10 Years

Karen's latest blog post made me sad today. Well, sad and happy. It basically says that when she thinks of Austin, she thinks of the home that she, Victor and I shared on 37th street in Hyde Park.

I know what she means. It sounds corny to say, I guess, but that house is deeply symbolic to me. It was the last time everyone was in Austin together. It was the last time we were all single (as in, unmarried). It was the last time we'll have multiple parties in one year, and have everyone we know show up for all of them. It was the home of the last real dance party we had (Halloween, 2003). Which also happened to be the last year there was a Halloween party for which everyone was excited and actually dressed up. Two serious romances were begun in that house. One of which is still thriving, and one of which is...not.

It was just the last time everyone in my circle of friends was all together. As I've said before, probably the biggest regret of my life is never having had that tight, crazy, undergrad college experience. Well, in a way, my early years in Austin I think have stepped up and taken the place of that. Hell, I moved here when I was 21: all of my growing up has been here. All of my biggest mistakes, most painful experiences, and biggest joys have happened here. I would say the years 2001 through 2004 or so were some of the greatest years of my life. I made the friends that I know I will have forever (some before that, and some after, but the bulk was during that time), and I had probably the most fun I've ever had in my life during those years.

Making films, traveling, endless parties, shows of friends' bands, art openings, film screenings, late-night, drunken four-square games, looooong nights at La-La's and the parking lot of the Draughthouse, summer bicycle riding through the city at sunset, a million packs of cigarettes and bottles of Knob Creek. Those years will always be so special and meaningful to me. I've never been more open to things and people and experiences in my entire life, and maybe never will be again.

Life here has been good to me. It's bitch-slapped me into next week a few times as well, but overall, I think Austin will always be my Home.

I can't wait to see Karen next month and stay up all night talking and drinking whiskey and cracking each other up. I love that girl so much it breaks my heart.

Old habits die hard

Some people say that in relationships, timing is everything, above all else. I don't completely believe this, but I don't disbelieve it, either. We bring to every relationship we form the sum of all of our experience, along with our current situations. And if we can't imagine our lives having turned out any differently than they are now, most likely it all has to do with one or two decisions we made, perhaps haphazardly or impuslvely, a long time ago.

Which is why "fate" is bullshit. Any of our lives could just as easily have gone a totally different direction if we hadn't ask that person for their phone number, or moved to a different city, or not gone out for drinks one night. It's sort of too overwhelming to think about, but it's something I tend to obssess about. Rather needlessly, of course.

Some very close friends of mine that I respect 100% recently undertook the viewing of Six Feet Under.

Anyone who knows me at all knows that SFU is kind of like my religion. It is what allowed me to be born again. I'll spare you the details (of course, if you've been reading this blog for the past 3 years, you already know the details....), but suffice to say, SFU pretty much ranks right up there with being born as one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. It literally changed my life: it opened up a whole new world to me, and totally altered my philosophy.

But I was also in the deepest, darkest trenches of emotional warfare at the time, fighting a losing battle against enemy insurgents in my brain that wanted to kill me. And SFU was a revelation. Why it was a revelation is too much to get into at the moment, but it was.

And the thing about my friends watching the show is this: they don't really care for it. I haven't discussed it in detail with them because I'm a coward and don't have the stamina for it (and I wouldn't want to put words in their mouths anyway), but I think they find it silly, pretentious and maybe slightly laughable.

Hmmm.

I know I'm overanalyzing here (surprise!), but if they see so very little of what I see when I watch that show, then what can that possibly mean?

Probably very little, actually. It's a fucking TV show.

But it's my TV show!!! It's what inspired me to change my life and become a therapist and go back to school. Hell, it even inspired me to practice a particular kind of therapy.

But maybe....just maybe....

If I saw the show now for the first time, assuming that my life were still in the same place it is now, would it still mean as much to me?

Hard to say, but probably not. I bet I would still like it a whole lot, though. When you find something (or someone) that speaks to you so profoundly, it's impossible to separate that from the circumstances or history.

It just is, it just does. So I can't hardly blame my friends for not seeing in Six Feet Under the same magic that I did: our lives and situations while watching it couldn't be more different. There's nothing more to be read into it than that.

Of course, I still think they're wrong and I still find it disappointing, but there is no deeper meaning than that.

A relationship with a TV show, or any piece of art, can be as complicated (or as simple) as any relationship with a person. It all depends on where you are, where you've been, and where you're going.

Plain as that.

VMU in Rogers, Arkansas??

I got into a conversation recently with my ex-boyfriend, whom I went to high school with, but who now also lives in Austin, about all the growth occurring in our hometown of Rogers, Arkansas. When he and I were both born, it was a tiny little empty town of less than 4,000 people, but is now the fastest-growing region of the country, and the town itself has now capped 50,000 official residents. It's only one in a series of what used to be small, distinct towns that have all grown together into one, sprawling suburb of more than 200,000 people. It starts with Bentonville, Wal-Mart headquarters, then turns into Rogers (where Wal-Mart was actually founded, but lays claim to little else), then becomes Springdale, a mostly poor, and fairly trashy farming and agricultural community that is now pretty much exclusively Mexican, which in turn segues into Fayetteville, home of the University of Arkansas, and the place most people would probably consider the cultural and liberal seat of not just Northwest Arkansas, but probably all of Arkansas. (It's actually very much like Austin, with a similar feel and geography, but with only about 80,000 people.) All these little towns are connected by HWY 540 (aka, the "bypass" to those in the know).

But I digress. In the last few years Rogers has exploded really more than any of these other towns for reasons I have yet to figure out (especially considering it's a dry county, which yes, means you can't buy alcohol anywhere in Benton County). Every chain store and restaurant you can possibly imagine (and some you can't....) have moved in, with shopping centers, gated communities, and suburb upon suburb upon suburb sprouting up in every direction, with names like Camelot Estates, except they all look the same, all the houses are fucking ginormous, and at last inspection, most of them remain largely empty. Town has really started moving south, out by my parents' house, which used to be in the fucking country, and last time I was here I rode my bike through a large, turny, sprawling neighborhood out behind my parents' property (5 acres that they're holding onto for dear life!) that was complete, but every single house was empty. It was really eerie, and felt weirdly post-apocalyptic or something.

Anyway, I was talking to my ex about all of this, and I was arguing that though it was all very nice and good for the people living here and the economy and all that, I just really despised all of it. I remember once upon a time not so long ago, that with the exception of Wal-Mart, almost every business in Rogers was locally owned and unique. Getting a Burger King was a novelty when I was about 6, and for the most part, it was all neatly contained. You had the historic downtown area, with lots of neat little shops, a few apartments, the library, and lots of tiny old houses with big porches and bigger character. A couple of streets branched off from downtown, both north and south and east and west, but that was about it. As of today, with the exception of a smattering of authentic Mexican restaurants, downtown is the only part of town that has retained any character, walkability, or local flavor (there's even a really hip coffee shop with Morrissey posters and hipsters and shit).

The old Peachtree Hotel downtown, now a retirement community.

It's hard to make people like my family understand why despite "having everything you could ever want" this place feels more like hell to me than ever (so I don't try, I just let it go, because why bother). My ex was arguing that despite the plasticity, sameness and sprawl of it all, the growth meant that attitudes were changing. When we were in high school, if you went to the movies with blue hair, or were 2 guys walking around downtown together after dark, you were taking your lives in your hands. Not so anymore, and I see his point. If you go to the movies now, you see all kinds of people, from frat boys, to soccer moms, to young, punk rock kids, to even (gasp!) black people! (I kid you not, you wouldn't have seen a black person in Rogers more than 5 years ago.)

