Aloha, Hawai'i

I had a new job starting in Japan in nine days, and I'd been instructed to land with a minimum of $1200 cash to pay my first month's rent and to cover expenses through the month. I only had $900, which was dwindling fast, and a one-way ticket to Osaka for a departing flight on my 28th birthday.

I could have been at the Maui Hilton and still been restless, but in the reclined driver's seat of the rented Pontiac Sunbird, flannel shirt on backwards for warmth, I didn't stand a chance of sleeping. My mind was racing.

I was single, broke, and directionless. I was heading to Japan to teach English -- on a whim, basically: I'd made the decision on a phone call with a friend one coffee-and-Bailey's-soaked Sunday morning when I called her so I wouldn't be drinking alone. She and her husband were moving to Japan to teach English, she'd said; the money was good, and they hired anyone. I was bored in my college admissions career and ready for a change, so I flew to Boston for an interview, got an offer, and here I was. I spoke no Japanese (I had thought "sayonara" was Spanish - and I only knew "sayonara" from a Debbie Harry song) and I was completely unprepared for the plunge I was taking.

What was most unsettling, though, wasn't this impending move and career change - I wasn't that anxious about the job or the move because, incredibly naively, I thought those were no big deal. What was most unsettling was Hawaiʻi. I was completely overwhelmed: by the sheer breadth and depth and scale of the natural beauty -- you simply couldn't open your eyes wide enough to encompass all of the green -- by the graciousness of the culture, by the beauty of the locals. I'd been so focused on moving to Japan that I'd never seen it coming.

I gave up on sleep, popped up the driver's seat and cranked down the window to hear the muffled surf from far below. From that scenic overlook on that parking area above that cliff in west Maui I could see the hump of Lānaʻi to the left, looking so close I felt I could touch it, the bulk of Molokaʻi dead ahead in the middle distance, and between and above them over the channel a crescent moon leaving its reflection on the ocean below. It was somehow chilly, with a breeze from the mountain behind me, but my shivers weren't all from the breeze. It was the most beautiful place I'd ever been. 

I wanted to stay.  More than I'd wanted anything in a long time. 

 

Restless, I punched the cassette into the tape deck, out of habit, not really listening until I heard this lyric: "He was born in the summer of his 27th year, coming home to a place he'd never been before." Yup, pretty much. I was 27, and I got it.

It was the middle of the night but I didn't go back to sleep. What was propelling me forward to my next step? What was keeping me from staying? It felt like an impossibly juvenile, impulsive, Romantic thing to consider -- giving up a job to stay someplace I'd been for less than a week because it was pretty. For sure it was impractical: there was just no way I could afford it, I was already broke. What would I do for work? I'd accepted an offer for decent money in Japan. I had a job in hand. I had student loans (so many student loans). Didn't Japan have the potential to be awesome, too? Was I really someone who could quit a job without having another one? 

I watched the moon on the waves and listened to the surf from far below until the sky lightened, and then drove back down the hill towards Lāhainā town. I showered at a beach park just after dawn, using a sliver of soap left by a previous user, and I listened to the cadence of the lyrically spoken language around me. I looked at the beautiful men just back from surfing dawn patrol, all lats and tans and teeth. I noted the poverty of those who, from appearances, were living rough, permanently, as opposed to me who was there in a career interregnum. I tried to take in everything, every last bit of it. And I thought. 

I didn't realize at the time that I was one in a long line of Westerners who had come to these islands and felt the same things, that I was a colonizer, unbidden and by many unwelcome. I am embarrassed to say I knew nothing of the history of these islands, of the illegal overthrow in 1893 of a sovereign nation, of the illegal annexation by an imperial power (us) in 1898, of the successive waves of people from the North American continent who came here to cavort and convert, spread disease and steal land, and impoverish the indigenous people. My education about these islands would come later. Right now, I was part of the problem.
 

I was in the islands to cover some college fairs for the admissions job I'd resigned from a few months earlier - god knows I was profligate but not so much so that I'd take a Hawaiʻi vacation between jobs. The college wasn't paying me but they covered the airfare to Honolulu and around to the neighbor islands, and I could expense hotels and meals and get reimbursed in a couple of months. I could just barely afford to front the cost for meals; there was no way I could afford to front the money for a hotel every night - hence the restive night in the car. I agreed to the trip to save on airfare (one way to Osaka from Honolulu was way cheaper than from Chicago) and of course to see Hawaiʻi as well. 

