Because there's time

I haven't spent time here in a long time. Even though I'm unemployed, I have been busy.
Each weekday and Saturday, my alarm goes off around 4: 10 a.m.
Because it's set to NPR instead of some hard rock station, it sometimes takes a few minutes to realize that the pretty music is not just there; it's there to tell me something.
I open my eyes and roll off the bed, cross the cat barricade and stagger to Joey's room to wake her up.
She has to be at work by 5 a.m.

Why do we have separate rooms? For many reasons. The primary one, I suppose, is that she sleeps in the shaps of a boomerang and butts me out of bed.

Other reasons include her snoring. (My snoring is irrelevant because Joey is legally deaf.) And there's three cats and a dog that share her bed. And she stills the covers and blames me for it.
So I bring my own blanket if I want to hang out in her room.

When I worked, she would call me at varying times to wake me up and sing to me, and to give me my orders for the day. She still calls and sings to me and gives me my orders, but she calls around 8 instead of 6:15.

Sometimes I cannot sleep so I turn on the computer and search the job listings. I average three applications a day.
On a really good day, I do six or seven. I think that I have just about applied for everything in a 60-mile radius that I am capable of doing. I have several pages of places I've applied to since September 15th. I have had three interviews.

Then my mother-in-law took me shopping for interview clothes. God bless her! Happy Birthday to me!

So today is the last day that I will go to my Dad's around noon to walk the dog and scoop the kitty litter for a small consideration. Their regular dog-walker will be back from vacation soon. I need to find another means of getting a weekly consideration. It helps. It's hard to find odd jobs these days. Everybody's gone legit, except for people who aren't.

The local drug dealer is a very nice looking young black man in an ostentatious bright green car on lifted wheels.
I finally saw his face from out behind his shaded car windows at the grocery store one evening.
It's tempting to do illegal things. But when I think of how drugs devastate families, like my own, I think again.

My own drug-addict stepbrother was finally kicked out of the house. It's very sad but he was impossible to take.
He did show up a few nights ago for food, but they made the mistake of letting him in the house. He stole. What did they expect? There are two tables outside the house where he could have sat. A bank envelope on the kitchen counter is something he feels entitled to.

Had they kept him outside, they could have hosed him off, too.

The person inside him is a very considerate person with an incredible aptitude for certain things. He is a fishing savant. Really. Unfortunately, there is not much market for that. And drugs have created a crusty exterior of lust for money to smoke off tinfoil up into his nose. That's how they take opiates.

I am the only person he has not stolen from, because I have nothing to steal.

Drug addicts are borne until the burden of them becomes to great. They either destroy their family totally, perhaps even kill their family, through murder or heartbreak, or they FINALLY get dumped.

The only good thing that a family can do is go to Al-Anon and talk it out. The only thing you can really do about other people's behavior is change your response to it.

I do love my drug addict step-brother, but I have treated him differently all along because I have known for years that there was no hope of changing anyone in my family. I talk to him, listen to his lies and act like they are the truth. Oh, drugs addicts become very artful liars. But I do not criticize or even bother to call him on his lies. I just know that unless I see it for myself, it's not true.

What's disgusting is that he has given up bathing. It doesn't matter anymore but it used to matter very much to him.
He loved to get cleaned up and put on nice clothes and cologne. He's handsome and he liked the attention he got.

I didn't know if I would come to the house and find my Dad and step-mother dead. I do know my step-brother's death is imminent, the way things are going. Any change that happens is completely up to him now. He's been sent to rehab three times. The last time he was saved from jail and sent out of state. In a year and a half he has spent more money and cost more money than I make in five years.

He is the living embodiment of what happens when you spare the rod and spoil the child. And he learned how to manipulate my step-mother from birth.

Parents these days indulge rather than discipline. We are raising future generations of assholes who will sit around watching footage of people getting hurt and laughing at it. These people will not consider the common good but only their own needs. Internal genocide is already approved by the Republican party and the right. Anyone who says that health care is a privilege for those who can afford it is espousing it. And they really don't care. Oh, they realize what they are saying and then they say that God wants them to be wealthy.

The deepest layer of Hell waits for these people.

So... I did not mean to detour into the heavy but I have had so much going on. Unfortunately, having a drug addict in the family makes life interesting. They say that you curse people by saying "May you have an interesting life."
It may be so.

