Tag: military

How It Really Ended, Because This is *Hopefully* My Fault

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I gave my Facebook subscribers the inside story, before the video came out. Now, the video is up and I was right…. so you get to hear the real story, too. I am not sure why the Q&A was cut off, but I have two very good guesses….. Jonna & Leslie.

So, I feel like I started it by saying that in another video, I’d heard she was “a real hardass” at CIA. It’s like I broke the surface tension on top of a glass of cool water…… because later on, she talked about a young female colleague who got tired of her boss’s bullshit and said, “Bill, fuck off.”

I laughed a lot harder than I needed to at that joke.

Anyway, we reverted into line cook and spy, which both speak profanity and irreverence as a first language. The black humor on “Homeland” is very real. Lives are on the line, and you sure as shit want to know who’s on your six. If you’re going to step in front of a bus for them, you have to know they’d do the same for you. People think of the military as being rough and tumble, but I’ve been around enough spies by now to know that they mostly run on coffee and hatred. Hearing Zac’s friends’ old war stories was great, because you learn quickly that it’s like being a goalie. You have those Bond moments, but you’re still a government wonk that does paperwork, mostly getting your raw data to the analysts.

Though CIA does not normally carry guns when they’re on intelligence missions, they do when they’re embedded in the armed services. I mean, they’d probably normally carry guns if they were DIA, but people like Jonna usually didn’t, though she’s trained on just about everything. So- note to self. That’s why spies can pick up most guns and know how to use them instantly. They don’t have to carry, they can pick up someone else’s if they’re in trouble.

So, the movies aren’t all bad. Except for this one….. where I got Jonna Mendez censored at her own museum……..

Even though this event was all about Jonna, I can’t think of anything to say except “Argo fuck yourself.” Because what do you say when you notice the other museum employees about to swallow their teeth because they’re so shocked that someone like Jonna would throw an f-bomb. What does she have to prove anymore?

She’s owned herself.

I think she’d agree, and so would Tony Mendez.

Fear While Changing Trains

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.

First of all, :::checks notes::: WordPress, it’s “describe a phase in life in which it was difficult to say goodbye.” Just like it’s not “where’s the library at?” It’s “where’s the library at, asshole?” Never end a sentence with a preposition.

I do it a little bit.

Humor before I start diving deep this morning, because there have been many, many times in which it was Boyz II Men hard to say goodbye.

The first time it was a really hard transition was moving from Galveston to Naples the summer after first grade. I loved the beach (my sister did not- she used to run away from the waves saying “don’t. Don’t! Don’t!). I mean, she got over it…… she did get married in Galveston. The cultural difference between living on the island and living in small town Texas wasn’t hard because I didn’t like it. It was just a transition. I was especially close to my friends Asbury and Beulah Lennox, who kind of took over being my grandparents when my own grandparents were so far away. The bonus was moving about 12-15 miles from my biological grandparents, a complete change as well.

I do not do well with change, and I’m glad we moved in the summer so I could ease into it. Incidentally, since The War Daniel was not a member of our church, I didn’t meet him until September. I can’t remember when it was second or third grade when we made it official. 😉 I will say that it wasn’t until I met The War Daniel that I felt truly comfortable, the INFJ/INTJ people we have always been. We were the book nerds, the music nerds, and the ones who didn’t give a fuck if people thought we were weird. We both have this historical Jesus personality, we just come at it from different directions. He’s a thinker. I’m a feeler.

Editor’s Note:

Two things. The first is that “The War Daniel” is a play on words, because of John Hurt in Doctor Who- “The War Doctor.” Daniel was a Doc in the Navy, embedded with a team of Marines.

The second is that if I say that I or anyone else has a “Jesus” personality, or that “it’s as hard to be me as it was to be Jesus,” I’m talking about his day to day life, not that I or anyone else has a Savior complex. Jesus cannot be much different than any current pastor (especially those in clerical collars willing to be arrested at protests), because he was a rabbi, though they didn’t have that term back then.

Incidentally, there is also no evidence one way or the other that Jesus wasn’t married, and it’s been a debate for centuries; think Catholic vs. Protestant- Catholic priests are told they have to bear the burden of ministry alone, because they can’t love everyone if they love only one person that deeply…. takes away objectivity or something. The Protestants, like The Avatar, discovered that pastors could not do it without a support system. His partner could have been anyone from John, the Disciple marked as “whom Jesus loved,” and I have not looked at the original Greek or Hebrew to see if there’s more context, like philia or agape. But right now, I’m willing to say that there is no evidence Jesus was gay one way or the other, either, because there is also a debate on Mary Magdalene.

Supergrover actually sent me several novels about this, and it’s basically that Jesus and Mary were married and were writing their own Gospel, the Book of Love. It does make sense. After Jesus died, the story is that Joseph of Arimathia (rich merchant) helped Mary and the children escape to France. It is, of course, fiction….. but based on the little evidence we do know. It’s just been too long, there’s too many questions that will always be unanswered. So, Jesus is who you need him to be, not the other way around…… as long as you realize that Jesus did not come here only to comfort the distressed. He came here to also distress you out of your comfort. No power over. Power with. It’s why he was peaceful about it, but probably hated the Sanhedrin because they were the most vociferous Jews regarding law and very little around compassion, which has no bearing on the church today.………….

I think what The War Daniel misread as anger was actually fear. We should have video called more before he went to rehab, but we’re *both* writers, and lapsed into that personality way too easily…. which took away too much of our compassion. I also know that being in a relationship your first year out of rehab is absolutely not advisable, so when we got engaged, I kept dating Zac because it really didn’t bother him. Because Zac is poly, Daniel knew he was no threat. That if Zac and I are building a life together, it consists of exactly what is happening now. I have so much love for him because he’s a solid dude as a friend and as a boyfriend. How our relationship is supposed to go is unknown. I just know that we probably won’t get closer than we are now. Neither of us has the time.

It wasn’t that we were rushing into anything, we were just each other’s end game. Daniel didn’t offer to marry me because of anything but I needed it for the health care and benefits as a military dependent. And it was his idea not because I wanted it, but because he saw I needed it.

So, the hardest transitions I have to talk about today are the summer before I met Daniel, and the months after he left.

The reason I chose to write about this instead of the transition after my mother died is that I just can’t go there today. So, I will tell you what I was feeling in the moment, instead. It is so raw and real that if you are also in grief, it might help you as well.

The ones who have helped me through all these transitions just being kind enough to sit with me and listen.

Any of Them, With the Right Person

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

What are your favorite sports to watch and play?

Editor’s Note:

This is another one of those rambling entries because I realized very quickly I don’t know shit about sports. But most of you love my rambling, so I know it’s probably okay. 😉

When I was 17, my crush was the goalie of the women’s soccer team at school. We ended up dating for a few months, and then she moved back to Canada, where she was picked for a college team that could get her to the Olympics. There are at least 10 different reasons why she left soccer after that, and I’m not entirely sure I understand any of them. But that’s not my story. That’s hers, and she’s a great writer so I hope some day she’ll tell it.

Yes, I did write her senior English final paper, but she used to have a blog, so I’ve forgiven her.

Also, I got a C on my own English final paper, so it made me feel good I got an A on hers (extraordinarily put upon, but still….). It’s not that I couldn’t have gotten an A on both. She’s neurotypical. She had the best notes ever. All I had to do was craft everything she’d already written down.

On the other hand, when I “write a paper,” I write them just like blog entries…. except I edit. I remember everything I read, so I am putting together sentences on the fly. My interest in a subject is directly connected to how fast I can craft a sentence on it without having to look anything up, because I’ve already read six books or whatever.

That’s why when the subject matter is interesting to me, the writing is tighter. The reason I try to remember everything I read is that unlike my first girlfriend, I do not have enough executive function to be able to pick and choose what I’m supposed to remember.

I inhale it all.

I think that’s what makes my blog entries interesting. I take in most everything through sight, and then write it down. My first girlfriend being a soccer player gave me a love for watching the game, because even when I didn’t understand the rules, I understood watching movement. It’s a ballet where the main characters are grass and blood.

I also think of dance as a sport, particularly those high school cheerleaders with the complicated routines and defiance of physics. In retrospect, I gained respect for cheerleaders by being in the marching band. We were all physically exerting ourselves at football games, and then the cheerleaders upped the ante with their own competitions in the off-season.

I only remember one cheerleader from my high school, JR, and he was my favorite because he was the only guy. Every cheerleading team needs a guy to help with the throwing and the catching. Plus, JR is straight. I can’t imagine it was a bad gig.

Many, many boys in dance and choir do it for the girls, and we appreciate it as long as they’re not creepy about it. I swear to God a tenor could walk into any choir anywhere and they’d be grateful to have him.

To me, singing is a sport, and I think only other singers would agree with me. If you don’t spend time training your body to get a solo-quality voice out of yourself, you won’t. This is because so much depends on your physical strength. You basically have to be able to inhale down to your feet and control the air so that it doesn’t all come out at once. That takes tremendous pressure on your diaphragm and breath control. You have to tighten down some muscles while keeping others loose. It’s a long process, and I think while not as demanding as soccer or ballet, we all learn the same types of breath control for being able to dance, run, and sing.

Getting winded on the field or the stage is inadvisable.

When I lived in Portland, most of my friends were baseball fans. I’ve always been a baseball fan in terms of going to games, but I won’t watch them on TV like my friends will. Without hot dogs and sodas at the ballpark, it loses a lot (to me). I don’t know that the Os would do well, but I’d love to see them against the Astros eventually. Now that they’ve moved leagues, they don’t come to Washington anymore.

In Portland, most of us rooted for the San Francisco Baseball Giants. I can think of one Mariners fan from my whole time there. Also in Portland, I was much more into football because Dana was. She never gave up her loyalty to WAS, but I love Pete Carroll and she respected that. I also love Russell Wilson.

In terms of basketball, I will watch LeBron James do anything, because he walks the walk. He gives so much charity everywhere he goes that it’s inspiring. And the way Dwayne Wade is raising his trans daughter gives me hope for other families.

Oh, and even before I met my first girlfriend, Ryan played lacrosse. He said something to me that I’ll never forget, because I wanted it to be memorable and it was, apparently. He’d just gotten home from six weeks of lacrosse camp (or maybe it was shorter, but I don’t remember. It was enough to completely change his body.) I told him that I liked his new look a lot, but it made him hug different. It sent the intended message. No matter what you look like, I love you, not your body, because he told me that almost 25 years later.

Again, we were unusual for kids. We were both old AF emotionally, so we treated our parents like in-laws from the beginning, us both calling the other’s “Mom and Dad.” I don’t know how my father felt about it, but a man worth paying attention to was paying attention to her daughter…. and being sweet to both her and Lindsay. This carried a lot of weight, and I knew it because she never treated any of my girlfriends that way. It was blatantly obvious.

But in addition to Ryan being sweet to my mother and sister, Ryan had an older brother I completely adored, because he and Ryan were so funny together. Inside jokes all over the place that I could join once I heard them.

Plus, I’ve always been the oldest and it was funny watching him pull the same stunts on Ryan that I pulled on Lindsay….. both before and after.

The funniest conversation I remember between Ryan and his dad was that Ryan had fallen off his bike, and was bleeding with road rash. His dad took one look at him and said, “geez. Is the bike okay? I learned later that being in a doctor’s house shapes you so much. Those kinds of retorts are par for the course.

And Caitlin once got her butt stitched up on the kitchen counter. That was before my time, but a legendary story. I believe I heard it on the night I went to her house for dinner, and we all came to find out that Cait had been picking the crab claws out of the gumbo all afternoon.

Maybe that’s her root. She likes working in restaurants, too. For Anthony Bourdain, it was oysters fresh off the beach in France.

I remember Cait being athletic, but don’t remember her formal sports. But our whole family likes watching the big games, even though we don’t watch every one. I mean, some of them do. Some of them are die hard Cowboys fans, and when I mentioned that I was a Cowboys fan she said the only way she could respect that was she liked Tom Landry. I told her that my memories of the Cowboys were mostly rooted in the 90s and it was okay to move on.

I’ve always rooted for the teams where I’ve lived except for the Nationals, because I don’t like the curly W on the hats. I do have one t-shirt that doesn’t have it on it, so it’s the only Nationals gear I own. I am much more partial to the Orioles, and when I lived here before, I was already a Giants fan. The Nationals are relatively new because we took a long break from The Senators (to our detriment, I think).

