Don’t Get Around Much… Anymore?

I find myself with a lot to say and no real time in which to say it.  When did that happen?  Much of my carpal tunnel problems and almost immediate numbness when I go to write by hand on paper  (a way around not having access to a computer, at least in days past) are attributable to endless writing sessions.  Staying up late while my son was young, even though I’d known he was an early riser and that I was going to have to drown in coffee, both at night and in that early morning, to stay awake ~ I had to get my thoughts, my stories, my observations, (dare I call them witticisms?) on paper.  Nowadays I go MONTHS, literally, without the slightest word on my blog.  Instead I keep a list of topics that I write about in my head driving home from school nights, or riding the bus from work or some other such contemplative time.  Home has become a sleeping, eating, dressing/undressing, and homework place.  I relax through on-line pursuits, like Facebook, taking Harris Polls, and the occasional Solitaire game.  (I don’t play Free Cell anymore, I couldn’t do it without keeping track of the games I’d already played, and couldn’t stop playing a game until I’d beaten it. Got that out of my system, doesn’t hold any charm for me anymore)

But I have a lot to say.  I want to talk about how blackberry picking was the highlight of my summer, ab out old friends, new bicycles, lunches my mother packed for me as a child, my lifetime hospital experiences, how my partner and I discovered Bariactric Donuts this last year, how this Fall has been one of the most beautiful, colorful shows of natural wonder and glory I’ve seen in many a year; how pets and their owners begin to resemble and behave like one another, about what it was like working the graveyard shifts for the first time in my life (though balloons used to happen all night, we just didn’t get extra pay or any kind of breaks, but that in and of itself is a NOVEL, not a blog entry).  I want to talk about the noises the car makes, how I believe my parents only really loved my two oldest brothers, what the “Deaf Expo” was like, and what my theories are about my Mother and the way she treats me and my son.  I want to get up on my “soapbox” and go OFF about elderly drivers / “scooters”, the smells and racket-noise on a job site, and the abysmal failure of the American election system.

Question is, what do I start with?  Do I go with what’s immediate, the stolen elections, the fund-raising that could SO be better spent on real causes like medical research, homeless help, health care for the poor, and finding alternative fuels and actually putting them into action?  And then work backwards toward summer?  Or do I start with blackberry picking, smiling, the sun warm on my shoulders, the bees buzzing around us, my wrist numb from holding the bucket for such a time (more evidence of repetitive strain injuries), and then work my way forward to present day?

What about random stuff from years ago?  My highly unusual ballooning experiences, working in an industry that didn’t exist before us, doing it first and from the tender (cocky, selfish, immature) age of 12 – on.  I have a wealth of stuff there.  What about stories from Chad’s growing up?  I’m the vessel of those stories, they will die with me if I don’t write them down (again, in some cases ~ many were lost in the fire) someplace!  What about funny stories about my childhood growing up largely alone and often very lonely?  Or perhaps I can launch into the sad, uncomfortable stories that shaped my youth and ultimately who I am today, the demons I battled, feeling sure the experiences I’d had were not anyone else’s, and made me purely unlovable, undesirable, and surely would be the deal-breaker should they surface at ANY time during the relationship, friendship, etc, with ANYONE.  What about that?

Instead, I pose my quandry, in over 600 words, and wonder how it is that anyone gets anyone else to read their blog and comment on it.  Does one have to use words like President-Elect Obama?  Saudi Arabia?  New Orleans?  I don’t know why that’s even necessary or desirable, except for my constant and sad need for approval by and acceptance from others, even strangers.  What’s THAT about?

I will say I miss my father, I love my son, I’m terribly sad that my son doesn’t get the love and attention from a father-figure, I miss my Aunt Gloria and my Grandma Peters (Americanized version).  I wonder if I’m ever going to FEEL like an electrician, and not someone wearing a costume, a fake, an imposter to be discovered and shamed and shunned.  I wonder if I will ever get to see Kory again, and how I will ever be as wonderful to my life partner as she has been to and for me.  I miss my house in Minnesota, I miss Loring Park, the bookstore, the cafe, and especially the mighty Mississippi River.  I don’t miss the danger, the dearth of happiness in my job then, the back-biting and secretive old boys club that was Graybar Minneapolis (and probably still is,) though a couple of people were trying to help me, give me a chance, encourage me, and break the bad cycle.  I still miss the grocery stores and the parks, if that isn’t too dumb.  Downtown Minneapolis, Foshay Tower and the “Birthday Cake Building.”

