When I Rule the World

My mind being what it is, I was sitting here minding my own business when I heard, somewhere in the space between my ears, Tony Bennett singing If I Ruled the World ("If I ruled the world, every day would be the first day of spring; every heart would have a new song to sing....")

I often think of how much better off the world would be if, in fact, God were to decide to take an extended vacation and turn the world over to me--or at least make me Emperor.

Here are a few of the changes I'd immediately initiate:

1) Every child will be wanted, loved unconditionally, nurtured, and allowed the freedom to be a child. If a parent deliberately denies their child any of these necessities, the child will be removed and given to someone who would provide them.

2) The objective education of its citizens will be a top priority for every government on earth. Any human being capable of learning how to read will be taught how to read. Courses in civility, basic manners, and respect for the rights of others will be mandatory for every elementary, high school, and college student.

3) What is good for humanity will take precedence over what is good for commerce and bureaucracy. Each human being will be treated as an individual worthy of attention and care. Those who subsequently try to take advantage of this fact for their own gain will be denied all rights afforded in this provision.

4) Individuals who deliberately lie or knowingly mislead others for their own gain will be disenfranchised and fined an amount equal to 100 times what they have gained by their actions. Those who use the internet for fraud will be forbidden to get with 100 feet of a computer for a period of five years. A second offense will involve banishment for life to a desert island without electricity.

5) Those who deny the rights of others will have their own rights denied.

6) The biblical concept of "an eye for an eye" will be reinstated. Anyone who deliberately causes physical harm to another will have the same injury inflicted on themselves, and to the same degree.

7) The death penalty will be abolished. Life in prison without parole will provide ample time to reflect on the stupidity of the act that put them there.

8) Handguns will be abolished and strict sentences imposed upon those who deliberately use any weapon against a fellow human being.

9) All prisons will institute mandatory education programs for those who cannot function on a less-than-twelfth-grade level.

10) Mental care facilities will be provided to those unable to function in everyday society.

11) Food and shelter will be provided to those who, through no fault of their own, are unable to provide it for themselves.

12) Two-year military service will be mandatory for everyone at some point between their 18th and 20th birthdays, no exceptions, no exclusions.

13) The lobbying of politicians will be forbidden, with strict penalties for both lobbyists and politicians, who will receive no benefits not afforded every other citizen.

14) Religious proselytizing will be banned outside of churches, synagogs, and mosques.

15) ...well, you get the idea. I'd appreciate your mentioning these proposals to God the next time you speak with Him.

Dorien's blogs are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please take a moment to check out his website (http://www.doriengrey.com) and, if you enjoy these blogs, the recently-released Short Circuits: a Life in Blogs (http://bit.ly/m8CSO1 ).

Tased

Why do I go through life feeling as though I'd just been shot with a taser gun? Why do I react so strongly every single time I'm confronted by anything I perceive to be utterly stupid and/or egregiously devoid of logic? Why can't I, like everyone else I know, simply accept things for what they are?

One of the infinite number of things I find totally impossible to comprehend is how any human not afflicted with scientifically recognized mental problems manages to survive from day to day without reacting as I do; how they can blithely sail through raging storms of mind-boggling contradictions and astounding balderdash seemingly unaware...or, if aware, able to ignore them. I can't. I never could. I doubt I ever will.

How can anyone...anyone...not be driven to distraction by the hate-filled, irrational rhetoric spewed out by human sewage plants posing as self-anointed pundits, politicians, and Speakers-for-God? That so many so blithely do stuns me to the soul. How can so many people, refusing to think for themselves, sit there like newborn birds in a nest, eyes unopened, beaks agape waiting to receive regurgitated nonsense, which they eagerly swallow?

I have a friend who is an intelligent, well educated professional, and yet for absolutely no reason I can even begin to understand is rabidly, utterly irrationally anti-Muslim. He believes to the depth of his being that there are no good Muslims. None. Not one. Nowhere on earth. Women, children, newborn babies, they are all terrorists in cahoots with Barack Obama--a Muslim--to destroy our great nation. Tased does not begin to describe how I feel when he sends me yet another stupefyingly irrational email forwarding.

There is a man in my building whom I will cross the street to avoid. Like my friend, when speaking of things other than politics he can be pleasant and rational enough. But he speaks of nothing but politics to the point where I fear for his sanity. I have told him time and time again that I while I respect his right to his opinions, I do not agree with then and do not wish to be exposed to them. Does that stop him? Silly question. Why do people do that? Perhaps I should use a taser on him.

Why am I incapable of glancing at the flood of messages pouring into my Spam folder without going into a rage which sometimes borders on the uncontrollable?

The answer is simple...at least for me: I expect my fellow humans to be good, and kind, and considerate of others, and at least reasonably logical, and no matter how often I am confronted with the fact that so many are not, I am truly shocked. I certainly should have gotten used to it by now, but I haven't.

I know the old saying that a cynic is a frustrated romantic, and I fear, while I do try to fight becoming cynical, I can feel it creeping up on me when I'm not paying attention. I fully realize that all my negativity is counterproductive; that I'm not going to change anything, and that the time I spend raging against perceived wrongs could far better be spent in constructive ways.

I admit, as a self-proclaimed romantic, that I see humanity in probably too rosy a light at times, I have to keep reminding myself that humans are, after all, biologically animals. We are predators; why can't I simply accept this elemental and incontrovertible fact? Spammers and far-too-many pundits and politicians and Speakers-for-God are, at their core, nothing more latter-day Tyrannosaurs eager to pounce upon and destroy the weak. They have no conscience, no morals, no concept of dignity or compassion or the common good.

So a good case could be made that if I'm constantly being tased, it's my own fault. I should just shut up and go along with the crowd, and accept the world as it is. I should, but I won't.

Dorien's blogs are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please take a moment to check out his website (http://www.doriengrey.com) and, if you enjoy these blogs, the recently-released Short Circuits: a Life in Blogs (http://bit.ly/m8CSO1 ).

Beauty Redux

I’m listening to Wagner’s overture to Tannheuser as I write, and as always, the section where the shimmering violins cascade over the granite of the brass clutches my chest so tightly my eyes mist over from the sheer power and beauty of it.

I am often overcome by visual and aural beauty…if seldom to the point of tears, very often to the point of a physical pressure in my chest. That I’ve always been an incurable romantic and spend so much of my time in fantasy probably doesn’t help. Beauty is truly in the eyes of the beholder, and I tend to behold it from several different angles at once. Beauty is anything I admire, or envy, or aspire to having or being, and is most often accompanied by the truly physical ache of realization that no matter how badly I might want it, I can never have it.

Beauty exists in lost things: in perspectives of the past only time can bring. Past experiences, relationships, never fully appreciated as they are being experienced, show their true beauty only in reflection. And for me there is sadness in the realization that they are indeed gone and will never return except in memory. That I can treasure them there gives me comfort rather like watching the video of a yule log on TV…it’s beautiful, but the warmth of immediacy is missing.

Being male, I don’t think it is the least bit surprising that one of the cornerstones of my being gay is my longing for the physical beauty and attributes I see in other men. I think this is a situation unique to gay men...I can't imagine it existing as a factor in heterosexual men's attraction to women.

I've mentioned before, in this regard, that before I was aged out of active participation in the "courtship"--a euphemism for which you can provide the appropriate word--aspect of the community, to meet and go home with someone to whom I was attracted was an exhilarating form of validation: that someone I considered beautiful might actually think I was attractive, too!

That our society is fixated on exterior physical beauty--and youth, which is its pre-requisite--to the point where we are bombarded by it and its inescapable message that if you yourself are not young and beautiful, you are inferior to those who are. People considered physically unattractive go through life bearing terrible burdens, not only emotional in knowing and constantly being reminded from without and within that they are lesser beings, but practically: "unattractive" people are less likely to be hired or selected in any process involving choosing one person over another. It is terribly sad and infinitely unfair, but it is a fact.

