Celibate but Equal

I was reading a christian man's account of coming out over and over and how dear his community of gay, celibate Christians is and his struggle with it all in general today and it broke my heart a bit.  On the one hand, who am I to say he can't have that strong conviction and make that choice and still be perfectly happy, you know?

On the other, I know that my view on being gay pre-gay-sex and post-gay-sex are night and day.  Having sex with another man for the first time was the closest I've ever been to a spiritual moment since leaving the church.  All my pre-conception about how wrong and guilty I would feel afterward melted away in a feeling of naturalness and completeness.  For me it was a moment where the missing pieces all fit into place and I finally had a glimpse of what it meant to take comfort in physical intimacy of another human being.  It was the opposite of awkward.  It was the opposite of broken.  It was a moment of genuine completeness, where I first understood the kind of completeness straight people had with each other, and that I could have that too.  And, more importantly, that if a god embodying love existed, there was no way he would object to showing affection to another man that left me feeling so whole.

I guess if I could tenderly offer my advice to the well-meaning and celibate gay christian, it's to commit that particular "sin" at least once.  Please don't spend your whole life segregating yourself behind sex-proofed glass because well-meaning straight christians are posing as experts on a topic they have very little actual experience with ,with only 3 questionably analyzed bible verses as their support.

Taste and see if it is good.  I promise you, it is.

Fringe-ology review

Having finally decided I'm just going to have to admit my writing is just plain not going to live up to my standards for now, I managed to arrange words into a review of Steve Volk's Fringe-ology, which I recommend highly to anyone who wants to dabble in fringe topics.  There are other reasons I dragged my feet on this one, but I'll not go into them now.

Hopefully I can crank out a few more lackluster reviews over the next work or so about a couple more "fringey" books.  And maybe pen an essay about why I'm interested in it and I should probably be less hesitant about admitting that.  And then on to less fringey things.

Getting Goat (a short story based on real goat events)

Everything I have ever written and everything I will ever write is garbage compared to this headline. ht @ErrorJustin pic.twitter.com/kD9V0JnFpL
— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) November 20, 2014

How I imagine this went down.

******

 I'd been working the local beat for two weeks when I got the call from my editor.

"Goat on a roof.  East side.  Might be a good human interest story."
"I don't know how many humans are interested in goats, Bob."

Bob sighed melodramatically.  "Just go check it out.  It's a slow day anyway."

On scene were two uniformed cops, facing off with the goat at them from his perch on the roof, scampering angrily to the edge and back to bleat at them defiantly.

"Maybe we should mace the thing," said cop one.

"Really Johnson?  You want to be known as the guy who maced a goat off a roof?" Cop two was arching his eyebrow at his partner.

"Nah man, I'm just tired of taking this goat's crap," Kowalksi whined, before dodging the stream of urine now gently arcing over the edge of the roof in their general direction.  "Motherfucker!" he cried, scrabbling at his belt for something violent.

Cop two reached out and put his hand on Johnson's heaving outrage in a placating gesture.  "Johnson, let's take a moment and see if we can't think of a response somewhere in between doing nothing and tasing a goat, shall we?"

I wandered over to the elderly lady watching the spectacle in her bathrobe from over the fence.  "It's so sad to see it come to this."  she said.  Mrs. Katsch had been neighbors to the indignant goat and her owner for 5 years.  "She was always such a good kidd." She said, her eyes brimming.  "But she was never the same after the war."

"The war?"  I asked incredulously. Although I was not surprised that the afternoon would choose to double down on weird.

"Oh yes, she and good old Colonel Hastings worked together in one of those gulf thingies."  She said, waving in the general direction of war thingies in the Gulf of Somewhere Else. "They were part of an elite bomb-sniffing unit or some other crazy thing.  Had some hard times don't you know."  Mrs. Katsch leaned over the fence and whispered loudly but conspiratorially to me, "Word is, they killed a few people.  Or saw a few people die.  Or something just horrible like that.  But they never talk about it.  And after the war, they couldn't stay together for the memories, you know."  Mrs. Katsch was tearing up again.  "So Colonel Hastings gave her to good old Mr. Newton here, but he's never been able to keep up with the mood swings and the PTSD that poor little thing came back with after the war.  That goat only respects one man."  And then louder, to the officers still discussing the best way to get the goat off the roof that wouldn't go viral from dashboard cam footage, "That goat only respects one man!"

