And…

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It’s been three years and I still think about him often.  I’m reposting this from 2020 because I don’t think I could write anything better than I did then:

2020 just needs fuck right off.

Now.

Seriously.

Traditional wisdom says that you should be able to sense when a loved one has died.

I’m here to say that’s a lie.

I found out this evening that my dear friend Floyd passed last October. And before you ask, no, it wasn’t COVID. It was his heart, and he went in his sleep.

Floyd left behind his husband Ron, with whom he’d shared his life for the last 40 years and many grieving friends, myself among them.

Floyd and I met January 28, 1983. Despite it being a Friday night I wasn’t planning on going out. As I recall it had been an exhausting week and I wanted nothing more than to simply stay home and unwind.

But I stepped outside that evening, saw the most incredible full moon rising above the Rincon Mountains east of Tucson, and something told me in no uncertain terms to go out. There was, as they say, magic afoot.

My destination was The Fineline, a relatively new dance club on Drachman Street. I’d been there with my partner Dennis, numerous times, but since we’d split up a two months earlier and he took off for Austin, this was one of the first times I’d gone there by myself.

And hell, I was young and in a state of perpetual hormonal arousal, so why not?

I’d been working out (believe it or not) since Dennis left and I was feeling good about my body and the way I looked. I radiated a certain amount of confidence and it didn’t take long for Floyd and I to gravitate to one another. He was there with his partner, Ron, putting a damper on any thoughts of immediately scampering off to get nasty. But Floyd assured me they had an open relationship and while nothing would be happening between us that night, he was definitely interested in getting together. We exchanged phone numbers.

Later that same night I met Lee, a friend whom I’ve written about before, thus cementing the magic of that night in my life.

Floyd called me the next morning. We had phone sex. Floyd was a dirty, dirty boy and I loved it. We hung out a lot in the weeks that followed. As we discovered our shared taste in music and culture, a genuine friendship and affection bloomed between us. That’s not to say the physical attraction waned; if anything it remained constant, and over the years we became infrequent fuck buddies, all—somewhat surprisingly—with Ron’s blessing. Even during my San Francisco years we remained in touch, with Floyd traveling to The City numerous times on business.

After I returned to Phoenix and made it through the cancer ordeal, I started driving to Tucson to visit the guys on a semi-regular basis. I had a new car and if for no other reason I needed to reconnect with the friends who knew me best while putting my life back together.

Floyd and I called each other Dolly (from our shared love of Personal Services.)  I’d call him up and say, “Dolly, I need to get out of town for a while. Are you and Ron free?” and depending on the answer, I’d hop in Anderson and make the 90 minute drive south. I remember one insane Saturday when I drove down to help with some computer issues, brought his PC back home to repair, and then returned it later that day.

Floyd did the same sort of spontaneous trips north, and one of my favorite memories were the two separate times he (and a few weeks later with Ron) came up to Phoenix and we shot photos at Arizona Falls.

Shortly before Ben and I left for Denver, Floyd and Ron fell on some very hard times. They both lost their longtime jobs, were unable to find work, lost everything they’d built together, and were forced to move in with Ron’s sister.  Through it all we stayed in touch, they stayed together, and when they’d gotten back on their feet and Ben and I moved back from Denver, talked of a weekend visit but it seemed life was continually getting in the way and one thing or another always prevented it.

When it finally seemed we were going to be able to coordinate a visit, COVID hit, killing our plans again. I last spoke with Floyd in September, when he called to tell me that Abe, a mutual friend from our University of Arizona days, had passed.

Floyd, Ron, Abe and I used to joke that when we got old and retired we’d buy a big house together and disgracefully spend our twilight years like the Golden Girls.

The best laid plans of mice, men, and queens…

Though we went through periods when we didn’t see each other, or even talk much other than an occasional text or email, Floyd was one of those people in my life I just knew would always be there…and now he’s not. I think that’s why this has hit me so hard. His impish grin, that devilish twinkle in his eye, and his extensive…vocabulary…will be so sorely missed. More than with any other death that’s hit my life (and yes, sadly that includes my parents and my first partner, Dennis), I feel like a part of me has been ripped out and there’s nothing but an empty hole remaining.

