Blue State Blues

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Something to keep in mind for 2020 as it starts to get ugly out there. Donald Trump didn’t win the White House by convincing the majority of America to like him. He did it by convincing the majority of America to be so disgusted with Hillary Clinton that they stayed home. He accomplished this by manipulating the right-wing media and the mainstream media, getting a little bit help from the Russians, and getting a lot of help from Democrats. People don’t remember this, and I’m anticipating some of my friends to comment on this post telling me otherwise, but five years ago, Hillary Clinton was a reasonably popular public figure. She wasn’t toxic, and she was a sure bet for the presidency. One primary and several exaggerated scandals later, she’s the least favorite politician in America.  

This tactic worked in the low-turnout elections in 2000 and 2004, when two decent statesmen were so dragged through the mud that the public, who didn’t really like George W. Bush, were even less sure about those guys. The Trump campaign took this and elevated it to a grand guignol, and they’re on track to do it again. Try going onto a forum manned by Democrats and mentioning a candidate’s name and see how fast and furious the attacks will come. Bernie’s washed up and crazy. Biden is a clueless Boomer. Mayor Pete is an evil capitalist. Warren is condescending. A Democrat can, right off the bat, tell you five things they hate about the other candidate, but they can tell you may be one or two things they love about theirs.  

Voting not-Trump isn’t going to win the election. It didn’t work in 2016, just like not-Bush didn’t work in 2004. What worked in 2008 and 2012 is that we had a candidate who, despite his flaws, we liked enough to unite behind. The only candidate who has people united behind him is Trump.  

I don’t know what the solution is. The allegations against Buttigieg are awfully troubling, almost as much so as the verbal diarrhea that comes out of Joe Biden’s mouth. I don’t trust Sanders, and his followers are really off-putting. The one I’m behind is Warren, but anyone will tell you they have “problems” with Warren (I haven’t been able to get people to tell me what those problems are), and according to the Bernie people, her health care plan will effectively torpedo any chance for us to ever have single-payer. Democrats are amazing about finding flaws in their own people.  

Man’s Second-Best Friend

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Instead of working on my book all late afternoon, I’ve been hanging out with Newcastle, who has been following me from room to room, giving me big, begging eyes for my attention. I let him curl up with me as I watched my one day off slip away from me. 

I love this cat. I love him so much. 

He crawled off of my lap and curled up in the corner of the couch to go to sleep, and he looks old. He is old. I can feel his bones when I pet him. It really hit me just now. He’s lived a lot longer than he was supposed to, with his heart condition and a liver that’s not where it’s supposed to be. But he and the other cat play chase still, even if Newcastle doesn’t really have the stamina to play long. 

When I saw my psychiatrist for the first time, and he asked me what my goals were, I told him, “I want to be as good as my cat thinks I am.” I don’t know if I’m there yet. I think Newcastle has unfairly high expectations. 

I don’t know what I’m going to do when he’s gone. But I know what I’m going to do for these years, these months he has left, When he comes up to me and demands affection, I’m going to put the notebook down and give it to him. This cat has brought me so much joy in my life that the least I can do is give him a happy retirement. 

More Powerful Than a Locomotive

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This week I declared war on Batman. I did it in a FB group where people were trying to make Superman relevant for 2020. Many didn’t think it was possible, and some commenters leaned into the fact that he’s an undocumented immigrant. I don’t think that really works, though, because Superman is a blue-eyed white guy from Kansas. He would never get picked up in an ICE raid. But he is identifiable.  

Most people in the United States know what it’s like to leave home for the first time and move to a big, scary place, take an overwhelming job, develop a crush on your coworker who can’t see you in front of their face because they’re into someone flashier and better-looking than you, and have a side of yourself that you don’t want anyone to see because you want to come across as normal. As far as the superpower stuff that most think is impossible to write, keep in mind that, in the comics, his ultimate nemesis isn’t someone who can punch harder than him, it’s a human being—brilliant, soulless capitalist with unlimited resources. That sounds like an easy movie to make, Warner Brothers. Why do you have to go and make everything so complicated? 

The Non-Functional Closet

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I have an announcement to make, and this is a big deal, so pay attention. This isn’t a conclusion I came about lightly. I didn’t just say, “I feel this way, it must be this.” It took me years to understand this. I’ve visited doctors and therapists and had some long conversations. Some people I’ve talked to just flat out don’t believe me, and I suspect a number of you won’t either, but it’s my identity, and I need to share.  

