My one outing

In honor of National Coming Out Day, I'm going to share what happened with one branch of my family when they found out I was gay.

Twenty-six years ago, I lived in Houston, Texas, and was planning a trip to see my sister in San Diego. I mentioned it to my aunt, my mother's sister, during a phone call and she asked me to come up to visit them, first. I already had my plane tickets, but this was back when you could change them without penalties. So I did and flew up to Pennsylvania, planning to stay for 3 days then head across to San Diego and back to Houston.

Now, I'd always felt very close to my aunt's side of the family. My uncle was a Tech Sergeant in the Air Force while she was an RN, and they had 7 children who were far more adventurous than I could even think of being. I'd visited them many times, as a kid and even into my 20s, and I felt safe around them. Like family. The closest I ever came to learning how to swim was thanks to them all being like fish in the water. I even jumped off the high-dive at a pool in Clovis, NM because they were doing it, over and over, and I damn near drowned before I made it back to the pool's edge. Had a blinding headache and felt nauseous, but also exhilarated I'd had the nerve to do it.

Well, I got up there and was met at the airport and everything seemed great, but then my oldest cousin took me to a bar and we had a beer and he finally asked me, after a lot of hesitation, if I had AIDS. Apparently, they'd been told I was gay and were shocked and more than a little afraid of me. So it turned out the whole purpose of inviting me up to visit was to find out if it was true and whether or not I was dying.

I'd taken an HIV test that had recently come out, and it was negative, and I told him this (I did another one a year later, with the same result). He seemed to accept it and I thought that was the end of it. Except it wasn't. Everything changed. I'd been invited to go fishing, to which I'd agreed, for some reason; I was uninvited. My youngest cousins didn't really want to be around me. There was fear I might cut myself and bleed on someone and give them AIDS, even if I was making a salad. Then one's wife cast me such looks of hate, I nearly left, right then, to call a cab and go to the airport.

A couple of cousins were fine around me and we went to a local carnival and took a trip into a coal mine...but I was so shaken, I did it all by rote. I'd finally realized I'd been fooling myself to think I was part of the family. I was just a blood relative. I think one cousin noticed and she tried to be attentive, but I wasn't open to kindness; it felt too much like duty.

What made things worse was, I noticed most of them were en route to being alcoholics. They spent their weekends together, working on each others' houses. They couldn't do anything without a beer in their hand...and that included driving, with their children in the car. Yet they had the nerve to act like I was the danger.

As for my aunt, who'd asked me to come up? I got to see her for a total of 6 hours over those three days, even though I was staying in her house. I don't know if that was by design or happenstance, but it emphasized in me that I was not welcome.

I went on to San Diego and came home and went back to work. But I was ripped apart. Up until then, I'd remembered birthdays and anniversaries and Christmas for them. I stopped. I made certain, any time I moved, my aunt knew how to get hold of me, but there were no cards. No letters. No phone calls. Nothing from them...except to announce a funeral, when necessary...though my aunt and uncle did visit me, once, in Houston while en route to San Antonio. We had dinner. They stayed at a motel near the Galleria. Then they headed on. It was just a courtesy call. A year later, I moved to LA.

After my mother died, a couple years ago, I drove down to my aunt's, more from duty than anything. I had pictures to give her and details to share of mom's last days. There had been minimal attempts by my cousins to reconnect via the internet, only I wasn't very responsive, but they still invited themselves over and we had homemade pizza and talked about one's daughter's wedding and another son's plans for going into the Air Force and such...while the cousin who'd asked me about having AIDS reeked of whiskey and his wife tried to be nice as possible to me. I nursed my one beer as they polished off a case. Then I left.

What saddens me about this is, I felt nothing around them except a sense of discomfort. I was with people I had to be with. That's all. Like at an office party. We were no longer connected. I don't excuse myself in this; I justify the disconnect by saying I did not cut off contact, I merely stopped maintaining it. They always knew how to get hold of me.

