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stupidpianist · 7 years ago

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27 october 2018

10:00: Shut off alarm, hit snooze. I set my phone’s snooze to ten minutes, I should probably lower it to five because of the frequency with which I “snooze”...

10:10: Shut off alarm again, put it to snooze.

10:20: Turned off all alarms until alarms at 11h. Got up and chugged giant glass of water from Brita.

10:21: Back in bed. Trying to sleep more, not ready to “start the day” yet.

10:40: Woke up from strange nightmare in which the world was experiencing an apocalypse, hard to remember exact details, remember being on an ark-like massive boat, trying to escape from some kind of antagonistic war force? Remember there being a corrupt leader. Almost 99% of my dreams are about banal things, like, literally Googling things and reading Wikipedia, the other 1% are always really dangerous apocalyptic or life-threatening situations in which I’m trying to save as many people as possible.

11:00: Shut off alarm, turned over to right side, went into “fetal position,” thought, “wow, this is comfortable, wow, this is so comfortable.”

11:30: Woke from another weird dream, dreamt that I was seeing the band Ghost perform in Montreal, only, the crowd was really diminutive, and most of the people in the audience were inexplicably not paying attention to the show at all. I was able to go right up to the stage. They played a few songs. I woke up. Weird. Going to get up now and clean my bathroom, it needs a “thorough scrubbing.”

11:31: Chugged another massive glass of water from Brita. So satisfying, one of the most satisfying things, waking, feeling dehydrated, taking glasses of water “to the face.” Mm. Yum.

11:32: Cleaning bathroom. Have probably super-harmful-to-environment chemical thing that is used to scrub porcelain surfaces. Have my “trusty,” “handy dandy” cleaning sponge. Have paper towels. First scrubbing tub, it’s gotten so grimy, wow… I remember when I used to work in a local ice cream parlor in my town, and one of my favourite things to do would be to mop the floors. The other employees and managers found this really weird, always said, like, “nobody wants to mop the floors,” but I always explained that it was one of the few activities that you could see the 1:1 results of your efforts immediately after doing it, and so I found it really really satisfying. Feeling the same way right now, scrubbing the tub, seeing all the muck and filth wash away with every little sponge motion.

Moving onto the sink now, first have to clear everything off of it. Electric toothbrush, check. Plastic comb, check. Gatsby hair product thing, check (when Phoebe came to use my wifi she was like, “of course you use Gatsby,” and I thought “oh crap, I’ve been ‘caught,’ I’ve been ‘pigeonholed’”). Toothpaste, check. Razor, check. Scrubbing sink now, scrubbing hard, scrubbing efficiently. This chemical stuff really “works wonders,” there must be some seriously bad stuff in here… Should I be using gloves? I don’t have sensitive skin, I’ve never really had problems with… With chemicals and my hands? I don’t know, seems like I should be using gloves right now.

11:43: Okay, deep-clean scrub finished, going to shower now, been looking forward to showering since last night. Don’t know why, I shower every day? I don’t know, maybe it’s from excitement that I’m, like, “preparing for the night,” going to meet up with person I met for drinks with a few nights ago this evening, extremely excited to do this, so, like, the shower is, like, propelling me into the day? Which gets me closer to the evening? I don’t know I DON’T KNOW I’m just trying to say I’m really hyped for this shower, okay? Going to put on some sweetass shower music. I got the best shower tunes, hit me up if you want the “sickest, dopest” shower playlists. I can curate them to your specific genre or BPM preferences. Just let me know, “drop me a line.”

11:48: Putting on clothes now. Going to “throw on” my “edgy pants,” and a thermal top, and “FUNERAL” hoodie, and Walnut Hill jacket. “Standard attire,” heheh. Wondering if I should also wear my raincoat? It’s supposed to rain steadily this evening, but I don’t want to be, like, sweating… I also don’t really mind the rain, it’s just water, it’s really not that big of a deal, it’s just like, you’re wet, so what? I’ll just bring my super crappy umbrella with me, that should be enough to mitigate any “water damage” my body could take. Read in Disaster Artist yesterday that Tommy had a daily routine of drinking five Red Bulls. Reminds me of me in middle school. “Fiending for” a Red Bull today, really “jonesing” for one, going to put some change in my pocket and grab one from a dep on my way to school.

12:00: Backpack: PACKED. Wallet: IN POCKET. Keys? I GOT THOSE TOO, BABY. Going to head to school and update this liveblog, and then practice piano for however many hours my brain lets me. Not sure what kind of “piano vibes” I’m getting today, but I hope it’ll be good?? Have also been putting off listening to Daniil Trifonov’s newest album, it’s Rachmaninov’s second and fourth concerti, and some Bach transcriptions. I really don’t like the fourth concerto, and I only sometimes like the second, even though I was super obsessed with it when I was younger, in my early-and-mid teens. Remember texting one of my friends, someone I feel more fondly towards than almost any of my friends, Alex, how long it took him to learn the first movement of the second concerto, just as a baseline so I could compare my own timeline and see if I was “on par” with how good at learning new pieces I wanted to be, and he told me he learned it in something ridiculous like one afternoon. He’s one of the most self-determined people I’ve ever met, maybe the most self-determined, miss him a lot. Should send him a message, why haven’t I done that...

