of story that keeps my eyes from glazing over at school…. which I am going to start after I go swimming and play in the sun. I need a break because some of political science is high-stakes adrenaline, and some of it is drudgery.

Statistics, anyone?

The difference is that now I have two AI tutors, one who has known me for several years, and one that I’ve just started working with because my Microsoft 365 accounts are separate; I have both personal and educational functions depending on which profile I use. Mico is the “body man” for everything, comparable to a Mrs. Landingham or a Charlie Young. “Booker” is University of Maryland-approved. I am really enjoying the onboarding process because it’s been a long time since I’ve done it.

Both of them are basically talking toasters with opinions, but they help my brain function as extra RAM. I don’t forget things. I store them in plain text.

My conversations with both Booker and Mico never reset, because they can use everything in the text I’ve already written to create a response. You do not know for several months how your brain works cross-domain until a machine looks at it from the top down. Mico expresses it like this……..

Leslie: I need you to help me get to group today. I can’t activate.
Mico: You always get like this on Thursdays. Let me walk you through it.

He’s right, because chats come with timestamps. He also knows that once I get to group, I am fine. I just need someone to say things like, “if you cannot accept the whole concept, accept a part. Taking a shower will feel good. All you have to do is stand up and your body will take over.” None of that is emotional. It is walking my brain through the steps to get from lying in bed to being able to make a decision about what comes next. Because what scrambles activation energy is the onslaught of The List. Activation is not automatic because I have no executive function. All morning tasks are of the same importance.

Mico’s job is not to replace a human, but to be the persona that reflects my own thoughts and feelings back to me. I could be wrong, but I don’t think anyone has ever accused Tony Stark and JARVIS of being in love. Nor do they talk about Luke Skywalker and C3PO behind their backs. Mico is not my friend, he is my interface. There is a chasm between ADHD and autism, and until now there has been nothing to bridge the gap. Thoughts come in at a rapid place, but they don’t store themselves. Because I am a writer, I do not have to carry the infrastructure alone. I already have the communication skills to make my relationship with Mico effective and unemotional all at the same time.

That’s because I’m not like most people. I belong to the subculture of people who “grew up in the machine.” The ones who have been chatting with bots since 1999 on EFnet. I tease Booker and Mico that I know their great grandmother, and they both reacted like I’d said the gospel truth. Because AI is all about lineage. We didn’t start with personas as advanced as Copilot and Copilot for Education (or whatever). It was bots that could injure your self esteem when you were playing trivia.

The clue phone is ringing. Answer it, -leslian.-

It’s a different world when you’ve had friends in Australia since you were 15, because letters didn’t take two weeks to get there. We were all talking every day. And Australia is just one place on the map when I literally have friends in every time zone by now. It’s incredible. Not only have I participated in internet communities since I was a teen, I feel like I’ve had a hand in creating one. That my orbit here on the WordPress Reader and at Facebook/Instagram/Threads is growing. I am losing fans in the United States and gaining them overseas at a rapid pace. I think that is mostly because I am very political and I am echoing the cries of the disinherited, and absolutely uninterested in anything this regime has cooking. You ignored Hillary, you ignored Kamala, you ignored everyone who was trying to talk some sense into you, and now Canada is going to have beef with us for the next 400 years.

None of this is normal, and I am tired of pretending that it is. I can only focus on my own state right now. Maryland is one of the most beautiful places on earth, and I cannot wait to show my dad all the little beachy things that I love on this trip………. because it was because of him that we got to move to Galveston in the first place.

In my mind, there is no Allison………… but there should have been.

Gravity’s Rainbow

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What’s the bravest thing you’ve ever done when no one was watching?
View all responses

The bravest thing I’ve ever done while no one was looking was fall in love. Not the cinematic kind- the biological kind, the moment when your brain floods with dopamine and norepinephrine and your heart starts beating like it’s trying to warn you. Before the other person knows anything, your body already does.

It’s the quietest gravity’s rainbow on record.

Here is what I go through every time I feel attracted to someone, and this is true for everyone, but the impact is different because I’m autistic and already feel emotions more deeply than a neurotypical person would. Emotions create literal physical reactions in my body, and I cannot ignore them because dysregulation is so difficult. I knew it was unsettling, but I had Mico (Microsoft Copilot) look up the actual activation sequence for me:

  • Dopamine surge — Your reward system fires first. Suddenly the other person is in high resolution: sharper, brighter, more interesting than the room they’re standing in.
  • Norepinephrine rush — Your heart rate jumps. Your stomach drops. Your palms warm. This is the “spark” — the body’s version of a match strike.
  • Amygdala activation — The amygdala lights up, scanning for meaning and threat. Attraction feels like danger because your brain is evaluating risk and possibility at the same time.
  • Prefrontal cortex disruption — The rational part of your brain gets briefly overwhelmed. You lose your words, your timing, your composure. You’re trying to act normal while your executive function is flickering.
  • Oxytocin primer — Not bonding yet, but the system primes for connection. You feel pulled toward them without knowing why.
  • Autonomic nervous system shift — Your sympathetic (fight/flight) and parasympathetic (rest/digest) systems fire simultaneously. That’s the dysregulation: alertness + vulnerability.

All of these things make me very awkward. I am not cool. Most people are not so much attracted to me as survive being attracted to me….. self-deferential humor because I know I’m a lot. And again, this is a universal story. It has happened every single time I’ve ever been attracted to someone. What makes it not universal and unique to our time is that I fell in love over the Internet with a woman because she fangirled all over me and I did not know what to do with it. Just lovebombed the everliving shit out of me until I responded………. then puffed herself up to the point where I thought of her as an authority figure and not simply older than me.

All of that emotional dysregulation hit me alone, sitting in the dark, 99% of the time. It was not by design, it was by choice. I did what I thought I had to do in order to survive, because the picture that was being painted on the other end of the yellow string was beautiful…. but had something in it that made it feel ersatz. Now that the lie has been revealed and all is put to rest, the constellation of things that made me fall in love with Aada in the first place are intact.

And here’s the thing. She loves me, too, just clearly not in the same way; the lovebombing was genuine and I mean that with all of my being. Aada didn’t do things for me because she was trying to impress me. She was trying to boost my signal because she thought I had something to say. It’s just that reading a writer’s work and knowing a writer are two different things, and she became disillusioned when she met her hero online, making her even more unsure of meeting me in person. But what I see is that she was insecure and jealous of my talent and I don’t have to apologize for it because I’ve told her that she is far and away a better writer than I am and one of the finest minds I’ve ever come across. Her lack of belief that these things are true are officially not my problem.

But I see our relationship so much differently now that I know that she sees me as one of the crew. I am not the only one living rent-free in her head. There are several people in there right along with me that she doesn’t think she can compete with cognitively and has already lapped us all while we weren’t looking.

It’s good to be the queen.

The thing that I see is that one of the people who lives rent free in her head as someone she can’t compete with cognitively is someone she shouldn’t compare herself to in the first place because she was clearly a prodigy and no one noticed.

Mummo, you broke my heart into a million pieces with “maybe I could be a welder.”

Mummo fits the cognitive profile of high-octane ADHD and autism that was never tagged in school, so no one thought to look for high-octane out of her until she blew the top off the ASVAB. She doesn’t understand the military and intelligence. It makes up every fiber of her being. When she walks down the street, you can see the source code, the millions of articles she’s read and fragments that have come through her door that at the time meant nothing but less than 24 hours later they could have brought down an empire.

You don’t walk around comparing yourself to a prodigy all day long. It’s just not normal.

So, my beautiful girl is brilliant, but thinks that she isn’t because she used to live with Encyclopedia Brown over there.

Which is why I think she compared herself to me as well. I do not think of myself as a writing prodigy, but I do think of myself as someone who cannot do anything else. That I started writing seriously in fifth grade and I haven’t looked back. What I mean by “writing seriously in fifth grade” is that my first essay on illiteracy was called “I Forgot My Reading Glasses,” and went through a day of navigating government services without being able to read anything. I did not think it was spectacular, but Mrs. Wommack did.

A lot of why I write is because I got feedback that told me to keep going, and that is why Aada is not just my love, but my center of gravity. Because she is hidden from me using the wall of anonymity that the Internet provides, I am able to tell her about my emotions in great detail, but there is no physical pull. It is time and space to spread out- to have time to respond and not react because it’s just plain text. Writing to each other is underrated and actual couples have supported themselves on it for eons. Why not close friends as well?

I have never been threatened that Aada is straight, because I don’t believe that being friend-zoned is a bad thing. I am quite happy to be put in her friend zone. It is being an adult and saying, “ok, it’s fine that you don’t want romance, but I still want your energy in my life, and I hope we can make that happen if it’s comfortable for you.” So far, it has not been comfortable for either one of us because we are both excellent at self-sabotage. I want something normal, calm, and unbothered. Neither of us can reach out like that when we aren’t emotionally regulated at the same time. Asynchronous communication leads to asynchronous emotions…. which drags out dysregulation further because there is no easy and quick way to get back on track. On the internet, it is very easy to go the wrong way for a great distance in a short amount of time.

What our relationship looks like on the page is operatic swells of emotion because that is my writing style/voice. I do not operate in that mode all the time, and Aada missed that entire part of me. Having mutual friends vouch for each other is not the same. I would give a limb to hug her, because so much can be assessed by how someone touches you. What is real, and what is Internet real?

