Green Lights

If I end up making it there and if it is true that Heaven is indeed the place where we get what we want, where we get our way, then my Heaven will be a highway of green lights. I will make them all. Get where I’m going with no delay or hassle.

 

But perhaps that is not enough. A true Heaven would turn every traffic light yellow at the exact moment my afterlife car passed under it. So I could feel I were getting away with something.

 

Even in the embrace of paradise, I would not be immune to looking back to see those poor suckers stuck behind me at the red lights Heaven was not kind enough to hold long enough for them. Even there, I would find perfection in feeling I were getting somewhere quicker than the people behind me. Even with all the time in eternity.

That's not the world we live in

No, it shouldn’t be a big deal when a public figure or athlete comes out, but I think it still is.

 

That’s why I thought some of the reaction to Carl Nassib of the Raiders coming out as the only gay player in the NFL was weird. A lot of articles I read seemed to be of the “NFL player is gay, not much to see here, it’s 2021, moving on” variety. Defector, a sports website I like that’s usually pretty good about these types of stories, wrote a perfunctory story that was dismissive and didn’t rise to the occasion (and the LGBTQ commenters in the story were very disappointed and gave much more thoughtful perspectives than the actual article).

 

I understand the idea behind “Why is this news?” when someone comes out because it’s increasingly common to see visible LGBTQ people. The idea that “it shouldn’t be a big deal” has good intentions behind and maybe when the world changes a little more, it won’t be a big deal. But that’s not the world we live in. We live in a world where it is big news when a professional athlete comes out. This is self-evident in that there’s exactly one out gay man in all four major professional sports leagues. There’s a reason for that.

 

I think in yawning at public coming outs, no matter how well-intentioned it is, people can come off as dismissive of the experience of the person who comes out. Nassib said he’d struggled for the past 15 years over whether to come out. There’s a lot of pain behind that statement.

 

I think that’s true for a lot of LGBT people. I didn’t have a dramatic coming out. My family was accepting and welcomed Steve into the family. But you still don’t know how it’s going to go until you do it. One online comment I read said when you’re in the closet, little questions like “What did you do this weekend?” can be a minefield because gay people are afraid to say they did something with their partners. It’s a type of trepidation people (understandably) can’t understand unless they’re in that situation. So saying “no big deal” to a coming out can come off as flippant, even if it’s not intended to.

 

There are plenty of gay people in every walk of life, but not all of those are visible or accessible to everyone. The NFL is accessible to pretty much everybody in America. People perceive football as tough and manly so the fact that Nassib is a football player gives this extra resonance, since a lot of people still think gay people can’t be tough or manly. This type of visibility—seeing LGBTQ people where you may not expect us—can help a lot of kids who are questioning how their future’s going to go.

 

We’re not yet living in that world where gay athletes are commonplace to the point where nobody really has to come out and everybody shrugs. If we were, there would be more out men in sports—and just statistically, you know Nassib has to be far from the only one in the four major leagues.

 

Once a bunch of NFLers come out, maybe then we’ll be living in that world and people will yawn. For now, let’s live in the world we have, where a gay man on an active sports roster is a huge deal.

Use the other door.

There are two doors in front of you. There is a right-hand door. There is also a left-hand door. This is how it is entering or exiting most retail establishments or public buildings.

 

Similar to driving, most people in America will instinctually use the right door. And that’s what you should do. Use the door to the right. Don’t worry about what’s going on at the left door or who’s coming out. Use the door on the right to enter or exit.

 

Grab that handle on the right. Push that bar.

 

Don’t add to gridlock because you’re waiting for the person to your left to hold the door for you. That person is using the door to their right; you should do the same. You can actually enter that building through the right door at the same time as a person is exiting through the door on their right/your left. Both things can happen at once. This is the miracle of physics.

 

And so there is no need to stand expectantly while someone is coming out for that person to hold the door for you. That person can hold the door for the people behind them who are coming out. You, however, are able to enter, entirely unimpeded, through the other door and can hold the door for the person behind you. This marvel of modern engineering is because there are—again—two doors, not one door that people must squeeze through.

 

Look, I know it’s courtesy to hold a door for anyone you see coming. But it’s more efficient and courteous for everyone that you just use the right door rather than stop short with an expectant look on your face. How many times have you been stuck behind a line of people because they won’t use the other door and want to instead have the left door held for them like Sir Walter Raleigh laying his cape down on the mud? How is it courteous to make people wait because you’d rather all squeeze through one door?