Beauty is absorbed into the human soul much like a sponge absorbs water, and comes in several forms, primary among which are sight and sound. The deaf are deprived of the beauty of the human voice and the wide variety of instruments mankind has created to produce various pleasing sound, probably best encompassed in symphony orchestras. So while the deaf cannot hear, they are subject to the same preconceptions of physical beauty as the rest of the population. But it is the blind, because they are not distracted by physical appearance, who can often far more clearly recognize and relate to the beauty of the soul rather than of the body.

True beauty exists not only in the eye of the beholder, but the mind, and just about everything is considered beautiful to someone. Because we are surrounded by so much beauty, we often do not see it, and it is often the subtle beauty, which must be given time to contemplate, which is the most rewarding. An autumn leaf upon the wet pebbles on a beach can be every bit as beautiful as any painting in a museum. All we have to do is focus our vision to be able to fully appreciate it.

Dorien's blogs are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please take a moment to check out his website (http://www.doriengrey.com) and, if you enjoy these blogs, the recently-released Short Circuits: a Life in Blogs (http://bit.ly/m8CSO1 ).

And Hast Thou Slain the Jabberwock?

We live in a world filled with Jabberwocks--social, political, and economic--wherein Lewis Caroll's poem makes more sense than much of what goes on around us. And although we may have relatively little protection from the Jabberwocks which roam the exterior world, we can at least join together to form armies to battle them. But there is also a potentially more dangerous Jabberwock within each of us which wanders the tulgey wood of our individual souls. Our personal Jabberwock takes many forms --insecurities and fears, regrets, unresolved issues, physical problems--which we must each battle in our own way.

Jabberwocks, like the human minds they inhabit, are complex beings, made all the more challenging and frightening because we ourselves create them to our own specifics. Each is a composite of everything that troubles us. Most dwell in the dark, uncharted areas on the far periphery of our minds, and though we may be aware of their existence, we can learn to largely ignore them.

But for some, the Jabberwock lives far closer to the everyday conscious, leaving the dark forest of the subconscious to break through the fences we have built to keep them out. I am one of those people. I find I spend so much time racing off to drive my Jabberwock back into the forest that it drains valuable time away from more constructive activities. And, more often than not, when I do drive him back, he merely hides behind the larger trees near the edge of the clearing, waiting to come out again at the first opportunity.

My personal Jabberwock is comprised mainly of the eternal conflicts between who I think and hope I am and who I think and fear I am. He is partly my ego turned on itself--the firm belief that I can do/be anything I choose to do/be clashing with the undeniable fact that no, I cannot. I refuse to accept reality while being forced to live in its world, at least physically. And the strongest weapon my Jabberwock has to use against me is the mirror.

He taunts me with all the mistakes I have made which cannot be undone; of all the people I have hurt or angered without meaning to; of all the countless things I would give anything to go back in time and do or undo. And he always, always, whispers to me of time, and the fact that no matter how much of it may be left to me, there is more of it behind me than ahead.

I do my best to battle my Jabberwock with whatever meager weapons I have at my disposal, or can improvise. For all my feuding with reality, I don the coat of awareness that most of what I want I realistically cannot have...not because it is me or my ego who wants them, but simply because there are too many things to want, and no human being can do everything. And I scored a sizable victory when I left my insular little world recently to go off to Europe for a month! Most of it alone. And I will do it again next year. I have determined to take far more advantage of whatever opportunities I have. When I was younger, I did not do so many things because I had the cocky assurance of youth that there was plenty of time to do them...later. Now I realize that if I have the chance to do something, I cannot afford the luxury of putting it off.

I sincerely hope that your own Jabberwock is not nearly so disruptive to your life as is mine, and that yours lives so deeply in your mind's tulgey wood that your awareness of him is limited to the occasional, unconscious shiver produced by a distant roar from the dark fringes of your conscious, and that he never threatens to come out of the woods.

And once again, I sincerely hope that, through all this talk of my Jabberwock and my battles, you may find something in it which applies to you and your Jabberwock, and know that you are not the only one who has one.

Dorien's blogs are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please take a moment to check out his website (http://www.doriengrey.com) and, if you enjoy these blogs, the recently-released Short Circuits: a Life in Blogs (http://bit.ly/m8CSO1 ).

Why? How?

Because my mind is a runaway train racing through a world I do not understand, I am eternally coming up with what to me are very logical questions for which there are apparently either no answers, or at least none that I can understand.

Here are just a very few. I would very much appreciate any answers you may be able to provide.

Why, if those "Not Sold In Stores" geegaw TV commercials are anywhere near as good as they say, do they have to double or quadruple the offer to get you to buy them?

Why have I never heard about all those things commercials assure me "everyone is talking about..."?

Why do nurses and doctors continue to smoke?

What the hell is a "well-qualified buyer"?

Why do those who demand you listen to them never want to listen to you?

How do they put a lid on those KFC buckets when the ads always show pieces piled up way beyond the rim? For that matter, why do the food photos shown in fast food restaurants bear absolutely no resemblance to what they serve you?

Why does the phrase "trust me" all but guarantee you shouldn't?

Why do the side effects of drugs often sound worse than what you're taking the drug for?

Why can we not sneeze without closing our eyes? (Just try not closing them once.)

Why do we applaud to show approval? (I at least have a theory on that one. I suspect it somehow relates to a child's wanting to grab ahold of something that pleases it. When we applaud, we're trying to hold onto what we're applauding for...plus it makes a pleasant noise.)

Why can we never remember the exact process of passing from being awake to being asleep?

Why is it so easy to give solid advice, and so difficult to take it?

Why do some birds "walk" while others hop?

Why do pigeons bob their heads when they walk?

Why do squirrels and rabbits hop?

What is the purpose of the slit at the base of a cat's ears?

Why are the irises of some animals (and all humans) round, while others are slitted? And why are some slitted irises vertical (reptiles and cats) while others are horizontal (i.e. sheep and goats)?

Why do all newborn babies have blue eyes?

Why isn't there a phonetic dictionary to help people look up words they don't know how to spell?

Why are there always more questions than there are answers?

Dorien's blogs are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please take a moment to check out his website (http://www.doriengrey.com) and, if you enjoy these blogs, the recently-released Short Circuits: a Life in Blogs (http://bit.ly/m8CSO1 ).

Unforgiving

There are a few blogs I've written which for some reason I cannot forget, and which I feel bear reposting for the message I hope it conveys. This is one.

My friend Gary and I went to a local coffee shop/bakery this morning. Standing in line by the glassed-in pastry counter, I was aware that the little old man behind me…unshaven, knit stocking cap pulled low on his head; long, shapeless brown overcoat…was making circular motions with one hand in front of the glass pastry case, saying “strawberry shortcake!” “Cinnamon buns!” I assumed he was talking to someone, but then saw he was alone.

“Soup,” he said. “Soup, soup, soup. I’ll have soup.”

I didn’t fully turn to look at him, but couldn’t be sure that he wasn’t talking to me. I didn’t want to say anything unless I was sure. When I got to the cashier, whom I know, I commented that he was lucky to be working inside, because it was cold outside.

“Yes, cold,” the little man said. I still didn’t know if he was talking to me, and felt like perhaps I should have said something to acknowledge him. But I didn’t.

When we sat down, the little man took a table near us, with his bowl of soup and the crust of French bread that comes with it. Head down, he ate quietly and quickly, not removing his coat. A few minutes later he got up to leave and, as he passed our table, he paused. Neither Gary nor I said anything or even looked up at him. He moved on, and Gary, who was facing the front of the shop, said he paused at each table as he passed it.