Anniversary / Termination

I lost my job today. I left the office and found four places to fill out job applications.
It's also the "one-month anniversary" of our wedding.
Nice gift. Maybe I should have told my co-workers....

Gay marriage, I'm getting married, merry-age

I'm marrying Joey.
It's not legal in Florida, but we're doing it, anyway.
When I was a child growing up in the Episcopal Church, I attended a confirmation class.
There was no proviso, no exclusion. The sacraments were for Christians. No limitations. Marriage is a sacrament. I am a Christian.
A sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.
Who has the authorization to install grace?
I'm getting married.
It's not "legal" in this state, but that doesn't mean a thing.

That's What She Said.

My family questioned if I'm truly happy and if I'm sure about marrying Joey.
They can see that I'm not ecstatic.
Early on, my friends told me that she wasn't good enough for me.
















I know they love me and have my best interest at heart.
















To be truthful, being more of a caregiver than a lover wears on a person.
But none of those people read this blog...
















There's only one person besides me that knows I made my vow to Joey leaning over her grandmother's death bed.
















A sacred promise witnessed by the company of spirits, the transitioning soul of her grandmother and one other in the room.

A hard promise to keep, it turns out.

The Pineapple Paparazzi strikes again!

Day of Pride: In praise of offensive stereotypes

Today is the day that for a few hours, in the light of the sun, I can be who I am.
I will walk around with old, hairy shirtless men, young men with toned bodies in short shorts, young women with short hair and piercings, tall men in dresses who look gorgeous... or somewhat like Bette Davis in"Whatever happened to Baby Jane?"

Thank God for those "freaks!" If they didn't draw attention to gays, no one would know we exist. For the harassment, beatings, torture and deaths that went on without comment long ago and that still happen today. When someone takes notice and becomes outraged enough to do something about it, their martyrdom was not in vain.

Think about the that, "straight" people, when you hold hands and kiss in a public place.
The two older women standing behind you on the elevator may be longing to do the same.

I can hold hands with Joey in public, but I still feel the fear that someone will follow us later, when we get into our car to go home.

Joey put a rainbow cat sticker on my back window and though I know that someone will be happy to see it, someone else may find it the perfect aiming point ... through my seat back to my head.

I don't want to die, yet. I'm not afraid to die. I just don't want to die at the hands of someone who didn't know me but hated me all the same.

I'm not being ridiculous. Gay, lesbian, transgender, transsexual and other people not hiding who they are get murdered in the US and around the world to this day. Our fight is not over. You haven't heard that last from us. We will not go away. We are your brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, aunt, uncles, cousins and grandparents. Sometimes, we're you.

The only difference between our struggle and the fight for black equality is that you usually can't immediately see that we are gay or otherwise-oriented. However, chances are when you are in a group of ten people, somebody is gay... whether he or she has admitted to themselves or not.

My family knows I'm gay. I don't put it in any one's face at work, but I talk about Joey all the time and tell her I love her on the phone when she calls and have a smiling picture of her and her mother floating in a pool on vacation in my cubicle. And that gay cat and the NO 2 bumper sticker on the front of my car don't leave much to the imagination.

I don't want to be beaten, burned or left for dead. I'll settle for writing about being gay and not free to be entirely true to myself.

And maybe I will put the rainbow-colored Mickey Mouse head my older sister gave me on my car antenna. At least for today.

The pineapple keeps growing :^D

Say What?!

I heard that some brain in Washington wants to tax us by the mile.
Obviously this guy has more money than he can ever use.
I sure don't. The price of gas is already causing so many of us to have to choose driving over other items, like eating.
Thankfully, our new prez has pooh-poohed the idea.

Some yutzes want to charge it. Bastards. Falling gas revenue? Bullshit.
The people who profit from the sale of gas are not hurting. They weren't hurting when gas was 0.89, when it was 1.89, when it was 2.09 (like today) or when it was nearly 4.00. They say they are but they are full of... gas.

If you hear about this, raise your voice. Gas pirates are already raping our wallets at will. The gas tax in my home county is already ridiculous. Just say no to a mileage tax... unless it comes with a mass transit system that will link you to anyplace in the country.

If I could take a bus or a train or walk ANYWHERE I needed to go, I would absolutely dump my car.

I am already living on soup. What more will those fuckers take?