While I agree with him, I find it frustrating that you have to trade one for the other. Or do you? Austin is a town that has proved you can grow but still retain local flavor and character. Maybe I'm romanticizing Rogers' past after all.

There are signs of good things, though. The new centerpiece of the city, the Pinnacle Promenade, an outdoor, pedestrian mall filled with stores like Banana Republic and Sephora, is creating a density all its own. It's right next to the highway (and about 2 seconds from my parents), has an interesting, playful design (it's all very art deco and actually sort of attractive), and is driving up real estate. They're building a huge, new state of the art hospital (and turning the old one near downtown into a solely mental health facility), a Westin hotel, and among other things...condos! (Granted, the ones going in right now are above a bank and a gas station, but the impetus is there.) Signs are sprouting up in large pastures near my parents' house advertising space for vertical mixed use, and apparently, some people are even starting to pressure city council to start looking into public transportation! That'll never, ever happen, but at least people are thinking about these things.

An outdoor scene from the Pinnacle Promenade.

Being at home sometimes is exhausting and enfuriating as I watch all of this happen. If I have my way about it, I'll never live here ever again, so I have no emotional attachment to it, and the people here seem to like it, so I guess I should just stop worrying. But when they put in a new Wal-Mart and shopping center about a 5-minute walk from my parents' house and call it Tuscany Square, and make it look like what I can only presume is some stupid developer's version of Venetian, except it's hideously ugly and stupid, and isn't even the correct region of Italy to call Tuscan, it makes me so depressed I can't stand it. Maybe not because I see every ounce of character this city ever had being sucked away, but maybe because I know that this happens everywhere. And people like it. And they think it's cosmopolitan and urban, and hating it makes me feel like such a self-righteous schmuck, but I do hate it. And it takes 45 minutes to get anywhere, even though the town is about 7 miles wide. I mean, is there no foresight? I guess the land is limitless, but don't they realize the resources aren't? The whole area is one giant, faceless suburb not even in search of a city and it all makes me feel so disconnected from everything (including my past) that it actually creates anxiety for me when I'm here.

I guess that's why for the most part, I try not to leave my parents' house when I visit. Which suits me just fine.

Christmas Vacation

Today I became furious with my mother in Borders because she said I wasn't spending enough money on my sister-in-law. Because clearly it's not the thought that counts, it's the amount you spend.

Not that I'm keeping score or anything, but last year, my sister-in-law and my brother together bought me a t-shirt. Which is fine. It's a lovely and thoughtful t-shirt (the Colbert Nation t-shirt), but I'm not allowed to buy a $6 book (even though I knew what I wanted to get her before I saw that it was on sale) because it makes me cheap?

And people wonder why I hate Christmas. Why can't I just buy what I want to buy people regardless of how much it cost?

Tonight I fell asleep in church and my elbow slipped off the end of the rail and I almost fell off the pew.

My sister-in-law spilled communion juice on the pastor and he didn't finish blessing her because he was so irritated. We both were laughing hysterically and couldn't stop.

Last night my mother became visibly (and verbally) angry with me for saying that when I decided to have kids I just want to adopt black foster kids with AIDS that no one else will take. Because someone has to love them. I guess that's not what Jesus would do.

Today at my grandma's house I found an old board game from the 80's called Therapy, where each player uses a couch to move around the board and has to answer personal questions about the stages of life and analyze the other players. And it's kinda racy.

If my friends in Austin think they're going to get out of playing this game with me, they're sadly mistaken.

Tonight I've had 3 glasses of whiskey, and earlier today my father walked in on me jerking off in my room.

That's embarassing but expected when you're 12, but when you're 30, it's just humiliating and pathetic.

Tonight Tom made me laugh.

Merry Christmas.

Feeding the War Machine

A recent blog post by a friend about what is coming to be commonly known as the "healthcare crisis" inspired me to add another chapter to the saga.

Roughly 15 years ago, my older brother (who was 18 at the time) was in a terribly debilitating car accident, was in a coma for 9 weeks, and upon awaking, spent months and months in physical therapy. He had to learn how to do everything again: eat, walk, talk, even sit up straight. After 3 months in rehab at Baylor in Dallas, his total hospital bill topped out at well over $100,000. And that didn't count the weekly rehab he still had to get once he moved back home to Arkansas. Luckily, he was covered on my mother's state insurance (she's a public school teacher) and very little of that actually came out of my parents' pocket. But imagine if one or both of my parents hadn't had good insurance, or my brother hadn't been covered? That would have been the end of my parents. There's no way they could pay that bill without losing everything.

Eventually he's able to work again, but only part-time, and he collects Social Security. Due to only working part-time and being disabled, his only real insurance is Medicare. He could, especially now, work far more than he is, but due to receiving Social Security, he can't make more than a certain amount of money each month, which is basically poverty level. Otherwise he loses his Social Security. And if he loses his Social Security, he loses his Medicare, his only form of insurance.

Somewhere along the way, he contracts HIV. (We won't even go into how his brain injury impairs judgment and inhibits control of impulsive behavior; that's another post, or a book). For years he's fine, but at the beginning of 2005 (or 2006, I'm not sure), he sees a spike in viral loads, and his T-Cells drop. Which means it's time for the dreaded "cocktail." Luckily, the cocktail works, with little to no side effects, which is rare, but all the drugs combined cost over $3,000 a month, which, with a small co-pay, is covered by Medicare.

Well, about 6 months after he starts on the cocktail, he receives a letter from Social Security informing him that he's been being overpaid because he makes too much money, and he now owes them $30,000 in back payments. End of payments to the brother; now he owes them.

2 weeks later he receives another letter informing him that he will still get his payments, but they're going to subtract $50 every month to begin reimbursing their $30,000. (Uh, how long you think that'll take? Anybody care to do the math?) Then 2 weeks after that he receives another letter saying he's still going to receive payments but they're going to take $100 out every month to begin reimbursing their $30,000.

Also, because of this, he gets kicked off Medicare. Bye-bye cocktail medicine insurance. Now, in order to pay for those drugs that cost $3,000 a month, it has to come out of somebody's pocket.

Needless to say, my parents are scrambling furiously to try to figure out how this happened, what to do, and how to get him reinstated on Social Security. Clearly, no one seems to be in charge, and their policies for dealing with my brother are changing month to month. Finally my parents start working with a counselor, who tells them to save all of my brother's pay stubs, public transportation receipts (he can't drive due to his injury) and all paperwork pertaining to the HIV meds. She says to send them to her every 6 weeks. So they do. And this works for awhile. She gets him all reinstated, and everything's back to semi-normal.

One day, my father gets a huge package in the mail from Social Security and opens it. It's a package of all the stuff he's been sending this counselor for the past 12 weeks or so, with a note attached from someone else saying, "So and so doesn't work here anymore. What is all this stuff and what am I supposed to do with it?"

And everything started all over again. (For the record, my brother gets his drugs covered again, with co-pays, and after a $4,000 annual premium due up front at the beginning of each year.) But my family has been fighting this for years, and it's still not resolved, and now lawyers are involved (I think it ended up that he's back on SS, but still owes the $30,000, even though all the previous rules were followed). Who knows how long this could continue to drag on, with no small amount of financial and emotional drain.

