Faith of my Mother

Every year at Christmas, I turn into an emotional wreck.  The impetus for that amped-up distress stays with my through my birthday, is supplanted by a different trauma in February, and finally breaks by Saint Patrick's Day.  As I have aged, it has become clearer and clearer to me where this derives from. 

I was raised as a Christian.  My background was not Nazarene or Pentecostal, though those were the names on the buildings we went to, and we didn't go for the philosophical diatribe between Peter and Paul in the Epistles.  What drove that upbringing was not any man in a robe or vestment or freshly pressed suit behind a pulpit - it was the faith of my mother. 

My mother was not brought up in this tradition.  She chose it.  She studied it.  She passed a fair amount (perhaps more than she realizes) of that well-reasoned approach to faith on to me.  The churches we attended, at least early on, took the same approach.  There was no infallible human leader.  There was an all-knowing, all-loving God, who had left us instructions to life that were nothing if not as complicated as life itself, that could be questioned and plumbed and an exact, correct, righteous answer reached for every ethical quandary we would ever have in our lives.  This, however, meant sitting with a fair amount of tension. This meant reconciling the God of Galatians with the God of Leviticus - and this was a thing you had to do as a Christian, because there can only be the one God.  Even the over-simplified division I've heard of the Old Testament as God the Father and the New as God the Son does violence to the truly monotheistic heart of the Faith and the teachings of Christ and the Prophets.  

I digress - but only a little.  The purpose of the study of the Bible, the reason we would gather in the back of the tabernacle for advanced classes with Sister Esther at Whited Bible Camp, was this deep-seated belief in unity and wholeness.  God could not be divided, neither could his Word, therefore, the failing is not in the text but in our inability to reconcile it, so back to the text we go, to question, to reason, to debate, to pray, and to seek to understand in a way that is consistent with the core fundamental teachings of the Faith.  

Well and good, but we do this with any philosophy, and Christianity is not a philosophy.  What sets Faith apart is the irrationality at the very heart of it.  It is the mustard seed from which all else springs, without which nothing else moves.  For Christianity, obviously, that thing is Christ Himself.  

This is the part where my Humanist, Secularist, and Atheist friends generally decry all their understandings of the Faith.  They denounce the need of a God to "make you" behave.  They detest the notion of some supernatural rewards system where the good go to heaven and the bad to hell.  They attack the accuracy or lack thereof of the telling of the orthodoxy itself.  It's a free country, they're entitled to do so, but I have to ask for the space to make the apology for the Faith.  These things are not that which sprouts from the story of the Christ Child.  All the other trappings that have grown up around it, the condemnation, the moral herding of man, the celestial granting of privilege, all of that comes later.  None of it sits at this privileged, core, primary position.  

What does sit there is love for its own sake.  Love without condition or reservation.  Love that need not see the fruits of its labor now, but that seeks desperately with its each pace and breath to move the hearts of man closer to one another.  It is a divine love that calls us all together for the sake of being one, and nothing more.  Much the way we must reconcile our readings of the Bible into a unitary text, so too must we reconcile our readings of one another into a unitary fellowship.  Unlike with so much of the complex Biblical teaching, on this matter, we are called to merely do two things - love and believe. This is the core irrationality at the heart of true Christianity. 

We believe that all things are possible through Christ.  We believe there is neither male nor female, Greek nor Jew, slave nor free - all are one in Christ.  We believe we do not follow Paul or Apollos or Cephus, but Christ.  We believe in the one High God, who out of love created the beautiful world and everything good in it.  But the one great unspoken, in all of our creeds, from Corinthians to the Masai, is that we continue to believe all this when there is no sign of it in the world.  To hold a Faith that teaches that we can all be made whole, be made one, through this irrational boundless love is to outright defy the modern experience.  

I am well acquainted with that defiance.  I have every reason in the world to be bitter.  I have suffered my share of slings and arrows.  There is no logical thing that stands between me and my life experience and being a law-and-order die-hard neoconservative arguing for self-defense and self-sufficiency and social Darwinism.  The coldly rational approach to putting and end to stories like mine is to destroy and lay waste to things and people that cause them.  But that which moves me as a Christian is not rational.  It is an irrational belief that the world is a better place, that there is less suffering, if we judge a little less and love a little more, even if my life is snuffed out.  There is a divine love that loves us each individually and together collectively, that calls us to find a way to it.  Christmas Day is the observation of that love becoming a real thing in the world, whose life was snuffed out, who yet triumphed over death, hell and the grave, who still calls us to love individually and collectively, to sit with the tension that divides us in the belief that through love we can be united.  

So yes, Christmas is the gifts, is the lights, is being with friends and family and all of that.  It is the observances both secular and religious.  But moreover, it is a reminder that Christian love - real, boundless, unreserved and unashamed Christian love - can be made a real thing in the world.  It is a chance to follow in Mary's example, and treasure this in our hearts.  In times like these, beset as we are on all sides by a reality that would seem intent on disproving that, it is as important to cling to that faith as it is difficult.