But the truth is, I was glad they left me alone. It was such a deep, deep wound, it has yet to completely heal. It may never scar over...and the possibility of it happening again has colored my relationships ever since. So I began to keep a slight distance...a reserve...for when friends and acquaintances accidentally...or deliberately...cut me. It may be part of the reason my characters are more important to me than anything else; they have replaced the family I lost.

So I left my aunt and cousins and I drove home, that night, and not one thought entered my mind...except, dear God, how I wish it had been different.

Processing David Martin...

Spent the evening trying to figure out the best format and company through which to publish David Martin. The artwork is almost done and the cover's up for work. I'm pretty much decided on a 6x9" format, black & white interiors, full color cover. But since it'll be illustrated, I wonder if that's too big? I guess I won't know until I put it together.

I checked with Bowker about buying my own ISBN for the book, but they want $125 for one. They also offer self-publishing...started at $325!!! Create Space will charge $25 for a wider service and nothing for publishing, but I don't trust their reporting. According to Amazon Author Sales Reports, I've sold 3 copies of the paperback of Bobby Carapisi. CS says I sold 2.

I know one sale was to me, so I'd have a paperback copy of the book, and another paperback sold a couple months back (I'm surprised it sold any, it's priced so high). Then another sold in late August. I pointed out the extra sale and they claim it's a resale of the one copy I'd sold. In short, I'd sold 1 copy of BC to someone who had an Amazon Marketplace account, like me, who then resold it.

I don't really believe them. I've long suspected Amazon's deal is to slightly underreport sales, just enough to add to the profit line but not enough to cause a full-scale audit. After all, they have close to 10,000,000 books on hand...they say.

I don't know. I guess no matter who the publisher is, you're at their mercy when it comes to knowing how well your book's selling.

I've been trying to get hold of the publisher of HTRASG, PM, RIHC6 and BC to get some money he owes me. Can't get him to answer the phone or respond to e-mails. Guess that's a dead end. My next step is to insist he sign the books back to me, I publish them, myself, and see if I can make any money off them.

I now have 4 people who owe me enough money to pay off my tax burden and make a good dent in this year's taxes...but you think I'm seeing a dime of it? Sure.

License to do what you want...

Reading The Count of Monte Cristo is proving to be a very liberating experience. Dumas has some very brutal moments in this book, with a massively detailed view of humanity that is anything but sweetness and light. A foster child who was nearly smothered at birth becomes a selfish jerk who accidentally kills his foster mother because she won't give him more money, twenty-something guys sit around a table complaining about the politicians and the police and making fun of each other, an otherwise decent inn keeper winds up a murderer thanks to his avaricious wife. It's not a pretty picture.

But that's not what's liberating. I've read similar characters in stories like Candide and The Playboy of the Western World and Washington Square. What's eye-opening is how casually Dumas switches from one omniscient viewpoint to another without so much as a thought.

The story's the same -- Edmond Dantes is a young man who's morally innocent of a crime but who is technically guilty of one. He's arrested just before he gets married, vanishes into a prison, is forgotten about, and finally escapes to have his revenge on those who destroyed his life. The men who crushed him are named Villeforte, Danglars (who becomes a baron) and Ferdinand (who becomes the Count de Morcerf).

Once Dantes is in prison, the story becomes about Villeforte warning the King about Bonaparte, not to mention his ambitions and wedding plans and fears about his own father, who's a Bonapartist, causing him trouble. Then it shifts to Dantes' imprisonment and his meeting of the Abbe, his escape, and up to the point where he finds a way to achieve his goals. Then it shifts to him helping a man who tried to help him, m. Morrell, then focuses on Franz, a friend of Count de Morderf's son, Albert, and Dantes becomes like a secondary character in his own story, then it shifts to Albert, and Franz all but disappears...and now it's back on Dantes, as the Count.

Each tells bits of an epic tale that is slowly coming together as it builds up Dantes' expertise and awareness and cunning. The story begins in 1814; Dantes is in prison for 14 years; now we are somewhere between 1835 and 1840 and we're getting back to Dantes' plot against Villeforte. And it works...except for the flowery language; that still irritates a little.

