231. nostomania

This’ll be a quick download on Thanksgiving and how things ended up not going with my family.

In short, I told my mom that while I appreciated her invitation, it’s not a good idea for me to spend major holidays with them right now.

But first, a video.

Like many things YouTube, I discovered Sexplanations through the Green brothers’ creative and informative YouTube channel.

“Field of eligibles” was a new term for me, but it put a name to something I’ve been struggling to define for a while. Because while there are a good number of gay men in the Minneapolis/Saint Paul area, eligible, as she notes, doesn’t aways translate to desirable.

And we’re not talking about a huge population to choose from here. If statistics are true and only 5% of the U.S. population is predominantly gay, of the 1.86 million males in Twin Cities metro area (the current estimate is that 49.7% of the population here is male), probably around only 93,000 of those are in my field of eligibles.

Then factor in my personal preferences—well-educated, cultured, geeky, secular-minded (ideally, atheist/agnostic), self-reliant, mentally and emotionally stable, physically attractive (to me), and reasonably hirsute (that’s more of a nice-to-have than a must-have), to name a few of the qualities that I look for in potential partners.

Even just using a couple of those filters rules out a huge percentage of the gay men around me.

The reason that I was thinking about this in these terms today is because yesterday found me single yet again at Thanksgiving. It’s been almost two years since I’ve been in a relationship. And I realized the other day while cooking for the Sunday Assembly Thanksgiving that the last time I really cooked for a holiday was when I was with Jay, and that brought up a whole lot of sad memories and feelings.

One of the things I’ve been exploring in therapy lately is why I’m obsessed with being in a relationship. From what I’ve been able to parse out, for most of my life I’ve had all of these external measures of self-worth. Even though I grew up hearing about unconditional love, the kind of love I actually experienced as a child was anything but that. The standards for being an evangelical, fundamentalist Christian were pretty steep. In short, we were expected to live up to the model of Jesus’ life on Earth, although that was only the minimum requirement (the rest I’ll get into another time).

Basically, I was unwittingly trained from a young age to compare myself to others and base my self-worth on how I was or wasn’t up to par. That paradigm transferred over into other areas, too, from basing my self-worth on how good a pianist, to how good a composer, to how good a writer I was, and so on. It was all performance centered.

I attended an evangelical Christian liberal arts college where the saying “ring by spring” was only partly a joke. The expectation was that by the time you’d graduated, you’d have a degree and your opposite-sex life partner. On the drive into campus, there’s a large rock that students would paint in the way of an engagement announcement. Usually it was just the couples’ initials or names, but often it was quite artistic. By the time I graduated, virtually everyone I knew was engaged or married.

Soon, I was often the only (or one of the few) single person at a gathering. In the years before I came out gay, the reason for my singleness was difficult to explain to anyone. Working all the time was a convenient excuse, but even that started to wear thin after a while.

After I came out, finding a long-term boyfriend became even more of a measure of success. Especially for someone like me, it would signal having overcome decades of oppression and religious abuse to deliver the ultimate “fuck you” to an institution that had told me for years that my limited choices were to change my sexual orientation, embrace a lifestyle of total celibacy and be alone for the rest of my life, or burn eternally in the fires of hell.

A real brain teaser.

So all that to say, holidays can be a real downer for me.

The only time I’ve been with a partner for Thanksgiving and Christmas was when I was with Jay. To be honest, I more enjoyed being with his family than I did with him, and they’re the only thing I miss about dating him. Because those times were the first I can really remember feeling welcome and accepted at a family gathering. While I know that my biological family loves me, there’s so much tiptoeing that I’ve had to do around them, always worrying about what not to say or do. That feeling intensified once I became an atheist.

And forget about bringing home a boyfriend or husband to meet them. While I’m sure they’d try to be tolerant and civil, I doubt they’ll ever be truly accepting and welcoming.

Yesterday, I spent Thanksgiving with my housemates’ family. And it was lovely. The only time religion or politics came up was when explaining to Matt’s mom why I wasn’t with my own family. The rest of the time we just enjoyed being with each other. I could be myself. And it was terrific!

While I was the only single person at the table, looking around, I could see myself bringing a boyfriend home to meet those people. Of course, there’s tons of work to ahead before I’ll be capable of dating anyone. Establishing stable friendships is difficult enough. I have to scrape away decades of internalize self-loathing and self-hate, and the fundamental beliefs that I’m not valuable, not worthy, not lovable, that I have to have achieved something or look a certain way for anyone to accept me, let alone think I’m worth dating.

But regardless of how long that takes, I’ve at least found a place to call home.

228. cloister

Sorry it’s been a bit between entries, folks. This fall hasn’t been doing much for my depression or my mood.

The short of it is that I got laid off again last Friday. Basically, my job got outsourced to the main corporate office of the company I was contracted with. I shouldn’t have been surprised after seeing half a dozen full-time employees depart in the last month I was there. It averaged about one a week. Most of them put in their two-week’s notice, and the next day were told not to return. In fact, my last day was also the last day for a project manager who had been with the company for 26 years. More than once I heard the phrase, “This place is hemorrhaging people all over the place.”

