Author: Mark Alexander

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A Realization

That graphic has been sitting in my downloads folder for weeks. When I originally ran across it, the message resonated, although at the time there was really nothing in my life it directly pointed to.

Oh, how things can change.

I realized this morning that emotionally I’m going through the same things with the loss of hour home as I did when I received my cancer diagnosis in 2003. It came out of nowhere and totally changed the direction of my—now our—lives. At first it was disbelief (although not totally), and then anger. Once a plan of action was in place, I felt somewhat better and was able to wrap my head around it, but not knowing where things were ultimately headed or the final outcome was still overwhelming at times.

The shock of the fire has for the most part worn off, but we’re both dealing with the anger. As I mentioned in my last post, “Fuck James” has become our go-to phrase for pretty much everything at the moment and will unlikely remain so for many, many months as we begin to heal and rebuild our lives.

Right now it’s a waiting game to see what the insurance company comes up with and how many of our items are actually returned from restoration. We’ve started looking at new digs (and actually applied at one place), but we’re discovering that while places may be available, in the age of COVID it’s not just a matter of walking into a leasing office, seeing a place and signing a lease. EVERYTHING is done by appointment, and so far only about half the places we’ve contacted have gotten back in touch with us. (This waiting period is akin to the time between my diagnosis and when I actually started treatment.)

Once we have secured a place, we can get out of the hotel, but what will we sleep on? What will we sit on? And since the leasing agents we’ve spoken to want us to move in sooner rather than later, this poses a real challenge.

Yes, if we secure a place we can go ahead and buy a few pieces of furniture in anticipation of reimbursement by insurance, and frankly I’d rather do that with my available credit than sending it down a black hole of continued life in this hotel, but until we actually sign a lease, nothing like that can move forward.

Additionally, we’ve been told we aren’t going to be receiving any of our items from restoration until after the first of the year, so it’s not just a few pieces of furniture we’ll need to acquire to begin resettlement. It’s bedding, towels, cooking utensils, dishes and silverware. All things we wouldn’t have had to buy if it were not for the short-sighted “I can fix anything” mentality of our former landlord.

That’s where the anger comes from.

Fuck James.

Our friend Cindy, who along with her husband, went through this herself many years ago and was not nearly as lucky as we were, tells me that eventually things will get better. She says that it will be fun to shop for new things once we have the insurance money in hand, and I tend to agree with her in that limited regard. But even buying new stuff promises to be a pain. I’m not looking forward to putting furniture together again. Or organizing a new house.  Or essentially having to move when we had no desire to move at all. Or any of the thousands of other things that will need to be done over the next six months.

Fuck James.

On the other hand, these are things I know we have to go through, as painful as they may be; the same attitude I had when the radiation treatments began ravaging my throat making eating even the softest of foods was unbearable at times. (One of the reasons god created Ensure, my doctors told me.)

Eventually, things did get better. I made it through the crucible and onto the other side. My throat healed. I received a clean bill of health from my doctors, and life went on. I didn’t want to get cancer, but looking back on everything now, it was obvious that changes needed to be made in my life, in me, and that was the catalyst necessary to bring them about.

Hopefully the same will happen as Ben and I travel through this crucible. I think we both sensed that change was needed, but at the same time we needed a bitch slap from the universe to bring it about. Hopefully this journey—much like my cancer journey—will leave us better people when we emerge from the other side and years from now will ultimately allow us to look back on it and see it as—if not necessarily a good thing—at least a necessary one.

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Goodbye, Friend

Well, it’s done. There are a few items remaining on the property that we need a truck for, but yesterday was my last trip to this house. (Ben and his friends will be removing those items next weekend.) The restoration companies (one for hard goods, one for clothing and linens) came out earlier this week and inventoried, packed, and removed everything that was salvageable from the house. The contents will be cleaned and restored and returned to us wherever we eventually resettle.

We hit the place after they had finished Wednesday evening and retrieved anything else we wanted to keep that they had deemed unsalvageable. For instance, they took the vast majority of my books but curiously left others that were completely undamaged.

We are somewhat fortunate in that with my anal-retentiveness, I’d scanned and saved receipts from many of our big-ticket items which will make getting money out of the insurance company that much easier.

Lately the most common phrase to leave my lips is “Fuck James.” (James being our landlord whose negligence while sweating the water lines to the new water heater caused this disaster.) Every time I have to buy something that didn’t need to be bought, every time I have to throw myself out into public after nine months of COVID isolation, I mutter “Fuck James.”

All this could’ve been prevented if he’d only used a heat shield up against the wood when he was welding.