That also means that when I lived in Portland, I became a rabid Timbers fan, and even have a picture of me with their mascot somewhere. I didn’t really live in Houston when The Dynamo was established, and because Houston didn’t have an MLS team when I was in high school. I’ve always been a fan of DC United.

Everywhere my friends go that’s overseas, I ask them for a national jersey if they want to know what I want. I know there’s plenty of cheap knock-offs, so it’s not paying DC United prices.

Zac doesn’t follow sports at all, but he’s told me that he’d go to a minor league game if I wanted because he likes it better than MLB. So, we might do it, we might not because it’s a road trip to Hagersville to see the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs.

The first time I went, I saw them play The Sugar Land Skeeters, and I was just as excited to meet them as I was The Crabs. That’s the thing about minor league baseball. You can get into deep conversations with the players because they have more time to talk after the game and they’re trying to get their adrenaline to come down.

The reason I wanted a deep conversation is that I really wanted to know how Caleb was doing. He lives in Louisiana and commutes for The Skeeters, so they were in Maryland during the height of Hurricane Harvey and he’d already been through Katrina. Because I knew what was going on in Houston/Sugar Land, I wasn’t just talking to him; I was asking questions about his experience from the other side.

My sister was running the relief effort at the George R. Brown Convention Center. He said that because of the touring schedule, he hadn’t even had time to check it out- grateful he wasn’t there and desperate to see if his house and truck still were.

I wished him well, but what even he doesn’t know is that I got a fabulous picture of him right before he hit the ball out of the park, and I took a million to get that one shot from the time the ball was in the pitcher’s mitt. The ball is several inches in front of the bat and he’s in perfect form…. and even if he wasn’t, he still got a home run. I wouldn’t have known the difference.

I think one of the things I really like about Supergrover is that she’s successful at her job (I think) because she played so many team sports as a child/teen. She already had experience with collaboration and not lording it over people. Delegation when you’re the boss is key, because you cannot micromanage the work, you have to hire the right people- the ones that are self-starters and persnickety about details on their own. It’s not on your plate and doesn’t have to be because there’s a special bond between coworkers who are invested and those who aren’t, as in, how fast productivity goes down when the boss has left the office.

That will always happen in top-down situations because the boss is so exhausting. It’s not fun to be micromanaged, especially by a narcissist.

Narcissism leads to very problematic behavior, like blowing up your phone at 3 AM and being mad you’re not awake to serve them. No family thing is important enough not to miss work. Leave your family thing when I need you.

Because in the military and all the intelligence agencies around here, that is true and ironclad no matter how your boss communicates, which is why there has to be a lot of support from your family to do those jobs. There are going to be missed birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays whether anyone likes it or not. The chessboard is at stake, the one thing that really is more important than being with your family and you can’t argue with it in any place, at any time.

Support to all those people is doing enough work on yourself to be a complete person when they’re gone. For some people, that means moving back in with their parents when their spouse is deployed so that they still have a support system. Others rely on chosen family because they live on base, either here or overseas.

According to Jonna Mendez, you have a choice as to whether you tell your family that you’re CIA or not. That’s because you don’t know if your family/friends are going to find it easier to help you live your cover, or whether they’ll blow it. One thing that Jonna talked about in the event for “The Moscow Rules” is that she didn’t tell her best friend she was CIA for 35 years… and that’s because she told her dad and her dad was impressed, so he told all his friends….. the ones who had seen her face, already knew who she was, etc. The more people that can attach those things, the more “in trouble” you feel.

However, with the military and intelligence, you just have to accept that some things are above your pay grade and you can only know so much. Like, “I can call you on a sat phone, but I can’t tell you where I am.” It’s not that the soldier/case officer doesn’t want to help you understand, it’s that they can’t because it would reveal troop movements if the sat phone was hacked.

I do not think that we are preparing for war ourselves. I think that those secrets are being kept so that no one knows who’s watching and where.

I can connect all of this to “Argo,” because there’s an “Argo” illustration for every occasion. To have people know what your face looks like reminds me of that scene where the “face book” has been ripped to shreds, and they get at least 20 people to sit there and line up the strips so they can see the pictures again, trying to stop the houseguests from getting out of Iran. This is because the diplomats didn’t have enough time to burn all the classifieds before the Iranis rushed in.

Let me say for the record that I do not have a dog in this race. Both the Americans and the Iranis have done horrible things to each other. I can understand Iran’s frustration at us getting the Shah out before they could prosecute him. I understand that it put the United States at a distinct disadvantage because we cut off diplomatic relations, closing the embassy altogether at that point.

I believe that’s why people like Tony and Jonna are every bit as effective as sending “a fully armed battalion to remind them of our love.” That’s because we can prevent a lot of boots on the ground with the right intelligence, because then we can go after someone diplomatically/politically instead of starting a war.

It is so disheartening to have a president who’s blind to the plight of Palestine. It is so complex we need to withdraw support from both sides immediately. It’s not our fight. That’s one that’s been going on for too long for us to rescue anyone. The president needs to realize that in their case, the call is coming from inside the house. We can’t police this one. It will work out every bit as well as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and any other conflict we’ve entered where there hasn’t been a thousand years of fighting over that land.

I also don’t know what Biden’s faith is telling him about Israel, and that’s bothersome as well. It is a damn problem, because all the Abramic branches are at war with themselves over this. Christians and Jews want to protect their holy places, and don’t understand that all Muslim holy places are in the same vicinity.

I am not sure that is the message Christianity and Judaism want to spread…. that Muslim lives are worth less.

Because that’s what they’re doing…. like it’s a sport.

Strawberry Letter #23

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Share what you know about the year you were born.

The number one hit by The Brothers Johnson in the title was at the top of the charts the day I was born. When the funk bass starts, and you move; if you have heard Louis start that vamp it’s still going on in your head right now……. so addictive that you might have to find another earworm to get rid of this one.

(Small aside- if you are a Louis Johnson fan (bassist), Thundercat is his heir apparent.)

I was delivered on September 10th, 1977, so for most of what happened during that year I was only marginally present. Jimmy Carter had just been inaugurated as president the previous January (election in ’76, the first presidential election since Richard Nixon resigned). As far as I can gather, it was not one of those years that had a huge historical event. It was a year in which we were recovering from being led by a criminal, which has no bearing on today.

There were smaller accomplishments.

The first official flight of the Concorde took off from JFK after having had several successful test flights. It cut travel time to London in half. Interestingly enough, cutting the flight time in half wasn’t the end goal. As I grew, the Concorde got better. Its fastest speed run from the US to the UK was 2:52:59, and then it was discontinued (thank God, for environmental reasons, yet still sad…… I don’t know why. I wasn’t buying tickets).

That wasn’t the only advance in business, though, because 1977 was one of the years in which personal computer companies were popping up everywhere. Instead of a mainframe and dumb terminals (like at the office), you could get a fully functioning machine that fit on your desk.

Kids, I’m taking a moment out to say that because things have changed so much, I am not sure that you’ll have a reference for this, so I’ll explain.

Before the personal computer, at an office you’d have what was called the “server room,” and every desktop monitor was reflecting what was going on in the server room. None of the desktop terminals functioned independently, similar to today, when it is impossible to use some apps without being connected to the Internet and for the very same reason- the processing is done on the web servers, not on your local device….. which is why a solid network connection is every bit as vital as the CPU/RAM/graphics card/etc. But back then, there was no “internet,” there was the intranet. The server you were connected to was physically located near you, because everything was a wired connection.

I do not think that the Internet would be what it is today if we hadn’t learned how to pipe data through a wireless connection. I believe this was possible because our drive to be wireless all the time came from internet connectivity through your cell. Having a basic web browser on a dumb phone led to everyone being connected, all the time, for better or for worse. But in 1977, we couldn’t see it coming yet. We were satisfied with creating documents and saving them to a floppy disk for easy carrying….. until you bent it…… and then, cell phones only supported calling. Short Messaging System (SMS) had not been invented.

We could not see the future, but how computers operate in 2023 is merely an evolution, it is not wildly different from anything we did back then. What we learned at networking an office turned out to be instrumental in how we network the whole world at once.

In terms of the world at the time, things were tense with the USSR, but in different ways than they are today…. the biggest reason is that the Soviet Republic fell apart, and now there’s only Russia. Any dreams they had of world dominance went with the republic’s collapse. They didn’t have the money to be big players anymore, and honestly, I don’t know that they have it now. As with American leaders, they make it look good….. but who knows what cards Putin is really holding?

(The answer is Hilary Clinton, btw. When the former Secretary of State to the most powerful nation in the world says Putin is masterminding our demise by having a Russian UI in the White House, you believe her. I’m sure your next question is “what’s a UI?” Useful Idiot- the stooge planted in a country who doesn’t do anything outright evil to show they’re being traitorous, just makes mistakes that are bad for American interests because they’re being manipulated by a foreign state. When we elected Trump, we learned that Russia thought they were getting a UI, then even they were surprised with 45 because there was so much emphasis on the “I,” not so much with the “U.” You get what you pay for……… I’m sure Putin thought it was marvelous when 45 went into CIA’s house and ripped them a new asshole. I didn’t. “Say that to Martin Freeman’s FACE.”)

Speaking of Hillary, I don’t know what she was doing in 1977, but I do know that it was near the beginning of of Hillary becoming a one-person monolithic idea of who a president’s partner should be; as such, it was the beginning of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” But the 70s would have been the beginning of social justice awareness, because back then was when the emphasis on social justice really took hold with white people. It’s not that there weren’t white people interested in social justice before, it’s that American Christianity divided in half, and the horseshoe of extremities divided into Evangelical white supremacy apologists and “the woke.” If white supremacy was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for everyone.

Except there is no way for Jesus to be a white supremacy apologist because the image painted of him in every white church in America looks like Jesus was the only French baby born in the Middle East, and at that time, it would have been a severe anomaly because people didn’t generally travel that far, first of all, and second it’s impossible for him to be white as as a descendent of Jesse and David. It was part of Matthew’s whole schtick. He was the captain in charge of “see? I told you he’s the Messiah. I’ve followed quite a few.” Kidding, but not inaccurate. Matthew focused on proof…. not of Jesus’ divinity as the actual son of God, but proving to Jews that he (waves hand) was the Messiah they were looking for.

But in the end, it wasn’t proof that mattered. It was “how do we appropriate Jesus’ culture and religion to fit our justified racism and inequality?” Thus, the Democrats eschewed religion and the cancer of racism spread into the Republican Party at an alarming rate, because they didn’t have to believe racism was wrong.

That’s not limited to the US, by the way. In the 1970s, they were also struggling with this very idea in South Africa. As Trevor Noah has pointed out, when South Africa came up with apartheid, they researched all the ways you could be racist, and took the worst of each system and applied it. Guess what? Most of the really evil stuff came from us.

If you remember nothing else about South Africa, it’s that Jim Crow laws are directly responsible for apartheid being implemented and maintained, because we built the system that had the largest impact on apartheid policies. So, the cancer that is Evangelical white supremacy spread and made South Africa malignant, too.

Even Thai people applaud Ho=Ho great job.

It was Barry Goldwater who warned us, and we didn’t like AuH2O, so we didn’t listen and now we’re fucked:

Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.

Want to hear something really interesting? Goldwater was a progressive Republican, the people most lonely at parties. You cannot convince me otherwise if he also said, “you don’t have to be straight to be in the military. You have to be able to shoot straight.” Millions of gay men have said, “I can do that.” Despite it, “those preachers” became the voice of Christianity and people like Jimmy Carter, Barry Goldwater, and me are left out of the conversation.

I was telling a Facebook group who was, at the time, coming down hard on Evangelical colonialism through mission trips. I said, “I am a Jimmy Carter Democrat. I know that mission trips on the whole are problematic, but I’m a Jimmy Carter Democrat. I didn’t talk about faith, I helped build them a house.” I got emotionally pummeled into the ground. Par for the course. American Christianity as a whole does not like Jimmy Carter’s version of Christianity unless it’s a meme of him and not the rest of us.

Stephen Colbert said it better than the rest of us, the question we should have asked ourselves before we let the Republican Party become a theocracy:

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.

So, if there’s anything good that came out of 1977, it’s that I got the liberal version of Christianity in the Methodist church…………….

Just like Hillary Clinton.

Oh, The Places I Would Go…

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 4 Comments

What cities do you want to visit?