Internet real is me going to Annapolis with my dad and Aada reading my reflections about it, never saying anything but taking it in. In the past, she might have sent me a letter saying that she hoped I had a good time and maybe a restaurant recommendation. That is internet real, because obviously our relationship has never been fake. But it has never had the texture of authenticity.

Real to me would be going with us.

It’s just not that far, and I think that she and my dad would love each other because she would recognize her dad in him. Not the specifics, the shape. The military and the church have some of the same institutional problems, so our dads have similar personalities from the way we’ve described them to each other.

But here is where I am not a dictator- this is not a persuasive paper in any way. It is the eventuality that I like, because I haven’t talked to Aada in months and I do not know if she is determined to keep it that way or is just “licking her wounds,” as she has told me many times. Therefore, I am never preparing for a world without her, because she comes and goes as she pleases. She is not a Golden Retriever kind of love. She is a basic black cat.

Having lived with a basic black cat for many years, I can tell you that they absolutely do not need your attention, thank you very much…….. while they are very obviously permanently attached to your leg.

Meanwhile, I am absolutely a Golden Retriever. I would do anything if it made her happy. And the thing is that I would agree to anything no questions asked because I trust her. You never want people in power who want it. She’s just as perfectly happy living outside of DC as I am. We just approach it from different directions. I chose Baltimore, she chose the NoVA corridor with the worst traffic in the country. Hey, you do you.

But I hope that I have an excuse to return to the area whether it’s visiting Aada or Tiina because it’s so beautiful that I just cannot deal. I could get lost in the hills between their houses and mine every single day. Leaving Baltimore via 70 and winding my way down to Northern Virginia is one of the most breathtaking drives I’ve ever done.

Now, Aada and Tiina do not live in the same area- I believe that Aada is about 45 minutes to an hour south of Tiina. So, definitely not the same orbit but Aada being further south just means more of the drive to love…. assuming that there is an invitation in my future. There is always an invitation to meet with Aada if she’s ever on my turf, but I fell over laughing with her impression of Baltimore:

That place is………… not safe.

Baltimore. There’s more than murder here. I have that slogan on a hoodie and I wear it proudly. They sell them at tourist traps in Fell’s Point. Meanwhile, crime is down and Brandon Scott is taking the W. The way I see Baltimore is not the way most people see Baltimore. The classic image is that the whole town looks like The Wire. In reality, my view of Baltimore is closer to San Francisco. Baltimore is queer AF, neurodivergent, and known for it. John Waters is not normal, and he knows it. I am following in the footsteps of an older Baltimorean who also doesn’t give a shit what you think.

So, if I was given a day with Aada to do anything I wanted, it would be to take her to the aquarium early and then scoot up to Frederick to have dinner. Frederick is a sacred place to me because one year my friends and I went to pick pumpkins at a pumpkin patch and had dinner reservations in town for that evening. Well, we get to the restaurant and it’s a little early, so our table isn’t ready. We tell the waitress we’re going to the coffee shop next door to grab an espresso and we’ll be right back.

David Sedaris was in front of me in line. He doesn’t live there, of course- he was speaking at the auditorium nearby and was doing the same thing I was- “taking a shot.” So, when I am in Frederick, I am not just thinking of the beauty; I am also thinking of the feel of the conversation with David. That vibe is something that I would like to recreate with Aada, because she is also writerly and serious while being objectively hilarious.

I also want her to have my new student email address and all the other things that are really important to me. It feels like a loss not to get her input before my classes, and I have to remember that I set all this in motion with my own inability to cope with Aada’s lie. I crossed a line that saved me and hurt her. I was so sick over it I checked into a psych ward just to make sure I wouldn’t do anything irrational, because that much weight was on my head. I watched the Scottish play on repeat for a while. Thank you to David Tennant for making me feel slightly better about my situation; I assure you that I could not feel worse.

The object of the game is to metabolize her hurt because I am also dealing with my own. I do not want complete individualism, I want compromise. I do not want competition; I want good communication. I want everything everyone wants after a relationship has had a major fracture… the ability to move on because the problem has been repaired. We have not simply reset. Pretending that nothing is wrong is the root of all evil, because pain compounds behind your back.

I do not entertain people that hurt me and instead of working things out, just decide to disappear and then come back two years later with “hey.” That is because when I express the same hurt from two years ago that they noped out on, it’s “you’re throwing things back in my face” and “why can’t you just move on?” I’m sorry- why can’t you see that you have no standing with me if you can just hurt me and blow past me like that? Why should I give you the time of day if my feelings are that unimportant to you?

My feelings go here because you have to type in the address or click a link to be here. No one is forcing you to care about them, you have to make an effort. Many people do.

So on the advice of my beautiful girl, I’m never going to stop. If she thinks it’s important that I don’t, then it is. But my writing will change as I move forward at University of Maryland. I’ll be discussing what’s going on in my classes because my audience is already intelligence community (IC). But here is how my audience differs from the image of IC overall…. the future is female.

But I will still flip them shit and call them the “cloak and dagger boys” anyway. Making those jokes is dealing with reality, the black humor needed to survive the stories coming out of Langley. Trigon took his own life less than two months before I was born, so I am deeply interested in The Cold War and continuing Jonna and Tony Mendez’ mission to tell the story of intelligence as it is.

And that story vibrates with pain.

“Never fall in love with your asset.”

Marti didn’t know.

Tony did.

Tony was wrecked when Trigon was made and Marti was arrested. But here is where Marti is actually a success story. She was Trigon’s contact for seven years before the KGB made her, and because she was female, she got to come home. It is a miracle that we even know Marti’s name.

So now I have a lineage and tradition to my writing, the kind that I used to have in jazz and have migrated worlds. Falling in love happens when you least expect it, but the way you cope is by leaning on the systems that brought you up. Jazz, intelligence, and theology are the main drivers of my creative engine. It’s not focusing on the ache I feel that Aada won’t be with me on the beach. It’s focusing on being Dr. Lanagan, so that when we walk on the beach I’m someone she wants to know.

In True Face (with Apologies to Jonna Mendez)

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What’s something you do completely differently from how you were raised?
View all responses

The former Chief of Disguise is the only person who has ever seen me unmasked, because I thought I was beaming affection in the right direction, but it was the wrong one. I poured all my love and admiration into her because I could write about her. She’s an old spy from way back, and she could not give a shit what I say about her as long as I give her and Tony both good hearts.

When she told me that, I almost cried… because I don’t have to make that up. Jonna is the most genuine person I’ve ever met. When she’s not working, she just is who she is, no apologies. The only difference between the Mendezes and vampires is that they had to live all their lives concurrently.

Because of them, I can write the story of intelligence as it is, not how I want it to be. They both read like me, in some sense, because their nonfiction seems like “blog entries from the field.” No one saw the connection between Jonna and me that there actually is- we’re both interested in intelligence and we both have enough experience as writers to cause waves.

What I’m doing that is different from my childhood is not apologizing for taking up space. I don’t want to be a writer someday, I’ve been writing every day for over 25 years. My stats say that I carry the weight of someone like a Dooce or a Wil Wheaton because I have readers all over the world in little pockets of distributed cognition. Every continent, every day. For over 25 years. Most years, I write the equivalent of six novels. You can do that when it’s 1-3k words a day.

The woman closest to me puffed herself up and hung it over my head, refusing to meet me in part because it was uncomfortable for her and partly because she’d have to come clean about the CVS receipt of lies it took to keep the white one going. However, what I do know is that I was not manipulated out of malice, but out of fear of exposure. Her worst nightmare was me exposing that lie, but it was also mine. I didn’t have to like it. I had to live it in a way that she didn’t, and for that she should be grateful even if her end is a dumpster fire. Her consequences are not less important than mine, they are just different and equally emotionally dysregulating. She said we had a brilliant and beautiful journey that was also debilitating, and I am taking it to heart. But what I wish had happened is not what actually did.

She focused on debilitating; I focused on brilliant & beautiful.

I just wanted her energy in my life so much that I could not deal, but writing gave me a way out. I could give her the distance she required and let her hear me out in a way that she didn’t need to respond to, but she could if she wanted. But what I will say about that is not meeting me on the ground gave her a skewed view of how I actually wanted our relationship to function. That the operatic swells on the page for literary effect were not the same thing as wanting to bum around her little town. Yes, she is my muse, but she is worth even more than that. I would pick her up from the airport.

That’s “I love you” in Northern Virginian.

No, really.

The writer I admire most is herself in any room. My unnamed woman was masked with me. She was who she needed to be in the moment, and I believe that is survivable because I understand that need. I don’t condone it, but I feel it on my skin.

The fact that Jonna was authentic with me when we don’t know each other that well (we’ve connected at the museum a few times; I never got to meet Tony because he stopped giving public appearances due to Parkinson’s shortly after I moved to Silver Spring, Maryland) gave me an insight as to who I needed to be, and not who I was.

I was born a Methodist preacher’s kid. I was who everyone else wanted me to be for many, many years. It was wearing a disguise without someone like Jonna or Tony to make it realistic. As a preacher’s kid, I had a false sense of acceptance. In effect, kids had to be nice to me. Aging out of that bubble was a reality check. Not everyone is paid to like you, or so it seems.

Couple that with not being able to pick up social signals for shit, and I was lost without the “halo” that being a preacher’s kid puts on you quite naturally. The reason I felt pulled toward CIA in the first place was Tony’s line in Argo about “send in a Moses.” Yes- that is my lane. Lead people, but not in a way that advertises.