Merry Christmas.  May we find the way to live and love in God's glorious light.

Breathing

I find myself once more staring at this great expanse of white space choking on the words.  I want so much to hide behind the the grandiosity of a greater good, when the reality is I just want the air I breathe.  The fight exhausts me, and I yearn to set it down.  

That's not an option, though.  Political fights are one thing.  There's the campaign, and then the election, then everyone sleeps for a little bit.  Even interpersonal fights - you can ignore the individual for a little bit, let the flames die down on their own, before reaching out to rekindle the relationship.  But when the fight is for basics like life and dignity, there is no setting it down.  There is no chance to catch your breath.  

Midway through the campaign, I made the decision to stop talking to my father.  My father is a bigot.  He believes he is always right, and that I am always stupid.  He feels he has special standing in the world having dealt with mortality in his 60s in the form of a triple bypass.  I feel I do, too, considering I have held my mortality in my hand every day since I was 23.  And while I would fight with my last breath for him to be able to say and do as he pleases, and indeed have reached out to his enemies to try and get them to back off, my father shares no such compulsion towards mutual defense.  In a sense, to win any of my battles, great or small, I must defeat my father. 

He decided at one point it would be appropriate to accuse the Democratic ground game of unethical and improper behavior in polling and voter registration.  Then he didn't understand why I would find this offensive.  He couldn't fathom why I would take that so personally, it's not like I had anything to do with it personally, he was referring to the mystery "them" that does bad things, the phantom menace "they".  It didn't matter to him that I was partially responsible for organizing a legislative district, and it sure as shit didn't matter to him that I had met and worked alongside literally every organizer in the county.  No no, it wasn't about me, specifically, so I shouldn't be offended, and I should afford him "some kind of consideration" because he's my father and he's old. 

Fuck that.

Initially, it was beyond liberating to cut the man off.  No longer did I have someone haunting my every last victory who was actively cheering my demise.  The specter of his self-righteousness, of his insistence on playing the sinned against martyr, was wholesale jettisoned from my life.  I felt like I could speak freely without having to give a damn if my father back in Maine got wind of this that or the other.  He could sit and rant at the Facebook all he wanted.  I didn't have to hear it anymore.  Now, though, the door of this new closet is clearly gone, and I am still afraid to come out of it. 

I should have the bravery to do it.  I should have the courage of my convictions to stand tall on my own narrative and tell it rather than flee from forming it.  The truth is I hate the story of me.  It is not that I am ashamed or regret it.  The making of me has been what it has been, and I cannot exist as I do now without it.  There are people all around me now who have encouraged me, who have lifted me up, who have lead me to believe in my own inherent good just as much as I believe in the inherent good in all of them.  That man cannot be divorced from his making.  If I am to be effective, let alone understood, I must come to grips with and be able to talk down that making.  I have to draw this deep ragged breath as best I can and begin the process of enumerating the moving parts, describing their orbits, explaining the warp and woof of the plane they transit.  

Here goes.

Three Things

This is not about that.  Whatever that is, I'm not writing about it here.  There will be no Olympics talk here.  No tax returns, no shootings, no whatever is in today's news cycle - this is not about that.  

In fact, nothing is about that.  As much as we like to think how interconnected we are, how interdependent, the fact of the matter is the teeming mass is remarkably stable.  Sure, the whole mass weebles and wobbles around as though at any moment it'll all fall over, but ultimately all it does is jiggle all over like a planetary jello mold.  If you were so lucky as to win the ovarian lottery and be born in America, a disaster will not occur to day that will ruin your life tomorrow - guaranteed.  So what are we doing here? 

We're watching TV.  We're going to jobs we hate.  We're driving our cars that cost too much money while pining for cars that cost more money, down too-small freeways provided by a too-big government.  We're tweeting and Facebooking and texting and emailing about that thing that guy at that place did with that girl from that other place and OMG did you see that?!  

But just as no disaster will occur that will ruin your life, chances are, no miracle will save you, either.  While most of us are looking at the TV, somewhere in America, someone is looking at a bill they can't pay, a child they can't feed, or a fist-full of pills that keep them alive.  Somewhere some fast food worker is being yelled at over french fries as though they were the cure for cancer, AIDS and the common cold - and nowhere, absolutely positively nowhere, is the conversation happened that this isn't civilized society anymore, it's panem et circenses. 

A little history.  Once upon a time in this far away place called Rome, there was an empire that had sprouted out of a Republic.  This empire had come to dominate absitively posolutely everything - and I mean everything.  If there was a speck of dirt to be seen, the Romans had seen it, claimed it, slapped a Latin name on it, and built a road to it.  Rome had more or less had its way with the world for hundreds of years, and then it started to decline.  During the decline, a satirist (yes, satire is this old), first coined this phrase to refer to superficial appeasement.  The people got their bread, they went to the circus, they watched the lions eat the Christians, everyone (except the Christians) had a great time, and nobody paid any attention to the impending doom - I mean, did you see when that gladiator at that colosseum took that big honkin' sword and ran it through that other guy?  Wasn't that the coolest thing ever?!  No, I don't care about whatever the Meccabees or Maccabees or Honey bees in the cedar trees of Judea - when is the next circus? 