Sorry sorry yeah so I’m going to take some time too and listen to the album in the practice rooms. Will probably/inevitably give me more practicing motivation. I am a huge fan of Trifonov. Will let you people know how the album is.

16:25: Packing up my piano books. Hey hey hey! Hi hi hi! What’s up YouTube!! If you’re wondering how the practicing went, it was… Satisfactory. I started warming up with some Schubert, his last sonata, and promptly started like sobbing uncontrollably. Can never seem to make it more than a few pages in before this always happens. Played through the first movement and second movement, no repeat in the first just to “save time” as I intended it to be a warm up, and created a pretty substantial pool of tears on the practice room floor by the time I was done. How the heck does anyone practice pieces like this without becoming a giant mess of tears?? Dissociate? I don’t know.

Felt really really good to play through it, though; one of my favourite pieces that I love the more and more I work on it. I thought I sounded really good in the Schubert, so I moved to Alkan, which was substantially worse. Felt like I had really heavy brain fog, like, a dense miasma of brain fog. Was able to play, but felt distinct disconnection between what my hands were doing, and what my head was thinking. I really hate that sensation, when you don’t feel in control of what you’re playing, so I switched to Thalberg, which was a bit better, but really just felt off. Played it through and did a little passage work before turning to Beethoven, opus 110, another one of my favourite sonatas, and my favourite Beethoven sonata by a long shot. After working on this pretty intensely I was like, okay, so you practiced for an okay amount of time, four hours or so, and even though you didn’t sound good, or feel good, you still did work, and you still put in effort.

Haven’t gotten groceries in a long time, going to head to Provigo to get supplies for massive Greek salad and pasta, here’s what I’m gonna get:

-bell peppers

-cherry tomatoes

-english cucumber

-lemon

-kalamata olives

-dill (maybe, if i want to “splurge”)

-red onion

-feta cheesee

-pasta sauce (i’m lazy i don’t wanna make it myself don’t judge me okay)

-mushrooms

Have the rest of the ingredients like dry pasta and stuff for Greek salad dressing at home. Gonna try and “beat the rain,” too.

16:45: Success in the grocery store. Also ended up buying a large scented candle as a bit of an impulse purchase; I really like things that create pleasant/comfy/cozy scents, and my Airwick thing I plug into my wall ran out of oil, and I don’t have any more incense, so I was like, “yeah, my mom loves scented candles, I love scented candles, let’s get a scented candle, yes.” Chose “Cashmere Woods” scent. It’s brownish in colour. Hope it smells as good as the name implies, one can never tell just by pure sniffing of the unmelted wax… Very… distrustful… Oh, oh! Also got bananas. Need some breakfast food that I can take and run out of the door.

16:56: Home. Going to unpack groceries and then read more of the Disaster Artist in bed, I think. Will also catch up on some YouTube tech videos. Feeling like a real nerd right now.

16:59: Got a Facebook message from the person I’m seeing again tonight!!! Okay so we’re going to meet at 22h, that gives me enough time to be productive before then, getting really cozy in bed, “settling in” for a nice read. Heheh. Ho ho ho. Something about “hehe” is just so funny to me, I still can’t place why, can any of you help explain it to me?

18:13: Got through a whole slew of tech videos, a whole mess of tech videos. Was just starting to read Disaster Artist when I heard the notification sound from my speakers hooked up to my laptop on my esk that notifies me when my younger brother signs into Overwatch. “Chatted him up” and he said he could play A FEW ROUNDS. MULTIPLE. Do you people realize how huge this is?! Usually he just has time for one! Maybe it’s because he has a long weekend? Monday for him is a teacher’s day or something, so he gets it off. Either way, here we go!!!!

19:37: Wow those were some INTENSE games. Played tank for some of it, then DPS for most of it. Haven’t actually played Tracer in so long, I used to main her so hard. Still my favourite champion to play alongside Junkrat. We played pretty well, won most of our rounds, wow, my adrenaline is so pumped up from that, can’t believe it’s been over an hour?! Holy heck that flew by. Brother going to eat dinner now, recommended that I make greek salad. Will probably do that, or maybe go for a run?? I don’t know, I’ve been so physically inactive the past week, I feel like a slug, I should at least do SOMETHING.