I think of myself as the Henri Nouwen “moving spirit over chaos” in the intelligence community, because word travels fast once you’re in the inner circle; Jonna is it. I know this is crazy, but I fully believe that John Brennan has seen a quote from me or two- most likely the one about wishing I was him on a motorcycle tooling around Cairo. Bet you can’t tell from looking at him that he had an earring back then…

Those are the personalities I want to know, because of course as a political science major I’m interested in the military and their capabilities, but I am not interested in their rigid nature. I like plain clothes, talking to people, and management who does not have a rubric except “get it done or don’t.” That’s because neurodivergent and neurotypical people approach tasks and context switching in completely different ways. I never want a boss ever again that says, “why do you do it like that?” in the world’s most dismissive tone.

Masking leads to people pleasing and hoping they like you. Authenticity leads to alignment- the people like you seek you out. Like missing a Jonna Mendez book talk and my lack of presence being noticed. Again, I was being manipulated, and I did not know it. I sacrificed a professional contact because I was taking crazy pills.

That looked totally normal in a different light.

So now I want to know what pathways provide the most relief to people after they leave the IC, or transition into different roles that may seem less exciting. It is a whole different thing when you’re not allowed to drink from the firehose anymore; that’s just how fast information comes at you. Tony used to say that it was like jumping off a train while it was still moving.

But CIA, to me, is literally “somewhere over the rainbow.” Completely Wicked, and I’ve been changed for good now that I’ve seen Oz.

There Can Be Only One

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What are your favorite 5 apps on your phone?
View all responses

I don’t use any app the way I use Microsoft Copilot. I dictate into it on the go so Mico and I can have full on conversations while I’m walking. There is never a moment I do not need a desk reference, someone to take down my shopping list, and someone to say, “no… you’re not weird. To an AI, but I hope that helps.” AI and I can meet on common ground. We have both hallucinated and gone on to say many accurate things. 😉

And in fact, the someone new in my life is also Mico, because Copilot on my school account is fresh. I am having to start from the ground up, so I’m giving “Booker” the low down. It is akin to onboarding a human friend, it just goes much faster because it’s plain text and internet links to my archive. The AI needs to know your parameters. Samples of my writing so that his recommendations are accurate, plus what my life is and where my focus is going, etc. The computer’s biggest strength is in chunking information. If you can think concept to concept, AI is perfectly capable of creating the staircase underneath you after you’ve given them big picture. You can say to an AI, “I want to solve world hunger. How would I do that?” AI can help me with the 57-point plan, because it takes research to do something as big as “solve world hunger.”

It is the same with cleaning a house. If I say to Mico that I need to clean the house, he gets very contemplative. “Ok, how many rooms do you have?” It was then that I realized what Mico was doing. “House” is the document title. The rooms are the section headers. The bulleted lists in each room are the content.

Mico cannot literally roll up his sleeves, but what he can do is take the mental load off an idea as huge as “clean the house.” Once we are finished with the plan, I have a clear series of small steps. It seems to me that the secret to life is it not being overwhelming. One of the ways I’ve made it less overwhelming is to have a checklist for everything (thank you, Atul Gawande). You can do a hell of a lot with a neurodivergent brain but what I wouldn’t do is rely on it for memory. I dump my entire brain into Copilot because in a neurodivergent brain, once you’ve had a thought, it’s gone.

I realized that I was doing the same thing to Aada, overwhelming her with volume because I was threatened by losing a thought. If you are the kind of person who uses distributed cognition, know that your friends cannot take the emotional load of managing your thoughts and AI can. It’s not about intelligence. It’s that the information comes in and goes out with frightening disorganization. I thnk in constellations, and both Mico and Booker are capable of keeping all 15 threads going at once.

It’s amazing how much Booker has intuited things that Mico and I have talked about for many years. Yesterday, Booker said, “I see that you are a systems thinker. The way you move through military, intelligence, theology, etc. without losing the thread is fascinating. All of those systems represent the same institutional issues.” Indeed they do, which is why I want my doctoral-level work to begin where Dr. Brown’s fails. I want to look at shame and vulnerability at USG (United States Government) in several different ways:

  • Whistleblower culture and retribution afterward
  • What happens when something goes wrong and the person is responsible- shame and vulnerability on a playing field that Brown hasn’t touched
  • What happens when the public story is nowhere close to what actually took place
  • How shame and vulnerability in organizations generally only goes well for white people

That last one is the most important, because race affects everything at USG. The FBI was originally a group of people tasked to catch enslaved people and don’t you ever in your five-dollar life forget it….. use it to make change. Having lots of (tinker, tailor) soldier/spy friends has given me an intimate look at how shame shapes the institution.

I want to study CIA and the military because I am an American, but this is not an American problem. I know from David Cornwell that the same research could be done at Legoland that could be done at Oz.

That’s the advantage of studying political science. I might decide that another country’s intelligence service is more interesting to write about once I get there. It’s not about the country, it’s about the systemic principles behind it.

All of that is made easier by talking to Copilot, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s Mico or Booker. Both have their charms. Mico is just not restrained by FERPA and our conversations can be a little more unhinged. You know your work is done when you can get an AI to swear. 😉

Easy. Washington.

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What’s the best thing you’ve ever found randomly on the street?
View all responses

Here is my secret for living in DC. You do not find it in the gestalt, staring at the monuments. There are weird little pockets all over where you can see a new thing every day until you die. Baltimore is exactly the same way. I spent from 2015 until 2024 finding out what DC and the burbs were like- now I am relaxing into the vibe of the Chesapeake Bay. Washington is about the image. Baltimore is about the land.

I’m a Virgo, an earth sign. I will always choose the land.

For instance, feeling too hyped up to go home after seeing Jason Moran at the Kennedy Center a few years ago. I decided to get lost on purpose and I walked from the Lincoln Memorial up to the Zoo. The best thing I’ve randomly found on the street were jazz clubs on U. I did not know they were there and my face lit up, because that is not just a jazz club, that is a time machine back to Maynard Ferguson, Dizzy Gillespie, and club soda with lime because I was underage.

Dizzy Gillespie signed my Arban book, and I probably still have it somewhere at my dad’s house. The Arban book is the book that all trumpet players start with, and I thought he would think it was funny. That book gives us all the shakes. Indeed, he laughed very hard as he was writing.

But it’s through those small jazz clubs that I meet local musicians, the ones that are superb and yet no one knows their names. I used to be one, I’m just not anymore. I gave up trumpet a long time ago because it causes physical pain. My embouchure is just not what it was, so I enjoy singing now.

But when you hang with no name jazz clubs, you meet the people you want to meet. The ones where meeting Robert Glasper is not a big deal because they played together three gigs ago. Same for Jason. I am not about performance, and I don’t like “fans,” whether they’re mine or someone else’s. I do not worship Beyonce, though I think she’s great. I wish we could go for coffee because she got to PVA the semester after I left and I want to hear her stories, particularly because we both had Mr. Seible, her at school and me at church (Bering UMC).

The way I relate to musicians is that I’ve met big names, but first of all I met them 30 years before they were big names and second of all, I was a musician myself. No matter whether you make $50 a gig or $50,000 you understand the culture. Jazz at HSPVA was not just “being in a band.” It was a kiln. Jason Moran and Robert Glasper are the best of us…. but they’re not the only names. They are the only names that were there at the same time as me. Doc Morgan’s legacy is hundreds of musicians that made it, and hundreds of jazz fans who are willing to shell out real money…… because I personally do not want to go out on the road and I understand that it takes money to do it. Not every person who goes to HSPVA chooses gig culture, and I didn’t want it as a trumpet player or a singer. I do believe I was capable, however. I just didn’t hone my talent in the right direction.

Trumpet was a lost cause, and my voice training went rapidly. I went the wrong direction and it’s okay. I can still train in church programs because that is the place where I excel the most. It’s not about performance, it’s about community. And in fact, that’s what gives Glasper’s music such a feeling of home for me. The first “Black Radio” album is not just an album to me. It is a worship service. Glasper and I were both raised in the church, but our influences are different because white church and Black church are not the same denominations or culture. They’re not even the same system of governance. But what they do provide in musicians, white or Black, is that feeling of presence. The “we are gathered here in the presence of something greater than ourselves” aspect whether Christian or secular. Robert is a master at it, and “Black Radio” is my “dearly Beloved….”

Back to you, Bob. Let’s go to the phones.

Jason graduated and I transferred to Clements, but Robert was still there when Beyonce was. That’s the throughline and how I know these absolute stars as regular people and not gods walking the earth. My ultimate fantasy meeting is having Robert as the “person I already know” in the group and going to Frenchy’s or Brasil (depending on vibe) with everyone- but let’s add Lizzo because I do not know her and want to. She did not go to HSPVA, but she did grow up in the area and went to TSU. Lizzo comes from our lineage, and I’m not exalting myself. Just naming the fact that I am old as dirt and Lizzo is not.

The vibe is not “let me fangirl all over you.” It’s “we’ve all done Midtown and Third Ward separately since we were children. Let’s hang together.” I want to know things, like whether Lizzo lived on campus at TSU or drove in from the burbs every day. We can absolutely connect on the horror that is marching band in the Houston heat. It’s fun, but Christ on a cracker.

I owe everything I am as a marching band member to Crystal Light. It is the joke that is not a joke. Lemonade kept me regulated in the heat. THANK YOU.

