They’re Already Doing It

January 4, 2024January 4, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

What is the greatest gift someone could give you?

Because I’m a line cook and a writer, I know the value of a dollar. If you’re going to be a writer and do manual labor, the kitchen is a viable option. Bourdain was onto something, this writing about the kitchen.

It gave me a place to go after my shift that a drink never did. Because even if I switched to Diet Coke or N/A beer, cooking is hard fucking work. I don’t need to be up all night losing rest I’m going to need in the morning for something as trivial as having beers. It’s a great thing once in a while, but not every night. In order to sleep, I need to wind down. I cannot have the endless cycle of “go out at three, wake up at 10, go out to eat, then do it again.”

I’d come home between 9:00p and 12:00a, depending on whether I was closing or not (I usually was). I liked working lunch the most, because first of all, few people do. The restaurant is not as busy, therefore the cooks stand around more of the time and the waitstaff complains because the tips aren’t as good. But “standing around” does not mean “lazy.” No, what I mean by “standing around” is that there are no orders coming in. When no orders are coming in, that’s when we are actually able to get things done. For me, “slow” meant cleaning and organizing. Moving things out of the way to deep clean in places that don’t normally get touched, etc.

I could have phrased it better when I said “lazy,” because what I meant is that it’s akin to being a stay at home mom. Just because the kids are sleeping doesn’t mean that you can “sleep while the baby sleeps” all the time. Pretty sure that when the baby sleeps is the only time you have to clean the kitchen. And yes, I have just compared customers to babies, because sometimes, that’s what we do….. babysit.

In a restaurant, I have no problem with “I don’t like the food.” I will remake it a hundred times until you’re satisfied. What I will not do is have you treat my waitstaff like shit to make it happen. There’s an epidemic, and Karen and Chad are driving it. I know it makes you feel powerful to dress down a waiter, because they’re paid to be nice to you and it feels good to beat up on someone that probably won’t “hit back” when you’re rude to them.

That does not mean you were not rude. It means that no one called you on it because they were dependent on your tip. The customer is not always right. They’re always right when they don’t like the food. They’re always wrong when they think that ad hominem attacks are going to make it arrive faster or taste better.

Most of the ire you have is actually at the kitchen, and I know you’re not going to come argue with us. You’ve seen “The Bear.” Line cooks are a unique breed, both fiercely proud and protective of the food if they’re a “lifer.” By protective of the food, we know when something is right and when you missed something on the menu. A waiter will not tell you that if you looked at the menu, you would have seen it was topped with capers, or whatever the fuck it is that you don’t like. All it took was a little more reading, and you think the problem is your waitress.

And then there are the women that won’t tip you because you “flirted with their husbands.” That’s not happened to me, but it’s happened to my friends (I worked front of house in college). In fact, there are a thousand ways a customer will try to make you feel bad for not comping something, not giving them free something, not telling them there’s no free refills when it says it twice on the menu….. or worse, using your children.

If there are free refills on the kids’ drinks and not the adults, you can bet little Timmy is going to “drink nine Cokes.” If there is a corkage fee, some customers don’t know what that is. Fine. No problem. But if you bring your own wine and complain that we wanted three dollars for you to open it, that’s three dollars for the privilege of not buying wine from us. It is not worth destroying someone’s self esteem, and it generally happens to all waitstaff multiple times a day. Working with the public has become a nightmare because of the epidemic of entitlement.

The hard truth is that you don’t listen to waitstaff when they go on social media and tell people about the things others say to express all this, and it has spread. Do you think doctors and teachers like working with Chad and Karen, either?

Karen and Chad have seen all the drug commercials. Hire them at a clinic while they still know everything……… #eyeroll I dated a school counselor for a while, and she said that in the history of parents’ conferences (majority white school), she’d never had a kid who’d ever done anything wrong………

My mother, who worked in a majority black school, did not have this problem.

So, the biggest thing my friends do for me is twofold. The first is that they don’t treat me as lesser than because I want to focus on writing. And in fact, they take it seriously. They don’t see it as “just this little thing I do,” they’re seeing that I’m becoming more popular and they’re about to have to hang on for the ride. I am more than the sum of my parts, and I’m beginning to show it to myself by believing my friends when they say I’m an incredible writer. Until now, I haven’t even given them that. I did not have the confidence to believe that I could be a popular writer, so even when I became one with my last blog, I didn’t believe it.

My sister-in-law ripped me a new asshole for writing something in which I’d actually locked it down so that only seven people read it, and it felt just like being ripped a new one by a customer…. and I reacted the same way. I folded into myself and stopped writing for four years.

I kick myself every day that I stopped, but it turned out that I was in the wrong family, not that I was doing the wrong thing. I’d already chosen what I was going to do and they didn’t like it, with the exception of Dana, but that support waned as I actually became a writer instead of just saying I was going to do it.

I wasn’t posting every single day. I wasn’t marketing myself because I didn’t believe in it (if people are going to show up, it’s because you’re sharing, not because I’m so full of myself…..). But what I didn’t realize is that writing is a business. If I want to be successful, I have to market myself. I don’t know how to do that with a blog, but I know I made some headway on SoundCloud, so that’s a distinct possibility for the future.

I eventually want to start Lanagan Media Group, but that will come later, when I actually need content creators under me to support what I’m doing. For instance, I am glad that Bryn has offered to record my entries, but I don’t have server space for her to store the files. I also don’t really want her to work for free, as it will be taxing (I write long essays to be recording them with ease and speed).

But that’s not all- I’m into a million different things, but I’m not a subject matter expert on anything. I’m not even a subject matter expert in my special interest because ADHD makes it where I can only read for a certain amount of time when it’s dry and boring. I will get the information down, but I won’t do with with speed or ease. 😉

For instance, I love science fiction, but I wouldn’t be the one to write blog entries or do podcasts on it. I could be a guest and shoot the shit about Doctor Who, but I am not the stereotypical fan who can tell you what Rassilon was wearing in his first appearance, which was probably 30-40 years ago (I don’t remember, he’s just an example)…. and that’s the level of detail I’d want to have if I was tapping directly into the fandom.

I’m going to kick another fandom’s beehive with my first novel, so I’m saving up any credit I have as a writer for that. It’s real and it’s deep, but it’s not fan fiction. You’ll just have to wait and see. The clues are all here, but I’m betting that only Dana would be able to tell you the entire storyline blind. That’s because she told me a fact that laid out the entire story for me.

Believe it or not, being waitstaff and line cooks are a central part of the novel…. which is why this one fact really ties the book together, does it not? It would make more sense if I could tell you what that fact was, but it’s a central plot point, so I cannot give it away. I can just talk around it…. so, don’t push me. There’s a drink here, man.

The kind of company I want is kind of like Nerdist and kind of like Linus Media Group. Nerdist got into podcasts, LMG is YouTube.

There are so many things I could monetize with either of those things, particularly on YouTube, because the research on autistic women is so muddled. Right now, I can only talk about my own experience with self-diagnosis (which is seen as valid because even most doctors don’t know the intricacies of how female neurodivergence presents). Plus, one of my friends brought up a good point- we’ve never been diagnosed, we’ve just been dealing with it our whole lives. What’s a diagnosis going to change? With autism, this is a very valid point, because if you get an official diagnosis, your life may or may not change the direction of your life. It’s a hard row to hoe.

I just have too many symptoms to ignore it, and coupled with my ADHD, it has been debilitating. I do not have the logical kind of autism, and by that I mean those that understand programming and other kinds of STEM to a savant level. No, I’m one of those people who is always lost in their own little world.

What I mean by the people around me already doing the most important thing is by saying “it’s ok for you to be who you are. We like all of it.” Whether I’m cooking or writing or staring off into space, that love is secure. What I cannot do is convince people that I will always have disabilities, because they are not completely obvious. Even my CP isn’t that obvious unless you know me really well.

I am starting to feel that everything is connected now that I’ve met another autistic person who also has CP. He works in a day center as a counselor, and he pegged me down to the way I walk. It was scary, because my life changed in a nanosecond. Then, I looked up stereopsis, and that’s a symptom of CP, too.

It’s hard being a very specialized person in a world that wants you to be a worker bee. But I’m figuring out what I can do, and gravitating toward it.

I can cook.
I can write.
I can be nice to servers when they’re on someone else’s line.

That’s enough for me in this life, because the writing trumps everything else. I could not live life as fully as I can right now without being able to look back over the year and see what’s been good for me and what hasn’t.

I don’t know that you’re aware of it, but I had a 60 day streak, took off one day, and now I’m on a 70 day streak. I thought I’d take a day off today, but then I realized it was “Bloguary” and it can’t be this month. But we’ll see.

I’ll think about it while I’m cooking. The love coming at me flows into my food, because I feel secure in everything when I feel secure in love. It’s the greatest gift I’ve ever been given.

Again, I have been invited to be on “The Dark Room” podcast. However, we are still confirming everything. I will post as soon as I’m sure of the date so that you can look out for it as soon as it drops. It’s a pleasure just to be nominated. I have no idea what they want to talk to me about, but it doesn’t matter. I have an answer to every question. It may not be the question that you asked, however……….

I Love College

January 3, 2024January 3, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What colleges have you attended?

Don't even bounce...
Not in my house. 
Better hope you make it...
Otherwise you naked.
I am champion at beer pong.... 
Allen Iverson, Hakeem Olajuwon....

While this is my favorite verse of “I Love College” by Asher Roth (Houston represent), I cannot say that I’ve ever been to a wild party like that. I may have gone to some things that came close to frat-level foolishness, but we learned a lot while we were building communities.

The thing is, though, I became an adult before my time. I got married too young and didn’t handle it well. I shouldn’t have left University of Houston, and it’s been so long now that I just have to hope that now they don’t matter. Of course they do, but I’m a jack of all trades and most people who work with computers have a mixed bag of certifications, and a Bachelor’s may or may not be one of them. This is changing, perhaps, but I don’t think so. What I knew 10 years ago, people also knew 40 years ago. The information changes too fast for it to be published in books.

If you’re going to study computers in school, you need something like a language that doesn’t change. Object-oriented programming has the same concepts no matter the syntax. However, if you are the person in charge of taking care of every device in the department, you will not learn a single thing in school that you wouldn’t pick up in a week on the job. That’s because you’re dealing with problems with:

Apple MacOS
Windows
Ubuntu
Red Hat (sorry, Fedora….. old habits die hard…)
Android for phones
Android for tablets
Android for Galaxy Wear
Apple iOS for iPhone
Apple iOS for iPad
Apple iOS for Apple Watch

And if you’re a system administrator, you probably have to deal with even more operating systems than that. Maybe not now, but in 1999 I also had an account on our VMS/VAX machine, and flirted with Solaris (it doesn’t look much different from Red Hat or Debian back then).

Now, how likely are you to read about those things in a textbook when you need the information RIGHT THE FUCK NOW because Professor So and So is going to blow a gasket if she can’t receive e-mail on her phone for 30 seconds. Meanwhile, I’m Irish. I’ll deal with something being wrong the rest of my life. Probably why I have so many devices. I don’t put up with their crap. I have an extra to use when I have to blow away the whole thing and start over because such and such app has hosed such and such setting.

Knowing how to do all that is something I learned in college, but because I worked full time for the IT department while I was a student. It was a tremendous load for a person with AuDHD, and I did not last long in that position. When I got to DC in 2001, I collapsed for a few weeks while Kathleen got settled at the office and I took care of all the house stuff. Then, later, when I was supposed to start at George Mason, she told me that she couldn’t pay my tuition anymore. I understood, but it didn’t make me happy because I’d already paid her rent for a couple of years at that point…… because she was a student, and I had a job.

I never should have ended up with her to begin with, and the red flags that I should have seen were because I was her boss for three months. She was just a summer hire, so my boss didn’t worry that we were together. She wasn’t there all the time, I was.

Now, I’ve worked for my stepmother for an extended period of time, and then I wanted to be a line cook and my wife was the perfect teacher. Both of those experiences have told me that Kathleen’s behavior while I was her boss was just egregious and I should have fired her on the spot, because in that moment (not all the time, just when push came to shove IN MY OFFICE) I was the boss. Objectively. What I had that Kathleen did not was a willingness to recognize that she was not at the top of the food chain because she acted like she had my authority…. to me.

When most of my life, I’ve been calling my stepmother “Doctor” and my ex-wife “Chef.”

I didn’t have Kathleen fired, I was relieved when I found out we were moving and that would be the end of the line for me trying to manage the unmanageable. I know how to be on and off the clock. Most adults do……..

All of this being said, I did go to between four and six years of classes, because I went part time at one point. I really only have a few classes to finish up my junior year, and then I’m onto the last stretch. The problem with that is that I’ve already taken everything I liked.

I got an F in Intro to Poetry because I had a full-time job during summer school. So, I wrote two outstanding papers and had an A+ in the class, but my professor failed me anyway because I didn’t show up three times. I was at work- what could I say? If I had known you couldn’t miss three days in a semester if you had perfect grades, I wouldn’t have done it. It just never occurred to me that it was something that could happen, but I don’t do well with injustice and I think this is it. I know I’m not a poet, but I at least understand it well enough to write about it, even if I don’t use the form myself.

I’m starting to learn what I’m going to do in this one wild and precious life, and word is beginning to spread. I’ve been invited to be a guest on “The Dark Room Podcast,” and here’s the thing that really made me sit up a little straighter…… they don’t really know me. They know my work. Apparently, I am interesting enough to be a podcast guest now…. or maybe I always have been, I just didn’t realize it.

Maybe I should have gone to Georgetown.

Yes… No… Maybe?

December 22, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 4 Comments

Are you a good judge of character?

I am an excellent judge of character in other people, but what I don’t know is how much of my behavior is inspired by me. I tend to pick out emotionally unavailable people, anyway, so I wouldn’t know if I was doing something annoying or not because they would not volunteer that information. Therefore, I could not change.

It’s why I had so much empathy for Jon Armstrong during his divorce from Heather (Dooce). He went through absolute hell with her, and I know this because my caretakers are often overwhelmed when I get mentally ill. I go into autistic meltdown and burnout, which is code for “doesn’t play well with others.” So, when Jon said “she told me everything that was wrong and just left so I couldn’t change it” (not a direct quote, I’m paraphrasing), my mirror neurons went off and my heart went out to him. Mentally ill people can be so ungrateful, but it’s not because they are actively trying to be emotionally abusive or narcissistic. It means that they’re in so much pain they can’t see past it.

I don’t blame Heather for leaving, either. Her feelings are absolutely valid. I just know from experience that perception is not reality. Whether what Heather saw was accurate or not is missing the point. There is no wrong feeling, there are consequences for acting on them. Depression, particularly bipolar, blows everything out of proportion because sometimes you’re depressed and sometimes you’re manic. You are not seeing what things are really like, you’re seeing them in a fun house mirror.

Whether I’m a good judge of character depends on when you meet me. My perception is different depending on my mood, and that’s not a good thing, but it’s real. It’s my work to do, because mental illness is not the whole answer. It’s developing coping mechanisms and safety nets. Depressed and anxious people do not actually believe that we are loved and we are not a burden on our families or society at large.

The hardest part of a mental processing disorder and/or mental illness is that you’re either slow or crazy, take your pick. I’ve never been called “slow” mentally, but I pick up facial expressions and microaggressions easily. I know what emotions look like on people’s faces and even when my perception is wrong, my judgment on other’s motivations/moods are generally correct. This is because in order to understand a conflict, you have to understand both people’s interests and what motivates people to get closer to you vs. further away.

Most of this is through looking approachable, not being nice. Nice is not kind. Those are two completely separate things. “Nice” says “no, we’re all good” while you continue to distance yourself from me. I noticed discrepancies between words and actions quicker than others do when the words are actually coming out of their mouths, because since my intuition on what I’m going to do is rock solid. I don’t make bad leaps by judging character, but by noticing the hypocrisy and seeing what happens if you call people on it. If they’re angry you noticed a problem and want to talk about it, that’s the biggest red flag you’re ignoring if you’re a people pleaser who lives not to rock the boat.

Most abused people exhibit this, particularly those who have been emotionally abused young by people who are supposed to take care of them. For instance (this didn’t happen to me, just an example), children raised by alcoholic parents are programmed to invert the dynamic. Boys are just as susceptible to becoming a parental figure as girls, though with girls it generally comes faster because women are designed societally to be people pleasers, anyway. But I know this to be true from the number of “mama’s boys” I’ve met, both straight and gay, who weren’t babysitting their mothers because they just wanted to do so; they realized their mother or father couldn’t take care of themselves and didn’t want to watch them struggle, because watching them struggle means that they’re angry and absolutely will take it out on them.