I at first assumed that the man was one of the far-too-many sadly dysfunctional people who flow along the city’s streets like twigs and leaves and Styrofoam cups float along a swollen creek; the invisible people no one sees, or pretend they don’t see. He may well have been. But it suddenly struck me that perhaps he was simply hoping someone might say hello to him, or somehow acknowledge his existence, and I was literally overcome with sadness and guilt that I, too, had totally ignored him.

When I told Gary how I felt, he said, logically, that to engage people whose looks and/or behavior strike a jarring note in the orchestra of our daily life was to risk…something: awkwardness? An unpleasant confrontation? The fact is that we simply do not know how to react to people who stand out as being uncomfortably different from ourselves and those we are used to having around us.

So rather than risk discomforting and embarrassing ourselves, we pretend they don’t exist. We tell ourselves, often with complete justification, that the panhandlers we see on the street could get a job if they wanted one, or that if we give them any money, they’ll just spend it on booze or cigarettes or drugs, and probably nine times out of ten, we are right. But what of the tenth person; the one who really does need our help. How can we tell the difference?

I have nothing but contempt for those who impose on others out of laziness or a desire to get something for nothing, or who deliberately try to take advantage of people’s goodness, or will do nothing to help themselves. They should be ashamed of themselves, but of course are not. And they deprive those who really need a little kindness or assistance of either.

I don’t know anything about the little old man in the coffee shop, or what his story might be, or if he was talking to himself or perhaps to me in hopes that I might say something to him and make him feel as though he were visible. But I am nevertheless truly and deeply ashamed of myself.

Why does this sort of thing bother me so? And why am I so relentlessly unforgiving of myself for not being who I think I should be? And the next time I encounter a similar situation, will I react any differently? I would like to think so, but, sadly, I doubt it.

Dorien's blogs are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please take a moment to check out his website (http://www.doriengrey.com) and, if you enjoy these blogs, the recently-released Short Circuits: a Life in Blogs (http://bit.ly/m8CSO1 ).

The Name Game

Our names brand us throughout our lives, though we had no say in choosing them. In the year I was born, 1933--and yes, there was a 1933, long, long ago--the top five boys' names were a solid, no-nonsense, feet-on-the-ground Robert, James, John, William, and Richard. (My own name, Roger, was #48 of the top 100 names. Roger means "Renowned Spearman," though modesty prevents me from assuming its meaning had any bearing on my being gay.) Girls, too, were given solid, practical names, the top five being Mary, Betty, Barbara, Dorothy, and Joan.

In an attempt to be unique, parents often give their children names that are trendy at the time. Like so many other things, names rise and fall in popularity, and the astute can often fairly well guess when someone was born simply by the name they were given, though the fashion in girls names come and go faster than with boys. In 1990, the most popular boy's names were Michael, Christopher, Matthew, Joshua, and Daniel. For girls, the most popular were the more fashionable Jessica, Ashley, Brittany, Amanda, and Samantha.

Based on Social Security Administration statistics, the most popular names for boys in the United States in 2011 are Jacob, Ethan, Michael, Jayden, and William. I don't think I'd ever heard the name Jayden, though I like it. For girls the top names are Isabella, Sophia, Emma, Olivia, and Ava.

Some names, for some reason, carry a subtle stigma: dated, elitist, racist. Percival, Reuben, Jebediah (though I like it), Hymie, Rastus. It is unfortunate but true that names too strongly reflecting national or racial minority heritage can put the child at a certain disadvantage in the real world. There seems to be a trend among African American parents to give their children lyrical names...Keneesha, Latasha, Leeshandra..but which may tend, however unfairly, to be a detriment when the child becomes an adult and enters the business world.

When I worked for an insurance company, many years ago, I made a collection of names which stood out; three I still distinctly remember: Peachy Poff, Mitzpah Frau, and Quo Vadis Cone. I can't imagine that a child with such unusual names can escape being teased and tormented by other children. There are enough battles each child must fight; being targeted for their name should not be one of them.

Oh, and a word of advice for all prospective parents: never give a child a first name he/she is not going to use. My full birth name is "Franklyn Roger Margason." I was given my dad's first name, Franklin (with an "i") and the middle name of my cousin, Cork, whose birth name was Donald Roger Fearn. To avoid confusion with my dad, I have always gone by the name Roger, which has created endless frustration. To every bureaucracy, to every imaginable place where I am not personally known and which requires a full name, I am "Franklyn." I wait in line at the DMV, or visit a new doctor, or...

"Franklin Margason," they inevitably call when my turn come.

"My name is Roger," I respond.

They look from me to the paper with my name. "This says your name is Franklyn."

"It is, officially, but I never use Franklyn. Ever. Never. I'm Roger."

"All right, Franklyn. If you'll come this way...."

Since I've begun writing professionally, I've used the name Dorien Grey. Google tells me there are 252 people with the first name Dorien in the United States. I've just spent half an hour going through literally a dozen sites giving the origin and meaning of names trying to find the meaning of the name "Dorien." Finally went to a site called "Behind the Name: the etymology and history of first names." There are 26 variations given on the name "Dorian." "Dorien" is not one of them.

Why does that delight me?

Dorien's blogs are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please take a moment to check out his website (http://www.doriengrey.com) and, if you enjoy these blogs, the recently-released Short Circuits: a Life in Blogs (http://bit.ly/m8CSO1 ).

Hoarder

I enjoy the tv show...actually, I think there are a couple of them...dealing with the subject of hoarders--people who collect and save and gather and can never part with anything, with the result that their lives become virtually unlivable if not for the hoarders then for those close to them. Shows like this provide us with the chance to "tsk-tsk" at the shocking conditions in which the hoarders live while allowing us to feel reassuringly if guiltily superior to them.

I am a hoarder. Not so much of tangible things as of thoughts and memories and ideas and information and songs and stories and poems and all kinds of trivia. I keep them not in my apartment, but in my mind.

Like a hoarder's house, my mind has rooms filled floor-to-ceiling with...well, thoughts. All sizes, all shapes, all topics--some whole, most in chunks or bits and pieces. Like the hoarders featured on the program, I always intend to get things in order one of these days. But like them, I do not, and just keep adding to the mounds and stacks and piles: a fascinating (to me) bit of trivia here, an interesting article there, a really thoughtful forwarding received from a friend over there--each of them great material for a blog.

The fact that my mind is such a jumble is related, I'm sure, to my lifelong habit of just putting something down somewhere, knowing full well when I put it down exactly where I put it. And then two minutes later, I can't remember what I did with it. I do that with blogs a lot. I'll get an idea, start to write it, then wander off after a paragraph or two. Oh, but I do save it, sure that I'll go back and finish it one day. And maybe I will--"Maybe" being the operative word. I carefully title each one ("Perspectives," "Tasered," "MacArthur Park," etc.) preface it with a "U" for "Unfinished", and "Save" it into my blog file. Lately, to help myself remember how long a particular unfinished blog has been sitting there, I've been prefacing them with a "UB" for "Unfinished, Begun" and the date. I can't say whether it has helped much, since I seldom go back through them...only add more. Just a few minutes ago, curious as to exactly how many of them I have in my "Blogs" file, I counted them. Seventy. Enough, were I simply to finish them, to last for over eight months!

Most hoarders tend to deny they are hoarders. They see themselves as collectors. However, over time, their habit/compulsion increasingly isolates them from those around and they become, by necessity or by choice, more and more reclusive. They have fewer and fewer visitors, either due to the visitor's discomfort with the conditions under which the hoarder lives, or by the hoarder's own embarrassment over those same conditions.

Unlike most hoarders, I welcome visitor to come into my cluttered brain and look around. One of the major differences between hoarding tangible things and hoarding thoughts is that a thing, once taken from the house, is gone, whereas should someone find something of interest in my mind they might want to carry off with them, I'm flattered...and I'll still have it. Thoughts are the only thing I know of that can be taken, yet still remain with the person from whom they were taken.