"And where is Mr. Newton now?"  I asked, in what I thought was a very professional tone given the circumstances.

"Oh, he went off to get ...  oh here he is now!" she said, waving at the old beat-up pick-up that had just pulled up, with what I presumed was Mr. Newton in the driver's seat.

"Oh thank goodness you're back!" shouted Mrs. Katsch, "the poor dear's just out of control!"

Newton nodded briefly, but not unkindly to Mrs. Katsch while on his way to unload his passenger, a slightly older gentleman with gray in the temple, a cane for walking and a slight limp.  After extricating himself from Mr. Newton's assistance, Mr. Hastings set his gaze on the unfolding scene and marched over to the house.

The goat noticed him about half-way over and sat down and watched him with unreadable eyes.

By the time Mr. Hastings arrived at the edge of the lawn where the officers were standing, the scene had gone quiet, pregnant with expectation. He planted himself, looked up and said, "Hello Billy Jean."

The Goat bleated softly.

Mr. Hastings locked eyes with Billy Jean and then asked quietly, but sternly, "Do you want to tell me what's going on here, soldier?"

Billy got up and walked to the edge and bleated at the police.  Looked over her shoulder at Mr. Hastings, and then walked back over to him, bleating plaintively.

"Billy Jean, I didn't ask for excuses, I asked what was going on here."  Colonel Hastings was having none of it.  "Why don't we ignore these fine gentlemen for now and you just come on down here.  So we can talk."

Billy Jean looked down uncertainly and at Officer Johnson suspiciously.  Billy bleated once.

"Yes, that was an order." said Mr. Hastings in reply.

Billy Jean trotted up the roof and disappeared over the other side.  Whatever goat magic she worked to get back down remains unclear, but within moments she appeared around the other side and approached Mr. Hastings almost shyly before stopping just in front of him.

Slowly, awkwardly, Mr. Hasting's knelt, bad leg and all, and put his face close to Billy Jean and talked quietly to her for several minutes, his gaze never leaving her eyes and his hand gently turning her head back to him when she looked away.  It ended, to my surprise, with a gentle kiss to her furry nose.

He stood up, and looked directly at Mr. Newton.  "Next time Sam, call me before it gets this bad."  He walked stiffly back to the car.

"Absolutely Colonel Hastings," said Newton, hurrying around to open the door for a man he clearly admired and maybe feared the tiniest bit.

Colonel Hastings looked back once at Billy Jean and nodded, his face a mask of professionalism, his eyes watering, before Mr. Newton sped him away.   Whatever history had made this moment of shared peace possible also making it impossible to stay.

The officers were leaving, Cop Two laughing at Officer Johnson's blustering excuses.  Mrs. Katsch walked back inside, "Such a good man," she said.

Billy Jean watched the truck drive away until it was long out of sight.  And then looked up at the stars starting to poke through the evening twilight, chewing grass quietly.  Momentarily sheltered from the storms of the past by the kind words and steady friendship of the only man she would ever trust.

I used to read

When I was in 1st grade, I got a trophy for reading 205 books.  When I was in second grade my mom and I would go to the Phoenix Public Library and check out 75 books at a time, 25 on my card, 25 on my mom's card and 25 on my dad's card, and I would read them all as quickly as I could, transferring books from the "to-read" stack to the "read" stack on the floor of our mobile home until there were no more books in the "to-read" stack.  And then we would go back and get 75 more.  I got a trophy for reading 1005 books that year.

By 3rd grade I had a new teacher who measured reading with a more sophisticated "pages read" system.  Continuing our weekly library visits, I read 8,000 pages in 3rd grade, and 11,000 pages in 4th grade.