 

I'd been fascinated by these islands since looking at my parents' photos and slides from when my dad was stationed at Schofield Barracks after being drafted during the Korean War. I'd thought about moving to Hawaiʻi before - I even considered Chaminade for college (one of three vetoes my mom exercised, along with enlisting in the Navy and Notre Dame) -- but I'd never even visited before. And now here I was. The fascination was only growing.

I inexpertly changed into my khakis and a new $7.99 aloha shirt from T.J. Maxx there in the beach parking lot and then drove to McDonald's for breakfast. I savored my pancakes and waited for other diners to finish their copies of the Honolulu Advertiser so I could read the news - and the classifieds - before I had to head to the college fair. Scanning the help wanted ads wasn't too helpful - the realization that I had no real skills was painful, but really, what could I do? -- and there weren't many apartments listed in that morning's edition.

Could I make this work? It was expensive, but why not try it? What did I have to lose? I had quit a job I hadn't liked to go to another I knew nothing about, so it wasn't like I was on a high powered career track. I had a shit ton of student debt to pay back, which had been a primary motivation to go to Japan, but... so?  I could defer that, right?

I was down to eight days in the islands before before my birthday, before Japan (if I was going), before I had to decide.

I wasn't super focused on work that week. I don't even remember all of the venues. 

 
What I remember from those eight days is rain -- every day, rain, and the few extant pictures from the trip corroborate that: after Maui there were no sunny days -- and the kindness of strangers. The bartender at Hamburger Mary's who told me where to park overnight to sleep in my car safely where I wouldn't be hounded by the cops. The off-duty HPD officer I met at Queen's Surf Beach, then the gay beach in town, who showed me around Kapiʻolani Park. The man sitting under the banyan tree at the old Hula's who shared his spliff and gave me ideas for where to find work. Lawrence, the local guy who worked at a Waikīkī hotel who let me use an un-booked room for a few hours. 

 

And all the while I wondered: could I make this work? Could I get the money back from my plane ticket and -- together with my meager savings -- find a place to crash while I looked for work? Could I build a life here? 

 

I didn't, in the end. I didn't stay. Not then. On my 28th birthday I returned the rental car to the Honolulu airport and got my stuff out of long term storage and checked it in for Osaka. In the United terminal in Honolulu you an still see the bays under an escalator where there used to be pay phones and where I sat for a couple of hours calling friends and family (using a friend's calling card number) to say, well, "Sayonara" for a while.

 

How do you know if a decision like that was the "right" one? Financially, it was. Undoubtedly. The yen-to-dollar exchange rate then hovered around 115 and I was able to pay down my student debt over my two years in Japan. I made some amazing friends there, three of whom I've kept in close touch with despite the years and the miles. I got to explore Japan (a little) and Thailand (a little more) and developed a cultural literacy that I had been sorely lacking before my departure, and that made me a much better resident of Hawaiʻi when I did first settle here in 2000. 

 

But what if I'd stayed? I have no regrets, only curiosity. If there were a "Sliding Doors" -esque movie made of my life, that week in November of 1996 is the moment I'd choose. 

Chicago

In Fowler there was -- and holy crap, still is! -- a restaurant called The Hundred Mile House because it was about 100 miles from both Indianapolis and Chicago. (One of my brothers, I don't remember which one, cracked "Yeah, a hundred miles and fifty years.")

One hundred miles on paved, four lane highways to each city with a lot less traffic in the 1970s would have put both within a two to three hour drive from Fowler, but you would never have known. Indianapolis was considerably the smaller of the two and just didn't have anywhere near the same cultural and media institutions that Chicago -- a cultural and physical behemoth, the sprawling second largest U.S. city at the time and home to a lot of media, sports teams and cultural sites that simply loomed large over the landscape -- had. Or the same cachet, let's be honest. I don't remember regular trips to Indy (as it was universally known) as a kid the way there were regular trips to Chicago. 