The staffing agency I work with has had me out on several short-term assignments, but the effect has been pretty demoralizing. Returning to Minneapolis after the brief trip to Seattle, to a job that I no longer enjoyed and to a state where my romantic prospects are negligible, was difficult enough. Then to be back to not having a full-time gig again was another burden.

I think what I wanted to write about today was family. So this shouldn’t be too long.

This afternoon I was practicing Tim Minchin’s song White Wine in the Sun. It’s a song about being a secular person at Christmastime and how the significance of the holiday (arguably, of any holiday) is spending time with loved ones. One lyric from the bridge goes:

And you won’t understand,
But you will learn someday
That wherever you are and whatever you face
These are the people
Who’ll make you feel safe in this world.

What I’m finding with this whole Sunday Assembly song-leader gig is that, while I may not have been gifted with a voice for Classical music, I actually have a pretty decent voice for indie rock. I’ve been heavily influenced (vocally) by the likes of Fiona Apple, Annie Lennox, Colin Meloy, and Tim Minchin.

So as I was singing through this song, one line of the chorus (“I’ll be seeing my dad / My brother and sisters, my gran and my mum”) particularly struck me as sad, seeing as I’m feeling rather ambiguous still about my own family, and whether I even belong there anymore.

It’s not that I’m not wanted there. I hear occasionally from my sisters and from my parents about how they miss me and wish I came around more. My mom emailed last week to say that my 85-year-old grandmother has asked about me several times recently. I was kinda surprised to hear that seeing as she’s in the declining stages of dementia. The things that stick…

It’s more that I still don’t feel comfortable or safe among with my family. They’re conservative (political and theological) evangelical Christians who don’t accept my “lifestyle” or the fact that I’m an atheist. They acknowledge these things… except, not really. When I’m present, they do their best to ignore the reality that their son is not the heterosexual male they’d always hoped for, or that I don’t believe in their so-called god.

This past summer, my father looked stunned when I declined to hold hands with the family when they prayed at the dinner table. Instead, he and my sister bowed their heads and pretended as if I was participating, going so far as to mime holding hands with the imaginary son/brother they wish they had. It was a symbolic gesture that seemed to sum up our present relationship.

Which is to say, fractured and tenuous.

This evening, while reading through some different news items, I happened across a link to an article on the website Queerty titled “Five Tips For Surviving A Weekend At Home With Your Beau.” I had two competing reactions while reading it:

1. Thank ‘flip that this probably won’t ever be my life.
2. This won’t ever be my life.

I’ve only dated one guy who I was with long enough that he wanted to meet my family. About a month before we broke up, Jay did meet my younger sister, her husband and her now three children. And no, that meeting was not the cause of the breakup.

Frankly, I’m getting sort of resigned to the idea that maybe there will never be any kind of close relationship with my family. If I ever find a guy who becomes Mr. LTR, maybe he’ll want to meet them, if only to better understand why I’m as seriously fucked up as I am.

The article advises not withholding information. In my case, that has never been a problem, especially where my family is concerned. I probably disclose too much information.

It also advises giving him “pointers”—but how to advise one’s beau to avoid getting cornered by any member of my family lest they lay out the whole “Roman road” and try to convert him? My parents are definitely to be avoided, especially together. They’re like the Christian Bonnie and Clyde of Evangelism, working in tandem to drag someone’s entire life story out of them and then work all the angles to convince them that “Jesus is the only way to salvation.”

And “Be understanding”? That’s a little condescending. I mean, it’s possible that my perspective on my family is skewed towards the dysfunctional, but how exactly is a gay couple supposed to react when the family doesn’t acknowledge that the two of you are in a legitimate relationship at all—and rather, they believe that you’re “sexually disordered”? What are you supposed to say when people start ranting about President Obama, about liberals ruining the country, how climate change is a hoax, etc?

Of course, all of this is purely hypothetical. I haven’t even been on a date in almost six months, so to speculate about a boyfriend who’d even want to meet my family is a bit… hasty.

But it was certainly weird to sing about seeing my family at Christmas.

166. glissade

Happy Boxing Day, everyone!

Well, we made it through another Christmas without being swept away by some long-foretold doomsday disaster. And I made it through my first family Christmas with a significant other, which is noteworthy. This is the first year I’ve been with a guy for a major holiday like Christmas. Last year I spent it depressed, mostly holed up in my room, alone and drunk, so this was a nice change of pace and scenery.

It’s also been a full year since I told my parents that I didn’t want any further contact with them, so long as they believe what they do about homosexuality. Since being outed to them by my first ex-boyfriend in November 2010, they’ve had plenty of opportunity to reconsider their conviction that homosexuality is unnatural. They budged a little on the notion that it’s “uncurable,” which for them means that I should be living a lonely and celibate life. So there’s no real change from 2010.

Last fall they said that they would never acknowledge any romantic relationship of mine with another man, or come to any wedding or commitment ceremony of mine. This was a particular slap in the face, considering how big of a deal my younger sister’s wedding was, and knowing that I’ll never experience that kind of celebration. She has three kids now with her husband, and my family would never dream of pretending that they’re just friends or roommates. Yet that’s the life they deem appropriate and reasonable for me, all because I fancy men instead of women.