I’m asexual. If you’re not sure what that means, in the simplest of terms, A is a prefix meaning Not. Heterosexuals are attracted to the opposite sex and gender, homosexuals are attracted to the same sex and gender, bisexuals are attracted to both, and pansexuals are attracted to everything in between. Asexuals are attracted to neither and none.  

Except when they are. 

You see, like anything having to do with sex, it’s complicated. There’s a whole spectrum (from people who are only sexually attracted to someone they have a deep emotional connection to, all the way to people who are physically sickened by the idea of genitals being touched by others), and I don’t quite understand where I belong on it. I can tell you what it means for me. I can be in relationships. I’ve even had sex since my transition. But in general, with very few exceptions, I don’t feel sexual attraction. I don’t think about sex, sex doesn’t motivate me. Sex doesn’t play a part in my life, and more importantly, I don’t want it to. I find people attractive, but I don’t want to sleep with them. I develop crushes, but not because I want to see the person naked. Hell, I write erotica, but it’s as much a distant, imaginary fantasy to me that I can’t really relate to as when I write about a witch battling the Norse goddess of winter. 

Do I think this is part of the reason Kate divorced me? Yes, I do*. 

I’ve kept this to myself because asexuality is weird to our society. Even the most juvenile of comic book movies shoehorn in a romance subplot, and what is romance about but sex? Sex is everywhere. Sex (in the United States, anyway) is the unnamed, hidden force behind everything. Sex is biology. The fact that I’m not into it is a rejection of a fundamental part of who we are as humans, and many people I’ve told simply won’t accept this about me. 

When I started making the transition, I thought there was something wrong with me. I went looking for causes and solutions and found none that worked. My doctors suspected that my testosterone was low, or my medication was causing a reaction. It’s been suggested to me that I just need to meet the right person. And then, of course, there’s the one that I will bet money some of you are thinking right now: it’s perfectly normal for a man my age to lose interest in sex. 

My testosterone is normal. None of my medications have sexual side effects. It’s going to take more than just one person to change me. It has nothing to do with my age. I’m not broken, I’m not abnormal, I’m not old. I’m asexual. This is who I am.  

* I was fully honest with Kate about how my needs and wants were changing, so this isn’t something that was just kind of sprung on her unawares. She’s the first person I talked to who actually believed I was Ace. And I’m pretty sure that she ultimately decided she wanted no part of it. 

Cool Spots

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I’ve had a few days to think about this. On Thanksgiving, Dr. Darrel Lloyd, one of my professors and mentors at Hastings College, passed away at the age of 85 (I hope that’s a lesson to all you youngsters about the dangers of smoking). My contemporaries at Hastings who had even a passing crack at the English Department knew Dr. Lloyd. If you didn’t take one of his classes, he did an annual Christmas reading which was one part hilarious and two parts bolt-you-to-your-seat. He was a brilliant man, and funny, and kind, and all of the other things I’ve been hearing.  

But the thing that he was to me, as I’m sure he was to a lot of people, that isn’t really coming across in all of the memorials I’m seeing, is that he was hands-down the coolest professor at Hastings College, possibly ever. I can name a lot of cool professors, including Dr. Lloyd’s son, also Dr. Lloyd, as well as the father of one of my dear friends, and they were pretty great. But as far as turtleneck-and-tweed-jacket-wearing, slow-motion-strutting, lecturing-anywhere-in-the-room-but-behind-the-podium, laid-back-quip-at-exactly-the-right-moment, deep-sexy-voice cool, no one could beat Darrell Lloyd. He couldn’t have been cooler if he was in a band. No one will ever be that cool again. 

I won’t be in Hastings on December 15 to celebrate his life and his passing, but my heart will be there. Darrel Lloyd will be there too, in the back, slouched down on his seat, taking it all in and being the coolest ghost in the Midwest. 

Vampire with a Soul

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If you ask me, I will tell you that my favorite TV show is not Doctor Who, as you’d suspect, but Angel, the vampire detective show. It was on for five years, and between that and his three years as a major character in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I found the perfect, most personal depiction of my particular brand of bipolar disorder.

Vampires in the Buffy universe are evil because they have no soul. They’re varying degrees of evil, and that appears to be tied into how much personality they had when they were still alive. An intense, tragic poet like William maintains that humanity when he turns into Spike, but someone like Liam, who exists only to sleep and drink around, has no humanity when turns into Angelus. He’s sharp, charming, more powerful, and supremely confident, like me in a manic episode. He destroys everything, and he does it for fun, and he does that until he crashes, i.e. his soul is restored.