I don’t have one top favorite, so I’ll give a few of them. I’m not a huge traveler, so I would rather get an AirBnB for several weeks than try to flip body clocks twice in three or four days. Just not my style anymore. “I’m older and I have more insurance.” But if money were no object, I would love to see:

  • Paris
    • I have been to Paris once, but only for a few days. I definitely hit all the highlights with my dad, but I don’t know what it is to sit at a cafe and people watch. I don’t know what it’s like to go to Paris and do nothing, and that’s why it’s valuable. You don’t go there to find things to do. You go there to walk around in its culture and see what sticks. Then, you either commit yourself to finding out what coffee shop David Sedaris frequents- or perhaps going to Pere Lachaisse for inspiration. Oscar Wilde and I had a marvelous time. Just because I am living and he is not doesn’t mean we weren’t both entertained. I told him that Stephen Fry played him in a movie once. He said it was perfect casting.
  • New York
    • I have never spent more than 24 hours in New York, so it’s the same idea there as in Paris. I’d like to go there for a little bit and then get back out. There’s a rhythm, and it’s intimidating to me. It’s sort of like Las Vegas in that the culture is different but the level of sensory input you receive when you get there is just as heightened. In 2003, I wanted to retire in New York, and I have absolutely no idea what I meant by that. I do remember past trips there to be fun, but not in a way I’d like to live there- except maybe someone I liked wanted to live there, so I did, too. Now, I just want to find hidden treasures on out of the way side streets.
  • Ho Chi Minh City
    • I have to do a lot of research on the Vietnam War, rightfully called “The American War” there. I’m writing a novel about it, and I don’t think I could do setting justice if I just made it up. I mean, I can and I will,if I have to, but there’s a lot to be said about putting effort into understanding something fully. I have studied political science since I got to college- the news junkie in me drove me to poli sci and it hasn’t given up. With political science comes lots and lots on international relations as well. So, I know the story from the American side fairly well, but I don’t like to write from the perspective of only trumpeting American interests. The military and C/DIA had many faults and failures during this time, and since most things more recent than Vietnam are still classified, I don’t know that either organization has really wrestled with our actions in that theater in a way that processes out institutional pain. Vietnam was the first war in which it was clear that we might not lose, but we don’t have enough money or resources to outright win, either. The Vietnamese have the right to call us out on that, because American soldiers were responsible for a lot of atrocities. We have the reputation of being feared, and not in a healthy way. It’s why we’ll never win a land war in Asia……. and death is on the line.
  • Seoul
    • Before I started watching both Josh & Olly, I’d never wanted to visit Korea before. They’re responsible for making a lot of people feel that way on their YouTube channel, Jolly. Josh met Olly in college (I think- British system), then went to university in Seoul. I think. I haven’t done all the math. Anyway, when Josh and Olly were both done with uni, they decided to start making videos about what Koreans think of English people. Hilarity ensues. I’m not sure how often Josh and Olly get back to Korea, but one of the fun things they do is “red carpet” style interviews while they entice celebrities to talk using Korean food. It worked very well on Ryan Reynolds. 🙂
  • Enseñada, Mexico
    • I have been to Enseñada once. It’s a small enough city that I could picture myself living there. I don’t speak much Spanish, but I took two years in school and have spent time in both Texas and Mexico speaking Spanish. My language skills aren’t as good now as they were in high school, because I was going to Mexico regularly (Reynosa and Progreso, both on mission trips). I could not land in San Diego and drive across the border without incident, but within a month or so I’d be all right. Within three or four years, I’d be fluent. It’s amazing what you can do when you have no choice. The water is gorgeous. La Buffadora (Buffalo Snort) is magnificent, a geyser that makes me feel the power of nature unlike anything else. I’m sure Papas & Beer is still there, it’s an institution. I don’t know about Habana Banana, which used to be my favorite Mexican clothing brand. I bought a ton while I was there, and at the time, they didn’t offer online ordering or international shipping. So, part of it is to find another clothing brand I like just as much…….. the rest of it is to sit outside with a Coke (we’re in Mexico, after all) and see what nature is saying around me. I live my life like the sound track is 4’33. I think it would kick things up a notch to perform it outside. My past performances have all gone very well. No one even knew I was “conducting it all while I sleep…. to light up my yard.”
  • Vancouver
    • I didn’t live in DC very long before I went to visit Meagan in Ottawa. However, I lived in Portland for 12 years and never made it to British Columbia. I have heard I would love it, now I need to go see it for myself. I will admit, though, that there is some truth to only the Canadian provinces with her in them being interesting. It wasn’t a draw while I lived there, but now I’m just curious. I sort of know what life is like on the East Coast of Canada because Meag has lived in Alberta, Ontario, and New Brunswick….. maybe more, but I’ve slept since then. But West Coast Canada is completely different, it seems. They don’t have bagged milk there. 🙄 Now that I’ve had time to reflect, I regret not going when it was only a five hour car ride. It would be a much bigger deal now.
  • Washington, DC
    • I live in Silver Spring, Maryland. It’s a suburb that has everything I could possibly want within walking distance. As a result, I can go as long as a year without needing anything from downtown…… and most of it is that the bands I like don’t play in Silver Spring- some of them do, though. If I want to see something relatively big, it’s at The Kennedy Center, not The Fillmore. I also haven’t been to Wolf Trap in 20-odd years, mostly because it’s such a hassle that I think about going to Wolf Trap and back out. I feel about Wolf Trap the same way people feel about Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion. It’s going to be a long concert, there’s no easy way in or out, and there’s a thousand people all screaming at once. I much prefer smaller venues, and wish Indigo Girls would play The Fillmore once in a while. 😛
  • Helsinki
    • My love of Finnish Independence Day led me to believe that one day I’d make it to watch the celebrations live- I watch them every year on YouTube from here. It’s not just that, though. I’ve said before and I’ll say it again that the palate for that part of the world is completely different- they don’t even have the same flora. Learning to cook there would be a whole new experience, and Anthony Bourdain introduced them to me through the magic of television. Why yes, I do want a large reindeer pizza. I also want to fly into HEL and drive up to Kilpisjaarvi so I can sleep under the aurora borealis in a clear-top tent. I also want to dress up really warm and sleep outside, just to see if I could do it. 😛

My Favorite Animals for What?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What are your favorite animals?

Fair question, right?

To eat, I say my favorite is pork because I like face bacon and all those esoteric things that professional cooks eat. I like offal, but some of it is awful. My advice is that stuff like hearts, brains, and marrow might not taste good to you, but they’ll definitely taste better than kidneys and livers. I don’t eat filters (immortal words from Dana, she’s right tho). I don’t care whether we’re going to Luby’s Cafeteria or a three Michelin star fine dining experience. I am not eating liver and onions, I am not eating it dressed up as $200 fois gras. The only person that has ever gotten me to eat a second bite of fois gras is Gabriel Rucker, head chef of Portland’s Le Pigeon (do not pronounce it in French). It is not “le pigh-jhon”). It didn’t taste any less like an assload of iron, but there was so much more to explore within the flavor. The crisp edges. The raspberry jelly donut. Just….. fuck me. Yet, I still couldn’t get away from the taste of blood, and not even blood. Just the constant taste of a coin in the back of your throat, and it will stick long after you’ve finished. It’d be okay if it was the jelly donut that reappeared………..

I also love the zoo with a deep and abiding passion, particularly in the Spring because it’s free and I can go write there every single day if I want. It’s lovely when it’s between 60-70 degrees….. not so much in August. I pick a table in front of whichever enclosure pleases me, and the animals’ activity makes writing easier. When I go to the zoo, I only sometimes go during tourist season…. but when I do, those days are often invaluable.

There’s a reason for that. Sometimes I am very much in the mood for an overwhelmingly large crowd, because in that space, I am not taking it all in. I wear a baseball cap AND cans, a move score blasting so that I’m only watching the crowd, I’m not listening to it. Sounds trip me up all the time- it’s my sensory issue, from the notifications on my phone that sometimes scare the life out of me to people talking and not realizing they’re talking to me because every sound in the room is equally loud and I do not process voices in the same way I process reading. This is true of most autistic people.

Editor’s Note:

If you are struggling to reach an autistic person, try laying out all your feelings in text. Write them a letter. Use Facebook Messenger. We don’t lack empathy, we lack the ability to process it correctly…… particularly in conversation. Again, voices are hard- so much easier to process it in our own way, get back to you and see if we’ve understood.

I am using it as cover. I learned this from Jonna Mendez, actually, in one of her videos for “Wired” magazine on YouTube (I’ll put one of my favorites at the end- she is so fabulous). The funniest thing ever said in a comment came from someone who understood the assignment. He said, “she was the Chief of Disguise. I was really expecting her to turn into a black dude at the end.” I died for a second, but I know something he doesn’t. The first mask she ever made for herself that actually animated when she put it on was indeed a black dude. In her memory, it was fabulous, but she could not walk it, talk it….. because she is indeed a white woman. 😉

Her next big coup was fooling George H.W. Bush by “borrowing someone else’s face,” and as I result I kidded her in person that we had mutual friends. George H.W. Bush and I used to go to the same church…….. what is really, really amazing is that she fooled him in the Oval and not when he was director of CIA. LEGEND. The other really funny thing is that she got dressed at a friend’s house before they went to the White House, and their dog didn’t like her when she first got there and went apeshit over her in disguise. 😉 Additionally, she was working for Tony when he came up with the quick change…. that you could completely change your look in between 37-45 steps depending on whether Jonna or Tony is telling the story. The funniest part of that whole thing is that Tony and Jonna’s boss was a narcoleptic (I KNOW), and Jonna’s job was to stand at his desk and make sure he was awake the whole time to see Tony do it. He started out as himself, the spy you see in “Argo” played by Ben Affleck (much to my Latinx stepsister’s dismay and humorous consternation).

It didn’t matter who played Tony, because that’s not what was interesting about him……. and also, Tony didn’t care that a Latino didn’t play him The only thing that Jonna noted about Ben’s character had nothing to do with race. It wasn’t public at the time, but Tony had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s and his personality kind of flipped. Ben based the character on that personality because Ben and Tony spent time together. He did not know what Tony was like at the time. She said that he was more effusive with his emotions back then, and that it would have been in some ways a different movie if Ben had known Tony for many years. I’m paraphrasing her, but I am writing in the spirit of what she said. Even still, it wasn’t Tony’s personality that drew me in. He didn’t have to have that personality for me to love him. It was his brain, especially after he and Jonna laid out their thought processes so brilliantly in their books that not only do I have them all on my Kindle, my dad gifted me all of them autographed as keepsakes. And in fact, one of them I bought on my own and she signed it in front of me. It was one of the most significant moments of my life…… because I realized that even if I couldn’t be a spy, I could be them after they retired.

My idea is that I am capable of short stories where I do not feel capable as a novelist. I’d like to write Bond level stories for a chapter, and then lay out the research for why I wrote it. It would be cool to write science fiction like Men in Black, then explore why I picked their ops based on my enormity of reading…. and this is completely separate from my alternate history, because I have had the idea vetted and the red team says it’s huge; it will be a knockout if executed correctly. You can’t get that one out of me because I don’t want to give the idea away to anyone who’d publish a shittier version before I did. This idea is free because it’s universal. No two books written in both fiction and non-fiction would be the same. Even if you’ve read something like it, you’ve never heard it in my voice…… which, I think, would be “Rachel Maddow on the non-fiction parts and an amalgamation of Tony and Jonna when it’s fiction, and also me because they’re not neurodivergent (or I’m not brave enough to ask). I would write that in the inscription, to make it clear that it’s just a character and people shouldn’t attribute my indiosyncracies to her- necessary when you’re writing about someone who is still living and almost certain to read it. Calling someone autistic or coding them that way is not for the faint of heart because I wouldn’t let a dog I didn’t like be treated the way people treat me. It’s not my friends and family. It’s the way I walk in the world…… and I would die of embarrassment if I passed on the “wealth.”

I had to think about that.

In trying to hold a mirror up to the world around me, it often causes me to attribute my own idiosyncracies with someone else. I think I do it the most often with Supergrover because she is a mirror image of me. She emotes too little, and I emote too much. It is indeed the gap between neurotypical and neurodivergent. It causes issues because I tell her how I see the world and she doesn’t return the favor. Therefore, I write from my own echo chamber. We aren’t checking the stories we’re telling ourselves, and that kind of love is harmful to both of us. It is my responsibility to take care of my anxious attachment style. It is her responsibility to interrupt my reality with her story so that I am not basing every decision on what only I think. My self image isn’t strong enough for that. My history is that if I really love someone and they’re being avoidant, I’ll just cave for years on end to avoid ending the relationship.