My stepfather is a perfect example. His mother was a horrible alcoholic and actually died from it in a roundabout way. She didn’t live long enough to die of cirrhosis. She was on a drunk and passed out in the snow. She didn’t wake up….. and obviously, he married my mother. The classic image of a “mama’s boy” is not him. That being said, he had to grow up fast. Running a household was nothing to him because he’d been doing it since he was five.

Again, he ran the household as a child until she died in the snow and someone (I don’t remember if it was his family or a neighbor) just found her. I cannot imagine that kind of trauma, and I don’t want to try.

Everyone is fighting something, which is why I believe there are no red flags. I have never met anyone, particularly a woman, that wasn’t fighting massive trauma. Absolutely all of my girlfriends have been sexually assaulted, more than not raped in childhood. That’s not an anomaly where I just went out and picked women who were abused. I have experience with abuse because again, ALL women. All of ’em. Every woman you know has at least a creepy story about a man, and in this culture it’s surprising when you get off that easy if one in four women is raped at least once in their lifetime.

In fact, for most of history it wasn’t rape if you were married to them.

Some mothers are even vicious enough to tell their children that they’re a product of marital rape and make their kids walk around with that knowledge until they’re adults and start unpacking it. It gets worse before it gets better. I cannot stress this enough. You will recover, but at times it feels like you should give up.

But here’s the thing….. during the Renaissance, beautiful statues were often finished in wax to cover mistakes. This is a double-edged sword as an illustration when it comes to PTSD. The first is that the statues weren’t any less beautiful. The second is that when finished with wax, it didn’t mean that the flaw wasn’t still underneath. What you get out of healing is what you put into it. Are you using the wax to cover your wounds, or are you examining the dead spots in your emotions? Are you using the wax as filler not because you are ignoring pain signals, but because you’re rerouting them?

A statue without wax is called “sin cera.” “Without wax.” A statue sin cera was incredibly rare….. another truism because you can make a statue sin cera, but no person ever could be. It is the nature of being animate, fully human and fully divine.

The sculpture you start carving after abuse looks completely different than the one you were carving before, because you don’t have the same thought processes anymore……. however, you do not get a new piece of marble. Maybe you’ve chipped more away. Maybe you’ve taken the “clippings” and rearranged them into something new.

People who have been abused and then are driven to success sometimes drive me insane because they’re so insistent they’re fine. Meanwhile, it’s not that they’re so perfect, it’s that everyone has learned to tiptoe around them. They’re not fine in terms of their emotions, but they don’t notice because why would they? Everyone around them is FINE.

Meanwhile, families who have someone with PTSD become the planets revolving around the sun…. in effect, nurturing it and asking it to warm them when they’re not capable of it. If they’re scared of their emotions, they’re scared of yours.

A lot of the women in my life are or have been a big deal. The two most successful women I know are complete wire monkeys, both raped in childhood and driven to control their entire universes so it never happens again……. not realizing that by trying to control everything, that includes controlling the people around them.

The planets orbit the sun, completely dependent on its behavior and not daring to deviate from the pattern that’s currently working….. but it won’t forever and instead of calling bullshit, the people around “the sun” adopt new ways of trying to please to avoid emotional injury.

Are you people-pleasing because you’re naturally programmed to give all of yourself away, or are you giving all of yourself away to try and mitigate damage?

I don’t know. Sometimes I’m a good judge of character. Sometimes I’m not. It’s especially wishy-washy in trying to determine my own. I am selfless and giving to an enormous degree, but not so much that I’d be willing to do anything to get love. But that’s a relatively new development. In the past, I was so afraid to lose a connection that I just wouldn’t do it. I would cower in fear instead of saying “this is bullshit. You don’t get to control my feelings in addition to yours.”

Whether or not the person listens is the best judge of character there is, because whether you’re wrong or not, your feelings still deserve to be heard. I am the worst person in the world at giving up in relationships, because I believe that certainly there must be a combination of words that will unlock you and make you open up, but it has never worked with a woman who has been raped.

Ever.

But that’s a perception with empathy, not a judgment call. The most upsetting thing is that statistics don’t lie and culture doesn’t change.

But you can.

How I Became a Writer

December 18, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Describe a man who has positively impacted your life.

I’ve been a blogger since 2003, but I’d never really called myself a writer. It was something I did in my spare time until Dooce and Jenny Lawson made it big. I am not any less crazy or adorable than they are (were- rest in peace with the former Congressman, my dear Heather.

In case you’ve never read Dooce, she called her dog “Chuck, the Former Congressman” for his whole life and people that were with her from the beginning fell apart when he died). But Heather planted a seed in my mind that this was something I could do. I could talk about my life and people would show up. I was correct, and I have all of you to thank for any popularity I’ve gained over the last 20 years. Until I started reading Dooce, I didn’t have a goal. Then, I did. I wouldn’t have believed it was possible to go from entertaining tens of people to millions in a relatively short amount of time if I hadn’t watched it with my own eyes.

The one thing I will not do is craft the narrative to fit what the audience wants, because that means I’m just writing for attention, not for therapy/clarity. My basic philosophy is that you are free to disagree with me, but you are not free to tell me to stop writing. And now even that is broken, because I would give up my career in writing through blogging if Supergrover asked me. But it’s not because she has some magical voodoo power or anything, it’s that she’s a more private person than I am. I need that relationship to be bigger than it was to succeed again, and I’m guessing that we’re all done because of it. I think that because I said I was writing our story, she thought I was trying to get something out of it. That I was studying her like a journalist. It’s the other way around. She became part of my writing because she became part of my life.

She was the first person to truly validate that what I do is important. That I shed light on the abuse of children because I know what it’s like to be a child and have emotionally abusive things said to you. They’re mind worms that never go away. She lifted me up in every way imaginable, and I’m betting she thinks I’m kidding that if I do get a book deal for this fantastic idea I’ve got and all of the sudden I’m Oprah’s Book Club material, I’d like to pay off her house. It’s dreaming way too big, way too early, but that’s what an INFJ does. They live in the world of utopia and are trying to drag people into the light. They also get frustrated at other people’s refusal to look at themselves.

But before all that, before Supergrover was even a twinkle, there was Bill. I decided in Portland that I’d like to be a cook instead of in IT because when I was off, I was really, really off. In IT, I was tethered with a laptop and phone 24/7, and my writing time is sacred. I go completely off the grid and put my tablet in airplane mode. I got better fast because of it. However, in those days, I wasn’t writing every day. I am on a 53 day streak, and before that the streak was 65.

Sometimes, I write because I want to. Sometimes, I write because I have to. If I skip a day, WordPress puts me lower in their algorithms. I’m not popular enough to be able to sustain a break right now. But it doesn’t take over my whole life. I am astounded at how fast I write. The prompt just came out 37 minutes ago (as of right now, not by the end)….. and I didn’t start until 00:15.

Even taking all that into consideration, I still didn’t think of myself as a writer. I didn’t think of myself as a writer in grade school, either, because writers are a type. I swear to Christ it’s a personality transplant because before you truly start taking a red pen to your own work, you have no idea just how much bullshit you can spout unchecked. When I wrote stories in school, I didn’t think of them as better than my other friends’ stories. All kids wrote them, I didn’t think of myself in a writerly way.

Until that day.

At the pub, there was a poker club upstairs that didn’t allow alcohol, so poker players would come down for a quick drink between hands. That means I saw the same men (there was maybe one woman in the crowd) nearly every night of the week. I don’t remember how Bill and I got to talking, but we developed a very playful love/hate relationship because he and I both acted like Texas “good ol’ boys.” Because I’m genderqueer, I sound more like my dad and The War Daniel than I do anyone else, because I have that Texas old guy patois. This was a lot funnier when I was nine. Now I realize that I am a Texas old guy.

I like my sex, but my gender and I don’t get along all the time. The way I write is often different than what I would say in person, so I come across as more male in writing and more female in person. Because I don’t outwardly look like a woman in my Facebook pictures, people often assume I’m male. I got accused of being a “white knight” for calling out misogyny on Facebook today, so I told him I was a woman. He blocked me and told the rest of the group that I was a sex offender, as if no one in the group would reply to him and let me know that he said it. I was busting him up for calling women gold diggers.

All of these things are color commentary on my conversation with Bill (I’m AuDHD, every thought comes with bonus content):

Bill, clearly sloshed: What do you do?
Leslie: I’m a writer (at first, I thought, “I work here?”).
Bill: How much have you made as a writer?
Leslie: I’ve never made anything.

This man, who is absolutely hammered, puts both his hands into his jeans pockets and pulls out the change. He dumps it into my hands, and says, “THERE. NOW YOU’RE A PRUFESSHIONAL WRITER.”

The total of the change was $1.83, and that’s what’s tattooed on my right wrist……….

And that comes from Dana’s first wife, Carol, who asked me why I got my quill tattoo on my left arm because I’m right-handed. I thought, “well said. Why didn’t I think of that?”

Under the Whispering Door, with Apologies to TJ Klune

December 11, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

TW: Child Death

I wrote a beautiful entry for all of you on the train. It was the best thing I’d ever written, or so I’m choosing to tell you….. because I accidentally exited out of AndrOffice before I saved the document. I had hoped there was a way to recover it, but unfortunately….. no. This is the entry in which I’m back at my house after having stopped at McDonald’s on the way home. I got a Happy Meal hoping it would rub off….. KIDDING. I was coming back from Zac’s after a very lovely time. I’m convinced we should write something together, but I don’t know what. I told him an idea in which I said, “I also thought you’d hate this idea, which makes you the best person to do it.” He said, “Rude.” I still can’t believe I got away with “peek a boo, bitch.” It has been my experience that few women talk like 15-year-old boys despite being ancient. I am filling a void filled by few others, and that does not suck. It makes me feel completely unique and also alone. But not. Alone together.

Basically, I realized I’d opened a door to poly by talking about it and not explaining my view on it… giving an example in action and not words. Zac already has partners, I don’t except for Bryn and she’s across the country. I don’t know what’s going to happen with that, I just know that no matter what we rely on each other because the boyfriends can all go away and we still need emotional support. It also fills my need to have someone to write to outside of dating Zac, most of the reason for my being poly in the first place because I crave so much more intellectual stimulation than I ever do contact comfort. It helps that Bryn understands why I call her my partner and I’m guessing that Supergrover doesn’t because I’ve never told her why I say that. I didn’t marry her, and if she thinks so, she’s not reading between the right lines. I also don’t care that she’s pissed off I’m a writer, because she knew that before she got close to me. She knew it was going to be a hard row to hoe and she went there. So I did, too.

I need friendship with her husband like I need air, and I would have gotten it if I hadn’t been such a dick. The flip side of the coin is “what could I have possibly done that would make you this avoidant for 10 years?” So, everything I did is bad and everything she did was justified. That’s not how that works, beautiful girl. What she cannot justify is isolating me from everything that would have made me feel better about our situation. She ramped up my anxiety, so I came up big. I don’t have the right to blame her, but I do have the right not to sign up for seconds.

It’s why I require so much of her now. I don’t need her time, I need her feelings. She thinks I’m not entitled to that. If that is true, I need to step away for my own mental health. She told me I couldn’t let other friends into our bubble, so I didn’t. Now, I’m in the posiiton of needing someone to talk to about my feelings without being able to make others understand why I feel the way I feel.

But nothing about this situation makes me regret it. What I regret is her not giving me a single second of relief by hearing me out and responding to it.

So, my reaction is to stand apart from other partners and just absorb. I can’t share everything, so I don’t.

Plus, now I’m not looking for a relationship, and if I was, I’d have to be with someone who understood why I didn’t want to break up with Zac and just be okay with that, whether they choose to be with others or not. Even marriage isn’t a contract where one of you owns the other, and if there’s anything positive that Will & Jada have done for the zeitgeist is show everyone how that is possible. Everyone has to be able to look at themselves in the mirror. Poly is more emotional work than being monogamous, not less, beacause you’re having to be that vulnerable with more than one person and practice makes permanent. If you don’t practice how to negotiate boundaries, you won’t learn all of a sudden.

I believe that this very idea is why Supergrover is so avoidant. She doesn’t know how to be me, so she doesn’t want to learn. It’s just easier that way. I wanted to help bring her into the light, but I don’t want to make her. I want her to want it, too. I want her to stand up to me, frankly. She used to, and she stopped. I remember I told her what being a partner meant to me years and years ago; was when she said that she wasn’t a God person and at the time, I was interested in starting a church plant. I said, “I don’t need you for that” (being a member). I need you to remind me that I serve God when I start to believe I’m them.” She said, and I quote, “I can do that.” When the words are that concise, you can take that check to the bank and it will always cash. My favorite check is “that’s how I roll.” It is so much fun thinking about how she rolls…. and also not.

She makes me want to give all the things while I can’t do any better if she doesn’t teach me the good things she wants me to give. I would have accepted anything in the way of guidance, and I’m sorry it looks from the outside that I’m not going to get it. It is so much not for lack of trying. Every time I tell myself I’m done, something in my mind thinks that’s unacceptable and to always leave the door open to reconciliation- just put everything away in terms of trying to make anything better between us. It’s my journey now, and I wouldn’t take anything for it. Even if we never reconcile, I needed this relationship to create the life I have wanted for a long time.

I have said this before, but if there’s a silver lining to having been with Dana and interacting on that level with Supergrover made me realize what I did want out of life and what I didn’t. Dana was going down and I didn’t want to go with her, first of all. Second of all, it was more important for me to learn what Supergrover knows and not Dana, because they had completely different approaches to life and S! has life wired, as much as she thinks she doesn’t. She has logic wired, and that’s the thing I needed in my life the most, because I’m all emotion, all the time.

It’s the role in my life that Zac fills, honestly, because I don’t know anyone who gets higher performance appraisals than Zac. My boyfriend is a rock star at life, and I am so proud of him because he figured it out at 18 being medically able to join the military. I would like to believe that I would have scored high enough on the aptitude tests for intelligence, but I probably would have ended up in welding. 😉 Zac retires relatively soon, and I’m going to be so excited to see what he does with his extra time.

I hope he expands the car idea. His short story was a banger, because not only did he use “we’re all hearses in the end,” he put a school bus behind it that said, “I know you’re proud to have been built as a hearse, but since all the humans are gone, we’re all carrying dead bodies in the back.”

Holy fuck. That’s my boyfriend.

He’s legit.

Laughing Because I’m Not Sure

December 11, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What are your favorite physical activities or exercises?

I have floppy muscles, it’s an inborn trait. Therefore, I have success with physical activity to a varying degree. I think if I had to pick a favorite thing to do outside it’s very simple. It’s walking Oliver, who is a dog. It’s better when Zac is with us because I don’t trust Oliver to behave with me the same way he would if Zac was there, plus hiking in the woods behind his house is intimidating if you don’t know the area well. I could get lost easily and because I’d be in the middle of the woods, my GPS would only say “continue to highlighted route” and I’d be shit out of luck.

Ask me how I know this.

I’m not sure what to call it, but Zac’s townhome development backs up to some sort of nature preserve, so I have hiking accessible to me that’s just as challenging as anything I used to do in the Columbia River Gorge . Zac likes to hike as much as I do, and because he does it more often, he’s more in shape than I am, too. Yes, I weigh less, but I do not work out my muscles in the same way he does. I don’t have to have a physical fitness test to stay employed by the Navy. However, I do stay slim and trim by not owning a car, and I have decided that because ride share exists, that should always be true of me. I don’t actually want to pay money for a car when I could pay money for a car and a driver, taking the risk of driving off me entirely. If we crash, it will never in a million years be my fault. It’s not the hassle, it’s that I know I don’t have 3D vision and driving is working without a net, knowingly putting other people in danger.

Nope.

I didn’t have a choice in Houston, which is why I moved back to DC. If you’re going to take public transportation, it’s a very good place to do so because we’re not huge like New York, yet we have all the same amenities. Maybe it’s because I lived here in my 20s, but New York frightens me in a way that DC doesn’t. I don’t know whether my sensory issues were out of control in Manhattan because it was that big a city or because I’d never been there before. I now know why writers live the way they live in movies when they’re set in New York. As soon as I got there, my nerves felt like they were on fire. As a writer, I was energized by it and also needed to find a way to mute it. Thus, writers in movies being hermits in New York. They’re trying to find a manageable amount of sensory input.

Writing is a sensitive area in terms of perception because you need enough stimulation to have something to say, energy that lets the words flow naturally….. but not so much that it makes your mind lose the train of thought that’s going to hit the New York Times. Fine-tuning that instinct takes time. When I am overwhelmed, I go back to zero. This means wired or Bluetooth headphones blaring white noise like TV snow or a jet engine (because people reading this are so young they might not know what TV snow is…..). Over time, you begin adding things.

I find that I function the best under a sensory deprivation diet, because it helps me to work faster when there’s less going on in the room. I cannot write if people are talking around me, and most of the time I cannot even write with music on. Today, my soundtrack is Zac typing in his office. I’m sitting in his room with my iPad and keyboard, he’s at his government computer because he’s neurodivergent as well. I wanted to cut down sensory issues for both of us.