The last exchange between my dad and me took place on Christmas Day of last year. I’d stopped by to write him a check for the last of the money I owed him for car repairs, after which I told my parents that I wanted nothing more to do with them because of their beliefs about my sexuality. He made a comment about how he didn’t think my “lifestyle” was making me very happy, how Jesus could’ve helped me “be straight” if I’d let him, and how I’d “never really given Jesus a chance.” I responded that my unhappiness had to do with the fact that my entire world had been recently tipped upside-down, and on top of that my family thinks I should be content being a second-class citizen, both in society and in their company. I asked if he knew the difference between sadness and clinical depression, and he remarked that “Jesus is bigger than depression.”

To which I replied, before slamming the door behind me: “I spit on your Jesus.”

That was last Christmas.

This Christmas was spent with my boyfriend Jay and his family. I had some anxiety in the weeks leading up to it, not so much about large numbers of people but rather about gift-giving. In my family, or at least among my siblings once we were older, gift-giving always felt like an exercise in posturing. The gift had to be nice enough to show that you spent a decent amount of money on someone, but not so expensive that it looked like you were showing off. It was the thought that counted, so long as the thought was interpreted in the right way.

Add to that the fact that for me it’s so hard picking out gifts. Something has to jump out at me as being just the thing for a person. For example, Jay’s uncle has some pretty right-wing political views, and a few months ago I was at Barnes & Noble looking for another book and saw a book by David Horowitz, The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and sixties radicals seized control of the Democratic Party. I thought, “That’s perfect!”

As for the rest of his family, it’s hard to get a read sometimes. I was worried about them seeing me as rude or that I didn’t really try, and that therefore I’m a bad boyfriend and not really a part of the family. A few weeks ago a friend of Jay’s sister came over and played a game with us, and I felt like everyone liked him way more than me. My rational mind was saying that they have more of a history with him, and that’s what’s going on. My lizard brain was saying that everyone was wondering what I was even doing there.

Family is tricky for me, for many reasons. As I’m learning in therapy, I was never able to connect with my family growing up (at least during my teen years) because I was so preoccupied with trying to hide from them and everyone else the enormous fact that I was gay. And, as I feared, they are unable to accept their gay son for who he is, which means that we can’t have a relationship.

In the summer of 2011, while I was staying with my parents while finding a new place to live, my dad and I had an argument. This isn’t out of the ordinary since we’ve fought most of my life. We were on the topic of sexual orientation, and he growled, “You’ve made your whole identity now about being gay! You’re so focused on it!”

I said: “Yes. Because I am gay. Contrary to what you think, it’s not some separate thing apart from myself. It defines who I am, just like your being married to mom defines you. And someday there’s going to be a man in my life who forms the other part of that central relationship for me. And you refuse to acknowledge that part of me. So yeah, I’m kinda focused on that right now.”

I’ll never know what it’s like to have my own parents love my spouse in the way they love my sister’s husband. I’ll never know what it’s like to introduce the man I love to the people who, for better or worse, I spent most of my life with and who raised me. That’s not an easy pill to swallow.

102. wolcum

“It’s Christmas Eve! It’s the one night of the year when we all act a little nicer, we smile a little easier, we cheer a little more. For a couple of hours out of the whole year, we are the people that we always hoped we would be!”
— Bill Murray as Frank Cross in Scrooged.

I don’t have many holiday traditions.

In my family we didn’t have very many, aside from putting up a fake tree, dragging out decorations (most of which were religious in nature), opening tiny doors on the Advent calendar, going to church on Christmas Eve, and making a birthday cake for Jesus, after which we sang “Happy birthday” to him, candles and all. They are, in fact, probably doing that right now.

Christmas for my family was about remembering the “reason for the season,” which was Jesus, and now that I don’t believe in him anymore I’m at a bit of a loss for what to even do. So today I’m engaged in probably the only holiday tradition I’ll ever follow: Streaming the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from Kings College on the BBC 4 radio online. I encountered it quite by accident one year while driving to the airport to do some holiday caroling and have never missed a broadcast since. I still remember sitting in the car in the car park, mesmerized, listening to the intoning of the Christmas story, and then an audience carol led by organ. It’s more for effect than anything else; and anything read or sung by a Brit just sounds fantastic, but they really know how to do Christmas.

Right now everyone is gathered downstairs for Christmas festivities: Opening presents, having dinner, and generally enjoying themselves—or at least pretending to. I really don’t know what goes on in peoples’ heads this time of year; whether or not they actually buy into the “goodwill” message of the season, or if it’s just another social obligation. I went to bed last night feeling rather depressed, and the feeling only deepened in the hours since. It’s a special feeling, spending Christmas hiding in your room, curled up in bed in the fetal position and wishing that you could just hibernate until spring.

We had Christmas Eve at the house last night. Since I won’t have anything to do with my own family, this group has functionally become my clan, and I’m grateful to have friends who care and who are including me in their own holiday traditions. My roommate’s sister came over, and their dad and his lady friend came up from Rochester for the weekend. (The lady friend was drunk for most of the evening and managed to insult and offend me several times over the course of the night, so I’m really not in the mood to deal with her today—not when I’m feeling like this.) I was pretty drunk too as I’d started doing shots of whisky around noon, and then mixing whisky with just about any drinkable liquid. Everyone seemed to have a good time, wrapping presents, enjoying hors d’oeuvres, and watching Christmas films.