I think we are all hoarders of one sort or another, though it does not often become totally life-disrupting. Too many hoard grudges, or griefs, or perceived slights and injustices. Some few, the very wise, hoard happy memories, or dreams.

So here I am, today, with a blog due tomorrow and, as too often happens, I don't know what I should write about. So where did I put that idea I had awhile ago for a blog on hoarders?

Ah...here it is!

Dorien's blogs are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please take a moment to check out his website (http://www.doriengrey.com) and, if you enjoy these blogs, the recently-released Short Circuits: a Life in Blogs (http://bit.ly/m8CSO1 ).

The Rose Peddler

I swear I don't know where these things come from! Really, I don't. But I was thinking this morning about my constant running around trying to find new readers for my books--which I always have found somewhat embarrassing--"unseemly," as they say used to say in gentler times. It's very similar to those people who come up to your table in a nice restaurant with a basket of roses, asking if you'd like to buy one. The roses themselves are beautiful, and you know the seller is just trying to make a living. But still you can't escape the feeling of being approached as an unwanted/unnecessary intrusion on your privacy at best, and somewhat intimidating at worst--if you're on a date and you don't buy a rose, you're cheap. It evokes a "Hey, if I wanted to buy a rose from you, I'd have approached you" reaction.

Every author is, in effect, a rose peddler. Big-name authors, at the very top of the writers food chain, do not have to come up to you and ask if you want to buy their book: they have agents and powerful publishing houses to do most of the work for them. An occasional book-signing tour or a speaking engagement here and there...usually paid for by the publisher...with pre-programmed buyers forming lines around the block, and they can get back to writing their next book. But for 99 out of every 100 writers, there are no agents, there are no long lines.

Writing books is a wonderful experience. However, for the average writer, trying to get people to buy them is like chewing tinfoil.

The hard, cold fact is that out of the 150,000 novels published each year, 100,000 will sell less than 100 copies. It’s been estimated that, if the writer were to receive $1.00 for every book sold, he’d have to sell between 25,000 and 50,000 books per year in order to make a living at writing. (And yes, yes, yes, I know there are women writers. But this politically correct and excruciatingly cumbersome “he/she,” "him/her" political correctness drives me to absolute distraction! No offense, ladies.)

The internet is full of "writers-and-readers" groups, which consist almost totally of second, third, and lower tier writers commiserating with one another over how hard it is to find readers. And the relatively few readers who belong to such groups usually sit in the background or, when pressed for their opinion on a topic, invariably say "Oh, I'm just a reader," having no idea that without them...without readers...the writer is nothing. Readers apparently never stop to realize that it is they who hold the fate of writers in their hands. They can "make" a writer by reading him, or break him by ignoring or simply being unaware of him. It's up to the writer to make readers aware that he exists, and to convince them to take a chance and read the book.

There are far more excellent writers and wonderful books out there than there are large publishers to produce or promote them. A writer's chance for success is, unfortunately, too often in direct ratio to the size and clout of his publisher. And the sad fact is that a vast number of books published by smaller houses, once published, just sit there because the writer is more concerned with being able to say, "Oh, yes, I'm a published author" than to do anything to get out there and find people to read the book. I've seen countless posts on writer sites where one of the members will proudly state that he took copies of his book to the church picnic and sold three copies! That's wonderful, but hardly makes a dent in the expense the publisher went through to put the book out in the first place.

So I, and many, many other writers like me, must constantly be doing our little buck-and-wing dances while waving our self-promotional flags and doing whatever we can to call attention to ourselves
and our books. Necessity ain't always pretty, kid.


But just as there is pleasure in smelling a rose, there is pleasure in reading a book, no matter who convinces you to read it.

Dorien's blogs are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please take a moment to check out his website (http://www.doriengrey.com) and, if you enjoy these blogs, the recently-released Short Circuits: a Life in Blogs (http://bit.ly/m8CSO1 ).

The Case Against Acorns

This past March I took a month-long trip to England, France, and Italy. Next year I'll be taking a 15-day riverboat tour from Budapest to Amsterdam, then stopping over in New York for several days before returning to Chicago. Bragging? No...utter disbelief. That I have done and will be doing these things--things that so many other people can only dream about, as I could only dream about were it not for Norm's generosity--leaves me lightheaded in contemplation. And all these wonderful adventures were possible only through the death of my dear friend and one-time partner, Norm, who did not spend his hard-earned money on himself when he could and should have.

I am deeply indebted to him in death as I was in life. So do I feel guilty for spending money he worked so hard for? No. I am doing with his money what I wish he would have done for himself. I think he would have appreciated the irony in that.

And therein lies the theme and message of this blog: you truly can't take it with you. I could have...and many might say should have...invested the money Norm was kind enough to leave me. But to what end? I have no family to support, and even if I did have a family, I'm well beyond the age of having to support them. I have finally learned to live within my income and therefore didn't really need the money, though I am of course delighted to have it.

I fully realize that everyone's needs are different. We all have financial obligations, which vary greatly from person to person. And I am certainly not advocating just blowing every penny we have on our own personal pleasures. We tend to work hard all our lives, putting money aside for...what, exactly? Like squirrels collecting acorns, we keep stashing it away. But once we have accumulated enough to assure ourselves a reasonable and sustainable level of comfort, we keep going. "For the kids," is perhaps the most common reason given if asked. A noble thought, but once "the kids" are no longer kids, the obligation to support them largely vanishes--they need to stand on their own two feet and make their own way. Leaving them something when you die is fine. But too often "something" is, realistically, too much. Pampering children is one thing; pampering adults is something quite different, not to mention largely unnecessary.

I think a major problem in the acorn-gathering/money-stashing philosophy is that we are seldom aware of how much is enough. It would be safe to say that the vast majority of people are unaware of their true financial condition. They do not budget, they do not plan, they have no real idea of where their money goes. They just keep gathering those acorns.

I'm not addressing this to those whose circumstances prevent much acorn-gathering. But there are still a very great number who can, but who are so concerned for saving for the future comfort of others they neglect their own comfort now.

Norm, for example, left a sizable amount of money to his brother, who has done quite well for himself throughout life and does not need it, and to two nephews whom he never saw and who, from all accounts, were also doing quite well for themselves. I do hope they will use that money as I am using it, to fulfill dreams. I'm sure Norm, too, had dreams, but he was too busy storing acorns to act on them.

I am, as I'm sure you've noticed if you've followed these blogs, excruciatingly aware of the passage of time, and that time is not limitless for any of us. If we don't take the opportunities presented to us, they may well be lost forever. One of my strongest memories of my recent trip is of sitting in the Piazza San Marco in Venice on a beautiful, sunny day, having a drink while listening to a small orchestra playing not 50 feet from me. I made a mental toast to Norm, wishing he was there with me, and knowing that he should have been there instead of me.

So don't spend all your time running around gathering acorns. Take some time to sit in the sun and enjoy them.

Dorien's blogs are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please take a moment to check out his website (http://www.doriengrey.com) and, if you enjoy these blogs, the recently-released Short Circuits: a Life in Blogs (http://bit.ly/m8CSO1 ).

"Scatter Ye Breadcrumbs..."

For some, life is a vast green pasture, for some a forest, and for some a jungle. But regardless of the terrain through which we pass, many feel the need to leave a trail to mark their passage, either so they can trace the path back to where they began or so that others may know the path they have taken.

Memories are the breadcrumbs of choice for most of those looking to retrace their steps along the way, but memories really don't hold up too well in the light of reality. They are much too easily warped by the passage of time. But since we tend to avoid staring into the light of reality just as we avoid staring directly into the sun, we seldom realize that what we're sure we remember clearly may not in actually be exactly what happened. Time wears away memory's sharp corners and fades the colors. As strongly as we believe something happened at a certain time in a certain place in the company of certain people or under certain circumstances, almost assuredly we are not 100 percent accurate.