The funniest thing that happened this morning is that I grabbed a pink coffee mug and Zac said something about it being his partner’s mug and her being picky about it. I said, “oh, no problem. If I’d known it was hers I would have respected the rule. You don’t have to apologize for having other partners or them having preferences.” He said, “I’m just sorry I couldn’t let you have a CIA mug.” I said, “that was a CIA mug? I didn’t know CIA came in girl shit.” I loved his laughter at that one.

Editor’s Note:

Every time I’ve read that line while writing/editing I’ve fallen over with laughter.

It’s not that I wouldn’t like pink CIA stuff, it’s that I’m a purist. I like the seal they already have on a navy background and think it looks classic…… There’s no need to change something that isn’t broken. I don’t need CIA feminized for me, because to me it’s already feminine. Look up all the department heads and count the number of women. It’s staggering.

The truth is that women my age are invisible, and that’s why we run the world. If you believe nothing else I say, believe that. There’s a reason female intelligence officers at CIA and in the military embed themselves in women’s groups all the time. Getting women together is a HUMINT ATM machine. Now I’m wondering what the equivalent of a “stitch and bitch” is in Arabic…………… You can tell a lot about a man’s mood, behavior, and actions by asking the women around him, because dollars to donuts he hasn’t heard what she has to say.

I love that my love of women in intelligence is making others excited as well. It caught on for Lindsay when we went to Zaytinya the other night, because I told her about a fabulous novel I’d read called “The Secrets We Kept,” by Lara Prescott. The premise is brilliant. In Russia, female spies were trained to use their sexuality to get what they wanted, so they were nicknamed “Swallows.” The United States does not do this, so the novel explores what would have happened if there had been an American “Swallows” program. It’s danger and intrigue, but also camaraderie. Spying is the world’s second oldest profession, and it bears a striking resemblance to the first.

My favorite female intelligence stories are “constant fish out of water.” At first, it’s being approached by CIA and getting trained…. hero origin story…. then it’s being fish out of water because CIA doesn’t work inside the US. My favorite part of the journey is from the approach to graduating from The Farm. The Spider-Man where you find out how he became that way is the best. I don’t make the rules.

I feel that though typing is not something one would classically think of as a physical activity, it is my origin story.

Especially since I can write it down.

Now it is time to transition into my day, because it always starts here at the keyboard and branches out. I have coffee to drink, news to read, and a trip across a city in which it snowed this morning. I am eager to get out and take pictures.

Taking pictures for me is a physical activity because I am one of those people. One of those who thinks nothing of holding other people up for a few seconds to be able to lay down in the middle of the sidewalk or whatever to get a shot. This is because I am willing to wait eons to make sure I’m bothering the least people. It’s really the only way I’ve shot the top of the steeple at Notre Dame.

It just occurred to me that creativity often feels like exercise. Creativity often feels like exhaustion once you’ve pulled ideas out of yourself. Both writing and taking pictures show your way of seeing the world, and especially because I don’t have 3D vision, the pictures I take look different than ones taken by people with stereopsis. It’s not a bad thing. It’s what makes me driven to take pictures. I want to see how I see the world by looking back at the way I shot it.

All writers search for themselves. In this blog, you can see it transparently. With novelists, you see it through archetype and allegory. A childhood is a writer’s credit balance, in the words of John le Carré. We start there and we excavate to a degree in which most people are uncomfortable.

And yet the physical activity of writing sustains us whether you’re comfortable or not.

Frank Discussions

December 10, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Tonight is a Zac night, and we’re just hanging out. He’s doing some stuff for work in the morning, and I’m writing to you. Later, we’re planning on going out for dinner and watching “The Pigeon Tunnel.” I am so incredibly happy right now, because I can’t think of a better way to spend it than geeking out over my favorite boy, dog, and writer.

Because Zac is Naval intelligence, he was able to pick me up earlier than we usually get together (normally I go by Metro to his house, but Ft. Meade is a stone’s throw from Wire Ave. It’s not that Zac wouldn’t come to me, it’s that I have a lot of housemates and he doesn’t. Zac has a bigger social battery than I do, but we both like what we’re doing now…. I didn’t even know there was a term for it, but it’s “parallel play.” He’s working now, but he’s writing for fun later. We’ll keep doing this until we get hungry. Zac was given a fiction challenge. Genre is comedy, setting is a car wash, and the word he has to work in is “interest.” You cannot imagine the places my mind went when I heard those three things.

Having the setting be in a car wash was a trigger into something great. We started riffing off each other. I said that for me right now, when I hear that word I hear “autism” and “special interest,” so mine would be about a kid whose special interest was car washes and it would be a whole comedic essay on soaps, etc.

Then, I thought of something brilliant. Zac wanted to do something with robots, and I thought, “what if the robots were the car wash?” Like, the brush arm is talking to the sprayer or whatever. So, Zac comes up with this whole dystopian landscape like Fallout 3 where the cars don’t realize all the humans are gone.

I said, “if you’re going to go there, make sure that one of the cars is a hearse. I think it would be hilarious and tragic that he doesn’t know his services are no longer needed. Every day he gets dressed up, anyway.”

So, Zac starts thinking it over and I’m checking out at Safeway- thank God we were held up so long in line because we got a chance to flesh this out, ironically. He says that he thinks he wants it to be like a bartender and some customers. He has decided the hearse will be “Frank,”and I had a small meltdown in which I was all like, “awwww, you used my idea” and I straight up cried as I held up my Apple Watch.

We have to go, and as we’re walking out Zac says something and I have blipped since then, but the end was “….and after all, aren’t we all hearses in the end?” More tears, but good ones. I said something like, “God damn, Zac…. that was a good line.” He became very impressed with himself and he should be. This is why we work so well as a couple. We’d drive each other up the wall if we lived together because two writers in one house just doesn’t work. It’s a whole basket of crazy. So, I feel like I live this great life in my own little world in some ways, and in others I look like anyone else trying to have a good time………..

Because we’re all hearses in the end.

Bold of You to Assume I Need Sleep Now…..

November 29, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If you didn’t need sleep, what would you do with all the extra time?

I would play it by ear. I don’t have the kind of mind that would plan it out in advance. I function way better as the red team than the planner/finisher.

Some people are unfamiliar with the term “red team,” but it’s journalism slang for people who point out the flaws in your plan. There’s a whole episode on the red team in Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom.” Very, very much like prepping a presidential candidate for a debate; the red team researches the blowback you’re going to get before you publish something.

It is so much easier to red team than it is to create it because an autistic mind sees patterns and can tell you what doesn’t fit. Other people can do it, too, but allistic and autistic people have different criteria for pattern recognition. This pattern recognition is created by our autism, but also our extensive social masking. We research neurotypical people, but we do not take it in. We do not become neurotypical by socializing with you. We make ourselves seem more acceptable to you and you interpret it as “getting better.”

But, if you try to tell a neurotypical person that they’re wrong about something, you’re fucked. Because mental health issues mean they treat you with kid gloves. Your opinion comes across as “why does this child think she knows anything?” There’s a huge superiority complex that comes from not having mental health issues or processing disorders. It’s such a catch-22 because you can’t hide it and living with the consequences of telling people is a concentrated tisane of depression and anxiety, served to you every morning even when you don’t sleep.

It makes people feel better about themselves when they’re in conflict with you and you have mental health issues. People are so much more likely to write off my feelings as symptoms of my mental health than actually consider the fact that they might have hurt me. I am responsible for hearing when I have hurt someone and responding; I am also responsible for knowing when people are seeing symptoms when I express needs. Normal things that people should care about, should worry about, all of the sudden become “you should take something for that.” Bitch, please. My psychologist thinks you’re a freak show and my psychiatrist says “not enough medication in the world.” Truly, there is no medication in the world that will fix someone’s perception that it’s always your brain (therefore, you’re always wrong) because you have a diagnosed problem with yours and they don’t. It would be gaslighting if it was malicious, but it’s not. It’s every bit as systemic as racism.

It’s the sign, being treated like a pest. That’s the sign that someone thinks of you as mentally ill and not a person anymore… but not consciously. It’s not personal, it’s global. I am a diagnosis to a lot of people, and I finally stopped catering to them because I started treating me like a diagnosis as well. It didn’t do anything to make me feel better and often made me feel worse…. and in fact, a lot of the “symptoms” people see are indeed symptoms- of autism, not depression and anxiety or hypomania. In some ways, it was such a blessing because the symptoms I thought I had from depression were actually processing disorders. I felt lighter than I had in years, because that means my depression isn’t as bad as I think it is.

There’s never going to be a time I can wean off of my depression medication, but there is a lot of comfort in things being unique to me as a person rather than brought on by depression. They just tend to work in tandem. If my autism gives me demand avoidance, my depression will tell me I’m useless and worthless. Anxiety will tell me that if I do not get with the program, I will keep on being worthless. The boss music moves faster, and the threat never appears.

Therefore, I’ve never fallen into a pit of fire, but I haven’t saved the princess, either.

I take that back. I have saved the princess once. I bought an NES controller for my PC, and downloaded an emulator capable of cheats like a Game Genie. The only time I’ve ever beaten Super Mario Brothers was turning up the cheats to full-on invincible. I didn’t have to do that for Alduin (main storyline villain in Skyrim, a dragon).

If I didn’t sleep at all, I’d probably play video games more. I don’t have time for them, which is why I stick to Skyrim and don’t pick up new titles. If you get into Skyrim, it’s different than getting into any other game. There are so many makers of free content addons called “mods” that add quests and characters that you’ll never finish it all. I haven’t even finished all of the quests in the main game, much less expansion packs. While Bethesda is amazing, the creators didn’t make Skyrim immortal. The modders did. It’s basically a video gamer’s blog, because they keep updating the story and the software as newer hardware comes out (getting Skyrim Legendary Edition to run on Windows 10 should be in your quest journal).

Besides, I’m a monotropic thinker. I am happy disappearing into Skyrim more than once rather than getting used to new game mechanics every time. I can change them slowly over time if I want. Part of the joy of the creators’ community is that they’re able to create new animations as well.

And, of course, I love the Thieves Guild, and not because they’re bad. It’s because it’s the closest you get in Skyrim to being a spy. You’re tasked with burning someone’s beehives and stealing something out of someone’s house without anyone knowing you were there. I may not be Jack Reacher, but I get to feel like it for a little bit.

It is so easy to me looking back to see how intelligence became my special interest. Hearing about my great uncle when I was a kid made intelligence feel secretive in a good way. I know for sure that my great uncle was a watchdog on CIA and the military, part of the solution and not the problem.

I have a couple of stories that prove to me that the American government is not lily white from that era, so I also do not think of spies as superheroes. Because James Bond is, well, James Bond, no one thinks of spies as the babies they really are. Most are recruited at the same age as people in the military. CIA recruits at universities as well because they always need people fluent in more than one language. As John le Carré points out, when you’re old enough to do those jobs well, people stop asking you to do them.

What I do think is that I identify with living a double life. My personality on the street is not shown online, and my online personality isn’t me in real life. I am not hiding one from the other, you just can’t only know me in one way and see everything. It’s not the way I’m trying to present online and in person. “The medium is the message.” -Marshall McLuhan.

If I never slept at all, I think I would spend more time researching. It’s my favorite thing whether it’s intelligence operations or biographies of real people. This is because the more non-fiction I read, the more I have a library of images in my head to make correlations. Reading about intelligence is like reading any novel. You find random facts about everything while on one topic. That’s because nothing happens with one decision. With worldwide intelligence, you may have to visit Mexico and Iran in a day. So, in the course of one operation I can learn the habits and mannerisms of a policeman in Oaxaca and a tea shop owner in downtown Tehran.

I am deadly serious in that I believe the Netflix version of “Carmen Sandiego” is the most realistic show we have about intelligence available currently. Carmen is a young woman, but I’m not sure how young. Her friends seem to be teenagers, so maybe college? Anyway, she has a ground support team (ginger twins named Zack nd Ivy) and a handler, Player.

Player is not on the scene, he’s kind of like Justin Long in “Galaxy Quest.” He’s at the computer with the floorplans in front of him, but he’s never in Carmen’s physical location. And because they’re an intelligence agency unto their own, they’re not trying to mimic another one poorly. I really like the relationship between case officer and handler when it’s written as a funny and touching buddy comedy, which this is (my other favorite is “Spy” with Melissa McCarthy and Miranda Hart). In this version of Carmen Sandiego, Player is written very much like her little brother, and it makes child labor so endearing. 😉

Speaking of “child labor,” I love The Disney Channel. They’re the ones that have 14-year-old children saving the world at every turn. I believe that’s a lot more realistic than expecting me to figure it out. Plus, I love writing for adolescents, because it doesn’t take fancy language to make a good story.

It is not lost on me that I bond with these weird little families because Player is coded as autistic. Carmen is coded as CPTSD. Zack and Ivy are clearly ADHD. Ivy is also coded as queer. When you’re the ones picked to live in the shadows, you don’t get to pick and choose who comes with you. The relationships just keep getting bigger to accept who everyone is. Player is never going to be on the ground support. Zack and Ivy are never going to sit still. Carmen is never going to let other people control anything, because she deals in burning beehives.

If you love “Doctor Who,” you’ll probably love “Carmen Sandiego” as well, because it’s very much the same idea. Zack, Ivy, and Player are very much Carmen’s “fam.” And she has more important companions in her life, but that would involve spoilers I’d be devastated to give you before the story unfolded on Netflix.

Often the best representations of intelligence agencies across the world are fictional, because then people have so much more license with it. Less chance CIA would get upset with me if I changed their name and gave them global power to track down alien activity. Maybe throw in Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones as the main characters. I don’t know. Seems risky. Think anyone would watch it?

I am watching very closely at how fictional characters are written across the board. My alternate history combines my two greatest passions in life, so I don’t know whether passion for cooking fed intelligence or the other way around, but now they are inextricably interrelated into the plot of my novel. The one thing that will happen for this alternate history with certainty is that OSS will not transition to CIA. It will transition to something else (or stay OSS, because its future would also be fictional). To me, it is better to create my own intelligence agency with its own fictional structure/rules than it is to guess what CIAs structures are and be wrong. I am a Virgo. I can’t be wrong. It creates a blip in the Matrix.

I have archetypes for my characters thanks to YouTube. There are lots of interviews with people from DIA, CIA, NSA, etc. Here is the one truism I can tell you from hours of all that. In every single one, someone says, “when you were a kid, did you think about working in intelligence?” In every single one, they say “nope. It just fell into my lap.” I think this is due to age. Most of the interviews I’ve watched are with people that are at least my age. When we were kids, spies were approached. There was no “go to CIA’s web site and apply.” Future female spies will be able to say that they applied when they were 18, all they did was send in a resume.

In fact, the way Tony was recruited was through an ad in the newspaper for a government artist. He was intrigued because he thought, “what would the government want with an artist?” Turns out, when an intelligence agency wants people to forge passports and documents, they call it “government artist” in the newspaper. 😉

I am certain that people still get approached because there are people out there doing all sorts of things that would be useful to CIA. For instance, you might love languages or cartography and think you’ll end up as a professor somewhere. But when you get up to six languages or images no one else has, someone will be impressed.

And honestly, we’re starting to be impressed as a country. People loved Madam Secretary, which is a great example of a show that shows how government works (heightened, but realistic). Not everything is accomplished in the shadows, but……….. “for everything else, there’s Visa?” When I think of CIA and State, I don’t want to picture Elizabeth. I want to read the real stories of the people in those jobs. I have read every word Hillary Clinton has ever written, both fiction and non.

I suppose I am trying to find what any writer is- the ability to find themselves while constantly researching other people.

I Just Thought of Something….

November 28, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes I have thoughts and need to write them down for myself. Then, I realize that they’ll mean something to someone else and I just write here, instead.

It just hit me on the head that Supergrover is beating herself up over what she thinks I think of her, and not what I actually do. Therefore, she doesn’t realize that because I’m creating a portrait of her, she is not just beloved by me. I think that she thinks I want to write about her because of what she does. I knew that wasn’t right, but I did feel this. One day, she’s going to be Jon Armstrong. One day, she’s going to be Victor Lawson. One day, people are going to compare Victor to her instead of the other way around. And I’m sure about that.

I cannot paint a true portrait without a bad side to a person, because that’s not real life. John le Carré taught me that.

“The cat sat on a mat is not a story. The cat sat on the dog’s mat is a story.”

I started reading “The Pigeon Tunnel,” and as I was reading I realized that though people say that my writing sounds like David Sedaris, it feels like I’m him in a different body just by the way he writes. This is for two reasons. The first is that we’re the same “type.” Both interested in news and government for the purposes of writing about it. Both interested in holding up a mirror to the world, because bad experiences are the spoils of war for a writer. As poet Mary Karr has said, “happiness writes white.”