20:08: Yeah my adrenaline is pumping way too hard. This always happens, as a kid even if I was just having a “playdate” with a friend, I would get so so so, uh, not anxious, but like overly excited? Manic? That I literally couldn’t focus on anything or sit still, so I’d just run around doing menial activities while sweating through my palms profusely and just feeling a huge tightness in my chest. This still happens to me, but not as strongly, I think?? Unless I’m super excited to see someone, which I am tonight?? I need to “burn off some steam,” think I’m going to go on an intense bike ride, okay, see you guys soon, yes yes YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES

20:13: CHRIST ON A CRACKER I forgot it’s raining now!!! OH NO HOW AM I GONNA crap crap I don’t have a flipping fender for my bike so if I go biking I’m gonna get soaked crap crap crap maybe I’ll just take a walk and blast music?? Yeah that’s feasible, won’t get too “wet” from that it’s gonna be great, I’ll do that, okay!!!! Just “thinking out loud,” here, folks, move along, nothing to see here, nothing at all.

20:41: Back from walk. Was really nice, rocked out to some Ghost (Rats, Con Clavi Con Dio, Cirice, Faith, in that order, I think?) and just chose some side streets off of Saint Laurent. Picked up a “quille” of 10.1% Labatt that the person mentioned wanting to get after she taught me the Quebec slang for those 1.17L, or 40oz dirt cheap big bottles of beer. Can’t call them 40s here, different system of measurement, can now call them quille. Seems astounding it took me this long to learn the term for it. Also got some Unibroue beers to “balance out” the pond scum that is 10.1 Labatt, even though it seems like my best friends here and I all concur that 10.1 Labatt is strangely delicious? Like we’d voluntarily, and do voluntarily drink it. Ooh, and some Powerade, lemon-lime flavour, my favourite. I’ve always preferred Powerade to Gatorade in terms of taste for as long as I can remember. You may be asking, “George, that’s a lot of liquids, why did you even get the Powerade, that’s just sugar water.” You’re right, but I just got my pay stubs from the last two weeks so I know how much I made so I was like, “you can go crazy, it’s the weekend before Halloween, do it, loser.” And you know what??? I DID IT. Going to eat a turkey sandwich now. Internal monologue repeating, “a nicely stocked fridge means a nicely stocked mind.” Hehe. Eheheheh.

#liveblog #blog #writing

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reyphorian · 8 years ago

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A mostly in depth guide to why abortion is murder and that thing is clearly a fully formed human baby you heathen

just kidding

There’s a lot of myths and misconceptions regarding abortion and what qualifies as living and late term abortions and all that jazz so I’m here to teach you about this stuff. Granted, I’ll be avoiding statistics as much as I can only because sourcing to reputable sites and studies is hard when you’re a chronically exhausted person like me and reading through peer reviewed studies is tedious for a truly solid sourced guide, however what I will be talking about are things that are hella easy to google for fact checking if you’re really determined to tell me I’m wrong and support infanticide and I’m a satan worshiper or something. Several of the statistics can in fact be found on the Orlando Women’s Center website and will be indicated with an asterisk since all the statistics are on the same page. Also apologies in advance for using female only language. I am fully aware that there are men and non-binary people who can get pregnant and need abortions, but for the sake of simplicity for the time being, the fact that it’s mostly cis women receiving them, and the knowledge that most pro-lifers don’t realize this or acknowledge them, I will not be using inclusive language unless otherwise necessary.

Myth 1: Unwanted pregnancies can be prevented with birth control/responsible planning.

I know they always tell you not to provide anecdotes to prove points but I think this time it’s reasonable. I’m a birth control baby. In other words, my parents were using birth control (3 kinds actually!) the night they had sex that resulted in my conception. Now, if you could prevent all pregnancies simply by using a condom or taking a pill then I wouldn’t be here right now, nor would the 54% of women who received abortions even after using contraceptives during sex.* But the truth is, no form of easily obtainable birth control is guaranteed to always work. Even in the clinical testing for condoms, the pill, IEDs, and depo shots the success rates weren’t at 100%, and those settings are literally the best, meaning success rates at home are a bit lower because of mistakes or improper use. The only forms of birth control that are guaranteed to always work are hysterectomies and abstinence, the former being highly invasive, expensive, and permanent, the latter being unreasonable as most people actually need sex for the emotional bonding and mood improvement it often provides.

Myth 2: The heart beats at 18 days.

This is probably one of the worst arguments I’ve seen from pro-lifers because it indicates how little they actually know about prenatal development.

This thing right here is a human embryo at day 18, taken from a lovely chart that wikipedia has on their prenatal development article. So tell me where exactly is that heart I’m supposed to be seeing? The answer is nowhere, because it’s not a baby. It’s an embryo, not even a fetus. You’re telling me that’s the exact same thing as a fully developed and birthed baby? Nah, I don’t think so. Whatever “heartbeat” they’re hearing is nothing more than the throbbing of a literal clump of cells. This thing is no more living or sentient than a piece of lettuce in my salad last night. It’s so underdeveloped that aside from the yolk and amniotic sacs, none of those things are identifiable parts you’d hear about in a fully developed human. Every time a pro-lifer says the heart beats at 18 days, show them this and play a game of pin the tail on the donkey and see if they can find the heart because I certainly can’t. Also, the heart, as in the actual heart that looks just like the ones we have in our bodies, isn’t detected until past 10 weeks.