I became aware that this story was total bullshit and realized that in order for Supergrover and I to move on, I needed a love big enough to silence the voices in my head. I needed her to tell me exactly what was up in her brain when she read it. I am neurodivergent, therefore I take everything literally. Meeting up one day was a “someday, perhaps,” and I waited five years. It wasn’t all because I was holding onto her. It’s that there was a pandemic. Why blame her for something so beyond her control? Alternatively, she didn’t seem to recognize when I shot for the moon and talked about a time in which she was retired and had nowhere to be….. anything from traveling to things neither of us have experienced to showing off our own experiences to the other to just having a damn cup of coffee together instead of in async. In short, I understood the assignment, I’m just establishing my area of operations.

I’m going to have to read “Nuking the Moon” by Vince Houghton, because I love the era of CIA involved in the space race. It is also an alternative title to this blog, apparently……. because having a relationship like ours would feel so relatable to every autistic reader. My friends become my special interest when I write to them. I don’t think of us as potentially falling in love later in life like I did with Dana. Dana and I worked on each other for a while, and she had me the first time she winked at me…… I just only know that in retrospect, because when you’re sapiosexual, someone has to open up to you over time. When you’re autistic, is has to be a forest fire to get you to notice…… and she’ll know exactly where she was when said wink occurred. It was not the same situation with Supergrover because she’s straight and she’s already met her life partner, anyway. I just like being cool enough to know her. It’s why I have no regrets at all right now, I’m just sad.).

Every neurodivergent person I’ve ever met has felt this way. Every single one. I haven’t realized my power in saying things that identify with AuDHD because I didn’t realize the rabbit hole was that deep.

Again, saying all this is not about my beautiful girl and me. It’s how perception of me would affect any character I write whether they’re fictional, living their lives, or dead now but their estate will freak. Any and all of these are bad, I assure you.

I should talk to Cora about this book because she absolutely is a novelist and creates entire fictional worlds. We could say a lot by not saying it at all. In fiction, you do things by showing. I want every character in the book to be neurodivergent and to show it by how they present. The book would basically contain how to communicate with a neurodivergent when they are trying to speak to a neurotypical. I can do this very well with spies because they are drenched in facts, not emotions.

Spies know everything, in my humble opinion. They take in too much information about the world every single day and remember random factoids all day long (e.g. American spies learning how to dress and count in Europe), allowing them to move quickly and quietly as the smartest person in the room. It’s not just Jonna and Tony that have taught me that lesson. It’s everyone I’ve ever met at the International Spy Museum or heard on SpyCast.

Even people who work at the museum are smarter than the average bear. In particular, shout out to Vince Houghton and Dr. Andrew Hammond, who both have served as the host of SpyCast. Otherwise, I would not know all this because I wouldn’t have gotten interested in real-life intelligence over Bond movie magic. Bond is the face of something very, very real…… and it has scared me more than once. I posted on an autism group that my special interest was intelligence, and the comments were varied from “oh, that’s so cool” to “does the American-based “International Spy Museum” have a wing for CoIntelPro?” Jesus God, let’s drag out every bad thing CIA has ever done right off the bat. I do not like those people. I really don’t. That’s because when you dig deep, you see that misses and wins are part of every organization. If the swing for a win is big enough, things are going to go very, very wrong- and faster than anyone would think.

But when I personally think of spies, I think about people like Julia Child, Virginia Hall, Alma Katsu (all OSS/CIA, but Virginia Hall also worked for MI-6 before she came to us), John le Carré (David Cornwell, MI-6, also a fiction author), and Jack Barsky (KGB). In terms of fiction, I’m not a Bond fan until we’re talking about the current set of movies, because the old ones are dated and incredibly misogynistic. (Pussy Galore? COME ON.). My favorite M is obviously Judi Dench, my favorite C is Stephen Fry in “Doctor Who.” And if I had to give an award to any intelligence officer in a fictional universe, there are two. I love K from MiB (“I never worked for a funeral home.”) and Carmen Sandiego (“Fedora the Explorer”).

In some ways, “Argo” is also a fictional universe because reel bears little resemblance to real. For instance, Alan Arkin’s character is completely made up, but John Goodman’s isn’t. John Chambers, his character, went on to do other sci-fi movies and his last one was “The Island of Doctor Moreau.” That being said, “Argo” is not Tony’s best book. It’s tremendous, but “The Moscow Rules” is better.

I think this is because in ’79 I was two. I don’t remember the hostage crisis in Iran. I very, very much remember “Mr. President, tear down that wall.” If you are not familiar, there used ot be a wall dividing East and West Germany. The dividing line was in Berlin. West Berlin had all the benefits of democracy and capitalism. East Berlin was controlled by communism, so this was a direct appeal by Ronald Reagan to Mikhail Gorbachev. In reality, Reagan and George H.W. Bush probably advanced the wall coming down by roughly 11 days. That’s hyperbole, but it’s the funniest line about the Cold War I’ve read so far (no past or present government employee said this; I was researching a paper in college for International Affairs.). Jonna and Tony were instrumental in all of this, protecting their assets and underlings like their own children. They also came up with two pieces of spy technology that changed the direction of the war…. and I’m saying it, they didn’t. They’re too humble.

Speaking of children, the first thing they came up with was called a “Jack in the Box.” It was literally a large version of the toy. This is because all the spies in Tony’s department (he was Chief of Disguise then) were taught that there is no distinguishable difference between espionage and magic. The area of operation is your “stage,” or your ring depending on the size of the circus. There are two operations going on at the same time. The first is that you’re trying to pop smoke (military slang for creating a distraction). The second is that you are actively saying to the crown, “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

Apt.

When CIA got a new building, they covered it in green glass. I don’t know what they called Langley before it was built as a code name/slang, but now it’s “Oz” (I don’t think Tony came up with it, but that’s on brand for him, clearly). In fact, one of the things that marks me as an intelligence superfan is that in “Argo,” Ben Affleck runs through the old building and ends up standing on the famous seal in the new one. I don’t know if you know that, but I know like five people who would know that…… and now I’m wondering if Zac is one of them.

ADHD moment- Zac is not a spy, but he works with the data they collect. He’s been in intelligence since he joined the military, which in my mind makes him a great boyfriend and a lucky bastard all at once. 😛 Unfortunately, he does not have the kind of badge where he can escort visitors, but he’s lucky that he doesn’t. I would have asked him to take me to a wide assortment of gift shops…………………… repeatedly. I’m lucky, though, because he remembers me when he goes. My baseball cap and “nightgown” are from the one at CIA (by nightgown I mean a CIA t-shirt that’s way too big on me), my sweat pants are from the one at the Pentagon, and I have a t-shirt from, I think, the one at DIA that’s for little kids (it’s my favorite). Interestingly enough, I don’t wear my intelligence/military shit all the time because they’re so great. It’s an added bonus that all their shit vibes with my sensory issues. If I ever find out who makes their clothes, I’d also buy a ton of stuff without the logo. This is because it doesn’t happen often, but sometimes I get treated like a human comment section. Not all of them are nice. The best one was from a tween who pulled on my coat and said, “Do you work there? I want to be CIA, too.” I freaked out because she was the most beautiful girlchilde……. a future Alpha Kappa Alpha that could one day be Tracy Walder. And by freaked out I mean that this was on the Metro platform so my emotions and sensory perception were already turned up to hell and I just cried. Flat out. But it was after she walked away. The last thing I wanted to do was freak her out, too. It was good that we were in such a public place.

When you think everyone is watching, turns out no one is.

To the rest of the world, this comes across as hilarious. To me, I just stare and quote Sarah Silverman on Jimmy Kimmel. That if she had kids, she’d tell them that “mommy believes she’s one of God’s chosen people, and daddy believes Jesus is magic.” Not sure he’s ever been compared to Jesus, but he’s a Moses in “Argo.” Sarah’s argument is valid for both of us.

Again, what I’ve learned from Jonna and Tony is moving in a crowd with my sensory issues muted by headphones and having my head covered. I can get lost in my own little world, and I generally want to because conversation is difficult for me when every noise feels the same and often drowns them out.

I was going to the zoo that day. I found that I love giraffes and kept going with my day. Not going to see me walking one down Connecticut because the zoo had “Adoption Day.” And, I would have to check with all of them, but I do not have room for a giraffe and (correct me if I’m wrong) neither do Zac, Supergrover & Michael, or Bryn & Dave. I do know enough to know that Zac, Michael, and Dave would have to convince me, Supergrover, and Bryn that no, we do not need a giraffe (they both have a heart that beats for animals). Also, I cannot afford to relocate both myself and a giraffe to Oregon. It would be easier to make friends with an Oregonian giraffe, which is a whole mood.

What would it look like to be an Oregonian giraffe? They don’t wear patchouli essential oil or hemp flip flops, do they? The only thing I know about Oregon giraffes is that they probably love The Indigo Girls. I do not say this lightly, actually, because The Indigo Girls have consistently been one of the best concerts at the zoo over the years. There’s no way that the animals don’t like the music, at least in some cases….. and Indigo Girls play acoustic just enough of the time that I can’t see how it would get on their nerves as much as electric. I love how I have worked all of this out in my head…….

If you’ve never been to the zoo in Oregon for a concert, it’s like going to Miller Outdoor Theater or Cynthia Mitchell Woods Pavillion in Houston or Wolf Trap in DC. Primates and parrots can both sing “Get Out the Map” by now. I would have enjoyed teaching it to Kevin, who is a giraffe.

Kevin and I used to hang out. The way his enclosure was built, there was a table with a bench bolted to the ground right in front of him. Like, I couldn’t reach out and pet him, but akin to being in the same bedroom or kitchen. Space, but not much of it. He always sat right in front of me, as if he knew he was my inspiration, posing for a portrait…… yet a devilish one. I have never seen a giraffe roll their eyes, but I liked to imagine that Kevin did. It fit the theme. If wishes were giraffes, writers would ride.I just called him that and now I can’t remember why. But anyway, I thought of us as tight because he heard about the rough drafts of so much that’s here now.

It’s not his real name. I was just gathering intel and needed a codename for my asset.

Just So Much… -or- Firsts to Share

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What could you try for the first time?

Let’s first get the fantasy out of the way. I could try living without depression. If only there was a medication that could do that…. even when medication works, it’s a Band-Aid, not a cure. If you thought I was weird before I was on medication, trust me, the medication didn’t touch any of that. Still lost in a world of my own making, which has been very dark and I’m trying to find my way out.

It’s been 10 years, and I’m starting to wonder when I’ll be able to wake up in the middle of the night without reaching for Supergrover. I don’t wish she was mine in those moments. If it’s that time of night, she’s there to calm a fear or kiss an emotional boo-boo. For the last 10 years, I’ve tried to tell Supergrover that. I’ve tried to tell her she represents safety and security in my dreams, the one who’s always bailing me out because if I fall I land on her cape. She thinks I’m trying to make her feel bad, and I know why but I do not accept it as valid. Her feelings as to why I’m trying to make her feel bad are based on something she told me, something I love but that she thinks I hate and must need to berate her about it.

I wish I could try asking her flat out, “why do you think I’m trying to guilt you and make you feel bad that you can’t be my partner? The reason I ask is that I feel like I’m trying to tell you I feel safe and you’re mad about it.” I have a working understanding of basic biology. To hold something like that over my beautiful girl’s head would be the most ridiculous thing anyone has ever done in the history of the universe, and I have never done it. What I have done is told her why I thought what I thought every step of the way. I was talking to her to have empathy, not to encourage. I asked her, “surely you’ve spent more time getting over someone than you wanted?” She agreed, but now it’s eight or nine years later and she still thinks I am trying to make her feel guilty for something I was never trying to guilt her over in the first place.

The fact that she even feels bad that she can’t be my partner is touching to an enormous degree, because I wonder what it is she actually liked about that picture to even inspire feeling bad. What would make her feel guilty she couldn’t do it? Her letters read as bittersweet and they made me cry because of it. The picture of us together wasn’t being intimate romantically, clearly, but I do think she saw the dogs, books, and witty banter thing pretty clear. When we’re together, it’s like having a steady stream of memes to your inbox except we’re just that funny so there aren’t pictures.

Of course, she was already dating Michael at this point and had been for a long time (without my knowledge- this was early- so it might have just been her fixer/pleaser nature bucking at not pleasing me. But at the same time, I hope she does know that my heart was in the right place even when I didn’t show it. I am far less reactionary when I’m not being trolled on the Internet, and I can say the same for our mutual friend.