David (Cornwall- real name, sorry- I use them interchangeably) has the same way that I do of talking about terribly serious subjects while adding just enough humor to keep the person reading. He seems like the same kind of serious that I am, because while the things that have happened to me are funny, I think David Sedaris is more camp than I am. David Cornwall is a dry wit, and that fits my personality nicely.

I like “The Pigeon Tunnel” the best of all Cornwell’s books because he’s not masquerading as George Smiley. It’s reading the non-fiction behind the fiction, just like I wanted to do in my own book idea of alternating chapters. I’ve also heard both David Cornwell and David Sedaris in interviews and I feel like they both represent me as a person. David Sedaris often explains the way I think to me, and David Cornwell explains how I write.

Apparently, I am an old English geezer at heart, which I hope makes him laugh wherever he is. He’s entertained me so much over the years. I think that’s because he’s such a marvelous blend of people like Rachel Maddow, David Halberstam, Tom Clancy…….. and also Ian Fleming. Basically, living in a system and writing the criticism of it. You can tell it’s a mixed bag. Even more when he was no longer under cover and people knew who he was. After his father heard that “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” had sold 15 million copies, he swindled him for the rest of his life and complained when Cornwell said, “no. Enough is enough.” Basically, his father wanted him to invest in some kind of farm. David said, “if you want a farm, I will buy you one and give you an allowance for maintenance.” I’m not sure he ever heard from him again.

He reminds me a lot of Jonna and Tony Mendez, which I learned quickly because after I saw “Argo,” I began looking for other stuff like it. I didn’t want to know what being a spy was like based on what I saw in movies because real spies had confirmed for me that the day-to-day job is better in terms of learning how policy is shaped, but most of it’s too boring to be filmed. I think it would be cool to be on one of the committees for intelligence in Congress, because I am definitely a “don’t tell me how you got this” kind of dude. I don’t need the semantics, I just want the protein.

George Smiley is just relatable. An Everyman with a normal job, with moments that would fry your hair. Every intelligence job seems to be akin to being the goalie of a soccer team. It’s red tape bureaucracy AND “oh shit, they’re coming.” What le Carré was trying to do in his books was to erase the public’s perception that all spies are like James Bond. At the time, CIA was all over MI-6 to get their shit together, they had a mole. Just like with Rick Aames, they went after the wrong people first because Kim Philby was good at covering his tracks right up until he wasn’t. People say that Philby was a double agent. I’ll believe it when I see that he also did something good for the British.

I genuinely believed that John changed MI=5/6 for the better by being honest about what was going on. They were a mess. He couldn’t fix it, but he could write it down. Especially when you can’t fix anything, having a voice is important. Even screaming into the void produces results because you don’t have to be heard to feel spent. That relief comes from getting it all out.

John does this so masterfully in “The Pigeon Tunnel,” explaining that his father was a crook, making him live in “show mode,” often doing errands for his dad when his dad couldn’t show his face in public. His father was not scared of the police. It was so much worse. It was the Russian mafia. So, John le Carré and David Cornwell are indeed two different people, but John has been around longer than his pen name. When you live a life like that, you have two personalities. His father constantly lost everything. He was well versed in espionage and needed refuge in the system. It was living the life he’d already been living, while having the stability of a government paycheck and normalcy at home. Living on an extreme edge, but with a safety net he’d never had before.

I don’t know how long into his career it was that he developed a knack for fiction. I don’t believe he thought of it as fiction, necessarily. He was just talking about people at the office. Guess what? They knew it was them. They got mad. They also got over it when he sold 15 million copies……. somehow, when other people loved his characters and the author was a great name to throw down at parties, they didn’t mind so much.

Reading “The Pigeon Tunnel” gave me new insight into who I am….. and how writing is not what I do. It is who I am, too. That’s because my blog is nothing more than a reflection of what I’m thinking. You are getting access to my brain without a filter. Sometimes, it definitely needs it, but generally those entries are popular so I know I can just be who I am and you’ll just roll with it. You know I’m Andy Rooney at the end of 60 Minutes over here. Just a string of words put together in a way that I hope others will find pleasing, but I don’t use it for that. I go back and see what’s changed and what hasn’t. I’m my own biggest fan, because reading my blog is not going to help anyone more than me. It’s a survival manual by now.

I also gain a better opinion of myself by reading myself with a dispassionate third eye, because I stop treating myself the way I normally do when the piece isn’t so close to home. I have empathy for myself in the same way I would in reading someone else’s work. Because I can look back over my life in a way that most people can’t, I think I do have a solid case for the fact that I am the greatest man who ever lived…. I was born… to give and give and give.

After the havoc that I’m gonna wreak, I hope my song also comes with full choir, band, and possibly even Shaker Melody…. but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. What people forget about blogs is that the story is always in motion. Essentially, that they are living in a book that is still happening. If they don’t like my writing, they don’t have to read it. I don’t require anyone who knows me to read it, but they often tell me when they do. The only thing they can’t do is coerce me into not telling my stories. I am strong enough to say that they can limit their interactions with me, but I’m a writer and this is what I do. I have plenty of people in my life who don’t mind that I do this, because they know that I wouldn’t do it if I could do anything else. Writing isn’t to impress anyone. It’s to tamp down the madness of feeling several things at once. How do you make a decision if you don’t try to see both sides of the story? How are people so certain they’re right so much of the time?

I would rather spend time with people who don’t read blogs at all than have to anticipate what their blowback is going to do to me emotionally all the time. I own my story. I own my perceptions. I am very perceptive and that’s one of the first things that Jonna Mendez noticed when I wrote a piece on going to her book talk and sent it to her. Having a spy tell you that you’re perceptive is pretty great, I want you to know…… because again, Chief of Disguise at CIA isn’t impressive at all.

I don’t know why, but I feel more at home writing about the British system most of the time. Oh, wait. Yes I do. I know exactly why. CIA doesn’t publish how they do operations, so there’s no real way to know what the American equivalent of C or M might be. I couldn’t tell you the difference between one American case officer and the next, but C, M, and Bond are all different levels and different personalities. If I had any job in the Bond universe, I think I would like to be Moneypenny. I don’t know whether I’d have the hots for Bond or not, but what I do know is that I would love hearing everything coming in and going out of M’s office. If we could make Bond regenerate into Hannah Waddingham, I’d be smitten. I also have a clear picture of who should play M in this fictional universe.

Jenna Redgrave has played the head of UNIT so long that she’s the archetype of who should play against Hannah. I don’t know that she’d get the role, but I think she’d be amazing if she took it.

It’s all an exploration of character, and how I accidentally make people in my life fictional characters on purpose. That’s because in trying to describe our lives together, I am only drinking from the well of my own memory. Therefore, anything that’s not fact checked is a fictional universe, and will change as my facts do.

I am trying to be as fair and balanced as I can, because I think like a journalist. There are just some times where there can’t be two sides of the story because this is my web site. I have to take care of me, and my writing is the only thing that does it. But as I learn more, I evolve and so do they.

Supergrover didn’t start out as Jon Armstrong and Victor Lawson. She earned it. In the end, she’ll never be more real to people than she is here unless she writes her own story. No one, even her, knows how valuable that really is. I haven’t said a thing I wouldn’t say to someone who worked at a gas station. I am not impressed by power/influence because my sister has it and I know what that life is like. It’s right for her and I’m happy she can do it, and also know that I can’t. I feel the same way about my beautiful girl…. “you do you and it’s okay, but that doesn’t mean it’s not hard and I’m not entitled to my feelings.”

For as much as I come across like John le Carré, I also sound like Walter Isaacson. Walter’s books are so good because he explores people so in-depth it’s like you’re in the room with them. He made me love Steve Wozniak and continue to think that Steve Jobs was productive yet clearly insane. It wasn’t a puff piece.

But, of course, you’re going to hate it if someone comes to you and says, “I’m a biographer. Can I write a book about you?” There was never a discussion like that with Supergrover because we were idiots. The first is that she told me something I can’t talk about and it’s hard. The second is that her job and my blog are completely at odds with each other, because I’m not “on her social media team.” She isn’t on my radar because I decided to write about her. She decided to be my friend, and is therefore a character because of it.

One that is every bit as strong and comfortable as the blog “characters” we’ve both come to love over the years. She would have let me keep Beyoncé, too.

This Should Be Short, and Yet It’s Not

November 28, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

Name your top three pet peeves.

Before we get started today, I finally found the perfect keyboard for me. When I use it, I feel like Jason Moran (jazz pianist). The touch feels like it’s made to help me go faster. It’s kind of like having a new car, honestly. Like, there is a big difference in the feel of an accelerator on an old Toyota and a new BMW. With the brand new Bimmer, you’re going to touch the accelerator and be a quarter mile down the road. It’s nice to have a keyboard that is not in the way of being able to jump in that fast. The amount of force on the key to make a letter is almost negligible, but it doesn’t feel cheap. It’s that middle of the road touch between mechanical and laptop. If I had to name the biggest sensory issue I have in life, it’s the touch of a keyboard. I think this is because I know how important it is. I would not know that touch was important if I hadn’t lived with a pianist.

Because of my mother, I have words to express what I need out of a keyboard in the first place.

The prompt today is about pet peeves.

My biggest one is that my housemate has a maid and I don’t. I am terrible at keeping things organized, so my room is a mess and I white knuckle through the common areas because since we have a housekeeper, it is manageable. The problem is the six days a week when our housekeeper isn’t here. There are three of us, and only two of us help. Only the entitled one shares a bathroom with me, so I am constantly cleaning up after her. The way she does this is to say that because I have touched something, she cannot touch it. She comes from a culture that does not accept homosexuality and pretends that it is contagious and I am unclean. I have been laughing at her for nine years now, and it’s not funny anymore. I cannot beg her to do it, I cannot get my landlord to make her do it, because my landlord has talked to her about it also for nine years. So, if she washes her hair in the sink, it’s my problem. Has been for nine years….. because I’m gay and that makes sense to her.

Because it’s been so long, I feel trapped between “this is unacceptable” and “this is my weird little family.” There is no way I do not have empathy for someone so twisted in their world outlook that they make me treat me this way. It’s not anger. It’s pity. I look down on her because she does clean up after our guests whether she brought them or not. I say that her culture dictates homosexuality as unclean because it sounds like very Karen behavior, and she’s the furthest thing from it. I cannot see it all the way around as entitled behavior because she’s been taught since she was a little girl that I should be in jail or dead. Therefore, I can understand and be angry all at once.

Another big one is not responding to emotion with emotion. I do not ever want to hear the phrase “you should have known” ever again. I am out of the anticipation business. I cannot be the expert on how I felt and how you felt, too. Because then you’ll berate me when I haven’t anticipated correctly. You have to be strong enough to communicate your needs with me. It is only my job to become emotionally flexible enough to hear them without reacting in autistic meltdown. It is not pretty and I always regret it. Always. However, now I have new ways to learn coping mechanisms. I don’t want people to feel like they have to walk around on eggshells, the way I feel when I’m trying to guess how to make our relationship better.

My answer for this pet peeve is time. I need to hear/read what you think and walk away. Let me have time to process, because I will look at it differently if I change my environment and come back. I do not trust my first reaction. Please always remember that about me and when I say I need time, let me go. I was emotionally abused as a child. I have trauma reflexes. That means my first reaction to everything comes from that place, and I don’t want to operate that way anymore. I react with autistic meltdown because you’ve interrupted my reality so violently that my environment feels different in panic. I often react with panic because I have been corrected so much about every little thing that I feel like a dog surrounded by an electric fence in most relationships. In anxious/avoidant, the avoidant person will move the target to avoid confrontation, so you cannot please them. Meanwhile, the anxious person feels like they can’t do anything right. Every relationship I’ve ever had has been like this to some degree, because I am the common denominator.

If you have trauma reflexes, after the trauma is over you’ll gravitate toward one of those extremes, and they marry each other constantly. That’s because one of you is social masking an abuser and one of you is social masking an enabler. The younger you are when abuse occurs, the more that pattern is ingrained. The person you really are is hidden underneath those trauma reflexes, because you built them to protect the bubble an abuser creates with you. Everything about how I react as an adult is based on how I reacted as a child to hearing secrets that were too big for me. I have learned that my first instinct is to protect myself from violence. If when I express needs, I am met with violence, I will do anything to avoid saying something and I become part of the problem. So much of writing to Supergrover all those years was learning how to walk in the world in a different way.

Because she’s a boss, her thought processes got under my skin quickly. Every time she got angry at me, I made a note of how and why. It wasn’t to throw things back in her face. It was, “I’m a nobody and she’s not. What can I pick up here?” She’s also not a politician, so she could give a fuck if she wins and influences me. 😉 If she goes back and reads my blog, she will see that it’s just a collection of things she’s said in new contexts, and so many of those lines I got when she was adding new definition to furious. The reason I love her so much is that I find lines that flatten me in letters that are meant to convey annoyance, rage, whatever. I thought, “it must be love if you delight in even this.” For instance, when she said “be careful painting your feelings as fact.” I have quoted that in this blog at least 10 times because it was an image I could use and beautifully.

I wish I could get her to see that I stare at her Renoir like she stares at my Jackson Pollack. They are both beautiful in their own way. We are so magnetic when we are both painting our feelings as fact, because what is happening is that she has so much more to work with than I do. Whether she really doesn’t have time, or whether she’s avoiding writing back to feel guilty, the effect is the same. She knows more about me and can think about it than I know about her and can do the same. She has more context about my life, my mental health, my family dynamics, my entire heart and soul on the page, basically….. because when she said I could, I started using a finer brush- that I’d give her details and she’d write back.

Writing back became a pet peeve because she’d find the things she didn’t like and leave out the things she did. I didn’t like living in negative feedback, because then she started to feel like every boss I’d ever had. Assuming malice where none was meant, turning everything back around as if I’d meant to hurt her by being honest about something, and just generally dealing with the fact that she doesn’t deal in emotions and I do. I write so much about this relationship because it became a list of what’s wrong with me and why. But instead of just saying she was wrong, I dug deep into myself and figured out what was going on.

She did not. Therefore, every time we came back together after blowing each other to bits, nothing changed because she’d react in the old way and I’d regress. I got tired of feeling like she was provoking me and telling me I was the one always provoking her. I was not, I was asking her what was going on in her mind regarding where we are and where we’re going because we have shit to deal with if we’re going to create a secure attachment.

The exhaustion came from feeling as loved as I’ve ever felt and a complete dumbass depending on the day; I never knew which woman was going to show up. As a result, neither did she. It was tumultuous and extreme because we were fighting our own battles in ourselves. My way to cope is to use my blog to be Jackson Pollack. Just like an artist, I am throwing my feelings onto canvas so I can look at them from an objective third eye. Her way is to throw herself into work and pretend that our problems will go away. So, I think it’s better to be apart, because I can’t go on having issues with her that are infinitely solvable with any kind of real conversation at all…. and by that, I mean she doesn’t have to come and pick me up or anything. Just send me an e-mail with your Renoir so that I have two pieces of art in my museum. I have only been saying “I feel neglected and this isn’t okay” because I am asking for so very little. I don’t care that she can’t be available all the time, I care that when she’s here she’s present.

I need to be less reactionary, and so does she. I don’t want to end the relationship, but I also don’t want to live in highs and lows, either. It’s too disruptive to an autistic mind, craving stability and having a volatile monotropic thought process. I am not saying I never had security. I’m saying that her coping mechanism was to end the relationship every single time she was mad about something, and then we couldn’t stay away from each other. Just binge/purge for 10 years straight. If my writing had any effect at all on her, it’s that it didn’t make her fall in love with me, but it did make a future in which we were alternately mad as hell AND also craving each other’s words. What do you think it means to her to be a voracious reader and have crafted pages like mine for long haul flights? What do you think it means to me that I’m the author she reads? That bond is unbreakable, which is how I know with a 60-70% chance that she is absolutely hanging on every word here while also not saying a damn thing. Good for her, because if I can’t entertain her one way, I can entertain her another. The delivery method does not matter, and if she isn’t reading, I also don’t care. I just think her morbid curiosity is stronger than her will. 😉

I do not pretend she is dedicated because I’m writing to her. I am explaining my experiences with her, and it would devastate me to publish something just because I thought she wouldn’t hear about it. I have to consider the possibility because it would wreck me if I didn’t, because there could be repercussions for her, not me. I am trying to anticipate what will and will not be offensive to publish, working within limits. So many things here are analogies for something else that will come across to her differently than the point I’m trying to make…. and also having to be aware of that, too. How much am I entitled to my stories and how much am I just actively hurting her? She doesn’t see that it hurts me not to know, and keeps everything close to the vest.