Sound familiar? 

There's still the major issue that separates us from Rome.  They thought they had subjugated the world.  We've actually done it.  If you are not starving now, you are not likely to be starving tomorrow.  If you do not have AIDS now, you will not need three hundred dollars with of pills tomorrow (and every day thereafter).  If you are not homeless now, you are unlikely to wake up in a cardboard box.  Those positions are already filled.  This is about that.  

We could fix it.  We could turn off the TV, we could ignore the Kardashians and the Jersey Shore and the litany of red carpets, and fix it.  We could get up off our ever-widening American asses and close the ever-widening American gap between have and have-not, the cultural and economic divide that is increasingly making it impossible to relate to anyone not in your own little strata off the Republic.  I refuse to believe there is any such thing as a stone-hearted American.  They don't exist, and frankly, I think it's actually part of the problem.  We don't want to watch the mother fighting with the DES guy that no, really, the money is gone and she needs assistance now.  Seeing a man wasted to nothing from HIV turns our stomach.  Stories of unbalanced people hording kittens make our skin crawl.  So we turn away.  We get our bread, we go to our circus, we see who gets impaled or eaten by lions today, we go home - but we know.  It nags at the back of the mind, eats at the corner of the heart.  We don't look at the unfortunate, not directly, they live at the periphery of our vision - but we know.  Sometimes the thought penetrates our waking mind that we really can't deal with living in this world where a very few of us are doing extraordinary, and the rest are split between the haves and the about-to-be-killed-offs.  

We could fix it.  We could roll up our sleeves and get involved.  Our government will not fix this.  Our churches will not fix this.  The problem is a lack of faith, hope, and love.  Faith in our ability to fix it, hope in our ability to succeed, and a love of life that will not stand by and let destruction happen.  But those three things last forever - we do not.  We have the equivalent of a cosmic sneeze here.  Whatever faith, hope and love can be crammed into the soul of one man is nothing more than one small speck of stuff.  No matter how many soups you serve, or clothes you donate, or kitties you save, you will never, ever, be more than one speck.  But it is one speck that was not there before.  It is one speck brighter, one speck further from the abyss.  Individually they may be nothing, but in the unorchestrated chaotic undirected aggregate, they go where the fit, they fit where they go, and that steady accretion of specks will stop the slide, will give us a foothold, and spare us the fate of Sisyphus - or worse.  

I'm starting to volunteer.  Through political avenues where I can find a voice, through LGBT organizations where I can help my own community, and come Fall semester I  intend to get involved with the ASPCA.  It does not make me love my job.  It does not make the bills easier to pay.  It is time consuming, and at times, it is discouraging.  There are reminders at every turn of my status as "speck" - but I am a strangely unburdened speck.  I believe less and less in the decline we all know and feel and are told is real, because I see proof every day that the there's an alternative.  My email is flooded with people working to create an alternative.  I am watching all these specks come together in an army of the insignificant create a teeny tiny bulwark between us and the great oubliette of history.  I know all these specks will be here but a little while.  Elections end, strays get adopted, and someday there will be a cure for AIDS.  We will all eventually stop our toiling both for the day and for the longer night.  But our works wrought of faith, hope, and love - those things endure.

To My Latino Friends

Welcome to being a wedge this year -like the gays with marriage equality, and if you give it in a minute we'll see the old people, the sick people, kids, education, and the kitchen sink all picked up and hurled at the Republicans.  Welcome to the 2012 cycle.  But the next time you hear "Oh, this is election year politics" on the DREAM act - here's why it needs to be election year politics.  


In 2010, when it wasn't election year politics, Republicans had no problem killing their own idea just to sick their finger in Obama's eye.  The DREAM Act sailed through the House on a largely party-line vote, and then couldn't get cloture in the Senate.  If the GOP wanted this to be done through the Congress, like they claim now, they could simply drop their filibuster (which is technically still ongoing), vote for cloture on this bill, and then vote to pass it as presented by the House, and it would be on Obama's desk as a permanent solution by the end of the week.  They do not want that - and no matter what they say now, they do no want this policy at all.  During the primaries, Texas had its own version of a DREAM act that provided for in-state tuition for children who were illegal immigrants through no fault of their own.  It was signed by Rick Perry.  And in the debates, the other candidates piled on him for taking this stand and for defending it.  Mitt Romney took up the issue of educating children of illegal immigrants like a pair of scissors and went after Rick Perry as though he were a gay kid with queer hair.  The media acts as though we haven't heard Romney's long term plan - but we have.  Self-deportation, slam the borders shut, let Mexico die on our doorstep, we don't care.  