My 5th grade literacy markers are lost to me as I mostly remember a few other things from the 5th grade.  Mr. M was a good teacher and I borked his best compass with a magnet and never owned up to it.  This was the peak of my on-again, off-again childhood romance with Angel B.  We would "french" after school.  My laugh has evolved over the course of my life, and that year it took the form of opening my mouth wide, emitting no sound, and heaving my sides in silent laughter.  I once got kicked out of class for laughing enthusiastically but completely silently.  Me and my friend Chris B. dominated the soccer league that year.  This was the peak of Diana M's crush on me, during which she kicked me in the balls repeatedly during the soccer tournament.  She seemed regretful.  And then there was the trip to the superstition mountains where Mr. M. held a rattlesnake at bay on a desert hiking trail while the rest of us scooted around it, the braver among us sneaking a peak at the snake.  I was not among the braver of us.

By 6th grade, I had been uprooted and dragged to Idaho, and most everyone hated me that first year because my dad was the principle.  He was strict and the previous teacher had basically let a nascent Lord of the Flies scenario bloom and they all hated him for not letting them have the run of the place and me by proxy.  One lunchtime early on, K, who is now one of my best lifelong friends, crawled over to me on his hands and knees, laughing too hard to speak or stand, and said, "H, H says to zip up your pants before we all puke."  That was how that year went.  It was also the year I met the first of many Matts, who introduced me to Douglas Adams.  So much of that year was spent on the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy and Robotech, which I had been introduced to by K, which are among the first of my pulpy SF loves.

My reading list more or less remained the same through 7th and 8th grade, discreetly picking up pulpy SF, or Tarzan or Black Beauty, or Wizard of Oz books from the tiny one-room library in Eagle, ID and devouring them as quick as possible.  I would sometimes read a novel a night at this point.

In High School, I found old SF short stories.  I'm not sure who I discovered first, Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke, but I devoured their short stories, and then novels.  The collected short stories of each, the Rama series and the Foundation series remain some of my favorite stories to this day.  I read less Ray Bradbury then, but wish I had read more.  And I neglected other classics, which I wish I had not.  I still have not finished Moby Dick.  The chapter that's purely an encyclopedia entry on the different kinds of whales just tanked me.  It never occurred to me I could skip it.  This was also my introduction to Robert Jordan and the Wheel of Time series, which was not finished before his untimely death and which I still have not made time to finish myself.

In college I got back into kids books, partly influenced by the women I wanted to get with who were in to YA literature.  But I developed and still retain a deep appreciation for A.A. Milne and the two Winnie the Pooh books.  The chapter where Christopher Robin tells Pooh he has to leave the forest and grow up still gets me.  I was introduced to more fantasy authors during this period, like Terry Goodkind, and the Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, which remains one of my favorite blends of fantasy and SF to date.

It was college where I began to dumb obscene amounts of money into collecting the comic books I'd been deprived of for a while and also where my gaming habit began in earnest.  I had been reading comics and playing games throughout my childhood, but it was college where the balance of time shifted from reading novels to reading comics and playing video games.  From there the latter two activities slowly eroded my reading time over the next decade or so.  At which point social media and glow screen swiping started eating into my comic book reading.

Today, I have one and a half huge shelves devoted to my "to-read" list, which are overflowing.  There are at least 50 books there that I have not read yet, or want to read again before I get rid of them.  Among those languishing unread are four books my thoughtful boyfriend got me as presents, and 2 or 3 novels published by a friend.  My comics go unread, although I would like to read some more of Marvel's Thor.  Although I remain satisfied with the great purge that reduced my comics collection from 17 long boxes to a more reasonable 4.

I play a lot of video games still.  I think it's the thing I've been doing the most since I came out of the closet.  What drives me to play is a persistent desire to dissociate/procrastinate since coming out (that shit was hard, y'all, although maybe not an eternal excuse) and some kind of mild OCD that enjoys simple worlds with simple puzzle solving and simulated achievement which my brain mistakes for actual achievement.  All that adds up to a state where I receive video game tasks like the Labors of Hercules.  "Kill one thousand orcs?  Yes, I will restore my honor."