There were once-a-summer trip to Cubs game with all of the altar boys from Fowler; a once-every-other-year-or-so trip to the Field Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry; a once-in-a-childhood trip to see the Nutcracker Ballet (though how we afforded that is a mystery); a once-in-a-lifetime trip to see Pope John Paul II when he came to Chicago in 1979 (I remember getting on a fancy coach bus before dawn on a school day in front of Sacred Heart Church, and my dad and I went, just the two of us -- well, just the two of us from our household and at least a literal one million other people for a mass in Grant Park). Indianapolis trips from Fowler were either rarer, or less memorable, or both. Indy wasn't as cool -- or as fraught.

Because there was another side of it, too. We were country mice -- by which I mean that my parents seemed to have if not a fear than at least an anxiety about cities in general and that meant Chicago in particular: it was The Big City and therefore alluring but also not to be trusted. They were Jeffersonian -- Thomas, not George -- in their worldview at least of where there lie virtue between urban and rural. Chicago induced stress and was feared, almost, for the traffic and the crazy drivers and the perceived crime -- recalling this now I can't help but wonder if there is some racism to ascribe to this, as well, and fear of the other. 

They could do it -- navigate Chicago, that is -- and they did do it, but they didn't like it. Driving hours (so many hours) to downstate Illinois to see my rural cousins and both sets of grandparents? No problem. Driving less distance across Chicagoland to see my northwestern suburban Chicago cousins? Decidedly more challenging, and decidedly less frequently done. I could feel the tension increase the closer we go to The City, as we called it; our thirty cents at the ready for the tolls on the Tri-State and the radio tuned to WBBM all news for traffic reports. 

As a passenger and not the driver? I loved it. I loved seeing the different cars and the different people in them, I loved trying to be the first one to espy the world's tallest building and the rest of the skyline from miles away on the prairie (a game that really only I was playing, so I usually won), I loved the energy and accompanying frisson and everything about it.

It simply loomed large as large over the landscape as its skyline did over the prairie, even in isolated Fowler, even in the 1970s.  

And I'm so grateful that my parents made the trips, because Fowler was isolated. I was shocked at the number of hands that were raised in my fifth grade class when Mrs. Muller, our teacher, had asked how many had never left the state of Indiana. There were kids in our class who lived three miles from the Illinois border and they made it in to Fowler every day. Benton County was on the border with Illinois. How had some of my classmates never been to Illinois -- it was right there! Did the state line loom so large in imaginations that it made it difficult to cross? Had so many peers' parents not take them for Dairy Queen Dilly Bars in Watseka from time to time? 

My world view was much broader due to the occasional journeys to or even around Chicago. These helped prise open my imagination and show me who I was sharing the world with. They lubricated my curiosities about others' stories -- and about what life paths were possible. It was assumed to be a little scary, yes, but we went anyway -- which laid groundwork for me. 

I was still very much a country mouse, let's be clear -- I hadn't pieced together that if a room number started with a three it was likely on the third floor until I was looking for my classrooms before my first semester of university, for example -- but I was one who could pack his bags for parts unknown: to Germany for a home stay after high school, to downtown Milwaukee for college, and yes to Chicago for a couple of years in the 90s. Sometimes jammed into CTA's 145 bus, headed to work on the Magnificent Mile, looking out over the Lake or towards the stately line of apartment buildings lining Lake Shore Drive, I'd wonder how a kid from Fowler ever ended up there -- and upon reflection and at least in part it was due to our trips to the Second City as kids. We were desensitized to its challenges and made aware of its opportunities. And my life was never the same, once I saw them. 

 

 

Riding Bikes

 

My bike was that rare thing in a house with ten kids: mine. Unlike ball gloves or sweatshirts or rosaries it wasn’t shared; it wasn’t “the blue bike” or “the little Schwinn”, it was mine. This wasn’t because I’d bought it (there was no money) or because it was given to me specifically for a birthday or Christmas (there would have been howls of protest), it was simply a matter of dimensions. My sisters, closest to me in age and size, each had access to newer, larger and mechanically sounder bikes, so they never needed to borrow one. I was by far the smallest -- my hulking big brothers were between seven and thirteen years older, a literal lifetime when you’re a kid -- and my bike was the smallest and therefore out of the pool of the borrowable.

 

And that little single-geared Schwinn was freedom. 