For them to get that, first, the President must fail.  They cheer for failure and blame it all on Obama.  Every time there is bad news they set their heads alight and scream "Obama's fault! Obama's fault!" and dance around the media and Fox & Friends.  But we are still in a stalled economy.  We still have major social issues that must be addressed.  Regardless of party, if the President fails, if the Office of the President fails  in its Constitutionally-mandated mission, then by definition the whole works fails.  If two years has taught us nothing, is that these particular Republicans, this Tea Party driven insurgency, are perfectly willing to not just drive us off a cliff, but to put the pedal to the metal.  On Immigration, and yes the timing looks very blatantly political, especially considering the memo was brought to him in February of 2011, the President has actually accomplished something, and they are spinning like mad to make this a bad thing.  "It isn't permanent!" they cry, and they're right, it's not.  If Romney gets elected, or if the GOP retains effective control of the Legislature, it never will be, either.  They are right, this is still not a win.  This is still Democrats having to play politics with the party that started the mess and refuses - quite literally - to stop the filibustering talk and bluster, and actually do things.

They've all got to go, all the way down the ticket.  This is being used in an election year to force Republicans to start answering the question of what do they want.  They have to be called to account for wedging off votes, for breaking up the electorate, then digging in their heels and refusing to do anything or put forward a single idea to accomplish a single goal.  If you'd like to not be a wedge issue ever again, if you'd like to see reform beyond an executive deferment (that Romney could revoke on Day 1), your best chance is to get every single person you know in every state you know them in and get them to go to the polls and vote Democrat, all the way down the ticket, from President to dog catcher.  If you want to keep the laws on the books that break families with immigrants into pieces, reigns terror over school children, and effectively considers non-Whites as second class humans never mind citizens, then stay home or vote for a Republican down-ticket from the President.

On Being Fat

Ketogenic diets have one huge drawback - when you carb load, or when you cheat, you bloat, to the tune of five grams of water weight for every gram of carbohydrate converted to glycogen.  It drops off quickly enough, but it means enduring fat days.  


This past Thursday I had an awful day at work.  It was just awful - my stats came in destroyed for the month and fairly damaged for the year, I had an unproductive coaching conversation with my boss, and I was stressed to hell over the pending change in schedules. So I decided to hell with it, I'm eating one of the free donuts.  And a kruller.  And a bismarck.  And the Subway cookies provided with the free lunch - but not the sub.  And a bag of M&Ms, and when I got home, leftover Easter candy.  Now, anyone who knows me can vouch that I don't normally eat like that.  Or at least not these days I don't.  There were times in my life when I ate like this de rigeur.  And this encapsulated moment of badness pretty well explains how and why I used to be fat.  


But let's sidetrack a minute and talk about what I mean by "fat".  I still have a few pounds more body fat than I'd care to be carrying.  My cut cycles to date have never gotten me down to the coveted single-digit body fat levels at which you have those longed-for six-pack abs.  That's not fat, though.  Fat is when I was 255 graduating high school, or 250 after transferring back to UMaine, or 235 when I was trying to kill myself with booze and take-out.  This is not oh woe is me, I will always be fat.  This is I have been fat.  I have sat and visited with that demon, have studied him to where I can recount every nuance of his being.  


Being fat isn't a physical condition - that's obesity.  Obesity's cause is very simple - you eat more than you expend, and your body stores it away as fat.  It is the most basic of metabolic processes.  Being fat is an identity.  It is a way of seeing the self, of taking one's own measure and seeing in the mirror naught but the undulating rolls of fat.  They are repulsive.  Modern American culture tells us that it's OK to be "heavy" or "plus-sized", we wage campaigns urging us all to love ourselves - because we know what we see, and must brainwash ourselves.  We know this isn't true.  We make peace with thighs that touch, with a little pudge around the center, but there's a tipping point.  Upon each frame, only so much may be hung.  That point, that limit, may be different for each, but it's there.  That point is not the few pounds from holiday fruitcake.  This is a point of no return. 


I was predisposed to be heavy.  If I track directly up my bloodline, there aren't many small people to be found.  Short, broad, deep chested - this is the only archetype to be had in the cards, the one lonely gene in the entire familial pool.  Growing up I was fairly isolated.  Mine was a childhood spent indoors, with lots of toys, thanks to issues with allergies, chronic sinusitis, and bronchitis.  I couldn't play sports - but I could play instruments, and by nine years old in the fourth grade, I was well on my way to band nerd status.  I was also well on my way to 80 pounds.  In time, I would also become a theater nerd, and be outed as gay, and take a part time desk job for my father - and I would eat. I would eat and eat, and there would always be food available.  I usually had no one I wanted to spend time with who would spend it with me - but there was always food.  Despite demonstrative proof to the contrary that there were in fact people who saw me as more than the fat pasty gay kid, this was the identity I had come to internalize.  By the time these 'formative years' that were high school were done, I'd pretty well externalized that image, too, clocking in at 255. 