I may try this with Carly Kills...sans lots and lots of wordage.

Land of the lost...

That's how I feel when I can't get online, these days. I'm finally home, and as much as I complain about Verizon's Fios...it's a hundred times better than the last two hotels I stayed at in NYC. Last night, I'd try to kick up the internet...and ten minutes later it would come up. And I was never able to get on my e-mail service. That's ridiculous. I noticed the room was wired for ethernet cables, so I guess I'll bring one of those with me, from now on. Needless to add, I'm not dealing with Best Western or La Quinta in NYC, again.

Of course, during this I got a rough sketch of the cover for David Martin and couldn't look at it. Now that I have, it's very nicely done, emphasizing both the journey and solitude of David's days on the road. Can't wait to see it in color.

I've taken a hiatus from ...Owen Taylor and been reading Dumas' book. The Count now acknowledges he's popping pills combining opium and hashish. And people are complaining about the French government and cops in much the same way as people do, today. There's a casual reference to the crime rate in Paris -- 4 murdered over a weekend -- and this is in the Paris of 1835 or so. It's really quite illuminating.

One good thing about reading old books is you find out that nothing is new, or even recent, when it comes to drugs, death, and politics.

WTF?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

The Count of Monte Cristo just got a young man stoned on hashish. Apparently, said Count uses it, habitually. That was never in any of the movies. Nor was this long story about bandits kidnapping girls, passing them around to be used and then killing them. If it wasn't for the archaic language and the fact I know this book was written in 1844, I'd have thought it was done a hundred years later.

There's a chilling passage about a public execution that starts off a Mardi Gras style festival, where two men are condemned -- one to be guillotined, the other to be beaten to death -- where the former is pardoned at the last minute, sending the latter into a rage that is only quelled when his head is bashed in and his throat crushed...and he's stomped on till he spews blood. As the crowd roars, happily.

Jesus...I have to admit, I was startled by it. I'm used to more genteel manners of death and destruction in the classic books I've read. I'm reminded of the death of Andrei's kid brother, Nikolai, at the Battle of Borodino in War & Peace. It's horrifying but it's told at a slight remove that's made the more painful by the excitement Nikolai has on the eve of the battle. No blood and guts.

Well...there's one surprise at reading the book.

MOMA

I was planning to get a ticket to see The Glass Menagerie but the line at TKTS was so long at 10am, I shrugged it off and went to the Museum of Modern Art. It was about the same price as a cheap ticket for the play, and I saw the originals of Starry Night by Van Gogh, Christina's World by Wyeth and a nice documentary about Dante Ferretti, the production designer for films like The Aviator, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Sweeney Todd, and the like.

MOMA's six stories of non-stop art of all sorts, from the banal -- installations of naked dolls with genitals, videos of elephants walking around then lying down then getting up -- to the classic -- works by Bonnard and Miro and Picasso and Rousseau and O'Keefe, a massive exhibit of Magritte's work -- to a sculpture garden...that really wasn't all that big a deal, except for being quiet. I read some of my book there, but LACMA's is more impressive.

Starry Night is the rock star of the artwork. College-age girls were sneaking up to stand beside it to have their photo taken, driving the docents crazy. It's under glass so there's little possibility of it being damaged, but that also makes it hard as hell to inspect. I wanted to look at the thickness of the brush strokes, from the side, but the glass prevented that...and one docent was eyeing me pretty tightly, too. Can't blame her; I tend to look a bit psychotic.

They show movies in the sub basement -- this series dealing with the movies Ferretti worked on. Many of his production design paintings were on display as well.

Christina's world jolted me into making notes about it. I didn't take a picture because it would not even begin to do justice to the stunning detail in the work. I'd seen copies of it so many times, but this is the first time I noticed the knuckles of her hands were almost white from gripping the untended grass and rough dirt. And how indistinct the houses were in comparison to the "every blade of grass" detail in the un-mowed field around her. Nor had I realized it was so large.

