Gifts of the Magi

On Christmas Day, my East Coast brother and his family rented a suburban theater so they could watch Wonder Woman 1984 together on a big screen. In her Facebook confession, my sister-in-law sheepishly observed “I know that sounds pretty bougie, but theaters are hurting so it was a lot cheaper than you’d think.” 

Here on the West Coast, the Leishmans are patiently waiting for rulings from the Washington Supreme Court and from the federal judge in my pending whistleblower lawsuits against the corrupt government lawyers who triggered my disability and covered up my wrongful termination. Despite practicing law for thirty years, I’m appalled by the glacial pace of litigation. Nevertheless, after enduring five years of abuse and stonewalling, I expect 2021 to finally bring not only answers and accountability, but hopefully also relief for my longsuffering family.

 

My son looks forward to getting a new videogaming system when our ship finally comes in. At the beginning of December, he quietly asked me “Have the bad guys surrendered yet? Or is Christmas cancelled this year?” 

I admitted to Oliver that I didn’t expect court rulings or a settlement before the new year. In the meantime, we couldn’t expect any change to our frugal situation.   

 

Once upon a time I could remember innumerable telephone numbers. Now that we’ve all been assimilated by the Borg and outsourced our memories, the only two working phone numbers I know by heart are my own cell phone and my parents’ 40-year-old landline. I’ve never learned the other six phone numbers that I'm responsible for on our family wireless account:  my daughters’, my son’s, my parents’, and my nephew’s.

I’ve also lost track of the number of iPhones our family has cycled through over the years. Here’s the family inventory as of December 1, 2020:

            

·   My father had an iPhone 5 Plus that’s been handed down through the entire family, and now serves as a paperweight next to the couch.

 

·   My mother had an iPhone 6 with minimal memory that we got on sale a few years ago. She insists that’s all she’ll ever need.

 

·   My nephew had a first generation iPhone SE that we got on sale when he moved in with my parents to finish high school in the States. The battery life was down to 45 minutes.

 

·   My son had my hand-me-down iPhone 8.

 

·   My daughter Eleanor had a finally-paid-for iPhone 8 Plus that she insisted on getting new two and a half years ago.

 

·   After years with the same outdated iPhone SE as my nephew, this summer my daughter Rosalind got a new phone for her birthday. She modestly chose an updated iPhone SE on sale.

 

·   And this spring I got a discounted iPhone 11 when Apple finally produced a model in green. 

 

Unlike the more rapacious among my children, my nephew is much too polite to complain about having a Neanderthal iPhone. Nevertheless, between courses of my mother’s delicious Thanksgiving feast, we all recognized it was time for an upgrade. 

After consulting with a prudent and diversified portfolio of financial advisors consisting of my brother, my sister-in-law, and my parents, my nephew and I identified an excellent deal for last year’s smart phone model – just like buying a new car at the end of the year, when the dealer is trying to clear out old inventory at steep discounts. One week before Christmas, my beaming nephew walked out of the neighborhood AT&T store with a beautiful new red iPhone 11. 

Our family wasn’t expecting much from Santa this year. After five years of battling dishonest government lawyers, I’m a broke unemployed disabled single gay dad, with a subzero credit score. Nevertheless, there’s still one crazy capitalist institution that’s dying to lend me money:  AT&T. I’ve had the same telephone account since I moved back from Chicago and bought my first flip phone two decades ago, back when the company was called “Cingular One.” With seven Leishmans now hooked on iPhones, AT&T regularly fills my inbox with upgrade offers.  

 

When Rosalind finally got her modest new phone this summer, Eleanor upped her relentless nagging about how she “needs” a brand new iPhone. I told her to leave me alone until I finally paid off her perfectly serviceable iPhone 8 Plus. A few months later, after we decided to get a new phone for her cousin, Eleanor came to me with the holiday deal she found on AT&T’s website.