College was Columbia, pure circumstance alone gave me an opportunity to rebrand myself as something else.  For most schools, it's the "Freshman Fifteen" that you gain - but for me, I lost some 70 pounds.  The school's food was terrible.  Most of my disposable income went to clubbing (and thus not food).  And sometimes, I'd get bored, and talk to someone on my cell phone, and just walk.  Many times I would end a conversation with "Oh, I'm at the Lincoln Center..." having walked there from Columbia, and take the train back home.  Without really consciously trying, the weight came off.


That's what the first error was, how I lost to the demon the first time.  I never changed my own conception of myself.  Sure, I was still pretty pale.  But I was fairly well known and popular.  I was a young blonde haired green eyed boy in the eastern Mecca of queerdom.  Life was good.  There were any of a number of identities that could've taken root, could've supplanted the notion of self-as-fat-boy, but none did.  I still saw myself as the fat pasty gay kid from Maine, just now I was at Columbia, and me at Columbia just happened to do things that made me less fat.  Not a whit of it was on purpose.  When the wheels fell off at the end of '01, I moved back to Maine, and spring semester found me in the frozen cold of Maine.  I now saw myself as the fat pasty gay kid from up north who had gone to Columbia, lost his marbles, and crash landed back in Maine.  And unlike Columbia where there were clubs to go to and only bad food to eat, at UMaine, the food was significantly better, and it was cold.  My time at Columbia became a memory, I burned that image of myself, and climbed back up to 235.   


The year before I left Maine once and for all, there was a great and powerful mess, that came through my life and irrevocably changed it for the worse.  It made that last year feel like trying to manage my life in a typhoon, and it became abundantly, capital red-letters clear, that I was going to have to leave Maine, or I was going to die there.  And so I did.  But before I did, I decided I needed to be able to compete with these gay boys out at ASU.  I'd been a college boy once before, I intended to do it again, and no reason not to get back down to 'fighting weight', right?  I tried to eat better, I racked countless hours on an elliptical trainer, got down to about 175-180, which in those days I had accepted as pretty good and/or good enough, and moved to Arizona.  


Arizona has been, and continues to be, a bizarre chapter of my life.  And within that chapter, there is a passage about just one man.  I loved that man.  With every fiber of my being, I loved him.  He made me feel attractive.  He laughed at my jokes.  He marveled at how smart he thought I was.  The sex was amazing, and curled up next to him, lying in that death trap of an apartment in Mesa, I felt safe, warm, and wanted.  I managed to battle my weight down to the 165-175 range while I was with him, on the grounds that I felt he was physically so much more attractive than me that it was incumbent on me to 'catch up', which he found flattering, of course, but don't pin this on the man.  This was on me.  I wanted to be rid of the identity of fat pasty gay kid.  I wanted to be this man's boy.  


So when he left, I was destroyed - literally.  He moved out on a Tuesday.  I came home, came around the entryway, and took one step into an emptied living room. My TV was there, and the stand, and my computer.  Everything else was gone, and so was he.  I collapsed on the floor, right there at the entry way, and sobbed.  I ended up drinking myself into oblivion that night, and it started a trend.  I would come home, drink, smoke cigarettes, eat food, and watch TV or play video games.  This was the second time I lost the game.  I had managed to see myself other than the fat pasty gay kid, but this time, I had built an image far less durable.  When it was destroyed, I only had the one to go back to, and so I did.  I ballooned back up to 235 pounds, and ruined my health in the process.  


But in the ruination of my health, something crazy happened.  After chasing one specialist after another, it turned out that a great deal of my trials and tribulations of dizziness and disorientation were driven by my sinuses - one of those early problems, one that had actually been diagnosed but back in the late 80s required massive risky surgery.  In 2010, it was an outpatient procedure with a week of down time.  It worked.  It was a piece of my original ancient identity that had, at long last, been chipped off.  The fat pasty gay kid mold was not indestructible after all, that did not need to be me, and I resolved to be rid of it.  This was a conscious effort.  I was simply not going to be the fat kid anymore.  And if that meant becoming something of a health nut or a gym rat instead, well then, that's what I would do.  This is the fittest I've ever been.  I am not at my goal, but then I had set my goal time-wise for 32, and I'm not there yet.  


That goal was to be built like a tank by the time I was 32.  If I was going to deal with this accursed frame that seemed to need to carry a good 170 pounds on it, then let it be muscle and not fat.  It would require discipline - and so I made myself get up and work out six times a day.  It would require research and new knowledge - so I tried and failed at many things, many times, until I found something that worked for me, a ketogenic diet and a whole lot of lifting.  It was something I could make myself into that could not exist alongside the fat pasty gay kid identity, and that is why I embrace the craziness of that whole endeavor.  The planning meals and counting macros, the body-wrecking workouts, the magic potion before the gym, all of it fall under the header of "things this identity does", as well as under "things fat pasty gay kid identity wouldn't do".  