Because I have never understood the world, and am so easily lost or led astray, I have been an inveterate breadcrumb-dropper all my life. But instead of relying totally on memories to mark my journey, I reinforce them with as many tangible bits and pieces of my past as possible, mostly in the form of my writings. Since words can last forever, I use them as my breadcrumbs. As a result, my trail through life is much easier to follow than most. I have an entire two-year period of my life, in fact--by way of letters written to my parents when I was in the Navy--documenting an almost day-by-day, as-it-happened accounting of events. After not having looked at the letters for many years, I was shocked to discover that several things I distinctly remember either did not happen, or did not happen when or in the order that I could swear they happened.

Memories are ephemeral, words are solid.

I always strongly encourage anyone with a desire to be remembered to drop tangible breadcrumbs as they travel through life. Even if they have no need to retrace their steps, it allows those they care about, and those who care about them, to see the exact path they took.

Photographs make fairly reliable breadcrumbs, but unless they are dated, even they can be misleading. When you take a photo, you know full well who is in them, their relationship to you, when and where it was taken, and under what circumstances. But unless you take a moment to caption them, 20 years down the line who else will know?

While few people think to do it, keeping a journal of what may seem uninteresting or even trivial to you. Taking brief notes on vacations and trips, saying what you did and, more importantly, your thoughts and feelings can, when you look them over in future years, sharpen memory and rekindle emotions--especially good ones.

I feel strongly about the need to leave breadcrumb showing our individual paths through life. If not for ourselves, then for those who come along a bit later and may want to know more about us and who we were. The more solid the breadcrumbs, the sharper the image we leave of yourself. Personal letters to friends or family, for example, are not only a part of who we are, they serve as a sort of time capsule for anyone who might come across them in the future.

What we take for granted, what is totally normal and may seem mundane or even boring--what is now--to us, will be viewed quite differently when seen from the perspective of the future.

You can't go back in time and leave breadcrumbs retrospectively. But it's never too late to start.

Dorien's blogs are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please take a moment to check out his website (http://www.doriengrey.com) and the recently-released Short Circuits: a Life in Blogs (http://bit.ly/m8CSO1 ).

Words Spoken, Words Written

I wish I spoke well...and I'm not referring to the residual effects of tongue cancer on my ability to speak clearly enough so that other people can always understand me. I mean I wish I were able to put my thoughts together quickly enough to enable me to instantly say what I wanted to say, rather than saying something lame or saying nothing at all, or coming up with what I wanted to say sometime later.

There's that old saying which, like most old sayings has a good deal of truth to it: "It's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and prove it." I, unfortunately, tend to do both.

How many times have I, having been snubbed or snapped at or insulted or neglected by a clerk or asked a totally unexpected question, felt angry or like a fool for not responding the way I should have responded at the very moment?

It's not that I am incapable of coming up with a blistering, sage, or witty (whichever is appropriate) retort to something said. I can...just not in time for it to do any good. Twenty seconds, five minutes, half an hour later I invariably come up with something absolutely brilliant I wished I'd said. It is no wonder I do not play tennis. Thought-mouth coordination is just as important to communication as hand-eye coordination is to sports.

Not only do I deal poorly with my own personal thought-mouth coordination, I frequently think of what I wish other people had said. To this day it truly bothers me that, upon landing on the moon, Neil Armstrong said, "That's one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind." What he should have said and I am sure meant to say, was, "That's one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind." Amazing how much difference one tiny word can make.

And the insertion of the words "under God" into our pledge of allegiance--words which were not in the original version, which were never intended to be there, and which flagrantly violate the fundamental principle of separation of church and state and were inserted only to satisfy fundamentalist Christians (in my opinion, the worst kind)--sincerely drives me into a frenzy.

I would have loved to be a candidate on the platform at the Republican debate when the audience booed the gay soldier in Afghanistan. Not one of those gutless-blob candidates had the guts to say what may well have guaranteed them the Republican nomination. Had, the minute the booing occurred, any one of them had the guts to say: "All right...all of you who booed stand up! Here is someone wearing the uniform of the United States of America, someone who volunteered to put his life on the line every day to protect your sorry asses and you have the utter, unmitigated gall to boo him? You're a disgrace and, should I be the Republican candidate for president, I do not want your vote."

I have often said that one of the main reasons I became a writer was that writing gives me time to think after I speak, and to go back and change things so that they come out the way I wanted them to. Spoken words are immutable: once they leave the month, they can't be changed or taken back, no matter how hard one tries. It's like trying to unring a bell. But written words are infinitely malleable: they can be rephrased, rearranged, amended, softened, hardened.

It is the spontaneity of the spoken word which holds both its power and its inherent danger. Hearing a moving speech, for example, often has more impact than reading about it, thanks largely to the ability of inflection to convey shadings of meaning. Many deaf who have learned to speak have a certain flatness to their voice because there is no way for them to really be aware of the importance of inflection.

Spoken words can and too often do confuse, or cause pain which cannot be uncaused. Both spoken and written words can induce thought, but unless the spoken word is recorded, it cannot be reheard; written words are always there and can be gone over again and again, allowing time for introspection. The spoken word is now; the written word is forever.

If it sounds as though I'm making a case for the written word over the spoken...well, considering the source, I guess you're right.

Dorien's blogs are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back. And please take a moment to check out http://bit.ly/m8CSO1 for information on Dorien's Short Circuits: a Life in Blogs.

Words Spoken, Words Written

I wish I spoke well...and I'm not referring to the residual effects of tongue cancer on my ability to speak clearly enough so that other people can always understand me. I mean I wish I were able to put my thoughts together quickly enough to enable me to instantly say what I wanted to say, rather than saying something lame or saying nothing at all, or coming up with what I wanted to say sometime later.

There's that old saying which, like most old sayings has a good deal of truth to it: "It's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and prove it." I, unfortunately, tend to do both.

How many times have I, having been snubbed or snapped at or insulted or neglected by a clerk or asked a totally unexpected question, felt angry or like a fool for not responding the way I should have responded at the very moment?

It's not that I am incapable of coming up with a blistering, sage, or witty (whichever is appropriate) retort to something said. I can...just not in time for it to do any good. Twenty seconds, five minutes, half an hour later I invariably come up with something absolutely brilliant I wished I'd said. It is no wonder I do not play tennis. Thought-mouth coordination is just as important to communication as hand-eye coordination is to sports.

Not only do I deal poorly with my own personal thought-mouth coordination, I frequently think of what I wish other people had said. To this day it truly bothers me that, upon landing on the moon, Neil Armstrong said, "That's one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind." What he should have said and I am sure meant to say, was, "That's one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind." Amazing how much difference one tiny word can make.

And the insertion of the words "under God" into our pledge of allegiance--words which were not in the original version, which were never intended to be there, and which flagrantly violate the fundamental principle of separation of church and state and were inserted only to satisfy fundamentalist Christians (in my opinion, the worst kind)--sincerely drives me into a frenzy.

I would have loved to be a candidate on the platform at the Republican debate when the audience booed the gay soldier in Afghanistan. Not one of those gutless-blob candidates had the guts to say what may well have guaranteed them the Republican nomination. Had, the minute the booing occurred, any one of them had the guts to say: "All right...all of you who booed stand up! Here is someone wearing the uniform of the United States of America, someone who volunteered to put his life on the line every day to protect your sorry asses and you have the utter, unmitigated gall to boo him? You're a disgrace and, should I be the Republican candidate for president, I do not want your vote."

I have often said that one of the main reasons I became a writer was that writing gives me time to think after I speak, and to go back and change things so that they come out the way I wanted them to. Spoken words are immutable: once they leave the month, they can't be changed or taken back, no matter how hard one tries. It's like trying to unring a bell. But written words are infinitely malleable: they can be rephrased, rearranged, amended, softened, hardened.

