This ought to be the last post about Mr Drunk and Ms Drunker, the former neighbors.
Friday night, our landlady had a party, to which she had invited everyone in our building, plus everyone in the building (not owned by her) in which Drunk and Drunker had lived, and a few other people to celebrate (or commemorate or maybe just commiserate) the leaving of Drunk and Drunker…
When the iPhone was first officially announced (in 2007), I grumbled a lot. Some of my friends took issue with my grumbling, and I had to explain that I wasn’t angry at Apple, nor was I saying the iPhone was a bad idea. I was irritated at a lot of the technical press who were elaborating (incorrectly) on some parts of the news. And I was angry at the executives and processes at the company that owned my employer at the time, and another company that we were working with on a joint project.
I was angry because if they hadn’t thrown so many obstacles in our way, a phone we had been working on for a few years would have been released before the iPhone. Don’t take me wrong, the iPhone would have still leapfrogged over us, but if we’d released it when originally planned, we would have been just a competitor at a slight disadvantage. Because of the delays, the soonest we could possibly release it would make our independently developed product look like a quick attempt to copy some of the iPhone’s features.
But the story begins more than a decade earlier than that… Continue reading While we’re on the subject of smart phones…
I attended a Methodist university that had rules calling for expulsion for, among other things, being an “unrepentant homosexual.” At the time I enrolled (back in the mid-1980s), I was still struggling with my sexual identity—I was trying to convince myself that I was bi, or if not, then maybe I could live my life as asexual.
Being in the closet was a survival necessity in my day-to-day life back then. Almost everyone that I knew, whether through school, church, or just in the community, thought that being gay was inherently wrong. The state-approved high school health class text had a whole chapter on abnormal sexuality, and it described kinky straight sex, homosexuality, pedophilia, and necrophilia as simply different stages of the same psychological disease, for goodness sake!
I’d seen high school classmates kicked out of school, then sent out of town by their shamed family after rumors circulated that they had been caught having gay sex, as well.
Whether one of the colleges I was applying to had harsher anti-gay rules than another didn’t seem like a significant issue.
So, yes, I have to confess that I applied to a university fully aware that not only were my religious beliefs not very closely aligned with theirs, but several things I believed were actually violations of their rules and code of conduct.
But that’s only the beginning of the story…
When I posted earlier about my journey from my redneck Southern Baptist roots to my city-dwelling ultra-liberal gay taoist present, I phrased it as a confession, which may have seemed odd.
Because I often write about matters of conflict between some people purporting to speak for Christians and the LGBT community, and because I frequently make references to Biblical passages (sometimes quite obscure ones), and also because I have been known to construct Biblical answers to some of those conflicts, I suspect some of the folks reading my blog think that I’m speaking as a gay, liberal Christian. I don’t intend to identify that way, and don’t wish to speak on behalf of any Christians. I’m a gay, liberal taoist. And when I speak, I speak only for myself.
You might ask, why does that require a confession?
I was working on a post, in reaction to an op-ed I read last weekend, in which I was ranting a bit.
Okay, it was more than a bit. I was probably well into self-righteous smugness. I took a break to catch up on some news, and came across another story that, as I processed it, made me realize that I was being extremely hypocritical in my rant.
I will return to the topic, and try to write something perhaps a bit less sanctimonious, because I think I have something worth saying on the matter. But before I do that, I have to make a confession or two…
I’ve written a few times about the troublesome, perpetually drunk neighbors whose lease was not renewed. They were supposed to be moved out by midnight Saturday. I had predicted, back in July, when we found out they had to leave, that they wouldn’t make it out in time…
Sometimes we fail to defy stereotypes. I’m a gay man who enjoys live theatre, particularly musical theatre. I own a lot of purple clothes. I grow flowers. I cry at weddings (and some commercials, certain songs, et cetera). I love to dance.
And I’m a football fan.
I’m a football fan whose spouse really dislikes the sport.
My being a football fan surprises people, particularly after reading about the horrible “why don’t you play football” incident in eighth grade, and other things I’ve written about football culture. Well, my relationship with football is complicated.
Most of my childhood memories of football involve trying not to annoy my dad while he was watching his games. I remember once or twice asking him questions while he was watching a game, because I didn’t understand what was going on on the field, but he told me to stop interrupting him. In years since people have expressed surprise that a football-loving father wouldn’t teach his son the game. It’s entirely possible that he tried when I was younger, and I hadn’t been interested. Our relationship was rocky since before I can remember, so who knows?
