Category: Current Affairs

Disaster and Mayhem In the (Not-Middle) East

~ riggledo ~ 9 Comments

A few minutes before 11:00 this morning, I’m sitting at my desk doing my daily Fish Wrangler tournament and pretending to work, counting down the minutes until I can leave.  I’ll go to the gym, but everyone thinks I’m going to my Therapist (or to my ambiguous bi-tuesday-ly appointment) (Deb is off this month.)  Suddenly I receive a text message from my sister who lives in Albany, New York.

“I think we just had an earthquake.  How do I find out?”

I refer her to USGS.gov which is where I always go when I think there’s been an earthquake.  If you look at the map of the US on that website you’ll see literally hundreds of little colored dots all along the west coast.  Depending on the week you might see one or two dots in other parts of the country.  (And honestly?  The vast majority of those dots on the west coast went unnoticed.)

Anyway, I refer her and then I go to look for myself.  Before I even get that far, I see a breaking news e-mail from MSNBC saying “Pentagon and the Capital Evacuated After Apparent Earthquake.”  I click on it and sure enough, 5.8 earthquake in Virginia.

I text my sister back:

“5.8 Earthquake in Virginia.  You have all the fun.  :)”

I start reading the stories, because as we know by now, disaster and mayhem is kind of my thing, (hey did you see that outdoor concert stage collapse?!?) but there wasn’t much to it.  The earthquake was shallow so it was felt over a wide area.

I report to my co-workers on this unusual event.  Unusual, to us, in that it happened on the other side of the country.  Not long after that, K tells me that a friend of hers, who used to live here, but now lives in Philadelphia felt the earthquakes as well.  The friend works with another California native and the two sit and watch as their co-workers decry the end of the world…

Later, K and I have this exchange:

K:  “OMG! Fox news had a new crawl on ‘No tsunami expected after east coast earthquake.’  Really?”
Me: “Of course!  Tsunami’s are all the rage.”
K:  “It’s the new black?”
Me:  “Tsunami’s are the new black.   That’s what I’m going to call my book.  I’m sure I won’t get in any trouble with Jen Lancaster.”

And then:

K:  “They are cancelling schools tomorrow back east, now.”
Me:  “It’s the end of the world you know.  Nobody want’s to be in school during Armageddon.”

Later, I discover that in spite of my making light of the situation, there was indeed some devastation back east; showing here:

Photo found here.

Excuse me while I briefly get political here.  Someone I don’t know was retreated by Wil Wheaton on twitter today when he wrote:

@markos god is punishing VA for not allowing gay marriage. RT by @wilw

It’s really only funny because, let’s face it.  If this had happened in Iowa, Pat Robertson would be saying “God is punishing Iowa for allowing gay marriage.”

I wonder if the rest of the country knows, California is pointing and laughing at them right now?

If I Were A Smurf

~ riggledo ~ 1 Comment

If I were a smurf
Even smurf for a smurf
I’d smurf outta smurf in the smurf
And smurf on what I smurfed then smurf
Smurf smurf with the smurfs
And smurf after smurfs
I’d smurf it with who I smurfed
And I’d never get smurfed for it.
Cause they’d smurf up for me.


If I were a smurf
I smurf I could undersmurf
How it smurfs to smurf a smurf
I smurf I’d be a better smurf.
I’d smurf to smurf
Cause I smurf how it smurfs
When you smurf the one you smurfed
Cause he’s smurfen you for smurfed
And everysmurf you smurfed got desmurfed

If I were a smurf
I would smurf off my smurf
Tell everysmurf it’s smurfen
So they’d smurf that I was smurfin’ alone
I’d smurf myself smurf
And smurf the smurfs as I smurf
Cause I smurf that smurf’d be smurfful
Smurfin’ for me to smurf smurf (Oh, to smurf smurf)

If I were a smurf
I smurf I would undersmurf
How it smurfs to smurf a smurf
I smurf I’d smurf a smurfer smurf.
I’d smurf to smurf
Cause I smurf how it smurfs
When you smurf the smurf you smurfed (smurfed)
Cause smurf’s smurfen smurf for smurfed (smurfed)
And everysmurf you smurfed got desmurfed

It’s a little too smurf for smurf to smurf back
Smurf its just a mismurf
Smurf I’d smurf you like smurf
If you smurfed I would smurf for you
You smurfed wrong