Remember, ketogenic diets have one huge drawback - the inevitable fat days.  And after Thursday's binge, did I ever (and do I ever) feel fat.  It is critically important, I feel, that this identity die, that I stop seeing myself in the mirror as fat and assigning that identity to myself.  I have mirrors in every room of the house now.  Completely without thinking, after spending most of my adult life in apartments that had the bathroom medicine cabinet mirror and that was it, I moved into a three bedroom house with giant mirrored doors on each closet.  For the first time this weekend somewhere in the process of climbing up and down ladders, fighting with painter's tape, and rolling out three rooms, I caught myself shirtless in the mirror, just out of the corner of my eye, and didn't see myself as fat.  It was a tiny little triumph of the new over the old, as I stopped, turned, and looked at myself in the mirror in a pair of boxer shorts with red paint spattered on me.  I was not fat.  Thick, yes.  A little bloated, yes.  But I was not fat.  If you're reading this, and you're fat, please, feel free to borrow this moment from me.  I looked myself over, saw the folds and curves that were parts of my body now, not just rolls of fat. There was a decidedly male build and composition, not the genderless corpulence.  Never did I ever the whole time I was fat think I could look at myself and see anything else, but it's possible - and it's even possible on a fat day.  We do not need to whitewash fat as an acceptable identity.  We can get rid of that identity, and grow a new one in its place.


This new not-fat identity is still, at best, tenuous.  There are still days like Thursday.  There are still setbacks.  There are still times I do see the fat pasty white kid in the mirror.  There is also no going back to that.  This is my why.  Why I'm not 'on a diet', why I don't stop doing all this, why I'll call myself too sick to work before I'll decide I'm too sick to work out.  I fully expect this new identity will take a while to replace the one that has been in place for the better part thirty years, but I will not go back.  I will not be fat again.  

Life Unarmored

There are vast swaths of my life that I do not talk about. 


It's always been like this for me, and I'm sure I'm not alone on this behavior, but to myself, from the inside peeking out, it seems bizarre.  These days, people share everything.  Your parties end up on Facebook and Twitter before you even leave them and God help you if you call out sick tomorrow, because HR has already seen that photo of you doing that thing at that place with that guy.  It's as if the whole world adopted a practice I used to engage in when I was younger - just live your life on broadcast, and be a wide open book to the world.  


But really, do we do that?  We still don't share our deepest darkest fears and secrets on social networks.  I tried an experiment with this on Facebook.  I still have the group set up for the folks I had chosen.  I still do not talk to them about everything, and I reckon the reverse is true.  I know of no one that shares their every last fear and secret, their desires and their drives, nobody that doesn't have at least one piece of armor wrapped around them, at least one thing you may never, ever know.  


I don't think this is entirely abnormal or unhealthy.  Everyone has thoughts they keep to themselves, things they don't really discuss with others.  We obey the taboos of our common culture and omit things.  Or we embrace the rebellion of a counter culture and discuss them in graphic detail - and steer clear of the more urbane parlance.  But what becomes of us when circumstance and one or the other set of mores wraps us up in armor?  


It's not just societally imposed, either.  There is safety in the armoring of the soul.  Hidden safely behind That Which Isn't Discussed, we can obscure everything over in taciturn silence, our reticence requiring inquiring minds to mind their business.  We are not questioned about these things if they are That Which Isn't Discussed.  The armor goes on, the self is protected, these weaknesses are never exposed, and we are suddenly made Achilles, all dipped in the stuff.  


But Achilles was held by the ankles when dipped, leaving them the one lone place that can still be touched.  Imagine had he not been killed.  Perhaps, gone long enough in his impenetrable shield of all shields, he would have yearned to be held again?  Maybe time after time of being touched with only a toe he would have yearned for the embrace of an arm or hand?  What's the the likelihood that Achilles would have wanted to drop off all his armor, and stand naked in the rain?  It's not as though he had never had the experience.  This is not do the blind know they're missing color - it's Beethoven blindly thumping time, doubtless craving the lost connection to music.


I believe Achilles would miss the rain.  I believe once he started to peel his armor off, there would be no stopping, not until every last article was gone.  That could've been well and good for Achilles, had he lived.  There could never be a life unarmored for Achilles.  But can there be for us?  Does the armor ever come off, or does it just get stickered over in likes and lolcats?  

Nothing Moves 36 Points

Nothing, as in nothing, in American politics moves by 36 points in two months.  We are a single-digit-spread nation. 31% of us are Democrats, 29% are Republicans.  Obama beat McCain in 2008 by 53% to 46% nationally. We talk a lot about how polarized American politics are, but really, we are frozen in this nasty evil bifurcated state of affairs.  The two sides may be getting ever louder about how correct they are, but the two don't actually gain a whit of advantage over one another, and no part of the electorate actually moves. 

And then one part of the electorate packs up its bags and trucks off in one direction at a faster speed than anything we've seen anything in the history of, well, ever. The segment in question is the African-American population, and the issue they're suddenly all changing their minds on is gay rights.  