It is the spontaneity of the spoken word which holds both its power and its inherent danger. Hearing a moving speech, for example, often has more impact than reading about it, thanks largely to the ability of inflection to convey shadings of meaning. Many deaf who have learned to speak have a certain flatness to their voice because there is no way for them to really be aware of the importance of inflection.

Spoken words can and too often do confuse, or cause pain which cannot be uncaused. Both spoken and written words can induce thought, but unless the spoken word is recorded, it cannot be reheard; written words are always there and can be gone over again and again, allowing time for introspection. The spoken word is now; the written word is forever.

If it sounds as though I'm making a case for the written word over the spoken...well, considering the source, I guess you're right.

Dorien's blogs are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back. And please take a moment to check out http://bit.ly/m8CSO1 for information on Dorien's Short Circuits: a Life in Blogs.

Be Prepared

It isn't that I don't like the idea of planning. I do. I admire, albeit oddly grudgingly, people who take the time to think out and methodically plan their every action. It's just, basically, planning takes time and I have precious little enough of that as it is, so I generally don't do it. If I'm at a point where I want to begin a project and I have the choice between just getting to it or spending the time to plan out every possible detail and contingency, the choice is clear: the time involved in planning something takes time away from actually doing it. It also, I think, takes some of the fun out of it, at least for me. I've mentioned several times that I never plan out my books (or, as you may rightly suspect, my blogs) before I start them. I get an idea and I go with it. It may not be the way most people do things, and sometimes I'm sure it shows, but it works for me.

I have literally dozens of begun-but-never-finished blogs in my "Blogs" folder. I get an idea, start writing, and run out of steam or thoughts a few paragraphs into it, and abandon it. I don't just delete it, though, in case I might want to go back and finish it someday. This is quite different than writing a book. I admit that with a book, the initial idea usually includes the theme, the method of murder, the motive, and tentatively whodunnit, though the actual killer frequently turns out to be someone other than I first intended, depending on how the story progresses.

When it comes to planning and its consequences, writing has overwhelming advantages over real life, the primary one being the ability to go back and rewrite what has been written. Probably that is also one of the reasons I so dislike reality. Life does not allow rewrites. Once a moment in real life has passed, it cannot be changed or altered. Say something you should not have said, do something you should not have--or wish you had not--done, and you're stuck with it forever. For all the planning you may have done in real life, changing the outcome is not possible.

One of the many joys in writing, for me, is in being able to, in effect, just read the story as it unfolds on the screen in front of me. This pleasure would be lost were I to have carefully plotted out exactly what was going to happen exactly where in the story. My mind simply could not allow such confinement, and I honestly cannot comprehend how those who do meticulously plot in advance can do it.

Of course I am not totally uninvolved in the progression of my stories; just as one has to make changes and adjustments and decisions and process new information in the course of everyday life, so it is, for me, with the process of writing--though with far more flexibility than real life affords. If, in the course of working on a book, I have to figure out how Dick or Elliott might come by a some piece of information, I can go back into the story and plant a clue or a introduce a character from whom the information might logically be obtained. With luck, the reader will never be aware that it was done, which is exactly the way it should be. Deus ex machina--just having something appear out of nowhere, with absolutely no advanced preparation for the reader is, for me, the ultimate cop-out and the kiss of death for a book, story, tv show, or movie.

For most people and in most instances, "Preparation" more frequently involves the mental process than any physical things that must be done before the event, and too easily "preparation" becomes a euphemism for "pointless fretting." Preparation implies that some specific actions can be taken prior to the event to positively affect what is being prepared for. Too much of what people consider "preparation" is in effect, busy work prompted by worry. I generally consider the degree of preparation required to be largely dependent upon the importance of what is being prepared for. I am really trying to prepare for my anticipated trip to Europe next year, for example, but I'm limiting it to laying the groundwork, without micromanaging every detail in advance.

Of course, as I read over what I've just written (since—surprise!—I didn't prepare what I was going to say in advance), I realize that it could, with some justification, be considered my attempt to rationalize the simple fact that I am just plain lazy, and not preparing for things is my way of taking the path of least resistance. I do hope I'm not taken to court over the issue, for I fear I would lose.

Dorien's blogs are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back. And please take a moment to check out http://bit.ly/m8CSO1 for information on Dorien's Short Circuits: a Life in Blogs.

Growing Up Gay

As you may have noticed, many of my blogs deal with various aspects of my being gay, and the reason is simple: I talk so much about being gay because for the first nearly 2/3 of my life I was, out of very real concern for the possible consequences, unable to do so.

And now, looking at the title of this blog, it has the same vague redundancy as if it had been titled "Growing Up Brown-Eyed" or "Growing Up Right-handed." Of course I grew up gay: it's simply an integral part of who I am and who I have always been. The realization...make that the acceptance of the fact...that one is gay varies from person to person. I was blessed to realize and accept who I was before I ever heard the term "gay."

I don't remember when I first heard the actual word "gay" used to define those like me. Up until my early teens the only words I heard to describe what I was were "Queer," "Sissy," "Pansy," "Nance," and other equally charming epithets. Interestingly, I don't recall hearing "Faggot" (the most commonly derogatory term today) until I was well beyond my teens. I was, in fact, not directly aware that there were more than a few others like me until I was 17 and was picked up in a movie theater by a guy visiting from Chicago, who showed me there was a whole world of us out there.

I never experienced any bullying for being gay, though in high school there were a few minor incidents of name calling and whispers and, once, a car full of my male schoolmates--none of whom I knew personally--driving by and yelling "Queer!"

Knowing what I know now about the growing-up experiences of others of my generation and beyond, I realize not only how lucky I was, but that I was in fact utterly blessed. My mother and father loved me unconditionally, and had they ever asked, I would have told them. But they didn't. They didn't have to. I never lied, or pretended to be anything but what I was, but we played a mutual game of avoidance. My father was far more aware of my sexual orientation than my mother, and at a far earlier age. It wasn't until I was 33 and had broken up with Norm after six years that we addressed the subject openly. My dad said, "Are you sure? Have you tried being with a woman?" (No, I most definitely had not.) and my mom, said, "Well, I wish you weren't, but that doesn't change how much we love you." And it didn't.

I had relatively (no pun intended) little contact with my father's side of the family...my grandmother, aunt (Dad's half-sister), her husband, Pete, and their two kids. I heard only many years later that one time while I was a teenager, Pete apparently made some comment about my being "queer" to my folks and my dad nearly got into a fight with him over it.

I always identified strongly with my mom's side of the family, the Fearns, and down deep considered myself more a Fearn than a Margason. Every one of them--my grandfather, aunt, uncle, cousins, and second cousins--never once so much as suggested that I was "different," though they all knew, and I love them all the more for it. One of my fondest memories is when I brought my then-partner, Ray, back to Rockford for a visit. The entire family got together for dinner, and treated Ray as they had treated Norm...as one of the family.

My dad, being more aware, was deeply concerned for me, and sometimes this led to conflicts between us. Once, between my freshman and sophomore years of college, two of my best gay friends, Stu and Zane, and I planned a trip to New York. Dad did not want me to go, and we had several heated arguments until finally he said, "Okay, go to New York with your queer boyfriends!" This shocked me because he knew Stu and Zane and had always treated them warmly, and had never before said a word against them. I realize now his reaction was based on his true concern over the possible dangers inherent in my being a gay teenaged tourist in New York.

When I moved to Chicago after college and partnered with Norm, my folks and the entire family accepted him without question. Even though my folks and I had not yet even mentioned the "g" word, and would not for several more years, they adored Norm and treated him as a second son.

When I took my parents to Hawaii as a Christmas present one year, Norm stayed in Chicago. One night, when my folks were getting ready to go to bed, I decided I wanted to go back out (to check out the local gay scene, though of course I didn't tell them that). My mom said, "Well, when you get married you won't need all this running around," and my dad said, "Hell, he's already married."