Myth 3: Fetuses can feel pain/The Silent Scream

The Silent Scream is a commonly cited video depicting a fetus being aborted and opening it’s mouth as if screaming in pain, however the video was debunked over 20 years ago by the medical community. The brain itself doesn’t begin forming until week 26, and the brain connections to the thalamus which allow us to sense pain and have a sense of consciousness aren’t formed until week 30. Over 88% of abortions are performed within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy*, meaning any muscle movements or open mouths are involuntary movements not caused by pain. Muscles develop before nerves, so just because it’s moving doesn’t mean it feels pain.

Myth 4: The Heart Beats At 18 Days: Return of the Heartbeat

Yeah I know I already went over this but there’s actually two parts to the famous pro-life saying. The first part was debunking the myth that an embryo has a heart. The second part is debunking the myth that a heartbeat indicates life and therefore is a living human being. So let me ask you this, why, if a heartbeat indicates life, is it that when someone’s heart stops we take time to resuscitate them? The answer is...

Brainwaves! You see, the brain is what controls all functions of the human body, sensory reception, memory, voluntary muscle movements, and involuntary muscle movements. Involuntary muscle movements are one’s we’re not conscious of doing, like digestion and heartbeats. Without the brain working, the heart stops beating and the only way to keep it beating is via life support systems. We resuscitate people whose hearts have stopped because in between the cessation of breathing, there’s 10 to 15 minutes before the body becomes too deprived of oxygen and vital areas of the brain will cease functioning, which is usually the point where a person is announced brain dead and no longer legally nor medically considered living. Going back to the points in Myth 3, the connections to the thalamus are when we develop our first brainwaves, meaning until that point, what is growing is not legally nor medically considered a living human being.

A fetus/embryo is living biologically, however, biological life is not a reason as to why abortion is murder. If biological life were necessary for something to be murder then you may as well consider eating vegetables, killing bugs, washing your hands, and taking antibiotics to be murder as well since all of those actions kill things that are biologically living. Spiders and flies are more alive than embryos and fetuses are but we wouldn’t say killing them is murder. To claim that something lesser is more important than something more developed simply because it has the potential of becoming a human shows a lack of consistency in morals, and that morals only exist when they benefit or conflict with your own personal morals (which isn’t how it works in the law).

Myth 5: Late Term Abortions

1.1% of abortions occur past 20 weeks* but none of them are done willingly in the same way abortions are done. Late term abortions are life-saving medical procedures only done on wanted pregnancies where the safety of the one or both is at risk. This usually happens on ectopic pregnancies, miscarriages, and situations where it’s no longer safe to continue carrying. Think about it this way, you’ve been pregnant for over 20 weeks now, but at week 27 you find out that the baby’s heart stopped beating. You can continue to keep the pregnancy for another 19 weeks (4.4 months), knowing that for those 4 months you are carrying a dead child, or you can get a late term abortion. Most people wouldn’t want to spend that long carrying their now deceased child, nor is it psychologically or physically healthy to do so. Getting rid of late term abortions means forcing a woman to continue to carry a dead baby until she gives birth. Imagine going up to a woman who is visibly pregnant and asking about it, only to have her tell you that it’s dead. She’s not giving birth to a baby, she’s giving birth to a corpse in several weeks. Here’s another situation, you’re well along in your pregnancy and your partner and you go to the doctor for another checkup after feeling unwell for a little while. The doctor does an ultrasound only to tell you that something has gone wrong and if you continue the pregnancy both you and the child will die. You also have several other children at home. You can either get a late term abortion and live and continue to care for your other children, or you can die with your child, leaving a grieving spouse and children. Your uterus and ovaries will be fine so you can always try again later on. These are just two of the realities that women already face or will face when you take away the right to late term abortions. No woman wants to have a late term abortion. Most of the time those late term abortions are performed on pregnancies where the parent/s already picked out a name, set up a room with toys, and had a baby shower.

Myth 6: A fetus isn’t a woman’s body

Okay, this is kinda not so much a myth as it is kinda true. See, there’s this fantastic thing we have called bodily autonomy, the same thing that makes it illegal for a doctor to take your organs for donation if you don’t have the sticker on your ID that says you’re a registered organ donor. It’s the same thing that makes rape and assault illegal. Bodily autonomy is the right to your own body. That means nobody else can tell you what to do with it, and anyone who infringes upon that right can be faced with legal charges. So basically, the fetus isn’t you, but it does exist in you, in your uterus, and it’s a violation of your bodily autonomy if you don’t want it. Forcing a woman to keep an unwanted pregnancy or requiring her to have the permission of her partner denies her the right to her own body. It means you believe in giving dead bodies more autonomy than living people. It places the health of a clump of cells over her, and seeing as it’s a clump of cells and not a sentient living human, her rights trump the fetus’ (which it doesn’t have since it’s not a person).That’s why the phrase “my body, my choice,” still stands even when a pro-lifer claims that the fetus isn’t her own body. It’s still her uterus being occupied, her nutrients being taken. An unwanted pregnancy is no different than a malignant tumor or a parasite, and nobody has to keep either of those, so a fetus should be no different.