To be honest, there were a lot of things we grew to dislike about this house; little annoyances cropped up over the years that became sort of a running joke. (Like for example who puts the refrigerator directly opposite the stove, preventing two people from working in the kitchen at the same time?) Counter space was abysmal; the bathroom horrifically small. And the back yard…don’t even get me started.

But it was still home.

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The Virus Didn’t Defeat America, Freedumb Did

From John Pavlovitz:

COVID beat America—completely, unequivocally, and historically.

There’s simply no way around that truth.

We have been decimated far beyond even the most dire calculations back in the Spring of 2020.

The sickness has been unfathomable and the death toll staggering.
We have been the planet’s most egregious cautionary tale on what not to do, how not to navigate this crisis—on how patriotism can become nationalism and nationalism can become deadly to a nation.

It’s no mystery how we got here: a nonexistent Federal response headed by an unprepared, ignorant sociopathic president who had neither the capacity nor the inclination to prevent loss of life. But these massive liabilities alone wouldn’t have been enough for the virus to defeat us so fully. It needed a boost. It needed an accomplice. It needed one more fierce ally in its brutal assault on America: it needed Americans.

It needed the flag-waving, chest-beating, bottle-rocket, Don’t Tread On Me, MAGA bluster of hundreds of millions of people raised to believe personal freedom trumps everything: Science, facts, humanity—even life itself.

And so, when the warnings came they cried “conspiracy!”
When the restrictions arrived they marched like star-spangled martyrs on Governor’s mansions with guns waving.

When healthcare workers pleaded with them for restraint, they tore off their masks; imagining themselves some heroic modern Tea Party patriots defending liberty against manufactured tyranny.

When the case and death numbers climbed, they attacked the “Deep State” and doubled down on the well-curated myth of their oppression.

When the second wave began, after a first wave that never ended—they complained about restrictions not working the first time, never mentioning the fact that they didn’t abide by them to begin with.

And now here, in complete and utter devastation they refuse to admit that America got its collective behind handed to it, because they had to “live free or die”—or at least, they had to live free and kill lots of strangers. They are so intoxicated with the drug of American greatness, that they can’t admit that in the face of this virus we have been brought to our knees because we insisted on it.

Today, I spoke with a friend in Taiwan about the response there to the COVID crisis, one they largely have in their collective rear view mirror. It is a story repeated all over the world:

She said “We got control of it here because we follow orders here, we do what we’re told.” She talked about the initial lockdowns and the way people did the hard work aided by wise leadership, and they got the upper hand early.

I talked about MAGA Americans and their chest beating, flag-waving anti-mask “freedom” stance that inexplicably still has them marching defiantly unmasked through grocery stores and still refusing to adjust their behavior.

She replied, “Today, I don’t have to wear a mask and I can go to the movies and see my family and travel and live a normal life without restrictions. So who has freedom now?”

That’s the hard truth America is going to have to reckon with: our ceremonial, showy, hollow “liberty” has caused us actual freedom:
to do the work we enjoy,
to make a living,
to see the people we love,
to make plans,
to be spontaneous,
and to fully enjoy these days.

We have lost an entire year of our individual and collective lives, because nearly half our country has ignored restrictions, flouted safeguards, refused medical expertise, and given a strident middle finger to the efforts of intelligent people prepared for exactly this kind of disaster—all because they wanted to protect a red, white, and blue facade of American exceptionalism by owning the Libs, even if it killed them. In their lust for personal liberty they abandoned the responsibilities of living in community with other human beings with whom they are interdependent.

In the coming year, these myopic, short-sighted practitioners of a religion of nationalism will try to rewrite history. They will spin the numbers and deny the crisis and blame the incoming Administration, but they will not be able to change what happened or why it happened and they will not be able to redact the real story:

The virus defeated America because their phony patriotism and cheap liberty was the greatest friend it could have ever had.

They were exactly what it needed to win.

God bless America.

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And Then All of a Sudden…

This happened:



I knew 2020 wasn’t going to let us off unscathed…

Last Friday we noticed a steady drip of water from our water heater. This is an old house, and it was located outside in a metal lean-to as was custom of the era in this part of Phoenix.

We notified our landlords and they asked how much of an emergency it was. “Not a holiday weekend rate emergency, ” I said. Our landlord said he’d come over (they live right next door) and take a look at it. The next day he said that he’d be replacing the unit with an “on-demand” water heater and would like to get started as soon as possible Sunday morning.

Well, Sunday morning arrived and amid pounding and sawing and a general cacophony, he was making progress. Around 3 pm I heard him yell, and before I could even get outside, his son came running over yelling, “Your roof is on fire! Get out NOW!”

