Buster is the Weakest Link

We’ve been trapped at home on coronavirus lockdown for four weeks now. Each of the Leishmans of Bellingham has made an individualized list of what we miss most. Here’s my top three:

1.     Vancouver Men’s Chorus

2.     Public schools

3.     Canada

“Public schools” also appeared on each of my parents’ miss lists, competing with bridge, golf, TV sports, church, and the public library. (For me the library closure is stuck on the bubble). The school closure would also appear on my nephew’s list if he were still in town, but instead he’s quarantined with the rest of his family across the continent. 

One of my children – the impatient extrovert who longs for softball practice and theater rehearsals – also misses school. Eleanor copes by awakening each dawn for a grueling daylong regimen of vigorous exercise, alternated with TikTok and binge-watching Grey’s Anatomy for the umpteenth time. 

My other two children are still in bed, regardless of the time of day. Their miss lists barely included “Seeing my friends at school.” Similarly, closed schools only made one of the dog’s lists. The coronavirus pandemic is making Buster miserable.

In contrast, Bear is loving it.

Our dog’s life is better than ever. He’s the lord of a large enclosed backyard, or he can wander throughout the house. Papa has abandoned the pretense of being either allergic or hygienic, and stopped shoo-ing the dogs off his bed. Bear is probably napping on the bed right now, dreaming of our next walk. As the alpha of our small pack, Bear gets first pick of all the good stuff, including Papa’s affection.

Sadly, Papa is not loving it. You probably thought someone who already works from home and who adores his children would be perfectly suited to “sheltering in place” with his family. You were wrong. It’s not just #1 and #3 on my list (plus the public library closure and zero social life). It’s also that big #2. I miss the kids being gone from 8:30 am until 3:30 pm five days a week. After adapting to single parenthood during the fall, this winter the kids, dogs and I finally settled into a lovely routine. Now it’s ruined. 

Like my children, I’ve compensated with extra sleep and exercise. For example, on Friday I walked thirteen miles:  three miles with Bear and Buster, four miles with Bear, two miles with Bear and the kids, and four miles alone. 

Buster is hating life.

Both dogs came from the same Aussiedoodle breeder, but Bear is more poodle than Australian shepherd. He hasn’t had a haircut since last summer. No one has seen Buster's eyes for months. I can barely squeeze a collar and harness over his poofy ears. With the arrival of spring, Buster regularly overheats on our walks.

The second photo is Buster. The first photo was posted from quarantine last week by my BYU friend Matthew. The resemblance is uncanny. Particularly their coloring (although I hope Matt’s chest hair hasn’t gotten as white as Buster’s).

All along the west coast, hairdressers and dog groomers failed to make the cut for “essential” businesses. Their closure made Matthew’s miss list, narrowly edging out “Church” and “Trips to the Faroe Islands.” For Buster, “No haircut” is #1.

Last week I gave up inviting Buster on serious walks. 

Before I’m accused of poodle-shaming, let me tell you about our family walk on Thursday evening. Neither of my introverted children made it outside by the dinnertime deadline. So they received mandatory invitations to join the dogs and me on what we refer to as our “short” evening walk around the hilltop.

My children only made it a third of the way before they abandoned us, announcing the route wasn’t short enough. Buster made it another block. Then he keeled over on some professor’s manicured lawn. 

Buster failed to respond to my comfort. I tried dragging him a couple of times, but he was dead weight. I couldn’t just leave Buster lying there on the grass, like I would with one of the children. I thought about texting Eleanor and asking her to come watch Buster while Bear and I walked back to get the car. However, my daughter’s direction sense is so terrible she’d just get lost.

As I stood in the sunshine pondering my dilemma, I saw a rabbit out of the corner of my eye. So did the dogs. They raced after the rabbit, yanking the leash out of my hand. Including Buster – the lazy malingering soccer player of the litter.

On our long Buster-free walk yesterday afternoon, Bear and I encountered a couple of little old ladies down the hill. One of the women asked about Bear’s breed. I explained I had a couple of shaggy Aussiedoodles, but the other one was staying cool at home. She said she has fourteen-year-old Labradoodle. Nowadays she has to carry him everywhere.

From their safe social distance across the street, the women couldn’t hear me mutter “Buster is only three years old, and already I have to carry him.” But Bear heard me.