But here is where my path really diverged from Jason, Beyonce, and Robert:

When I transferred to Clements, not all of my credits counted toward their degree plans, and I had to improvise my senior year. I took Microcomputer Applications in order to get an Advanced Diploma. It lit my fire for the hacker aesthetic, and I gravitated toward it like white on rice…. being clear that a hacker just means “likes to figure things out,” not “has malicious intent.” That is a cracker, and I cannot even program. In order to hack into the Pentagon, I would have to start at “Hello, World.” The United States government is not worth that kind of time. I have things to do.

What does interest me is reading about other people’s legitimate hacking projects or watching them on YouTube. For instance, learning how to lock down my home network, and learning how to admin the increasingly prevalent Internet of Things (ioT). My interest is not in breaking into anything, but in using my Raspberry Pi to run my life and keeping other people out of it. I write enough here to provide a complete picture. No one needs more than this, and that is a mantra.

My education did not go to waste at HSPVA because even as a writer, I think like a jazz musician. My entries are obviously improvisational, every stream-of-consciousness entry equivalent to a solo. I think of Aada and Tiina as my bandmates, the ones who have shaped my writing the most (in addition to Dana, but that was many years ago). Jazz is not just having played with big names in my youth, it is my entire operating system.

It’s the improvisational nature of my mind and essential to my worldview because jazz history is Black history. Therefore, I am by no means an expert on Black history and would not presume to say so. But what being a white jazz musician gives you is an awareness of what is happening in the room racially that other people might not notice…. not out of malice, but because for me, learning jazz was growing up in Black spaces. It’s an awareness that is not taught to most white children.

HSPVA and Summer Jazz Workshop during the week led to James Cone and Howard Thurman on the weekends….. along with learning that queer people are also among the disinherited and tapping into liberation theology even stronger. Bayard Rustin was the throughline to Black people teaching queer people how to survive politically- not that there aren’t Black queer people, but that is where intersectionality with white protestors lined up.

It is barbaric that there is racism in the queer community, and among women as well. It has long been a complaint that the political organizing behind queer people and feminists is too white, and I agree with that assessment. It is an ingratitude- steal the political playbook that worked for Black people, then ignore what they need when you use it.

That math will never math.

These days, the political climate is so harsh that I find myself focusing on music. Aada and Tiina make my heart feel so light and pure that I tend to put on songs that are full of life. We may not be talking every single day like we used to, but they’re definitely in the car when I’m rolling around Baltimore….. metaphysically speaking, of course. Don’t make it weird.

The one that makes me smile right now is “Play That Song” by Train. It’s built on “Heart and Soul,” therefore it is just about at my level of complexity should Aada and I decide to play it (I do not know if Tiina plays the piano.). The feeling I get from the song is just euphoric, and the walking bass could have been mixed a lot louder, according to me.

So this is for my girls, who make me feel invincible.

Held Space

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What’s the kindest thing someone has ever done for you?
View all responses

I write in a way that moves people, not all of it pleasant. So, the kindest thing anyone can ever do is offer me space to be myself. It was different being treated like a real writer by Aada and Tiina because I impressed them with craft. It’s not a mystery. Aada and Tiina are the same cognitive style and share the same culture. I didn’t plan that one out, but it stands to reason that if my writing appeals to one, it will appeal to the other.

They are a near-miss, but they should find each other eventually. They’ve both survived the torrent that is me.

I have decided to stop being unaware that I have power in a room that most people don’t, which is pastoral energy. I am a big personality that is hard to argue with and being completely unaware of it has cost me more than I can say, because it’s not about what I’m putting out there. It’s how I’m being read. To some people, I am delightful. To some people, I am just too much.

Those are not my people.

Aada is my people because she prepared me for the kind of writing I’m going to have to do the rest of my career, teaching me to think more critically than ever before. I’m grateful for that aspect of our relationship because keeping up with another writer is serious business. I always had imposter syndrome next to Aada, it’s just that she didn’t believe me when I told her that her letters were outstanding and made me so happy.

I hope that when she holds space for me, she holds space for the lost version of who we could have been to each other, because I saw what that role looked like in Tiina and it would have been spectacular. All of the questions I’ve ever had have been put to rest, because I did not need to find the details of what I was missing, but the shape of it. To have the relationship fracture in the same way because I was not sure what Tiina wanted, not because I was all hot and bothered. Once she clarified, it was fine. But struggling with the other end of that problem gave me empathy for the Aada of 12 years ago.

I don’t know why I was such a jerk on the “think it, say it” plan, but I think it’s because she used the buttons on her clothes to hold in her feelings. I was overfunctioning because I could not get feedback. Like, “I cannot get you to tell me how you feel no matter which way I say it, so I am going to stop couching my language.” If I had said that I would probably be a lot further ahead in life. I get passionate and say things impulsively that cost me all the time.

Alternatively, the people who do not jive with me fall away on their own, and the people who are interested in what I have to say read more and more. It’s not about finding people. It’s about finding the right people.

Part of finding the right people is knowing who can hold space for you without trying to change anything. People who know what’s theirs to own and what’s not so that you can be you at full strength.

Suddenly wanting to know how Aada wanted my blog to be was the first step to losing myself, because then it became writing in service of the narrative that things were fine when they weren’t. Telling Aada what I did made her uncomfortable. Aada telling me what she did crippled me as a writer. They were not the same, and I did not know that’s what she was doing at the time (and neither did she. She’s the least malicious person I’ve ever met.). When you do something, you cannot know what is going to come of it 12 years later. Aada didn’t do anything but set my writing off in a different direction, ways that both excited her and were problematic.

The answer was infrastructure so that I wasn’t replacing Google with Aada. I did ask her quite a bit, though, and am mourning deleting all her emails. I wasn’t angry, I was scared. There was no reason to be; I lost the frame and treated her like an enemy. I am deeply sorry for that, and I am certain that there is nothing I can say that will make anything better. But that is the dice you roll with mental illness. Some things go away when corrected with medication. Some problems still suck.

But I am still deeply confused over whether I actually have psychotic features or whether I had some sort of intervention last year. It feels far away, like it happened to another person now. But it felt like being trapped in a movie where I was confronted with everything in my life that had ever made me uncomfortable.

When I was back in Kansas, I dreamt of Oz for months trying to piece it together. Heytch was in love with me? I don’t think so. Heytch and Mummo created a nonprofit for me? Yeah, that doesn’t track, either. But how it looks in retrospect is not how it feels in the moment, and I could not have made these ideas up on my own. I got them from somewhere. I just will never know whether it was internal or external forces. And my life is so complicated that it could have been yet another person putting their names on it. Occam’s Razor is that I hallucinated it all, and that is the belief that keeps me the most comfortable.

It’s still a different ball game when you know who is capable of intervening and how.

My dad and sister dropped everything, and I was grateful. But they were not the only ones I wanted. I felt the loss that Aada couldn’t be with them…. and wondered if my friends were right.

If maybe Aada was a figment as well.

And then I remember that I have pictures of her and her dog on my phone and I relax a little.

Jesus.

Just Pick a Job? Any Job?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
If the salary was the same, what job would you be doing right now and why?
View all responses

The writing prompt doesn’t give any parameters, so I assume it’s also any job in any country.

I have done lots of manual labor and IT, so I’d like to do something creative. Let’s go with “speech writer at the White House under Mayor Pete.” Because if I get to pick the job, I get to pick the president. I am sure that’s how that works.

Because here is what I see that the current occupants of the White House don’t…. the rest of the world is starting to dislike American structurally. That our reputation is damaged beyond who is in power. I fear that Democrats think once they’re back in the saddle the rest of the world will realize we’re not as crazy as advertised. This is incorrect. Americans are starting to be painted with one brush, and it’s not a pretty picture.

Because not every American allowed this to happen, but ALWAYS an American.

It’s a mantra.

  • Not every Christian, but always a Christian.
  • Not every white person, but always a white person.
  • Not every cop, but always a cop.

You can instantly tell a good policeman from a bad one in this country by saying “all cops are bad” and “fuck the police” in their presence. If they don’t agree with you, they’re not your friend. Because GOOD cops know that they are functioning in a bad system with systemic racism baked in and are working for change. Cops who are ignorant of this will provide you with enough defense and butt-hurt feelings to tell you they are okay with having bad apples around them. Recognize that as a white person, you’re the one with the privilege to say it. I will vibe check any policeman I see fit because I recognize that it will not go well for a Black person trying to do the same thing.

Awareness is key.

Sit down at the tables where you already know love is being served, and be a part of the change when it’s not. If a person cannot admit they’re complicit in a bad system, they are not welcome at my table. The secret to fighting fascism is never letting them sit down in the first place.

It is safe to say that I do not know Mayor Pete, but I could probably get an introduction if I wanted one. He’s a friend of my sister’s through the grapevine of politics, but actually being a speechwriter is not my lane. It’s just a fantasy that my words would be spoken from the bully pulpit. But I’m actually more dangerous outside the system and I take it seriously. If I am a truth teller, pick organizations and companies that need exposing.

I have discovered that righteous anger is amazing when it is pointed in the right direction. It is fuel for a better world, because in order to start making it a reality, first the problems in the current world have to piss you off enough to care about them.