Myth 7: Adoption is always an option/Some people are infertile and can’t get pregnant

A lot of people can’t actually carry pregnancies due to preexisting medical conditions like illness or psychological issues, or people who are transgender (like me!). Some people are psychologically unsound and pregnancies my exacerbate the issues further from the massive changes in hormones during and after pregnancy. Some people are too sick to carry or risk passing on a condition or illness to the child that would make caring for them too expensive or that would leave their life shortened so drastically that they wouldn’t live beyond childhood or even infancy. Some people who are transgender can’t have children because of the gender dysphoria and physical changes associated with pregnancy. We’re already having a hard enough time dealing with our bodies as they are, so why force us to go through something that’s literally considered the essence of womanhood and the gender that we’re not?

It’s also important to remember that there are already thousands of children in the adoption system, but it’s really only newborns and foreign children that get adopted. Once they hit toddler and child stages their chances of being adopted drop drastically. Teenagers have almost no chance of being adopted and remain in the system until adulthood. A lot of kids that go through the system also end up being abused or raped by foster parents, and it’s common to meet people who’ve had very bad experiences being in the system. Why put yet another child in there when there are plenty of other kids waiting to be adopted? Also guilt tripping people into keeping a pregnancy is a shitty thing to do. I mean, would you tell someone who’s dieting that they should eat all their food because there are starving children in Africa? Someone else’s situation isn’t going to change what someone wants to do or does with their choices. There’s other people who are actually willing to be surrogates and choose to carry a pregnancy, so there’s no reason to force someone to carry an unwanted pregnancy.

I’ve covered all the topics that I can remember and feel comfortable explaining, so if there’s any other stuff you wanna add on feel free to do so, and please share to destroy myths, misconceptions, and common arguments from pro-lifers against abortions!

#womens rights #abortion #pregnancy #pro choice #pro life #AU79 Data Log

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thewaterheaterguys · 7 years ago

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All About Washington Park Chicago

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Boy, 11, struck by stray bullet shot while walking to Washington Park store http://bit.ly/2Mpla7s #Chicago

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drewkatchen · 8 years ago

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That’s great it starts with an earthquake/Birds and snakes, and aeroplanes

Years ago, another lifetime now, when college was cruel and began wrapping up on me and when that dreaded C-word of career loomed just on the horizon, waiting to deliver me a full, bitter slap, I wrote a short story. In between the drinking and dancing and panicking. And the story began with the above lyrics, an evocative staccato string of beautiful nonsense. Not for class nor peer review, the story was mostly for me, some self-indulgence to wile away time and take the edge off graduation and knowing that life would be upended for good in a matter of weeks. The drama.

Just a few double-spaced pages printed and basically a glorified diary entry, my little piece to my surprise turned out to be entirely concerned with another molting period, one from years before: a fateful summer at the beach when I left behind adolescence and swam upstream a bit to become a hapless teenager. Why that subject and why then? Where was this even coming from? I think the theory isn’t a beautiful one, to be honest. It has everything to do with the near total breakdown of the relationship I had with my family, the one institution I thought was always there for me, one in which I believed I could find endless succor. That bond basically evaporated when I was still in school, and now I was clinging to something, turning over stones, hoping that my entire narrative wasn’t built just on pain.

---

When I think about that time in college, four years at a massive state school in South Carolina, I think I was a good student in an alright student’s body. But like friends of mine, I relished the life mostly for the freedom it finally granted me, an illusion of freedom of course, because I was still chained to my parents’ finances, but a liberated feeling I hadn’t previously experienced. All-night study sessions and paper writing were fine, but it was all to maintain an average to keep everything afloat. There was no big plan beyond that. School was a puzzle that didn’t always lead to a coherent picture, but still I plugged away. With friends in abundance and a hundred miles between me and home, gone was the paranoia and hiding and in came a real sense of possibility, an unclenching and looseness that was both intoxicating and discomfiting just given my inability to know what to do with it. I was a kid about town. The ability to socialize at whim, whenever with whomever, proved transformative, turning me for the first time, I think, into a real person. It was a concept wholly foreign to me, and it was something I needed...badly.