 

It was a more-or-less convincing blue, multiple sloppy paint jobs not completely hiding what it had been new (or newer) at some point in Michigan, or Memphis, or greater Buffalo. I didn’t have a bike lock and counted on it being right where I’d left it, wherever I’d left it: at home unborrowed in the side yard by the tire swing, at the town pool at the bike rack, at Sacred Heart in the small yard between the school and the church, at the Little League park -- anywhere, all over town, balanced on its sturdy, after-market hand-installed kickstand, waiting for me.

 

Mostly, though, I was on it. It was something to do – in all but the deepest snow or most dramatic lightning storm or tornado warning, I could go “riding bikes” without asking or telling; between nine and nine, I could just go. Not to go anywhere in particular, usually, was the point; it was just to go. Maybe you’d call a friend and ask if they wanted to ride bikes, but more often you’d ride bikes over to their house and ask, or you’d ride through town until you found someone else who was also, literally and currently, riding a bike, and ask them if they wanted to “ride bikes.” If they said yes - if they weren’t on an errand, say - then you’d ride to the town park, or past the Sacred Heart school playground, or maybe over to the Little League field, or to the town pool depending on the time of year. And when you got to where you were going, you’d ride around it, languidly, and see if any other kids were around who wanted to “ride bikes”, and talk about the next destination.

 

Kids in Fowler in the ‘70s had terrific cardiovascular health.

 

It was safe -- opaquely safe, by which I mean it was so safe we never thought about it as being safe, an all-encompassing safety so complete it was invisible, unnoticeable and unremarked upon. It’s not that drivers were used to looking for pedestrians (they weren’t), or that we were safety conscious (we weren’t) or that we wore helmets (we didn’t own any and no one else in town did either). In town the houses were set in the middle of ample lots, so approaching each corner at little kid bike speed you could see if there was anyone coming. In the country, you could hear (in the summer when the corn was high) or see (the rest of the year - it was flat and tree-less) any vehicle from far enough away to have plenty of time to pull over from your path down the middle of the road to get out of the way.

 

And wave, of course, because you knew them, or you might know them, or they knew you, or maybe neither of you knew if you knew each other but you waved anyway. Why take the chance? You wouldn’t want to seem rude. 

 

There were dangers, I guess. There was a traffic light you could cross against, but it was just the one, and it was set to flash yellow at the cars coming up US 52 and red at those on Fifth Street, and the very – very – subtly undulating prairie meant that you could literally see three miles down the road to the massive grain elevator at Swanington and two miles up the road the other direction toward the bend in the road. It was safe.

 

I don’t remember any parameters on where I could ride. There were no “Don’t go past…” and few “Be back by…” restrictions that I remember. I was the youngest of ten kids in a family headed by two parents who both worked outside the home as they struggled to make ends meet, so triage, fatigue and resignation could have been factors. But Fowler was so isolated no restrictions were needed.

 

How was a kid on a bike going to get into trouble, and would he or she have gone? The next closest clump of human habitation was Earl Park, seven miles northwest up a slight but noticeable-on-a-bike incline on US 52. It had fewer than 500 people in the ‘70s and -- except for the Labor Day Fall Festival -- there was nothing there worth riding your bike seven miles to discover. Oxford, Indiana (southeast, population 1,098, Dan Patch Days) and Boswell, Indiana (south-southwest, 998, Benton County Fair) were both nine miles each, and between them and past them was more of the same. The closest chain retail outlet of any kind was the Dairy Queen in Hoopeston, Illinois -- twenty eight miles away. I never even dreamt of riding my bike there, or anywhere outside of Fowler. There was nowhere to go, and I had no money to spend even if I’d gotten there. Someone with a driver’s license and a car could get to the county fair grounds in Boswell in 12 minutes; for me it simply didn’t exist.

 

Perhaps I’ve been so compelled by island living as an adult because I essentially grew up on one. Fowler was effectively an island, one of an archipelago of small towns set in a sea of tamed prairie and corn and soybeans. Immense, interminable, impossibly fecund fields lapped up against gravel and asphalt shores.

 

I never thought about any of this as a kid, of course. I just knew, after the age of four or so, that I could get on my bike and go: whenever I wanted, as far as I wanted, for as long as I wanted.

 

I didn’t know then what a gift this was, of course – the freedom, the mobility, the safety of it all. And it’s unknowable, as well, how things in our childhood will redound in our future lives. Is it a stretch to draw a line from my trusty blue Schwinn to my willingness to explore as an adult? Am I peripatetic by nature, or did all that freedom as a little boy nurture the confidence to do things as an adult that I found unremarkable but which in which others found involved a modicum of risk?  