Everyone except me, that is.

As an introvert, it takes a lot of energy to be around people, and usually I have no clue what’s going on but I’m adept at faking emotions when the need arises. Most of the time I feel next to nothing, and it’s only around people whose emotions I can mirror that I can typically feel anything. But once they’re gone, it’s back to feeling “blank.” Or sad.

This is my first year as a nontheist. This is also my first year not celebrating with my own family—my own family who, for nearly two decades, I had to pretend around in order to maintain a modicum of tranquility; for whom I had to pretend I was heterosexual for (like the rest of them) to avoid any unwelcome questions or insinuations. I watched as my sister brought home her boyfriend and then, after they were married, her husband and look on as he more or less effortlessly took the place that I hadn’t been able to fill as the favorite Christian son. Now they’re bringing their son—my nephew—to Christmas, with everyone fawning over him like families do, celebrating the miracle of life and the love of god (or some such rot). Once I was out, there was something of a tacit agreement or an unspoken shift in thinking that we weren’t to bring up my being gay (homosexuality being the one sin their so-called god can’t stand), and my parents explicitly stated that they’d never accept anyone I ever dated. After all, we wouldn’t be dating. We’d be “living in sin.”

I’ve always been depressed around this time of year. That’s probably not really anything remarkable. A lot of people get depressed around the holidays for sundry reasons. For me, it comes down to the fact that I just feel like an outsider. I don’t understand family. I don’t get how it operates, how people relate, how they function, how they do it. If you were to press most people they’d probably admit that they don’t really know what they’re doing either. But even around this new family, I feel like a non-English speaker stuck with Americans, able to communicate in broken phrases and get the gist across but not truly understanding; or like Margaret Mead, studying the cultural practices and traditions of a native population to which I am an outsider.

A large part of it probably is that for so long I was so focused on keeping my family (my parents in particular, who are master interrogators) out that I never really learned how to let anyone in. I was so afraid of my parents finding out that I was gay and trying to ship me off to some ex-gay camp that I never learned how properly to interact with a family. And now here I am, nearly 29 and pathetically single, deeply desiring to share my life with someone but unable to speak the language. I’m like a Helen Keller, possessed of all my senses but emotionally deaf and dumb. I can communicate in a rudimentary manner, but it takes a lot of work. Writing is one medium in which I’ve been able to speak, but it still leaves me removed from normal society.

So what’s the point?

It’s painful seeing everyone else celebrating, going home for the holidays and looking forward to it; taking part in the festivities when I feel none of the joy or sense of merriment that they seem to. It feels as though I missed something; that I’m not trying hard enough, or doing something the wrong way. I’m looking in the window at everyone gathered around the table, sharing in each other’s company, and I can’t find the door to get in, which augments the feeling of emptiness that I have, and the loneliness.

And it didn’t always used to be this way. They say that memories aren’t enduring, but I can look back into my early childhood and recall the sense of magic that I used to feel around Christmas: The lights all around the living room, our tiny tree decked to the nines (which seemed a lot bigger then), the special candles lit, opening presents, and looking forward to receiving a new tree ornament from my parents. I remember going to church on Christmas Eve and feeling the sense of community and love all around, and that sense of being a part of something ancient and real as we lit candles and sang carols together.

But then I grew up.

We never did Santa Claus or anything like that. We knew that presents came from our parents and other family members, so there was never that belief balloon to pop. The excitement of getting presents was fun for a while, but then it gradually wore off, as most pleasures of childhood do. And then I began to notice that I was different from the rest of my family. They smiled a little easier. They joined in the fun more wholeheartedly. They loved Jesus, while I—ever like Margaret Mead—looked on in puzzlement, but all the time feeling left out, like there was something I’d missed that the others had latched onto, but I hadn’t figured out in time.

This is going to be a very different year, full of adjustments and opportunities to learn and figuring things out. I have to figure out how to handle myself around religion without turning into an iconoclastic berserker, as well as be around my religious friends. I have to find community with nontheists, and hopefully a boyfriend to boot. That’s what I really wanted for Christmas and, as usual, I was disappointed.

The ancients believed that during the solstice the sun died and was reborn. In some ways this Christmas was like that. I’m finally, truly on my own and having to find a new way to be.

It sucks being an adult.

101. yule

Do atheists hate Christmas?

With all of the talk about the “war on Christmas,” it would seem that the answer would be “Yes.” Atheists want to rain on everyone’s parade, and spoil the party with derisive and insistent assertions that “God doesn’t exist and neither did your baby Jesus!” We loudly point out that “Christmas” has pagan origins, and it was only later that the Church jumped on the Saturnalia bandwagon when they saw how they could use it to trick more gullible people into believing into the fictional god person and the even more fictional Jesus (who is just another recycled version of Apollo and Dionysus). We scowl and even growl at the happy people obliviously wishing each other a “Merry Christmas” and aggressively reply with “Happy Holidays.” We sue Christians for putting up crèches on public property, and try to force churches to take down their religious displays. We ban the singing of carols mentioning “God,” “Jesus” or any sacred motif.