Now he’s a creature of pure guilt, and eventually he believes that his redemption is through a girl. This leads to disaster, as it should. Eventually, in his own show, he finds that his redemption for his manic behavior is found in simply doing the right thing. He’s told that he will be rewarded with his greatest wish if he continues to do the right thing. By the end of the show, he doesn’t do the right thing for a reward or redemption, but because it’s the right thing, a true sign of maturing.

When the first season came out, it was about finding oneself in an exciting, scary new city, trying to figure out who you are and how to do it, and it came out the same year I moved to New York in pursuit of a new life. Season 2 was about the perils of thinking you’re smarter than everybody, Season 3 was about found families and a little bit about addiction, Season 4 was a dumpster fire, and Season 5 was about growing up and selling out. Buffy was a show about being a teenager growing up, Angel was about being an adult growing up. Angel wasn’t as good as Buffy, and is overshadowed by its source material, but it was still pretty good.

And speaking of Buffy, where the first three seasons of Buffy made them an OTP and then spent the rest of the series trying to walk that back, Angel acknowledged how unhealthy it was. His first meeting with Buffy after he left that show was contentious—she resented him for leaving, and he really wanted to assert his independence from her. We later find out that Buffy was a rebound girl that he projected all of his guilt and uncertainty onto, that in his mind, his OTP was always someone else, and that this love forever thing they had was all from Buffy’s perspective (which doesn’t make her bad or silly, it just makes her a teenage girl). Basically, his relationship with love is confusing and sometimes ugly, and even when he finds the right person, it doesn’t work out.

Angel is grumpy and awkward. He lives with the constant fear that something is going to go terribly wrong. Love is something that never quite works out, and eventually he decides to eschew it altogether. And there is a side of him, a wicked destructive side, that’s always there, waiting for him to let his guard down. The worst part about this side is that it is the real him, as real as the goofy, brooding him. And that’s me in a nutshell.

All that, and I didn’t even get to Spike, the actual OTP of the show.

Life’s a Musical

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I’m generally a happy person. My life is challenging, but I mostly get to do what I want, and I’m surrounded by good people. But find me on my commute and I get exceedingly crotchety and cranky. I don’t get violent, I become like Tommy Lee Jones in any movie that Tommy Lee Jones has ever starred in. And considering what a public transit commute is like in any big city, who can blame me? I keep to myself, I don’t jostle anyone, and I get home to my big, adorable, stupid cat, and everything is good again. 

There’s this thing, though, that I never noticed during my time served in New York, and that’s the singing. This usually happens at night, but it can pop up any time. Someone, of any age, with earpods in their ears, will start belting out, at the top of their lungs, and usually not very well, whatever they’re listening to. It’s loud enough to pierce through my podcast, and it drives me insane. It also puts me in a dilemma. I encourage self-expression, however you want to do it, from wearing colorful shoes to dancing on the sidewalk. This, though, is kind of awful. Even when the singer has talent, it’s kind of awful. I can’t maintain my bubble if someone keeps popping it with whatever the latest star has to say this month. There’s a reason playing music without headphones is illegal on the Metro.  

There’s nothing I can do about it. I’m not about to tell a Metro agent about it, because what are they going to do about it? And even if they could, am I really the kind of person who wants to penalize someone for doing something that makes them happy? No, I’m not a Republican. The good news is, it doesn’t happen very often, maybe three times a month. It’s a temporary nuisance when it does happen. So I just suck it up and mutter under my breath. Joy is a challenge to come by, and they found it, even it’s just for the length of this track. 

Oh, now they’re singing the next song on the playlist? Goddammit! 

Film-Flam

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Another day passes, and another person weighs in on this increasingly dumb Marvel-vs-Martin-Scorsese nonsense. I’m pretty tired of hearing about it, and I’ll bet you the only person more tired than I of the whole thing is Martin Scorsese. Mostly I’m tired because what difference does it make? There’s nobody who has ever said, “I was going to rent Ant Man & the Wasp, but Martin Scorsese said they’re not cinema, so I should watch Casino instead.” And when I hear about an out-of-touch Baby Boomer who has been living in Hollywood half of his life who is telling us that an enormously popular genre of movie that he’s probably never seen aren’t cinema, my first thought is, “Well, he’s not wrong.” 