 

Door holding is nice but there are not always going to be people to hold that door for you. So if you’re able bodied, and unless you’re some kind of frail monarch, it’s good practice to open that door for yourself. Develop a skill.

 

So use that right door instead of causing a logjam at Wawa. I promise it will open a whole new world of independence for you.

Les Fleurs du Mal

Their orange heads pop up like weeds in those weeks between Flag Day and Fourth of July when we start dipping our toes into summer. Charitably, you could call the color a vibrant shade of setting sun.

 

I call it vile, the orange of petroleum Cheeto dust sticking to your fingers or that shade the shower floor gets when you forget to clean it.

 

These are flowers out of Baudelaire. But I know better: they are weeds that I break my back trying to kill. They look pretty, sure, in these precious weeks, but I see the future. They die while summer is just beginning to bloom, leaving us with the better part of July plus August and September with their remnants. Green stalks wilted like hair matted in the humidity. They take over.

 

I did not choose this for my garden. It is just someone else’s standard of beauty that I have not yet been able to eradicate.

Loki Episode 1: Glorious Purpose

So I guess now I’m just reviewing all the Marvel TV shows. It’s not like I have any better ideas on what to write about, so here goes.

 

Loki is off to a promising start and looks to be a good foray into the Marvel Universe multiverse and time travel. Now to explain some of the Easter eggs.

 

The Time Keepers and Time Variance Authority are real properties in Marvel Comics, dating back to the ‘80s (the Commission in Umbrella Academy reminded me of them). I’m most familiar with the Time Keepers from the late-‘90s Avengers Forever series, which dealt with time travel and the legacy of the Avengers through their long and twisty history. These three beings, looking much as they did in those wall carvings, fought a group of Avengers that Kang the Conqueror (more on him below) pulled from various points in the timestream.

 

The Time Keepers are in that group of “overseers,” the really cosmic beings that make the Marvel Universe tick. In the show, they are keeping the “sacred timeline” safe by eliminating any stray timelines so destiny will take its course. It was very similar in comics (Avengers Forever dealt with the idea of eliminating any timelines in which earthlings made real inroads in space because they were destined to become a Terran Empire and establish a dictatorship modeled after the Avengers), with the added idea that the Time Keepers are keeping the timeline safe ultimately so the timeline in which they are born will survive.

 

The Time Variance Authority in the comics is a bunch of bureaucrats, apparently modeled after the late Marvel writer Mark Gruenwald, who was sort of the keeper of Marvel continuity. I liked the cartoon orientation video of the TVA and the form Loki had to sign about every word he’d ever spoken.

 

The idea of a “sacred timeline” highlights one big difference in how DC and Marvel handle their universes. DC reboots its continuity every so often. There was a DC multiverse for decades until it got too confusing, at which point DC contracted back to one universe and one Earth, then later expanded back to a multiverse. Along the way, DC jettisoned some of its history so certain events never occurred. Marvel has never done a hard reboot, so events going back decades have all occurred. They might retcon our understanding of events, or update the Vietnam War to the Iraq War, but it’s still basically one unbroken timeline.

 

The woman judge who ruled on Loki’s status is credited as Ravonna, which may go somewhere interesting. In Avengers comics, she’s not part of the TVA but is a love interest of Kang, a princess of one of the worlds he conquered. This might be exciting since it suggests they’ll bring on Kang (I did read he’s supposed to be featured in an upcoming movie). They really need to, since Kang has been an Avengers villain since the ‘60s and if time travel is involved, they have to bring him in. I’ll give some more info on Kang in an upcoming episode but he’s a time-traveler and longtime manipulator of the Avengers who once actually conquered present-day Earth.

 

I’m wondering here how powerful Loki is. Sometimes it seems like the MCU will underpower the Asgardians and go for laughs, and I’m not sure I like that. In the comics, Thor is immensely powerful but he’s not funny, but I guess they realized humor worked better with the character on screen. I just hope they don’t downplay Loki as some guy with an inferiority complex who puts up a front as a trickster. He’s an actual Norse god (more on the Asgardians in another entry).