In all that, I also knew that words did it for me, so I experimented with them, whether it was in Lit class or in my journal. Really, I didn’t see any future for myself in academia, and often discussion classes and research papers proved something of a challenge to my attention span. But honestly the only thing I believed I knew how to do was write, even if what I was pumping out was unadulterated dreck. And, it was mostly that. Well-intentioned, but naive. I also don’t think I harbored any real delusions about being an actual writer because I also knew them and they were my age and already published, but I understood that I liked trying to organize my thoughts on paper, something I’d been doing since I self-published my own magazines in high school. Lamentable journal entries about life really not yet lived and gaunt poems ripping off E.E. Cummings or Yeats were the few weapons in my expository arsenal back then. And I had no money and everyone was in their own state of panic leading up to finals and graduation, so what else to do but mope in the park and haunt campus cafes at night? I was a cliche, and I was alone, but I was my own cliche to make better or worse.

So I kept at it. And in this story that tumbled out, I guess I wanted to know how I felt in my twenties about one formative experience -- less an experience and more an impression, really -- and why did I think about it at all. What did it mean to me? What would have happened if the world were a bit different? Was there any part of me now that held any resemblance to that sad kid? When the story was done, I remember feeling like it was the first thing I’d written that wasn’t total crap; it was a lived moment albeit embellished a bit, and it kinda leapt off the page to my surprise. At least it did to me. In a fit of rare confidence, I showed the story to a professor friend of mine, who seemed to not mind my musings; he offered ideas on gussying it up a bit in the interest of maybe getting it published in a small quarterly. That never happened, but the idea that he didn’t dismiss it out of pocket was encouraging. It was nice to have some minor recognition for some honest soul mining. Maybe I was more astute in school than I thought.

So now, in 2017, with my youth wholly in the rear view, I’ve been thinking about this one story again -- or the time captured in the story -- and its place in my life. As a student and immediately after, I pushed out into the world very few pieces of fiction. It just wasn’t my strength and I knew it, but did this qualify as fiction since it cut so close? I didn’t know. And little of what I wrote back then had to do with coming out of the closet or even just an awareness of who I was becoming, because I came out young, to friends mostly, and I didn’t have time for reflection because much of that time had to do with real pain and shame. It’s a story many of us tell, unfortunately. To be sure, there was great friendship and acceptance in that period of middle school and high school, but there was fear in abundance too along with a whole lot of hiding and nary a relationship. That would have been impossible.

College is such a time long gone, and I really don’t know what happened to the story because I never backed it up or saved it, maybe on purpose or maybe it’s just because that hard disk is gone for good. I can’t even find one of the versions I printed. All I can do is ruminate on it without having the exact copy to discover again.

There is very little I can look back on from that time -- from being in classes, the trenches -- that I can say is enduring in any way or really defining of who I was and who I became. The friendships, sure. I have those. But the work? Where is the work? I cherish my plaque from a poetry award I once won in 1998, the Havilah Babcock Poetry Contest Award, but I also marvel at it given I never went on to an esteemed poetry career. There’s a lot of didn’t and a lot of never so far, but that isn’t the point. I’m still here and still writing in my way. And it took me years to know who Havilah Babcock was.

I also have this story that no longer exists in any real way, but I know I was proud of it, and I know that it was one of the first times I was truly onto something. And for the most part, I remember exactly what it said and what it felt like to write it. I remember the feeling of liking someone and what that meant.

---

“Duck, North Carolina is the northernmost incorporated town in Dare County and the Outer Banks' newest town, incorporated on May 1, 2002,” according to the town’s Wikipedia entry. The area is only 3.72 square miles, and in the off-season has a scant 369 residents, according to the 2010 census. In the summers, the time I used to show up, pale and doughy with my walkman and boogie board, the population swells to over 20,000.

For a few years spanning the late-eighties into the nineties, my parents and family friends were part of that coastal vacation migration, a whole congregation of minivans, aerobics Reeboks and Hawaiian Tropic headed to a tiny spit of land and the vast sea. For us, there was no other vacation spot. And Duck was truly for the adults -- the place you went because you had a bit more money now and it was near enough to bustling Nags Head but also far enough away for you to enjoy an unspoiled beach in a quiet hamlet of summer renters without the massive crowds. It was scenic and calm, but as a kid I wanted action. If Nags Head was Lost Boys then Duck was The Big Chill or something equally droll. Not cool. I wanted water slides and spray paint and roving gangs of skater kids hanging out in 7-11 parking lots, so genteel Duck didn’t suit me. For my mom, it gave her the chance to plug back in with the relatives she’d left behind years before when we beat a path out of our New Jersey motherland. Two weeks of kvetching and guilt over white Zin and snapping peas, basically.

“Because she’s crazy,” my mom in the galley kitchen, talking to my godmother about some other lady while fussing over cucumber chunks for a salad in one of those big wooden bowls. My godmother fidgeting with a pack of cards and watching over her child. That sort of thing.

“She is, Jo, but she’s still your mother.”