I need to put Jake's art back into OT, now; it's his comfort, like this visit to MOMA was to me.

Reading, again...

I decided to read "The Count of Monte Cristo" a couple weeks back, and have chugged through it to the point where I'm able to overlook the archaic style of writing and not want to put the book down. Alexandre Dumas was obviously paid by the word, like Dickens, because he uses a LOT of them. Man, I thought Wilkie Collins was verbose? He's like Hemingway at his most minimalist in comparison to Dumas.

BUT...I'm caught up in Edmond Dantes' situation and want to know how it turns out. I have an idea, but I'm realizing both the 1934 and 2001 versions of the story were very freely adapted...so I have a feeling surprises are still to come.

I'm at the point where Dantes and the Abbe have connected by tunnel and are considering the amazing tools the Abbe's made, on his own...like pens from bits of fish bone, and a clock that uses the barest of light coming through a tiny window to tell him if it's morning or night, and the making of papyrus scrolls from torn up sheets and shirts, upon which to write in ink built from mixing soot and his weekly ration of wine.

The grammar and attitudes may be completely old-fashioned but it doesn't matter. It's the characters who count. I've always felt that way about my scripts...which is partly why I let the people in them run the story. I don't care how great your structure and dialogue are in a screenplay or novel, the characters are all that honestly matters. If you don't care about them, you won't care about perfect grammar or eloquence in you use of words.

Guess I'll have to re-evaluate my attitude towards movies like Titanic. I hated the dialogue and what James Cameron did to hype a major tragedy into the worst kind of melodrama. I am still deeply offended by some of the things he pulled in reworking the story. That said, Leonardo DeCaprio and Kate Winslet inhabited characters you cared about, which helped personalize the tragedy far more than the rather cold-blooded A Night To Remember from 1958, and heightened the horror of what happened far more than 1953's Titanic.

Unfortunately, what Hollywood looks for, these days, is structure and concept. All else is secondary or they figure it can be fixed with the right casting and rewriting. I can't tell you how many times I've been told if I'd change this character or focus on that one, I could sell some of my work. An idea that ignores how I did do that, a few times...and my work still didn't get produced.

Of course, it could just be that I'm crappy at writing scripts...but I don't think so.

Fly me to the moon...

I'm off to NYC in the morning and will be there through Tuesday; my flight home leaves JFK at 10:45pm. Should be interesting, to be nice about it. This is one of those impossible jobs brought about by people who have no idea what they're doing. Not that I always do...but packing a thousand books in 2 days is not going to be easy, even with help.

But this is the life I chose. And reality is, if I honestly wanted to change it, I would. But I guess deep down...I don't.

I've been snapping and snarling about the GOP shutdown of the government, but I'm beginning to see a spark of light. Maybe this will make the Republican Party inconsequential at the next election. There was talk a few months ago of how the GOP has the chance to take the Senate and keep the House. Now? It's all up in the air. Because those twits are actually gloating over this, and bullying people they know can't fight back...and stupidly doing it on camera, so they can't say it's made up or a misquote.

I'm reminded of when Ann Richards was running against Clayton Williams for Governor of Texas in 1991. I worked on her campaign, and it was Texas nasty. She was smart, knew the job, had connections like you wouldn't believe, had been the State Treasurer for years...and she was still running neck and neck with a misogynistic millionaire who made jokes about rape and some appallingly stupid comments about the days' events. It was entirely possible Texas would vote another idiot into office just because he was a good ol' boy (and did so with her successor).

But then he did the unforgivable. He deliberately insulted her, to her face, in front of news cameras he'd asked to come see him do it. Seriously, they showed the entire thing on the news. It was at a banquet and he said to the news crews covering it, "C'mere, I want you to see this," then he went straight to Ann's table, and as she got up to greet him, he told her was was refusing to shake her hand because her campaign was saying mean things about him. (Like his hadn't done that about her.) That was a major breach of etiquette, and that's why he got his butt whupped.