As I get older, it’s becoming more and more apparent to me that you need to tell the people you love that you love them every damn day, because they can be taken from you at any moment.

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About a week and a half ago I put on a new record I’d just gotten and almost immediately I noticed a rhythmic thump thump thump in the background. Since I hadn’t noticed this before with any record, I immediately suspecting the vinyl itself. I stopped playback and the thumping remained. I did all the usual troubleshooting to no avail and did not relish the thought of lugging the receiver back to Prescott for my guy up north to look at (not to mention the six-to-eight month turnaround it normally takes him).

So went online and found a highly-rated vintage repair shop just up the street from where we live. I’ve driven past it a hundred times and never knew it was there. I called to verify they were open, and then drove the receiver up and told him what was going on. After paying the $40 inspection fee, the guy said he’d call in about a week with an estimate for repairs.

Got the call on Tuesday. He could find nothing wrong with it. Everything was dead quiet.

So I brought it home, hooked everything back up, and  heard thump-thump-thump.

This was maddening. So I disconnected everything except for the turntable and speakers. Thump-thump-thump.

Disconnected the turntable. Thump-thump-thump…but only when the receiver’s selector switch  it was set to  phono.

I discovered the sound went down significantly when I touched the back panel of the receiver. This told me this was some kind of ground problem. But everything was grounded!

After about an hour of trying everything my years of experience in this hobby had taught me, I gave up and decided to see if Google had any answers.

It turns out there were lots of mentions of WiFi routers causing interference like this with vintage equipment.

Hmmm…

We have an Orbi mesh router. The satellitewas in the bedroom, directly on the opposite side of the wall from the receiver. For the longest time it wasn’t in use, but I decided to power it up just a few weeks ago.

The light bulb went off.

I unplugged the satellite and voila! Dead silence from the receiver.

I moved the satellite about three feet, plugged it in, and the receiver remained quiet. Go figger.

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From Bustle:

Humor me for a moment, and try to think back to where you were in 2006. If you also unwittingly conjured a bunch of images of frizzy hair, braces, and angsty sing alongs to Taylor Swift’s “Teardrops On My Guitar” in the back of your mom’s minivan, then you’re not alone. Why, you may be wondering, did I just take you on a journey back to your pimple-ridden, t-shirt layering, pre-Gossip Girl youth? Because if you’re wondering how often Friday the 13th happens in October, you should first wrap your mind around the fact that we haven’t had one since 2006…and according to my good friend math, that means this is the first one we’ve had in eleven years. [This was published in 2017 – MA]

That being said, you won’t have to wait as long for the next one, which will come in 2023. As for how often it occurs, it just depends on Leap Years and our good old friend the Gregorian calendar; we can go anywhere from five and eleven years between October, Friday the 13ths. (For future reference, in case you like to plan your memes ahead: the next few are 2023, 2028, 2034, 2045, 2051, 2056, 2062, 2073, 2079, 2084, and 2090. If you manage to live longer than that, don’t @ me, because I personally plan on dying of butter consumption long before then.)

But why, exactly, is it so spooky to have Friday the 13th happen in October than any other month? It’s not just because it’s rare—it’s because one of the more popularly documented origins of the superstition took place on October, Friday the 13th.

A medieval society known as the Knights Templar were arrested on Friday, October 13, 1307 by French King Philip IV; the Knights Templar, a group of mostly unmarried men, were paid handsomely by Christian pilgrims for their protection during the crusades. Apparently they amassed enough of a fortune that when King Philip IV was low on funds himself, he initiated the arrest of hundreds of them on the grounds of heresy, which is—well—bad luck if you’re one of the Knights Templar.