The upshot was that I didn’t really understand the game. Being in band I had to attend games and we would march at halftime, but it wasn’t until my junior or possibly senior year that some friends sat me down and explained the game. Then I started enjoying it.
While I was attending community college and living with my maternal grandparents, I started watching college football with my grandpa on Saturdays. Then on most Sundays I would watch the Seahawks with friends.
I continued watching the Seahawks fairly regularly until Ray and I moved in together. Ray couldn’t stand football, so I only watched it occasionally while he was alive. Not long after I started dating Michael, he admitted he didn’t much care for the game, either (for instance, last week when I mentioned that kick-off was in 25 minutes, he sighed, rolled his eyes, and asked, “Is that some sports thing?”).
For many years it was easy to fall out of the habit of watching football. I would still occasionally talk about games with a few people. I would skim the news for information.
A few years ago, I wound up watching a play-off game, and I quite enjoyed it. I’m still not a hardcore fan, and we often have plans for Sundays. Fortunately, between TiVo and the ‘net, I can catch games I miss.
I’m still not a hardcore fan, but my TiVo is programmed to record games by my favorite team, just like last year.
See you at kickoff!
When I was a kid, just about every metropolitan area in the U.S. had at least one local TV station showing some sort of monster/mystery/sci-fi/horror movie program every week. Many of them ran on Friday nights, after the local evening news ended. A few ran on Saturday evenings, and fewer still on Saturday afternoons. And something that a lot of those shows had in common is that there was a host: a person who usually was dressed up as some sort of monster or other stock character, who would introduce the show, possibly banter with a sidekick, or otherwise provide a bit of color commentary to the proceedings.
Some people operate under the impression that the first horror host was Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (no, she didn’t begin hosting until 1981). Slightly more informed people point to Bob Wilkins, who hosted Creature Features on a couple of different Bay Area channels from 1971 to 1984.
Well-informed people aware that all of them were preceded by some years by Vampira (1954-56), who later tried to sue Elvira for stealing her schtick. [Given that the actress who played Vampira had been working with the station in ’81 and was to be an executive producer of the show that became Elvira’s show, and she left in a dispute over the casting of the host, you can understand.]
A few years after Vampira’s show went off the air (it was aired live, and virtually no footage remains), Screen Gems put together a package of 52 horror films and made them available for syndication. Stations all over the country began showing their own weekly horror shows under titles such as Shock Theatre, Nightmare Theatre, Sinister Cinema, Saturday Chiller, and so on. The shows were usually broadcast on either Friday or Saturday night, after the evening news.
One reason that every station that carried the show had its own host was simply technological. In the late 50s (and for some time after), the way non-network syndication worked involved physically shipping cannisters of film (and later videotape) back and forth. It worked a lot like the non-streaming version of Netflix. A station would subscribe to the show, the syndicator would ship movies out to the subscribing stations. After the station showed the film(s), they would ship them back to the syndicator, who would ship them to another station.
My understanding is that they shipped out four or five movies at a time, and that as long as the station paid their subscription fees, they didn’t wait until the last set had been shipped back before sending the next.
In this case, Screen Gems just provided the movies themselves. Some location stations just ran them with, at most, a voice-over announcer. Other stations came up with their own shows, inspired originally by Vampira.
During the years I was old enough to be allowed to stay up and watch such things, we were living in various small towns in Utah and northwestern Colorado, and one of the stations we got was KCPX channel 4 out of Salt Lake City, where each Friday night brought us Nightmare Theatre.
For a few years it went by the name of The 10:20 Double Nightmare, because it was a double feature and it started at 10:20pm as soon as the evening news ended. I remember that phase only because sometimes my parents would let me stay up late enough to watch the first movie, but I wasn’t supposed to watch the second. By the time I was allowed to stay up as late as I wanted on Fridays, the local evening news went all the way until 10:30, and the show had reverted by to a single movie.
Nightmare Theatre was hosted, during that period, by Dr. Volapuk. Which is to say that a man wearing a vaguely Dracula-like suit and cape, and a really awful rubber ghoul mask, would come out of the shadows, introduce the movie, and make a lot of bad jokes. He would make more bad jokes at the commercial breaks. Occasionally he would impart a bit of trivia related to the movies. At the end of the show, he would give a preview of the next week’s movie, and then end with his traditional sign-off, “I, Dr. Volapuk, have been happy to be your host tonight. Remember, Volapuk spelled backwards is cup-of-love. So in your nightmares tonight, dream of me…” and then he would laugh maniacally.