That’s not her fault, either. That’s just the difference between us. I have something she lacks- the ability to spill my guts emotionally. She has something I don’t- the ability to protect myself emotionally by not constantly focusing on others’ needs. We are both lying to the other- she’s as much a people pleaser as I am, she just makes it look good……. and I only know because of how much she tried to please me. I regret every single time that I “made her feel like she wasn’t good enough for me,” because her feelings are valid and yet not a message I ever intended to send. How she got from “you’re the absolute love of my life and I’ll never put anyone above you again” is just beyond my comprehension, but it’s also my reality. I don’t get the right to make that reality untrue…. and she fucking knows it. That’s my anger issue.

That she cuts and runs when it’s hard, and it’s deservedly hard because it’s so fucking worth it. She does not see that’s what I’m saying. She sees it as “you’re a bad person.” I am not asking to change the nature of our relationship and make her act differently, I am saying that “this is a thing we should manage, not avoid.” Absolutely all of this is because of who she is as a person, but it’s not a dealbreaker at all. It’s that I need someone who can deal with the fallout, and she’s insistent on it not being her while also saying I shouldn’t talk to anyone else. It’s devastating to an enormous degree for both of us, because whatever she’s avoiding in me has nothing to do with me at all. I am asking for something she does not have to give. She’s 10 feet tall and bulletproof IRL while also putty in front of me, because she thinks she’s not good enough for me…. and has thought that about many other people. It didn’t start with me, and I know that.

For most people, she’d be a walking red flag. She doesn’t see that she gets to be that with me. That I’m the person who willingly said “the flag is a lie.” My feelings were deep and immediate because of it, and she’s run from it ever since.

The first fissure was treating me like I was suspect and avoiding me because I’d done something wrong….. except the story she was telling herself was fiction. It was a diversion tactic to avoid talking about the fact that she was wigged I’d told her I’d had feelings for her. I tried to be cool. I really did. But I was wigged that both she and Dana were angry at me about it, because I didn’t have a secure environment anywhere. Not at work, not at home, not in the cloud anymore.

It was a time of trial, and instead of blaming everything on others, I got the help I needed. But the problem with Supergrover never went away. Just avoid, avoid, avoid. Checking in once in a while and gifts were enough. It confused me, and she got angry if I said so. I began to walk on eggshells in a way that I don’t for anyone else anymore. I have explained both sides of the story; Dana was going down, but that didn’t not mean that Supergrover led to my decision to break up with her. I couldn’t deal with both their anger at once, and Supergrover was the more stable choice at that point. It wasn’t the whole story….. but it made cutting ties to Dana so much easier when I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would benefit me.

She just got freaked that I chose to come back to Washington to do it, because she thought it meant that I was leaving Dana for her. What she did not realize was that a tiny part of it was for her, but not all of it. I could have broken ties with Dana from Houston just as easily. What I could not do is live in a city without a car. What I could not do is find impartial friends who didn’t know me from Adam…. I know my friends. I know that they love Dana every bit as much as they love me. I also knew that Dana needed them more than I did and it was easier not to give them a choice. You can keep up with me online, she needs you to jump in. Go to her.

Just because Dana was a walking red flag didn’t mean I didn’t love both of them equally. Dana just didn’t like sharing me and didn’t have a choice. Every “come to Jesus” meeting was a rehash because she treated me so differently and I never knew which Dana was going to show up, either. We all have trauma reflexes, full stop.

The entire problem was that when Supergrover pulled back, she didn’t have that choice, either. She thoughtlessly put something into my head that will affect me forever and decided she had the right to just let me cope. I don’t have the right to make her do anything, but I do have the right to be angry that she did indeed fail me in some respects, and absolutely delighted me in others. She is a spectrum, a 3D character, you might say. 😉

I loved checking in once in a while. I loved getting gifts in my e-mail. All that stuff was so rock solid. What wasn’t was all my anxiety roiling underneath, the feelings she refused to acknowledge that she had created. The feeling of “not good enough” doesn’t come from the fact that she is failing me. She is failing us. I could love her more deeply and be less reactionary with more information. I do not feel anger at her, I feel angry about my insecure attachment and environment because of it. Her conflict avoidance told me more than anything I could ask her outright, because she thought I was hysterical and overemotional…. because she doesn’t see that my approach to life is so different. She sees it as needing me to get with the program while also not explaining what the program entails. Hard to be successful when you don’t know the rules, but she doesn’t do rules, either.

Therefore, I feel like she steps all over my boundaries by withholding information, and I step all over hers for asking for it. We are at an impasse and always will be, because now it’s up to her to accept my reality. If she doesn’t, a part of me will always be angry with her, but it doesn’t mean that my love gets smaller. It only means that it will remain unresolved, and that causes feelings of injustice. An INFJ does not do well with injustice, local or global.

So, now I’m just working on the anger, and she’s not working on the anger she “doesn’t have.” She says in words that I’m just projecting. In her actions, I feel on target. That’s because she’s never vulnerable about anything. When she’s mad at me, I don’t know it. As you can see, that doesn’t cause problems at all. I didn’t walk away because I was angry. I got tired of feeling like my emotions don’t matter to her while she’s saying that’s untrue in words and deeds.

She did something enormous for me when we met, and I think in some sense I’ve come across as ungrateful because she sees me pointing out problems as throwing emotional bombs. That’s not true at all. I can handle bigger emotions than she can, so I write from that place. She reads it while being buttoned up, so it feels like an attack because she can’t receive what I actually mean. She is moving too fast and accusing me of moving too slowly. Again, the leap between a neurotypical and neurodivergent brain with the exception of both having CPTSD. It’s amazing to me how our traumas are on completely different playing fields, yet our reactions are the same, yet mirror images of each other. I forced us into a bad pattern, and it is better to walk away and lick my wounds than it is to convince her I’m right.

My emotional strength makes me care about myself in a different way than I did before……. but not entirely.

“For all our mutual experiences, our separate conclusions are the same.” -Billy Joel, Summer, Highland Falls

Hers is a gift I’ll never be able to repay, because now I have the confidence to believe that if I speak, powerful people will listen because that’s what I’ve been taught. At the same time, I can’t go on with such an inflexible power structure, because the avoidant one always has it. They don’t do things wrong, you’re a problem.

All I want is reconciliation on my terms, because we’ve been on hers for so long and it’s not helping either of us. If it’s not helping either of us, I have other friends. She thinks of me as someone who points out everything wrong with her…. and in my mind, she is everything amazing about being on this planet.

The last pet peeve is that she’s funnier than me.

Let’s All Say it Together- The International Spy Museum

November 20, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 4 Comments

What is your favorite place to go in your city?

If you’ve read me even twice, you probably know I love intelligence. I believe wholeheartedly that I could have been a spy based on my preacher’s kid upbringing (really, really not much different growing/maintaining a congregation and recruiting/handling assets), genetics (great uncle was C/DIA), and the fact that I’ve “done” news like cocaine since I was eight.

There is a direct correlation.

When I was eight years old, I came to Washington for the first time. It was love at first sight. A miracle dropped in my lap that the first offer Kathleen got out of school was from ExxonMobil, because we got to choose whether we lived in Houston or DC. Moving became a monotropic thought process in which I envisioned my life playing out much differently….. and it did. Absolutely none of the plans I made for myself materialized, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have a hell of a good time making them.

If you’re that kid, the one that grows up in a small town and travels so that they see how much bigger the world really is than 40 square miles, you become a “type.” By 10 I had been to Mexico, the UK, and The Bahamas. I noticed the highs and the lows, the looming cathedrals and the neighborhoods made with tin. Global issues become important early. News becomes important early. Politics become important early. You begin to see that working for the government might be a positive thing because instead of reading the news, you are helping create it.

Kids like me end up at State or at the Washington Post. Rarely do we want to be the story. We want to shape it, especially for writers who process “verbally” in stream-of-consciousness spaghetti code. Writing about my life in DC is learning how to say “Hello, World” in every language.

(Sometimes when I write, I imagine people’s faces as they’re reading and now I’m smiling to myself knowing my programmer friends. Just for them, that line should be “every language……….. except JavaScript. Fuck JavaScript.)

My autism and ADHD are why my plans haven’t come to fruition, and my bipolar disorder threw my first choice out the window. So, right now, I am trying to concentrate my energy where I feel it can manifest. I am a better writer than I am anything else, and I know that I’m not the best. What I do know is that by writing every single day, there’s no way to get worse. I am sure that this brings hope to many, many people. Living in DC is where I feel the most alive, because I’m tapped into The Source. The United States is a living, breathing entity, and I am deep within the carotid artery (or the vena cava, depending on administration).

When I go to The Spy Museum, it’s not about seeing the exhibits. I’ve done it 10 times, they don’t change it that much. I hardly ever go during the day anymore, because it’s more fun at night. After the museum closes, all the Bond mannequins…. kidding…. after the museum closes, that’s when they do book talks and record SpyCast, how I met Jonna Mendez and Tracy Walder.

Jonna is one of my writing heroes, because she writes about the stuff I like in the way I like to hear it. She’s got a very concise, no bullshit tone and the wit of someone like David Halberstam or Rachel Maddow, who have also written a wealth of political non-fiction thrillers. I should tell Jonna that if she sees an uptick in sales the next few days, merry Christmas. The post I talked about yesterday for reddit re: Spy Dust and Moscow Rules has had 471 upvotes in 23 hours. I hope I sold her a thousand copies, and I’m not even going to tell her about it because “Secret Santa” is a thing. Book sales are the best gift I could have picked.

A woman said her dad wouldn’t read a book about intelligence if it was written by a woman, and I think that if Jonna can’t convince him, he’s a misogynistic lost cause……. being Chief of Disguise at CIA isn’t impressive or anything (my eyes are rolling out of my head). I like Spy Dust better in terms of being able to pick out Tony’s voice from hers, but The Moscow Rules is my favorite of them all….. and I thought Argo was hard to beat. The book was made in reaction to the film, and it was still better.

I have a different relationship with/to Tracy than I do with/to Jonna because Tracy is so much younger, and in fact, is a bit younger than me (I think). Do you ever have a moment where someone says something and your heart just walks out of your body in empathy? I know it happens to people with their families, but Tracy was a complete stranger to me when she told the audience that she was born with hypotonia. I had never met another person who’d been born with it, she’d never met anyone outside her family. It was not just that kind of moment for me. The emotions we felt at seeing each other mattered. It is one of, if not the most intimate moment of my life. I wasn’t proposing or having a baby, and yet it was still that big because the chance of us connecting was so small, our affliction so rare. It’s one of the few times in a relatively unfamiliar situation in which I’ve been able to breathe that deeply.

However, there is a reason I chose Jonna over Tracy with the reddit comment. That dude is already predisposed to disliking female intelligence writers, so handing him a book with a sorority sister protagonist didn’t seem like the wisest choice. You get Jonna until you can handle pink coffee mugs without being an asshole about it. But make no mistake, he definitely needs to read it. There’s more dirt on scumbags like him inside FBI who don’t trust women in intelligence. To be clear, Tracy did not have problems at CIA. She had problems with FBI. Tracy has a problem with FBI, so they have a problem with me. It’s just that simple.

I am sure that Tracy appreciates the support in which I do legit nothing but talk shit about the FBI on my web site……… but hey, she has a great autobiography called The Unexpected Spy. It’s a thrill ride through her life having worked at both agencies, and thrilling to find out that CIA is actually as forward-thinking as I thought it was. Tracy also made an interesting style choice. When you write a book involving CIA (and I’m not sure if it applies to me, but it definitely applies to employees), it has to go through a publications review board. When Tracy got her manuscript back from the PRB, there were parts that were blacked out….. and she just left them in and published as is. Tracy’s is the one book I don’t have on my Kindle, and the one hardback I’m grateful to own, because the words come across the same on e-paper with Jonna and Tony, but the feel of the paper with its saturating amount of black ink looks official.

And in fact, I liked it so much that she signed my book after the lecture and as she was writing the inscription, I asked her if she would black out a word. Tracy understood the assignment. 😉 She blacks out one word, and you can still see what it is, so she asks around and finds a black Sharpie. She hands it back and it says:

To Leslie-

Go [redacted] the world.

Then she says, “there. Now no one knows what I told you to do to the world.”

We’ve (sort of) kept in touch- I should reach out and see what she’s up to these days. Last I heard she was in Dallas (went to SMU just like my dad, went back to teach at Hockaday). If she ever comes to DC, first coffee’s on me.

Here’s to hoping we can [redacted] the world together……..

because the Spy Museum is my favorite place in my city.

I am including the link to both book talks, and I’m in them at the Q&A. In the Walder video, I’m wearing my CIA baseball cap. In the Mendez video, I am “Sir Not Appearing in This Film,” because the video cuts off right when Jonna stops speaking.

Show Mode -or- Fixed Point in Time

November 16, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been disconnected from everyone lately, because having two people validate my experience as AuDHD has made me run. I am not isolating to piss people off, it’s just that there’s three people in my life for which I have enough energy because I’ve made commitments to them. To augment that is to overload my sensory perception while I’m going through a hell of a lot, and I have not taken this tack my whole life, just the last 10 years (on purpose- I’ve isolated, but through mental illness, not working out a processing disorder). Meeting Supergrover was the catalyst for leaving Dana, but falling in love with her was not.

While I had a virtual relationship, it unlocked the disconnect between ADHD and autism. Dana and I began to drift as I holed up in my office to write. It wasn’t just attraction on my end; it was being able to process through writing all the time and becoming dramatically more introverted and quiet. I have a tendency to let another person drag me along because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, so me being steamrolled for eight years in this relationship is what I do. If I am not pleasing someone, I will not give up. I didn’t give up on the woman that emotionally abused me until someone who could read the situation blind (three someones, actually) and tell how she messed me up. They gave me permission, in a sense, to stop. Nothing was ever going to change or get better, because she made a horrible emotional mistake and was running from it. She gave me a college journal that was full of information about sex I never should have had at 14. Whether she meant to or not, she’s opened a door to something that I couldn’t handle…… but I was 14, so I wanted to…….. JFC I was so wrecked. I wanted to be married before I could drive or vote. She piqued my interest on so many levels that I know it wasn’t all abuse and there were genuine moments.

I wouldn’t be the singer or the personality I am today without her, for evil or for awesome. I would like to think that as I grew, I shed the things about her that no longer served me and tried to let go of rage. My rage toward her is the biggest trigger that makes basic anger multiply into red mist rage. At the time, in my mind I wasn’t being abused. She was a bird with a broken wing and I was going to help her fly again…….. in my infinite 14-year-old wisdom.

Guilt and anger led her to tell everyone how mentally ill and obsessed with her I was, because she opened herself up to becoming a monotropic thought process for me and fucked me over. The reason that the relationship with Supergrover is not the same, because the woman who abused me was a narcissist who fed on my emotions. Supergrover didn’t trust me after I’d hurt her. I got screwed over by my emotional abuser, so I perpetuated a bad pattern. Full stop. But regaining trust was impossible because for as much as Supergrover hates when I say it, their mutual experiences are the same, therefore so are their trauma reflexes. That doesn’t mean their behavior comes from the same source. I could not take responsibility for being 14, but I can take responsibility for being 36.

My isolation is thinking about The Gospel of Billy Joel:

They say that these are not the best of times, but they’re the only times I’ve ever known….. and I believe there is a time for meditation in cathedrals of our own. I have seen that sad surrender in my lover’s eyes… I can only stand apart and sympathize, for we are always what our situations hand us… it’s either sadness or euphoria. So we’ll argue and we’ll compromise, and realize that nothing has ever changed. For all our mutual experience, our separate conclusions are the same. -Psalm Summer, Highland Falls 1:1-2

I wrote that from memory because an interviewer asked Joel what song was his favorite of all the ones he’s written, and this is it. I don’t have anything but the first two verses memorized, but that’s because they’ve changed my life the most. I realized that my entire personality was living life in two different time streams, because my writing digs backward as I move forward. It’s not a thing I do, it is a comprehensive response to life. I skirt the edge with blowback not because I’m asking for it, itching for a fight. It’s that I cannot understand my environments without it. What other people think of me is none of my business.

I did not come to that thick a skin unscathed, I just want you to know that. I had to tank my blog out of embarrassment and stop writing for a few years to get up the confidence to come back. It’s all connected, though. If I hadn’t taken the time out to regroup, I might not have written the article on Facebook Notes that translated into more popularity than I’ve ever had…. popularity that snagged my beautiful girl out of my peripheral vision and made her the whole show. I didn’t fall in love with simple adoration. Like Driving Miss Daisy, it was “I’m here to take you where you want to go.” You want to know how well Supergrover knows me? She bought me a font.