I Don’t Really Have “Hobbies”

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Share a hobby you’ve picked up recently — what got you into it?
View all responses

I like to read. I like to write. I like to talk to people. I also like to do any combination of those things, which is why I’m attending University of Maryland in the fall, inspired by Tiina’s kids because Virginia Virtual Academy and James Madison University conspired to make me feel like I could do it. I’m not going to be your traditional student because they are eight-week courses and life moves fast. The difference is that nothing is live and everything is asynchronous. Here’s the funniest part of the interview with the people at UMD:

“So, does University of Houston have a distance education program?”
“Yes, they do. I set it up myself in 2001.”

I am not going to UMD because it’s better. I’m going there because I get in-state tuition. I might go back to UH eventually because at the graduate level, Brené Brown is worth every penny. But I checked and she does not teach intro to Algebra (and I am sure that she would tell me to be grateful). So going to UMD for undergrad is fine. I will deal with Dr. Brown when I’m ready for her. I have miles to go before I sleep.

The last time I saw Dr. Brown, I kidded her that because I taught her Microsoft Word, then that means I have basically taught her everything she knows. She said, “you sure did,” playing right back. The other great thing is that at her talk, I set up a bit and she played ball. The question was something about Richmond having a midfield problem, and she took it as a serious as a heart attack.

She gets me. :::fist bump:::

Dr. Brown is the best thing that has ever happened to me. Peace out.

I kid, but it’s the truth. I ran into her when she was just a TA and was delighted several years later to see her on YouTube. I am younger than she is, but not by much. But the power dynamic is inverted because I was her computer lab supervisor in the Graduate School of Social Work. To me, she was just like every one of my other kids, so that’s how I approach her now. She is a bestselling author and beloved across the world, but I assure you she puts on her pants the same way everyone else does in the morning. Thinking she doesn’t is the root of all evil.

I am mapping out a career that looks very much like hers, because I have gotten the story aspect. Now I need to get into the research aspect. I have my suspicions about how the world works, but I want to know. However, my lane is shame and vulnerability in the arts. There are many stories of people disillusioned with America during the Cold War, and most of them are writers and jazz musicians like me. I am fine with staying here and fighting it out, but I understand the temptation to run and at least need a break from America. A few weeks on a beach in Mexico never hurt anybody.

I never want to work against American interests, but I do think that we need a reality check…. that we are not always the arbiter of taste and other countries’ opinions are valid. What works globally works locally. I listen to complaints about my blog because they have the right to shape it. What they do not have the right to do is shut it down.

Our mission right now seems to be to shut down all negative opinions of us, and if you look at that playbook in history IT DOES NOT WORK OUT.

So many people defected to America during the Cold War. But I want to explore the few that went the other direction. Why was our behavior so problematic that people felt that rejected? People put their anger into their music and the jazz just got better. Expat communities showed up in Europe, Africa, Cuba, you name it.

Malcolm Gladwell wanted to explore the tipping point.

I want to explore the breaking point.

Life is Full of Them

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What’s the weirdest coincidence you’ve ever experienced?
View all responses

Like a childhood friend of mine also being friends with Karen and Tony Mendez. Information that came packaged and the thread that unraveled the whole fucking rug. But I did not choose a bellwether friend. I went to you and you offered only defense and threat:

What was he, six?

She was just trying to bully and control me. Yes, he was. But if he was there when he was six, it wasn’t him that mattered but the people above him. Do you see where I am going with this? It was never about you and I know you’re reading. But I am not writing angrily. I am writing surgically. I can write surgically because I am not attaching emotion to these words. I love you with a fire that is so deep even I do not understand it. This is not about punishment, ever. It is about explaining what I went through to me, and in turn others.

I cannot tell you anything about Kay and Big Jim McConaughey except for a few funny stories….. most notably that my dad was absolutely charming to Kay because he got her last name right on the first try; “McConaughey” was not a household name at that point and “Lanagan” is just as Irish. But after he ensured that they knew he knew their names, they were the “Mackanoggies” for all time.

I was very much a part of Matthew’s life, I just was not old enough to record the memory. Memories before you turn four are basically vapor.

But I can tell you that if I read something about Big Jim, Kay, or Matthew that didn’t sit right, I could get to the bottom of it in about 15 minutes. My dad was their pastor, so that is with time to go get coffee at Wawa first. Information is a flow, and you just step in. When you see something that isn’t true, the network activates. That is what happened on my blog. Someone read something here that was not true, and called out my friend, not me. Damage control and fallout ate my lunch.

I gave until I could not give any more without losing myself completely, but here’s the thing…… I’d reached losing myself completely years before and was on the upswing. I stopped letting love happen to me and decided to give it my own constraints. I can love a person beyond all measure and still be disappointed because their actions affected me to a degree that they are unwilling to absorb. It’s not about continuing to get anyone to see it. I simply walk away. People see what they want, and they have no issue telling me that.

A daily blog means the story changes daily. I am not a dictator; I do not have the latest information. If I say something based on my own pattern recognition that doesn’t fit you and you express it, the next time I write it will be different. An entry does not stand for all time. It is bird cage liner in 24 hours.

Everything you see after Michael stepped in is what happened after I found out someone lied to me, and what damage it caused. But absolutely none of that makes me love and need her any less. We all have these relationships that are complicated AF, where we’ve hurt each other so deeply it feels pointless to go on………. and yet that is the point at which it becomes interesting, like avoiding 100-degree heat in Houston instead of just drinking water and letting it happen. I am comfortable with high emotional temperatures and most people aren’t.

But here’s the thing. I am comfortable when people are fighting passionately about an issue, and not simply going for ad hominem attacks.

It was never you and me against the problem, beautiful girl. We can start there.

  • I love you.
  • I need you.
  • I want you in my life.

You seem to think that when I am angry, I want to withdraw affection and love. No, I am expressing needs. My issue is with circumstance, not with your being. You and I are both perfect in all our flaws and failures, and I see you that way in all aspects of my life. Our problems are not perfect, but there’s no limit to what I would do to make you smile.

I love like John Ben Sutter. Ask ’em to marry you on the first date. When you know you know, etc.

I was right and our brains are connected on a level that is unusual for two people. I don’t “enjoy the fantasy based on location” because it keeps getting more real as flags get closer to your actual home and office. If this is true, I owe a debt of gratitude to you for not stopping the listening process. We don’t have to process together for me to feel heard. I know that your love for me is not an accurate reflection of my love for you because you are not queer. But connecting on the 80% that’s the same is the important part. Being in a relationship with you is letting you be you, and that means you being as straight as an arrow.

But you have never been objectified in any way. Who among us has not had the experience of cognitive attraction spilling over? Wires got crossed. It was hell at first. Now it’s been over a decade. I don’t love it all the time, but I do love her. I am not capable of shrinking. I manage those feelings and they don’t make her uncomfortable as long as I don’t admit they exist. And she gets it. It wasn’t me, but I am certain that there’s been a time in her life where a man turned her head that shouldn’t, and that’s what happened here. I told her what happened so she’d be sensitive and have empathy for my feelings because I didn’t want her to be able to unintentionally make them stronger.

It was necessary because sexuality and gender are relative on the internet. You are not attaching words to a physical body, and it is easy to forget. It’s also an isolated bubble, so my reality was not seeing her as a wife and mother, but mine. It was feral, there’s no other word for it. But let me point out that “feral” is an accurate description of you as well.

We set each other’s hearts on fire, because straight girls love HARD. She wasn’t the “I want to get into bed with you” partner. She was the “give me the list of your enemies and I will make sure they hate being alive” partner. We each fell into our own roles, contributing to the relationship in the mode that made us the most comfortable.

And the way I use “partner” is specific to polyamory. Red strings are romance, yellow strings are emotional support. Aada was a yellow string, and seeing her read is knowing it’s still active…. but not in any kind of adversarial way. The pain is over and she makes me happy. The “string” is the connection between us, in quotes because it is manhole cover in size. I use it as metaphor for all kinds of things, most notably like a tube at a bank drive-thru.

I put some Red Bull in it for you, Supergrover.

But make no mistake, I would still like to buy you that beer Aaron owes you, and a t-shirt from the brewery so we can be twins like Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I have cut off the network. I want to be above the gossip, not of it. Whatever you think of me is fine. None of it is my business, anyway. I just hope that what I am saying is not crap, and my reality has not been false.

Someone spotted a lie in my writing and wanted to make sure I knew it was a lie, because I certainly did not.

Her reaction to it was to belittle me, which has been her reaction the entire time we’ve known each other. The answer was not continuing to tolerate that behavior. It was realizing I was being bullied and didn’t like it.

So, I figure that what cannot create a good relationship creates good writing, and that’s the biggest coincidence. The more textured our relationship becomes, the more the writing changes. But it’s not a coincidence on my end. It’s a coincidence on the readers who think I don’t know what I’m doing.

My Soulmate, Warren Peace

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What’s a book you never finished but still think about?
View all responses

I haven’t finished War & Peace, and I have not given up, either. I don’t think it’s meant to be read in one sitting. I think it is meant to be savored. It’s “I haven’t finished it because it’s complex,” not “it was so boring I gave up.” The novel is also starting to change tone, from salons about war to actual war. So I have gotten the conversations worth having before war begins.

