Ramblings of An Aging Gay Guy

I have had a lot of feelings pop up lately about a variety of things.  I am going through a time of many changes and I think they are all starting to get to me.  School begins again soon; I am leaving the job I have had for years because I am no longer valuable to them.  I am starting a new job and with that comes a certain amount of anxiety, especially since it is in a completely different field of work than what I have done for the last decade or so.  I will be making less money but I will have greater flexibility and less stress so that is a good trade-off.   Mostly what I am feeling is fear and worthlessness. And anger. Anger at homophobia, anger at racism, anger at injustice, anger at the president. I fear what the future will hold for all of us, both in the short-term and in the long-term. Every day at work I feel on display, I feel judged and hated and it wears on me. It is an environment where crass white heteronormative values are held up on...

So I have been thinking a lot lately about mortality, death, and what my death will be like.  Maybe it is a mid-life crisis, maybe it is because Mom will have been dead for 3 years come this Thursday.  Maybe it is because I see the cardiologist on that same mom-death-day, to explore an issue that has cropped up.  Maybe it is because it was an arrhythmia that began my mom's decline towards death all of those years ago.  Maybe it is because my biological father has had a heart attack awhile back.  I don't know what has caused this rumination that I find myself mired in.   Or is it maybe the situation we find ourselves in, with the country flipping a finger off to it's citizens when it comes to the future of healthcare.  The future seems uncertain on so many levels. I thought it was bad enough when I was diagnosed with HIV.  I thought HIV would be insurmountable and difficult.  When my diagnosis of HIV happened, I remember it being inconcei...

Tomorrow will mark one year since the shooting at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.  It will be one year ago that all of us in the LGBTQ community saw the direct result of an intersection between unchecked access to guns, mental illness, religion, and homophobia.  It was a year ago that all of us within the community felt a little piece of ourselves die. The shooting did not occur in a vacuum.  We live in a country that is supposedly great and awesome and better than all other countries.  At least that is what we are indoctrinated to believe as we grow up.  As a child I remember we used to say the Pledge of Allegiance every morning at the start of school. But that pledge is a lie told to everyone ever forced to say it... One Nation Under God We are NOT one nation.  We are a divided nation, both politically, socially, economically, and religiously.  There are elements within this country...the Religious Right, the Republicans....

So...I have deleted my Facebook account.  It was time.  It was a waste of time.  I received no benefit from it.  When I caught myself feeling worse and worse about myself every time I logged on then I knew Facebook needed to go away.  I even found myself getting upset when I would get very little likes, comments, or interactions from my posts.  Oh there were always a few of those interactions here and there, but overall I felt invisible.  Worse, I felt bad about myself for feeling invisible.  Then I was mad at myself for feeling that way.  In the end Facebook caused too many negative emotions inside me. It is funny, because it has been 24 hours since I deleted it and nobody has even noticed.  Nobody has reached out.  But that's ok.  Facebook is NOT life.  It is a fantasy, a billboard on which people advertise their half-truths and their bright, beautiful, perfect lives.  Instead, I have chosen to engage i...

I never understood why Mom died.  More specifically, I did not understand why she signed a do-not-resuscitate (DNR) order.  I could not understand why she would choose to die while there was still chances that she may live.  "But what if we tried this? What if we tried that?" is what kept going through my mind while it was all happening.  I wonder if I was grasping at straws in order to deny the inevitable, or if she had simply just gave up.  Part of my was so angry when she decided to unplug her life-support machines.  I could not understand why she wouldn't just wait it out a little longer; what if there was hope just around the corner but she never got to it?  But then I realized two things.  These realizations are recent, because it is only with time and distance I can even think about those horrible days.  She was tired.  She had been battling so many things the past few years of her life.  First, and probably the c...

It has been almost 2 weeks since this sickness began and I am still not at 100%.  Isn't it funny how sickness or illness happens in the most inopportune time?  For me, this illness has been a huge setback, both for school and in life.  I have had to take time to rest, in an attempt to hasten recovery. And yet it seems recovery is not happening quickly enough.  I feel like everyone expects me to brush it all off, to jump back into being the same old me, and that is not happening.  I have not been this sick in years.  It has fundamentally changed me.  I feel closer to my mortality, closer to death, than I have ever felt.  Maybe I am a crappy sick person.  Maybe I am a pessimist.  Maybe I am just weak from it all and everything looks like doom and gloom. All I know for sure is that I am exhausted and afraid.  I am afraid of falling behind in school, with only a few more weeks left of the semester.  I am afraid of getting in...

Where is all of the world's water going?  You would think that in a closed system, such as the global climate system of water evaporation and precipitation, there would be a set point of available water.  But we are seeing that is not the case.  Droughts are occurring globally.  Glaciers are melting, the sea level is rising.  The rising of the sea level will cause a contamination of fresh water sources, causing that water to be unusable by humans and wildlife.   The increase in surface area to the oceans will cause a warming of the oceans, further fueling wild and chaotic weather patterns - more hurricanes, more typhoons, bigger hurricanes, a longer hurricane season, etc.  The reduced salinity, caused by the influx of freshwater into the salty ocean water, will affect biodiversity, culminating in an increase in algae blooms and to the death of barrier reefs. Already deep aquifers are running dry globally.  The human population obtains about 3...