She’s crazy gorgeous, and remembers all my favorite things. Tell me my feelings are wrong. I’ll wait as long as it takes for all y’all to catch up. 😉

And in fact, I do not not think she had the same effect on Dana, the source of her jealousy and ire. It’s just a whole other thing because our adoration looked different. As my beautiful girl and I opened up to each other, it excluded her in a major way. Her jealousy was not wrong or bad, just, I feel, misplaced. Logic and emotion are not the same. Even if she didn’t understand my feelings, she completely understood why I would feel that way.

That being said, I do not think that Dana and I would have worked it out later because a) I couldn’t shut up and II) she overfocused on Supergrover being a monotropic thought process for me and not that I was actively trying to remove her (not from my life, from my “obsession” that’s actually autism- a trauma bond making it impossible to not make her my first thought every morning.). Thoughts of being with her were fleeting. Thoughts of supporting her were not.

I told her I would be the Merlin to her Arthur, and at no time did I stop meaning it. I figured out the balance years ago, and waited for the butterflies to fade. They did, but she hasn’t left the space she occupies in my head. Due to a series of fortunate events, I might be able to move her from a monotropic thought process to a passing interest, but she’ll never move out. She’s in the tapestry of my writing and my gray matter.

But, sensibly, since I couldn’t shut up about her it made her nervous. I didn’t have to love it, but I did have to live it. Therefore, I just had to be okay with seeming threatening in order to leave Dana; I didn’t want to be within a hundred miles of her. Staying in Houston would have been okay if I’d moved to a different quadrant. Leaving to go back to a familiar city was better, because I felt that the biggest mistake of my adulthood was leaving DC originally and not establishing myself on my own…….. social masking my closest friend was easier, treacherous when I realized that she wasn’t, in fact, my closest friend.

If I hadn’t left DC, I wouldn’t have been in water that kept getting hotter. I also wouldn’t be where I am now, so out of pain came glory. If I hadn’t moved back to Portland, no one would have been able to see the patterns we established in my childhood because they wouldn’t have been current patterns. An abuser always cold shoulders you when they’re done…… but you’re still pining for them because they trained your body with a Pavlovian response.

In fact, that’s why we “broke up.” It was years before Supergrover and I connected, but the spell had been broken and I’d started to reevaluate. There are three instances that pushed me into a cathedral of my own.

First, coming to Portland was rough on day one. Basically, I’d come to visit about four weeks before and we solidified plans for me to move. Then, when I arrived with my car, she looked more freaked out than I’d ever seen her in my life, like telling me I should move and encouraging me to find a job and a place was just child’s play. Like we hadn’t been discussing this since she got the job offer in 1996 or 7. It wasn’t a dumb move. She’d moved to Dallas so she could live with her partner while she used her for free rent to get through grad school (don’t think I couldn’t suss that out- her partner was every bit as much trouble as Dana- with her DUI, not Dana’s ability as a wife.) With the emotional abuser, as it turns out, “for all our mutual experiences, our separate conclusions were the same.”). Coming to Portland was about being able to have someone to lean on, even if we weren’t a couple…. just like had been modeled for me. She might have stayed with her partner, but not because she meant it.

Secondly, I know said emotional abuser saw the pattern repeat coming, the abusive one between her and me. I know she did. For every time she pushed me away, her love for me was the purest thing in her life. I know this because I got in under the wire. As I got older, I was not a person. I was an event….. an opera with many intermissions, plot twists, and both sopranos die at the end.

I don’t know how she knew, because I don’t know how she knew Dana’s drinking history. But I swear to God that’s what her eyes said….. “this is a mistake, but I know you cannot even see it yet because I have walked this path and you haven’t.” I was mad AF and still defend Dana to the ends of the earth.

Thirdly, at the time, it came across like “you’re better than Dana. She works at a grocery store.” It was very muddled because she was not the only one who held such an opinion. Neurodivergents have trouble holding down jobs. Period. She had to find the job she could do, not where she’s the most talented. Consistency over excitement. Hospitality every single day. That doesn’t mean she hasn’t studied Shakespeare. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t a technical theater major in college. That doesn’t mean she’s not an actor. She would have been hilarious on Portlandia- I would have, too, in the writer’s room.

But did my current friends see that? No. No, they didn’t. I didn’t just dump the abuser, I dumped all of them, too. They weren’t my real friends because they couldn’t see Dana the way I could. I saw her the same way as the people who birthed her, grew up with her. I didn’t live in her limitations, I reveled in her strength. Despite her truly bad case of ADHD, she’s higher functioning than I am. Social masking her was like social masking my sister (and that line is specific).

I learned all of this by going down to the river to pray, studying about that good old way.

One day when I was particularly wrecked about all this, two friends took me hiking in the Columbia River Gorge, where I sent my tears down Wahkeena Falls, out into the river, and around Cape Disappointment. They were the friends who bailed me out the first time I got dumped by this woman in a way I knew we’d never come back.

I mentioned before that abusers install a back door in you that activates dopamine/sex drive because it feels exactly like the first rush- if they’ve been turning the sunshine away from you to regain access. This came in the form of a phone call when I was in my 20s, one that when I got it, I didn’t want anything more in my life…… until it was over.

I would say her tone was seductive because I’d just watched her do it to someone else, but I’m willing to entertain the fact it’s not correct. At the very least, her tone felt inviting in a very heightened way, and I’m dead serious, not spitballing. She said that she felt like I was a woman she’d like to get to know. I don’t remember anything else because it was a trigger. I went into fight or flight immediately and damn near passed out from red mist rage. I’d had a full-on panic attack at work and went home early. It was 10 years before I knew why I’d been triggered, and couldn’t explain why I felt the way I felt, but avoided her from there on out.

Two things about that. The first is that when I reacted, she immediately pushed me away and I knew there was no chance to prepare my environment and “win” another chance. Second of all, I have to believe that she knew what she was doing. She didn’t stop herself, but she realized it was wrong afterward. On some level, she realized it was hurtful because of the back door and because it was a little too little too late.

I watched her marry a partner I didn’t like because she was just like me, the spitting image except older and more degrees. I watched her manipulate her best friend into “friends with some benefits,” keeping her on a leash for years. Someone I’d once wanted so bad I couldn’t breathe proved to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that she didn’t deserve me in her life, much less as a partner.

She has no idea how much damage she’s done, because since I was social masking her, I’ve been the best and worst of her without ever understanding why. It’s not that I’m not the best of my own mother as well, it’s that we didn’t spend time together as intimately for her to know me on that level. She got frustrated, I did, too, we gave up.

Years later, I went back to the Gorge with Dana, crying and singing my eyes out; it was the moment I knew I wanted to marry her, in retrospect. We were years away from it, and I knew. That’s because when I was finished crying and singing, I looked over and Dana was crying, watching me. She saw how much pain I was experiencing and took it on. It is a gift I will never be able to repay. I traded something valuable for something valuable, even though the relationship wasn’t valuable to me at the end. We became a bad thing for each other, we didn’t start that way.

Those three experiences shaped me- the ablutions in the river after a truly rough jump scare. I was so frightened of everything because I lost all my social masks at once; they weren’t social masks. They were triggers, and why I don’t like to speak. Speaking means not having enough time to think or delete things so I can never be sure when I will say something without thinking that she used to say and the pitch perfect imitation becomes the jump scare. When I mentioned having her sense of musicality, that’s the healthy part. The negative part is that I’m not in shape because I don’t like to hear myself sing.

I’m a lot more low-functioning than people think because of her and my dad. They’re both unique presences on stage and social masking them covered up just about all my executive function disarray because I was always “on.” What covers my executive function now is not covering it, because people thought I was coasting on charm because I was lazy….. not that when I don’t have a social mask for something, I am utterly and completely fucked. “Coasting on charm” is not a want sort of situation. I am only now trying to social mask Leslie Lanagan,™ because for once in my life, I don’t think she’s that bad. I also don’t think that “Diving Into the Wreck” is something I should avoid.

Supergrover and the rest of my friends don’t have all this context (or, they didn’t until I started writing it down). They haven’t known me since I was 12 years old.

Supergrover in particular gets on my ass about said abusive relationship, always has from day one. She does not see why I do not spit white hot rage all over this woman every day of my life. Easy answer is that monotropic thought process damn near killed me for real. Fuck her, but I’m taking my peace on my own by telling my story exactly the way I want to tell it, because she’s the one person in my life that I absolutely want to tank her career. Writing it out over and over gives the story less power and I’m done being worried about what she thinks, have been for 10 years. I’m not a vindictive motherfucker. She’s just worked with too many kids over the years and I’m also done protecting her. We cannot, do not have any more mutual friends….. or if we do, I run away when she comes up. I don’t talk shit about her in person because I already have a “shelf” for that.

I would Google tattoo her every day of my life if I hadn’t indirectly told Supergrover I wouldn’t. She didn’t ask me to do it, just disapproved of my approach to things because she knew my attention needed to be redirected before I did- not that my ire toward this person was unearned and/or undeserved. She encouraged me to lose my shit on many occasions. Though I decided loving Supergrover was worth my all-encompassing attention, I didn’t get over that abuse immediately because of the genuine moments it contained. My experience, unlike others, wasn’t all negative and I had to wade through it. With the information I had at the time, I wouldn’t do anything else but move to Portland if I could do it over.

For better or for worse, Supergrover is a wolf with terrible yellow eyes when she’s angry. When she met me, she found an excellent use for her jaws in my emotional abuser. When Supergrover bit her, the abuser’s claws finally, finally let go of me…… a mask falling off like the end of a Very Special Episode of Scooby Doo. What was valuable was not concrete. I’d had an experience with my cat recently that felt the same way. Asher was closer to a human than she was a cat, and I could tell the moment her personality left her body, because her face changed and she looked like a wild animal. Revealing the emotional abuse gave that face a different context, looking no less feral.

Supergrover and I are so much better at fighting for each other than we are fighting against, because if someone crosses her, God help them.

The only reason I was okay with the abusive relationship dying at the end is that I got time to make my peace. I was reborn into something I never would have been otherwise. My grumpy old wizard did find a knight, a “Wart” who’s already Arthur and I have to avert my eyes (WELL,STOP IT). I made it to Camelot, which is indeed a silly place.

Because I don’t have to think about abuse anymore, Supergrover has been in my head for 10 years as I process my mutual experience with abuser. Her anger carries me when I don’t feel it enough, and that was important in the months afterward- just not now because none of that is close anymore. I can write about it with the emotional separation I need not to explode emotional landmines.

I’ll let you know if Supergrover moves from her castle “in the cloud.” Just because I gave her an eviction notice means legit nothing in terms of the way I process, and she’s stubborn enough to keep me around in her mind, too. No matter what, we have a past, present, and future

…….because I live in two time streams, forward and backward. Where they meet is a fixed point in time, and you can’t cross your own timelline (I’m so, so sorry). You can only understand it after you’ve passed it by.

Dooced

November 16, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever found (and kept)?

For Heather

Web design and development are the coolest things I’ve ever found (and kept) as special interests job-wise. That’s because of anything I’ve ever found, it has led to this moment. Lucrative in the beginning by being IT, possibly lucrative later on as well because I know how to express myself using those tools. I don’t think I have the capability to be a developer anymore, because there’s too much Python, MySQL, and JavaScript for me to keep up. When I started, it was only HTML and CSS. Toward the end, I learned how to read XML, but not write it. Therefore, I can still design, I’d just have to hire out the backend (things like making database connections if I had a content management system, pulling in APIs from other apps, etc.). I know how to edit a script to connect to a database with my username and password securely, but not all the ins and outs of getting the results from the database to appear in a web page. Although in terms of development, search engine optimization is very important, and I do know how to do that. And in fact, search engine optimization is why I’m still here and not using something like Dreamhost.

I have access to a community here that likes to read……. which, if you write 1500 to 3,000 words a day is pretty damn important.

Without getting interested in computers, I wouldn’t have been interested when my friends Joe and Luke said they were starting a linux server and did I want an account on it? I started writing on Darkstar, their (our) server. It connected to the web and you could get to it from the outside, but things didn’t start getting interesting until WordPress, the next big thing I found and kept. However, I didn’t have to transfer from Darkstar to WordPress directly. By that time, my job at University of Houston covered three things that propelled me here. The first was web design, getting used to publishing to a production server to make sure there were no issues before I went live (I caused a few disgruntled looks occasionally, but luckily I never broke a site designed to serve millions of people at once (oops, my bad…. should I leave a note?).

Design includes things like how the page looks, like the columns and where the ads fall and all that (I don’t control ad page breaks- sorry if they suck).

The second aspect of my job was development. Generally, when I was working on design, I’d do it in Photoshop/Illustrator first to get page layout. Development is being able to slice the images I just made and get them to fall the same way through an HTML interpreter. Believe it or don’t, that is a million times easier than page layout in Microsoft Word (amiright?).

The third aspect is content, at which I kick ass and take names. I doubt I’d be able to find all my articles now, because I worked for UH from 1999-2001. When I graduated from lab supervision to the web, I helped run a web zine (looked professional, but that’s basically what it was) called “Information Technology Daily News.” It is in no small part why I can write 1500-3,000 words every single day without blinking. I was trained like a journalist.

It was through that job that I interviewed Helen Thomas, unofficial dean of the White House press corps (the one who said “thank you, Mr. President” at the end of every gaggle). She and people like Sam Donaldson would get information and run to the phones, so I asked her how the Internet had changed all that with a 24-hour news cycle. In Helen’s own spicy way, she said basically it was a bitch on wheels. The question was possible through continuing legal education, but I got into the law school with a press pass.

Editor’s Note:

I didn’t want to see Helen Thomas at all…. eyeroll…. the Mia Hamm and Samuel L. Motherfucking Jackson of news? I was dead. DEAD. Boss came through for me even though Helen Thomas was one of his least favorite people on earth (had a t-shirt that I thought was hilarious; it said “charter member of the vast right-wing conspiracy.” I remember when I could laugh at that…..) I cried when I saw Helen’s old press pass at the Newseum later that same year.).

The transition from Houston to DC in 2001 was when I really started getting popular, blog-wise. This is because my friend Chason, one of my staff at UH (I was sort of in charge of my area once the original supervisor of the zine left, but I didn’t have hire and fire privileges, just input.) introduced me to people like Anil Dash, Ernie Hsuing, and Wil Wheaton. He may have introduced me to Dooce as well, but I can’t remember how I found her. I just know it was right after she’d gotten “dooced” for her “Asian Database Administrator” comments, but hadn’t taken anything down yet. It was before Jon Armstrong, before Leta was just a twinkle in Heather’s imagination.

The path to Chason was the one directly to Chuck, the former Congressman (who was a dog), the Avon World Sales Leader, BYU dry humping and Sprite,™ and what to do about blowback (nothing).

I wouldn’t have gotten good at WordPress without her, and I miss her every day. People tell me that I sound like David Sedaris and the compliment is astounding….. meanwhile, “I am sparing you the DETAILS OF EARL’S ANGINA.” I wrote a piece on her the moment I found out she died. It was one of the worst moments of my life…. yet, it didn’t have anything to do with her at all. It’s that my virtual friend lost her battle with neurodivergence. I do not know her from Adam, because even though we are both OG, we never crossed paths.

I was not but a few years from a time in my life that I felt that way- not that I wanted to die or anything like that. It was having to choose between physically sick and mentally well every day of my life….. the relentlessness of managing a disease like that, not a particular want to escape from people….. And by that I mean dropping out of society, not my personal relationships. In short, I know what it’s like to be Dooce even if we’ve never been in the same room.

Painting my feelings as fact, she stopped checking the story she was telling herself, betraying heather and leaning on Dooce.™ I do not believe she was a narcissist. I believe that she was protecting her brain from injury with social masking. Blowback will do that to you, and why I believe she started focusing on products instead of her life. People understand “influencers.” They do not understand blogging and why it’s important.

For most of history, we have had to divine it. We had to search for signs of life in archaeology and ancient language. Blogs will eventually shed light into how we lived. The observers to history and culture will be valued in a way that they aren’t currently, like authors becoming famous posthumously.

Speaking of “posthumously,” the second worst moment during Heather’s death was seeing my stats spike as a result. It was a mixed bag of knowing my time has come and what to do about it. I am not the only blogger left standing, because Jenny (The Bloggess) and Wil (Wheaton) are still going strong. We are more of a group than we’re not, all writing through the painful moments in life and trying to make sense of them. It’s carving out our own niché while also being similar…. even the way Dooce, Jenny, and I use humor is simpatico.

That means there’s only four people that I can think of off the top of my head that have been left doing what I do. One of them is me, and one of them has passed away. I am not special because I am getting better. I am special because I am getting rare. I may be getting better, too, but that’s not the source in terms of why people read. I learned though Supergrover that I was talented, that I did have promise in a way that, if I played my cards right, I would be a success. Other rabid fans to come after her have said that I’m going to be a big deal. But it only took 10 years for me to realize that I had to have the same confidence in my writing that they did.