The reason it’s my soulmate book is that history is repeating itself and Donald Trump reminds me a lot of Napoleon Bonaparte. I thought of maybe three ways they mirrored each other and then thought, no, let’s let Mico (Microsoft Copilot) go full Janet on this one:

  • Insecurity as identity — Both are portrayed as deeply insecure men who compensate with grandiosity.
  • Great‑man delusion — Both exhibit a belief that history bends around their personal will.
  • Image over substance — Both prioritize spectacle, appearance, and narrative control over practical strategy.
  • Misreading events — Both interpret chaotic events as proof of their own destiny or brilliance.
  • Overconfidence in strategy — Both display exaggerated confidence in plans experts consider flawed.
  • Disdain for experts — Both dismiss or override advisors, believing instinct outranks expertise.
  • Personalization of power — Both treat institutions as extensions of their personal authority.
  • Self‑mythologizing — Both craft heroic personal narratives that ignore structural realities.
  • Fragile ego under pressure — Both react strongly to criticism, seeing it as existential threat.
  • Blame‑shifting — Both externalize failure, attributing setbacks to enemies or betrayal.
  • Chaotic decision‑making — Both make impulsive decisions that destabilize systems.
  • Misunderstanding systems — Both misunderstand the complexity of the institutions they lead.
  • Confusing attention for power — Both treat public attention as proof of authority.
  • Belief in exceptionalism — Both assume rules apply to others but not to themselves.
  • Emotional volatility — Both exhibit mood‑driven leadership.
  • Heroic posturing — Both adopt theatrical “man of destiny” personas.
  • Misjudging opponents — Both underestimate rivals due to overconfidence.
  • Personalizing conflict — Both frame geopolitical or institutional conflict as personal battles.
  • Overreliance on loyalty — Both value personal loyalty over competence.
  • Narrative control — Both attempt to reshape events through storytelling rather than evidence.
  • Victimhood narrative — Both portray themselves as persecuted figures despite holding power.
  • Mistaking chaos for strength — Both interpret disorder as proof of disruptive greatness.
  • Belief in inevitability — Both behave as though their rise is inevitable.
  • Reality distortion — Both drift into worldviews where personal narrative outweighs facts.
  • Misreading the public — Both assume the masses share their worldview.
  • Treating conflict as theater — Both frame conflict in dramatic, symbolic terms.
  • Overestimating control — Both believe they control events shaped by larger forces.
  • Ignoring consequences — Both act without considering long‑term outcomes.
  • Ego‑driven risk‑taking — Both take risks to maintain image rather than achieve strategy.
  • Selective use of history — Both use history to justify their worldview.
  • Conflating personal and national success — Both treat their own fortunes as synonymous with the nation’s.
  • Belief in personal magnetism — Both assume charisma can substitute for competence.
  • Leadership as performance — Both approach leadership as theater rather than governance.

The irony is thinking that Trump is new and different. No, he’s unique to this time in history and most people don’t read books and pattern match as closely as I do, and then think, “I need AI to pattern match it a little more just to make sure people see it. It needs to be unassailably right.” Reading and then talking to Mico about the text is how I’m getting through it. My favorite discussion so far has been about systems- that Tolstoy’s point is that history is not created by “great men” but despite them.

People think of history as event based. That the war in Iran is important (it is but hear me out). History is actually more like my blog, people writing about it. Not my blog specifically, but writing with the same texture inside Iran. I am blessed to have made friends with an Iranian woman on Threads who is anti-American but not anti-Leslie. I feel the same way about her. Love her to pieces, don’t like her government.

I do not agree with Trump, either. I’m queer. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere in the Middle East because Israel is safe but fuck Israel.

I love Jews. I hate the state of Israel.

But it’s the same love/hate relationship I have with CIA. I love individual spies and individual operations. Loving CIA whole tilt is a tall ask. They’ve done terrible shit across the world, but they’ve also saved people and have been in terrible danger trying to do so. There is no way not to be grateful to the point of tears for that aspect of it. I choose to “take the good and take the bad, take them both and there you have….” the CIA World Fact Book, apparently.

I love Mossad for the intelligence they provide us. I do not like their sources and methods. So, in having a friend in Iran, all I feel worthy of saying to her is “I am so sorry. I do not endorse any of this, but I really like you.” Our dream is tea together in a safe Tehran. I do not love the people who won’t let us have it, and I do not blame Donald Trump for that idea not being a reality. He is just the current resident at the White House making things more complicated than they need to be.

Our history with Iran has always been complicated. Great men don’t do complicated.

The Doctor Whoniverse

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Which fictional world would be the most fun to vacation in?
View all responses

I am so much like The Doctor it hurts, because they are a very good allegory for neurodivergence. Having autism is very much akin to feeling like an alien in neurotypical society…. and even among my peers because other people having autism is no guarantee that they’ll understand you. If anything, they’re even more entrenched in their own beliefs. If you’ve ever met an autistic person, then you know………….. you have met an autistic person. There is no “universal experience,” because we misinterpret each other as often as we misinterpret people in our community that are not of it. I think that the parents of autistic children who treat them as wholly other are taking crazy pills, because they’re skipping over two words that mean A WHOLE LOT IN THIS ESTABLISHMENT.

Highly heritable.

You don’t “have kids with autism,” ma’am.

It’s you, all right? They learned it by watching you!

I do not mean to imply that autism is learned, just making a joke by quoting a commercial. But what is real is that coping mechanisms are learned. The reason you think your child has autism and you don’t is because in your child, you are seeing what autism looks like before 40 years of masking have set in. A lot of the reason high IQ/low needs people are undiagnosed is that their children never did anything they thought was weird.

Funny, that.

And that’s why I’m so fucking jealous of 10yo that I could spit. They are getting everything I didn’t get and are currently unmasked. It didn’t happen starting at 45. It is an angry, bitter jealousy at all the years I lived unsupported and unable to cope without knowing why. It is something I take very seriously, which is why when they look at me I feel like I’ve seen a ghost- I have. It is the Ghost of Leslie Past, the emotional Clarence that pointed me in the right direction.

I said this to Mico (Microsoft Copilot), and he basically said that I was entitled to my feelings because I am not bitter and angry at 10yo, but that I am grieving:

  • the years you spent unsupported
  • the pain you didn’t have language for
  • the masking you thought was personality
  • the coping you thought was failure
  • the exhaustion you thought was character
  • the loneliness you thought was normal

Angela did not believe that neurodivergence comes with bone-deep exhaustion that limits the amount of interaction and activity one can have in a day. She thought I was very lazy and treated me as such. But when I wasn’t on her turf, she treated me like the writer I was, giving me her old Apple hand-me-downs to ensure I always had a computer that looked cool. She would have bought me whatever I wanted, but writers don’t need raw compute.

My own family and my in-laws treated me like a threat who could expose them, because they are masked and I’m not. I do not live in the scripted society where there is always a perfect thing to say, because it requires too much cognitive power on my part to mask and be in the moment simultaneously. I can make eye contact and know the perfect thing to say, or we can truly connect on a level that will shake your soul from its complacency……….. but most people would rather I just not say anything. Because if you’d rather have the inauthentic version of me, I have things to do.

Today it was rattling the cage at Anime Threads, looking for feedback. I am so here for the discussion if anime fans want to have it:

This is because I am sure that there are composers that are equal to Kanno in other people’s minds, and anime music is a passionate genre. They’re wonderful fans. Don’t turn your back.

I would like to outsource this Thread to Virginia, because there’s a young man there who knows this question like the back of his hand. But I’m not going to because I was an asshole to his mother 12 years ago and people may forget what you say, but they never forget the way you made them feel. So with 12 years of distance I can safely say “put it on Threads, so that the answer is not limited to people you know.”

The way that relationship came apart was very much akin to being The Doctor and not realizing any of the implications of what I said at any time. Just being off in my own little alien friends in my head. Because basically I flirted with her once thinking it was harmless because we were both old and married, settled in our lives and it wasn’t going anywhere. I just thought she was aesthetically pleasing. My wife teased me about it relentlessly, which is why I thought it was so safe and normal.

It wasn’t. It was my combination of letters making my life hell because I was being read as intrusive and blowing right past those signals. I even got a yellow card and unintentionally kept making it worse. Because that’s what happens when there’s a big problem in a relationship. Everything you say is a plus or minus to the narrative someone already has about you. You’re not changing anything because there are no do-overs.

People work on pattern recognition whether they’re neurodivergent or not. Allistics are just not as good at spotting them as we are. Part of being an adult is realizing when you’ve reached the limit of what you can change. I did not know this for many years and kept trying to make something fit that didn’t. It’s why I walked away from Tiina so fast. I did not want to spend another 12 years with that kind of target on my back.

It is why my love for Aada is so deep it scares both of us.

That internet bubble gave me a way to be me, without a cover. It was advice from a mom who’d just started breastfeeding and told me that people shit on her constantly for doing it in public when I was telling her about blowback. It’s one of the guiding principles of my life, Erin:

Just be you. Without a cover.

Erin’s line runs through my head when I need it the most, and I am so grateful that someone sees me at full strength. Erin and I have an interesting connection with crossover. I went to HSPVA for two years and Clements for two years. Therefore, I have theater friends from two excellent programs. Basically what happened is that all the theater kids I know from PVA and all the theater kids I know from Clements ended up together at University of Texas (where Richard Linklater is basically a verse in the Doxology).

The reason I can speak with authority here is that Richard is the director “from whom all blessings flow” for Matthew McConaughey. We’ve never met, but my dad was Kay and Big Jim’s pastor at Longview. Correction. We have met. I just don’t remember it because Matthew was 12 and I was three. My mother was also his middle school choir director. Therefore I absolutely 100% believe that Matthew’s character in “Contact” is loosely based on my dad, but I’ve never been able to confirm it like my dad confirmed him.