This didn’t stop people from theorizing that the knights were actually involved in shenanigans within the church, or they discovered legendary treasure, and all sorts of far more interesting fates. But despite their unfortunate arrests and the timing, more documented incidents of that particular Friday the 13th being an “unlucky” day didn’t really start to stick until the 20th century, when authors began to reference it in their works (most notably The Iron King in 1955, and The Da Vinci Code in 2003). From there, the idea of October, Friday the 13th being a super spooky day instead of just a baseline spooky one seemed to take on a life of its own.

Friday the 13th may have been causing unease long before that particular one in October, though, because in Western superstition, both the number 13 and Fridays are considered historically unlucky; some people theorize that it may hark back to the Bible, as 13 people were at the Last Supper, and Jesus died on Good Friday.

As for the October factor, Knights Templar aside, October itself is a known ~spooky month~. A lot of the things we associate with Friday the 13th — superstition, magic, black cats (which are pure and good and must be protected)—we also associate with Halloween. It’s kind of a psychological double whammy considering that alone; when you put the 11 year wait from the last one into the mix, it’s no wonder people are more hyped about this particular Friday the 13th than they have been over others in recent past.

Whether or not you choose to acknowledge Friday the 13th this year, stay safe, y’all—and try not to let any French kings rob you of the cold, hard cash you pillaged and protected for.

And for those of you who (like me, obviously) were curious, we haven’t had an October Friday the 13th full Moon (adding to the spookiness) since the year 2000—and the last one prior to that it was in 1905. I haven’t been able to find definitively how often this confluence of events occurs, but based on the two dates I was able to dig up, it looks to be approximately 90-100 years.

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I am not well traveled.

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From The Palmer Report:

MyPillow guy Mike Lindell keeps suffering blow after self inflicted blow. He now claims he’s just about broke, and he recently revealed that the lawyers representing him in the Dominion case all quit because he couldn’t keep paying them.

Now Lindell says he’s going to represent himself in the Dominion case…

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The Missing Link making “demands” of her political party who currently hold the gavel in the House wants to stop weaponizing the government…because she can’t spell hypocrisy let alone define it

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From Comic Sans:

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From I Should Be Laughing (*originally posted in 2009):

He was just a kid. A slight kid, a sweet kid. A gay. But it wasn’t the kid who got noticed on this day eleven years ago, it was his murder that caught us all, gay and straight, off-guard.

Matthew Wayne Shepard was a twenty-one-year-old college student at the University of Wyoming. And he was gay. And, for being gay, he was tortured and left to die near Laramie, Wyoming. His attack occurred on October 6, but Mathew didn’t die until almost a week later.

Matthew was born in Wyoming and grew up there. He spent his last high school year at The American School in Switzerland. After high school, he attended Catawba College and Casper College before he relocated to Denver and becoming a first-year political science major at the University of Wyoming.

Political science. Matthew might have been a politician, or a community organizer, or a gay rights activist. Or a teacher or a bartender or any number of other things which we’ll never know because he never got the chance to be anything else.

He was described by his parents, Judy and Dennis, as “an optimistic and accepting young man [who] had a special gift of relating to almost everyone. He was the type of person who was very approachable and always looked to new challenges. Matthew had a great passion for equality and always stood up for the acceptance of people’s differences.”

He might have done so much.

But Matthew knew he was gay, and so did many other people. And like so many in the LGBT community, he faced physical and verbal abuse all throughout his life, and death. In 1995, during a high school trip to Morocco, he was beaten and raped, leaving him withdrawn from friends and family and battling depression and panic attacks. But he soldiered on, went back to school and seemed to be coming out of his depression.

Then, just after midnight on October 7, 1998, Matthew met Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson in a bar. McKinney and Henderson offered Shepard a ride in their car. They took him to a remote area, tied him to a fence, robbed, pistol whipped, tortured him, and left him to die. They also found his address and decided to rob his home as well.

Matthew Shepard was discovered 18 hours later by Aaron Kreifels, who mistook the beaten, dying young man for a scarecrow. Matthew was barely alive. And suffering.