I can stand in 20 years of observations on society without that confidence. I can stand in the fact that I can write about a lot of topics, and people will still find it interesting. I am floored that people will wade through Android/Linux to find Zac, Bryn, Supergrover, Lindsay, Oliver (who is a dog), and the characters that are less prevalent, but no less important. It all adds to the fabric of my life, which gets richer with age as I shed my need for approval.

I get to own my story. I get to take up space.

Heather “From Whom All Blessings Flow” Armstrong is counting on me…… and now my nose is getting red, the first sign I’m about to cry. It’s okay to be wrecked, tears are not a problem….. which is what I do to correct the story I’m telling myself. I needed to hear desperately that the world needed me, and if I could have convinced her of the same, I would have made it a full-time job….. one in which I could go the distance, and we’d have been able to cross the finish line together.

So, when push comes to shove, Heather is the most important thing I’ve found and kept. First, I read her. Then, she moved out of her mind and into mine. I’ve tried to make it nice for her.

She has a pool.

IFLS

November 13, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Whenever one object exerts a force on another object, the second object exerts an equal and opposite on the first. -Newton’s Third Law of Physics

I knew I was attracted to Supergrover’s personality from the moment I met her. Again, cute, cuddly, and (works) blue. She was attracted to me because I was vulnerable with her in a way no one else could be- she read my thoughts here and thought she found a safe space. She did, it just took initiation into a really shitty club, the one in which I’m not social masking so there are maybe three people in it. Her husband spoils her in a way I would have wanted, because she put up with too much bullshit for discount yogurt coupon.

She talks me down off the ceiling, and the reason I’m over the moon is that she does it whether I need it or not. In those moments, I may not be able to look into her eyes, but I see the forehead kiss coming. The problem comes in when Supergrover doesn’t take the time to correct the story I’m telling myself and we get off track. But I don’t want to be off track. I am open and communicating, which comes across as rude and demanding. It’s how she came across after she didn’t want to solve anything anymore. Therefore, I used her tone thinking that’s how she’d respond to me. That when we came back together and regrouped after I’d had time and space to think about it, there would be a continuation of her giving me no bullshit answers and me doing the same.

What actually happened is that my no bullshit answers were taken as “you’re trying to hurt me.” Meanwhile, my heart’s all tied up and I’m lovesick because she thinks that. It leads to more anxiety on my part and avoidance on hers. It finally became untenable, because I was tired of having made a commitment to her like I did and not getting a say in anything…… while she said I dictated everything. Easy to be a dictator when I’m the only one who initiates and first response is anger. I wanted her to keep standing up to me by confiding in me. Being stronger by being vulnerable. Raging inside that she couldn’t and it was all my fault. After eight years of it, I finally decided something true. I matched her tone for tone and it wasn’t all me.

Turns out if I can’t date her, she can’t date her, either. That’s because we’re annoying as shit from different ends of the spectrum. I’m laid back. She’s persnickety. “Do not miss a detail or I will incinerate you if my ire is in full force” is on brand. Mine would be “your nachos look better than mine.” That’s because she’d never ask something of someone else that she wouldn’t do herself, and she wouldn’t miss a trick with nachos, either.

There are certain songs that remind me of her.

If you said “goodbye” to me tonight, there would still be music left to write. What else would I do? I’m so inspired by you. That hasn’t happened for the longest time.

She hides like a child but she’s always a woman to me.

Those are Billy Joel lines that have come through my head recently, but I’ve attributed others.

She’s like a one-way ticket and you can’t come back….. singin’ yeaaaahhhh, you want her, but she’s so mean.

I’ll never let her go, but only in terms of the character she presents here. There will still be music left to write because all creatives use their pain as art, no matter what kind it may be. For me, it’s having a love so deep and so ethereal that it has become a mind worm, but stopping our interaction has made it healthier. I do not ruminate on the questions when I know there aren’t going to be any answers…. as in, I’m not expecting them, waiting on them.

I never should have been waiting on them in the first place, but you’d have to understand details I can’t share as to why that didn’t happen. Why she got twisted further into me rather than further away.

We leapt before we looked, and were only now starting to see real promise- or were we? I don’t think so, because our relationship hung on thinking about perhaps one day maybe never doing something and what I could do for her. She is not selfish at all. I had time to be sweet to her and I wanted to do so. When she had time, she wanted to as well. We’ve sent each other all kinds of digital shit, particularly books and coffee because Amazon and Starbucks are the easiest to transfer back and forth.

We just don’t have the same time; people are right when they say everyone’s got the same 24 hours, but wrong at both ends of the spectrum. A poor person doesn’t get as much accomplished because they can’t travel very far, very fast. You have to have money for gas or public transportation. A powerful person doesn’t accomplish very much because they can’t focus on anything with everyone pulling them in all directions. The difference is small ball. Conversations and research add up. You might have had five minutes a day, but that’s 25 minutes at the end of a work week.

An ADHD or Autistic person does not do that consistently because their thought process is not going to pick up at the same place the next day. They have to come up with a new great idea, because they had it at 3:15, then Carol had an issue, then they got back to their desks and remembered the seed. But then there was only about an hour or an hour and a half left in the day, which isn’t time to fully flesh out the idea. By 5:30, it might as well be, “what idea?”

This is why conversations with Supergrover are so important to me. She’s big picture, and I’m details in terms of spitballing creative ideas or solving a problem. But that’s because she keeps track of everything and all my brainstorming will be off the cuff. My disability comes in where she shouldn’t be expected to keep track of everything, and I’m ADHD. We both have to learn to cope if we have a shot at friendship down the road, and it will be a long time before I’m ready to say we won’t. This is because traditionally when we try to separate, no we can’t.

There are just two reasons it feels final. The first is that I have a legitimate issue with her, I’m not just trying to be an annoying little shit. I’m sorry she’s busy, but I’ve been in the waiting room for eight years. The second is that she sabotaged one of my relationships and I let her because it was good for both of us. And yet also wouldn’t compromise with me on anything later when I felt I’d proven myself trustworthy.

I never railed at her for being straight, I never railed at her for telling me what she told me so that we couldn’t separate, I never tried to make her feel bad because she married a man. I never did a lot of things, she just assumed. She’d read a shit ton of my writing and decided what it meant and how to feel about it all on her own, which she should have. But she didn’t share with me any of her interpretations so that if her assumptions were wrong, I could correct them. She also wouldn’t correct any of my assumptions, then rail that I’d made them. It was not healthy, and her last words to me were “obviously, you’re the only person who can change…” as if I’d lorded my changes over her. I’m not better than her, I’m just different. I felt like I’d done a very good job of listening to her needs and responding, and I was being repaid in anger and guilt.

Reminded me of going to the hospital after Dana hit me and her saying, “must be nice to just be able to check out like that” after she’d hit me. Both Supergrover and Dana caused me to feel things that I’d never felt before in the extreme. I will never forget what it felt like to be hit by a partner. I will never forget what it’s like to be alone in a room with Supergrover, which is how I viewed our relationship- displaced in space and time, a room of our own. 😉 Different experiences, yet not. Different environments, yet not.

In the case of the failed relationship, I felt like I’d anticipated Supergrover’s needs jumping up and down for attention and it didn’t work out the way I thought it would. I don’t know what I was expecting given the previous few years, but it wasn’t what I got.

I got a big gift from her, but there was nothing on the card to indicate that it was transactional. Most of our gifts were “just because,” so if it meant “thank you,” I didn’t pick it up. Therefore, I recognize that she spoke to me in her love language and I am grateful. I just think it’s foolish for only one of us to study the language. It means only I’m in a foreign country.

Marcus? Marcus would get lost in his own museum.

And in fact, that’s exactly what I did. I wrote into the night, creating new memories with her and reveling in her old stories when she told them. I told her I wanted to be the Merlin to her Arthur, but I know in my heart of hearts that she did not believe I was telling the truth. This is not real? I ended up wishing that it could be more than each of us curled up reading each other from thousands of miles away, but grateful for even a 30 second interaction because her time is as precious as she is.

My beautiful girl is such a force of nature that I had to be mad at God for a while. First, railing at them because I’d been born queer because the relationship would be so much easier if I hadn’t. Then, railing because since she shut down communicating with me, it felt like she thought she was them.

She thought I was mean and vice vera.

Whatever objects of mine weren’t in motion before she appeared certainly started rolling afterward. The entry before last took place at Marylhurst, the year leading up to meeting Supergrover. Before I knew it was an emotional affair on my end, and I was always preventing her from being uncomfortable because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut and I knew she would be.

Not only was I blunt, I couldn’t get a read on what was okay and what wasn’t. Our reactions used to be so similar that when she put me in motion, we moved in the same direction.

Now, for every action there was an equal and opposite reaction in which her actions were always pure and she was perfect, and I was trying to take her for a ride. This was in no way true, but I see how she’d get that impression. I thought she would see with eight years of diligence that I wasn’t going anywhere and I was taking my end of the bargain seriously, but an avoidant attachment will run from an anxious one every time because they are not used to communicating with people clearly enough to avoid small anxieties that then spiral. Slights unfold in the memory.

I also don’t know when our relationship is affected by outside sources, and she held that against me, too. She asked why I wrote like she does everything because of me. If you don’t tell me there’s an outside force, I’m not going to look for it. I have enough problems not spiraling out without anticipating even more blowback because the moving goalpost would be “why do you attribute things to my friends and family?” I didn’t want her out of my life because I thought she was a bad person. I thought our relationship was difficult because I couldn’t love her any more than I already did unless she showed me how.

She has no idea how many e-mails I’ve written with tears streaming down my face because of it. Whatever you call it- a chord running between us, wearing her metaphysical ring, two toys in the same sandbox, etc.- I wasn’t prepared for how hard it was to undo a trauma bond, and I’ve been left with no other choice. I am not holding onto hope because I think it’s realistic. I am holding onto hope because neither one of us has been able to avoid each other no matter what our feelings have been for 10 years. It’s a tapestry.

I just decided to stop stitching until we went to Target together to buy fabric softener….. and she has to drive for many reasons. She doesn’t get to have an engine that good and not let me watch her play with it :::sly grin::: because she’d know how to raise the hair on the back of my neck safely. That’s why she’s the alpha in our relationship. One of only four or five people I’d trust to catch in one of those exercises where I just have to hope I don’t hit anything as I lean back.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. I am angry that she does not see me as someone who would catch her and it has become useless to keep saying it and hope she takes it in. Maybe she will in retrospect, but even so it’s unlikely to result in reconnection. That’s because I’ve told her over and over that if she comes back, it has to be big. She has to lay all her feelings on the table so that I feel secure.

I know her first thought when she read that (the first time) was “why didn’t she just ask me to poke myself with a fork instead?” That’s because she’s cute and cuddly, but doesn’t indulge that side of herself. Doesn’t realize that the things she sees as “darts” from me are actually the things I love most about her. I’m not criticizing her, I’m telling her I notice her “-isms.” She has personal and professional quirks that make her unique. She doesn’t see that I think she’s uniquely inspiring and stupid gorgeous because she isn’t looking for it. That doesn’t make it less true.

I say everything wrong, but no I don’t because no one is ever wrong a hundred percent of the time. All of this has become a drumbeat because if I do not concentrate on resolving the issue and keep looking back across the river, I won’t be able to rescue myself.

She has told me to find people that bring good things into my life, that don’t cause me issues. Two huge problems with that. The first is that if I move on, she still causes issues because the bond is unbreakable. We leapt before we looked, and now I’m paying for it dearly. I am sure I am not the only one, I just don’t know her side of the story because she’s so adamant about not telling it.

So now, my task is to find something that will turn my attention, and I’m finding all sorts of temporary interests, but not anything so magical that it would interrupt how I’m feeling currently. Part of it is being a monotropic thinker caught up in a rumination that won’t go away. Part of it is that the situation cannot be duplicated, so if I lose her, I lose a once in a lifetime experience. My broken heart was caused entirely by thinking that I was the only one who got the chance of a lifetime. I forgot that when I saw her trademark and thought it was cool, she had met Leslie Lanagan.™

I don’t think that because of anything but Newton. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Supergrover fell in love with my writing. I started believing in myself. Any belief in myself started with “you like Eminem? Explain exactly how I’m not going to fall in love with you. USE BIG WORDS.”

I was joking. We’d just met like, 30 minutes ago. It was a mistake, and a big one….. but not for the reason you might think. I didn’t pull a trigger in her that meant anything sexual, but I made her feel good and vice versa. We amped up each other’s dopamine so that we felt this heightened bubble around us that excluded the rest of the world for evil and for awesome. It was private and healthy until it was private and not. And I’m not even sure how private it is, sweating bullets over everything about everything.

What I know is that if I keep putting one foot in front of the other, my attention will eventually turn. I think that’s best because she’s given no indication that me asking her to step up would do any good at all, and in fact most things I say piss her off because she can only accept my truth when she sees herself the same way I do. If those stories are different, she will become defensive and accusatory. At that point, I’ll just explode because I am so tired of trying to make it work.

The reason I’m tired of seeming “demanding” is that I’m not asking for anything huge. If she actually asked what my terms were, filling them would be the bare minimum in a virtual friendship. It’s not that I blame her for always being busy. I blame her for doing everything she can not to talk about her feelings so that I constantly feel like the failure in our relationship because I’ve asked her to emote. Anything above clear communication in text, like having lunch, is above and beyond. Penciling in lunch is what I’m willing to do, not what I need.

What I need is her to stop moving the goalposts so that I actually get positive feedback. When she holds off reading because she feels angry/guilty, she opens the e-mail and responds to it with anger and guilt…… if the issue is between us. She has time to post-mortem with me if she is not a party. She will help me improve any relationship except for ours.

It felt like I was settling for a connection that would be insecure my whole life because I would walk on eggshells to keep her until I died…….. because bringing up anything about our relationship makes her avoid me. It has to stop for as much as she walks in beauty and I do because of it.

Two reasons for giving up. The first is that I genuinely don’t want to take up her time. The second is that I don’t want the occasions when we do have time to interact to be contentious. I can’t be one of those “Christmas and Easter” friends because we’ve been so close in the past that it physically hurts when we’re distant. Having that distance is the only thing that allows me to keep that thought process at bay. It’s exhausting for the feelings I have about her to rush in and out. Riding the waves is a good thing, but it’s dangerous when the water levels are so different at low and high tides.

I am astounded by the entry where she told me she had read as much as she was going to read, that it’d been okay up to now. There were tears running down my face; my face felt as if it had never really been washed before. The reason I was crying is that the entry was much later than I thought it would be, and she’d read everything that was truly important to me. She didn’t agree with all of it, and that’s okay. Just knowing she read it is enough. Knowing she was still reading while I was at full strength, not social masking. Letting my autism run wild over our experiences so that I could process them through my fingers.

Of course it hurt that she said she wouldn’t read anymore, but it hasn’t been true at any other time in our relationship, so I’m convinced if it’s not true now, it will be. I have no doubt she loves reading about you. For some reason, in her mind I am very perceptive about everyone on this blog as well as completely 100% wrong when she’s in it.

I am not surprised at this attitude, as it’s most people’s attitude about my writing. It’s irritating as shit because people will read me for days/months/years and really get a feel for my writing. They’ll fall in love with it and treat me like a hero. They’ll build me up til I think I’m James Dean on toast. Then, when they’ve convinced me they really want to be a part of my life, they see what I’ve written about them and it quickly begins a downward spiral if I say anything but “the sun shines out of their asses.” I have not changed a thing in terms of the way I operate, but they’ve changed their perspective on me.

I love that Supergrover read the entry about all the things she never knew, about telling the bees she was gone… and might have even heard me read it. If she did, I hope she likes it, because that’s the purest love letter I’ve ever written to anyone.

Falling in love with straight women is never advisable. It’s cliché for a reason, though. Happens all the time. When it comes to being attracted to someone, mistakes are made whether people are the same sexual orientation or not. Plus, even if we had both been queer, that’s no guarantee that we would have been attracted to each other. I’m not even sure I’d be attracted to her physically because I’ve never seen her in person. Yes, her photo is gorgeous; I can’t go on that because you can’t judge how you feel around them by it.

This is why I’m so sure that what she looks like doesn’t even matter. That whether we meet or not, our brains are connected and that’s what’s important to me. Our brains being connected is just not a good thing until we establish healthy patterns and tamp down all the rage.

She and I, like Dana and me would’ve if we’d gotten back together, restarted with a lot of hostility. Over time, we each came around and I kept growing. I felt like we were getting closer, but I think now that I felt the intimacy of opening up to her. That theory holds up because my feelings didn’t degrade if she stopped talking- still haven’t, won’t. What I went through with her was a dream, but a disjointed one…. the kind where you think you’re going to learn the meaning of life….. until you realize it’s all just a bunch of green glass and movie magic.