 

It’s usually not worth the bother of trading in your old phone when you upgrade an iPhone on the leisurely Leishman timeline. Ordinarily you would expect a trade-in credit of $70 or less for a two-and-a-half-year-old phone. So it makes more sense to hand down the formerly new phone to a sibling, and eventually to a grandparent. However, according to Eleanor, for a limited time only, AT&T was offering a $700 credit if you purchased one of Apple's newly released iPhone 12s and traded in what they deemed to be a “recent” phone – including the iPhone 8. 

 

Eleanor is a notoriously unreliable reporter. Isn’t that an extra zero? Wouldn’t AT&T make me sign up for a new phone line, or sacrifice one of the dogs? But when I read the fine print I couldn’t find the catch. So I went to the AT&T store. The sales guru responded to my questions with with skepticism, assuming that at best we might be eligible for a lesser but still impressive $350 offer. After looking up our account, however, she had to confirm Eleanor’s report.

 

Some deals are too good to be true. Other deals are too good to resist. When I brought the kids home from the airport on Christmas Day, Eleanor found a surprise box in her stocking. Inside was an iPhone 12. In the fabulous new “Midnight Blue” finish. According to Eleanor, 2020 was The Best Christmas Ever by the Most Important Measure Known To Humanity.

While the kids were visiting their other father in the Midwest, Eleanor did not know that I’d already ordered her new iPhone 12 in time to arrive before Christmas. So all week she texted me with arguments why she “needed” a blue phone. Meanwhile, having just delivered two new phones for the family account, AT&T plied me with relentless propaganda about how much I deserved to upgrade to an iPhone 12 myself.

 

AT&T’s entreaties fell on deaf ears. I already had a perfectly fine – and green – iPhone 11. AT&T and Eleanor’s insatiable voice of “need” was therefore offset by the voice of responsibility, like a good angel hovering over my other shoulder. (Strangely, the responsible angel sounds just like my mother – the same voice that whispers “Put on a sweater” every time I reach for the thermostat.) 

 

Then Eleanor texted to say I should get her the slightly fancier iPhone 12 Pro, informing me that with AT&T’s irresistible holiday offer all the iPhone 12 models were the same price, and that the iPhone 12 Pro has an even better camera that she “needed” because she’s serious about photography. But as I pointed out to Eleanor, just two weeks earlier she’d spent all her work savings and Christmas money on a fancy new digital Canon camera that’s much more powerful than any smartphone, including the iPhone 12, the iPhone 12 Pro, and even the iPhone 12 Pro Max with its extra telephoto lens.

 

Then the voice of responsibility had an idea. Who’s the member of the family who takes even more pictures than Eleanor? Me. And who happened to have another trade-in eligible iPhone 8 in the house, because he handed his down to Oliver when he bought a green iPhone 11 last spring? 

Meanwhile, earlier that same day I’d seen a flock of tuxedoed Barrow’s Goldeneye ducks swimming by the boardwalk. I was frustrated when the ducks all looked like black dots in my non-telephoto pictures. What if we see an orca? Or if one of my children smiles in public? And what if I want to torture myself by taking high-resolution pictures of the entrancing mountains just across the border in Canada?

 

So that’s how Oliver got my iPhone 11, and I ended up with iPhone McDreamy.

Eleanor did not expect to find a blue iPhone 12 in her stocking when we got home from the airport at 10 pm on Christmas Day. And no one expected me to pick up a blue iPhone 12 Pro Max when we stopped by the AT&T store on Boxing Day to buy phone cases.

 

One of my friends from Vancouver Men’s Chorus is the earliest of early adopters, always in possession of the iPhone of iPhones. I could never aspire to such opulence or trendiness, even if I weren’t a broke unemployed disabled gay single father. Nevertheless, despite our dire circumstances, my entire family somehow ended the annus horribilus of 2020 with our first set of new or new-ish phones. And for the first time in my life, I have the fanciest iPhone on the market. Capitalism apparently works after all. 

 

It’s an Epiphany miracle. 