The arrival of a gorgeous spring has made quarantine bearable. This week Bear and I went on several long excursions that were potential candidates for Second Best Walk Ever. However, any Best Walk Ever will include Buster, too. And the children. Unfortunately, like a lot of good things these days, it’s not likely to happen for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, it’s nice to finally be #1 on someone’s list.

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"

Click here for more entries from Roger’s Plague Journal

Peak Mount Baker

Each night of this new plague, as I lay me down to sleep, here’s what I hope to ask while kneeling with the dogs beside my bed:

“How did we all survive both the continuing school closure and the border closure today?”   

Today was Bellingham’s first gorgeous sunny Friday of spring. Depending on your degree of introversion, you could leave home without a jacket or shirt. But you’re welcome to wear ether, or both. As always, in Bellingham certain wardrobe mainstays like fleece, shorts, flannel, nudity, and/or Birkenstocks are somehow de rigeur yet optional. And in each instance an absolutely individual choice. 

Here at Chez Leishman, exactly one other member of the family has been outdoors today, counting Bear and Buster. The other two children are vampires.

It’s been four weeks since Papa last crossed the border for Vancouver Men’s Chorus, or for anything else. That’s the longest hiatus at the Peace Arch since they began keeping records. 

Papa can tell. His parents can tell. His writing can tell. The dogs can tell. Even the children can tell. They’re the ones who pointed out the previous No Canada record was barely twelve days. The kids are getting worried about having to explain something to Child Protective Services.

Here’s my best “lemonade” plague insight so far. It came to me this afternoon, during the fourth of my walks with our happy but exhausted dogs.

We quant types secretly love pandemics. There’s always more interesting data to pore over. For example, last week Bellingham was listed as the fourth most dangerous city in the world, based on the number of coronavirus deaths per 100,000 population. We had one of the country’s first tragic nursing home moments. 

Fortunately, like the rest of Washington we promptly followed Governor Inslee. In fact, here in Bellingham we may have achieved the most effective social distancing in America. 

During our walk, Bear, Buster and I were discussing another one of those Rabbi-Kushner-bad-things-to-good-people moral dilemmas. Here’s what I asked the dogs:

“On this lovely sunny Good-ish Friday, where can Bellingham find the silver lining in what is a merely metaphorically dark cloud today?”

If I can’t personally take all the credit for yet another poorly targeted biblical plague, I’d prefer to blame some interesting statistical anomaly. A hypothesis that’s capable of explaining why a classically just God would smite poor charming Bellingham of all places with an extra dose of coronavirus. 

And then the answer came to me. All three answers: 

First, Bellingham is not only home to the nation’s highest proportion of introverts, but the combined introvert-extrovert population of Bellingham also contains the highest percentage of hippie health nuts anywhere outside Berkley, California. That means a freakishly huge number of human beings of all ages are outside exercising, right now.      

Second, Bellingham has a marvelous public park system, with an amazing network of trails. Miles of these trails are sufficiently long and wide to maintain perfect social distancing for everyone at all times, regardless of your unique medical or introversion needs. If you happen to be stuck in an extra infectious community, you want to be where the highest percentage of the population can get exactly as much exercise as they need. This keeps everyone from climbing the walls beyond their capacity.

Third, the little extra oomph that makes optimal community outdoor time possible here is that Bellinghamsters have a unique ability to maintain exactly the perfect CDC-mandated social distance at all times, even on a forest trail crowded with runners, hikers, bikers, skateboarders, stoners, and strollers. 

It takes an inner Pacific Northwest gyroscrope. We all have it. As Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist David Horsey recently observed, “Suddenly, the notorious ‘Seattle Freeze’ seems quite prudent….”

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"Ordinary" Medicine During a Plague

Last week I woke up to find an itchy spider bite on my leg. The next morning it was surrounded by a circle of little red dots. 

When I found similar mysterious bumps last year, my hypochondriac daughter eventually convinced me to visit the urgent care clinic. To my surprise, they determined I was infected with the “superbug” MRSA. The doctors at the clinic ordered a round of industrial strength antibiotics.

This time, however, I just sighed and went back to sleep. These days there’s no point visiting the St. Joseph-PeaceHealth campus and risking exposure to coronavirus.

My most recent trip to the urgent care clinic occurred right before the pandemic changed everything. 