So many things were so long ago, it’s hard to remember.  It’s why I think I should start recounting things that happened today, and work backwards, because I do not know how much I will retain about ANYTHING this far from it.  So far it makes for a really disjointed, and probably to the reader, very unsatisfying, but to me it’s the kind of stream-of-consciousness that really helps me.  Some things are so very clear, from years ago, that it seems as though they just happened.  Pieces of things come back to me, and I have to write down some stuff because it’s really not something I can squeeze into conversation anywhere.  Interesting, just not really relevant or pertinent to the shopping list, to Grounding and Bonding, to gas economy, human rights, the tallest building in town, or coffee grounds.

I chose the title because I never got out, never got “around” even when youth was on my side.  I stayed home nights, in front of TV, yes, I drank alone, I didn’t like talking to people on the phone on my own time when I started working at Candela in the mid 80s because it was so constant in my work day.  Later my phone exposure was less, but I really enjoyed writing letters.  My letter writing skills were honed writing to my Aunt Gloria and Grandma in New York as a kid.  I wrote to Julianna Williams as she traveled all over the country.  I used letters to further my career, to talk with civil servants about snow removal responsibilities, to get stuff done, and to convey love, and obsession, which filled my closeted little life for most of my youth (my youth, I estimate, ended at about 30)  Not that I’m old, I’m just in-between.  Once you’ve had a baby, worked for about 17 years, own a house and drive a minivan, the youth just isn’t there, not in spirit, not for me anyway.  It’s not to say I never sowed any wild oats, either, because I sowed a few.  I have friends still who will attest to it.  And other things no one will ever know about, they will die with me, and that’s just fine.

I don’t get around much, don’t get to the Saturday dance, don’t even get to the movies out more than a couple of times a year.  My vacation this year was broken up in the middle by the death of my Dad, and though the people we were visiting were awesome, I can’t say it didn’t take some of the shiny off of it for me.  I was having such a good time, relaxing for the first time in such a while, and our hostess was amazing.  I just felt at sea.  I still do.  My Dad was my only connection to California, to what was going on, what the family was up to, doing, achieving, marrying, divorcing, etc.  It’s like when you go for weeks without any messages on your answering machine, you know?   It’s kinda sad, kinda depressing, and kind of telling.

Perhaps I just really never wanted to get around much.  When I went to the Saturday dance, my social ineptitude glared so badly that I drank myself sick.  I don’t remember a fun time that was a sober time, except for a couple of times going places with my freshly-sober alcoholic brother, but those times didn’t feel so much fun as they felt like a sort of obligation.  Maybe because what I really wanted was a girl, and where we went, there were only boys for me.  The relationship between my brother Whit and I could fill several volumes of text, so I best only strum that string for a moment, lest I am writing all night.

So I’m happier at home, I have the grrrl I was secretly hoping for, I have the kitties I always wanted as a kid, I get to eat what I want, watch on TV what I want, listen to Swing Time music Saturday nights, read what I want, wear, for the most part, except at work, what I want, and come and go as I please.  Perhaps the happy up-beat tempo of the song excerpted in the title chosen is more telling than I realized.  On the other hand, maybe a cigar is just a cigar.

Peace to you all, unless you are gay, you are not allowed to have peace, as you are less human than any other people in America.  Yes, I’m bitter and pissed off that I still belong to one of the last accepted, allowed minorities to legally and socially be discriminated against in this country.  I know, trying to conclude this gracefully, and yet launching into another heavy topic on which I have a LOT to say.  Still, think about that while I await another opportunity to blog, which, at this rate, may either be over the holidays, or sometime in  February.  In the mean time, I will be at home, fireside, with a kitty in my lap, a song in my ears, and likely a book or magazine in my lap, my partner by my side, my son probably out getting around, because he’s much more social than I EVER was.  And that, my dear readers, is how it should be, in MY life.

What’s Men Got To Do With It?

Lately I’ve been having terrible difficulty reconciling my past lives (all in this body, this time, just vastly different ACTS if you will of the same play) and especially the interest in men.  I have a really distorted, what I think is a messed up feeling about men in my life and on the planet in general.  I don’t want to blame my mother or my father, for that matter, but I do want to jerk myself to stand up right about it before it seeps over any more into how I raise my SON.  

See, all along he’s been a baby, a toddler, a boy.  He’s becoming a man, now, and I don’t have sage words for him about that.  I don’t know how to teach him to shave, I don’t know who will teach him to drive, but not me (!!!) and the best I can give him in order for him to grow up as a good man is the womyn’s perspective.  He has a Big Brother, in order to give him the actual testostorone-swagger version of what it is to be a man, and I have to say, his Big Brother is one of the best male human beings I’ve EVER met, in a straight, gay, transgendered or otherwise male.  That’s a very positive influence in his life.  In mine, too, as it turns out.  

