Grrrr

Grrrrr….

This is a letter to the world that will never be read, since at the moment I am without Internet access. And why is it that it puts me into a total funk?

Consider, I have lost my mind, my mother, my job. I should know something about perspective, about what’s important and what matters.

I also feel that I’m spinning my wheels, not doing anything important, not doing what I need to do. I’m stuck, and I don’t believe in stuck. But even though I am writing every day, I’m in writer’s block—which at the moment I can’t define for you, being Internetless. Or unInterneted. Or sans Internet.

And I’m hungry—why won’t they feed me? Previously the old system worked—I gave them money and they gave me food. Today, I gave them money and now? No food.

Well, it’s clear that the world went off somewhere and decided not to take me along. But shouldn’t it have left a note on the refrigerator door? Something like, “Sorry, but you’re fucked today. Don’t try and do anything. You’ll be tired and not able to sleep. You’ll be hungry and they won’t give you food. Expect to fall and break your leg for no reason. Fire may break out. There will be insurrection in the streets. Prepare to be struck by a meteorite…. Get the picture, sucker?”

And this guy at the café which is not a café since that would imply food and that, it appears, is reserved for other people, all of whom are sitting in front of plates and slowly munching away…. Now then, why is it that my least favorite person in the café has decided to fuck around with the staff, distracting them when they should be exerting themselves at full speed with the obviously imperative, critically important task of feeding me? No but there he is, and worse, he has an Argentinian accent, which totally drives me insane. It’s Spanish with a heavy Italian inflection. And now, guess what? He has chosen to stand between a seriously beautiful guy—a man who doesn’t know, though I could tell him, that his identical twin is named Adonis—and me.

And why do I have to go to Boquerón? It was supposed to be a hotel, Copamarina, which was nice, but now it’s a timeshare in Boquerón and people will be sleeping in the living rooms, which is crazy. And where will I go when I wake up, as I always do, at three in the morning and there are sleeping and probably snoring bodies in the living room?

Outside, said Mr. Fernández, or the hotel lobby. So the whole world will be sleeping and I’ll be up and bug eyed and pacing around the lobby, accompanied with the sound of profoundly unjustly earned snores.

Well, well—I shouldn’t complain. Because my mother-in-law has decreed that she wants vegetarian lasagna, and guess what? That falls on Mr. Fernández, who has almost never made lasagna in his life and who cannot even eat lasagna, since it has pasta, and that has become the fatalist-no-computer-I-meant-fatalest (and you know where that red squiggle can go, don’t you?) of poisons. So Mr. Fernández has washed the pan that was collecting the water draining from the third floor, and he is now probably elbow-deep in that infernal pasta, which will kill us all.

Well, I for one refuse to eat it, on general principle, and to spite my mother-in-law, whom in fact I like except on days when there is no Internet and no food. No, I intend to sit at the table but with my back turned to it, in silent but very much obvious protest. Nor am I going to talk to anyone at all—not a word will be wrenched from my lips—for the entire week we’re there, since it should be Copamarina but it’s not so guess what! No words from Marc!

Hey, maybe I’ll make a sign! “I AM NOT TALKING BECAUSE THIS IS WHERE I SHOULDN’T BE AND I PROTEST AND UNTIL THE PLACE IS RIGHT AND THE FOOD COMES WHEN IT SHOULD AND THE INTERNET AGREES TO BE AVAILABLE INSTEAD OF OFF SOMEWHERE ELSE, DAMMIT, I AM NOT TALKING AND YOU CAN’T MAKE ME!”

That’s what I’ll do. I’m tired of being adult and reasonable and nice and not making a fuss and going with the flow. I’m gonna get good and mad, and tell the whole world about it. In fact, you know that lasagna? I’m gonna spit on it, on the whole pan of it, so that no one can eat it. That’s what I’m gonna do, and just wait and see! Then we’ll have to go to Copamarina which is where we should be and not in Boquerón where I can’t go anywhere when I can’t sleep! Hah!

Now let’s see—what else can I do?

And now it’s several hours later and Jaime has come in and made me drink three beers, so now I can’t think!

Grrr….

Boys Beware

It was a curious coincidence, hearing of the danger of the homosexual just after having read a biography of one.

“Homosexuals are sick,” announced the computer speakers. “But not a visible sickness like chickenpox or the measles. Mentally sick.”

“What in the hell are you watching?” I asked Mr. Fernández.

“Boys Beware, an educational film from the fifties.”

Wrong—it was from 1961.

And it was educational in everything but the message. Although some of the message made sense. Don’t get into cars with strangers. If a friend does, write down the license plate number, and the make of the car. If you have any doubt, go to your parents or a trusted teacher.