Historically, and to me personally this is deeply upsetting, the black community and the gay community have not gotten along terribly well. This has been the last aisle we could not reach across, the last of our fellow minorities we could not wrap our arms around and embrace, the last that would not embrace us. Anti-gay sentiment has always run deep in the African-American community, in no small part thanks to that community's deep-seated religiousness. We can't truly hold this against them. As a community, when they had nothing else, they had their faith. Indeed had the Great Awakening never happened, the spread and crystallization of abolitionism may never have happened, either. It only makes sense that a community so steeped and so both owed by and indebted to its faith would find queers queerly upsetting.

Then there's the modern stereotypes of masculinity in the gay community, which run directly contrary to the perception of what it is to be gay. Never mind for a minute the wrongness of the gay stereotype, nor the pressure on gay men to not live up to it. Just look as far as black male celebrities. There is a loudly heterosexual machismo that radiates from that segment of society, that gives rise to concepts like 'pause', that flaunts its love of women and things traditionally masculine. What if that doesn't apply to the subject in question? What if you're black and don't like women? Worse, what if you're not the dominant or masculine partner? This has been for too long and for too many been a double prison, an exile from exile. Bad enough to be a member of a group visually identified as other, but then to open one's mouth within one's own group and immediately be castigated again?  

Nothing we in the gay community have ever said nor done has ever made a dent here. We have never been able to win over the black community to our side. Gay liberation's blatant homage to the African-American civil rights movement has never, at any point in time, won us any quarter with them. It has always seemed that on this we shall routinely lose, and that nothing could ever, ever change this. Until now. 

Since President Barack Obama opened his mouth on the subject, Jay Z, Chris Rock, Colin Powell and the NAACP have all come out in favor of gay marriage. And in Maryland, where gay marriage is headed to the polls, the state has gone from favoring gay marriage on an 8% span to favoring on a 20% span - and that's been driven by a swing among black voters of 17% opposed to 19% in favor, a thirty-six point swing in two months.  And the only thing that's changed, the one and only thing that's changed, is the president, the man who captivated the African American community by demonstrating that truly in American you really can crash through the glass ceilings as a black man, spoke openly about his journey from opposed to in favor. Now, on top of it, we hear stories like the President of the NAACP talking about how back when interracial marriage was illegal, and he had to speak out that no one, no one should live that nightmare ever again of not being able to marry who they loved. 

I'll be the first to admit I didn't see this coming.  I saw a big fat nothing coming out of the President's interview on the matter.  But now that it's over, now that the cat is out of the bag, could the President have bridged the gap between the LGBTQ and African-American communities? Of all the talk of politicians promising to unite us, did one of them actually do it? The mind boggles. 

Fred Karger as a Noun

Merriam-Webster defies the term "uncle tom" as follows 

1. a black who is overeager to win the approval of whites (as by obsequious behavior or uncritical acceptance of white values and goals) 

2. a member of low-status group who is overly subservient to or cooperative with authority <the worst floor managers and supervisors by far are women ... Some of them are regular Uncle Toms - Jane Fonda>

The roots of the term are debatably Stowe's, or maybe from minstrel shows, but it matters not - this is the definition that lives in the public consciousness.  I'd like to submit a similar term for the queer community. I vote we strip away Fred Karger as a person, and make im into a noun.

Fred Karger can't be a person.  He simply cannot be a real live flesh-and-blood human being.  Characters like Karger have to be made up. You see, Karger has his bona fides as a gay activist.  Karger founded Californians Against Hate - which has been absolutely positively instrumental in unveiling the Mormon church's involvement in California's Proposition 8, and the National Organization for Marriage's blatant attempt to create and exploit racial divisions in Maine (which is hilarity unto itself, for entirely different reasons). He speaks openly these days of the need of the Republican Party to be "cleansed" of bigotry - and he's right.

He also worked for the President who let tens of thousands of Americans die of AIDS before acknowledging that any such problem existed. 

This is not a matter of the Republican Party's stance on gay rights and Karger's tacit stated support of the party regardless. This is a matter of a party of laissez faire allowing the thought to run to its illogical, immoral conclusion - we help no one, no one, not even to avoid the grave itself. Let the gays die. Let the women die in childbirth. The sick? The elderly? The disabled? Be sick, be old, be cripple, but be it on your own, we shall not help you.  

Karger is old enough to know this, and stayed on that side of the aisle the whole entire time. He was living in California during the AIDS epidemic - and working for the side that wouldn't acknowledge it. What drives a man to work for a leader who lets that man's people die a slow, horrible death? Surely, any such man would be wracked with guilt the rest of his days the moment the error of his ways were made clear. Surely he would at some point see the light, and come crawling home to his people, ready to take on the labors of Hercules to make things right. Maybe this is the reason for Karger's about-face in 2004. Perhaps a rock thrown by God hit him in the head. Perhaps he realized he could no longer carry on aiding and abetting the castigation of his very self, and felt the need to atone for it.  

