Trans/plant/portation

So many people liken a new arrival to a life-changing event that as a Jersey boy through and through, I plan like a hurricane is approaching. Thus I’ve gotten down to battening the hatches here. Come to think of it, though, I don’t have a lot of experience on ships, so I’m not sure why I think I know anything about hatches per se. The point is, we’re prepping with the idea that soon, preparation ends and the next chapter begins. All signs point to an early delivery for us, due dates and calendar slide tools aside. I am at DEFCON 3. Read More…

It rose out of nowhere, otherwise known as 3.7 miles below ground in a section of Virginia far from DC, but as of this writing, today’s geologic event is being called the “DC earthquake.” In the middle of the working day, government employees, among the last people in the country with jobs, evacuated their buildings in case one of them had a crack after the 5.9-level quake shook the eastern seaboard for something around 10 seconds.

J. McKinley covered the devastation on his blog, and other people began using their only means of communication—social networks—to make sure everyone was okay. Read More…

I know I’ve posted before about weak or disingenuous arguments that writers create, articles that take issue with people in the LGB/t community. One one level, I want to know why we’re so willing to cannibalize ourselves before or instead of people like the Koch Brothers, who unraveled collective bargaining in Wisconsin, Glenn Beck and the incendiary statements he makes from his Internet war room, Ryan Rhodes, who considers himself the Obama Heckler Premier, or any number of other figures currently at work destroying reproductive rights, civil rights, and advances in ecology. Is it really the “celebrity” trans men who are to blame for the trials of trans women?

Seriously? Read More…

A garden variety therapist will tell you, the earliest messages absorbed are often the most powerful. Having gone through 12 years of Catholic school, it follows that my most powerful messages revolve around avoiding Hell. I was preoccupied as a child with the rather significant difference between white lies and worse offenses. “That dress looks nice” might be a non-truth, but in response to someone asking about their fashion, it appeared that Saint Peter would let it go as an infraction.

One of our earliest lessons, at least that I can remember, was the proclamation that if the world ended tomorrow, all of us Catholic kids would be okay because we’d been baptized. This was obviously a step up from getting corralled with the thieves and unrepentant pillagers of the earth, but it caused me to worry about all of the poor innocent babes who’d never crossed paths with a squirt of holy water and a proxy refusal to follow Satan.

So now that the birth of our baby is pretty much imminent, guess which dusty messages have crawled out of my memory’s woodwork? Read More…

There are interesting shows that cable TV launches in the doldrums of summer (The Closer), and there are awful ones (Franklin & Bash). I’ve learned over the last few years that what will turn out to be an entertaining 44 minutes is not always discernible on first viewing—Suits seemed a little weak to me at first, but it quickly dialed down the melodramatic friend relationship story arc, and focused on its strength, the undertold story about new attorney associates and their rat race in big law firms. As a replacement during the hiatus of The Good Wife, Suits is no slacker. But I want to talk instead about a show for which I had low expectations, a show with a title that refers to a movie of yore that I love, and that I thought would have something to do with the plot, and a show that earned its respect from me. I’m talking about Necessary Roughness on USA. Turns out, it’s a long meditation on masculinity. A fascinating, thoughtful meditation at that.

Spoilers from here on out, after the jump. Read More…

Earlier this month at the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Association conference in metro Seattle, I went to a workshop on first page critique. The plan as proposed by the panelists, was to have writers bring just their first page of text from their works-in-progress, pass them to the moderator, and listen as the two agents and one editor gave feedback. It sounded to some of us writers like a free craft workshop, which to some degree, it was. But the real gem of helpfulness from this exercise was, in my opinion, the glimpse into how brutal a process of reading unsolicited work can be, and how quickly a publishing professional makes a decision (mostly to reject) a candidate piece of prose.

And wow, it was painful to hear. Read More…

I’d been sleeping, somewhere between my cycle in fetal position and an overhead reach to stretch out my right hip because years of nursing my left knee had taken its toll on my other side. I suppose it was easy to surround me in my vulnerable state, sitting ducks and all, but I woke up to the sound of them humming. They hummed like camels and llamas do to warn off potential threats, but I guess, with their aggression toward me and all, that their motivation was somewhat different.

I rolled over and rubbed my eyes. I was trapped. Trapped by three dozen jumbo prawns.

Holding toothpicks like spears. Read More…

With summer comes the spate of anti-gay sentiment, or at least it feels that way to me. Maybe it’s because state supreme courts are wrapping up their year and the toughest decisions come out in June, or thereabouts. Of course this summer season we have the GOP primary jockeying, so as candidates are scoping for uber-conservative votes, they’re more than willing to say things like “gay families aren’t families.” We could blame the incessant “heat dome” for frying people’s brains and in their heat exhaustion, causing chronic foot-in-mouth disease. Whatever the cause, I am beyond sick of it. Let’s call a scapegoat a scapegoat. In this time of financial strife and political cowardice, I think it’s fitting to look at all the ways in which people crap on the “gays,” and excuse me, Dan Savage, but I’m using it as an umbrella term for queer, not a reference to your clique in Seattle. Read More…

We went out a couple of weeks ago to Public House 124, a new eatery and watering hole on Walla Walla’s Main Street, and no location gets any more “heart of downtown” than this. Inside, brick walls run from the front windows to the kitchen area, where a counter lets patrons watch the culinary work in action just like over at Whitehouse Crawford. This isn’t surprising, I suppose, given that PH124’s chef used to work there; he’s doubled down with a former bartender at the Marcus Whitman Hotel, and yes, the drinks are pretty tasty. There’s no word yet on if the Cocoa Cowgirl, a pint-glass of liquor with a little bit of cream, made it over to this new establishment, but I’ll ask the next time I go.

Which will be when the weather has cooled off, because PH124 doesn’t have air conditioning. Read More…

This is the first in a series on narrative deconstruction, looking at tropes.

The other day on NPR, they were talking about Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Seriously, public radio hosted an hour of discussion that sounded more like a promo for a movie and its expected series of new films than journalistic reporting. I need to dig a little now and see if NPR has received any money from 20th Century Fox, the attention on the film’s production and narrative was so all-encompassing.

At some point they got to conversing about why we have a fascination with this idea of our ancestors uprising against us. Is it a narrative about anxiety, or tension about our place in the world? Cultural control issues? Read More…