The biggest problem in all of this to me seems to be a serious lack of oversight. If Social Security and Medicare are both federal agencies, and no one is there to manage them or hold anyone accountable for anything, then how is universal coverage going to work? I have my doubts about universal coverage, despite how badly I want it, and think the citizens of this country deserve it. I also have my suspicions that under a different administration, and were we not in the middle of a ridiculous war that's draining every federal resource there is, this kind of stuff might be handled in a more pragmatic and efficient way.

But also, if the United States had a more formalized version of universal care (and maybe an addendum to this could be a caveat for parents to cover their adult children if the adult children are disabled), then the Social Security wouldn't be so important to my brother, and he could A) work more, and B) probably ultimately be less of a drain on federal dollars (depending on how his federally subsidized insurance coverage would work, and how prescriptions fall into that).

Root Shock

The Housing Act of 1949 was designed to address inner-city “blight,” which was loosely defined as any building or neighborhood that had lost its “sparkle,” or, more pragmatically, its profit margin. It was developed post-WW II specifically to initiate “progress” in the cities, and switching from the economy of war to a more productive economy.


Once the blighted land was identified, the areas (neighborhoods) could be seized by the government due to imminent domain and, thanks to federal subsidies, sold to commercial developers at a fraction of what it was worth. And the people who lived there? Well, they were compensated mildly and sent on their way. If you haven’t yet figured it out, the people this most affected were poor black people. By June of 1967, less than twenty years after “Urban Renewal” had become the modus operandi of American cities, over 400,000 low-and-middle income residential units had been demolished to make way for office buildings and cultural institutions, while only 10,760 low-rent housing units had been built to replace them.


This is the very issue that Mindy Thompson Fullilove, M.D. addresses in her book, Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It. She traces the people and neighborhoods, and subsequent destruction and displacement due to urban renewal, in 3 American cities: Pittsburgh; Roanoke, Virginia; and Newark, New Jersey. According to the National Commission on Civil Disorders, a “seminal work on segregation in the United States,” inadequate housing was the number three grievance among people surveyed in 15 cities in the 1960’s, the United States’ most active decade for rioting and civil unrest.


Many factors that you see today that contribute to the sprawl and dismemberment among cities can be attributed to urban renewal. In an attempt to shield the wealthy whites of the city from the poor blacks, housing projects were often physically separated from the rest of the city by massive highways, or sometimes, literally even walls. More often than not, however, whole neighborhoods (sometimes referred to as slums) were simply bulldozed to make way for nicer, “whiter” homes, office parks, arenas, universities, museums, or simply left as empty, vacant land. Blocks were taken out to run highways right through the center of cities. Pittsburgh, for instance, destroyed an entire thriving city-within-a-city called the Lower Hill, right next to downtown to construct the civic arena and three connecting highways, thusly not only driving out all the blacks, but contributing to a crumbling and disconnected infrastructure for the wealthier white people as well. In addition, most of the inclines (Pittsburgh's main mode of public transportation at that time) were all deliberately ripped out to inhibit the passage from the "lower" neighborhoods (the inner city black ones) to the "upper" neighborhoods (the white ones on top of the many hills surrounding Pittsburgh). Thus ensuring that a car culture would inevitably take route, encourage even more "white flight," and thus rip out the beating heart of the city.

While most people would look at these neighborhoods as poor substitutes for a healthy urban environment, in speaking with the residents themselves who were uprooted by this process, Dr. Fullilove finds a heavy emotional toll. They weren’t perfect neighborhoods, to be sure, but the neighborhoods belonged to these people, from the crumbling houses, to the jazz clubs, to the restaurants and markets, they were largely self-contained and black-owned. People spoke of true community, where you knew every single person within a 4-block radius; if someone was sick, their neighbors took care of them; everyone’s children played together, stayed in the neighborhood (where else would they go?) and were watched over (and disciplined) by every adult. If unemployment struck someone, the neighbors and family pitched in to help until the person got back on their feet, and all the businesses catered to the blacks: their family, friends, and neighbors. In other words, it was cohesive, and it was a system that worked, gave people a sense of efficacy and belonging, and provided a valuable social safety net at a time when black people had very little going for them in American society.

Contributing even further to this disconnect was the slow flight of production from cities to the suburbs. Once the people from the inner cities were gone, the factories and blue collar jobs also moved further out, or closed their doors altogether. Thus, the displaced now not only had to abandon their homes and neighborhoods, they lost their jobs. (And forget about all those black-owned businesses ever reopening in new, often more affluent neighborhoods.)

Dr. Fullilove spends considerable time getting to these uprooted people, including a black, gay, HIV-positive, slightly scizophrenic homeless man, who grew up in dire poverty and sexual abuse at the hands of his family, but survived only through the care of his Philadelphia neighborhood and neighbors and community institutions. Dr. Fullilove revisits the site of his old densely crowded neighborhood, which was demolished years ago to make room for empty space and a Hertz rental car facility ("where it Hertz to rent a car," the man jokes).

It is a book of despair, but also of hope, with Dr. Fullilove having spent years and years of her life studying the psychology of displacement and uprooted urbanism. She currently leads community projects, workshops, therapeutic conferences, and meets regularly with city council and other governmental leaders in various cities across America. She offers a specific and goal-oriented program on ways to avoid these further catastrophes and help rebuild and restore the hearts and souls of America's cities: their neighborhoods.

Times Change

Last May, the Oregon legislature approved two enormous civil rights bills for gay folk, the first being a broad anti-discrimination bill in employment, and secondly, a "civil parternships" bill which grants gay couples every single legal benefit of marriage in Oregon, just without actually calling it marriage. Only Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, California, New Jersey, Maine, Washington, and Hawaii have civil partnerships benefits to gay couples, but none go as far as Oregon's, except obviously, Massachussetts, since they allow outright marriage. This was an especially bold move for the Oregon legislature, since voters in that state voted to constitutionally ban gay marriage there as recently as 2004. One wishes every liberal-leaning politician could be so brave (or honest).

Both bills in Oregon are due to kick in starting in January of 2008, but not without a fair amount of protest. Former senator Marilyn Shannon, leader of the hate group Defense of Marriage and Family Again (one assumes the "again" to reference their activism when gay marriage was on the ballot in 2004), has spent the last 5 months desperately trying to get enough signatures on a ballot to present to the legislature to force both gay-rights laws into a public vote and override the legislative decision. All that was needed was 55,179 signatures, and in a state with a population of almost 4 million, guess what? They couldn't get enough people to sign it. Being only 116 signatures short, one wonders how hard it could possibly be to get just 116 more. Either they didn't try hard enough (which I sincerely doubt), or the interest among the general population in continuing to waste time spreading hatred and discrimination just isn't there.

What a differenc 3 years, a war, and a completely corrupt and perverted "family values" Republican party can make, huh?

It's official: the only thing worse than being gay in Republikan Amerika is being poor.

This week, after George Bush told 4 million poor children and their parents to go fuck themselves and stop being so poor, at least 3 Republicans have shown that they still have a heart and a pulse after overturning a particularly insidious piece of legislation from Oklahoma from 2004.

...that's what Oklahoma lawmakers were striving for in 2004 with their chillingly titled "Adoption Invalidation Law," which targeted adopted children with gay parents.