 

Years later, I was spending my summer on a friend’s couch in Bangkok when I had a jolt of recognition reading David Malouf’s gorgeous “Southern Skies”: His narrator comments “Looking back on those days I see myself as a kind of centaur, half-boy, half-bike, forever wheeling down suburban streets”, and that was exactly right. Every day in the summer and many days the rest of the year I was welded to that old hand-me-down Schwinn, safe and free. 

GOP Hypocricy - Again

In the tidal wave of news this week you might have missed this nugget: The Pandemic has created a coin shortage. Even though fewer Americans are using cash -- for lots of reasons that predate Covid-19 -- somehow there aren't enough coins in circulation.

Why do I possibly care about this? Because in the depths of that article in the Washington Post alerting us to the issue is this:

Rep. John Rose (R-Tenn.), however, said he has been hearing concerns from banks in his district that are receiving only a fraction of their weekly coin orders.

Rose mentioned one particular bank that may run out of coins by the end of this week or weekend and asked if the issue was on Powell’s radar.

I had never heard of John Rose (though it's too bad it's not Johnny Rose from Schitt's Creek) but I knew - I just KNEW, before I even looked - that Rep. John Rose (R-Tenn) was an implacable small government asshole because, well, he's a Republican and he's from Tennessee. And I was right.

What surprised me was just how implacable and how much of an asshole he is.

John Rose (R-Tenn) was

• One of TWELVE people in the US House to vote against extending the 9/11 victims compensation fund - it passed 402-12 and President Trump signed it into law. His reasoning? Cost too much. 
• One of 22 House members to vote against the NATO support act -- giving Trump a free hand to pull the US out of NATO if he wanted to (remember when that was on the President's radar? Thankfully he has the attention span of an over-sugared 7th grader). 
• One of 22 House members to vote against the Ocean Acidification Innovation Act of 2019, which authorized "...Federal agencies to establish prize competitions for innovation or adaptation management development relating to ocean acidification." 
• One of, well, one to block a disaster relief bill fast-track -- not because it wouldn't ultimately pass (the disasters had hit Republican states and GOP congress members' principled stand against relief funds, which they so firmly believed after Sandy, vanished) but just to make some kind of cranky point about how members votes should be on record. (And, since we're keeping score, wrote a letter to President Trump asking for tornado relief funds "as soon as possible.")
• And the least effective member of the Tennessee US House delegation, passing 0 bills out of committee for House consideration and co-sponsoring the fewest bills. 

But hey, if you run a bank and need (literal) change, call your boy. He'll answer. A radical small government, less regulation guy, yes, unless a literal banker needs literal government intervention because they're literally running low on coins. Then John Rose (R-Tenn) believes in govt.

What an asshole. What a hypocrite. What a 2020 Republican. 

Going Deep - Reflections of a Gay Football Fan

I’ve always loved sports.  I grew up in a rural town in Indiana, and sports were one of the things that boys talked about.  I sucked at talking about some of the others – most obviously girls – but I could talk sports.  While technically I played sports in middle school - football (cornerback, where I watched a lot of guys run by me), baseball (where I spent a lot of time in deep center and right), and tennis (where I’d swing for the fences every time the ball came at me far more effectively than I ever had in baseball) - my love of sports was from watching them, almost any of them.

I loved watching high school sports – and nine older siblings gave me lots of opportunities to do that – and then college and pros as I got older.  In high school in the 80s I had a job selling soda in Purdue’s Ross Ade Stadium (capacity, 69,000; average attendance, 17,000) and I loved it, even when I’d get heckled by disappointed, wet, cold fans who would tell me to go find the hot chocolate guy as the home team lost, yet again, in the 35°F-grey-and-sleet of late November. 

When we moved to a town closer to Indianapolis and I could catch Colts games on the radio, that’s when I really fell in love.  I would listen to every down of every game if my parents let me, sometimes in the car parked in the driveway because that’s the only radio that could get reception.  Despite the 3-13 seasons and the freezing temps of three hours sitting in the car, I knew the roster, I knew the schedule, I knew the verbal tics of the announcers.  