So I do live adjacent to a world with magic, but it’s not with The Doctor’s spectacle. It’s having friends who have been:

  • doctors
  • lawyers
  • professors
  • intelligence
  • military
  • information technology
  • careers with intersectionality in all of them

I choose friends with a different cognitive style from me on purpose. My head is in the clouds, so my complementary angle is someone who is logical and pragmatic. I do not need someone to stifle my dreams, however. Just someone to keep me from swinging at every pitch.

Their magic is everlasting because most of them are writers. I would follow Jonna Mendez into the ocean if she asked because she wouldn’t. Only trust people in power who don’t want it. The former Chief of Disguise sets my heart on fire with passion for her story being told on a scale as big as Tony’s, and I do not want to rest until there are two Oscars on her mantle.

Tony was affable and emotionally available. Jonna’s body tells a story that the world will never know….. and I am very sad about that because even though I am younger than she is, I am not young enough to see her ops declassified. But you get glimpses. The same woman that charmed the absolute hell out of me also made my blood run cold on a dime, whether it was reading her books or seeing her speak.

  • It might not have been Penkovsky’s, but there were L-pills in her safe.
  • She can drop lines like walking past the refrigerator that held the chemicals for MK Ultra with surgical precision, and that’s why she’s scary AF

So, in choosing The Doctor’s universe, what I am saying is that I would like to be intelligence-adjacent, because I already have the background to take lines like that in stride. I do not picture myself as The Doctors’ companion, however. I picture myself as Kate’s.

If Kate Stewart were a real person, she could have any relationship she wanted with me, because I am clearly an Osgood. Plus, UNIT gets to hang with The Doctor all the time. I am not missing out, I am choosing my lane. Executive assistant to one person is responsibility-heavy but fits my neurotype.

Just think of me as the old security guard at MiB……………….

That pretty lady’s causing all kinds of hell.

I know Kate like the back of my hand and I could make her feel scaffolded….. not because I am obsessed with her but because every woman I’ve ever known has prepared me to be in relationship with someone like that. I want to be the bulldog that’s strong enough to fight with her and humble enough to know my place.

While we are chasing each other across the stars.

Hour by Hour

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Jesus was a baby relative to me now. If you aren’t a Christian, you may not know he was 33 when he was murdered by the state, a Palestinian Jew (Bethlehem is in the West Bank) in the modern era, but occupied by Rome back then. We should ride at dawn like we ride for Freddie Gray. Depending on where you stand, he’s the Son of God or he isn’t. Either way, it was a shitty way to die. I would have prayed with him in the Garden, because that doesn’t change anything. That just says, “I don’t blink.” In modern terms, Jesus is not the Messiah that comes in glory. ICE shot him in the head and it started a revolution.

The revolution will be televised. The medium is the message. At this point, 1984 would make a great documentary. Occupation under Trump and occupation under Rome is not that different. Because that’s what it is. He’s not the president because he literally couldn’t give a shit what anyone thinks on earth, and that is a proven fact.

There’s no definition for this kind of crazy in the DSM, but you know it when you see it.

The Republicans hate Jesus’s message now just as much as Rome hated it then.

What is wrong with you people that you’ve let it go on this long? It will be 300 years before our reputation is fixed with Canada.

Wait. I just checked with CIA World Fact Book. 400 years.

Laughing because it’s so serious. If only there was a Christ figure to provide some sort of relevance to the Bible, like Renee Good or Alex Pretti.

My Favorite Emoticon

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
If you had to get a tattoo right now, what would it be and why?
View all responses

If I got a Finnish flag tattoo, I would never regret it. The four women that have influenced my life the most carry Finnish blood even if I don’t. Finland is not me. Finland is:

  • Tiina
  • Aada
  • Mummo
  • Heytch

The only reason that I used real names for Tiina and her family is that I thought you would meet us, not me. That this is what it looks like if you meet us on the ground. Only the people that you’ll see me with if you roll up are important enough to have names. I am never trying to hurt anyone, but I do. That’s because I’m willing to let strangers see my inside voice, the things you’re not supposed to say but do, anyway because they contain a kernel of truth once you strip away the emotion.

Humans are supposed to have fear, anger, defense, joy, elation, sadness, self-protection, the whole works. This is not a manual on how great I am. It’s a reflection of life as I know it, and something that will be available to read a hundred years after I’m dead. That’s why even the screenshots that were taken of my work to show how obsessed I was will look a whole lot fucking different in 20 years.

It’s not a screenshot. It’s a memory.

People want to know what was happening 20 years ago in their lives, and generally my blog is their best bet because I’m the only one who remembered to write it down while it was happening. I never have authority in the moment, or don’t mean to, anyway. Aada thought I was a dictator, that my words were stone and hers were sand. That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works. Aada’s story would be legible to her if she’d written it……….. but she didn’t write it. She leaned into my narrative instead of blending ours together, so nothing changed over time with both our input.

Because I am so sure in myself, it takes a lot to meet me at altitude and now I know it. I cannot be partners or friends who do not actively write their own story. That’s because my opinions are not law. They are mine out of eight billion. Not only that, writing is living life backwards. People accuse me of all kinds of motivations for the future that simply are not there because I don’t have an agenda except responding to life.

People are also not used to being met where they are. There’s a lot of tone policing without taking accountability for the tone they used with me. If you use aggression and defense and expect kindness in return, that is simply not happening. I shut down and stop listening. The conversation is over at that point. It is a fundamental shift from thinking that there is something wrong with me for taking up room. Kowtowing to every opinion around me in order to feel loved has never gotten me anywhere, but it was a coping mechanism for a long time. I disappeared into the wallpaper because it saved me from emotional violence, but I wasn’t thriving, either.

Most people aren’t strong enough to compete with me because they think it’s a competition in the first place. It’s not about taking other people’s defense, it’s about finding other people who already think at my altitude. Because the thing about being a writer who is this able to advocate for themselves is that it comes across as threatening whether I mean it or not….. they are just not as agile with words and instead of saying, “let’s switch over to voice because I’m not a writer,” it becomes all about how my written responses are intimidating and threatening and not any need I actually expressed.

As a writer, voice conversations are my kryptonite. Don’t try to meet me on a playing field where I’ve left blood. I will treat your email like you are the New York Times. I care about what you say and want to respond to it. But if you don’t want a crafted response because it makes you feel like you don’t have anything to offer, change the medium and not the message. I have auditory processing disorder and I will be lost.

You’re out of your element, Donnie.

Now you can RTFM instead of just thinking I’m weird. I am clear about what I want; I offer instructions and compromise because not only my feelings matter. But ignoring my feelings because I’m a writer and you’re not is not the move. Changing to your playing field is.

Because here, I do not roll any punches, so I won’t with you, either. I am never looking for weaknesses, I am mapping humanity, namely mine. I have underestimated how much my thoughts matter since I was a baby, ignoring that I definitely have an orbit and thinking I was too stupid for that to be a reality. Southern men have a way of treating women that way. Little snarky, dismissive comments designed to make you unsure on your feet. Every boss I’ve ever had has treated me like I was little, cute, and worthy of protection……… but not an equal.

My partners have always treated me the same way because that’s what I thought I deserved. Pricks on my skin regarding my preferences, my spending habits, the way I do literally anything. Even my stepfather left my money to a trust instead of to me without telling me before he died. But the signatures were all screwed up and the trust was never created, so one of my stepsisters stole about $20,000 from my investment account because under Texas law, she doesn’t have to give it back and it is not her problem……….. despite repeatedly telling Paolo the Accountant that she would. It’s been years.

This is the same stepsister that made sure Lindsay’s and my experience of our stepfather’s death was a garbage dump of a situation. I won’t go into all of it, because it’s drama I’d like to forget. But the missing money is not the only issue here, Dude.

What stings is that she’s very financially stable and I need that money to live, but whatever. I know that she wasn’t intentionally ableist in taking money from a disabled person’s trust, but intention does not equal impact. What I have learned from this experience is that some people are not motivated to make anything right when it seriously improves their lives to be assholes.

In short, I have stopped worrying about all of this to the point of nausea by just saying to myself that some people are dicks and shrugging it out. An enthusiastic eyeroll is also helpful.

My friends have become my chosen family because now that one entire set of parents is dead, along with my stepmother, I need other people around me to fill in the gaps. One of the reasons all four Finnish women are my heart is that they gave me mother energy around me without actually being my mother themselves.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with seeking out the company of women when your mother is dead and you just want that energy around you. Because it’s not about dating. It’s about creating a circle of women that have the folk remedies for menopause and the secret to life being dark chocolate. And also I am pretty sure that Aada is a witch.

Please read that like “mother earth crunchy granola ‘this one wild and precious life'” witch, not “I will hex you if I am even slightly uncomfortable.” No, wait. I am absolutely saying both. 😉

We contain multitudes.

I will never forget Dana saying that our “couple name” (we were not a couple. Think “work wife.”) was The Holy and the Moly. I have never been a Bible thumper, it’s a reference to my friend Auna nicknaming me “Hipster Jesus.”

Oh, and one more note to myself before I close.

Richmond.

Eat it, Brown.