But this is not a real Saul on the road to Damascus moment for Karger. The scales off the Apostle's eyes, he switched sides and went into the world a new man. But Karger? No, good Fred only gets the mud in his eyes. He chooses to envision a "Clint Eastwood" Republican. But Eastwood isn't really a Republican - he's a libertarian. He said so himself in a 2011 GQ interview. Eastwood, claiming to believe in a politics of leaving everyone alone, surely couldn't - and likely doesn't - support the ultrasound-requiring, gay-marriage-banning, immigrant-hating far right that has so plainly hijacked the Republican Party and taken it for a ride to Fascistville. That seems the sort of place Clint Eastwood would ride into and shoot up. 

But I've gone of track - my argument is that Fred Karger is a noun, and not a person, because his story cannot be real. His reference to a kindred spirit holds no water. The sort of about-face we could potentially view as mayhap private epiphany simply did not happen. And those roots... those awful roots... surely, no subjugated person could ever ever contribute to their own subjugation! That behavior cannot be human. It is the sort of thing you can train an animal to do - to see itself as the natural inferior, to believe that he who holds the food dish holds it by divine right. To hold otherwise, we can speak of no such thing as a human right. If a human can view itself as rightly subjugated, can aid and abet in its subjugation without being viewed as somehow sick or corrupted, then how do we differentiate between the human rightly demanding equality, and the human mistaken regarding his right to that? We can't. We can't have human rights if this is human behavior, because we have to allow for an all-powerful master choosing who is his equal and who is not, since the other party may or may not be correct on the matter. This behavior must be illness or damage of some kind, they cannot be the undertaking of a rational human actor. Therefore, Fred Karger cannot be a real person. He can only be a noun, and I submit the following definition for him: 

1. a gay man who is overeager to further the causes of those who hate gays (as by directly aiding and abetting those who turn a blind eye to the death of scores of homosexuals)

2.  a member of an oppressed group who is overly subservient to the group inflicting that oppression <After driving gays from the party and refusing to seat them at the caucus, you'd have to be a real Fred Karger to be a Republican.>

Hello, world!

Clever blog name, isn't it?  I feel like I should explain it, which involves a bit of talking about myself.  It's really just three aspects of me, lain in lovely alliteration.  


I am bright.  No, really, I'm rather quite clever.  I've accumulated hundreds of college course credits scattered across a half-dozen disciplines.  I figure things out on my own.  And let's call it what it is, they don't let dumb kids into Columbia.  I'll refrain from getting too deep into this one, it simply doesn't do to be a braggart.  You can judge my wit or lack thereof on your own. 


I am, very much, and in several senses, blue.  The most obvious sense in our hyper-partisan world is to call me a liberal - and in that sense, you can attach the bright part to this, too.  In the words of the inimitable Molly Ivins, fish gotta swim, hearts gotta bleed.  That's me.  I'm not the type that believes in equality of outcome, just opportunity.  I believe it's not enough to just wait for the tide to raise all boats, sometimes you gotta dig a few of the boats up out of the muck and shove 'em out to see and even then you may have to pull them back in, put them in dry dock, fix them, and push them back out again - because they're boats, and that's what you have to do with them.  Likewise, people are not clean easily dealt with things.  In a rising tide, left to their own devices, most will drown - because they don't know how to swim.  You don't just let people drown any more than you just let boats sink.  Fukuyama must be right.  At the end of history, liberalism must win.  If it does not, then we are willfully sacrificing the hopes and dreams of all mankind to whatever victor would claim them as its spoils.  


Blue can also mean puritanical (and on some issues I am in fact a moral absolutist), profane or risque (ask me about the contra-bass some time), or melancholy - and that I am in spades.  Having come thus far, everything that has gone on these last thirty years has left my whole being tinged over with something resembling a certain sadness, a resignation to all that is and shall be.  It's the Moynihan quote on being Irish - but I'd add on to that.  If the world is going to break my heart, if I know that now at the onset, then what difference does it all make?  May as well I dance all the faster, sing all the louder, fight all the harder.  If my heart shall break, then at least let it break spent, with nothing left within.  


As to the last term of the three, well, I took the alternate spelling because the traditional one was taken.  I do still think of myself as a boy, yes, even at thirty, and yes this is in no small part bound up with my sexual identity moreso than with my age.  No, it is not because I consider myself the stereotypical "gay boi" - nothing could be much further from the truth.  For this to make sense, we have to go down a bit of a deep rabbit hole, one that will be flagged when explored in future postings.  For as dominant and domineering as I can come across professionally and academically, for as much in my politics and prose as I am a man of wide vision and booming voice, in my closest most intimate relationships, this all turns to submission.  I have no real desire to be the "man of the house", even if I'm doing stereotypically male things (like owning the damn thing).  I am unlikely to see myself and loathe to want to be the "important one" in the relationship.  To me, this context is the one where I no longer need to be out in front, no longer need to be the avenging hero, but can just be my man's boy, with nothing more important to do than keep him happy.  It is all the same strength and will - just a radically different manifestation of it.  


So here has been your intro.  You now have a little bit of a handle on who I am.  On this and on all other posts comment and question as you will - some I'll answer, some I won't.  All I ask is you enjoy you time with one bright blue boi, and re-share that far and wide.