That wrongheaded statute declared that Oklahoma would refuse to recognize "an adoption by more than one individual of the same sex from any other state or foreign jurisdiction." In other words, if a gay couple and the child they adopted in, say, California or Maryland moved to Oklahoma or simply drove through Oklahoma on vacation, they would not be treated as a legally recognized family by any Oklahoma official -- whether a police officer, public school teacher or judge.

Sounds un-American, doesn't it? It's also unconstitutional. That's what a federal court of appeals told Oklahoma on Aug. 3 in striking down the law. A panel of three judges -- all of them Republican appointees -- of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with a lower court ruling that Oklahoma's anti-family law violated the U.S. Constitution's Full Faith and Credit Clause, which requires states to honor one another's judicial judgments, including adoptions.

I mean, if Okalahoma wants to hate on gay people (which they do), then fine. I don't know who in their right fucking mind would want to live in that ugly-ass, wasteland, vacuum of a state anyway, but to intentionally target little kids to suffer is just pathological. You seriously can't get much lower than that. That's like being mad at someone, so you decide to torture their cat to get revenge.

Beyond that, I'm actually left a little speechless.

Down in the country, amongst the pines

I've been really feeling the need lately to really sit at this thing and write something, as opposed to just posting pictures. It's hard to do here, partly because I don't really have anywhere that's actually private in which to do it, and I'm very shy about anyone being able to see what I'm doing if I'm doing something like writing in this stupid blog. Matt & Angela's house is always nice for writing, but it takes away from my socializing.

Speaking of them, I had, of course, a lovely time at their place again last Saturday. Matt's parents were there as well, so I got to have dinner with all of them Saturday night before I headed back to camp. His father has recently gotten into counseling (he does the counseling; he's also an M.D.), so I talked to him for a long time about that, and about different theories and ideas. It was great; I could have talked to him all night.

Sunday evening I drove back to Asheville yet again to see my parents. They're attending a church conference in Chattanooga this week, so hopped over here to see me. On Monday we toured the Biltmore, which was fucking incredible, if a bit overstimulating. And we were there for, like, 5 hours, touring the house, touring the grounds and gardens, eating lunch, shopping. Monday night we went to downtown Asheville and walked around a bit (I still can't get over how much I love downtown Asheville, and how awesome I think it is), and went to a really cool little pizza place that Matt recommended. They just so happened to be having a little trivia game that night, so my family and I jumped in and ended up coming in second! We were very impressed with ourselves. So we won a $15 gift certificate that I'm going to give to Matt. The third place team left and didn't claim their prize, so the guy heading up the trivia came over and gave us their prize too, which was a set of 4 bar-glasses with their logo on them. They're cute. I stole one, so my parents won't have a complete set, but whatever. I wanted one.

At 6:30 Tuesday morning, we left Asheville, and my parents drove me back to camp. It was hard to come back; I still don't really feel very settled here, but once I'm actually back, it's easier. It's the coming back that's hard. Being somewhere like this sort of drives home to me how disconnected I seem to feel so much of the time from other people. Granted, almost everyone here is quite a bit younger than I am, and the people that are my age have all known each other for years. But Charlotte is great. At dinner last night I asked if anyone would have any desire whatsoever to go see Hostel 2 with me, and everyone wrinkled their noses except Charlotte, who got excited and said she would "love to." So I think we're gonna try to sneak out one of these nights and go see it. (Which isn't why I think she's great, that's just one thing that makes me happy.) A couple other people here, too, are really cool, but I don't talk with them much. My professor's niece, Annie, that's a counselor is awesome, too. She just turned 19, but acts like she's 30, and she's super sweet. Which doesn't surprise me. Unfortunately, she's leaving this Saturday for good because something came up that she has to attend to.

Some pictures Charlotte took of me and Annie when we went mountain biking together the other day:


I have no idea what I'm doing in this picture.

Anyway, things are okay. I've really been wanting to write a big entry about Flannery O'Connor lately, but I just can't seem to collect my thoughts enough to do it. But being in the mountains, in her part of the country (sort of) and reading a lot of her in one sitting is weird. She gets me thinking like few writers do. Which is why I think I'm having a hard time writing about her: I have no idea what I actually think of her. I'm interested, and her writing alternately fascinates and totally creeps me out. Anyway, more on this later.

Yesterday I stepped on a snake, but we both escaped unharmed. And then today, on the Pigeon River, I was barefoot, stepping over rocks, and almost put my foot down right on top of a snake with his head sticking out of the water. That freaked me out a little.

I couldn't even tell you the last time I was awakened in the morning by being furiously licked in the face, but it certainly makes one feel welcome!

Well here I am in Asheville. It's a charm factory; I think I'm already in love. I haven't made it camp yet (that's tomorrow), but I've been hanging out with Matt and Angela, which has been totally lovely. Yesterday we went mountain biking with their dog, Ada (who incidentally, is also who licked my face awake this morning; not Matt). Ada is an Australian sheepherder dog, so it was really fun to watch her run up ahead and check everything out on the trail, then run back to the three of us and make sure we were all corralled together and heading the right way. She would run alongside the bikes for a bit, then get bored and run ahead again, then run back. Man, she had a great time. As did I.

After that, we came home and showered, and Matt and Angela gave me the official Asheville downtown tour. It's so cute, I can't stand it. We visited some galleries and thrift store/flea market type places, went to a "sustainable clothing" store with really cute stuff that also has bins in the back of irregular American Apparel shirts for super cheap, but I didn't end up buying any of them, and then a musty old used bookstore that was everything a musty old used bookstore should be. We had dinner at a really hip vegetarian restaurant where I had a spring salad with grilled tofu that was divine. There was a hippy/street urchin/gutter punk couple at the table next to us with a box of RID, and one of whom I saw actually lick the top of the sugar dispenser. I was totally grossed out and then irrationally angry about it, and then I wondered if I was going to be a Republican when I grew up.

Today Matt and Angela are both at work, so I have the house to myself. There's no air conditioning, and their windows are all open and pouring in light and cool breezes and bird songs, and their home is surrounded by trees, and it's the most tranquil I've been in forever. Ada is sleeping at my feet as I type, and I'm drinking delicious coffee. In a bit I'm going to take her for a walk. When Angela gets home I think we're going to go shopping for me to get some last minute things for camp. They have been gracious and hospitable hosts, and their home is truly lovely.

Silence looked me in the face, and I finally heard its voice

Working at a place like Doug's House can get you used to dealing with a lot of shit. Both literally and metaphorically. You see the "dregs" of humanity, societal castaways and the forgotten. People who have been so abused and abandoned, and done plenty of abusing and abandoning themselves, that if you never understood the human survival instinct before, you surely would after being there. Or maybe sometimes it's the opposite, working feverishly against the individual in every action they take. Some people try for years to kill themselves, and in the end, they're the ones that hold on most tightly when it's time to go. Sometimes they're the ones that fight the hardest; whose bodies, even after years, sometimes decades, of abuse and destruction, refuse to give up. Working at a place like Doug's House can quickly teach you what it might take years to discover in books. Nothing replaces experience. I can easily see why people get so burned out in this profession. It's draining, for the most part unappreciative, demanding and just hard to do, physically and emotionally. For the rest of my life, every time I see soft serve ice cream, I'm going to think about cleaning up about a pint and a half of diarrhea out of someone's brief, who not only can't move, but has a prolapsed rectum that's swollen and bleeding. I don't say that to be flippant, I say that because it's true and that was the goal: to make his stool the consistency of ice cream.