And I really loved it.  I would read everything about the team I could get my hands on.  I couldn’t sleep on Saturday nights before big games, I’d be too excited.  I consumed so much football knowledge that years later, sitting in my regular sports bar with other transplanted Colts fans, I’d be the one they’d ask about a decade-old game score or the players involved in that three way trade with Minnesota and Cincy that went bad.  I really loved it, and still do. 

Some of my friends, my gay friends, don’t get it - certainly some boyfriends haven’t - and sometimes they’ve been super judge-y about it.  I didn’t get that, at all. Not at first.  If it’s not your thing, fair enough, but why is it a problem that it’s a thing for me?  Why, for some queer folk, is it okay to know every Academy Award nominee, but knowing the tie-breaker rules for how teams get into the NFL playoffs is off-putting? 

In 2013, I watched the Super Bowl at a (straight) couple’s house; they have a lot of gay friends and there were a lot of people over. During halftime Beyoncé performed - and I cleaned, restocked beer, and freshened drinks.  I wasn’t that interested in (2013) Beyoncé - though I did learn that she had been in Destiny’s Child, whom I’d heard of, and that she was married to Jay-Z, whom I'd also heard of  - I was far more interested in the game. After the power outage got resolved in the second half (the lights went out in the Louisiana Superdome for 35 minutes, leading to a suspension of play) I was excited when the teams finally re-took the field so we could unmute the TV and, you know, watch the game. One of my gay friends, who is usually lovely, said: “Like there isn’t enough football. They’ll be hours of it to go, we don’t need to hear this part.”  I looked around the room – a room full of guests at a Super Bowl party – and realized that at this moment most of the people in the room were gay, and in assent.  Thankfully there was another TV in the house. 

If this were the only time I’d heard something like this I would have chalked it up to circumstance or a lapse in manners. But queer friends have told me “you’re not really busy” when I say I can’t go to a movie at the same time my team is playing – in the playoffs.  That I’m wasting my time on a Sunday “sitting in a dark bar, watching football” when I've begged off going to brunch.  And, most annoyingly, some - including some who I have just met, have given that look and said that acid, arch, reductionist, tired “Oh, that’s so butch,” when I’m off to the bar to watch sports. As if it were an affectation. 

Why the disapproval? 

As I’ve thought about it, I’ve realized that in at least some cases the dismissal and disapproval that I’ve felt from gay friends weren’t from bafflement as much as from discomfort or even intimidation.  I’ve come to learn that some gay men would feel very uncomfortable walking into a sports bar on a Sunday filled with football fans; it’s not that they’d be bored – though there’s that, too – it’s that they’d feel they didn’t belong. 

A few years ago if you’d asked me to walk into a crowded gay Oscar party I’d’ve had a few drinks before I got there for sure – I’d’ve felt very out of place.  I’d’ve been keenly aware that I lacked a shared experience and thus things to talk about; that opening my mouth would reveal my ignorance; that I wouldn’t know the cultural markers – sartorial, conversational, behavioral – to fit in.  I get it. 

For some queers, though, athletic contexts hold even deeper challenges: they are fraught.  They bring back a moment in junior high when a conversation came up about sports that they didn’t follow, or when a dad or an older brother told them to try out for a team with an implication that this was a chance to show they were a man, and they were terrified.  I get that, too.  I was not and am not a graceful athlete, and athletic prowess is one key way in which males are evaluated in adolescence (and later). Some of that – feelings of evaluation and judgment – can linger, and can affect how we see ourselves as men.  And my love of sports perhaps puts me on the other side of the divide from other gay men.

Not all, of course.  I’ve dated ex-college athletes (hoops and soccer), I’ve had gay football-watching buds, particularly in the Midwest, I had an ex once look at me across the table in a sports bar in New York City during a playoff game surrounded by other fans of my (and now his) team and say, “Thanks for giving me this.  I had no idea it could be so fun.”

So how did unathletic me develop this love of sports – all sports, but especially football, that most macho of American sports? I can't help but wonder if I love football so much, a love that really took root in early adolescence, as a reaction - using the internalized stereotype to counter my inability to deal with my own queerness. I had inklings that I was gay; in my narrow, rural world view most gay guys don’t like football; I love football; therefore I must not be gay. I don't think that's the case, but it's certainly possible. I've read enough queer biography and hooked up with enough Marines to know that there is a type of gay male who on some level tries not to be gay by doing the most stereotypically un-gay thing he can think of.