I miss my folks...and at this moment, (no offense, Mom), I particularly miss my dad.

Dorien's blogs are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back. And please take a moment to check out http://bit.ly/m8CSO1 for information on Dorien's Short Circuits: a Life in Blogs.

"Damned if you do,..."

That we humans are able to exist at all in so infinitely-complex and frustrating a world is a testament to our resilience and flexibility. We are bombarded every moment of every day with contradictions and challenges and decisions, and somehow we manage to wend our way through the minefields, though it can be argued it is harder and harder to do so.

Ironies and contradictions abound. We have created technology to make our lives simpler, and have ended up being ruled by it. We come up with new ways of direct communications and lose the ability to communicate directly (as anyone who has ever tried to reach a real human being at a major corporation can attest).

The invention of the computer has changed our entire world. But now, to have a computer is not enough. One must have an iPod and an iPad and a Tablet and a Kindle and a Nook and a Blackberry. Telephones begat cell phones, and cell phones begat texting and ring tones and 14,999 various "apps". I have a computer (and have made the quantum leap from sit-in-one-place PC to a laptop and have a small device that plugs into the laptop to enable me internet access from anywhere in the city of Chicago). I do not have an iPod or an iPad or a Tablet or a Kindle or a Nook or a Blackberry. I have seen them, but I have never used them, and though I'm sure they're lots of fun, I honestly get along fine without them.

I am bedeviled by endless TV commercials that encourage me to sign up for a mind-boggling array of supposedly absolutely necessary services I in fact do not need, each of which I can have "for only $99.99 a month for the first three months," after which it usually goes up to $129.00 per month. Multiply this by six different devices requiring some sort of service contract and you're getting close to the gross national product of Paraguay.

I am well aware that the single purpose of all commercial ventures is to make money, but I rather strongly resent the implication that if I don't have (read "buy") all these gadgets and gee-gaws, I am a pathetic relic unfit for society. Lord knows I get that message clearly enough in other areas of my life; I don't need it from technology.

I have yet to completely figure out Facebook and Twitter and Google+ and LinkedIn and and BranchOut and the 9,000 other internet sites I am told I "must" belong to if I intend to get/keep my name out there and find new readers for my books. And as a result, I spend so much time bouncing from site to site trying to keep up that I have almost no time to write.

Obligations are part of life. If you are below retirement age, you have to get up and go to work five days a week whether you want to or not. We all have obligations, to friends, family, employers. For the most part, we meet them, and when we don't, there are often consequences. It is the obligations imposed on us by our culture and by technology which are the problem. We are in effect bullied into them.

The human need to belong, to feel part of the whole, is universal. It is a fact advertisers know well and exploit to the fullest. One of the most popular expressions in the advertiser's lexicon is "Everybody's talking about..." The fact that, of course, everybody is not talking about it is totally irrelevant. The clear message they are sending is that if you are not talking about it, you don't belong.

Bombastically partisan politicians are fond of saying "The American people will not tolerate such-and-so," meaning that if you have no objection to or may even be in favor of the "such-and-so," you are obviously not a part of "the American people."

The world, it seems, is the embodiment of that old vaudeville question: "Have you stopped beating your wife?" No matter how you respond, you're in trouble. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Dorien's blogs are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back. And please take a moment to check out http://bit.ly/m8CSO1 for information on Dorien's Short Circuits: a Life in Blogs.

When I Was Who I Was

When I was who I was, I was not satisfied. I took everything I had for granted and wanted more. Now that I am who I am, and no longer have what I had then, I look back in longing for it, and in self-recrimination for not appreciating what I had until I no longer had it. This seems to be an all-too-common human trait, and one which, if you do not yet understand, you surely will.

We tend to assume that life is just...there...all for us. When we are young, we firmly believe that we will be young forever. Life does not come with an instruction manual or a warrantee, and we totally ignore cautions of what lies ahead for us just as we ignore the tiny-print cautions that come on every bottle of aspirin. It is only much later, when it's too late to make any sort of mental preparation, that we begin to realize that life is not a gift, but a pay-as-you-go proposition. Each of us must pay, in some form, for every year we live and, like health insurance premiums, the cost goes up every year. It is not until we are well into our 30s or 40s that it begins to occur to us that the rules of mortality apply to us. The realization is like slowly being lowered into a bath of ice water.

We are far too easily distracted from where we are going by our real and perceived problems. Every human has problems--they're a part of life. Some, of course, are much more serious than others, but while some are life-changing, the vast majority are not. Problems of the moment tend to be exaggerated in our minds because 1) they are our problems, and 2) we are having them now. Once they are past, they generally fade away to relative insignificance, to be replaced by newer problems. But in our obsession with them, and in wasting much more time than necessary on them, we lose perspective on the rest of our lives.

Some species, like ants and bees, seem to share a common awareness. It would be nice if, even as we remained individuals, humans were privy to some sort of similar shared awareness of the true path of our life. Because we are locked within ourselves and spend every instant there, we are not aware of the changes going on within ourselves...the gradual change from who we were to who we are. Seeing ourselves in a mirror each day is an example of this phenomenon. Reflective surfaces reveal these changes, but they are so gradual as to be unnoticed. I, unlike most people, go to great lengths to avoid reflective surfaces out of my refusal to accept what I see there. I therefore can go for months without confronting myself. But when I do, because I do not have the "buffer" of incremental unawareness, I am painfully aware of the changes between what I see now and what I saw the last time.

I don't want to be who I am now. I want to be who I was, once. And the full awareness that I never will be, never can be, does not stop me from wanting, or reduce the intensity of that want. And yet I find myself slowly coming to what I hope to be an...accommodation...with myself. No matter how old we are, we are never going to get any younger, but by the same token, we are, at this moment, as young as we will ever be, and I am determined to enjoy whatever it is--and there is much--I have now. I can't do anything at all about the past, but I can have considerable control over my future. I plan for it (a European river cruise next summer, the completion of my current book and a string of subsequent books stretching as far into the future as time will allow me); I try not to put off things I want to do by falsely assuming I will have "plenty of time" in which to do them. I may not, and this is as true of you as it is with me.

To say "time is precious" is to repeat one of the oldest and most overused of cliches. But like most cliches, it became a cliche because it is true. And I relate my awareness of the value of time to my habit of, when seeing a penny on the sidewalk, stooping to pick it up. Not because I need the money, but because like time, it is there, it has value, and it should not be wasted.

I will never be who I was when I was, but I'll do my best to be who I am.

Dorien's blogs are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back. And please take a moment to check out http://bit.ly/m8CSO1 for information on Dorien's Short Circuits: a Life in Blogs.

We Humans

We humans are an endlessly fascinating species, constantly at war within and among ourselves. We each exist in and move through a world of astonishing everyday wonders of which we are never aware. That we are not is understandable in that were we to be aware of them all we would have no time, given our relatively short lifespan, to do anything at all else but be in a state of constant, overwhelming amazement. We'd be like a deer in the headlights, immobilized.

But every now and then we should stretch our minds by giving some thought to those things never thought of. Our genetic imperatives, for example. Our DNA is almost identical to the primates and carnivores from which we evolved--and yes, you Tea Party twits, we evolved! Get used to it.

But for all our genetically based aggressiveness, which has plagued us since before we became identifiably human, we are also programmed for what might be called nobility. Our genetic imperative is centered on the preservation of the species. We protect our children instinctively. With few exceptions, we would without hesitation give our lives to save theirs. And, to our credit, not only our own children, but all children within our circle of influence. Were the starving children in remote areas of the world within our physical reach, I have no doubt but that we would do anything to save them. It is the physical distance which gives us a sense of helplessness. Our only recourse, given the distances separating us, is to contribute money to be used by those physically closer to the problem to help them, and it can always be argued that no matter how much we do to alleviate their suffering, we can and should do more.