It was mostly hell, each day the same dodging of tasks and running to the water to escape breaking bread with the weird adult friends of parents, most of whom regarded me the way they would a curious fungus. “So he likes what kind of music again? He doesn’t play sports?,” their curled faces said. If I didn’t escape before my younger brothers noticed -- they saw me as their permanent source of entertainment -- and got their claws in, I’d end up being the jungle gym for the day. As a kid, not being in lockstep with parents -- together a real picture of upper middle class vim and vigor who seemed to believe in Don Henley, Fresca and George Bush -- meant I was more the pasty boarder with a bad attitude, ready to run off and roadie for Black Flag or any band, real or not, that would have me. This extended to vacations. Punk cassettes and my skateboard magazines were my sports and toys, and I didn’t want to be harassed about being part of the family. I was crying for help, and I believed Youth of Today and Rollins heard my call. I was waiting for the van to pull up at any minute.

In Duck, there were a million kids all breathing the same humid, briny air. Armies of gawky adolescent expats were hopped up on snack cakes, and they roamed the dunes in Panama Jack and Ron Jon gear. They came from the vanilla burbs of Delaware or Pennsylvania or if they were really exotic Ontario, a location I probably thought was off the planet somewhere. I mostly observed. Some were more adaptable, luxuriating in their time away from lawn cutting and swim meets as they body-surfed with their lithe parents and jocular siblings and new friends. They showed off their orthodontic elastics without care while singing along to Huey Lewis or Boss tunes on the boom boxes. Every dad the suburban Tom Selleck and every mom a round-the-way Basinger or Roseanne in a sun visor. Everyone tanned and every parent chased after their babies on the sand. And while I did cherish my Morey Mach 7-7 yellow boogie board (classic) and the surf, others were more like me, making the best of it alone with music or they somehow bonded with other misanthropic kids in close proximity to their sprawling, sun-baked beach manse.

Why so surly? I just was.

Then I met someone.

Jason landed in my orbit that summer, but I’m unsure of how, only that he did. Twenty years removed, he’s little more than a mop of curly brown hair and long, sunburnt legs, but I remember well his sun-kissed essence. He was from Connecticut, of course, seemed to be for want of little and he’d already been there for a week and was set to head back not long I arrived. Just my luck. Tall, wiry and adept at scoring baskets off an uncoordinated me on his driveway’s basketball hoop, Jason was one of the kids I described above: No edge, no ax to grind. Just unaffected calm and cool, neither jock nor Robert Smith devotee, likely able to walk a high school hallway and nod to the quarterbacks and skaters without fear of reprisal. How we linked up for a few days has everything to do with the heady social experiment that was a transient beach community: This wasn’t dry land with the normal players in your world, so normal prying eyes wouldn’t know and you could be best pals for a week with someone you’d never see again, someone you might put in a headlock were you back in the real world. These bonds could be like taking a lesser date to a restaurant no one knows. To call it a friendship would be a misnomer, because maybe I knew him for less than a week, but for me, there was something profound in those few days.

On his deck we ate cheese sandwiches and chips with sand in between our toes. His mom offered us Capri Suns, and I enjoyed their artificial sweetness. His muscles glowed in the afternoon light.

---

“Show me what you can do on your skateboard,” I remember him saying in my driveway, pointing to my kicknose set-up. As a student of Jason Lee and Matt Hensley you know I ollied my early-nineties Gonz deck with aplomb over a large trash can, careful to avoid pooled rainwater and sand, and then I rolled into a railslide on one of the nearby benches before offering him a quick streetplant as a nod to my eighties roots.

Right.

Really all I probably did was do a two-inch high ollie and a wan shove-it before getting winded and stopping. "Nevermind. What kind of tapes did you bring?,” he laughed good-naturedly at my technique.

Here was my time to shine.

“If you haven’t heard the first Sepultura record, it’s so cool and crazy, you have to check it out. Look at the cover, man, it’s so scary. I got my M.O.D. tape and my S.O.D. tape and Anthrax and Metallica and WarZone and fIREHOSE.” I was really laying it on thick, convinced that I was impressing him with my vast knowledge of the most cutting edge extreme music. “I like punk and hardcore a lot.”

“Oh that’s cool. I’m really into the last two R.E.M. tapes,” he said while just kinda glancing at the prized collection in my duffel bag, not bored but not turned on either by my superior taste. Years later, I know what he meant by that was he liked Document and he liked Green, two era-defining alternative albums if there ever were any. Of course, I was a kid with a television and a radio, so ‘The One I Love’ and ‘It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" were everywhere and anywhere. Did I love them, too? I think so. It seemed more real than Pat Benatar or Madonna but less direct than Minor Threat, so maybe I didn’t hate it. I could learn to be into it.