Was that what I was doing?  Did my eleven-year-old self let heteronormative stereotypes define him, even in a counter-typical way? We all have normed expectations that we marinate in from birth, so what do we do as burgeoning queer children when we begin to understand that we don't fit – fundamentally can't fit – our mandated roles?  Is that why I love sports, and in particular why I freakin’ love football?  Is that why this particular entertainment interest of mine is discomfiting to some queer folk?

I don’t know.  Maybe?  But there really isn’t and can’t be an answer.  I’ve learned to be a little patient with gay people who are inadvertently ignorant or rude about my particular way of being entertained by baseball on summer afternoons at Chavez Ravine and McCovey Cove or any of the 26 MLB parks I’ve been too; by basketball as I tweet incessantly about the Pacers and my college team; and by football on Sundays in the fall.  

It’s a big part of who I am, and I love what my love of sports has given me.  Like talking to group of four ladies of a certain age from Cleveland in big hats, sharing their brandy with me on the Amtrak bound for Milwaukee where they were going to watch their team play the Brewers.  Or going to the same sports bar with the same gear for 16 Sundays in a row and becoming part of a community.  Or walking into a bar in a Pacers hat when I’m in whatever city and immediately getting included in a conversation.  Or sitting bleary eyed in Guam, watching a playoff game at the one open bar on the island at some ungodly hour. It’s comfortable for me in a way that an Oscar party will never be, and it’s easy, and fun.  It’s my church, and despite what my team might be preachin’, I’m faithful.  

And if you have a gay friend who’s sports-addled, well, first, it’s just what he’s into.  He’s not judging you for not being into it or drawing any conclusions about you, but it’s a hobby, however ridiculous (and he may well admit that it’s ridiculous), and we like what we like.  Second, he’s got superstitions to maintain and a schedule to plan around upcoming games, and that shit ain’t easy.  If his team wins on a week when we doesn’t have his cell phone, then he’ll never again bring his cellphone to the bar to watch a game.  That’s just the way it works.  And finally, maybe ask to watch a game with him.  Not a big game, maybe, not a playoff game his team is in, but a game.  Maybe you can tell him about Destiny’s Child during timeouts while he tells you a little about what’s going on during the game.  Maybe you’ll both be a little more comfortable.  

Senate shenanigans

Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) is on record as saying that the next President of the United States - the one we'll elect in November - should nominate the next Supreme Court Justice to replace Justice Scalia after his sudden death last weekend.  

Here's the quote, from Politico: 

“The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”

A couple of things here.  First, the job of the President, as explicitly outlined in the US Constitution, is to nominate a Supreme Court justice. The Senate's job, as explicitly outlined in the US Constitution, is to vote on them. (I mention the explicit thing because the deceased Justice Scalia loved nothing more than to say that the US Constitution was a dead document that should be taken at face value and not interpreted for current exigencies.)  

Senator McConnell made this statement an hour after the justice's death was confirmed - when people like Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Bernie Sanders (D-VT) were offering condolences to the family of the recently departed - which is a dick move, but that's besides the point. 

The point is that the American people do have a voice now.  Senator McConnell might not like it, but we - the American people - voted for the current president. Twice. And he still has over ten months left in office.  

And another way that Americans - FAR more Americans, as it turns out - have a voice, is by for whom they voted in the last election.  And overwhelmingly, more of us - the voice-ful American people - voted for Democratic members of the US Senate than for Republican members of the US Senate. And when I say "overwhelmingly" that's not hyperbole: it's over 24 million more votes. 

That's about the entire population of Ghana, or Australia, or to put it in terms perhaps more comfortable to the GOP Senate, that's more than the entire populations of: Tennessee, South Carolina, Arkansas, Louisiana and Alabama combined. 

Not voting age populations of those particular traitor states, but their entire total population.  

That's staggering. 24 million more Americans voted for current Democratic Senators than Republicans. 

And I can hear some people saying, "Well, that's California and New York, so what do you expect?" Like California and New York don't count, but whatever, okay - delete California and New York vote totals and it's still FOUR MILLION MORE.  That's more than Oklahoma! 

So who the hell are these "American people" that Senator McConnell wants to hear from?  And is he sure? I don't know, but Senator, you might want to be careful what you wish for. 

(Raw data below the jump.)