It's not as hard as it sounds. You just suck it up and you do it. It has to be done. You get through it. You don't take deep breaths, you wash your hands about a zillion times afterwards. Even if you don't believe in god, you go outside to collect yourself and look up at the stars and thank him that it's not you, and beg that it never will be. You think, "I would just kill myself before it got to that point," but you know it's not true. You wouldn't. You'd hold on because you're not ready to go yet, even though your body is quitting on you, you're literally nothing but a skeleton, and at this point, all you're expelling is years of intestinal sludge.

I never knew that when people are dying, their heart rate increases (usually to about 120 beats a minute), but their breathing slows down drastically (usually to about 6 breaths a minute). That's one way you know that they're going. Sometimes, when they've been paralyzed for years on one whole side of their body, that side of their body begins to move for no reason. It twitches, and they can grasp your hand with their fingers.

R. is 56, and his partner of almost 17 years hasn't left the house since he arrived 8 days ago. He's going, anytime, probably tonight. R.'s father, who is very old and restores stringed instruments for a living and resells them in a little shop, is also there every day. He's a beautiful old man, and sweet as the dickens. He goes home for dinner more often, and usually home to sleep at night, but always comes back. R.'s sister is often there as well; she's not ready to let go yet, and she's gonna have a rough time of it. You know. But it's nice to see someone get so much support, to see someone whose life was so full of love and tenderness and art and fulfillment. Just being in his room with all these people is so intense, and the energy in there is so...not really positive, but it is. It's sincere, it's palpable, it's inspiring. They're the real deal, and no one's going home early.

And you go in the kitchen to get a drink of water, and you can inadvertently start a conversation with another staff member about philosophy, and existentialism, and dying and books and they've been there and their heart is so large and they've lived so much life it makes you wonder how they can just walk around on Earth and act like a normal person.

And sometimes, you can leave a place like Doug's House at night to drive home, and realize how fucking full of love the world can be, and it feels like your heart is going to burst, and you just listen to the Dixie Chicks in your car and cry instead.

88 Percent

That's the number of foster children adopted by gay couples in San Francisco since last July. This week, as San Fran prepares a huge pro-gay adoption blitz (complete with billboards all over the city), apparently the San Francisco Chronicle likes to quote leaders of hate groups, as recognized by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The offending article was printed yesterday morning, and the offending paragraph goes like this:

The campaign, which will include a billboard in the Castro featuring two dads with their teen daughter, is perhaps the first of its kind and sure to be controversial. It comes just two weeks after the evangelical Christian group Focus on the Family began its drive to recruit more Christians as adoptive parents, partly -- the group said -- to keep foster children out of homosexual hands.

Focus on the Family's objection to same-sex parents is grounded in interpretation of biblical scripture and research by Paul Cameron, director of the Family Research Institute in Colorado. Cameron says gays and lesbians are unfit parents, are more likely to molest children of their same sex, switch partners frequently, have shorter life expectancies and cause their children embarrassment and social difficulties.

"Any child that can be adopted into a married-mother-and-father family, that's the gold standard," Cameron said. "An orphanage would be the second choice, and then a single woman."

Well, if all that isn't offensive enough, reporter Ilene Lelchuck fails to mention that Paul Cameron, according toAmericablog: "told the 1985 Conservative Political Action Committee conference that "extermination of homosexuals" might be needed in the next three to four years. He has advocated tattooing AIDS patients in the face, and banishment to a former leper colony for any patient who resisted. He has called for gay bars to be closed and gays to be registered with the government.

He was kicked out of the American Psychological Association, and was publicly rebuked by the Nebraska Psychological Association and the American Sociological Association. And he has been called the leader of a "hate group" by the Southern Poverty Law Center, America's number one civil rights organization for tracking the klan, neo-Nazis and white supremacists. The Southern Poverty Law Center went so far as to say that "Cameron's 'science' echoes Nazi Germany." And the SPLC tracks actual Nazis, so they have the right to make the comparison.

This is the "expert" quoted by the San Francisco Chronicle. And to make matters worse, not only did the Chronicle quote a known hate group as an expert on civil rights, but they didn't even identify who Cameron really is. Nope. They don't tell their readers anything at all about Cameron, simply that he's an expert on gays molesting children. Do you think it's relevant that the man's "science" has been debunked? Not according to the "journalists" at the Chronicle.

I suspect Ms. Lelchuck will most likely be issuing an apology in the next day or two. This is just incredibly sloppy, lazy reporting. Why quote the man in the first place, unless that's your agenda?

Entitlement

I used to think that having grown up with two public school teachers as parents had given me a biased view of what public school and teenagers were all about. My father quit teaching when I was pretty young, and eventually went back to it, but my mom has always taught, and still does. She teaches orchestra, and built a huge, statewide recognized program in Rogers from virtually nothing. But teaching an elective also has its downside, especially when you're dealing with something like music, where egos tend to become oversized and demanding. I'll never forget when I was in 8th grade, seeing my mom sitting in her car in the parking lot of my junior high, sobbing uncontrollably, because she'd just come from a meeting at the high school where she taught, where a group of students, led by their coddling parents, had decided to make my mother's life miserable. She couldn't bear to come inside the classroom in that condition, obviously, and it took her 15 minutes to collect herself enough to do so. This particular group of students, who all had horribly pretentious, overbearing parents, had decided that they had outgrown my mother's musical instruction, that she wasn't giving them the credit they rightfully deserved, that she was treating them unfairly, and that perhaps she was no longer suited for that job, and someone else should step in. I don't recall all the details; my mom tried to hide them from me the best she could since I knew all of these students and their families, and a couple of them went to our church, but from that day forward, my mother has barely been able to conceal her contempt for each of those students and their parents. Even to this day, and that was like, 17 years ago. Because of them, after that year she quit teaching high school and taught only elementary and junior high students. I know that was a really heartbreaking decision for my mom to make. She loved teaching high school, and many of her students went on to major in music in college and have rewarding careers as professional players or teachers, and she loved being there through all those transitions, and she loved many of them personally. But I guess it's sort of how if someone breaks your heart, it's impossible to ever go back to the way things were before, even if you want to. It's over.

So in a sense, those awful kids won: they got a new instructor, though this time it was a man, and they didn't go any easier on him. In their senior year he got leukemia and actually began dying, and they showed absolutely no compassion or support, and the worse he got, the harder they tried to make things on him, because somehow they perceived it as being shortchanged on the education they should be getting.

Over the years since then, though, things haven't gotten much better. My mother eventually moved to a whole new school district in a whole new town to start a whole new program from the ground up, and already in the second year, she was facing many of the same problems, the same egos, and the same overbearing parents, but this time, it was starting in 7th and 8th grade, not 10th or 11th. She's had parents in her office literally screaming at her because little Johnny isn't first chair violin, even though little Johnny doesn't practice and is disruptive in class. She's been called a bitch, told she's a horrible teacher, told she's unsuitable, been threatened, and had parents rip their kids out of her class because she won't acquiese to every demand. This is what education in America has come to.

Being an older student at a private, mostly-white and upper-class university has been interesting for me. Professors confide in me. They see that I'm different, that I work really hard, that I make an effort to work with them, and come to them in humility when I have an issue, instead of in anger and entitlement. Obviously, I'm not the only student like this, but I can only speak from my experience. And a couple of professors there have told me the same stories. So much entitlement. That's the word they always use. Parents who call up screaming at them because their child got a B, or students who throw hissy fits in the professors' office because they failed the class, but didn't bother to show up for half the semester and failed two tests. It seems to be an epidemic, and it's terrifying. These same college kids are no doubt the same kids and parents who give people like my mom such a hard time and suck out what little joy or fulfillment she ever found in teaching.