It happened the day after I ushered at Vancouver Men’s Chorus’ annual fund-raiser “Singing Can Be a Drag.” I apparently fainted and fell down the backstage stairwell. I still have no memories from those two hours, including the allegedly hot firefighters who responded to someone else’s 9-11 call. My theory is a couple of fierce Canadian drag queens pushed me down the stairs. All I remember is driving across the border a few hours later in a low blood sugar daze.

The next morning I got a worried text from one of the show’s producers. He described the whole fainting/stairway tumble/hot firefighter episode. None of it rang a bell. As I wrote in “Falling Can Be A Drag,” I therefore decided it would be prudent to seek medical advice. 

Even though I don’t have a personal or family history of stroke or heart problems, I’m a stressed-out middle-aged dad who’s convinced he has a brain tumor. The triage nurse at the clinic sent me next door to the Emergency Room so I could get a CT scan. Fortunately, everything checked out fine during my very first visit to a hospital as a patient. The folks at the ER told me to stop by my regular doctor’s office that week. 

Everything still looked fine when I visited my doctor a couple of days later. We scratched our heads, hoped for the best, and scheduled a follow-up appointment a month later. Dr. Heuristic ordered one more heart test, which was scheduled for elsewhere in the hospital complex later this month.

As the date for my follow-up appointment with Dr. Heuristic approached, I got a call from his office suggesting we meet by telephone instead. According to my calendar and the confirmation text from PeaceHealth, our telephonic visit was scheduled for last Friday at 11:30 am.

Last Wednesday morning at 11:29 my phone vibrated with a call from Dr. Heuristic’s office. I was just finishing up a grocery run to Fred Meyer, where I’d finally found toilet paper, hand soap, and Tillimook Wafflecone Swirl ice cream. I was in the checkout line, suitably distanced from other customers. No reason not to take the call. 

A couple of days before my remote consultation, a three-page letter arrived from my discount insurance company. The letter said the heart test ordered by my doctor was both approved and denied. It was incomprehensible.

Dr. Heuristic got a copy of the same insurance letter, and didn’t understand it either. He’s been a doctor about as long as I’ve been a lawyer. Collectively we have six decades of experience dealing with insurance companies. Either of us could have figured out what the denial/approval letter meant – after at least thirty minutes of rigorous textual analysis. Both of us have better things to do. 

I’m sure the heart test seemed like a good idea way back in ordinary times. However, as Dr. Heuristic pointed out, the last thing I need right now is a trip to a health care facility. So we agreed to pretend the test referral never happened. 

The New York Times has an article today from a doctor at Yale New Haven Hospital asking “Where Have All the Heart Attacks Gone?,” ever since the coronavirus pandemic arrived. It’s all a mystery.

In the weeks since the drag queen attack I’ve felt perfectly fine, other than the fact that I’m trapped 24/7 in a house with three kids, two dogs, and no school. Plus I have a twinge of tennis elbow from writing too much.

Dr. Heuristic concluded my fainting spell and memory loss was a one-time event, likely caused by the combination of too little food and an intense emotional experience. As usual I defer to Dr. Heuristic’s keen diagnostic instincts. Even over the phone.

Click here for more entries from Roger’s Plague Journal

Thanks for the Megaphones

My Tuesday blog post this week, “Have Fun!,” included a challenge for readers – can you identify the clueless gay Mormon boys pictured in old photographs? (Psst: Don’t give away the answers in the comments if you've already read “Have Fun!”)

Both of these examples came from Northern Utah. They date from either 1883 or 1983:

The top photo was actually taken in Farmington, Utah, on my last ever visit to Lagoon Amusement Park. Nowadays I seldom have the opportunity to indulge my passion for roller coasters. In contrast, when I was a teenager in Utah we lived less than an hour away from Lagoon. I regularly went for thrills with friends or family. 

Forty years later, I can only remember details from two visits to Lagoon. The first memory is actually a composite of four annual Pioneer Days. Every 24th of July, the band from Box Elder High marched in the Pioneer Day Parade before descending on Lagoon in our purple polyester trousers. (We left the rest of the band uniforms on the school bus.)

My second Lagoon memory is from Spring 1983. As I described this week in “Have Fun!,” the gang from my sophomore year at Brigham Young University posed for that sepia-toned portrait in Lagoon’s “Pioneer Village.” The other group photo was taken at the mall a few weeks later, when I was learning Korean at the Missionary Training Center before shipping out to Seoul. 