Marvel movies are about a lot of things, like honor, sacrifice, duty, personal responsibility, loss, family, and grief, but mostly they’re about a guy who dresses in red, white, and blue and calls himself Captain America hitting a large purple man with a hammer. They’re not high art. But perhaps Martin Scorsese or his sidekick Francis Ford Coppola (the director of Godfather Part Three and Bram Stoker’s Dracula who has a lot of nerve passing judgement over what counts as overwrought, pointless spectacle) would answer a question for me: What have gangster movies ever done for the world? Has society grown or become better because Joe Pesci flipped out and shanked a guy to death for making fun of his shine box? Has Marlon Brando sticking cotton balls in his mouth improved humanity in any way?  

Don’t get me wrong, The Godfather and Goodfellas and all of these movies are really good. My senior year in high school I saw Apocalypse Now five times, and it holds up today. I went into The Departed with a bad attitude because I’d seen Internal Affairs, and how dare these Americans think they can remake a—okay, it was actually amazing. These movies are art, I won’t dispute that. But they’re movies, i.e. moving pictures. Yes, these two men and the filmmakers agreeing with them have come up with the most interesting ways to manipulate light against a screen, but that’s all they’re doing. And if you’re one of the people thinking that making yet another gangster movie starring Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro makes Martin Scorsese a better person than anyone, you need to get your perspective checked right away. 

I love movies, but they’re movies. There’s plenty of things to get furious about right now, but one of them shouldn’t be an old man stating his opinion. 

Pit Stop

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I’ve been writing nonstop for the past two-and-a-half, almost three years, whenever I can, wherever I can. It’s been nothing particularly profound, mostly silly magical adventures, with a few romances and one epic sci-fi/fantasy thrown in, but it’s my art and my reason. I have no doubt whatsoever that if I hadn’t been structuring my new life around writing, I never would have made it through this divorce. Even as I’ve been working these endless strings of fifteen-hour days, I’ve managed to find a cumulative hour a day to put pen to paper.  

And with that in mind, I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself. I just finished a novel that I think is good enough to shop to agents after I give it a once-over and a polish, and for the first time since I started this marathon in 2017, I don’t have an idea for my next piece. I’m not calling it Writers’ Block, because that connotates an outside force keeping me from inspiration, when in fact, I just haven’t let my mind wander as much as I usually have (probably those aforementioned fifteen-hour days). I’m also not sweating it. If I take some time off from writing, I might actually do things like finishing unpacking my room or read a book. I’ve committed to doing some editing next month, which I wouldn’t be able to do if I was scribbling and typing furiously away every time I wasn’t working, sleeping, or doing laundry. 

But I can’t deny, it’s weird not to be stressing out about when I can find some time to sit down with my notebook or wondering where the characters are going to go next. It’s like writing was a job, and I just got laid off. I talked about free moments earlier, but when I’m in full writer mode, I don’t have free moments. I’m constantly occupied by my novel or short story. Well, now I have free moments. Who knows how long that’s going to last until inspiration gooses me, and I get back to work. 

What to do, what to do … 

Hack the Planet

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The reason they won’t let me write suspenseful thrillers in Hollywood or TV Land is because all of my stories would end like this: 

*Our scene opens in the VILLAIN’S lair. The VILLAIN has been defeated, but he has left one dastardly trap for the heroes—a biological weapon that is primed to subject all of Los Angeles to an agonizing death. In a desperate attempt to stop it, the HERO and HEROINE confront the VILLAIN’S laptop.* 

HERO: The only way to stop it is to enter the password! 

HEROINE: We’ve only got two minutes left! Start guessing! 

HERO: There’s a catch! If you enter the wrong password three times, it automatically triggers the device! I know an algorithm that can bypass the security node and access the device! *HERO types furiously, but the screen flashes red, and he pounds the table* Dammit! There’s a firewall eating my code! I can’t get through! 

HEROINE: Two guesses left! 

HERO: There was only one thing that he loved in this life! One thing that made him human! His daughter! *HERO types the VILLAIN’S daughter’s name, but gets another red flash* Dammit! 

HEROINE: One guess left! 

HERO: There’s only one thing we can do, and it’s a long shot! Before the Villain murdered him and his family, my brother entrusted me with a worm he coded! If it works, it’s like an electronic skeleton key that can— 

HEROINE: *Slides the laptop over to herself and types P-A-S-S-W-O-R-D. With a dull hum, the device powers down* 

HERO. Goddammit.