I never understood the psychology behind any of this. Even as a child it was baffling. These kids will never learn to fail and pick themselves up; they'll never learn emotional coping skills or experience the fulfillment of real success and struggle.

This whole post was inspired by another post I just read about the exact same thing (albeit much shorter) with a link to a jaw-dropping ABC news story about how employers are now even feeling the heat from parents, but shockingly, they're bowing to them! Parents have created a whole generation of crippled adults, which in some ways is better news for those of us who have actually learned to struggle and cope and don't expect handouts: it can only make us that much more appealing in a glutted and overly-competitive job market.

The tourists come and look at us

In a recent post on my friend Mark's blog, he talked about settling in at night with his wife, my other friend Kat, getting their favorite snacks and junk food, and watching their favorite trashy television shows together, and that this is what marriage was all about.

I'm pretty sure he meant that in a good way. Because they're with their favorite people: each other. I found this one little line incredibly sweet and more romantic than a million flowers or rings, and also, to me, what's always defined a great relationship. What I miss the most about living with my "significant other" (boyfriend, partner, lover, whatever you want to call him) is the exact same thing. I miss preparing little meals together, watching dumb TV and falling asleep on the couch. That probably sounds like death to most people, but it's not like this is all that our lives entailed. It was just those...quiet moments that you can share with someone that make relationships so great. Those times when you could easily be alone, and probably be okay with it, but it wouldn't be the same. It wouldn't have that comfort and that peace, and your trashy shows wouldn't be nearly as fun.

But you don't have to be in a romantic relationship with someone to have that. My roommate and I have a fairly regular routine every night of watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report together. Watching these silly shows is often what precipitates many of the conversations we have.

Lately, though, Jon and Stephen have been relegated to second-class citizens by Dylan because it's basketball season, and I've done a lot of watching of Jon and Stephen by myself, and you know what? It's not nearly as fun to watch by yourself. I mean, it's mildly amusing, but it's not as much fun to laugh by yourself, and you can't comment on the jokes they make, or the stories they talk about.

All of which is to say, for Dylan's sake, I hope the Jazz does well, but for my own selfish reasons, I hope they lose soon. I want my Daily Show buddy back.

Buy, Buy Baby

On Morning Edition this morning, they had a brief interview with Susan Gregory Thomas, author of the new book Buy Buy Baby, about the insidious marketing of consumer products to babies, the day they're born.

Obviously, these products are really directed at parents, exploiting the anxiety every new parent feels about taking care of their babies. Marketers posit that if they can hook a "consumer" from Day 1 and make a life-long customer out of them, they can gross over $200,000 from that consumer in a lifetime. Clearly that all depends on the product and circumstance, but it's a sick business. She went on to talk about how useless "educational" toys are for babies, you know the ones that are supposed to "stimulate" certain areas of the brain? Well, as she so helpfully points out, everyday life is incredibly stimulating for babies already, and what most babies need most each day is time to not be stimulated, to just be still and quiet and process.

Colic has recently been attributed, perhaps, to overstimulation on sensitive babies. Their nervous systems simply get overloaded, and it causes them a great deal of stress and anxiety. That makes me think about how stressed out I get when I walk around in New York City with all that stimulation (I really do find it incredibly overwhelming), and how babies must feel day to day.

Another thing she pointed out that I thought was really interesting, and makes sense, but which I'd never thought about before is that babies, and often even toddlers, get absolutely nothing out of those "educational" TV shows like Barney, or the Teletubbies, or Dora the Explorer, except for character recognition, which is then used against them in advertising. That's why it works so well.

So, in the days before Baby Einstein, and before Barney, and before Thomas the Train, we actually had the real Einstein, and Mozart, and Shakespeare, and Freud, and Kubrick, and Darwin, and Marie Curie. Humans have been getting along just fine for a very long time without educational toys. I hope that if I ever have babies, I can remember that and not let my parental anxiety and guilt dupe me into this crap.

Easter portraits with my nephew!

Jazz hands.
He loves his uncle.
He's dancing. That Akon song is his favorite song. When I was there, he was constantly singing, "Nobody wannna see us together, but it don't matter now, cause I got you!" I never liked that song before, but now I love it.

And here he is, apparently in some kind of drum line...?


It's weird how they start turning into actual little people.

"The world is white no longer, and will never be white again."

To add a counter-weight to my last, somewhat...negative post, I'd like to draw your attention to an incredibly inspiring "3am" column in this week's Austin Chronicle. The writer, Michael Ventura, argues that once the notion of an idea is released into the public, once the idea is in the air, "everyone inhales it."

What he's talking about is the idea of gay marriage, and the more the conservatives have to reiterate what it "should be" (as in, "marriage should be between a man and a woman"), the battle by the progressives has been won. It may take another generation to be fully integrated into society, but it will be integrated, and all this silly hand-wringing and non-comittment by politicians (we're looking at you, Clinton and Obama) will be a laughable trademark of the past.

Already it's legal in Massachusetts, it's on its way to being legal in New York; exact-replicas of marriage, dubbed "civil unions," but only in semantics, have been recently passed in New Jersey, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Maine, California, and DC; new laws protecting the rights of transgender students (read: kids!) have recently been passed in Massachusetts, Minnesota, California, New Jersey, and DC; and sweeping new pro-gay (well, anti-discrimination) laws have been passed just in the last couple of weeks in Iowa, probably will pass in Oregon (including a civil unions bill), and the gay foster parent ban was killed in Arkansas; a federal bill was introduced that would make discriminating against gay people in employment illegal.

But I digress. He argues that as society becomes more and more accepting of the debunking of "traditional" marriage vales and gender identities, a whole, new, sexually pluralistic world will be ours to embrace however we see fit (and however we see fit to define ourselves and our relationships). It's an exciting concept that makes me giddy to think about.

My mom has been really putting a lot of pressure on me lately to move back closer to home. Of course, it's never going to happen, but whenever I sort of (as nicely as possible) shrug off her suggestions and cajoling, it kind of breaks my heart a little bit more, as I'm sure it does hers. It's frustrating sometimes, and the real irony of it all is that the life she's always wanted me to lead, and the life I've affirmatively decided I want, I could never have there.

I want a family (yes, including kids). I want a home. I want a fulfilling career, and to feel a sense of inclusion and community wherever I live. Everything that I want is so ordinary, so regular, so boring. But were I to do all of those things in Rogers, Arkansas (which wouldn't even really be feasible), it would be considered radical and provocative. This is one thing I've absolutely never understood about opponents of gay marriage, and by extension, gay rights: for years they've maligned, persecuted, slandered, discriminated against, and threatened gay people for upsetting the status quo, for corrupting children and society, for being hedonistic, selfish, narcissistic. But when a gay person says, "Hey, I want exactly what you want. I want a spouse, I want 4 kids to raise, nurture and love, I want a regular job that I go to, and to make money to take my kids on nice vacations and send them to good schools," the conservative world shutters (or shrieks) and accuses us of being evil.