Happy New Year and Happy Epiphany 2021

Rescue Me

Yesterday morning it was sunny and 34° in Bellingham. With the windchill it felt like 24°. (For our metric system-loving neighbours, that’s 269° Kelvin.) 

It was my first dog walk wearing an Oh Canada toque. My worn black fleece kept me warm. As a top layer I added the magic high-tech wind breaker my ex gave me for Christmas years ago, back when I had a sailboat rather than children. 

With a dog leash the real cold-weather issue is gloves. I had two choices. There’s a fancy pair of ski gloves in the closet that some guy left behind. But they make me overheat, and I could only find the left glove anyway. So I went with the cheap pair of cloth Ace Hardware work gloves.

 

After lunch I stopped by REI to check out alternatives. Did you know that gloves these days are “touch screen sensitive”? For just $40?

 

I decided to wait for Santa to leave a pair in my stocking. It’s not that I’m an unemployed disabled singled dad on a limited budget. Or that I’m too healthily unplugged these days to justify dog walks with touch screen sensitivity. It’s just that my old work gloves from Ace Hardware match Bear’s coloring.

Like the autumn leaves, Bear is currently at peak foliage. 

 

When my ex moved away a year ago, I inherited three kids full time, a conveniently located rental house, and a couple of dogs. Bear was already getting shaggy. When the Covid shutdown came, the dogs were long past due for grooming. By spring Bear looked like a Mad Max-era Tina Turner wig with legs. 

 

By the time the dog groomers finally re-opened this summer, the dogs’ fur was so tangled they needed buzz cuts. With his hair’s variegated shades of cream and brown no longer blended together, Bear looked like a blotchy weasel. 

 

Fortunately, after a couple of months his fur finally grew in enough to restore his natural pied beauty. As we walk along the boardwalk and the sidewalks of Fairhaven and South Hill against a flattering backdrop of sunshine and autumn leaves, we meet countless beaming smiles and gushing compliments. Bear is more attractive than anyone I’ve ever dated, and obviously way out of my league.

 

Sigh. It’s never going to be about me.

November is the cruelest month. I wrote a year ago that “many of the darkest times of my life occurred in this light- and joy-deficient time of year.” As we approach this particular November, everyone’s hopes are locked in a battle with Trumpian darkness. 

 

Even without the election and the U.S. Supreme Court’s descent into lunacy, I was already facing peak anxiety. Last year in “Schrödinger’s Summer Vacation,” I wrote about my experience waiting for the Court of Appeals to rule on my appeal from the trial judge’s two years earlier, when the judge threw out my damage claims against my employer’s sleazy investigator on an inapplicable technicality:

 

For as long as I’ve practiced law in Washington, Division One of the Court of Appeals has set a goal of issuing its opinions within thirty days after oral argument. Each case is assigned to one of the three judges on the panel that heard the appeal. Whenever the opinion is written by nine out of the ten judges currently serving on Division One, the Court releases the decision an average of five weeks after the argument. However, if the opinion is assigned to the Court's tenth judge, it won't come out until an average of sixteen weeks after oral argument. His longest bout of judicial writer’s block that year lasted 26 weeks. 

Oral argument was in April. In mid-June I looked over the statistics and realized which judge was writing the opinion in my appeal. Every Monday afternoon from April until September, I repeatedly logged onto the website that lists the Washington appellate courts’ most recent opinions. Each week’s batch of new rulings from Division One of the Court of Appeals would appear at a mysteriously random time between noon and 3 pm. Each week my increasing anxiety would spike on Mondays.

 

Twenty weeks after oral argument, the Court of Appeals finally issued its ruling. In an emphatic published opinion, the Court agreed with my legal arguments, and reversed the lower court’s decision. 

 

A year later, my new weekly bout of stress spikes on Wednesdays at 4 pm. That’s when the Washington Supreme Court announces which opinions are scheduled to be released the following morning. The Court’s ruling on the investigator firm’s appeal, which we argued in June, is due any week now.