Basically, we’re carefully and deliberately eviscerating any joy or fun out of the holiday season because, after all, atheists don’t believe in anything, and if we can’t have any fun, the rest of America doesn’t deserve to either.

At least, I think that’s something like what many of you will be hearing in church this weekend…

Today I saw this posted on Twitter and thought it ties pretty well into what I was going to write about today:

This is my first Christmas as a nontheist. This is the first year that I can remember where I haven’t gone to church on Christmas Eve, heard the songs and the traditional reading of the Christmas story, lit candles, sat with my family in a pew and sang “Cantique de Noël.” Of course, I see the origin of the symbols now:

• We light candles against the night in order to remind ourselves that morning is coming.
• We raise our voices together in song to remind ourselves that we are not alone.
• In the story of the birth of Jesus is the story of the death and rebirth of the sun and the triumph of light over darkness.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of these. In the midst of all the reasons we have to despair and lose hope, here are tiny beacons to raise our spirits.

Now, certainly there are atheists who want to rain on everyone’s parade, and who think (like the fundamentalists also most likely believe) that they’re really doing everyone a big favor by setting them straight and down the path to true enlightenment. After all, most people don’t really think about what they’re celebrating during Christmas. They’re just employing the symbols and the language of the season as part of the social traditions that are really just about gathering together with family and friends.

I guess what most irks me now about the Christmas season is the mindless dragging-out of all the trappings, the chintzy songs and the spirit of commercial merriment that any of us who venture out at any point between September and December 25 are forced to endure. It’s having to run the gauntlet of holiday parties, avoiding having what’s left of your soul hammered to death by the relentless stream of advertising campaigns, being saddled with the artificial guilt of having to get everyone in your life some sort of meaningful gift, and listening to the million-and-one iterations of “Merry Christmas!” from well-meaning stranger, friends and family.

No wonder there’s so much depression around this time of year. Every year we’re forced as a society into celebrating a holiday without much context to its symbols or its history, that is little more than a thin pretense for stores to quickly rake in billions of dollars in revenue (and have you noticed that they’re starting earlier every year?). And to make it palatable, it’s thickly coated with a sugary glaze of saccharine emotional appeals. I could delve into a diatribe at this point on everything I hate about commercialism and how it and not atheists are responsible for the evisceration of everything that’s truly special about this holiday.

But I’m trying to focus on the positives.

To be honest, I really don’t object much to Christians having their “special time of year.” If it’s going to get you through the rest of the winter—great, I’m glad you found something that works for you. But for the sake of all that’s decent, I wish they’d observe it at home and in their churches, show a little regard for the beliefs (or non-beliefs) of others, and leave those of us who don’t want to go along with the rest of callow America alone. Because unlike most Americans (it would seem), I take God pretty seriously: Seriously enough to not believe in Him.

And I take words, symbolism and their meanings pretty seriously too. I wish that people who didn’t really believe in God or that “Jesus is the reason for the season” felt that they had to pretend like they gave a damn about God, going to church because “that’s what we do on Christmas Eve;” or that corporations felt the need to bombard us with vaguely religious paraphernalia for three months out of the year because it makes people feel a little more mirthful, a little more generous, and a little more willing to part with their hard-earned money once a year.

Just as gay marriage will one day hopefully restore sanctity to marriage (if conservatives get over themselves), I think atheists could actually bring back some of the importance to Christmas by stripping away the artificial trimmings and trappings and getting back to what really matters this time of year: being with the people we love the most. We were doing that before the Church came along and told us we needed Jesus to do it properly.

So let’s welcome return of the triumphant sun, of longer days, the coming summer, and the likelihood that we’ll do all this again next year.

98. cranberries

The other night I watched National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation for the first time. This was to correct a serious cultural deficiency in me—although now that I’ve seen it, I’m not sure that I’m actually better off.

While I realize that this is a lighthearted comedy (the purpose being to entertain), and the intent is ultimately to stress the importance of family and how we should stick it out despite how much we screw things up, offend, infuriate and torment each other (which—don’t get me wrong—is a positive message to send), it left me with the desire to never celebrate another holiday ever again, to never see my own family again, and to never attempt to ever deal with anyone else’s family at family gatherings.

This is probably not exactly the reaction the filmmakers were hoping to engender; and, to be fair, it’s not the reaction that most people will have when they see it.

Part of it is that the whole biologicalness of family gatherings makes me… uncomfortable.

All the parents and grandparents, children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces, brothers and sisters, all gathered together under one roof. Now, of course, this is my lizard-brain talking: The part of me that doesn’t get humanity or its social rituals. I mean, I understand the functions and roles, and even the origins, but I don’t “get it” like one of them. The thought of everyone, young and old, gathered around a table, just seems to me overly sentimental, like something out of a Norman Rockwell or even a Thomas Kinkade painting.

My immediate family was removed from our extended families by virtue of the fact that my dad’s family is all in Pennsylvania, and my mom’s family is all on the West coast, so we never really took part in large family gatherings at Thanksgiving or Christmas, and only rarely got to attend family reunions. So family is peculiar to me, and therefore makes me uncomfortable.