But you’re just a smurf
You smurf undersmurf
Smurf you don’t undersmurf
Smurf it smurfs to smurf a smurf somesmurf
You’ll smurf you were a better smurf
You don’t smurfen to smurf
You don’t smurf how it smurfs
Until you smurf the smurf you smurfed
Smurf you’ve smurfen smurf for smurfed
And everysmurf you  smurfed got desmurfed
But smurf just a smurf

~~~~~

Guess what I did this weekend?

Fuddy. Duddy.

~ riggledo ~ Leave a comment

I love a good fireworks display.  I really do.  Always have.  The kinds of displays put on by professional pyrotechnicians have never ceased to thrill me.  I love the power of the concussive force as the cartridges explode in a myriad of colors and patterns in the sky.  When I was a kid I loved the Fourth of July and could not wait for one or the other of my parents to take me to a fireworks display.

These days, my love of professional pyrotechnics is confined to New Year’s Eve, when I’d sooner suck on a salt lick than sit at home alone, missing the celebrations!  Why a salt lick?   I don’t know.  It’s just the first thing that came to mind.  So many of the professional Fourth of July fireworks shows that I once loved have been called off due to expense and the ones that are still in effect are a lot of trouble to get to for a 20 minute display followed by a 90 minute trip home because of the amount of traffic (on a school night, no less.)

As I write this, I’m sitting naked in my non-air conditioned apartment with the doors and windows open, because it’s been too hot to have the place closed up, and I imagine what it might have been like to live in any number of places in “The Gulf” during our many attacks on the “bad guys”, which is to say that on this night, every year, I feel as though I’m living in a war zone.  It starts in the early afternoon and will continue until well after I go to bed; a constant bombardment of explosions and sizzles and bangs.  Noises that, only because of what day it is, are brushed off (mostly) as the sounds of some unwise, amateur pyrofile getting his (or her) jolly’s, but on any other day would prompt me to pause the television and wait for the sounds of the sirens that one would expect to follow gunfire in the neighborhood.

I hate this, immensely.

Maybe it’s because I remember watching my father holding roman candles IN HIS HANDS while they shot off their seven or eight colored orbs into the night sky.  Maybe it’s because I never got over the fear of being burned while holding a thin wire with sparks shooting off of it in my own hands (what sense does that make, I ask you?)

Maybe it’s because I live in what some might consider the Murder Capital of the United States (certainly of California) and the sound of gunshots is neither uncommon, or comforting, and it can be difficult to differentiate between a hand gun and rampart.

Maybe it’s because I live in a place where most of the time, everything is so dry that it will catch fire if you look at it sideways.  Maybe it’s because I watch the news and hear the stories that are inescapable of the various types of injuries and even deaths that take place every year as unqualified and unintelligent people operate fireworks IN MY FRONT YARD (figuratively.  I don’t have a yard, just a driveway and a crowded street.)

Maybe it’s because I’ve learned enough in my EMT training to not be cavalier about the possibilities on a night like this (and fully expect that if ever I get a job as an EMT I’ll never have the Fourth of July off work again).

Maybe it’s because I’m an egalitarian and amateur fireworks within city limits are simply illegal.

Whatever the reason, I’ve grown to hate this night, in which I will get no sleep (this raucous will continue until the wee hours of the morning) and I will have to fight hard against my nature to become angry because hundreds of people, who I do not know, have decided to take it upon themselves to take away my choice, my freedom (on Independence Day no less) to have a good nights sleep, free of noise polluted disruption, free of fear at whom might be dying from gunshot wounds (the sound of which might be mistaken for fireworks), free of fear that my house might randomly catch fire from a stray, or misdirected rocket, well into the early morning hours.

This  is not what Francis Scott Key had in mind when he wrote “The rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night…”

 

It Gets Better?

~ riggledo ~ 5 Comments

I’ve struggled greatly with how and whether to write this.  I’m still not entirely sure what to say.  And I’m truly, if unrealistically concerned that somehow, this will be the post that I write that will be seen by more than the 6 or 8 people who usually read my blog and that somehow my words will be misconstrued as something more than they are.

By now we all know about the number of teens who have committed suicide recently after having been torturously bullied by their classmates for being, or being perceived to be, gay.  Most of you are probably aware of the “It Gets Better” campaign and the numerous videos that have been made of people, some in a position to know, some not, telling the youth of this world that life gets better and that they have so much to look forward to and that if they’ll just stick it out until they graduate they can have the life they want, free from bullying and torment, free to live openly and proudly and freely as who or what they determine for themselves that they are.

To that I say, “Don’t bet on it!”

My story is about more than just being a gay kid.  Hell, I didn’t even know I was a gay kid!  Nevertheless, I was bullied and beaten and name-called; abused by my classmates with words I prefer not to use, even as an example.  I didn’t know why they would call me that and I wondered what they thought they saw in me that I didn’t think I saw in myself that would prompt them to be so hurtful.

But it was more.  I wasn’t just called names because they perceived me to be gay.  I was tormented for many reasons.  And when I went home after school into what was supposed to be a safe place of refuge, I was tormented for entirely different reasons in new and terrible ways.  I was raised by a single mother.  While she was at work, I was at home alone with my older siblings, a brother five years older and a sister three years older.  My brother was abusive; he once broke my nose over the use of an alarm clock… MY alarm clock, that I bought, with MY own money.  That was the worst, but he abused me often, physically and emotionally.

