Mental Blanks

My mind has a tendency to go blank at the most inappropriate times. (And an "appropriate" time would be...?) Usually it happens when I most desperately need it not to go blank…like when introducing two people, each of whom I have known for years, and suddenly can't remember one, or often either, of their names.

The most current example was about five minutes ago, when I realized I needed a topic for this blog entry. One minute my mind is like a whale swimming through thoughts as thick as an ocean full of krill, and the next It’s like looking for a lemonade stand in the desert. (Aha! How about a nice blog on non sequiturs and mixed metaphors?)

When I’m writing a book, one or two blanks are almost guaranteed, but I usually get over them by going back a chapter or two into the manuscript and reading my way forward to where the blank occurred. It’s rather like a car trying to get up a slippery hill…back up, shift it into first, and gun the engine. (Hmmm…about those metaphors….)

Blanks are always a source of frustration, but on very rare occasions they can also be terrifying. I've only had one such instance, but it was more than enough. About a year ago I was on the el late at night, returning from a writers’ meeting. Chicago’s els have various “lines,” the Red and Brown serving the north side of the city. Each line has its own stations. The Red line is the main line, and all its stations are located in the center of the tracks with northbound trains stopping on one side of the platform and southbound trains on the other. Brown line trains are more or less “feeders” to the Red line, and have two platforms, northbound on one side of the tracks and southbound on the other.

I was on a southbound Brown Line train and somehow got off one stop short of the one I wanted. I had reached the bottom of the stairs before I realized my mistake. I immediately turned around and went back up the same set of stairs to the platform. But when I reached the platform and looked across the tracks at the other platform, my mind drew a total blank. I was absolutely positive that I somehow had crossed from the southbound to the northbound platforms. I stood there totally confused, and my confusion quickly turned to panic. Even when a Red Line train passed by and I clearly saw it said “Dan Ryan,” which I knew meant it was southbound, I still was sure I was on the northbound platform.

It was one of the most terrifying experiences I have ever had, and I realized just how horrifying memory loss has to be for those with Alzheimer’s.

A Brown Line finally came by, clearly marked “Loop” and I got on. I hope I never have an experience like that again.

And so, children, you see what I do when my mind draws a blank when it comes to what I can possibly write about for the next blog. I just start writing about whales and krill and lemonade stands in the desert, gun my engine, and charge up the hill.
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This blog is from Dorien's collection of blogs written after his book, “Short Circuits,” available from UntreedReads.com and Amazon.com, was published. That book is also available as an audio book from Amazon/Audible.com. I am looking at the possibility of publishing a second volume of blogs. The blogs now being posted are from that tentative collection. You can find information about all of Dorien's books at his web site: www.doriengrey.com.

Different Worlds

I was reading a post from a cyberfriend on one of the many predominantly straight lists to which I belong. She was telling of her Memorial Day weekend activities with her husband and family, and of picnics, and nieces and weddings and all the other wholesome things that seem to be part of every heterosexual’s life, and I was struck yet again by how totally alien these things are…and have always been…to me.

The sense of belonging to my own family is something I cannot imagine being without. It is the one solid, unchangeable thing in a constantly changing, turbulent world. Yet even with them, I was always aware of vast gulfs in our daily lives…differences which go far below what appears on the surface. So much of the lives of heterosexuals revolve around the problems (and joys) of raising children, of weddings, engagements, bridal showers, baby showers, messy divorces, church functions, and the like. All integral parts of the average heterosexual’s life, and all completely foreign to me.

I don't have much trouble, day to day, dealing with straight women. But I tend to be uncomfortable around straight men I do not know well. It probably stems from the fact that while I myself am a man (and have never either doubted it or had the slightest desire to be anything else), we simply cannot relate to or understand each other. Intellectually there may be few differences, but socially.... Straight men's lives social lives understandably revolve around the wife and kids or the girlfriend or fishing or deer hunting or sitting around with their emotional peers watching the Big Game du jour (and even more incomprehensibly, getting jump-up-and-down excited about it). Sorry, but we might as well be from two different planets.

I’ve never understood, for one thing (among many) why it is that straight men seem driven to go to great lengths to prove that they are “real men”? Why in the world should the question ever even have to arise?

Straight men tend to view gays with widely varying degrees and mixtures of suspicion, mistrust, revulsion, and curiosity. I rather suspect that deep down inside there is also an element of grudging envy of some of the “freedoms” gay men supposedly have that they do not. While gays have long been condemned for their “promiscuity” (largely because society won’t allow us the rights of monogamy), I wager that more than a few straight men would love to be as unrestrained in their sex lives as they condemn (usually wrongly) gay men for being.

Straight men may well...and rightly...resent the fact that gay men are as a rule far more free to ignore the chained-to-the-wall constraints our society imposes on men. “Men” do not cry when they are sad or hurt: in fact, the less emotion they display, the more “manly” they are (or consider themselves to be), and if keeping things bottled up inside leads to ulcers or a stress-induced heart attack, well, so be it. Straighten up and face it “like a man.”.