“He traded his life for a newspaper headline,” announces the narrator. For some of them—in my case us—can be violent. And careful, they / we may seem normal. Even really friendly—always a dangerous sign. One of the four boys in the movie makes the mistake of going to a motel. Well, why not? The guy—a suspicious type with sunglasses and a mustache (right, central casting wasn’t being imaginative that day)—had bought the boy a coke, taken him fishing, and then showed him a little pornography. The boy reports the presumed molestation to his parents—the man is arrested and convicted, but Jimmy is given “probation in the custody of his parents.”

Oh yeah? Isn’t this the classic “blaming the victim?” Shouldn’t we look on the kid as, well, a kid? They do stupid things, sometimes.

Well, it was shot in black and white, there in 1961. But apparently the message was no less timely—or important—in 1973, when they decided to shoot it again in color, though with the same script and soundtrack, but different actors.

1973 was the year I graduated from high school.

I tell you this because the ten minutes of nonsense that you can see below was the absolute background for my formative years. The men in their suits and their ties. Mother in her skirt, sweeping the walks. Even the voice of the narrator, with his folksy talk about “young people” is a voice no longer heard.

You never stop coming out, is a frequently-expressed truism in the gay world. Watching this film, I wonder if I can ever fully rid myself of the self-hate that comes with being told, for the first two decades of my life, that I was sick and perhaps criminal.

Perhaps? Well, unless I chose celibacy, definitely criminal. I didn’t realize, somehow, that the 1950’s were perhaps the worst years for oppression of gay people. In 1953, Eisenhower decreed a ban on homosexuals working in the federal government. Most gay people resigned--why wait for the axe? Joe McCarthy of Appleton, Wisconsin, threw fuel on the fire a few years later, and by then it was automatically assumed, if a man resigned from a government post, he was gay. The police are raiding bars, and taking a nice little pay-off in bribery money. Thugs are looming everywhere--to beat and bash gay men senselessly. Among all of this trauma, it's a wonder that there were men who continued trying to live their lives.

One of whom was Samuel Steward, a professor, a friend of glittering literary figures, and later, a tattoo artist. He travelled to England to meet Lord Alfred Douglas. To France, to meet Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein. Through them, he meets Thornton Wilder, and has a physical relationship on rare occasions for the next twelve years.

And apparently, he’s a gifted teacher, judging from the letter from a former student quoted at the end of the book. But he tires of it, and goes into tattooing. Then, after a dozen years or so of work, he closes up shop and retreats into a small cottage behind a bungalow.

The description of the inside of the house is heartbreaking. A compulsive collector, he can throw nothing away. Papers are everywhere, along with the empty food cans and the newspapers the dogs have urinated on. The stench is unbearable. It takes the executors of the estate several months to clear out the house.

He was a sexual renegade, writes the author. Yes, in the sense that he had plenty of sex, and didn’t feel much shame about it. But I wonder about that. How could anyone—he or I or any of us who grew up in an environment saturated with shame and sickness not have been, or still be, affected? 

When Grandmother is Right

I swore, as a younger man, that I would never sing that old tune, made popular by (I think) Mark Twain: “when I was twenty, I though my father was an idiot, at age 25 I was surprised how much he had learned…”

It’s so smug, assuming the young know less than us, assuming that they too will grow up and make the compromises and—too often—forget the dreams and the ideals which on occasion can have real worth. And if they don’t? Well, isn’t it better to have had them? Who wants a 21-year old Republican investment banker? I’ll take a kid writing the great American novel in a garage studio any day….

So why am I reading a book called Willpower, a New York Times Bestseller by Roy Baumeister (the social scientist) and John Tierney (science writer)?

Well, the first reason is that I want more of it. As I sit writing this, my eyes see a group of coupons for Swanson Vitamins (excellent source, by the way, and cheap), two containers of juggling balls (decided to learn to juggle in lieu of getting a job), a little device that I had no idea what use it could provide until I figured it out—it’s the iPod (from aPple!) charger.

Well, Messieurs Baumeister / Tierney would hate that. The first thing they suggest is to clean your desk. Get a to-do list that is concrete, not fuzzy. No “clean the house”—who can possibly do that? Where to start? Instead, “clean guest bathroom sink, dust piano, remove junk from desk…”

You get the idea…..

The book has much to commend it. Which is better—to give kids self-control, or to give them healthy self-esteem?

Confession—that’s the next chapter. Haven’t got to it, yet. But I did sneak and read the two quotes under the title. The first is by someone called Lady Gaga—a popular entertainer (haven’t heard her, don’t know if she can sing): “You’re a superstar no matter who you are or where you come from—and you were born that way.”