What my mother did was worse.  In the case of all three of her children she “disciplined” us into submission so that long before hitting our teens, or even our “tweens” to use a modern term, there was no longer a need for “discipline.”  So instead of physical abuse, I suffered emotional abuse; bullying of its own kind.  I wanted to be close to her, she told me I was “in the way”.  I wanted to talk to her, she turned up the volume on the television.  I told her I was horribly depressed, she told me I wasn’t and “never say that again.”  I told her I didn’t have any friends and I was miserable, she told me “Well that’s your problem, isn’t it?”

I was raised in the “Bible Belt” of America where there’s a church on every street corner and if you’re politics aren’t ultra-conservative, you’re a sinner who will burn in hell, or so I was led to believe.  In the Bible Belt… where Christianity, acceptance and God’s perfect love abound, right?

I’d be lying if I said I never had feelings and urges I didn’t understand.  If I said I never felt desires that I was ashamed of.  I was embarrassed by my body and just plain scared of sexuality in general, fearful that I would cross some boundary into sinfulness; more fearful that I’d discover something about myself that I couldn’t handle.

When I was 12, I spent the night at a friend’s house and while he was using the bathroom, with the door open, he asked me if I was in puberty yet.  He told me that he had a hair and then he wanted me to come see it. I didn’t want to because I would have to look at his penis to see it.

When I was 17, I was hopelessly in love with my best friend, I just didn’t know it then.  I spent the night at his house one time, and more than once during that night, I wished something would “accidentally” happen before immediately catching myself and feeling ashamed, embarrassed to look him in the eye over something he didn’t even know.

My mother told me repeatedly throughout my life that being gay was a sin, it wasn’t something that I could accept about myself.  And that belief was only reinforced every Sunday and Wednesday night at church.  And do you think that bullying and hateful speech was limited to school?  It wasn’t!  I got it at church too.  At church! Children and teenagers running around a very highly reputed, internationally respected institution yelling “F____t!” at the top of their lungs and aimed at one specific person.  Me.  Yeah, this was a safe and loving, welcoming environment.

In every circle of my life I was reminded almost daily that to be a Christian, to be acceptable in the eyes of God and man, I had to be straight.  I had to grow up and fall in love, and get married (to a woman) and have 2.5 children with a dog and a white picket fence.  I could never admit to anyone that I didn’t want any of that.

I was miserable every minute of every day.  I wanted to be out of that situation at every turn.  I went to bed every night and prayed I would wake up as someone else.  I drifted off to sleep at night begging God to let me off the hook and take me in my sleep.  I never cried; it wasn’t safe to do so. I still don’t cry.

And if I’m to be completely honest, I tried to kill myself, more than once.  I was terrified of pain, and completely unsure of where I believed my soul would go if I killed myself so, no, I didn’t try very hard.  I buried my face in my pillow and hoped I’d “accidentally” suffocate in my sleep.  I don’t suppose I ever really believed it would work and maybe on some level deep down, I didn’t want it to, but I was sincere in my attempts nonetheless.

The one thing that kept me going, the one hope, the one belief that got me out of bed everyday and kept me moving in my life was that one day life would get better.  I would move on from this place.  I would live on my own, in my own place with my own feelings and beliefs and the real world of an adult would be a better place.  I would be OK.  I believed that because I had to believe something would change.

Twelve years ago, I moved to arguably the most liberal, inclusive, welcoming, accepting place in this country.  I have lived in the San Francisco Bay Area ever since.  I have worked the last eight and a half years for a company with a sterling reputation for diversity, inclusiveness, acceptance and equality.  We rate 100% on the Human Rights Campaign’s Buying for Equality Guide which means we have full domestic partner benefits, nondiscrimination practices in hiring and, as a corporation, actively supports public equality.  And still “we” are not perfect.

Despite the community in which I live, this is still a nation of in-equality.  We are still a discriminating people.  Our institutions still bully.  Though things are still in a state of flux, as of this moment, I can not get married.  Even if I could, I couldn’t reap the federal financial benefits of being married.  Up until a week ago, I could serve in the armed forces if I wanted, but I couldn’t tell anybody the truth about myself while I did it.  My status as a homosexual man isn’t recognized as a protected minority even though, statistically, the proof is irrefutable, and as such I am not entitled to the protections afforded to minority populations.  You can call it what you like; I call it bullying.

Oh sure, some of the circumstances have changed, but many of them have not.  I still don’t feel safe to reveal myself to the people around me.  I still don’t have the confidence to be open and free in the world I live.  Every day there are stories in the news of discrimination in the world.

It’s not fair to say that I’m in this place because I’m gay.  And it’s not fair to say that gay teenagers today have everything in their favor except that they happen to be gay.  My story is not unique.

So when I hear these messages, telling kids “It Gets Better“, I have to ask: Does it?  Really?

I don’t have the answers.  I wish I did.  I know it’s not suicide!

I also know it’s not false hope and unreliable promises of a better tomorrow.