 

Meanwhile, like everyone else, my covid-amplified background anxiety is scheduled to peak on a definite date:  Tuesday, November 3. 

 

But wait, there’s more. In my separate lawsuit against the State, both sides are waiting for United States District Judge Richard Jones to rule on a couple of pivotal motions that have been pending for months. Judge Jones’s decision could come any day. So that particular component of my anxiety peaks every day at 5 pm, except for weekends and federal holidays. 

 

Schrödinger’s Fall offers three times the excitement of Schrödinger’s Summer Vacation.

When I began my Phase III of blogging in September, I cheerfully observed that “despite the various plagues besetting everyone, I’m as happy and healthy as I’ve ever been in my life.” Nevertheless, despite the progress I’ve made with PTSD and codependency, living with constant stress increases many of my other symptoms, including trichotillomania, bruxism, and social anxiety. 

 

Ironically, even as my thinking and writing get clearer, I’ve become even less articulate talking to other people. Fortunately, walking the dogs give me ample opportunity to practice my social skills. Bear’s charms evoke predictable set-up lines from friendly strangers, such as “Your dog is so cute!” and “What kind of dog is he?” 

 

Bear and Buster are purebred Aussiedoodles – one of the most popular of the trendy class of “doodles.” My ex and his husband were friends with a local breeder. I never wanted a dog myself – to the contrary, I was comfortable in my role as the dogs’ fabulous gay uncle. Besides, if I’d chosen a dog, I would have picked what in my day we called a “mutt.”

A few millennia ago, when humans made the terrible mistake of abandoning a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and embraced agriculture and civilization instead, our ancestors domesticated (or rather conquered) various species like cows, chickens, and pigs. Cats domesticated themselves, more or less. Dogs and humans domesticated each other. 

 

Dogs make perfect comfort animals. Humans do too, when we make an effort. Many of the dogs Bear and I encounter on our walks look like mutts, but their owners always refer to them as “rescue dogs.” 

 

The fastest, leanest, and quietest dog among the regulars at our off-leash park is a beautiful greyhound. His owner is a sweet white-haired grandma who hauls a gallon jug of water to the park each day to fill all the dog bowls. She rescued her greyhound when one of the country’s few remaining dog racing tracks closed.

Last year I didn’t have a dog of my own to help me through Schrodinger’s Summer Vacation. It would have helped.

 

Fortunately, this year things are different. Like my children, Buster is allergic to exercise. However, Bear has proven to be an marvelous walking companion. Plus he’s an excellent conversationalist, and listens patiently as I work on material for my writing. 

 

Most afternoons the rest of the family kicks us out of the house to go on a Real Walk. In addition to our short walks in the morning and evening with Buster. So far this year I’ve worn through two pairs of shoes. As we approach an ultimate stress-test November, Bear and I are averaging well over ten miles a day.

 

In 1904, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov won the Nobel Prize in Medicine after demonstrating the concept of “conditioned reflex.” Pavlov famously rang a bell when presenting dogs with food. The dogs learned to associate the sound with mealtime. Eventually merely ringing a bell was enough to make the dogs salivate.

 

Now that I have a dog, and Bear has me, I realize that Pavlov’s report was incomplete. When you ring the bell, dogs don’t just salivate. They also stare at you with sad “feed-me” eyes.

 

Dogs have expectations. So Bear and I are off for another cold walk.

Opening the Sluices

During World War II, my maternal grandfather Hyrum Boyd Phillips was a civil engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers. His father, James Wilford Phillips, worked on the Panama Canal as a young man four decades earlier.

Hiram M. Chittenden served with the Army Corps of Engineers a generation before my great grandfather. During his long career, Chittenden worked on projects across the country, including many of the original improvements in Yellowstone Park. In 1906, Chittenden was appointed to head the Seattle District of the Corps of Engineers. He designed the waterway that connects Lake Washington with the Puget Sound. My map collection includes a 1907 copy of Chittenden’s canal proposal.