I'm hoping the same thing happens to these Tea Party scum. They've revealed their true colors -- gleeful about the shutdown, yelling at park rangers who had to close monuments because of the shutdown, being overheard discussing how they were going to change the dialog by repeating the same "It's Obama's fault for not negotiating" nonsense...I just shake my head at it.

And use it to help me with OT. I'd thought I was going too far with the story? I'm nowhere near crossing the line into surreality, yet.

Maybe I should try...

It's the end of the world...

I'm sharing something from Slate.com, even though their new site design is atrocious and too damn much like TPM's...including repeating the same stories half a dozen times on the main page.
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Juan Linz’s Bad News for America

The Yale political scientist died this week. His life’s work tells us that American democracy is doomed.
By Matthew Yglesias

Juan Linz, the distinguished Yale political scientist, died on Tuesday morning in New Haven, Conn., at the age of 86. He was a great man whose death happens to have coincided with a series of news events that nearly perfectly illustrate some of the main themes of his work. Linz, you see, was a student of comparative government, of political institutions, and of democratic breakdown. He saw these, naturally enough, as related issues. He looked at the success of democratic institutions in Western Europe and their frequent failure in coup-ridden Latin America and saw the contrast as driven more by constitutional structure than by culture or economics.

And his analysis has a disturbing message for residents of the contemporary United States. The current atmosphere of political crisis isn’t a passing fad and it isn’t going to get better. In fact, it’s very likely to get worse. Much worse. And lead to a complete breakdown of constitutional government and the democratic order.

To see why, start with Linz’s analysis of Latin America in his two-volume seriesThe Failure of Presidential Democracy. The problem, according to Linz, is right there in the title: too much reliance on presidents. In Linz’s telling, successful democracies are governed by prime ministers who have the support of a majority coalition in parliament. Sometimes, as in the British Commonwealth or Sweden or post-Franco Spain, these prime ministers are formally subordinate to a monarch. Other times, as in Germany or Israel or Ireland, there is a largely ceremonial, nonhereditary president who serves as head of state. But in either case, governing authority vests in a prime minister and a cabinet whose authority derives directly from majority support in parliament.

When such a prime minister loses his parliamentary majority, a crisis ensues. Either the parties in parliament must negotiate a new governing coalition and a new cabinet, or else a new election is held. If necessary, the new election will lead to a new parliament and a new coalition. These parliamentary systems are sometimes very stable (see the United Kingdom or Germany) and sometimes quite chaotic (see Israel or Italy), but in either case, persistent legislative disagreement leads directly to new voting.

In a presidential system, by contrast, the president and the congress are elected separately and yet must govern concurrently. If they disagree, they simply disagree. They can point fingers and wave poll results and stomp their feet and talk about “mandates,” but the fact remains that both parties to the dispute won office fair and square. As Linz wrote in his 1990 paper “The Perils of Presidentialism,” when conflict breaks out in such a system, “there is no democratic principle on the basis of which it can be resolved, and the mechanisms the constitution might provide are likely to prove too complicated and aridly legalistic to be of much force in the eyes of the electorate.” That’s when the military comes out of the barracks, to resolve the conflict on the basis of something—nationalism, security, pure force—other than democracy.

It used to seem as though Linz’s theory had one enormous and obvious flaw: the United States of America. The success of American democracy seemed to show that institutions were not the key. Old-fashioned Anglophone pluck and liberal values triumphed under both presidential and parliamentary systems. If something was going wrong south of the border, blame some aspect of Latin culture or economic development. But Linz always did have an answer to this objection. In the 1990 paper, he said that a full explanation of America’s success was complicated, but that “it is worth noting that the uniquely diffuse character of American political parties—which, ironically, exasperates many American political scientists and leads them to call for responsible, ideologically disciplined parties—has something to do with it.”