Well apparently, our landlord was just finishing up the final weld on one of the water lines that was too near the roof overhang. It flashed and spread into an attic conflagration that melted one of the vents on the roof.

Ben and I got out safely with the dogs and our second most important possessions, our laptops. We watched as four fire trucks pulled up and disgorged their troops who swarmed into the house, hoses in hand. I knew we were in trouble when they started bringing things out into the yard. Thankfully they did. My third-most prized possessions: the new speakers I’d bought last summer, along with my turntable and amplifier were brought out still on the entertainment center, like they were being transported on a Dias.

The fate of everything else in the house remained unclear until we were allowed back inside several hours later. The firefighters had thoughtfully draped everything that looked important with enormous sheets of black plastic, protecting the remainder of our computing equipment and—as I only discovered today—the bookcase holding all my books and vinyl records. I didn’t lift the veil too much for fear of disturbing the ceiling detritus that had fallen, but it appeared everything dry. (The thought of losing my collection was one of many things that contributed to me getting only about 3 hours of sleep last night.)

Needless to say, the house is trashed. We’re spending a couple nights in a nearby hotel, and tomorrow the plan is to transfer to Extended Stay lodging.

The owner’s insurance adjusters came by today and while they didn’t write the whole house off as a loss (something that would’ve made our lives infinitely easier in the aftermath as we’re discovering), they did point out that the entire roof would have to be replaced. And not just the shingles; the entire roof structure had to go, along with most of the interior plaster and drywall, to say nothing of the house wiring.

This was the result of an accident, albeit one that could’ve been avoided if our landlord simply chose to have the new water heater professionally installed. I don’t blame him for this, but I blame him for the fact that we now have to move.

In some ways this is a blessing. While cleaning house Friday, I remarked that we—like many Americans—had just too much stuff—and the thought of moving absolutely turned my stomach.

But yet, here we are, and like others who find themselves in this situation, it soon becomes apparent how many of those amassed things are easily dismissed.

The one thing that has prevented the tears from flowing is my core philosophy that everything happens for a reason. As comfortable as it was, it was time to move on from that house; that area of town. Ben recently accepted a position in a school district in Casa Grande, a community about an hour’s commute from our current location. We needed to move east to cut down on that commute. As for me, I’m going to be working from home for the foreseeable future, and if the time comes that I have to go back into the office, I have a (relatively) new ride and will be traveling northeast going in and southeast going home, a perfect commute with no sun in my eyes.

So yeah, life goes on. Changes will be made. And thanks given that we and the dogs are all alive and well.

 

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Down the Rabbit Hole I Go

The first thing to go is the memory. Or the knees. Sometimes both at once.

In my case, it’s definitely memory. While some aspects of life in my 20s stand out very clearly, others are more…muddled. And what I’m increasingly discovering is that things I swore happened one way—or in such a such a month—actually did not, as backed up by photographic proof.

And while it could be that those photographs are nothing more than a glitch in the Matrix, I find it far easier to believe that I just got it wrong and it’s a glitch in my matrix.

I don’t exactly remember how I got there or what I was searching for, but last week I found myself knee-deep in the online archives of Arizona State University; more specifically, their collection of Arizona gay rags from the 70s onward.

The collection is far from complete, but reading the smattering of articles and opinion pieces pointed out exactly how far we’ve come as a community and our standing in society at large in the last 50 years.

It was also a wonderful trip down memory lane.

Phoenix Gay Bars/Bookstores, October 1979
Tucson Gay Bars/Businesses, October 1979

(Click either to embiggen.)

Seeing the ads and logos from all these long-gone establishments especially brought me back.










And then there was the card shop on 7th whose name I was searching for a few weeks ago…

…where I bought this treasure in 1983:

Done by a probably local artist, “C. Ruth”, it thought it was adorable. I loved the colors, I loved the subject matter, and while my partner at the time, Dennis, didn’t have a beard, he was a ginger…

Frankly, I’m amazed that it’s survived the 24 moves it’s gone through since then.

But I digress.

Lastly, who could forget this information-packed reference? Kids wonder how we met up before the internet? This is how.

(I never bought one. Six dollars was a lot of money back for me in 1979; it was an hour’s work!)

I decided to enlist Google Maps to see what now stood on these once-hallowed locations.

To say it was a sobering experience would be an understatement. While I knew instinctively that the bars came and went even back then, it was still disheartening to see that so many were now just vacant lots, or had been torn down to make way for new strip malls and condo/apartment complexes.

Interestingly, the one bar that still remains in business and at its original location is the Nu-Towne Saloon; the one bar I have never visited. Back in the day it was “way out east” and basically surrounded by little more than open desert. Now it’s surrounded by development and doesn’t seem nearly so far east as it once did.