Lake Washington is the largest lake in the state. Before Americans invaded the Pacific Northwest, the lake’s surface was 30 feet above sea level. The lake emptied at its marshy south end into the Black River, which joined the Duwamish River before meandering into Elliott Bay. 

Nearby Lake Union was 21 feet above sea level, and drained into a protected salt water inlet to the west. The future location of Seattle’s Ballad neighborhood was a native village named sHusHóól, meaning “Tucked Away Inside.” Paler folks named the sheltered inlet Salmon Bay. 

At the beginning of the 20th century, Chittenden’s ship canal changed everything. 

On the east side of Seattle’s isthmus, the Corps of Engineers dug the Montlake Cut to connect large Lake Washington to small Lake Union and Portage Bay. To the west, the Fremont Cut replaced the stream draining Lake Union with a navigable channel. And where formerly salt-water Salmon Bay connected with the Puget Sound, the Corps built a pair of locks, a sluiceway, and a small fish ladder.

In July 1916, the engineers closed the gates at the western entrance to the newly-completed locks, and let water flow west through the Fremont Cut. Freshly desalinated Salmon Bay rose nine feet to meet the level of Lake Union. 

Click here for the Seattle Times’ cool before-and-after sliding version of these graphics

While engineers construct a dam, they build a temporary “cofferdam,” a watertight enclosure that is pumped dry during construction. On August 25, 1916, the Corps of Engineers breached the cofferdam protecting the Montlake Cut. Water poured through the gap into the finished canal. Over the next few months, Lake Washington’s water level gradually fell nine feet, permanently altering the lake’s 72 mile shoreline. The spillway at the west end of the locks became both lakes’ sole outlet. The Black River dried up and disappeared.

The last surviving member of the Shilshole native community, “Salmon Bay Charlie,” was forcibly removed to make way for construction of the locks. Hiram Chittenden died in 1917, three months after the Ship Canal’s dedication. In 1956, the canal locks – no longer “Second to Panama” – were renamed in Chittenden’s honor.

Everyone more or less adjusted to the new normal. Except for the salmon.

This week marks three years of blogging, with 300 essays published on this blog so far. I lost track of the total word count long ago, but it’s probably approaching 400,000 words. Collectively that’s somewhere between the size of Middlemarch and Gone With the Wind.

Appallingly, my published blog posts are only tip of the writing iceberg. I already have another three hundred individual MS Word files containing draft essays, book chapters, and book or article proposals, with titles ranging from “Oliver Votes for Asparagus” to “Me Too, Bruce.” At this rate I could keep publishing a couple of blog essays each week for another five years, even if I had no new ideas, and completely ignored current events.

Instead, as a result of my much improved mental health, the writing muse has picked up the pace. For example, a couple of months ago I woke up with the idea for “If Love Were All,” and published the final essay three hours later (choosing the pictures took 45 minutes). Last week I wrote “Buster is the Weakest Link” in my head during a four mile walk with Bear. 

Meanwhile, my gay Mormon PTSD memoir, Anyone Can Whistle: a Memoir of Showtunes, Religion, and Mental Illness, finally took shape last month after I poured its extra chapters into my other book projects. FYI, all the sex, drugs, and other fictions filtered into my gay Mormon novel, The Word of Wisdom.

In addition to the fun writing, my life also remains flooded with wordy legal filings. Fortunately for everyone, improved mental health reduces the number of PTSD-fueled rants against injustice. My long monologuing letters to opposing counsel are down to a pithy two pages or less each, tossed off between Zoom writing classes for myself and home schooling sessions with my children.

After three decades of debilitating writer’s block, I marvel at my newfound ability to sit down at the computer and just write something. For example, I wrote my entire Supplemental Brief for the Washington Supreme Court from scratch in two days, well before the due date. I should apologize to all my clients in private practice who were told a project like that would take at least two weeks to do well. 