And yet there’s another part of me that longs to be included in such gatherings: In being part of a lovable, cute, frustrating, “overcoming it” family. I’ve never had that experience, and the thought of being accepted as “one of them” has a certain appeal.

This appeal has even more urgency to it since, for the time being, I’ve excised myself from my immediate family since they’ve made it clear that they’ll accept their son, but not their gay son and certainly not their gay son’s partner—if and when that ever happens.

I have this elaborate fantasy of finding a guy who happens to come from a big, really welcoming family who will just fall in love with me like I did with him.

His parents will be the parents I never had, and when we meet for the first time they’ll make a big deal about it, and I’ll go over to their place for dinner or something, and his dad will give me a huge hug that’ll crush the breath out of me and his mom will cry because they’re both so happy that their son finally met someone.

And they’ll insist that I come to their home for Christmas and Thanksgiving, and they won’t mind one bit if we stay in his old bedroom (because they’re not old fashioned like that). And I’ll help in the kitchen in preparing the big meal for the family; and they’ll be atheists and agnostics and humanists, and dinner conversation will center around philosophy or science or literature or NPR (because they’ll be articulate, educated, thinking people), and he’ll squeeze my hand under the table because he’s so happy that I’m there; and nobody will mention “God” (except in passing), and nobody would talk about going to church for Christmas Eve service, or want to bring out a cake to sing “Happy birthday” to Jesus (even though Yeshua was probably born closer to Easter if we take the account of his birth seriously). And yes, my family did that, cake and all. And we’ll go on vacations together, and they’ll insist on taking us out to dinner when they’re in town, and maybe go see a show, and vice versa.

And it’ll be the family I never had.

Heavy sigh.

But that is not what I wanted to write about.

What I wanted to write about is Chevy Chase—or rather, Clark Griswold. (Although maybe Chevy Chase.)

For anyone who hasn’t seen it, Clark Griswold is this well-meaning, passionate, caring, loving family man. And through the course of each of the National Lampoon movies, he ambles through situations with the well-intentioned grace and poise of a careening wrecking ball. He starts out Christmas Vacation dragging his wife and two very reluctant and freezing children out to a field in the middle of nowhere to pick out the “perfect Christmas tree.” In the process of he and his wife belting out Christmas carols at the top their lungs, he pisses of the locals with his inane driving, and nearly gets them all killed when he inadvertently ends up underneath a semi hauling tree trunks while playing King of the Road with a couple of red necks. He goes on about how picking out a Christmas tree is an American tradition, as if George Washington took time out from hunkering down with the Colonialists at the Battle of Valley Forge to drag a tree home on Christmas Eve to Martha to put up in their living room.

Quick primer on Christmas trees: The modern Christmas tree originated in western Germany as a prop in a mediaeval play about Adam and Eve, with the tree representing the Tree of Life. It first began to appear in British homes after the marriage of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert in the 1840s. It came to America in the 1850s via a publication known as Godey’s Lady’s Book, in which a picture of the royal family’s living room was reproduced with the royal crowns and whatnot removed in order to make it an American scene. So by the 1870s, Christmas trees were ubiquitous in the States.

Back to Christmas Vacation. It only continues to get worse from there. In his tireless and monomaniacal obsession with having the “perfect Christmas,” complete with two giant Christmas trees, every surface of his house being decked in lights (which, as one visual gag describes, drains the entire surrounding power grid to sustain it—a metaphor?), and a horde of relatives who descend obliviously on the house to add their own unique stamp to the mayhem (including one scene where a red neck cousin empties his RV’s septic tank into a storm drain). In the process, Clark’s kids and his neighbors are relentlessly and unapologetically terrorized in his single-minded quest for the “perfect Christmas,” which, in Clark’s mind, probably looks like something straight out of that Norman Rockwell painting, with the family happily gathered around the table, each joyfully taking part in the great American tradition of Christmas.

What we’re left with to witness is a nightmare that spirals out of control. And at the center of it all is Clark, with his almost child-like faith in the institution of Christmas and what it represents, no matter how much hell he puts everyone else through.

You know what else is like that? The fundamentalist Christian.

I saw in Clark’s enthusiasm for the Christmas tradition the same single-minded devotion to the teachings of scripture and to the God of the Christian faith: The belief that no matter how dark or confusing things get, what really matters is toughing it out, and that the only thing that truly matters is knowing God and knowing Jesus.

I also saw in his megalomania that same devotion in evangelical fundamentalist Christians that leads them to try to impose their beliefs on others, and cause reckless emotional and psychological havoc in those around them. On a personal level, I look at the issue of homosexuality and the untold lives of misery and agony that have been suffered by gays and lesbians over the centuries at the hands of Christians alone, all because a narrow reading of a number of scripture passages leads them to teach that homosexuality is wrong. And then there’s the doctrine of original sin, and how wickedness is basically imputed to every human being ever born all because “Eve ate the apple.” The church teaches that you’re an evil, worthless, corrupt, wicked, rebellious, repulsive and depraved sinner who deserves to suffer an eternity in Hell because God can’t stand the sight of you… all because of what someone else (who probably didn’t even exist in the first place) did however many millennia ago. So you’re constantly asking God for forgiveness for even the smallest of infractions (e.g., losing your temper, telling a “white lie,” watching a show with sex on it), terrified that he’ll send you to Hell anyway or are content with the story that God tortured his son Jesus to death on a cross, basically as a sacrifice to himself.

