I happen to have a hard-to-get appointment with the foot doctor smack dab in the middle of what promises to be a huge pro-gay marriage demonstration, coordinated across the country at 10:30 PST.  This is when I find out if I get a cast. If so, of course I could get a lot of bonus points appearing late in my contraption--oh, look how committed he is!

I am still full of ambivalence about our strategies. It is exceedingly difficult to communicate my ideas about expanding and enriching the options available to anyone who wants to get their relationship legally recognized without somehow being perceived as not wanting or caring that gays are treated equally under the law. Of course I do.  But like Elton John, I just don't understand what the problem is with Civil Unions that give us that protection. So what if we can't call it "marriage?"  If I can visit my partner in the hospital, inherit his property, and our children don't have to be adopted by the other--why does it matter under what legal rubric this occurs?  

What is becoming fascinating is the sociological phenomenon of mass protest and action that is generated almost entirely by individuals spreading the word on Facebook and via email.  One of the reasons I want to go to the demonstration is to participate in this kind of new social movement. It's the best kind of democracy--the "60s all over again."  I think I will try to show up late, even with a cast. If only for the flirting opportunities.

On a front that is frankly more important to me personally--as I hightly doubt I will ever be married or unioned--I finally got the novel underway.  I had been stuck on page 1, writing and rewriting it, and now I broke through, and it's moving along. 

The technique I discovered is to open up the file first thing in the morning and do a little work on it, if only a sentence or two. What results is that I take advantage of my A.D.D., my tendency to parallel process. I go back and forth from the novel to email to surfing the net.  This recognizes that I needn't wait till I have everything else done to start writing and then do nothing else. That's not the way my brain works.

Play to your strengths. This is my thought for the day. 

MCO 2008

The night before last started off the following 24 hours with a real collision. I hit my driver-side mirror against a tow-truck in my parking lot and have to replace it.  Luckily, my neighbor who owns the truck was almost apologetic (the truck is way too big for my lot, but parking is difficult in this neighborhood, he has no choice) and he offerred to install a new mirror when I get one. That will cushion the blow, but it's a bitter expense for a boy on a budget who is normally much more carefully getting in and out of my very thin driveway.

Then the editor of Wehonews.com wrote me an e-mail that my "Jim Crow piece" had received a lot of mail.  There was no reason for the alert--of course I was going to read the letters to the editor. He was going out of his way to let me know how he felt about the article, making an inflammatory reference implying I was a racist.  "Jim Crow" refers to the laws that enshrined the concept of "separate but equal" in the South, and they were struck down as unconstitutional in 1954.  Of course "separate but equal" was a lie, a figleaf.  Blacks were never accorded remotely "equal" facilities, schools, resources etc, that's why separate was ruled as inherently unequal.

My proposal was that all people, straight or gay, be given the right to a better system than marriage--which originally arose as a state rite to institutionalize patriarchal property rights, including over the women. To compare that to Jim Crow laws was ridiculous and deliberately designed to provoke me. (I left the magazine after writing 10 articles for no pay and dealing with the editor's micromanaging megalomania. He's been evidently harboring a grudge ever since.)

Provoke me it did. We had a progressively nasty and personal exchange of emails. What can I say, being called a racist tends to get my gander up, even if I probably should have recognized from the get go this wasn't really about my article and refused to take the bait.

Then David and I had some discussions about buying the house that threw me.  Oddly, it synchs up with the whole marriage thing. I feel like I'm ahead of my time. I think there is far too much societal emphasis on the primacy of relationships based on sexaul and romantic love.  I mean, look at us, in the blogosphere!  Most of us haven't even met each other, and yet what we say every day is of enormous importance to each of us. I'm not proposing we get married, I just think friendship and non-intimate relationships get short shrift in the society when in reality they occupy an enormous emotional space for most of us, often a bigger one then that occupied by any significant other.

David and I have lived together 7 of the last 20 years. We are more married than most married people, but it is an entirely vertical relationship.  Buying a house together represents a commitment to an alternative significant other relationship.  Perhaps I'm being unrealistic expecting it from him or from myself.

Well, I'm nothing if not flexible. If he buys the house without my help and charges me a much lower rent, this could work out.  With me, practicality always trumps ideology.

MCO 2008

I figure this would be a great place to spend the next four years before the poles shift and the black hole in the center of the galaxy sucks the milky way into nothingness around December 21, 2012.  That's right, I've been watching the History Channel again, and those prophecies (not just the Mayans, but Mother Shipton, Merlin, and the I Ching too) are scarily plausible.  (There will be an astronomical alignment that occurs once every 26,000 years--that's not even woo-woo, that a fact.)

I find the idea that the end might be near eerily liberating.  What's the point of writing my ass off it there will be no one to read it, no libraries for a book to dwell on, no posterity to worry about? It reminds me that we truly only have the present, and the only reason I need to write is because I enjoy the process--the rest is all gravy.  

Likewise there's the question: if I knew the end was near, would I want to stay sober for it? This is the kind of dilemma only an alcoholic would ask, and my disease grabs onto it as the ultimate justification for a nice big glass of wine every night.  What I have to remind myself is that I LIKE being sober. I like the sense that nothing is impeding my concious contact with God, I love the lack of chaos and unmanageability in my life.  But I do have to remind myself. The basic alcoholic thought is some form of this: ingesting a substance is part of the solution; altering is good, enhance when you can.

Don't worry, I don't sit here and struggle. But I do have these thoughts, along with a daily repreive from acting on them.

MCO 2008  

I got all geometric on the beach one afternoon in Provincetown.  I was going to post these one at a time, but I'm impatient.

Today I went to a gay morning meeting, and had an UPLIFT  (Unexpected Parking Lot Flirtation). I was wearing a cool black shirt I bought yesterday, and looking good, and I came up with a spontaneous but fairly amusing one-liner. We were also introduced by a friend, to whom I was able to signal my interest afterwards, just in case the object of my attention voices interest back.  ("Matchmaker, matchmaker...") This is probably the closest to actual romance I will get all month. I like to think of it as seed planting.  One of these days something's gonna bloom.

These last minute attempts on the administration's part to issue executive orders and regulations that Obama will have to repeal or rescind is the most passive-aggressive bullshit imaginable.  It's got Dick Cheney written all over it.  I personally think Bush is exhausted and beaten down. He doesn't understand how it all went so wrong because he doesn't have the intellectual wherewithal to distinguish ideological good intentions from competent governance.  Cheney, on the other hand, can't bear to relinquish power. He might as well be Hitler ordering nonexistent armies to counterattack as Berlin falls.

I probably shouldn't sully a blog entry bearing artsy photos and talk of love with references to the evil regime we still live under, but it's all on my mind. I may spend most of my time alone here at the computer, but my brain is perpetually engaged with the world. The personal is political, I see what's going on far from home and close to home and in my very head as completely interrelated. I'm as likely to be as buoyed by something Obama does as by a flirt in the parking lot, as upset by an article about Darfur as by noticing my bank account is in the red. What I love about the blogosphere is the capacity to locate others who think the same way, who see themselves as citizens of the world, affecting it and affected by it.

When someone "doesn't pay attention to politics," or couldn't find Afghanistan on a map or, horrors, doesn't vote, I feel sorry for them.  A lack of intellectual curiosity, a sense of separation from the wider world--it makes, in my opinion, for a life so much less rich than it could be.

MCO 2008