I've always been fascinated with sudden, unexpected natural and man-made disasters--fires, earthquakes, explosions, tsunamis, ship sinkings, floods, tornadoes--not for the suffering they cause, but for the very best qualities of our species those disasters bring out. Caught up in violent events, we react instinctively, and to our great credit, most of us act nobly in attempting to protect and save our fellow humans--and often other living creatures also directly involved.

We have created complex societies with complex laws which we obey without thought or question. We hear a siren behind us while we're driving, and we instinctively pull over without giving an instant's thought as to why we are doing it. With few exceptions dictated by circumstances, we stand in line rather than trying to rush to the front. We pay our taxes, we vote...all elementary, simple things until you pause for a moment to wonder why we do these things. We have schools and hospitals and libraries and stores and factories and build roads and bridges and establish national parks and playgrounds. Think of any one of them and wonder how they came to be and why--really why--we invented them.

It is sometimes difficult not to truly despair for the future of humanity. There is so very, very much evil and hatred and bigotry and cruelty and gratuitous stupidity in the world it tends to overwhelm us, and makes it easy to forget the good, the selfless, the caring, the kind. It is, again, to our credit that we pay so little attention to the positive because we expect the positive: it is simply assumed to be the norm. And because the negative still surprises, shocks, and saddens us, we tend to forget that it does so because it goes against what we assume and expect--through desire if not always through fact--to be the norm; to be the way we expect the world to be.

Of all the gifts given humanity, the one which most separates us from all other species with whom we share the planet is hope. With it, we can and do face any challenge. Without it, we are doomed.

I wonder if, were they to look for it, scientists might find a Hope gene in our DNA?

Dorien's blogs are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back. And please take a moment to check out http://bit.ly/m8CSO1 for information on Dorien's Short Circuits: a Life in Blogs.

"Dear Dugbate:"

After my last posting on the subject of internet spam, I swore that I would go to my spam folder only long enough to hit "Delete All", and thereby save myself from the fits of uncontrollable fury reading even the subject lines of those messages inevitably evoke.

But today, rather like an alcoholic who, after a period of abstinence, thinks it will be okay to have just one little drink--I gave in to the temptation of trying just one, brief, totally objective look at the messages awaiting me when I came on line this morning.

I sincerely wish it were possible to write the real people...and I am being kind in referring to them as "people"...behind these messages to see if I could determine exactly why they have chosen to throw away their humanity for the sake of pure greed. But I guess that sentence both asks and answers the question.

Anyway, since I know full well that to actually respond to a spam message is to automatically have my email address and whatever other information I might be foolish enough to provide put up for sale to thousands of others of the morally dead, I thought I'd pick out two at random and write--though not send--a response. This is, I've been told, a valid and often recommended form of therapy.

So here are just two of today's spam subject lines and my responses:

SGT LARRY WAYNE - Pls do not disregard - Hello, How are you and your family sincerely hope all is well. My names is SSG Larry Wayne; I....

Hi, there, Larry!

Why of course I wouldn't disregard your message: You're a member of the United States armed forces, to whom I and every American owe a great debt! Though I am a bit curious as to why, since as stated in your note, your "names is" SSG Larry Wayne (I thought it was "SGT" Larry Wayne), the message was sent by suzana.paunescu@cgsinc.ro? ".ro" is the e-mail designation for Romania. I assume Suzana is your Romanian girlfriend, and you had her look through 2 billion email addresses to specifically find mine while you were out there putting your life on the line defending my freedom.

Your folksy approach in asking about my family--though I don't have one--was very much appreciated, and yes, all is indeed well except for one small thing: that anyone would stoop to posing as an American serviceman in an egregious attempt to screw me and the 18 million other people to whom this same message was sent.

You're so far beneath contempt, Larry, you could not be located on Sonar, and I wish I believed in God so that I could fervently pray for you to get what you so richly deserve if not in this life, then the next.

Your Buddy,

Dorien

Federal Bureau of Investigation - Federal Bureau of Investigation Contact Mr Dugbate John for your payment...

Dear Mr. John (may I call you Dugbate?)

While I was unaware that one of the duties of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was to send out "payments"--I won't presume to ask for what--to complete strangers, I am eager to accept your kind offer. Please, however, do not ask me for my bank account information in order to complete the transfer. Just send the check to me, and I'll deposit it.

My best to J. Edgar,

Dorien

Dorien's blogs are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back. And please take a moment to check out http://bit.ly/m8CSO1 for information on Dorien's Short Circuits: a Life in Blogs.

"For Want of a Nail..."

The proverbial rhyme about the consequences of the loss of a single horseshoe nail ("for want of a nail, the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost...") is no less applicable today. So let us gather here today to mourn the loss of simple common sense, one of humankind's greatest gifts, which has shown us the way through some of our darkest hours, and whose loss has significant consequences on our society.

And I think, being honest, that we must all accept responsibility for its loss by increasingly turning our backs on it.

Michele Bachmann, that great humanitarian and scholar, tells us that a trip President Obama (a.k.a to Republicans as "the Antichrist") made to Japan cost taxpayers $200,000,000 a day; that he took along an entourage of 2,000 people, who stayed in 735 luxury 5-star hotel rooms (at least that comes out to nearly three people per room--a sure sign of frugality ignored by Ms. Bachmann). She also told us, with the deep sincerity and profundity for which she is known, that our founding fathers worked tirelessly (this is in 1776, mind) until slavery was eradicated from the land.

Is she laughed off the stage and forbidden to play with sharp objects? No, she is running for the office of President of the United States, and her every word is greeted with applause and knowing nods of agreement by her followers. And she is accompanied in her bid for the presidency by others whose intellectual qualifications and devotion to truth equal her own.

As our society becomes more and more ruled by technology--the workings of which are unintelligible to the average human--we feel, correctly, that we have less and less control over our own destinies. As even trying to figure out how and why things and institutions work the way they do becomes increasingly more difficult, more and more people are throwing up their hands in frustration and saying to self-proclaimed pundits, "Okay, you tell me what to think," and those pundits, whose motivations are based far more on greed for power than altruism, are more than happy to oblige. And with every egregiously false and misleading statement they issue, another nail is pounded into the coffin of common sense.

Can this trend be reversed? Possibly, but I fear it would require more time and effort than most people are willing to devote to it--there's a "Housewives of the Jersey Shore" rerun on tonight, after all, and priorities are priorities.

But just because we've tossed common sense into the back of a sock drawer doesn't mean we can't take it out and start using it again. First, we must all realize that just because something is said on TV or read in a forwarded email does not make it true. As someone once said, if ten million people believe a lie, it is still a lie. All it takes, when reading/seeing/hearing something like this is to ask the simplest of simple questions: "Does this really make any sense?" President Obama plans to give every illegal immigrant $400,000 a month, free health care, a new house, and a new car? Forget that even if he wanted to he could not get it passed through a congress which, if he said the sun was shining, would run for their umbrellas. Hey, a friend sent me an email of an article he saw in some magazine, so it must be true. Muslims use a melon scoop to remove the brains of Christian babies? They said so on Fox News, so it has to be true.

Politics, of course, is not the only thing lacking the nail of common sense. Internet spam is obviously unaware of its existence. After railing against Spam endlessly, I still cannot comprehend it, let alone how any rational human being could ever, under any circumstances, believe a word of it.

Television commercials--and especially infomercials and those aired late at night--depend on the lack of the nail of the viewer's common sense.

Instances of the effects of the loss of the nail of common sense are endless, and to point to them all is like standing in the back yard at night pointing up at the stars.

But the nail's not lost; we can find it and use it. All we have to do is try.

Dorien's blogs are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back. And please take a moment to check out http://bit.ly/m8CSO1 for information on Dorien's Short Circuits: a Life in Blogs.