Most of my reading from day to day comes form my twitter feed, and the occasional great article that gets linked there.  At night I browse the paranormal/woo side of reddit half asleep, hoping to find something imaginative there.  My favorite to date is the random poster who laid out a system of higher powers that theorized that Jehovah was but one of a pantheon of gods and he was just the Law and Order aspect.

Which is not to disparage video games or social media, at least not right now.  This is just to say my habits have changed.

And good lord do I miss the reader I used to be.

In Which I am a Tremendous Asshole

I am sure it will surprise you to learn I have said things I regret on the internet and twitter specifically.  If there's a medium better designed for hostile, half-thought chirping at everyone I am not aware of it.   Here's an example.  Earlier this year I got mad at a famous-ish author/twitterer for how he handled a spoiler that I did not actually care about on his twitter feed.  And then I got mad at his author friend for implying right-thinking people prefer spoilers.  And then self-righteously unloaded on a 3rd author friend (editor?) for implying I was a child for not liking spoilers by mimicking me with the internet version of a baby voice.  Do I still kinda think that last guy was a dick about things?  Yeah.  Do I wish famous-ish people would not believe their own press releases?  Yeah.  Am I proud of how I handled myself.  Not so much.  The worst part of this being that another twitter personality I follow turns out to have written a book on C. S. Lewis I quite liked.  And follows those people.  And may have seen that exchange.  I find it mortifying that he might have seen that particular exchange and how I handled my end of things.  He is someone I would potentially like to talk with, but if he saw that would he think the same of me?

More recently, upon the advent of another Apple product, and the requisite hosannas and hallelujahs  and golden trumpets that attend such an event, I went on a rant about hype and how much I hates it.  I do.  I hate hype and hype culture.  It's like being in love with the promises of those snake oil salesmen who used to get run out of town on a rail for bilking the gullible out of money with lies.  Because it'll be totally different this time.  But it is probably unkind and unwise and hypocritical of me to berate others for the "crime" of anticipating a new thing, especially if I'm not going to put out a better argument for why we should collectively ignore the hype machine other than "I hates it."  I believe there is an argument to be made there, but I have not yet made it.  So, my apologies to all my friends and not-friends and extended twitter family for that rant.  I regrets it.

Please, do not put away your rotten tomatoes yet, there is more.  Speaking of hypocrisy ....

The universe, in it's infinite, if potentially non-personal, wisdom strives to keep me humble.  Shortly after that hype rant my old 4s iphone broke.  After briefly debating whether to downgrade or go android or whatever, I decided just to get another iphone, the iphone 6.  Because everything I own is apple, because they all talk nicely to each other without much fiddling, because I had been eligible for an upgrade for over a year, because, because, because I'm a hypocrite.  A little bit.  Or a lot a bit.  In any case, my rant was ringing in my mind as I hit the "buy" button.

At this time, I would encourage you to send your rotten tomatoes to British Airways, who will route them to me in good time.

The truth about most of my rants is that the real target is me, and how I am responding or not responding to the environment in which I find myself.  The rest of you are all but casualties in my ongoing conflict with myself and my choices.  Yes, hype sucks.  Yes, Apple hype sucks.  Yes, I own their products anyway.  I just want to use them though, not worship them like tiny mechanical gods.  I have a vision of adulthood that entails picking up a tool when you need it, and putting it down and forgetting about it when you don't.  I am still trying to articulate and live up to that vision.  And, I don't know if you've noticed, but advertising and consumerism has kind of lost touch with reality in terms of fantastical claims and cult followings.  So I believe in any case.  But it doesn't excuse me from yelling at everyone else for my discomfort with the beliefs and practices of modern consumer culture and my decisions, hypocritical and not, within it.

So, sorry for yelling at everyone about hype.  Sorry for being a hypocrite.  When I have an argument to make about it, I'll try to do it here with something resembling coherent logic rather than just chirping at you all on twitter.