It’s just that the more I get to know about the male “animal,” the more I dislike them.  I am turning into the one thing I never thought I could be, having been so broad, diplomatic, understanding of all perspectives, empathetic and such ~ me, a MAN-HATER?  Yet I don’t think I outwardly portray that to everyone.  I think I disguise my disgust for their base, simple, often disgusting way of walking through their life, focusing on what can get them laid next or what they’re going to read the next time they take a shit.  These many men I’ve known in my life have not made a good example for the few that I’ve liked.  And I’ve begun to wonder if EVERYTHING these beasts do is not some kind of show for the other half of civilization, whether, if laws were abandoned, every one of them would revert to some raping, eating with their hands, shitting where they sleep, depraved, uneducated lunk.

That is not to say that there aren’t some men ~ a fraction of a percentage, I think ~ who would behave well even when no one is watching, and similarly that there aren’t womyn out there who don’t wash their hands after they use the bathroom, who think “American Pie” and the “Police Academy” movies were the pinnacle of human achievement, who scratch their privates and maybe even spit for no apparent reason.  Is it bias or life experience and knowlege that makes me think the fraction of the percentage of those “womyn” would be carried out SEVERAL more decimal points?

Manhater is one of the terms/people I grew up with, and until about ten years ago, associated with being a lesbian.  I assumed one naturally went with another.  Then life turned again and showed me that my assumptions and biases, once again, were unfounded and immature, just like every other assumption I’d carried from my childhood: guys with beards are hippies, fat people are lazy slobs, black people can dance, womyn are naturally predisposed to housework and child-rearing, poor people just don’t want to get a job, and on and on and on.  Well, shocker, I’ve decided that to a certain extent, I CAN blame my parents for these.  Where else would an 8-year-old get this kind of information?  Where but parents do all of our societal norms come from?   So here’s a “Father’s Day” card and a belated “Mother’s Day” card to myself, I’m gonna let myself off the hook for thinking the way that I do nowadays.  I’ve reversed and revised all of the above assumptions, and I’ve never stopped questioning the assumptions that pop into my head from then on.  I’ve ditched most of my hatreds, my unfounded accusations and assumptions about just about everything, and surprisingly, haven’t come up with any new ones of my own.

Here’s to all our Moms and Dads, who were living based on the ass-umptions, unquestioningly, that their parents and grandparents and other older / influential family members passed on to them, consciously or unconsciously.  They did the best they could, and can’t be penalized for what they didn’t know or were incapable of embracing/changing.  Thing is, I can think, and rethink, all of my stereotypes, all assumptions, and I can change.  That change will be apparent to my son, and hopefully he’ll go out into the world and spread the word that people can be flexible.  People can change.  No two people are alike.  I “do” gay differently than any other gay person, and I’m still his mother and I still love him.  Most of all, even if I find every single male walking the earth reprehensible and repulsive, I am constantly examining that, revising it, and changing my own mind.  That openness to change, that indecisiveness, if you will, is the one thing I pray, I hope, I dream he’ll carry with him out into the world, and spread it like jam.  It’s not weak to change ones opinion, it is strong.  Find a position, and go with it until it no longer suits you.  Then adapt it, tweak it, remodel and redecorate it until it does, and go on again.  THAT’S life.

Starting with P

I’ve decided this, my very first blog, will be about things that start with, or can be described with, a word with the letter P.  For instance, first the perils of going to do “one’s business” in a Port O Let, “Honey Bucket,” etc. that has two steel hooks on the top strung with a cable accross it.  The cable is capable of suspending said porta-potty from a forklift to deliver and remove said units.  There are forklifts being employed all around me, and my head is flooded with images from TV and the internet of people being “funny” by knocking over, or, ~worse, I think ~ lifting the can in the air so the occupant is stuck and just leaving it there.  JUST THE THOUGHT, the image, the supposition of all of those contents SLOSHING THE SIDES and, so very surely, out the hole-opening makes me dizzy to the point of almost paralysis.  So I guess that could fall under Paranoia as well.   Hm.  Moving on.