It changed the whole way I do relationships on multiple levels. The first is that unless my partner is military and just wants to, I won’t get married again. That’s because I know within myself from being queer that I don’t need a piece of paper to tell me who to love. If I married someone, it’s because the legal benefits outweighed staying single, particularly with dating someone military. Being a dependent is a whole other thing.

But what I know from being queer is that you don’t have to get married for love. It’s not because I’m throwing a shit fit over tradition. It’s that marriage was never a part of my childhood, teenage years, or early adulthood. I could look in on it, I could not envision it because I am a Weird Barbie. I also know that all my readers know that Zac is military, so I feel like I should say that dating him is not about trying to convince him we should. I don’t have a “game” here except having the closeness of romance without the obligations of romance, which seem bigger at 46 than they did at 24. So, if you are looking for an eventual wedding invite, you’re not getting one. Die mad about it.

My next partner will get a completely different version of me than anyone has ever seen, because I’ve grown past Sam and she’s the only one who saw the previous model. But they’ll get a different model because I’ve already met the most important person in my life. It’s unfortunate that the most important and the biggest romance are not the same person, but I hope each will learn to roll in their own time. For Supergrover, that might mean roaring in someone’s face or it may mean we’re done. But what I’ve noticed is that she says “I vowed not to respond to your e-mails or blog posts” a lot…… and it jump starts my heart in all the right ways. She is reading. She is absorbing. She is getting something out of it.

I wish I could try hugging her for the first time. I think it would solve a hell of a lot. It would make our relationship look so much different to find the way we fit against each other in a hug, because it says everything about how much we trust each other. You can totally tell distance between people because guys don’t generally want to hug at all. If they do when they meet, they are generally either trauma bonded or actual siblings. for instance, I have noticed that combat vets hug each other more than most, and I am blessed to know enough combat vets to say that. I hate that they got their personalities through such intense pressure and pain, but trauma makes all of us who we are. I understand them and they understand me because PTSD looks the same in all people, no matter whether you were emotionally abused, raped, or kidnapped (as an adult or child). Physical and emotional pain set up the same way. Your emotional fibromyalgia starts with a reality break in all cases.

For me, the reality was raising my mom, because my biological mom didn’t want to and my emotional abuser was a fucking mess who couldn’t get it together until she did. I walked on eggshells around her all the time, which means I have the same reflexes as a combat vet now. Where we differ is in degrees. But it’s all the same shit. No matter what happened in childhood (including combat here because 18 is only an adult in theory), it will be measurable with the same llst of symptoms. Believe it or don’t, it feels just like being autistic or having ADHD. You are wakling around with a third degree burn on your face and acting like it’s not there……. until you doo the work and realize how relentless the burn is and try to turn it down. The severity of your emotional injury depends on the length of time it takes to get your reaction times and behaviors back to whatever your new version of normal might be.

My thing about Supergrover is this type of work is what we set ourselves up for. The emotional affair we were having was completely on the up and up except when I decided to ruin it for all sorts of reasons. The first time it happened, it was because I couldn’t get rid of her internally. She was my every waking thought because she couldn’t not be. Supergrover didn’t plan that part of it, because she didn’t know anything about me as a writer. My process as opposed to what’s published. All this time, she’s read my e-mails and blog posts and thought she knew me. She does, deeply, to the point where if it had been an arranged marriage, we would have figured it out eventually because the rest was too good……… the same way it is now when it’s an arranged marriage of an entirely different nature. No one should attach seduction or it being sordid in any way….. I crave her because now I’m not naturally designed not to. It’s a trauma bond, like you’d have with someone in your foxhole.

What is it that Diana Gabaldon says about secrets? I can’t remember the whole thing, but it was basically about Claire knowing Jamie doesn’t cheat on her. That when he’s with John (or whomever, I can’t recall), secrecy deserves respect. That if something was up, Jamie would just tell her. The same is true of me and Supergrover. The difference now is that she believes I believe she could suddenly be touched by an angel and change her mind about Michael; it makes her terrified to open up to me anymore, and I let her get away with that for far too long. It was not a friendship anymore and I couldn’t break the addiction. I could say the same for her.

I could try trusting her for the first time. I fell in love with every inch of her because she told me the truth, always, even when I didn’t like it. She stood up to my bullshit and I finally felt like I’d met my match intellectually. She could go as hard and as long as I wanted with argument and rhetoric. She always had her p and q statements in a row. We were never merely contrary unless we were just trying to act like eight year olds, which she will absolutely cop to- in retrospect, it was childish, and a war that never should have happened on either side of the equation. I wasn’t stalking her. We were both trolling the hell out of each other, trying to find hot buttons we could use and which ones should be on speed dial. Which ones were just enough below the belt to inspire fear.

Hers were just better, and I folded first. I wanted her to see that she wasn’t so tough because she was treating me like she was. We both called each other’s bluff, the moment I realized she’d have to be my primary partner now (from my perspective- she could share. I can’t.). That she’s hot shit, and therefore a relationship with her hits different and she’s blissfully unaware of that fact. She ended me for a while because I had to figure out what to do. I was in charge of something I never asked for and also wanted. I have only wanted to dive into her to the level she wants me there. And now I’m there to the point where I’ll never get out. Think about how much Peppa the Pig has changed the entire speech pattern of a generation of children. This is us, and i hope that I am as talented as Peppa the Pig.

It would please me if she told the author of Peppa Pig that, and it is not a sure bet she doesn’t know them. It is not a sure bet she doesn’t know anyone. That’s because in terms of gait and manner she’s kind of like Olivia from Scandal or SVU, take your pick. I like the image of Olivia becauuse Supergrover showed up like my white knight and that was Shonda’s vision for Olivia. Why she wears white all the time. Supergrover looks beautiful in white, and she also wears it all the time.

She’s also the whitest person I know despite not actually being white.

I don’t crave the sameness of her life, but the difference she makes in mine. For her, every day is the same. Just normal, everyday, suburban crap. And then she gets to work but when the shit hits her fan, it also hits different. My life feeds hers and vice versa because we’re too different for direct comparison until you get to how much information our minds are capable of processing at once and the capability for Large Discussions is unbeatable. We can talk like Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earheart instead of The Trailer Park Boys….. and given that we both grew up in similar situations, not a turn our lives wouldn’t have taken had we each been looking for it.

I have been doing things for the first time for 10 years just through the nature of the path my life has taken. One of her firsts is only having enough time to get to know a tiny fraction of me, so she’s missing out on all the emotional intimacy I have to offer and trading it for a mistake I made so long ago that it should have been forgotten by now. I am not chiding her for holding onto it. Her right. Her perogative. But not her perogative how long I stay when she forgives me on the surface and makes it where we don’t have any firsts to share.

This Question is Impossible and I Hate It

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

I can only do what I do. Keep putting my crappy first drafts on this web site to prepare me for my real writing. These entries serve as my warm-up, and are my favorite of all my projects because there’s no pressure. I ask for money via donations, but I don’t make you pay to read. These are WordPress ads, and I don’t make money from them, either. I’ve just made a commitment that this is important whether money is involved or not. If you’re curious, sometimes I make enough to cover the hosting and sometimes I don’t. In the meantime, I am celebrating other authors in hopes that they’ll celebrate me. Being well-respected is more important than famous. I’d be crazy to think that people adoring me is more important than me adoring Jodi Picoult when she likes something I wrote. Same with Mary Karr, Margaret Cho, Amy Tan, Wil Wheaton, and James Fell. I don’t want to be known by everyone. I want to be known by them. In fact, I once made a joke about Jonna Mendez being excited to meet me, complete tongue in cheek. SHE REPLIED THAT SHE WAS HONORED and I died for a second. This is because I sent her the entry I linked to via Facebook Messenger, literally handing her a piece of me and hoping that it at least wouldn’t offend her because her husband’s memory is my blessing.

I didn’t even know she was watching because I am a complete n00b when it comes to social media, and not because I don’t know it cold. I choose to spend my energy on something else. It’s the whole reason I use WordPress. I don’t have to do anything but type even though I could code CSS and HTML blind (I have been dared). I don’t forget because of anything but protection of my energy.

In my reflection on being a preacher’s kid, I figured out something big while I was sitting with the bees (we talk every day now, I think Brian has asthma). There are so many people in Texas that want to know what I’m up to, as well as some in Portland. Bryn is the absolute only person I record for, because she’s the one who asked me for it. It’s also a lot more work than I thought it would be, especially in terms of finding a place to store the files. It also freaks me out that my audience is bigger now, because I have followers on that platform as well in the “Storytelling” category. I’m trying to decide if I want to spy on my friends or not, because SoundClouds stats are more granular. I know which area of the city the play is coming from. Guessing there are a few people that would like to know that. If you still want to read, WordPress only counts by country. You’re welcome, three people that would freak.

Spying on my friends is not my intention because it wouldn’t serve a purpose, it would just hurt me. I’d put in double the amount of effort in resolving issues with those people in order to do the work so it doesn’t dog me. But the people in Texas have a unique need when it surfaces. I was the kid in their pastor’s church. They all knew and loved me on the platform that was his, understanding me through that filter. Then, when we moved away, it was no contact. My dad never wanted to be threatening to his colleagues and social media didn’t exist. When I was gone, I was gone.

But now, social media exists and when people Google me to see where I am, it’s important to them. It surprises me to know that other people love reading me that have no connection to me at all… that by focusing on my own people I’m coming across as focusing on the world…. Sometimes. I have my selfish moments and I’m entitled to them, because no one can give me more energy than me. No one else could or should have the time. I live here, capiche?

A lot of the people that would Google me are dead in the first place. I know that and I write for them, anyway. Breadcrumbs or complete entries all about them so that not only do I live forever, so do they. Ours is the story that will stick, not because it’s perfect, but because it exists. I live for people’s curiosity, and answer questions gladly… with the knowledge that first of all, looking at my writing doesn’t tell the whole story and I’m different in person. Secondly, allowing for the fact that rarely do I think the same about things a week after I’ve written them. That’s why I post a lot. I give myself material by reflecting on what I’ve written and a new idea will pop up. I can get through things extraordinarily quickly that way. I’ve already gone back to thinking of my beautiful girl as Supergrover, because she’s inherently cuddly and yet wears a cape and tights, in my humble opinion. I only think the opposite sometimes because her walls not only keep me out, they keep her from listening. Information is being cut off both ways, and I know that because I wrote about it. Her story is “The Monster at the End of This Book,” and not because she was a monster to me. It’s what she thought of my friends when they hurt me. Yes, she knows what you did. Every single one. And if you’ve been reading even a few months you know which bodies are buried. She’s been my lockbox because I was hers. That covenant is not broken between us. I will keep what she’s already told me walled off. I just didn’t want a future, and I wanted to be able to talk about my experience of her without her bothering me… and it’s not what you think. I don’t get irate when she’s mad about something I published. It’s when she’s touched that I just fall apart at what’s been lost.

Internet communication made both of us quick to react and quick to anger.

And yet I can bet dollars to donuts that she’ll eventually want to look me up and see whatever happened to?

This is only problematic because I don’t recognize it as only letting me know she loved something. I pick right back up where we left off and she won’t tell me she doesn’t want that. So I don’t notice that she’s not receptive and get angry she won’t resolve anything. We expand and contract over time. It would be a great relationship if I could back off and be comfortable with the pattern we set up, but it’s not. It reminds me of early days, when sharing a beach umbrella with drinks and books would have been a viable option. I can’t live with panko when I would have made breakfast for everyone, and you can’t even believe how big that is. That is a catering operation. At the time she had a teenage son, and whom I jokingly called her “hundred siblings.”

It was so amazing when we met, because then I could put one face in my head that was my audience when really it was worldwide. So helpful to think of this blog as letters to her so I could be intimate without constantly thinking of the repercussions, again, allowing my friends to listen but looking at the bigger picture. The more personal I am, the more vulnerable I am, the more you’ll see me as I am. I’m not trying to be famous. I’m not trying to be successful. I’m not trying to throw anyone under the bus because if you show up here, you’re important enough to me to look at our relationship deeply. To memorialize you in my history. Again, yours will be the story that sticks, and that may not matter to you in the moment, but what about 20 years from now? Won’t you want to remember what you were like when I glowed about you and that it showed even though you were never a perfect angel? That I loved you this big in spite of your actions pissing me off sometimes? That I loved you even when you didn’t get it? That I only walked away because I couldn’t get through to you?