I kept thinking in watching Christmas Vacation, “It’s a commercialist holiday, for pete sake! All these ‘traditions’—the house decked out in lights, the huge and exorbitant feast, the presents, the bringing the whole family together—are a cultural construct that you’ve been suckered into! And do you really need a pool, or is that just another status symbol that will boost your self-image and your self-worth as a man, and provider as a husband and a father—or rather, in what America tells you that you should be as those things?”

Religion does the same thing. It holds up an image of what a Christian should be: An idealized, romanticized, impossible-to-live-up-to superman (or superwoman). It’s an image that millions of well-meaning and sincere people think they have to squeeze themselves into every day, and they beat themselves up when they ultimately fail to do so. Because after all, the only thing that matters is getting to Heaven to spend eternity with Jesus, at any cost—even if that cost is a lifetime of misery.

So Clark Griswold… you’re doing it wrong.

95. cornucopia

Here’s a little Thanksgiving story I wrote last year and recorded today. It’ll be new to most people, but the first people to hear it were Joe, Jenny and Seth.

The title to this blog is rather ironic since I feel anything but enough right now. Quite the opposite. This time last year, I was spending Thanksgiving with my family, shortly after being outed to them by my ex. Then I joined friends of mine with another family where I wasn’t worrying about feeling judged or rejected by anyone. And Seth was there (which is why I was there). That was probably one of the last happy times I can remember.

I realized today that I’ve been depressed ever since the night of my birthday. There have been happier times and moments when I’ve been able to escape into a happier persona, but every day since then has been tempered by some sort of sadness. And today, when most of America is gathered with their families, making happy memories together, I’m home, by myself, not really wanting to be around anyone. And I’m not anticipating it getting any better for Christmas either.

Happy holidays.

91. yen

Brief update this evening.

Spent most of the day in bed with a fever. Started feeling not-so-great yesterday afternoon and by the time I got home all I really wanted to do was crawl into bed and sleep.

Which is precisely what I did.

All I wanted (besides to not feel like the second coming of Hades, who, by the way, is a character in my novel – and no, HE DOESN’T SPEAK IN SMALL CAPS) was for someone to bring me potato soup and maybe read to me or something.

But, alas, that was not to be. I wasn’t even hungry, so all I could do was curl up in bed in the fetal position.

And, naturally, that set off a whole chain of depressing thoughts that led to feeling more and more depressed, augmented by the fact that I was feeling like the second coming of Hades. Thoughts that I’m almost twenty-nine and still single, and this is likely what the whole rest of my life is going to look like: Lying in bed in the fetal position, feeling dreadfull (sic), and wishing that some cute guy would bring me soup.

The holidays are also fast approaching, and this will be the first year ever that I do not celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas with my family. It’ll also be the first year that I observe both as an atheist. That part isn’t so bad since I never really believed in any of it anyway; but it’s losing my family, and not having another family to be a part of, that’s the hard part. I’ve always more or less been on the periphery when it comes to holidays as the non-plus 1 – always the single guy at the table. Now I don’t even have a table, or a family. Or a God. It’s a lot to take in at once.

Most of today looked very much the same, aside from checking work email occasionally (and got an email back from a co-worker saying, “What are you doing!? Stop checking your email and worrying about what’s going on here! Get better!!”) and then going through some old keyboard music and realising how full of shit I used to be. Some of the organ music was cool but so pedantic. Oh god, enough with the twelve-tone! I kept thinking. It was 2001-2003, and it seemed like a good idea at the time, I guess.

Makes me wonder now how I’m going to look back on the work that I’m doing now. That’s the beauty of being in the business of creating, is that you’re always a work-in-progress. Unfortunately, that means producing a lot of shit in the process. But there is always some good that comes of it. It’s like mental alchemy – with the gold comes a lot of dross.

In the meantime, is it too much to ask for a great, cute guy to come and bring me soup, and maybe read to me from the New York Times?

Perhaps.

39a. bring in da noyse

(Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.)

It’s December 26th, and my holiday funk is starting to pass.

It was going well for a while. The past couple of weeks I’d been feeling unusually cheerful and festive lately, playing Christmas music in my car on the way to and from work or errands. L’esprit de Noël had arrived, like the Ghost of Christmas Present, all jovial and good-natured.

Then my roommate finally stopped mucking about and asked the girl he’s been texting about a hundred times a day to date him. She agreed (not surprising), and suddenly I found my Christmas spirit a bit deflated, for I was once again reminded that I’m lonely and single at Christmas.

A-fucking-gain.

Seriously, I feel like some sort of talisman or charm. Whoever I live with seems to find the love of their life. I move in with my sister, she’s dating this guy, next thing I know they’re engaged and now married. With a baby on the way. Last June I got an apartment with a buddy of mine. He starts dating the girl next door (literally), and now they’re married. Now the current roommate.

Seriously, what the hell??