I'm pretty good at being empathetic I think, and seeing other people's points of view, even if I vehemently disagree, but that just makes no sense to me. I mean, obviously it presents a threat, but I don't get why. I truly, truly don't. Like, my mom loves for my brother and his family to come to her church on Sunday, and she parades my nephew around, and brags on him, and shows him off to everybody. I wonder if I had a husband, and a child that we adopted, if she would be quite so willing to put herself out there and so eager to show off our child, and say, "This is my son and his husband's daughter," and have to endure people's looks, questions, and whispers. Somehow, I doubt it. No matter how proud she might be, I just don't think she would have the strength to do that.

And it's fine. That's why I'll never live there (well, one reason among many), but I wonder if that would make sense to my mom. She thinks gay people wanting to raise children is radical. If she's gonna freak out if I kiss my boyfriend goodbye in the driveway of her house (because someone might see), well, then I'm fairly certain she would be pretty uncomfortable with the idea of my bringing home someone I call a husband, and our children, and sitting together in a pew at her small, conservative-ish church.

It's not that she's not supportive, it's just that, well, maybe it is radical. But it shouldn't be. And I think that's what Ventura is arguing in this article: that someday, probably sooner rather than later, it won't be so radical. The generation that thinks gay people have to be single, childless and alone their whole lives will someday all be gone, replaced with a new generation who takes gay families for granted. When I mentioned to my mom recently that I did want a family, and I did want kids someday, she gave me an utterly perplexed look, and said something along the lines of, "Well, you're gonna have to find a woman in order to do that." Well, yes, I suppose so technically. It's just not something people of her generation expect gay people to do, thus, she doesn't understand why it would be so difficult for me to live in Rogers, Arkansas. Not to mention, I'd just kill myself from boredom.

Ventura ends the article (and this is where he really won me over) with a quote from my favorite writer, James Baldwin, and a little nugget of real hope:

In 1953, James Baldwin, a gay African-American, wrote the most telling sentence of the 20th century: "The world is white no longer, and it will never be white again." He was right; the primacy of white power was soon to end. Now marriage and gender are no longer defined strictly by heterosexuals. Heterosexuals will not cease to be the majority, but – an enormous sea change in human history! – they have ceased to be the sole "official" definers of sexuality. Eventually this will expand our relationships in ways we cannot imagine. We've embarked, as a species, upon unmapped spectrums of sex. Baldwin would be pleased that half a century later his sentence could be refashioned to read: "The world is heterosexual no longer, and it will never be heterosexual again."

What I really mean: I wish you were here.

Despite being a 30-year old man, silly little things really freak me out sometimes. Like David Cronenberg's film The Brood, about a genetically engineered breed of mutant, murderous little kids who hide in people's kitchen cabinets and jump out and attack them when they least expect it. After watching that movie, everytime I came home from anywhere, I had to check all of my cabinets and closets, usually with my boyfriend on the phone with me, just in case I were to be attacked. I'm not sure what he could have done through the telephone, but at least someone would know. He was patient with me, despite sighing and saying, "Ryan, you're almost a thirty-year-old man." This went on for about a week.

When I was a little kid, one random day my pet dog decided to stand at the threshold of the bathroom, stare up at the light fixture and bark and growl incessantly at it. But if you tried to coax him into the bathroom (or worse, push him in there), he would freak out and run away, only to return some time later and resume his barking without ever actually going into the bathroom. This lasted about 3 days, and my entire family was, of course, convinced that we were being visited by some kind of poltergeist or ghost. As a child it both enthralled and terrified me, and despite not having any real feelings one way or another on God, ever since then I have been a firm believer in the supernatural. You know, they say animals can sense this stuff, and they know, and they do their best to protect you (like bark and growl at the bathroom, and try to warn you not to go in there). I don't know what an evil spirit would have wanted in our home, and why they wouldn't bother to wreack (sp?) anymore havoc than tormenting our dog, but there you go. I'm convinced it was real.

I hadn't thought about this in a long time, until last night. It was my seventh night of house-sitting for Kurt and Meredith, and thus far, I've been surprisingly comfortable in their home, and not at all freaked out by stuff at night. It helps having a hyper, noisy dog around to keep the bad guys away.

Or, to completely freak you out and convince you there's a ghost in the doorway of the bedroom.

I got home late from work last night (around 11) and did my usual nightly activities (showering, pouring some wine, and settling in to a big comfy chair to read a bit before bed), leaving Ruby (the dog) outside a bit longer before corralling her in for the evening.

When she came in, she immediately crawled up into her sleeping chair and laid her head down, but a moment later, suddenly jerked it up and began staring in the direction of the bathroom/bedroom. It was such a sudden movement that I noticed her doing it, so I watched her. She stared. She perked up her ears, without for a moment moving her eyes. I called her name, but she just glanced my way, then turned immediately back towards the bathroom/bedroom.

She had a chew toy between her paws so I picked it up and threw it in the direction of the bedroom/bathroom to see if she would go get it (as she always, always, always does). She didn't.

Chills went over my entire body.

Finally, after a moment, she slowly got out of the chair, meandered over to where the toy lay, hesitated a moment, then picked it up and trotted back over to me.

I tossed it again, and this time she went to get it, but about two feet in front of it, stopped and continued to stare at the bedroom door.

She slowly walked towards it, picked it up, and walked back over to me.

I swear to God, she turned around, actually turned her head, to look back at the door.

I wasn't interested in performing any more experiments, and watched her behavior as she left the toy, crawled back up in her chair, laid down her head and went to sleep.

I read for a few more minutes to observe her behavior and try to take my mind off the fact that I might be attacked in the night by some unholy apparition lurking in the bedroom.

But eventually my fatigue got the best of me, and I braved my way to the bedroom, where I immediately regressed to childhood by covering my whole body, including my head, with the blankets. So, you know, the ghosts wouldn't find me.

I guess they decided to leave me alone, as I'm still here this morning, and Ruby is back to being her loud, rowdy self. But I haven't been that freaked out in a long time. It was the kind of freaked out where the hair stands up on your neck and your breathing gets shallow. I have chills now just writing it.

And Texas is the place I dearly love to be.

I'm back in Arkansas this weekend to celebrate Easter and my birthday with my family. While it's always nice to see my family, being back in Arkansas, in the town where I grew up and spent the first 19 years of my life, is also always a little emotionally...disorienting. I don't want to say taxing, really, because it's not really that, but it's a sense of unease, a feeling of dislocation. I have a lot of extremely mixed emotions regarding this place, as I'm sure most people do who deliberatly leave their hometowns, not just for something a little different, but in order to even be able to live this kind of life they want to live in peace. I guess, having said that, it's a little ironic that I ended up in Texas, not at all by accident. Well, that's not entirely true; I did end up in Austin slightly by accident, but I had lived in Dallas 2 years before that, and that was quite planned.

I recently really let loose on a fellow blogger, whose blog I've been reading for awhile, for his constant Texas-bashing. See, the guy used to live in Texas, and he's gay, and an oh-so-enlightened liberal, and now he lives in Boston, which is the center of the fucking universe, and he writes column after column about how wretched Texas is, and how everyone who lives here is from hell, and how everyone in Boston hung the fucking moon, and they're so evolved up there.

I should have been more restrained, I guess, but the fact that he lives in Boston, I have to say, is somewhat of sore spot for me too, as I had to listen, for a whole year from my ex-boyfriend, about how lame Austin is, and how Boston is the best place in the world. My ex-boyfriend was from Boston, and moved here for work, for any of you reading who might not know that.