My increased efficiency and capacity arrived just in time. Even as the State’s stubborn denials result in additional legal proceedings, I’ve learned how to juggle numerous hot water balloons.

We think in metaphors. As I wrote last year in “Indoor Plumbing,” flow metaphors provide the most useful models for describing how my writing process works. At the same time, writing has also become the most useful proxy for my thinking process – such as the interaction between my conscious and unconscious mind, and the current status of my ability to think and communicate effectively.

Looking back at my blog output over the last three years, I recognize another important recurring theme:  quantum leaps. I’ve come a long way since my PTSD diagnosis in November 2015 and my suicidal nadir a year later. Much of that progress has been gradual. But as I wrote in “Nonlinear Thinking,” and as we’ve all learned from epidemiology recently, some events trigger exponential rather than merely linear change.

Starting with my Court of Appeals victory in September and the Washington Supreme Court’s favorable ruling in January, through gay Muppets and fierce Canadian drag queens in February, I’ve experienced a quantum leap. It shows up most obviously in my writing. Since the first of the year, I’ve regularly published two substantial blog essays each week. My legal work is going well. My other writing is coming along well, too. Most importantly, my family is thriving. Despite all the massive changes to our lives over the last few years, this winter the kids and I finally achieved an equilibrium. As I wrote at the beginning of March, I finally felt Better-ish. 

Days later, pandemic closed the schools and the Canadian border. And cancelled chorus, and sports, and travel, and art, and life. Suddenly I found myself without enough fingers to plug all the leaky dikes.

Here’s where quantum leap connects with water works.

All the Leishmans of Bellingham are desperate for something new to binge watch. Fortunately, each of the new streaming services has been competing for customers by offering free trials. So far I’ve watched the first two episodes of Belgravia, some Schitt’s Creek and Pennyworth, all of Star Trek: Picard, and the first season of Star Trek: Discovery.

In Star Trek Discovery, the ship’s security chief is a hot guy who suffers from PTSD. The also crew includes a gay couple, with the engineer played by Anthony Rapp and the doctor played by Wilson Cruz. (As usual, Cruz’s gay character tragically dies.) In the climactic episode of Season One, the USS Discovery is trapped in a parallel universe. To save both universes, the crew must ignite a massive explosion. Unfortunately, the resulting surge will destroy the ship. Fortunately, Rapp’s engineer character figures out how to ride the wave from the explosion and escape back to our universe.

As I was researching the history of the Hiram Chittenden locks, I came upon this additional picture of the Montlake Cut opening in August 1916. The photo reminded me of Star Trek Discovery.

After the failure of two earlier cofferdam attempts, the Corps of Engineers finally completed excavating the Montlake Cut in June 1914. However, the empty Montlake canal remained blocked at both ends by wooden gates for another two years, awaiting the construction of foundations for the drawbridge across the ship canal. In an eerie premonition of the region’s feckless transportation planning, Seattle voters refused to approve any bonds funding bridge construction until 1915. 

Coronavirus’ arrival a century after the last flu pandemic didn’t remove any of the existing pressure on my plague-filled life. To the contrary, pressure has only increased on everyone. Like the crew of the Discovery, I had no alternative to riding the wave. 

Happily, after a few weeks of false starts we’ve achieved a new equilibrium at our house. It turns out I made some sound investments in mental infrastructure. I don’t expect the new normal to last a century, like the Lake Washington Ship Canal and the Hiram Chittenden Locks. But I’m confident the center will hold.

Click here for more entries from Roger’s Plague Journal

Least Gay Great Day Ever

Whenever Vancouver Men’s Chorus stalwart Len Cousineau delivers the announcements at intermission, he begins by telling the crowd “You are the Best AUDIENCE EVER!” 

Over the years I’ve heard numerous other people try versions of the same schtick. No one pulls it off like Lenny. You hear it, and you believe it – because you’re convinced Lenny believes it, too. 