I am explaining the relationship I had with my Internet friend to avoid talking about one of my real friends. I’m not going to bother with her name because you wouldn’t know her anyway. She read something on my blog that pissed her off about Sam and didn’t listen when I told her that I’d only leaked as much as Sam allowed me to leak while still being pissed off that she hurt me. She apologized, but wouldn’t let it drop. She told me on the phone that she had talked to her friends about it, and they agreed with her, never having read me at all. These were friends gathered at a restaurant where I was expected to walk in shortly. I am an introvert empath. I couldn’t take it and couldn’t believe she didn’t recognize that she was setting me up for failure, thrashing before a committee, and she’d already thrashed me twice. At this point, you’re not a concerned friend. You are in my way.

I guarantee she won’t agree with that assessment, but she doesn’t get to decide my story. She could help with craft, but she can’t help with plot. I’m sure she thought I lost it, but I couldn’t get her to understand that I was already validated by my decision to lay everything out here and that I had millions of readers over the years. That I’d been doing this for 20 years and the cost benefit analysis favored me. That I wasn’t choosing to throw anyone under the bus, I was telling other people what was happening in my brain at the time of the incident and it’s up to them to believe whether I am a reliable narrator or not.

I feel like people should self select whether they want to be on here or not. I talk about Zac and Bryn because they allow me to do it. Zac and I have not discussed the particulars of what I can say and what I can’t, but I do ask him if it’s okay to use something he said as a writing prompt. I just don’t want to tell his story for him, to intrude where I’m not wanted. My connection to him doesn’t involve anyone else yet, because I’m not friends with any of the other people he interacts with on a daily basis, and I’m not itching to get to that point with him. If we do, we’ll keep talking about what I can and can’t say. Only Daniel has said that he’s an open book, say whatever you damn well please. In fact, his actual words, and I’ll remember them forever, are “my girl, be prolific.” God damn it. Why does he have to be so impossible and so endearing at the same time?

I hope what I’m doing is talking about the “Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ” moments of my life. The clusterfucks that lead to forks in the road, letting you know which one I’ve taken.

I am not saying I wouldn’t get more involved with Zac, I just don’t know yet. More than what we have right now is too much for me to think about. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t love him with the same intensity as a friendship with someone like me. That it requires care and work even if it’s ultimately platonic in the end. We’re at the stage where I don’t even know what to call him and I don’t want to, if that makes sense? When I can give energy to that question, I will. In the meantime, all I ask is that the time we’re together, we’re together. Be present in the moment. You can tell me everything and my reaction is my own. If I see a problem I’ll call it out. As of right now, you can do no wrong because I’m not sitting here thinking of all that could go wrong when everything is so right.

Maybe that sounds a little dude brah of me, not going the traditional route of a woman begging to know if she’s his girlfriend or not. I am just protecting my energy because I don’t want to fall too fast, too soon, messing up everything before I have enough heuristics to feel out what I’m doing. I just need time to soak everything in and decide how I feel, what CIA calls a “DADA loop.” I know this because I’m reading a book by a former officer called “How to Think Like a Spy.” DADA stands for “decision, analysis, direct action.” Things have changed since the Cold War Era. CIA has stepped back up to paramilitary and this time embraced it. Analysis of every decision is absolute. You better know six ways to Sunday what is most likely to happen if you do x or y…. Because the rule at CIA is that you can call off a mission even if it just doesn’t feel right… but you can’t always see those things coming. Mistakes have been made. I just choose to ignore all that because it’s not like the people who work there aren’t under the same pressure as the military. Do you think all boots on the ground like what they’re asked to do?

Part of that I got from Zac as well, because his job has always been intelligence, since the Navy, in fact. There is no universe in which I’d dump Zac over anything he’s ever been asked to do. If anything, I’d take on his pain as my own, becoming his lockbox as much as I have been for my other friends since I was five (probably earlier, but I can only remember starting at five). That’s the other thing the title of preacher’s kid gives you. You’re the lockbox and you know it (clap your hands).

I hope that in ten years, I will show the world that I have fought against this instinct because I had to have a release valve somewhere, otherwise I would explode from having so many people’s stories in them that cause me pain. I hurt when other people hurt, more than I realize when my own life is going to hell in a handbasket.

If I focus on myself, I have room to handle bigger emotions.

At least it’s an ethos.

Strength and Helsinki

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

CIA, MI6, and MiB

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

I can’t find it.

This has never happened to me before in terms of writing. Ever. I’m a blogger, right? So I’ve hit post and never had to search through a directory tree in 20 years. The worst part is that I’m fluent in DOS and Linux, so I know how to do all the shit that would compare and contrast documents…. and it didn’t even occur to me to do that with my writing until right now.

I even have a pen pal that I’ve known since Jesus was a boy and I know to create different subject lines so that all our crap doesn’t mix together, like separating personal from professional (editing vs. friendship, really… not for this, for my books…. this is graffiti with punctuation [cracked me up in Contagion]).

Today I started with creative writing instead of memoir type stuff because every time I write about my life, blowback comes from somewhere. So, no more about that. I’ll write about things long enough in the past that they don’t matter anymore, or put up fiction. If I write about a decision that is currently being made, there are just so many, many people who have an opinion that is either stupid or invalid.

Let’s start with Daniel.

I would marry that boy like yesterday. I still feel that way even though right now he is acting like a jackass by being a doctor and a patient.

Now, why would I know what his motivations are?

If you have to wonder, you’re not my friend.

How do you know that I don’t have years and years of experience with addicts?

I’m a line cook. I’ve wondered if people relapsed to the point of wondering if they died and that’s why they didn’t show up today or give me a call.

I’m not laughing.

If you are, you’re not my friend.

How do you know that I’m building a family too fast?

My daughter is trans and 24. The reason I call her my daughter is not because she actually is. It’s that her biological mother is straight and I’m both bisexual and genderqueer. I get it, where her mom and dad are blind. I am giving her the relationship I should have gotten.

If you have to wonder, you’re not my friend.

None of you have ever asked if I had friends who I’ve married in terms of loyalty and confidentiality so I have people that hold me together. I have friends in multiple places who support me and I can reach out any time, day or night, because it might be 1100 there. My friend Suzanne is in Aberdeen. I wake up at 0400. I have coffee, she has tea.

Since I’ve never gotten asked that question, I feel like it’s necessary. I have friends who have supported me for years and years now. I don’t need a romantic partner. I want one, but I don’t have to have one to function.

And finally about this topic, if you know all of the above, than you’ll know that my absolute best friend at one point was a severe alcoholic and now she’s one of the most successful people I know. All of you who are so incredibly worried about me can stop now.

Even if Daniel broke up with me every day from here til kingdom come, I wouldn’t believe it until January 2024, which is the conservative estimate on how long it takes his brain to clear. Right now he’s finding out that life is rough without medication to control cravings and all that shit.

So if you think for one second that I thought this would be easy, that I’d have it made in the shade, or that I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. Daniel was in a bad place. I sold him a fantasy to give him the courage to get to rehab. He did. My work here is done. But that isn’t the whole story. The whole story is that I love him more than anyone on earth, including me. He just doesn’t know it, because his brain is dopamine-starved and using every trick in the book to try and get him to believe that he’s a worthless piece of shit.

Here’s the thing. I sold him a fantasy to get him to rehab. I want to make the fantasy real so we can be done with rehab and off to living in Fez, Cairo, Casablanca, wherever. I don’t care. Just anywhere to get us somewhere cheaper. The US is bananas. I didn’t fake him out. I didn’t do anything but promise him a fantasy that was doable if he would only get his shit together.

Every addict in the room is quietly nodding. They might not agree with what I did, but they will also tell you to do whatever you have to do to get your partner into rehab. WHATEVER. So I did. I got him there. Whether he comes home and still wants to marry me is up for grabs. But does it really matter?

I GOT HIM TO REHAB. I MADE SURE HE WAS GOING TO LIVE. I HELPED SAVE HIM.

The rest is totally up to him, and I’m going to let him figure out all that. He’s the one in therapy most of the day, so I think I can move on to something else. They’ve got him. I can rest until May.

And I will, because I’ve already got two best friends who love me enough to marry me, but not enough for the fun stuff. That is for the love of my life if he decides he wants it.

Again, none of this comes from a place of “he’s going to screw up.” Addicts, raise your hands. Who among you got through the last drunk and getting into rehab without fucking up some relationship or another?

I thought so. I can hear you choking with laughter from here.

Now that I have explained myself and hopefully shut the shit down (can I get a witness? HELL YEAH!), it’s time for today’s lesson on metaphor.

Men in Black II is a documentary.

K was a designation in the British system of intelligence. If you’ve seen the more recent Bond films, K has not been in use since WWII, I believe. However, it’s the rank above M, played by Ralph Fiennes and Judi Dench. You don’t see C in movies very often, but my biggest example of who C is comes from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I can’t remember whether C is the bad guy in that one or not. I’ve slept since then. No UK disrespect meant. The C I’m talking about is basically Stephen Fry in Doctor Who.

Q means quartermaster. In MiBII, this is like the scene where K says, “guess I’ll have to buy The White Album again.” That’s because Q is representative of an entire department of people. In the US, it’s called the Office of Technical Services. Back when it was OSS and CIA hadn’t started…… chefs and cooks, sit down. You’ll need it……. Julia Child worked for OTS. She developed shark repellant. Why case officers would need such a thing is where I draw the line in terms of research.

Z is probably also a rank somewhere, but to me it refers to the decryption of the Zimmerman Telegram in 1917. That was the first time in modern history that signals intelligence (SIGINT) was useful on the world stage. Interestingly enough, the guy that played Z (Zed) was in my grandfather’s class in high school.

In terms of rank, I’m not sure where Zed falls. My guess is that he’s C.

C was named for Sir Mansfield George Smith-Cumming. If I were to compare him to an American, it would be “Wild Bill” Donovan, because he’s the one that started OSS to begin with. Cumming managed to wrangle together MI6, which is why the head job is named after him. I’m honestly not sure who he would match in today’s CIA, because they don’t publish how they do things. For instance, are people like John Brennan C, or is C under cover and people like Brennan are just figureheads?

Damn, Gina.

If you got that joke, you can stay.

If you’re wondering whether I just like Bond and spy shit or if I have a direction with this, yes to the first and still working on the second.

People have no idea why I like spy stuff. At 18 I wanted to be a trumpet player in the Airmen of Note. I didn’t care that the Air Force was basically a group of people standing next to the military. I just wanted to play.

I didn’t get to, which began my lifelong obsession with books and movies where people fought each other without using violence.

And then CIA appeared on Doctor Who, and it was all over for me. Of course I can love Everett. Of course I can love The Doctor when Richard Nixon asks him how he’ll be remembered, and of course The Doctor can’t say SHIT, and just says, “Oh, Dickie. THey’ll never forget you.”

Of course I love MI6 and CIA. They’re basically the closest thing to magic we have on this earth, and as I was telling my friend Zac, “it’s like science fiction because they already know the new technology coming out, but they can’t tell us about it.” It’s real in the way that real magic occurs.

MiB training even reflects real life. Jonna and Tony Mendez both write beautifully about taking their subordinates to Georgetown and giving them a head start while they make everyone and no one makes them. Jonna was even the old guy….. Chief of Disguise gonna Chief of Disguise. Can you imagine being a case officer and finding out your boss was Tony Mendez, then stayed in long enough to have also had his wife as a boss? That’s magic.

Like taking an American and a British intelligence agency and filling it full of aliens and putting a Burger King in the lobby of the spaceport.

In terms of the actual training at MiB, case officers in VA had to lose themselves in Georgetown and try to pick out who was watching them. J shot a little girl alien because she was carrying a chemistry textbook that was way too advanced for her. It’s the difference between life and death, that noticing things.

Down to a Lay’s potato chip bag life and death.

That Burger King isn’t really a joke, either. If you look on CIA’s web site, they’ll tell you they have a Starbucks at Langley and it’s one of the busiest in the world.

I have also found a place for The Hot Sheets that’s really friggin’ funny. In my head, The Hot Sheets are the Presidential Daily Briefings.

I swear to Christ, you just cannot get photographic journalism better than this. Even Shane Harris couldn’t write something this good (teasing him because he’s the local National Security reporter at WaPo and has been on Maddow several times). I don’t stop hoping, though. Pro tip, Harris. Memorize it.