So he (my ex) was someone who came to Texas, not quite involuntarily (he had to make a decision), but this wouldn't have been the first place he would have chosen to live. As it is with this particular blogger I got so angry at. He moved here for work, had a terrible experience, and then got another job in Boston. Fine, dude. Let it go. Now he's made it his personal mission to denigrate and feel superior to everyone who might choose to call Texas home.

And I have chosen to call Texas home. The blogger makes some valid points about Texas, in terms of our miserable health care, sky-high poverty rates, poor quality of education, and the fact that our beloved governor Rick Perry, who somehow keeps getting re-elected by somebody, in 2005 publically suggested that gay people should find some other place besides Texas to live. I'm willing to concede those points.

But if that's the route you want to take, then you could look at America's federal government, and say the same thing, as over the last 6 years, we sure have had a pretty miserable showing in every area as well. Although I guess in 2004, a lot of people, myself included, did lament that maybe we should find another country to call home, but then we recovered from our national hangover, pulled up our boot straps, and decided to keep on keeping on, fighting the Good Fight.

I love Texas, and in most respects, Texas has been very good to me. I will admit that I live in somewhat of a shelter, I think, in Austin, and don't really have to experience the rest of what Texas has to "offer." Although Mr. Blogger also argues that people are deluded when they say that Austin in "liberal," and cites the fact that it's a white-majority city in a non-white-majority state, but that only 20% of Austin's poor are white people. And somehow that negates its liberalism? I'm not sure how, or what point he's making, but whatever.

I plan to leave Texas soon, but it's not necessarily because I'm unhappy here. I will say I feel like I need a change of scenery, but that has less to do with a dis-like of Texas and more to do with the fact that I've lived in the south all my life, and I just really feel the need to see another part of the country for awhile, to truly experience how other people live. I've done plenty of traveling in my day, but it's not quite the same thing. And another thing I hate to admit, is that Austin has really broken my heart, I mean some real doozies, not once, but twice. I know that you can't just run away from a broken heart, and you especially can't just run away from yourself, but you can take a break for a couple of years. I feel so tired here sometimes, and I think a change of city could revive me, could renew my spirit. Maybe I'm wrong, and until I truly become comfortable with myself, and at peace with my past, I won't be content anywhere. Which I higly suspect, but there you are. Moving is always an adventure. And this particular blogger I argued with also concedes to having had his heart smashed into a million pieces while living here, and freely admits that that situation has colored his feelings about Texas. Which, in my opinion, is all the more reason to call him out on his Texas-bashing. It's short-sighted and bitter. And despite my own bouts of bitterness, I'm doing everything in my power to try to eliminate bitterness from my life. So I've stopped reading the blog.

I'm not sure how I got so off-topic. I think every place has its good and bad points, nor do I think a whole state (or country) should be judged negatively or positively by what its government does, even if those officials have been elected (sometimes over and over and over....). People have different experiences everywhere, and while as a gay man, I have felt pretty assaulted and brutalized a few times while living in Texas, I know I don't suffer alone, and Austin has brought the most wonderful, loving, generous, intelligent, creative, and special people into my life, that I know will be in my life forever. We all ended up here by deliberate choice, and I'm sure none of us appreciate having our adopted state shat on by people living in fucking Massachusetts, of all places. As I once told my ex-boyfriend, people in the rest of the country don't hate people in the northeast because they're all "liberal" (which isn't even true), but because they're all such assholes who think they're so much better than everybody else just because of where they live. Which, I know, is also a gross stereotype. But that's my experience. And the blogger that I attacked can have his experiences. And hopefully we can both do it without hating one another.

I can't say that I would ever come back and live in Arkansas, for lots and lots of reasons. But I can also acknowledge that as much as I don't care for this place, and the things that a lot of people here do, it's where I grew up, and came of age, and I have to acknowledge that it shaped me. And that there are lots of good people here who do good things. And there is incredible nature.

Now, having said that, I'm leaving now to take my nephew bowling.

Gabies

The new issue of Texas Monthly has a really interesting article about the current state of gay parenting in Texas. Surprisingly, San Antonio has the highest percentage of children living with gay parents of any other U.S. city, and according to a 2000 census poll by the Urban Institute, gay couples in Texas are more likely to adopt children than in any other state in the country. Nationally, about 1 in 4 gay couples has children, but in Texas it's closer to 1 in 3 couples.

The article focuses primarily on the Texas State Legislator's attempts to deny parenting status, and the ability to be foster parents, to gay couples throughout the past decade, with most efforts led by two Republican legislators, Warren Chisum and Robert Talton. In 1999, and again in 2003, legislation was introduced that would have forced the removal of children from any "gay" homes, and banned all future placement in any gay households. Another bill filed in 2003 would have outright legally banned gay adoptions.

As of now, gay adoption isn't illegal in Texas. Generally, when a gay couple has children, it's a child left over from a previous marriage or relationship, and often the new partner adopts the kid. In both straight and gay adoptions, this is called "second-parent" adoption, and is incredibly common, as you can imagine, among straight people. In Texas, as in other states, it's not illegal for gays to engage in second-parent adoption, but not exactly condoned, either. In cases where a gay couple adopts a child that doesn't biologically belong to either of them, or when a gay couple applies to be foster parents, the home is treated as single-parent household with "other adults present," and only one partner is principally dealt with by the CPS (Child Protective Services).

What makes all of this so sad, as is the case with gay marriage, are the potential legal quagmires and emotional devastation. If a same-sex couple splits up, whoever the "principal" guardian is can legally bar the other partner from ever having any contact with the child whatsoever, and the barred partner has absolutely no legal recourse. They may be prevented from visiting children in the hospital or adding a child to an employer's medical plan. If the birth or adoptive parent should die, the remaining parent again has absolutely no legal obligations or privileges to the kid. The child's biological relatives, or even a sperm donor that may have never met the child, have more legal right than a parent who might have raised the kid from birth. There are more children supported by Social Security payments in America from a deceased parent than are on welfare, but again, a non-custodial gay parent cannot (absent a legal relationship) bequeath these payments to their children, even if the parent has paid into Social Security for decades. Surviving children are also subject to significantly higher taxes on inherited property than are children of heterosexual parents who both have legal rights to the child.

Gay parenting in Texas became a huge issue in 1997, when CPS employee Rebecca Bledsoe removed a foster child from a family in Dallas for the sole reason that the parents were both lesbians. She was admonished and demoted by CPS, so she sued. Her lawsuit held little weight, but it opened the doors for all kinds of legislative action against gay foster parenting and adoption (in addition to marriage), all of which were supported by then governor George W. Bush.

In one side-note, in a 2006 television interview, Tennessee legislator Debra Maggart claimed that gay men adopted children for the sole purpose of having unfettered access to children they can molest. This tells you the kind of mentality we're fighting here.

In 2005, Robert Talton once again tried to ban gay foster parenting, and it was defeated only at the last minute, partly through the work of openly gay Austin legislator Glen Maxey. Of the roughly 19,000 children in foster care in Texas, between 2,000 and 3,000 are presumed to be in gay households. The immediate cost of finding new placement for them would have cost the state (taxpayers) over $8 million, and provide a huge setback for CPS, which is already scrambling to find enough suitable homes for all the foser kids.

After the 2005 defeat, to his credit, Chisum agreed to leave the gays alone. "Some of them do a fabulous job of stepping in when no one else will," he said at the time. Talton, the magazine notes, remains unconvinced and is expected to bring up the issue in session once again in 2007. Gay families all over Texas are holding their collective breath.