Every performance gets the same treatment. Regardless of the artistic or technical fiascos that occurred in the first act, and no matter how catatonic the audience seems so far, we all believe today’s performance still might turn out to be Vancouver Men’s Chorus’ best ever. Really. Lenny – and therefore the chorus and the audience, too – remain supremely confident that somehow tonight’s magic can pull it off once again.

The Peace Arch border crossing between Washington and British Columbia is closed for the first time since 1814. Vancouver Men’s Chorus cancelled all our performances and rehearsals for the foreseeable future. Wednesday’s weekly Showtunes Night in Canada is also on indefinite hiatus. Meanwhile, I’m trapped in the wrong country with three kids, two dogs, and no school. Obviously I’m going through withdrawal. 

It’s not just me. The rest of the men of VMC have similar chorus-sized holes in their lives. All of us miss the music and the hugs. (Even the introverts in VMC are huggers. It’s weird.) Increasingly desperate for a big gay fix, we’ve started Zoom meeting online on Wednesday nights at our regular rehearsal time – just so we can hear a few boring administrative announcements, then sing a shockingly atonal “Happy Birthday” to all the guys with birthdays this week.  

The coronavirus pandemic leaves huge holes in everyone’s lives. We’re filling them with old and new vices like Doritos, alcohol, and Tiger King episodes. All of us who thought we’d whipped our iPhone addictions are again wallowing in a sea of indignant anti-Trump editorials and BuzzFeed personality quizzes. 

Last week someone in the chorus challenged us on Facebook to identify something positive from the quarantine experience. I found myself grasping at straws. Does the cheapest unleaded gas price in decades mean we’ve reversed climate change? Were both of the new Star Trek television programs truly bingeworthy? Do I really need this much quality time with all three of my children, and both dogs? Will you be allowed to have favorites in an actual Zombie Apocalypse?

Then I read about the perilously low blood supply. After three decades of homophobia and bad science, coronavirus desperation finally loosened the FDA’s irrational ban on gay blood donors. It’s been four weeks since I was trapped with my children fulltime as a result of the closure of the schools, border, businesses, etc. I’m looking forward to becoming a first-time blood donor very soon. 

FDA reduces one-year celibacy requirement 

for gay and bi men to donate blood to three months....

Any challenge to identify the best impacts of coronavirus quickly turns my thoughts to the pandemic’s worst consequences. Not that I’m a pessimist – it’s just that there are so many more bad consequences to choose from.

Right now my worst-impact vote goes to my seething frustration with how quickly everything unravelled. As I wrote in my previous Rock Bottom essay, “Better-Ish,” on a personal level at least, things finally seemed to be going well in 2020. After several terrible years in a row, all the important stuff in my life was going better. I was doing better.

Now lots of new and old stuff aren’t going well at all. My rage is prepared to combust at any moment. But I can handle it. Because I was doing better.

Every gay man from my generation bears the scars of AIDS. In an eerily prescient burst of inspiration, I took a break from writing about kids, brains, and dishonest lawyers in January, and for the first time wrote about the experience of coming out of the closet into a world dominated by AIDS. As I wrote in “Avoidant,”

I’ve never endured physical or sexual abuse, war, or a serious accident. Instead, like too many other sensitive Mormon youths, I was the victim of emotional abuse from a pervasively homophobic and authoritarian message that denied our very existence. Those unhealed wounds reopened thirty years later, when I experienced “unrighteous dominion” at the hands of ignorant employers and dishonest bureaucrats.

But there’s a sixth common cause of PTSD:  “Witnessing/Experiencing a Mass Disaster.” A big gay mass disaster, which resonated with and amplified the horror of the closet. 

Now we’re all living through the stress of a “Mass Disaster.” Not everyone emerges from war, abuse, disaster, or other traumas debilitated by PTSD. But for some unknown percentage of us, our traumatic experiences during the coronavirus pandemic will result in lifelong wounds.