That was 23 years ago. Today, of course, we have ideologically disciplined parties that are “responsible” in the sense that they make a serious effort to deliver on their stated policy agendas. We also have a government shutdown, a looming debt ceiling breach, and a country in which regular order budgeting is an increasingly distant memory.

In a January interview with the Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews, Linz explainedthat the cover to the Spanish edition of his book on presidential democracy was illustrated with a photo of the White House. “I said I’d prefer some other presidential palace,” he said, “but now it’s failed the same way.”

Obviously, this doesn’t mean a coup is coming this week. Republicans will probably back down from the brink. We’ll probably avoid breaching the debt ceiling and the president won’t even need to resort to crazy platinum coin loopholes. It’ll probably be fine. (Besides which, one thing both parties agree on is that the military should keep getting paid even while nobody else does.) But Linz’s work raises the deeper question not of what will happen next week or next month, but next year or next decade. In a world with well-sorted parties and little ticket-splitting, the geography-driven differences in voting results for the House, Senate, and president are going to lead to persistent conflicts, in which both sides feel they have an electoral mandate to stand firm and there’s no systematic way to resolve the issue. That’s very bad news for America, and nobody knows how to stop it.

Matthew Yglesias is Slate's business and economics correspondent. He is the author of The Rent Is Too Damn High.

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His last paragraph reveals an optimist. Silly wabbit...we are now at war...

Much to contemplate...

Looks like the psychotic branch of the GOP has taken over and is doing everything it can to destroy America. I've gotten to where I call them the US branch of al Qaeda, because they are managing to do what bringing down the Twin Towers could not. Eight years of Bush and his filthy lies and doubling of the debt didn't do it. No, it was having a black man in the White House that galvanized the terrorists of the Right, and they are now taking over.

People say not all Republicans agree with those diseased animals, but I don't see them doing anything to stop them. It's like the Christians who don't go along with maniacs like Pat Robertson and the Westboro Baptist Church devils in their blame liberals and gays for everything wrong cries; they just say, "That's not nice" and do nothing more. The same goes for Muslims who insist Islam is a religion of peace but don't even try to counteract the sickness spread by the likes of Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad and the Taliban and, yes, al Qaeda.

Not everyone in Germany went along with exterminating the Jews, except they did, because they did damn near nothing stop it. Not all Russians think gay men and women are a danger to society, but they haven't pushed back against Putin's vile laws and how he's using homophobia to help pad his pocketbook and build his powerbase. They stand by, think to themselves, "That's not nice," and go about their own business, certain it will never affect them.

Of course, not all people just let evil happen; some do fight and cry and scream and argue...and their voices are barely heard. Barely paid attention to. The evil screams louder, and too many well-meaning twits try to take advantage of the other side's decency. I get dozens of e-mails a day demanding I help some liberal cause with money and/or sign a petition against this or that, as if that means anything. It's all made worthless by its redundancy.

You don't stop crazy with pieces of paper; you stop it by removing the nutcases from power. Where are the demands for recalls against the GOP Reps causing this mess? Why aren't people on the left giving the Tea Partiers a damn good spanking by hitting their districts with the first cuts in services thanks to the shutdown? Politics is a blood sport, and the right wing knows it...but liberals have played at it like it's just a game of Bridge.

Which raises the question -- Why do people tolerate the maniacs taking control? Why do they allow the radicals to run things? Are we just lazy? Selfish? Uncaring at heart? I used to think humanity was basically good, but I don't know, anymore. I wonder if we, as a species, are really just the intelligent version of a flea or a tick, living off the blood of a healthy animal until it sickens and dies...and then we move on. Too bad about that dog or cat, but I had to feed myself.

So...next comes the debt ceiling fight, and unless Obama changes his ways, that will add to the chaos. It's his own damn fault this is happening. He spent too many years trying to work with the growing insanity of the Right, tried too many times to placate them, and like a 3 year-old who's learned that if he screams loud and long enough daddy will give in, the screaming will continue until the brats are exhausted or punished enough to not want to keep up the temper-tantrum. That moment can't come soon enough.

If it ever does.