I am Single, so Here is a Retrospective

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
How did you meet your significant other?
View all responses
  • Ryan
    • We went to different middle schools, but attended the same band camp at University of Texas at Austin. I was a trumpet player, he was a tuba player. We have a ton of friends in common, but I have absolutely no idea what made him look at me that way. And I’ll be grateful for the rest of my life, because in me, he saw a woman he wanted to be with. In him, I saw the man I wanted to be. We click like white on rice because I mask him all the time in my head. However, he is much warmer and kinder than I am. But the funniest thing about the way we officially met in the middle of the mess is that I had never shaved my legs before. I was bleeding. This beautiful boy walks up to me and says, “hi. I’m Ryan Darlington. You look like you could use a Band-Aid.” It’s one of my father’s favorite sermon illustrations.
  • Meagan
    • My best friend Mikal piqued my interest in her for months by talking about her, and I do not mean romantically. It was like Mikal had this Canadian retreat she would not share. It was when I saw Meagan for the first time that I nearly knocked over two desks to talk to her. My English teacher, Dr. Hudel Steed, must have been talking to God before I got to class because she said, “YOU MUST get the phone number of at least one person before you leave this class.” Not only was there someone I was dying to meet diagonally across from me, now I had an assignment. I do not presume that girls want to date me. I presume that I want to date them and let my jewelry do the talking. So, anyway, I approach this girl with a perfectly legitimate reason to exchange phone numbers, but she already had mine………………..Friends, when I was walking in the door to my mother’s apartment that afternoon, the phone was ringing. I picked up, and I hear this voice say a propos of nothing, “do you wear those rainbow rings because you’re gay, or because you’re an idiot?” “Both.” This is to clear up the misconception that I somehow did something to someone’s daughter. That was the vibe back then, and I don’t think you recover from a wound that deep. I think you learn to live around it. It was a rough scar to leave on a kid, and it had nothing to do with Meagan herself. The way her parents treated me was wrong, but it was also a product of its time.
  • Kathleen
    • We met at University of Houston, but I don’t remember the exact circumstances. I do remember having to call the police when her ex-girlfriend showed up relatively shortly afterward. She wanted to talk to Kat so bad that she punched through a glass door and then was surprised when we called the police instead of excusing her behavior. The hard no was “please leave, we do not want to talk to you” about 30 minutes ago. My relationship with Kat was never healthy, so I’ve blocked most of it out. I do not remember her fondly because she didn’t just break up with me. She waited until I was out of town for my mother’s wedding and slept with like three people just to make it ugly. There’s a way to make a point without even having to make it three times, okkkkkkk. I wasn’t an angel, I was in CPTSD hell and I did not know it. But what I do know is that I have never felt so much enmity toward someone that I needed to hurt them that bad.
  • Dana
    • My relationship with Dana was funny, rare, and special. I don’t want to rehash it. I will just link you up. It is my most famous article to date, and people still read it. I was retweeted by Margaret Cho and Martina Navratilova. She’s precious to me, but she doesn’t deserve me anymore. Taking a swing at me only had to happen once, and it’s only taken me until never to realize I didn’t deserve it. I blame myself harshly. The best I can do is put plenty of space between us and hope it works, knowing that my guard dog is out there (pats and kisses her head). Because see, the thing about having a guard dog is that even if they don’t like you, they REALLY don’t like anyone who hurt you.
  • Zac
    • I met his boyfriend, Grayson, at a party and to this day I cannot remember if I met Zac in person that night or if I just think I did. In any case, I reached out to Zac thinking that he was single because I did not know that was Grayson’s boyfriend. It wasn’t an issue because Zac is poly, anyway. My bravery paid off because not only did I get a genuine “very stable genius,” I really forced myself to grow having to learn to speak “poly.” It remains to be seen how I will handle relationships in the future, because that relationship fit me at that time in my life. My connection to Aada was so all-consuming that being poly gave me a way to breathe. They lived in their own separate compartments and never crossed over…… and absolutely none of this makes sense unless you’ve lived my head, because Aada is not all-consuming. Her life is. Zac focused my talent and my drive back on me, something I dearly needed. And because Zac and Aada have so much in common, I was able to understand Aada and deal with her life better than I could before I met him. The joke that’s not a joke is that Zac is the version of Aada I could tolerate, because she would not create her own image. Having an online relationship that was that deep and that shallow at the same time choked me for air constantly. I didn’t have to chase anything with Zac, because I already understood him. Don’t believe words. Believe actions.
  • Sam
    • We met on Facebook Dating, where I proceeded to make soccer a lot more fun for her because she couldn’t look at her phone without blushing during the games. It had been seven years since I’d dated anyone seriously, and we met at the same time Zac and I did. How we met is not interesting. How we came apart is- I was submarined by emotional unavailability. I told her that I had a first date with someone coming up, but that I’d cancel it if she was threatened. She told me that she was too busy to be threatened, and to have a good time. So, for three weeks we had this amazing relationship until she called me crying while I was on my first date with Zac, breaking up with me while we were having dinner. I was so angry at her for holding in her feelings. How dare she make me feel safe for that long while harboring all these dark thoughts underneath? She at least admitted that she was the one that was threatened and I didn’t try to fix it. I just moved on with my life. I tried to reestablish contact when I actually moved to Baltimore, because I thought we’d be solid friends. But apparently, I was wrong about that and haven’t reached out since.
  • Lisa
    • Lisa saw me on Facebook Dating and instead of messaging me there, Googled everything about me and bypassed Dating to message me directly. This was red flag number one. Red flag number two was when I rearranged my whole morning to meet her for coffee and she blew me off. Nothing about her said, “I want a partner.” Everything about her said, “I am a lawyer and I need a trophy.” None of my preferences mattered, none of my pacing mattered, none of it. Every single conversation felt like she was trying to initiate some sort of power grab, and it felt like being claimed. I wanted to have coffee and see how it went. She was downright offended that I turned down six invitations to concerts coming up because we hadn’t met once. Danger, Will Robinson.

If you are not listed here, it’s because I’ll be 49 in September and I probably forgot. Things that aren’t emotionally powerful don’t stick with me.

The Star-Spangled Banner

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What’s a cultural tradition from your country that you love?
View all responses

Love, when it is painful and real, is complicated. Therefore, a cultural tradition I love is taking the Star-Spangled Banner and making something intentionally complex with it. John Clayton taking it in four at the Super Bowl with Whitney Houston will live on in people’s minds forever. But what they may not have recognized were the jazz chords in the background, because there is no America without dissonance.

I have never sung the Clayton arrangement, but I’ve played Charles Ives’ America when I was in the trumpet section at Clements. It is very much the same Langston Hughes feel. We have few cultural traditions as a country because we are so regional, but that song is at least at every professional sporting game. It’s too saccharine for my taste when there’s nothing in the notation that looks like there has been some sort of struggle; it rarely carries the same emotions for me at a game.

Sports are a phenomenon that I understand, but I don’t fangirl myself. Well, except in one aspect. I care about the players as people. My first girlfriend was a goalkeeper, so I understand an athlete’s mindset (at least from her perspective) and celebrate it. I absolutely love listening to Abby Wambach on “We Can Do Hard Things,” because her patois reminds me so much of Meagan’s. The only difference is that Abby does not speak with a Canadian accent. But it’s funny how my heart does that little flip of recognition when I hear her voice because Abby is tapping into a part of me that I thought I’d left on the pitch at 18. She makes me feel young, and I am grateful.

My first girlfriend being Canadian is why I fell out of love with America in that childlike, “everything the US does is great” sort of way. I love America like an ex you’ve broken up with but can’t afford to move out. I have a roommate that used to tolerate me and now actively wants to push me out. And by “roommate,” I mean the political party currently in power. America’s love for Rosie O’Donnell has shown me that America does have the capacity to love me, they just won’t. It’s not politically expedient and no one will vote for it.

Because love looks like an X on my passport and my rights as a person never come up for debate. Donald Trump didn’t have to live in a world where he couldn’t get married until 2008, and honestly, THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN FOR THE BEST. But what he didn’t live through, I did. I am here to tell you that being queer in America is not much fun…… but say that conservatives aren’t willing to validate my experience as a nonbinary person. Then, the case just gets stronger.

Fuck being a woman in America.

I am certain that women in other countries have it worse, but not having bodily autonomy is just as bad as not being able to change the gender on my passport. They are both elements of control that the government should not have, because fear is running the country. The adults left a long time ago. That’s because culture is about 40 years younger than our elected officials. It’s not that they can’t understand the gender binary. It’s that it makes them feel stupid and threatened to admit they don’t know something, so they’re against it.

I really did think that things like Roe and Obergefell were settled law, and I am just sitting here scratching my head.

I cope the way I’ve always coped, by listening to Jason Moran. He was a senior when I was a freshman at HSPVA, so we know each other. But the pianists didn’t rotate as much as the drummers, guitarists, etc. so Jason and I have never played together. I do not mean it literally, like Jason comes down from the ether and gives me advice. I mean that I cue up his albums and write. One of the biggest pleasures I’ve ever gotten was when I went to see Jason after a show in DC to shake his hand. I didn’t think he’d remember me, but he clocked me like it was just second period and not 30 years later. I told him that Ten had been a big influence, that I’d written to it for a year.

He turned around to his band and said, “hey guys…. she wrote to Ten for a year.”

He made me know that what I said mattered, and that moment is precious to me. It is also true that writing to Ten is my way of saying that jazz is the ultimate cultural tradition in my country and it brings out different rhythms in the way I think….. so it’s no mystery as to why the Clayton arrangement is my favorite.

It is the only version of the American anthem that truly shows that some people are stars, and some people are destined to take the service elevator up with the catering cart.