 

I wonder how susceptible Loki would be to the Time Keepers and the TVA and if there’s a hierarchy to the cosmic beings in Marvel. There are pantheon gods like Thor, Loki and Hercules and they’re massively powerful but there are also cosmic beings like Eternity and the Living Tribunal, and they seem to be above some of the gods. (Thanos, to me, is someone who’s not at the level of the cosmic beings. He’s elevated by acquiring the Infinity Stones but if he loses them, he just has a superhuman but not-unreasonable level of power. A being like Eternity has power that cannot be stripped away; there’s no gauntlet he can take off. And above all these in the Marvel Universe is Galactus, a fundamental force of the universe.)

 

Anyway, good start. More Easter eggs and inside baseball in the coming weeks.

Pride (in the Name of Kink)

With June comes LGBTQ+ Pride and with it, the annual debate about who should get to march in the parade. This time I’m hearing that some LGBT people are uncomfortable with some of the more flamboyant elements of Pride, like the kink community in leather and harnesses, scantily-clad go-go dancer types, etc.

 

Some people apparently think the main Pride event should be very family friendly with any people they deem unseemly featured at a side event. The idea is that they didn’t consent to see someone walking in the parade in leather chaps or rainbow briefs. The idea of consent is important in things like touching or in-your-face nudity but I think at a Pride event, it’s more of a gray area. The more overtly sexual people aren’t necessarily in your face or forcing you into something. Nobody actually goes naked or touches you—if they did, I could see the problem with consent, but that’s not what’s happening here.

 

I think it’s different if you just see something that makes you uncomfortable or challenges you. I think then the onus is on you to adjust your behavior rather than on the person you’re seeing. You’re not always the center of it all. Just try to deal with something that makes you uncomfortable but isn’t necessarily pulling you into itself.

 

So I think people in the kink community and the scantily clad people should have a place in a Pride parade. The LGBT community should be a big tent and include as many letters in that acronym as we can.

 

I think the Pride parade is a “fair warning” event: You know you’re going to see some wild stuff there. It’s like when I saw Madonna in the Girlie Show, I wasn’t shocked at the topless pole dancer, because it was 1993 and I had fair warning about what I was going to because I’d been paying attention. Plus, guys—it’s a parade. It’s necessarily going to feature drag queens with a ton of makeup and sequins, twinks in rainbow briefs and all kinds of other pageantry, because a parade is about spectacle. It’s not going to be schlubs like me in Polo shirts marching down the street. Nobody would come.

 

I’m uncomfortable excluding some people in the kink community and people with a more outré appearance just because that makes people uncomfortable. Is there that much daylight between people in the LGBT community saying “I didn’t consent to see that” and homophobes saying “I don’t like when they shove it in my face”? One comes from an ally and one comes from a detractor but the message is the same: “You’re not publicly acceptable.” We shouldn’t send that message to anybody trying to join Pride. 

 

I’m not a flamboyant person. I’m perfectly happy living a quiet life with my husband and son. But I can’t forget—and the people objecting to the rowdier elements of Pride shouldn’t forget—that it wasn’t the clean-cut, well-mannered people who started the rebellion at Stonewall. It was Marsha P. Johnson and the trans women of color and the drag queens and the sex workers. It was people who didn’t fit in in many places and made people uncomfortable. I’m able to live my life with my husband and son, and we’re able to march down the street, because of the rabble-rousers and the shit-stirrers, who caused trouble just because of who they were and what they looked like.

 

Hott Vaxxx Summmmer

We were stuck inside for over a year and now I’m vaccinated and finally ready for a hot summer. The hottest summer ever. Not just any old hot summer like the summers of yore but a hott vaxxx summmmer. I’m going to go out and just get hot like all the other hot vaxxed people out there. All those hot bodies just being hot and sweaty and touching each other and not caring who they touch or who they breathe on. I’m heading for the hottest beach this summer—the hotttest beach in the whole vaccinated world. It’s going to be red hot. No, hotter than that—white hot. Or red hot and white hot together. And everybody’s going to be hot as hell and nobody’s going to be wearing much clothing because nobody has to care about infection anymore. We’re all going to flash our microchipped vaccine 5G cards at each other like they were colored hankies in the ‘70s and do a sexy, sexxxy dance together on the beach. We’re all just going to breathe free in the sexy open air. Good thing we don’t need our masks anymore because we’re all going to be breathing so hard and sexily. In fact, we’re going to burn those masks in a big hott bonfire. And we’re going to throw our hand sanitizer in the ocean and just wash our hands with only soap from now on, And we’re going to bury our sourdough starters in the sand and order bread from a poorly ventilated restaurant with no masks and eat it right there at a table of 12. And then we’ll do another extra sexxxxy lambada on the beach. Bring on the hot summer.