In the meantime, everyone must endure continuing major stress. Human brains “react in predictable ways in unpredictable situations.” For example, stress can make us scatterbrained. Many people have weird dreams. But we all respond as individuals:  even in the small sample of our household, I’ve observed certain of us sleeping, exercising, reading, or eating more than usual, even as other family members sleep, exercise, read, or eat less. 

Even though I’m a stress-and-trauma veteran, life has been a struggle lately. Some of my most effective coping strategies remain unavailable to me, such as hugging Vancouver and Vancouver Men’s Chorus. Ordinarily my adorable children are an asset; when they remain in my hair full time, the kids frequently become liabilities instead. Meanwhile, my feverish attempts to impose order on chaos have only made things worse.

Eventually I stopped fighting. Frankly the house feels less crowded when half of us get up by 7 am, and the other half get up at noon. I’ve also accepted that true “home schooling” only works for anti-vaxxer fundamentalists. The arrival of spring helped, although Bear and I are wearing out Buster with our long mindful walks. (Buster is an overheating fur ball who thinks dog grooming should be considered an “essential service.”) 

It took a few weeks to get here, but last Friday we finally had a Great Day. I did what I could, and endured everything else with my family and a smile. I finished a blog post, plus some other legal and nonlegal writing. The dogs and I frolicked in our favorite parks. I read a book and stared at screens in appropriate ratios. I took a shower, even though I didn’t need it. The whole family made it outside with minimal wailing and gnashing of teeth. Back indoors, we tidied the living room before watching the new Pixar movie Onward. 

I even got some good news. A couple of weeks ago I published a blog post, “Have Fun!,” about how my Mormon mission started with traumatic drama. My friend Todd was sent home from our mission in disgrace when an overzealous BYU sanitation employee found incriminating letters in a garbage can from Todd’s secret gay lover.

Decades later, “Have Fun!” concluded with a happy gay ending:

A few years ago, I got an email out of the blue from Todd. I was still a frustrated lawyer/single dad in Seattle. Todd revealed that after facing a few more challenges in his twenties, he got his life back on track. Eventually Todd became a gay English professor. 

Damn. Isn’t that the definition of a happy ending?

I lost touch with Todd after moving to Bellingham and encountering mental illness, but I still had his email address. Because my blog post included preposterously gay photos from our youth, as a courtesy I forwarded him a link to the essay. Last Friday he responded with an email updating me on his life. Excellent news – Todd no longer is a gay English professor. Instead, he’s now a gay academic administrator. In my experience, that’s a huge demotion.

Quarantine still sucks. And life isn’t a competition. But if life were a competition, I’m back in the running.

A big part of my improved mental health in the last year came from transformations from a “fixed mindset” to a “growth mindset.” Being forced to deal with one disaster after another eventually taught me how to bounce back from repeated failure. 

So a big part of my frustration with pandemic living was the fact that the sheer suckiness of everything suddenly made it impossible to plausibly tell myself things will be getting better any time soon. However, on our walk last Friday I finally regained my ability to tell Bear and Buster, “yes we have lots of challenges, but today still could end up being the Best Day Ever.”

One more pandemic bummer:  I’m currently suffering from my worst bout of carpal tunnel and tennis elbow ever. I wish I could say it’s because I’ve been writing too much. Screen time on my computer is indeed up 685% over January. But phone usage is up an exponential 7,080,500%.  

So here’s one of the numerous handy BuzzFeed items I’ve run across: All The Disney Princes Ranked From Least Gay To Most Gay.  (at #10, “Aladdin is the Nick Jonas of Disney princes.”) Sadly, just about everything else in my life is less gay than ever. It’s like all the “gay” has disappeared from “Gay Sitcom Dad.”

Nevertheless, today still could be the Best Day Ever. If so, odds are today will also be the Least Gay Great Day Ever.

 
Previously in Rock Bottom Stories: “Better-Ish.”   Next: "I am Karen"

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