Back in a moment—gotta do 100 units of insulin for that surge in blood sugar….

The second quote is just a bit tarter: “Brats are not born. They are made.”

That’s from a lady called Deborah Carroll, a.k.a. Nanny Deb (which does suggest somebody with a bit more hands-on than Lady Gaga…)

Why do I feel that I pretty much know the thesis of this chapter—just by reading the two quotes?

OK—the book also has some great ideas for increasing will power. In the first place, like a muscle, the will can be strengthened. How? By repeated exertion, so that the act or action stops being an act of will, but becomes instead a habit.

And thus steps the explorer Henry Stanley into the book. You’ll remember him—the guy that set off into darkest Africa to find Dr. Livingstone? By the way, it appears that Stanley made up at a later date the famous line, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” A fascinating guy—our Stanley. Born poor, was put into the workhouse, and emerged pretending to be an upper-class American—he even affected the accent. Anyway, he kept voluminous diary accounts—he never missed a day—and guess what one page has been torn out of all his diaries?

Yup, the day he finally stumbles on Stanley….

Well, besides being rigorous on the diarying (oh, all right, computer! Diary keeping!), he also shaved every day of his life. Even in the jungle. Even when he had yellow fever or malaria or whatever-it-was and had gone from 160 pounds to 110 pounds. Even when his beloved Miss Alice—to whom he was romantically attached; who was his North Star; who said screw-this and up and married someone else almost before the ship had left the harbor—wasn’t there to see him. Just the cannibals.

With whom he dealt quite well. In fact, on one of the expeditions, he was the ONLY guy to walk out of the jungle—his entire party had died. And yes, he seems to have understood and empathized with the natives.

Was it because he had shaved, that morning?

Yes and no. It seems that by building habits that promote self-control, you no longer have to exert self-control except when really necessary. His sense of rectitude and command, in other words, came easily. When the cannibals shouting “meat, meat!” set upon the group, Stanley had the strength to—as we would say—dialogue.

In addition, the book tackles the thorny question—why do religious people, in general, live longer and happier than agnostics / atheists? Does AA really work, with its invocation of “a higher power?”

Seems so—which is why I may start to meditate again. In the case of Stanley, he was an agnostic, as am I, officially. But his Miss Alice—that less than faithful fiancée—worked for him as God does for the religious. He spent years of his life struggling to be worthy of the woman he had chosen to be his goddess (you do have to be sorry for her—all that adoration would drive anybody into another’s arms….). So, she served him well, in a sense.

Lastly, we come to Trollope.

The learned and educated Readers of this blog don’t need to be told that Trollope has some claim to be a major Victorian novelist—and the Victorian era industriously produced some great writers. And no one was more prolific than Trollope. A more devoted blogger than I would have counted the works listed on Wikipedia. But I can tell you that the list is two-columned, AND you have to scroll to come to the end of it.

Not all was great, of course. But what is great is like nothing else. Or at least George Eliot thought so—she wrote that she could not have written Middlemarch without the novels of Barsetshire (this is too funny—Barsetshire was the fictional shire created by Trollope, and the computer has red-squiggled it! Self-reference turning back on itself?)

And how did Trollope do it? Did he devote himself to working from dawn to dusk?

Nope, he had a job—working at one point for the Royal Mail. He’s the guy who dreamed up a little red post box—an obvious idea, but novel at the time.

He also wrote every day from 5:30 to 8:30. His routine output was 2500 words per day. (This post is at 1083—and will be ending soon…) He charted his progress, and wrote in his Autobiography, “a week passed with insufficient pages has been a blister to my eye, and a month so disgraced would have been a sorrow to my heart.”

Well, it goes against the romantic myth of the writer, desperately awaiting the muse, struggling and fighting to give birth to a work of genius. Trollope is at his desk, counting his words—250 words a quarter-hour, 1000 words an hour. 

“I have been told that such appliances (i.e. the watch) are beneath the notice of a man of genius,” he writes. But he’s not, he claims, a man of genius. Yet goes on to say, “a small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules.”

Well, such ideas—shaving in the jungle, dining formally in the desert, industriousness and duty—all seem from another time, when ladies wore corsets and the legs of the piano were seemly dressed, so as not to provoke wanton desire. The time of our grandmothers.

“You can’t grade papers with a red pen,” a student told me, I thought in jest. But no, it’s true. A paper slashed with red ink wounds the self-esteem of the students, according to popular theory. Red pens are no longer permitted in the schools.

Yeah? There was a lot not to be kept from those times. But there may also be a place for self-control—for the rigor of sane and healthy habits practiced over a lifetime.

Note to readers—1341 words. Just over half of Trollope’s daily production….