Saturated

60º and a softly hissing mist, it didn’t matter to us.

 

We set up camp for the summer at our spot at the pool on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. Gave our number (347) and plopped our chairs onto the cement. Barely moving all summer.

 

It did not matter if the toothpick inserted into our season came out with crumbs still sticking to it. Summer was done enough for us.

 

We soaked in the season until it saturated us.

 

And every day I could, I walked down sweltering interlocked driveways until I at last could jump (never learned to dive, you see) into the electric blue of the chlorine pool.

 

They could barely drag me away. My eyes turned bloodshot, my eyebrows singed and my skin turned bronze, but they could barely drag me away.

Mare of Easttown Week 7

Mare Sheehan’s great strength in Easttown is that she knows everybody. Nobody but Mare could have followed the Ross brothers to the lake cabin and show up just in time to prevent a murder and/or suicide. Nobody but Mare could have discovered Ryan killed Erin since Mare had a personal history with the man whose security cameras caught the kid stealing the gun. Mare used her insider status to her advantage.

 

But there’s a definite cost to being an insider and knowing everybody. An outsider detective like Colin Zabel would not have felt the emotional toll it took to question and prosecute the people of Easttown. Mare paid an emotional price when she questioned John, when she took Ryan into custody, and when she temporarily lost a longtime friendship with Lori. You could see in her weary eyes how much it affected her.

 

I was right for a few minutes when I pegged John as the killer, who was trying to frame Billy for it. So I was all proud of myself because I never see anything coming. But no, although John is DJ’s father, he was actually trying to take the fall for his son for killing Erin. Lori knew and lied to her friend about it. I don’t know if I can judge Lori because I don’t know what the hell I would do in that situation.

 

Lori understandably erupts at Mare. What a great performance by Julianne Nicholson. Why couldn’t Mare let this go, Lori cries? Now Lori has lost her family, like so many in Easttown. But she has gained a son as she’s apparently adopted DJ at the request of John. (Having gone through the adoption process, I have some questions about this. I don’t know how it is in Pennsylvania but when we fostered our son before adopting him, we couldn’t even get him a haircut without permission. He did have periodic surgeries, but our case worker had to authorize those so there was some red tape and delays. It seemed like Lori just filled out a form for DJ’s ear surgery and told the hospital she was the parent, when in reality, they would definitely have known who she was ahead of time and that she was coming, and they would have had to wait for authorization. I guess Lori could have already adopted him, in which case there’s less red tape, but I really doubt she finalized that fast.)

 

There were a lot of twists in the resolution of the murder mystery and I’m sure opinions will vary. For me, the best part of Mare of Easttown was not the whodunnit—it was the character studies, the examination of all these people and their deep bonds of family and friendship and how those bonds can both sustain and damage people. I live for that kind of thing on TV so that was what affected me most, not the murder mystery. The killer could have been Maggie Simpson and I would still have loved this show; the murder mystery was of secondary interest to me. Some people thought the writer killed Erin but that would have made no sense to me. He lifted right out of the story. The murderer had to be an insider to give the show some emotional resonance. If it had been the writer, the show would have been just another murder mystery when they were going for something deeper.

 

With the question of the murderer resolved, we had plenty of time left in the hour and with that, Mare of Easttown became something more transcendent. It focuses on forgiveness, both forgiving others and forgiving yourself. Helen long ago forgave herself for her husband’s suicide but still bursts into tears over pizza because she knows Mare hasn’t forgiven herself for her son’s suicide. At a (curiously packed in ordinary time) Mass, the priest tells the parish although Easttown is seeing brighter days, not everybody has come back from the darkness yet.

 

“They’ll tell you they’re not deserving of your mercy,” he says. “Don’t let them.”

 

And Mare knows her longtime friend Lori will need forgiveness. So she doesn’t give up but after months of one-way communications, goes to her house. Lori crumbles into tears and Mare cradles her on the kitchen floor like a Pietà. At the very end, the perfect image: Mare summons the courage to go to the attic, where she found her son’s body, and maybe, maybe, start to forgive herself. This was very powerful.

 

I watched Mare of Easttown expecting to make some Delco accent jokes but found something much more profound about family and friends and the ties that bind people.