Zed, think about it. I could be Agent H………

This One Time, Listen Up and Hard

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

I want to tell you something about the man I eventually want to be with for the rest of my life. I need you to really hear me, really cry with me, really feel the pain and joy that I felt when Daniel decided that I was trustworthy enough to be trusted with a story this big. I want it to go around the world by tomorrow, and I’m not kidding. I want you to lose your MINDS when you hear his story, and I want to make myself the best known writer in the world for this one entry alone. I do not think this is undoable. Please make me famous for this one thing, and I will owe you everything.

I just got a text message from Daniel that said, “my girl, be prolific.”

Well, I am nothing if not that.

It was a calm day in the market when Daniel was in country. He noticed something out of the corner of his eye. He stood strong and shot.

The “noticing someone” was a terrorist wiring up a five year old child to explosives so that he could blow up everyone in the plaza.

If I showed you the award he got for it, the Marines in the audience would lose their minds.

I did. I took on all his pain. Just all of it. I sobbed and sobbed and couldn’t get ahold of myself for hours, and I’m sobbing even now. I can’t get over it. I am too filled with joy that even though it was the worst day of his life, it feels like the best day of mine.

I definitely had thoughts. The first was the strength it took for a military-trained nurse practitioner to break the Hippocratic Oath…. to wrestle with it, because he was tasked with saving life, not taking it. I wonder what it was like to look a terrorist in the eye, knowing that under normal circumstances, you’d be taking his history and physical. The second time was just how close I came to losing one of the great loves of my life before it ever happened…. well, as children. It counts, but there’s so much more. The third was how humbled I know I’ll be to be in his presence. It’s a reverence that will fade when he hasn’t done x or y, but will never be forgotten. Please don’t let it be forgotten by anyone else.

But don’t you DARE do it to honor me. I’m just the messenger.

This entry is going to be short, but I hope it hits you like you didn’t even see gravity’s rainbow until the bomb NEARLY went off, taking a five-year-old with it.

Sit in that. I did. I am humbled. Just bleeding out with gratitude. My heart can barely take it, but it wants to.

Editor’s Note (DW): When we called general quarters on the ship, I never felt the mixture of fear and excitement. It was all business. I took control of my sound powered phone with my CSOSS manuals and a dry erase marker and kept track of what systems were up and down. That was my job during the shit in the shop. Afghanistan isn’t even a different animal. It’s a different being. You literally see a bag of chips and ask if that’s a ied. The excitement is skipped and the fear is squared. Getting back to the wire was a tear leaking experience , because thank fuck today wasn’t the day and all 7 of us came back

I just had a thought that is so funny that I cannot end the entry without telling you. “When you want something done right, hire a Corpsman.”

Let me also add a note to my dad and all my friends in Naples, particularly Tiffany Anthony, MD. I am fully convinced that I am eventually going to marry Hawkeye and House, mixed with the very best of Jimmy Leeves we have left in this world and Dr. Anthony in our corner from Dallas.

Karen

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Karen,

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

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

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

Best,
Leslie

All Boxed Up

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is my use case.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing You Could Say Could Tear Me Away

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been waiting for seven years to say that I’ve met someone and not have it be an April Fool’s joke or clickbait.

Today is that day.

I can’t tell you much about her because she’s a mom. Her kids know she’s dating someone, but not who it is. It’s too early for them to meet me, but acceptable for them to know that if their favorite sci-fi novels are missing, they haven’t been stolen. I hope they know what their mother has done having told me I could read anything I want. 😛

Editor’s Note: This week I borrowed “out of my mind,” by Sharon M. Draper. It’s about an 11 year old girl who has a photographic memory and is trapped inside her body. She can see everything, but she can’t tell anyone about it because she can’t write. She finally gets a voice, and not everyone is eager to listen.

I can give you details that have nothing to do with my girl’s current life, though.

She has a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Vocal Performance. When she’d gotten those done, she auditioned for one of the specialized choirs in the Army, and got a secured chair as an alto before she shipped off for basic training. After she retired from the Army, she directed church choirs for a while, then reinvented herself yet again. I absolutely wouldn’t tell you what that was, anyway, because it tends to make people ask her for things as if her time doesn’t cost money.

One of the things I truly love about my girl is that she reminds me of so many people I’ve loved over the years…. The professional musicians that raised me, including my biological parents, teachers at Clifton, HSPVA, Clements, private instructors in trumpet and voice, beloved choir directors, et al. are the lights that shine behind her, strengthening our connection with shared language. She’s also from New Jersey, not Texas, so she doesn’t remind me of any one musician from my past, or any of them if we’re strictly talking personality. The Texan church musician is an archetype all its own, can I get an “amen?”

And now you’re going to ask if her voice makes me cry, and I’m going to have to decide between snarky comeback and my vulnerable truth. I’m going to go with it.

The truth is that even when she’s just driving and singing absentmindedly, my heart flips. If I was sitting in the audience of one of her performances, forget about it… I’d be gone. She’s got the kind of heart that I know she’d be singing to me no matter how many people paid to be on the front row. What really makes my heart clench is singing together…… You can coax me into crying with that mental picture almost a hundred percent of the time.

But that doesn’t stop her from giving me shit about being a soprano and a trumpet player, and I love every second of it. Because she’s a choir director, she already knows all the inside jokes that are going to make me laugh, especially because her field choir traveled with a band and that rivalry never goes away. For instance, a lot of her friends have gone from the Army Field Band to professional work all over Washington and Baltimore. I am only one degree from Marin Alsop now, and I will not tell you anything about those conversations. I will only say that no matter what I’ve heard, it’s trivial. I’ve heard it all in my own musical life. I still want to see Alsop conduct. Whether she’s Jesus incarnate or Lucifer, every time she gets excited and does that little Bernstein hop, I’m drooling like a computer programmer at a Star Trek convention.

Here’s the best inside joke according to me:

My Girl: Voice is the superior instrument with choral music being perfection.

Me: Back the fuck up, Wilhousky.

Here’s why it’s an inside joke. Peter Wilhousky wrote one of the most famous, glorious arrangements of the Battle Hymn of the Republic I’ve ever heard in my life. My choir director at church from seventh grade to ninth loved it, so I’ve known every note to the soprano, first trumpet, alto, and second trumpet part since before I could type. I have also dabbled in first tenor because I will never drop out of the the a capella section in rehearsal. It’s just too chewy.

One of the first things I asked her was, “since you were in the military, just how many times have you done the Wilhousky arrangement?” She said, “a million, and I’m not even exaggerating.” One of the reasons I like it so much is that whether I was singing or playing, it was so damn fun.

My girl and I have other things besides music and the full on church experience regarding how the sausage is made, but I feel they might be too identifying, and thus, too private for now. But if we stay together long term, I’m sure more details will be allowed to creep out. I know we’ll be having discussions about how much I can say and when, and later on if things go really well, asking the kids themselves how much they want said about them because they’re teenagers. They can make up their own minds. I would also rather sign up for shock therapy treatment than become, for lack of a better term, a “mommy blogger.”

I’ll tell you right now, though, one of the kids and I are obsessed with the same thing. I’m not aiming to be a parent. The kids already have two parents. However, if neither of them are as into this shared thing as me and the shorty, it’s on like Donkey Kong. I tease my girl about it all the time…. I get fake disgusted with her assessment of something in said activity and say things like, “if I ever meet your kid, I’m going to assure them you’re only there to hold my bag and my water.” Teasing that hopefully never even gets close to the line of actually hurting is our thing.

This is the first potentially serious relationship I’ve ever been in where we’re not thinking about having kids. She has kids already. So, time is deliciously limited and every moment counts. It’s a little bit tricky because even though we don’t live that far from each other, it’s not really close enough to meet up on a whim. This is because I live in Maryland, a few miles further northwest than the line between Maryland and The District, still inside the beltway of the city. She lives in a suburb of Baltimore that’s closer to BWI, only 30 minutes from my house by car but two completely separate transit systems. The closest I can get is taking the bus to the Metro station and getting on the MARC train, with either my girl picking me up at the airport station (which thankfully, is very close to her house), or a quick Uber ride to get myself there if she’s tied up at work or something.

I downloaded the public transit app for Baltimore and added one ticket to BWI and a funds card with a few dollars on it. It’s for both of us. I can escape if something goes wrong and I just don’t feel like talking about it right that moment, and if nothing ever goes wrong, it’s just handy to be self-reliant. I’ve also watched too many couples break up because one person always has to do the driving… or if that wasn’t the main problem, it certainly didn’t help anything.

It’s something of which I’m aware, but I’m not as panicked as I would be if I lived in Houston. Now, I don’t have to be reliant on my girl to get me anywhere in either city/suburb. Any time she wants to pick me up to save me time or to spend more time together, it’s welcome and I am always grateful. I just don’t want to feel like a big issue later on…. Driving is one of those things that’s irritating enough if you’re rarely the driver… more so if you’re the only one who does it. When the honeymoon period wears off it’s generally the first knock-down drag-out fight.

Only one piece of the puzzle is left, and that won’t get solved until we decide to get really serious. If I move to the same city or the same house, we’ll gain the ability to do one more thing that we don’t have now…. being able to call each other up and say “I’m going to the pub with the crew. Meet us in 20.” It’s still possible if plans are made early enough in the day, but right now I’m at door to door in somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours. Her town is small enough that I could walk to a pub in 20 minutes if I was local. As long as I stay put, though, 90 minutes to two hours door to door is much faster than I could do it by car, because between traffic and construction there’s no time of day where it takes dramatically less time than others.

It’s so easy that next time my girl might not want to drive here, either. Our friends in Silver Spring would haul us around or we could Uber. So much better than sitting in traffic and driving. It’s sitting in traffic, reading and cuddling. The reason it’s not sustainable as a solution is that if we’re a committed couple, I would lose my mind getting to her or the kids if there was an emergency. Anything less than immediately is unacceptable. “Less than two hours” might fly in a long distance dating situation, but in a partnership is cruel to everyone. Being reliable is important to me.

For now, it’s a delicious thing to will time to stand still; things can progress slowly… I can take things out, try them on, think about them until they’re not foreign anymore. My girl and I can create a private bubble of writing to each other and dates where we really get to know each other with more senses than just reading words on an electronic page. If we’re playing for keeps, we need to be a team, starting with learning how the other one communicates.

I find that I communicate best in writing, especially when I have to say something hard. I can take as long as I need to flip out about it, and then calmly craft a response. My emotions are enormous. Most people don’t deserve my kneejerk reaction. They deserve my response after I’ve walked off and written about it. Just one of the things that lets me be an INFJ on my own without scaring the bejesus out of anyone… and then when I get to the part where I need to say something out loud, I’m confident because I’ve worked it out on my own. I simply need input. If my girl feels strongly about something, my own conclusions need to change. If we’re chatting about it online, I have two things. The first is the ability to copy and paste my thoughts into a letter. The second is that a moment expands when I read about it later…. and in a much more beautiful way than if I just tried to think about the conversation and remember it that way. That’s like trying to read a series of novels and then being tested on which events happened in which book.

I love going back over our conversations and rereading, because different things jump out at me than they did the first time, because I’ve walked away and am looking at it from a different perspective than I was even ten minutes ago.

There’s another advantage to rereading our conversations, and it’s invaluable. Because I’m rereading our conversations and replying to things as they come up, it’s like conflict repellant, and every bit as effective as bug spray. One of my triggers is having someone tell me that my perceptions aren’t accurate. I spent so many years doubting my own perceptions and instincts when I am actually extremely astute. Not much gets by me, and doubting my abilities as a visionary and truth teller when I can bring the receipts is a flat out rejection…. yet another reason why it’s taken me so long to open myself up to a romantic situation.

Only once has this happened, but I went on a date several years ago with a woman who’d gotten the URL for this web site from my OK Cupid profile. Then, she asked me out for coffee. When I accepted, she turned out to be a drooling fangirl who wanted me to be the voice I am here. It’s something that doesn’t seem like it would be problematic. This web site is me. I am this web site. Here’s the rub. At no time during that conversation was I ever allowed to deviate from anything I’ve already written, as if writers are never allowed to change their minds. Particularly with bloggers, entries are just verbal pictures, not even videos. It’s 2D with a timestamp. She’d quote me to me and then accuse me of lying, even if it was 2016 (or whatever, I don’t even remember that much- just that it was before my mother died) and the entry was from 2014. It made me express something verbally that I’ve always known with my other senses. I love respect. I hate fame.