Same Port-a-Potty topic, different area of “interest”: isn’t it disgusting enough to have to walk into an already cramped and tiny space, avoiding getting your clothes and/or tools in the urinal replete with “cakes,” and keeping one’s trousers(pants) up enough not to drag in the “mud” and sundry other trackables, most assuredly including pee that has missed either the urinal, the toilet part, or both?  Boys that use these things ( I immedeately leap to the boys sheerly from the absolute ratio of 1 in 100 of womyn to boys on these sites, it is very simply math and not predjudice, though the latter can also be covered on this blog.  Later.) invariably leave reminders that they have been there: they write in pen over the advertisements of the seat liners, making the waxed liners’ taglines into suggestive, I think repulsive propositions; they leave newspapers there belying the fact that they spent an inordinate amount of time POOPING there instead of working, and no wonder this job is taking so fucking long; (shitting doesn’t start with a “P“, therefore…) they carve words into the walls and sometimes they leave wads of toilet paper, chewed gum, and especially cigarette butts [Note: often the air is poluted BEYOND just the foul stench of their human remains, I mean, wtf are these boys EATING?, plus the chemicals used to keep breaking down that stuff and the air less putrescent ~ poluted additionally to the point of almost unbreathe-able by SMOKING.  I fucking hate that.] ~ strewn all over the floor and seat area.  Navigate your butt amongst ALL of that, finally to sit on a flimsy plastic seat,  and suddenly you’re faced with what can only be described as an infantile drawing of some dolt’s idea of the female anatomy, occasionally coupled and/or accompanied by an even  more caveman-oriented version of a penis with balls, usually spurting something with a dotted line to pool somewhere gravitationally lower than where it starts.  Why?  Now I understand why LITTLE boys persist in this, but is it physically impossible to grow up?  To progress?  Hell, at the very least, to improve upon their artistic / anatomical skills?  Yes, the answer is yes, it is impossible.  Words like bitches, gay, and cocksucker must be somewhere inside as well.  [Sidebar: whole 'nother blog on how "gay" and its derrivatives is/are still the worst thing(s) you can call someone.]  Perhaps the “P” portion of this is “port-o-let prerequisites” ~ ???

Pants hanging down below one’s butt.  Pet peeve of mine.  They’re wearing a belt, so clearly the boy is aware of the concept, just addled and sad when it comes to its actual USE.  Pants don’t need to be Sergio Valente in the 70s – 80s – tight, just not looking as though there’s a load of crap hanging out behind them.  Please, boys, and I emphasize boys, because Real Men don’t employ this lazy, unimaginative habit, PLEASE pull up your pants.  I am sure many will think it’s because I work in one of the trades, and the boys around me are, by definition and set-up, occupationally predisposed to have pants hanging below the equator.  It has, some times, on the job, to do with a volume of tools one wears around one’s waist, attached TO the belt.  Others just have a body shape not conducive to the mainstream manufacture of clothes, i.e., they’re FAT.  Bringing us to the ”P” in this portion, Potbelly.

What baffles me is not the potbellied men who wear suspenders and yet not-long-enough of a shirt to protect us all from views of their considerable, often dirty, and occasionally (shudder), extremely hairy butt cracks.  What baffles ME is the way grrrrls with a soft middle, some belly, some hip ~ insist on wearing low-rise jeans and letting the belly flop or hang over the top, or worse, drive the low-rise jeans even farther down!  What a waste of fashion sensibility and good money.  I love womynly forms, I adore every aspect of the femyle form, but it doesn’t have to be adorned with a very restrictive, exclusionary, limiting garment like the low-rise jeans.  Embrace your curves, get some Levi’s comfort fit and let it all hang IN!

That’s all I have for now, I’ve started with P, I can go anywhere in the alphabet I feel like now, and it doesn’t even have to be the regular 26 characters, as my wyfe is learning Russian this summer, so I feel certain that my immersion in her learning process will strengthen my vocabulary as well.  ”Lightning Strikes” is a play on several word sets, as lightning first and foremost is an electrical atmospheric discharge and generally only strikes once in one place.  Electricity is my bag, and lightning, while frightening, also deeply excites and energizes me.  Lightning is also a form of easing up, like decreasing the dark or heavy, lightning up the tension in a room, lighting someone’s burden, etc, and correlating THAT lightning, which I know is really “lightening” but seriously, bite me ~ correlate that with the strikes of keys on a typewriter on paper.  Lightening strikes, if you will.  I also feel that lightning struck me with the greatest relationship I could ever hope for in my Partner (still on P) Wendy.  Lightning does strike, and in this case, it will be only once, and I don’t need it to strike me again, for this life, I’m good.

Peace out, word to your mother, hope you have enjoyed.  Today’s blog was sponsored by LIGHTNING and by the letter “P.”