No, I have no idea what all that cup-of-love business was supposed to mean.
I didn’t know, at the time, that the actor in the mask was also the guy who dressed up as Fireman Frank every morning to host the cartoon show on the same station.
Nightmare Theatre showed a lot of the old Universal Monster movies (Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Son of Dracula, Werewolf of London, The Mummy’s Hand, and so on), but also a lot of the Japanese kaiju genre of moves (Mothra, Godzilla Raids Again, War of the Gargantuas).
A lot of the nerdy interest in such shows got re-focused on newer things when Star Wars came out and kicked off a bunch of higher quality films of the fantastic. Relatively cheap high quality satellite feeds and other cable television technologies replaced the old model of shipping film around, so shows such as Elvira’s Movie Macabre, Mystery Science Theater 3000, or Cinema Insomnia could be produced in one place and seen in the niche of each market. Which has put stake through the heart of most of the local horror hosts.
All those Friday nights that I stayed up to watch those movies is probably why I often still get a hankering on Fridays for some cheesy sci fi or similar films.
Wanna join me?
I’ve written before about my perpetually drunk neighbor, and his string of sometimes equally-dysfunctional roommates. The last few months I had been referring to him and his latest roommate as “Drunk and Drunker.”
When news got about that their new landlord was declining to renew their lease, I had predicted that they wouldn’t successfully vacate by the end of August. The many loud arguments heard from over there and the ever-growing pile of junk accumulating in their off-street parking lot seemed to cement that notion.
I was having flashbacks to a completely different neighbor who, some years ago when she was supposed to move out by the end of September, was so delayed that I came home on the evening of Halloween to find an enormous U-Haul truck backed just far enough into the driveway to not block the street (Yes, a month late, she spent that month sharing the place with the guy who had taken over her lease; not only that, when I talked to him the next afternoon, as he was carrying stuff into the truck, he asked me not to let the landlady know they they were still trying to get her stuff out that day). That was the Halloween where we got one, and only one, trick-or-treater. And since it was my godson, I’m not sure that counts. I totally blame the giant truck.
So I was a bit surprised when I heard people trying to maneuver a small rented truck into the harrow driveway between our two buildings this last weekend.
One of the people outside trying to call directions to the driver was another neighbor, a woman who lived above Drunk & Drunker. The other person was the sister of the perpetually drunk neighbor.
I had seen, earlier in the month, the same upstairs neighbor trying to cajole the perpetually drunk guy into calling about some apartments whose ads he had looked at. I had heard from our landlady that the upstairs neighbor had decided to spend a half hour every day trying to get the drunk guy to look at ads and call places. I knew that drunk guy’s sister and mother had both been coming over and trying to help with packing.
Not long after the truck pulled out Saturday afternoon, there was a knock at our door. The upstairs neighbor (a sweet woman who I think deserves a medal, and possibly sainthood) wanted to let us know that the rental truck had run over one of our solar decorative lights in the side flower bed. She had already swept up the glass and had the broken light in a bag that she was taking to the garbage. “I just thought someone should tell you, and I know you both come out here barefoot a lot, so you should be careful.”
I thanked her for both cleaning up and letting us know.
She repeated that she was sorry. So I pointed out that it wasn’t her fault, or her responsibility.
“I just… really like the pretty lights, too.”
There’s still a lot of junk in the parking space, but the line of lawn chairs, benches, occasional tables, and the ornamental birdbath have all been removed for the walkway in front of the apartment. The unplugged Christmas lights, the weird fake flower hanging baskets, and the ugly fake parrot have vanished from the eave. All of the familiar knick-knacks and gew-gaws are gone from their windows.
Which isn’t to say that they are bare. A new gew-gaw, which appears to be a ceramic Mr Toad of Toad Hall driving a wooden jalopy, has appeared on the sill of the living room window.
The other roommate is still there, with less than a week left to move out. And there’s still all that junk piled up in the parking space. Some of it I recognize as property of perpetually drunk guy.
So there is still plenty of evidence that my original prediction is going to be correct.