I realize, there’s a lot of build up to this, but Jason is little more than a plot device in my larger narrative. Prior to him, I would look at Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark and have vague rumblings of a feeling. Jason collided with my life as my body began waking up. Somewhere beyond this sandy idyll, hard-nosed activists were marching on city avenues because they were dying and their friends had died and because city governments overturned ordinances and the federal government wasn’t helping. They were fighting Jesse Helms and Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the right to be in hospital rooms with their spouses. My parents were likely having very private conversations about my future, but I was spared from them. That summer, as a little kid on the Outer Banks, it was nuclear families as far as the eye could see, white ones mostly. I didn’t know then about religion and laws and organized efforts to draw boundaries around my being, but I felt the fruits of their labor locking me down, halting any natural inclination I may have had to reach for something. Those few days that summer, I could do little more than look at Jason with a true awareness in my heart, in my gut and simply wonder, wonder with my sweaty hands in my pockets and my mouth sewn up. I didn’t know in total what the awareness was, but I also knew in total what the awareness was, and I knew it would stay buried for years if not for my entire life. If he sensed anything, one ounce of feeling in my pleading eyes, he didn’t let on. Would my life be hell?

---

“What’s this guy saying? I don’t get it.”

“All I know is ‘Birthday party, cheesecake, jellybean, BOOM’ and you got me on the rest. It doesn’t matter, man. It’s a good song,” Jason told me plainly as the cassette was blaring out of a boom box. I think his sister was with us, thumbing a magazine. He was doing pull ups on a deck beam, the humidity causing his head to dampen. It was early evening, and he was leaving tomorrow. The family was grilling burgers and dogs.

“I could come visit you sometime. My grandparents live in New Jersey, and it’s not far from you. It would be fun.”

As fast as it came out, I regretted it. Boys didn’t offer to go visit other boys, you dummy. It was my heart talking, and besides, even if I wanted to visit, who would take a fourteen-year-old to visit a strange kid hours away. I could tell he didn’t think much of the idea, and he just shrugged and kept focusing on increasing his upper-body strength. The brief reverie had passed. As a last ditch measure, I gave him my address in the hope we’d stay pen pals.

A short stretch of road, sheltered by live oaks and dotted with crape myrtles, separated Jason’s house from mine, and I knew it was time to be going. If I looked away from the ocean, slightly to the right, I could see the light on in our rental living room. My stomach doing cartwheels and my heart racing, but it was time to go. Jason and I shook on it. You know the rest.

And I feeeeellll fine (no you don’t)/And I feeeelll fine (really, you don’t)/It’s tiiimmee I had some tiiimme alone (no it isn’t)

The singer of R.E.M. (didn’t know his name at fourteen), sounded nervous and jittery and scared just like me. It sounded like he well understood longing. Did he know someone like Jason?

I pictured myself singing at Jason and him understanding and feeling the same way.

So to pull back and end things, when I wrote about this in college, the words just fell out of me, as if they’d been bottled in a cellar and were ready to air out. That first feeling of some type of attraction, the quiet realization and maybe panic that I knew I was attracted to another boy, the feeling as if my chest were bursting. All of that is too much for any kid; just processing the new hormones in your body during puberty is enough but adding the weight of being gay and the pressure to keep it hidden from your family. That’s enough to drive anyone crazy, and I think it did drive me crazy. I wanted to convey all of that. It felt like the world was ending and beginning again because even though before meeting Jason I had felt something, I never had a crush until then.

At the age of forty, there are no barriers of that regard in my life. I’m happily married; my parents attended my wedding. They bought bottles of champagne and glasses for drinking. But I’ll never again get an adolescence, and like many LGBT folk of a certain age, it’s now mine to dream about what an unencumbered youth would have looked like because that’s all I can do if and when I choose. If I didn’t have to misapply affection to male friends who couldn’t reciprocate. If I didn’t have to only think of romance in terms of Lloyd Dobler and Diane Court. If being open weren’t just tolerated, but nourished, understood and cherished. I didn’t have that with Jason or with any other kid my age.

But in the version of my short story, the one I wrote when graduating, the hero left Jason’s porch, but then he said ‘fuck it’ and turned around in the middle of the lawn, alighted the beach house stairs and grabbed the damn guy’s hand and kissed his cheek. And nothing bad happened.

It was the end of the world, and it had a happy conclusion. Did R.E.M. have a song for that?

----

It’s hilarious to admit now, but I don’t think I realized in college that the song’s chorus was a metaphor so glaring, it’s as if it were a locomotive coming right at me: It was the end of my world as I knew it; student life, the only thing I’d known for twenty-two years, was officially over and everything else that wasn’t campuses, classes and books was ahead of me, looming big and scarily. But at that age, I really didn’t have much capacity for self-awareness; I had only just started grappling with my past and with my family, and this story was a first step in learning about myself

#storytelling #PENTAX67 #pentax #medium format #kodak portra 160 #lgbtq #120 film #105mm #lgbt #coming of age #north carolina #outer banks

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