Blogging is a stream of consciousness first draft in which I’ve given myself permission to write absolute shit. This is nothing compared to the heights I can reach with research and dedication. In some ways, I should never have become a blogger in the first place. I laid out every problem I had, including my struggles with mental illness, in hopes of “leading from the back.” Wounded Healer, Henri Nouwen, et cetera.

The pro was that people I didn’t know flocked here because I was saying things that connected. Those closest to me started trying to judge the stability of my mental health by my silly observations. I have the same relationship with my blog that I do with preaching in public. I can lead one person or a million, but not two…. as in, it’s very easy to talk to people I don’t know. People I do know tend to think that they are excellent detectives. Not once have they ever been right. They are right that occasionally I do spiral out, and as bad as they think. But not when.

The difference in my writing voice is not mania vs. depression. It’s “in the creative zone” vs. “I haven’t written in X number of days and I am itching to get everything out.” The other differences that are seen as lies are actually easily explained without being excused. I can only write one line at a time. My mind is a multi-core processor. Every time I tell a story, it includes thoughts from all the cores and not just the one I was using at the time the story was originally written. My details don’t get larger or smaller. They just get more dense…. or in layman’s terms, “I can bring the receipts. I don’t just make shit up.” Well, unless I’m preaching. One of the funniest things my little sister has ever said was “DAaad? Wassat true, or were you just preachin?'”

Returning to this moment, it’s foreign to me that someone wants to date me… will hold my hand walking down the street, will give me quick kisses and put her arm around me as if we’ve known each other our whole lives. It’s been 10 or 11 days. Nothing is being rushed about our relationship. It cannot be for all our sakes. We’re not thinking for two, exactly. Well, we are, but it’s not the two of us. I have an activity to do and she has a bag and a water to hold.

I’ve thought about kids two other times in my life, and shut the door permanently. I can’t remember what year it was that Dana and I went to the OB/GYN to check and see if we were good to go, but I was much younger then……. even still, it would have been a geriatric pregnancy. I am almost positive that if I had to make a choice between getting an abortion and having a child would be torture, because some kind of trauma was probably involved. I’ve also wanted a child since before my mother died, but I know my biological child would look like her even if the biological father didn’t. The flip side of the coin is that I would be much crazier than advertised if I decided to carry the pregnancy to term. I already have to choose between physically and mentally sick (physical drug side effects). A pregnancy would make that distinction as clear as it could possibly be. Both my medications (I think) are pregnancy approved…… but what if they don’t work for me while pregnant? Yes, I have thought a lot about this. Maryland has everything I need if something were to happen here, but I go to Texas more often than I travel anywhere else. Southern men are typically sweet and genteel. If they are liberal enough that they don’t have a problem with homosexuality, sometimes the flirting gets intense because we both know it’s not going anywhere.

If they’re a conservative crazy, and the percentage on that in Texas is not zero, it’s not impossible that they’d say they love Jesus while shooting me in the chest, or letting me live but raping me because “you’re only a lesbian because you haven’t had a real man yet.” Let me really drive it home for you. After the shooting in Colorado Springs, I had a panic attack. I was filled with survivor’s guilt. My only accomplishment that day was living in Maryland. I met my girl not long after, and it was like coming up for air after free diving. When she kissed me, I remembered what I was fighting for. I fall asleep thinking about her, and all I would do to keep myself strong so that she can lean on me. It’s all any couple wants. That the idea of support in government via marriage tax breaks and support in community through erasing prejudice is just crazy and we have to tear down all the progress we’ve already made is Looney Toons. Of the two, though, I’d rather have the love and support of the community. I’m kind of over entangling marriage and the government. Laws can move legal protections. They can’t change hearts and minds because that’s not what they’re designed to do.

As for me and my girl, we’re being careful not to become examples of the lesbian U-Haul stereotype. It’s good for the kids, but we see why it’s not that big a deal for other people (especially if it’s just the two of them in a very large house). Because of our shared language and library of images, I believe we could move in together tomorrow and with some counseling, make it work. There are multitudes of things that make us unique, but we are also extraordinarily similar. Both musicians, birthdays five days apart (although she’s four years older), both fluent in church lingo for an amazing understanding of my life before she arrived. It’s a whole bunch of things that would make us able to start off with good communication and get better at it, not constantly trying to make it work and needing counseling to keep from throttling each other. Getting by is just not the goal, though. It’s both of us thriving and growing together and not at each other’s expense.

Actually, there are ways in which it would be eerily difficult to tell us apart. There are others that are wildly different, but not in any way that would cause conflict. The kind where her life experience differs greatly from mine and brings a whole new skill set to the table. At her core, she’s the kind of peacenik musician you’d find at Interlochen and Julliard, but of course she also had to go through a program physically designed to make her fail to get into this professional-level program. It’s akin to winning a chair in a major symphony (or medalling in the Olympics). By contrast, I synthesize ideas very fast and often throw out thoughts before saying “do you have the bandwidth to listen to……” I am also highly adept at taking on the emotion of every person in the room, and thus have inside information as to their motivations. I’ve always had instincts in that direction, but I’m deadly accurate now that my bullshit detector has dropped.

Speaking of taking in the reaction of everyone in the room, my favorite thing is still being the only one not drinking. Sometimes I do, but I think it’s more exciting to relax with a non-alcoholic beer (especially in a glass) so that people forget two things. The first is that you’re not really drinking. The second is that you’re a diarist. You’re not talking to a reporter, but definitely reporter-adjacent. At parties, if I don’t know you and you have a dumbass attack in front of me, you’re probably going to become a funny story on this web site. If I do know you, I’ll at least ask you if I can write about it because you can laugh about it and I’m not hitting a real nerve. Live and learn.

I feel so good around my girl that it’s a great surprise she’s told me I do things for her that help. I don’t feel as if the relationship is one-sided. I feel wanted in a way that I haven’t in years, that I am a priority and she drops everything for me the same way she checks out of our relationship when we’re apart so that other people also get her full attention. It’s priceless, and feels healthier than trying to manage five conversations at once.

I honestly forgot how much all people need these feelings. I was so focused on independence that I forgot about interdependence, and how nice it can be as well. I’d let the pendulum swing too far into loneliness… particularly because I didn’t notice I was lonely. I used to be the real life Linus Baker, just American and not British…. also not from the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, but that’s neither here nor there.

Now, my life feels whole. I have amazing friends, and a chance at a real thing with someone I’m crazy about. It didn’t feel real until she told the kids, though. Doesn’t matter that she only told the kids she was dating someone. Fine for them not to know it was me specifically. It just made me feel important that she thought our dating life was important enough to mention. Maybe now she’ll let me have diet soda at her house (I can hear it now… “friggin’ sopranos…..”). Even if she doesn’t, there are times when I think my heart can’t get bigger; it always does.

Like when she took me to Ingrid Michaelson and held me while Ingrid sang… some dates are close to magic… when you can feel the night stretching to accommodate your wishes. We went for half smokes and fries at Ben’s Chili Bowl, then walked to Jeni’s ice cream for a “nightcap.”

The next day we took in a matinee of “Into the Woods,” and then it was time for her to go back to her real life. It was so hard to let her go, knowing that I was stepping out on faith that we’d find a way to keep seeing each other if our paths aligned.

My faith is in this being the start of something big. She feels the same way, but I don’t want to speak for her on anything more than that. Wanting to be together for keeps if we continue being successful at communication is the one thing I don’t have to fact check. How we feel is deep and intense, passionate in every color across the Scandinavian sky. At the same time, I’m 45. She’s older than me. Combining lives is not an easy process, and when kids are involved, sometimes love isn’t enough. Unclear communication regarding division of labor kills a relationship faster than lack of love ever will.

I have issues with having brilliant ideas and an interesting relationship with follow-through. Luckily, my girl has plenty of experience in dealing with people close to her that have mental health issues. My girl can recognize a coping mechanism and roll with it, or help me create one. I will never get over the idiosyncracies that my mental health presents, but I can always use more cognitive behavioral therapy to make it manageable. It’s the same with medication. I take meds to make it better, but it’s a pill…. not a magic wand.

There’s one last connection that we have that I can tell you about, because it’s probably the thing I feared the most in putting myself out there in terms of dating. My grief is deep, It is ever-present. There is no moment of any day that I’m not away from it. It’s a constant dream, waking and sleeping. Her mother is dead, too. So much I don’t have to explain when we share that particular frame of reference. You just join the shittiest club on record. It’s something you literally can’t explain to anyone else who hasn’t lost a parent, because the feelings are too deep to put into words. Losing anyone is painful. Losing a parent rewires you from the inside out. Putting things into words gets easier over time, especially for writers because they’re constantly exorcising their demons whether it’s fiction or not. My girl and I are also in roughly the same place in our process. It’s not overwhelming anymore. It’s a dull buzz that’s occasionally triggered into an alarm. It makes our music connection that much more intense and primal. If you know me in real life, you got here several paragraphs ago.

I need to write this down for posterity, because it is a moment I’ll never stop treasuring. I remember her sitting on my couch. I was kneeling on the floor so I could look into her eyes. It was too much. Too powerful. Tears started rolling down my cheeks. I said, “thank you for bringing the music back.”

Nothing you could say could tear me away from my girl.

It hit me all at once that I was dating someone my mother would have loved and wanted to adopt. James Lipton was famous for asking this question from the Bernard Pivot questionnaire…. “If heaven exists, when you arrive at the pearly gates, what would you like to hear God say?”

My favorite answer is Harrison Ford’s…. “You look just like me.” My own is a delicious smirk and “see what I did there?”

That Moment When…

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

That moment when you feel like you’ve just run a marathon in the kitchen is one of the best adrenaline rushes on earth, but it is often thankless. Last night, it wasn’t…. a moment I want to record here for posterity. One of the waitstaff came into the kitchen after about a four hour run and said:

Ticket times were on point. You guys rock.

I swear to God I almost started crying, because emotions were already running high in a “we made it” sort of way. The bar was busier than usual due to the Washington Capitals game (which we won- go Caps), and to say it was relentless was an understatement, especially with only me, one other cook, and a dishwasher. It really helped that this same waitress took time out to help us expo, which is shorthand for calling out to us what she needed and in what order, because we had so much food to hand out. She was the real hero. We were just background noise.

Generally, on nights that busy, there is a permanent expo- another cook or the kitchen manager- but no one expected us to be that busy on a Wednesday. Generally, expo is reserved for the weekend. This particular weekend is all hands on deck, because it’s a holiday known for three days of Bacchanalian splendor. IMG_0024It seems to defeat the purpose of the holiday. I can’t help but give thanks for the veterans who made it possible for us to have picnics and beer in our American egocentricity, when we forget that we get all these privileges for which they died to protect.

I know that I have ancestors who have died in wars, but I don’t have any friends who have. Luckily, all my friends who have served have made it home in one piece… but not necessarily in one peace. Because of this, I believe Thank You For Your Service is required viewing in addition to all your hot dogs and beer this weekend. Not only is it about death during wartime, but the aftermath of what those deaths do to the living, and the absolute hell the survivors go through in order to get help for it.

So while I am slinging hash, I’ll be thinking about why. The above picture is one that I took at Arlington National Cemetery myself, surrounded by people ignoring the signs to be quiet and respectful.

This weekend, it’s them that deserve your praise. Being able to cook well is a distant thousandth compared to their bravery, even the cooks in the military. I haven’t done it, but I am assuming that cooking is even more stressful under the threat of the mess hall being bombed. It makes me grateful for everything I have, and everything I ever will.

My job is often thankless because I’m just doing what I’m paid to do. It’s nice to get thanked, but it is not necessary. I make good money to do what I do, and I am internally satisfied when it goes well.

If their job is thankless, we are not doing so well in the basic humanity department. So, no matter what you’re drinking this weekend, from Diet Cokes to margaritas, raise a glass to the fallen. It’s the least we can do because they allow us to drink them. If you see a veteran this weekend, make sure to say “thank you for your service and sacrifice.” This is because it ignores how they might feel about why they did what they did, and how they might feel about what the top brass asked them to do. It is a simple acknowledgement that when you sign on the dotted line, you serve and you sacrifice.. no matter the administration or the justification for the fight.

Yes, Memorial Day honors those who have lost their lives, but at the same time, it is not a bad thing to honor the living while we’re at it. Some soldiers suffer incredible survivors’ guilt, and though it is inappropriate to say so, you never know what kind of sacrifice you’re honoring that day…. and maybe, just maybe, it is exactly what that soldier needs to hear at the time he or she needs to hear it.