I’m just starting to feel like being gay is untenable, or at least impractical. The current guy I’m interested in doesn’t seem to share mutual interest, is too busy, or doesn’t see me fitting into his life. Apart from a Christmas Eve “Howdy, Merry Christmas” text, he hasn’t returned any of my voice mails or texts, and I don’t want to sound desperate. This added to my funk.

Lately I’ve had this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I shouldn’t be this way, or perhaps that God doesn’t intend for me to be this way. At the same time I’m a bit suspicious because this all started again a few weeks ago when I was outed to my family and they shocked the hell out of me by not freaking me out or reporting me to church elders. As my best friend said the other night, “You’ve always wanted unconditional acceptance and you never got it. Now that you’ve been outed, you’ve got conditional acceptance dangling in front of you like a carrot from the very people you’ve always wanted to love and accept you. You’ve waited a long time for what they’re offering.”

So I’m considering (read that: considering) the alternative—that God doesn’t intend for me to be a homosexual. Not out of any obligation to my parents, a desire to fit in, or fear of damnation (though that is a factor), but searching my conscience. I’m just asking the “what if” question, and considering its implications. I’m not attracted to women, and frankly, from what I’ve seen of marriages and relationships in heterosexual couples, I don’t want to be. So here are my “con” reasons:

(Two apologies: First, this will be rather rough since I’m just writing off the cuff; and second, if you’re a woman reading this, please don’t be offended.)

1. Attraction. There’s the obvious: I’m not physically attracted to women. According to scripture, God made woman as a helper for man, delight to the eyes, all that rot. I’m open-minded and reasonable enough to admit the possibility that I could indeed be a “broken heterosexual.” Somehow, with the way that my parents raised me, any “traumas” I experienced as a child (‘trauma’ used very broadly here), and a failure to bond properly with the same-sex parent, I could’ve developed same-sex attractions. It’s possible. But the fact is that I don’t fancy female physiology. Women are just too soft, and I’ve always liked the hardness and angularity of the male figure. Then there are the breasts and… well… the rest of it.
2. Masculine space. There’s just something about the directness and functionality of it that I like (maybe because I’m male?); but it seems that once women get involved, all these knick-knacks, scented candles and homey items appear. Things have to be comfy and nice, and pillows multiply like rabbits. (Ye gods, I’m sounding like Henry Higgins.) In the movie Juno, Vanessa “gives” Mark a room for “his stuff.” I thought this just happened in movies until I actually observed it happening to my married guy friends. And they put up with it rather than fight. This is known as the “abolition of masculine spaces.” Maybe some guys like that. Personally, I don’t. Maybe it’s true that men marry their mothers.
3. R-E-S-P-E-C-T. It was one thing when women were brought up to cook and clean and be the “little wife” (don’t worry, the idea of that shocks my modern sensibilities too), but with the advent of the independent woman and feminism, guys just don’t get much respect in the home. To quote My Big Fat Greek Wedding, “The man is the head, but the woman is the neck. And she can turn the head any way she wants.” In most homes today, women make most of the decisions, or at least make the final call. My guess? Again, it’s easier to capitulate than to escalate.
4. Period. There’s the fact that women tend to go crazy at certain times of the month. I know this is no fault of theirs, but honestly, who wants to endure that? A man would only put up with it if he really loved a woman, and was able to just shrug it off. And besides the moon cycle, women often seem to go out of their way to find fault or take offence with what a man says (which usually ends up with him sleeping on the couch or not getting sex for a while). Guys don’t play mind games like that (for the most part).
5. Bedroom. As alluded above (and I don’t have experience), just from what I’ve heard women tend to be rather capricious sexually. And biology aside, I just can’t imagine that sex with a woman would be better than with a guy. Guys are just more intense… going at it. Without going into detail, a guy knows what another guy needs. With heterosexual intercourse, both are essentially guessing at what to do. (Maybe. Again, I don’t know.)
6. Children. If you know me, you know how I feel about this one. I’m not a fan. There are some women who don’t want kids, for whatever reason; but (again—I’ve observed this) once women get married, they often start thinking about family and having children. I would be an awful parent, for one thing. But there’s also the inconvenience of having an infant (my friend Emily can attest, I’m sure), which is worse than having a dog. Child services tends to get involved if you leave a child alone at home all day. And it tends to turn your life upside-down. Permanently. Unless you go in for nannies and boarding school, which I think is a great idea.

I’m just thinking out loud here, because this is a stumbling area for me. I have plenty of reasons why not, but ultimately I have to bow to the fact that God is God. And it’s not like God never asks people to do hard things, but it seems utterly unreasonable for Him to expect me to endure marriage to a woman just because this is the only model we have in Scripture? Alternatively, is He asking me to be celibate? Because that would really suck.

Again, I’m just not sure. On the one hand, if what the Right is saying and this is a matter of life and death, I’m in a rather precarious situation because one can’t have cake and eat it, to borrow from dear Antoinette. On the other hand, if what the Left is saying and it’s all not a big deal, then I’m needlessly letting myself be tormented. However, neither do I want to be swayed by what sound like logical arguments, or arguments that cater to my list of wants, and “enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season.” I do believe that there is a battle going on for the allegiance of our souls, and this may well be a part of it.

So what do you do when both sides seem to make sense? Maybe I need to do what everyone seems to be pointing me towards and pursue God and let him sort everything out.