One of the moments this last weekend that I realized just how alien I felt in the town where I attended High School was when my Aunt Silly asked me if I liked living in Seattle. It wasn’t the question itself, nor was it even the extremely disbelieving tone of voice or her incredulous facial expression. It’s the fact that she, and several other relatives who live near her, have been asking me the same question, with essentially the same amount of incredulity, for at least a quarter of a century.
And they never accept, “Yes, I love it,” as an answer. They frown and ask, “Really?” If I try to explain, the puzzled expressions just get worse. The only times I’ve been able to get even a grudging acceptance is if I mention my work and how difficult it would be to find something similar there.
It made me think about a conversation I’ve seen unfold at work many times. In the tech industry there are always a number of co-workers who are from other countries, and sometimes people talk about the difficulties moving to a completely different culture, raising children and building a life on the opposite side of the globe from your own parents and siblings.
In the middle of a recent iteration of this topic (we were having some celebratory cake for a young man who was about to fly back home to get married) I had a somewhat shocking realization: it has been 25 years since I have seen my father face-to-face. This co-worker who flies to the opposite side of the planet once a year to visit his parents hasn’t even been alive that long.
So I shouldn’t be thinking about how odd it must be for him to go so far away to make his way in this world. Because by comparison, I’ve let more than mere physical distance separate us.
My dad and I have never been close. And I do mean “never.” I distinctly recall being scolded by both Mom and one of my grandmothers when I was four years old to make more of an effort to spend time with him. My other grandmother and an aunt have talked about how even when I was two we had problems—and not just the ordinary problems of an inexperienced parent with stubborn toddler.
How much of that was due to his abusiveness, and the co-dependent relationship that develops between a child and an abusive parent, I can’t say. But even without that issue, I think we would have had problems. In oh, so many ways, we are alike. But in others we’re completely different.
Physically we are so alike that it’s a bit spooky. For instance, once in high school (this was after my parents divorced, and I was living 1200 miles away), one of my friends saw some photos Mom had put up which included several of my dad in his teen years. My friend would not believe that the pictures were not of me wearing some costumes. He became so angry when I insisted that they were not pictures of me, that he stormed out of our house and wouldn’t talk to me for about a week. Even then, he only relented because he’d talked to Mom and she confirmed that the photos were my Dad (actually, one was of my grandfather, so the look-alike thing has gone on for a few generations).
We share a certain number of personality traits. While a lot of that might be learned behavior, some of them I think go deeper than that. Sometime in my late teens or early twenties I realized that some of his less pleasant personality traits were getting a bit too strong. I had to make some serious changes, because I didn’t want to carry on the cycle of abuse.
But in some fundamental ways we are very different, and I know that some of those differences were unsettling to him even when I was very small. My tendency to talk to myself in order to figure out problems certainly upset him. I resisted his efforts to make me conform to “boy’s toys” and the like. Not that I didn’t play with my army men and rockets, I did! But I was just as interested in “girl’s toys.” I could go from staging immense battles where the future of the entire world hung in the balance, to acting out hurt/comfort romances where my sister’s Barbie nursed Captain Action back to health after he nearly died saving my sister’s Ken from… well, I can’t remember the name of the monster toy I had.
And you won’t believe the drama that ensued—after months of him angrily telling me that I could not have an Easy Bake Oven, plus telling Mom in that tone of voice that meant someone was going to get slapped around if we didn’t listen that she wasn’t to let anyone buy me such a girl’s toy—when I opened a Christmas present from my paternal Grandparents and found my very own Easy Bake Oven.
And don’t get me started on the political arguments!
It was mostly because of the abuse, though, that I was happy to be separated from him after my parents’ divorce was final. I’m not entirely happy at just how deep that separation has become. Being 1200 miles from him also meant being 1200 miles from one set of grandparents, an aunt, a bunch of cousins, and more. I have a half sister who seems like a great person, for instance, but we’re really just long distance acquaintances.
But I’m obviously not unhappy enough about it to take a road trip and try to renew some acquaintances. I have my reasons, and maybe they are as good as I think there are. As it is, my other relatives who only live a few hours’ drive away only see me once or twice a year.
That’s probably the real source of those looks of incredulity when my aunt asks if I like living in Seattle. I’m not that far away, and yet I don’t get back any more often than as if they were half a world away. And that just doesn’t make any sense at all, does it?
Font Folly 