Here’s another quiz question:  How many non-Utahn readers recognized the reference in the title of my essay “Have Fun!”? 

As other locals will confirm, back when I was a clueless gay Mormon boy myself, a Lagoon employee said “Have Fun!” whenever you embarked on one of the rides. Do they still do that today?

I found Lagoon’s ancient slogan inspiring. When I was still a teenager in Utah, I began signing all my letters and postcards “Have fun, love Roger.” My letters home always ended the same way, regardless of whether I was an exchange student in Switzerland, a Mormon missionary in Korea, or a gay rights lawyer in Chicago. After four decades I still sign all my personal correspondence “Have fun.” No exclamation mark.

In contrast, my business and professional correspondence always ends with a different tag line:  “Let me know if you have any questions.” If I really like the addressee, I’ll add a “Please.”  

I can only recall two occasions in the last year when legal correspondence omitted my customary closing. Both occurred during the same week in October 2019, and involved my ongoing public education campaign regarding the serious consequences of lawyer dishonesty.

In May 2017, I filed a lawsuit seeking compensation from Ogden Murphy Wallace PLLC and one of its partners, Patrick Pearce. Defendants are the Seattle lawyer-investigators that my former employers hired to justify my wrongful termination. Unfortunately, my case has now been on hold for almost three and a half years – ever since Defendants’ second set of insurance defense lawyers convinced the busy trial judge to dismiss my Complaint on an erroneous technicality.

Fortunately, last fall I won my appeal in the Washington Court of Appeals. At that point the case could have returned to the trial court. There the Ogden Murphy Wallace lawyers will finally answer questions under oath about the fraudulent representations they made to a gay single dad suffering from discrimination and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. 

Rather than face the truth, however, Ogden Murphy Wallace again responded with stall tactics. On October 3, 2019, thirty minutes before the court deadline, Defendants’ attorneys filed a long-shot petition seeking discretionary review by the Washington Supreme Court.

Here’s the account of my frustrated reaction in “The Prime of Roger A. Leishman, Esq.”:

On my way to chorus rehearsal in Vancouver that week I was seething. Not because Defendants exercised their right to seek discretionary review of the Court of Appeals’ decision, or because their Petition for Review was predictably sleazy, or even because I’d be waiting until at least Fall 2020 to finally have my day in court. No, I was frustrated because as a lawyer and a writer, I knew I wouldn't be able to resist filing an Answer to Petition for Review. I couldn't think of anything I could say to the Supreme Court that would make it even less likely for them to accept Defendants’ half-baked appeal. And I used to write exactly this kind of brief for a living.

Then like the Grinch I had a terrible, horrible, wonderful idea – why not try to make it more likely that the Washington Supreme Court would take the case? 

The result is described in my blog essay “This is what ‘Impact Litigation’ Looks Like.” I joined the strategically clueless folks at Ogden Murphy in urging the Supreme Court to accept review. This case indeed presents important issues of substantial public interest that should be determined by our Supreme Court. I explicitly invited the Court to take this opportunity to provide guidance to lower courts and the public – not just about the proper interpretation of Washington’s whistleblower protection statute, but also about how the legal system should respond when lawyers start lying, and then won’t stop.

Sure enough, the Washington Supreme Court accepted review. Oral argument is set for June 9, 2020.

Back to Lagoon. 

One of the two times last year when I omitted my customary “Let me know if you have any questions” happened right after I filed my Answer to Defendants’ Petition for Review. When I forwarded a copy of my Answer to another experienced civil rights lawyer, I accidentally ended my email with “Have fun” instead. Must have been a Freudian slip.

My other omission came at the end of a letter I sent to Defendants’ lawyers earlier that week. Before filing my Answer with the Washington Supreme Court, I provided a copy to Defendants, together with a letter extending my final – and damned reasonable – offer to settle all of my claims against Ogden Murphy Wallace PLLC and Patrick Pearce. As with each of my other settlement overtures during the last four years, Defendants and their lawyers ignored my letter.

Here’s how I concluded my letter to Defendants’ previous “Great Lawyer” – before their insurance company hired a new attorney in February 2020 to handle the rest of the appeal, because of the unanticipated success of Defendants’ petition for review by the Washington Supreme Court:

“Thank you for handing me the megaphone I could never afford myself.” 

Click here for more information about my lawsuit against Ogden Murphy Wallace PLLC and Patrick Pearce