I am not sorry for wanting her to be my somewhere over the rainbow, but I am sorry that she knows it….. and I couldn’t get around it by hiding her to her because I’m just not that good a writer. Hiding her to people who don’t already know her is hard enough. The reason she knows I love her this much is not just because I told her. I thought it was easier to go the hard route and just be honest with everyone, including you.

Generally, after I talked to her, I talked about her…….. and she read it. The reason we didn’t leave it at a one-note conversation is because I wasn’t writing my feelings about her to her. I was writing my feelings about her to you and she was listening. Sometimes it made her angry. Sometimes I touched her heart. The worst days was when she perceived I was doing the former when I was trying to overdo it on the latter. All I’ve ever wanted is to change her mind and heart, because I wouldn’t be who I am if she hadn’t changed mine.

She knows how I feel about her, how I’ll always feel about her. I will stay in motion especially being acted on by an outside force. In so many ways because our relationship is virtual, losing her is losing me. There are moments when my social mask is her because none of my other friends know her and won’t pick up the imitation. We’re both good people. If something worked on me, it’ll work on someone else.

Supergrover is sort of neurotypical with ironclad boundaries and morals. Therefore, it was imperative to pick up her social masking. She is much more stable than I am in that arena (I’m autistic/ADHD and she’s not, but she has PTSD so I’d be surprised if social masking hasn’t been a part of her life since she picked a favorite Crayon.). We are both incredibly complicated constructs, what makes us attracted to each other on a magnetic level because our conversations just keep digging down.

At first, she was good about thanking me for calling her out and not immediately getting angry, but it didn’t last because I got on her last fuckin’ nerve. I’m not saying her reactions weren’t anything I didn’t deserve, just that I was thoughtless and it had bigger consequences than I could see on the current chessboard. You often don’t when you’re playing black.

I didn’t get anywhere in our relationship until I pushed over my king for the last time….. except it wasn’t, because Supergrover was used to having a fight and would provoke me when I said I needed time. I am responsible for not walking away at that point, but because autism, I’m not very good at that. So, we’d spend our days ripping each other apart when this is someone I wanted to love for all time.

It mystified me that we were fighting over how beautiful she was and I was losing. I’ve loved beautiful women since forever and I’d still never seen anything like her……… and I would say that if I’d never seen a pic.

Her letters were like uncut coke to an autistic brain. I lit up like a Christmas tree every time a notification came in. My senses were heightened because I’d been in burnout/depression when we met and the dopamine of new relationship energy pulled me out. I missed DC (I lived in Oregon then), and for as much as I thought of myself as a lovesick girlfriend obsessed with punctuation, I thought of her letters as “news from home,” too.

I had never had a relationship that was so deep emotionally without being physical, so it took a while to learn how straight women do that. Definitely something I needed to know because I’ve misinterpreted lots of signals the wrong way in both directions. One of the things that’s come from being so tired of walking in gray area is if I’m interested in someone, just tell them. Don’t stop to hem and haw over whether they’re straight or not. If they are, they’ll tell you.

I realized I was pigeonholing women by anticipating whether they were or weren’t based on a non-existent set of facts that are actually just stereotypes. I’m not saying that telling Supergrover I had feelings for her was wrong, I’m saying that I was an idiot for thinking it wouldn’t change things as much as it did, because she was already a monotropic thought process without bringing all that romance shit into it. I felt like a seventh grader. Ugh. Eyeroll.

The one thing I will not do is pretend it didn’t happen. Supergrover has to learn to deal with my feelings if she wants to be in my life because I do not want a relationship where only one of us is getting what we need. What I need is for her to stop the push/pull of adoring me when I adore her here- deeply, intimately… and saying “you’re the only one who ever ruins anything” after we have text.

If this was a movie, our indecision over whether to be good to each other or not would make the audience throw popcorn at the screen. So many times we have duelled, enough that now there’s never a winner because we decided to attack each other instead of the problem.

I want to be kind to her. I want to love her like no one else does, and I can be safe and secure in the fact that I do. It has been such a circuitous route that it is impossible to remember every turn. I do know that at some times, it has felt like Google Maps just told us to swim.

Right now what I am doing is making sure that when I’m older, I still have these memories. It’s not a lot to write down to move on. It’s a lot to write down to record. Hindsight is 20/20, and I cannot look forward before I look back. If I am only looking forward, I am not seeing the mistakes I’ve already made.

Autistic people take in information by reading a lot of the time because processing someone’s voice is more difficult than text. In effect, I’m writing down my memories because it makes social masking stick in my head.

Social masking doesn’t mean that I’m not being real with you when I do it. I am not trying to learn how to emote. I am learning how people receive it so that I can be more effective in my communication. It would be nice if people did the same for me, but neurotypical people don’t generally do that. It’s not how society works. If you are not having a meltdown and stimming by rocking, “you don’t look autistic.” If you hear people say that, they’re certainly not the type who’s prepared to be sensitive to it.

The world doesn’t owe me any favors in terms of excusing my behavior because I’m autistic. It is only a tool for me to learn how my reactions are different by having them classified into a group. I would like to make the whole world more accessible, but that’s not my call. My call is being able to act upon an outside force because it acts upon me, not cower away because I’m afraid to take up room.

For instance, I know that I rejected a lot of love in my equal and opposite reaction to Supergrover because it wasn’t the package I wanted. She thought I was being selfish, like a child who’s had their favorite toy taken away. Our problems weren’t child’s play, so I don’t know why she thought the solutions were easy. She took up an enormous amount of room in the relationship and, I feel, blamed me for wanting a solid 10-20% rather than a rolling approval rating with large spikes.

I’ve said it so many times, and mostly that’s just to convince me I did the right thing. It is torture in the moments I think I didn’t, because if so, I traded a lot for a little. There had to be multiple battles for me to concede the war, because I kept changing tacks and nothing got better. It was hell walking away, and an even bigger hell to stay and be caught in a gray area that felt like it had an electric fence. No matter how much I tried not to get buzzed, I hit a wire somewhere.

The two scenarios are so different because the honeymoon phase is so different from where we are now. It would have to have been that explosive to create this much pain.

Every action creates an equal and opposite reaction, but some elements are more stable than others.

I am not coming from a place of lack, begging her to come home. I am coming from a place of abundance that I ever got to love her at all.

For cesium, there was flourine. For me, there was you…. and the joy and light of being complete.

English & Language Arts

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

What was your favorite subject in school?

In elementary school, I had two classes. One was called “English” and one was called “Language Arts.” It has been at least 40 years since I started school, and I still can’t tell you the difference. I am 100% certain that it would only take a quick Google Search to make the distinction, but I enjoy being a writer and not knowing. It’s just funny. However, if I had to guess, it would be that “English” = Grammar and “Language Arts” = content. I’m guessing because I always got grades like 97/95 in English and I think those were the two criteria. I then, like now, wrote in stream-of-consciousness mode so my grammar wasn’t infallible, but even before I learned to type it was typo-adjacent. I only spelled things wrong when I wasn’t thinking about it. Also, in high school I wasn’t a very good typist. I caught more mistakes that way because I was going slower.

Learning how to chat online made me a better writer, because now I can touch type. In fact, I can keep up with my thoughts to the tune of only being a couple of words behind what I’m thinking. Most businesspeople can do this, but it’s a specialized group that didn’t know anything about typing and learned it because conversation moved too fast for them to keep up. My first real foray into language arts was with meeting girls (of course it was). Then, just like now, big emotional connections, but not outright flirting because I was 15 and they lived far, far away.

I will tell you about them (mostly because if they Google themselves, they’ll re-find me), but I have to tell you that I might not be in any way correct because catfishing was a thing even in the 90s. But whether these women were real or not, they were my friends and there was no sexual content to anything, leading me to believe that they were legit. Yes, I was young, but I found other young people, or at the very least, adults who did not hurt me.

The first was Rainey McMillan from Swansea, Wales. It was 31 years ago and she’s still fresh in my memory. I didn’t have a personality with her because we’d never met. In her, I found my real self- the autistic person who went non-verbal for very, very, very long periods of time because writing took away my barriers to conversation. I believe wholeheartedly that Dana didn’t see it because she couldn’t. I used to be a lot more okay with forced extroversion than I am now, which was bad. Very, very bad. I was overwhelmed a hundred percent of the time and lived in burnout often. If I can narrow down my demand avoidance to the most essential of needs, I can feel my body’s rhythm and flow. It gets lost in an overloaded schedule. I notice when my demand avoidance gets so debilitated I cannot move. My biggest job right now is to learn how to deal with these disabilities, because I cannot even ask for ADA accommodations if I don’t know what will actually help.

I could do lots of jobs in a quiet room. Very few offices have them anymore because it’s all about cubicle farms and conference rooms. People have asked me how I worked in a busy kitchen. It was a process. First, my relationship with Dana was strong and a lot of it was just us alone in the kitchen. She was a sensory experience in and of herself and my eyebrows are going over my forehead and that was meant to make her laugh because she knows her. They’ve met.

Dana becomes very excited about things. Very excited. I was irritated by a lot of it, but she also became very excited about me. It wasn’t all bad. The negative aspects of my sensory experiences paled in comparison to the positive. 😉

However, this shouldn’t be taken as a slam on Sam, either. A positive of waiting is forgetting enough about the experience to make it new, which is what 90s gays in Houston called “Baptist virginity” (because they get re-baptized all the time and we have no idea why. The first one didn’t take?).

I’ve always thought sex was hilarious, since I was a kid. One of my favorite comedy routines is the one about Jeff Foxworthy trying to make the room all romantic for his wife. He puts candles on their headboard and halfway through they realize wax is dripping on their faces. I would like to believe that I am also hilarious with stuff like that. There’s no point in getting too worked up over it. One day it’ll make a cute story between us, what doesn’t kill you makes good writing, etc.

I also think being queer had to cure me of Protestant beliefs about sex because I had to talk about it so often. The glossary of my community alone, JFC. Learning it takes years and I’m behind the eight ball. If I’m talking to someone under 30, they’re going to have to use flash cards. :::pause for laughter::: On the other hand, new terms come to me easily because I want to learn the language even if I never use it. I picked up “new relationship energy” or NRE from polyamory because it describes how I feel at the beginning of every relationship. I’m what’s called “demisexual” or “sapiosexual.” That means I am not attracted to people by the way they look, but how much they excite my brain. That’s why it doesn’t matter what kind of relationship it is, I’m going to get lost in a fog. I feel the same energy with Supergrover that I do with Lindsay- because since Lindsay only works here and hasn’t actually relocated, every time I see her it’s the brain fog of it feeling new and heightened. Strong, comfortable, and exhilarating because she’s such a big shot. What I have learned from both of them is that I am worthy of being married to someone like them. That they weren’t more powerful because they were smarter. They were more powerful because their brains were built for the system and you couldn’t find more beautiful women in a catalogue selling fuckin’ anything.

Thus the first, Rainey, eventually became Supergrover…. and not because I tried to replace her. It’s that by the time I met Supergrover, I’d had 30 years of relationships entirely in text. My relationship on the ground with my sister helps me to understand Supergrover’s life by being able to see what a powerful woman is like and how they became so without it actually being her.

When they walk into a room, it’s not only their employees that snap to attention. It’s all the men above them, too. It comes in handy because their beauty makes people trust them before they talk to them, and they’re wonderful people so being magnetically attracted to them is easy. They’re also the type of people that are infinitely kind…. the type people who other women don’t see as a threat because they go a little stupid when they see them, too. If Supergrover has had one real crush, she’s had a million “girl crushes” on her since birth. She’s the kind of person that’s gorgeous enough to have power like a mean girl, but she gets it through attraction and not malice. I know all of this because I grew up with her personality type. Every man wants to be her boyfriend, every woman wants to be her bestie.

That’s because they both have the power to make you feel like you’re the most important person in the room when you’re with them, and it not coming off as manipulation because it isn’t. They genuinely like their small moments with people that are quality, true connections. A connection is worth something even if it only lasts a few minutes, because networking is more important than mental/physical labor. Networking makes any job easier while being at work is more specific.

For instance, Lindsay has worked in both private sector and non-profit lobbying, plus campaigning and body man for the mayor of Houston and did constituent services for a while. Knowing Annise Parker was her connection to the White House because she ran Mayor Pete’s campaign. Pete losing was hard on me because even though I never realistically thought he would win, I thought “now she’ll have to move to Washington and I won’t have to make it my idea.” It’s not a priority to me because it would be so nice to have her here all the time, but I wouldn’t see her any more than I do now. She just doesn’t have time. I don’t even see her every time she comes here. I text her 99% of the time for the same reason I e-mail Supergrover, and why I say that if we had a relationship on the ground, it would look a lot like the one I have with my sister. That being close meant “I can give you 15 minutes in March.” And that’s only if I ask in December and am willing to be picked up and driven somewhere, find your own way home because I got shit going on here, man. But you know what? Those would be the most valuable 15 minutes in my entire life. I would walk differently after that. I get the impression that time with her is valuable because she makes time, never actually has it. We’d play by the rules and improvise on them as necessary. I’m ADHD and don’t give a fuck. That means spur of the moment get together or cancel and I’m great either way.

That’s what I mean about being in Washington at a time she wasn’t supposed to be and joking about having an affair with Michael’s wife. That it wouldn’t do to hide anything because it’s more trouble than it’s worth…. what I feel is happening when she doesn’t claim me outright, and feel secure when she does. It had gotten to the point where I thought that Michael didn’t even know about me because she seemed so secretive with me, I assumed she was secretive with him as well. It was a surprise to me that she wasn’t, and I had to be furious, overwhelmed, and forgiving all at the same time because her whole shtick is that adults don’t discuss their conversations with other adults and that she didn’t want any of what she said to go to Dana, or have to worry about it so she wasn’t going to say anything more when what she told me was the source of my anxiety. She destroyed me in a second, and because my environment was threatened, I completely rearranged my life in order to get peace I so desperately needed. She took all her feelings about me and told someone else, where it would do the least good.

So, in short, I felt like I kept my word and she screwed me to the wall.

That’s because now it’s 10 years later and I’m still a nervous wreck. She won’t listen when I say that because she’s programmed herself to only think of me as a threat. It helps her ignore my reality, because I know she feels guilty. She tells me that all the time without ever resolving the problem. I keep hoping, and keep being disappointed.

I decided that was all her own shit, that I didn’t think of her as a threat until she acted like one. That I didn’t paint her as a villain in every story, just the one where she was. I also painted me as the villain first. It’s not only that I hurt her. It’s that she had the high ground first, and relationships tumble and roll. She cannot win every fight, all the time, and she won’t give on anything. It’s like working with a Republican congress, but not one where we can’t get anything done. When they used to collaborate to the bare minimum.

It’s so sad because we could have been Obama and Biden.

I bet she’d look good in aviators. I don’t know for sure, but she has the personality of a flyboy…. the equivalent of Finn Hudson, the quarterback popular kid and the choir nerd (she doesn’t sing, I just mean she has a soft side). It’s more fun looking back than it has been the last eight years, because I felt so constrained by what I could say to her. Since she took everything as a negative, I was constantly searching for the right thing to say and landing on the wrong one.

One of the songs on the playlist I made to move my mind forward was a Ludacris duet that I hear in my head all the time… “can’t live with you, can’t live without you.” I only wanted to solve the swings, not kill the relationship altogether. But like I said, we both get defensive immediately, which lead to not listening on both sides. That’s because she’d only answer when she was angry. She wouldn’t feed the positive, so my reactions to her were angry as well.

I own a lot. I just don’t own everything. I am not the only person that needs to learn and grow in a relationship, and this is what happens when only one person makes the commitment. And I don’t care if it’s because of apathy or not. Whether I made the mistake of wanting her to work on something when she didn’t and not walking away, or whether she really does love me with Mama Wolverine intensity and I’ve underestimated her feelings, I couldn’t get her to say how she felt either way.

I told her I thought that and no response. I have no idea whether she’s licking her wounds or happy I finally got the message. If she’s happy I finally got the message, then I deserve more than her, no matter what I think of her. I will eventually find someone else and hopefully she’ll see she made a mistake. But by then I’ll be gone and I’ve told her that if she comes back, she has work to do with me. Nice is not going to cut it. It’s not that she can’t come back in and of itself. It’s that I will no longer tolerate this crack-smoking foolishness. I watch Doctor Who. I have standards.

She doesn’t see her hypocrisy. I’m the only one who ever ruins anything. But I didn’t ruin us. I ruined me trying to find her.

For Susan Hoefer and Sue Protheroe, my English and Language Arts teachers. If they hadn’t taught me how to express my feelings clearly then (7th grade), I wouldn’t be able to express myself to the degree that I do now. They are precious to me because of it.