I find it fascinating that while sex is an integral and undeniable part of human existence, it is the object of our sexual attraction which creates nearly insurmountable walls between us. Love, the most positive emotion known to our race, is only considered valid if the two people experiencing it are of different genders.

With a global population of six billion or so, and counting, one might think that the fact that Adam and Steve or Eve and Joanne cannot naturally procreate would be considered in a far more positive light than it is. (“Breeders” is a pejorative gays direct against straights in partial retaliation for the endless string of epithets directed against us.)

The fact of the matter is that our society concentrates far, far too heavily on strict adherence to arbitrary gender roles, and in so doing it prevents our focusing on those things far more basic to humanity: love, loyalty, honesty, kindness, honor, and common decency toward one another.

It is said that the mills of the gods grind exceedingly slowly. Our society is, in fact changing. But I wouldn't put off doing the laundry waiting for the change to be complete.
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This blog is from Dorien's collection of blogs written after his book, “Short Circuits,” available from UntreedReads.com and Amazon.com, was published. That book is also available as an audio book from Amazon/Audible.com. I am looking at the possibility of publishing a second volume of blogs. The blogs now being posted are from that tentative collection. You can find information about all of Dorien's books at his web site: www.doriengrey.com.

Homes

Though it never occurred to me until much later in life, my family was what used to be known as “lower middle class,” a term seldom if ever heard any more. It applied to financial status, but I never cared for its other connotations. Both my parents worked very hard all their lives and despite the fact that neither of them graduated from high school, they did their very best to see to it that I never wanted for anything that was really important in a child’s life.

The first home I remember was the 14' trailer in which we lived in Gary, Indiana during the time I had my broken leg, and which I described in an earlier entry. Imagine if you will two adults and a five-year-old boy, in a full body cast from just under his armpits to below his knees, living in a total area of about 114 square feet. Oh, yes, and we had a dog. As I have mentioned before, the smell of kerosene still pulls me back in time and I see my mom priming the stove with a small hand pump to get the kerosene flowing. I can still hear the hiss of the gas and the “pop” of when the kerosene ignited.

The next home I remember was, in fact, a converted garage in Loves Park, Illinois, a suburb of Rockford. The bathroom was a small wooden 5'x5'x7' (if that) rectangle in the back of the property. We lived there during my first two years of school. The school was less than a block away, and I have fond memories of, in spring, using a flat piece of plywood to skim across the water-filled empty lot between our house and the school.

The one-block-long, dead end street on which we lived was named “Loves Court” and it was here I had my first introductions to sex: playing “you show me yours” with a girl classmate in an overturned outhouse—which, as I’ve said elsewhere, totally revolted me and slammed the door firmly on any however remote a chance there might have been that I could ever have been  straight. The same game with a male classmate, on the other hand confirmed what I already knew. I liked boys, not girls.

From Loves Court we moved to 328 Blackhawk Avenue, on Rockford’s south side. A tiny, four-room structure, it was still another step up in my parents’ march through life.  I think they paid $2,500 for it. It was set far back on a nice lot with a dirt driveway a sagging garage of its own, and another outhouse, from the roof of which I one time fell while playing, getting my pants caught on a nail on the way down and hanging there, upside down, until my mother came—as she always did—to my rescue.

Our next real home was a two-story duplex, at 2012 Hutchins Avenue, on Rockford’s east side. It had at one time had a grocery store on the ground floor with an apartment above, and it sat nearly on the sidewalk. It had a none-too-stable one-car garage which, like the house, had a flat roof. It also had a very nice back yard with a cherry tree and a fish pond my dad and I built.

When Uncle Buck died, Aunt Thyra moved from the Fearn family home (in which my mother was born and my grandmother had died) at 1720 School Street on Rockford’s west side, and my parents bought it. It was the only “real” house that we had ever lived in.

I was in college at that time, and went off on my own. When I moved to Los Angeles, after sharing a house on Tareco Drive with Uncle Bob, I bought my first home, on Troost St. in North Hollywood. My parents had to co-sign for it because, incredible as it sounds, banks would not give home loans to single men.

It was a great house, and I loved it. A swimming pool, a beautiful patio with a huge avocado tree and a flowering bush I never did find the name of, which, when in bloom, smelled like crushed bananas.

I was there about five or six years before buying an even larger home at the edge of the Angelus National Forest. It backed up on the steep foothills which attracted coyotes and rattlesnakes. It was by far the nicest of the homes in which I’ve lived.

I then moved to Pence, Wisconsin, for reasons which will be the subject of a future entry, and had two houses there, which will best be left also for another entry.

“Good Lord, Roger!”, I hear Dorien asking: “Of what interest can this be to anyone?”

He has a point.
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This blog is from Dorien's collection of blogs written after his book, “Short Circuits,” available from UntreedReads.com and Amazon.com, was published. That book is also available as an audio book from Amazon/Audible.com. I am looking at the possibility of publishing a second volume of blogs. The blogs now being posted are from that tentative collection. You can find information about all of Dorien's books at his web site: www.doriengrey.com.