There was a fracture from the back of his head to the front of his right ear. He had severe brain stem damage, which affected his body’s ability to regulate heart rate, body temperature and other vital functions. There were also a dozen or more lacerations around his head, face and neck. His injuries were deemed too severe for doctors to operate.

Matthew Shepard never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead on October 12, 1998.

Police arrested McKinney and Henderson shortly thereafter, finding the bloody gun as well as the victim’s shoes and wallet in their truck. The two men had attempted to persuade their girlfriends to provide alibis. They used the gay panic defense, arguing that they beat, tortured and killed Matthew Shepard because he came on to them. They even tried to say they only wanted to rob him, not hurt him.

But they hurt an entire community.

Russell Henderson pleaded guilty in April 1999, and agreed to testify against Aaron McKinney to avoid the death penalty; he was given two consecutive life sentences. The jury found Aaron McKinney guilty of felony murder, and as they began to deliberate on the death penalty, Matthew Shepard’s parents brokered a deal, resulting in McKinney receiving two consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole.

In a statement read to the court, Dennis Shepard told McKinney what the sentence means to him:

“You won’t be a symbol.

No years of publicity, no chance of commutation, no nothing—just a miserable future and a miserable end.

It works for me ….

Mr. McKinney, I give you life in the memory of one who no longer lives.

May you have a long life, and may you thank Matthew every day for it.”

He was just a kid. A slight kid, a sweet kid. A gay kid. And he could have been any one of us, but in death, Matthew did what hadn’t really been done before. He shone a light on hate crimes against the LGBT community. He gave us a face and a smile that needn’t have been snuffed out so readily.

He could have been any one of us. He is every one of us.

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I’ve spent a lot of time studying bad men. I’ve examined their characteristics, their mannerisms, the utter banality of their cruelty. Yet there’s something different about Donald Trump.

When I look at him, I don’t see a bad man. Truly.

I see an evil one.

Over the years, I’ve met gangsters here and there. This guy tries to be one, but he can’t quite pull it off. There’s such a thing as ‘honor among thieves.’

Yes, even criminals usually have a sense of right and wrong. Whether they do the right thing or not is a different story—but—they have a moral code, however warped.

Donald Trump does not. He’s a wannabe tough guy with no morals or ethicc. No sense of right or wrong. No regard for anyone but himself—not the people he was supposed to lead and protect, not the people he does business with, not the people who follow him blindly and loyally, not even the people who consider themselves his ‘friends.’

He has contempt for all of them.

WE New Yorkers got to know him over the years that he poisoned the atmosphere and littered our city with monuments to his ego. We knew first hand that this was someone who should never be considered for leadership.

We tried to warn the world in 2016.

The repercussions of his turbulent presidency divided America and rattled New York City beyond imagination. Remember how we were jolted by the crisis in early 2020, as a virus swept the world? We lived with Donald Trump’s bombastic behavior every day on the national stage, and we suffered as we saw our neighbors piling up in body bags.

The man who was supposed to protect this country put it in peril, because of his recklessness and impulsiveness. It was like an abusive father ruling the family by fear and violent behavior. That was the consequence of New York’s warning getting ignored. Next time, we know it will be worse.

Make no mistake: the twice-=impeached, 4-time indicted Donald Trump is still a fool. But we can’t let our fellow Americans write him off like one. Evil thrives in the shadow of dismissive mockery, which is why we must take the danger of Donald Trump very seriously. 

So day we issue another warning. From this place where Abraham Lincoln spoke—right here in the beating hear of New York±to the rest of America:

This is our last chance.

Democracy won’t survive the return of a wannabe dictator.

And it won’t overcome evil if we are divided.

So what do we do about it? I know I’m preaching to the choir here. What we’re doing today is valuable, but we have to take today into tomorrow—take it outside these walls.

We have to reach out to the half of our country who have ignored the harzards of Trump and, for whatever reason, support elevating him back into theWhite House. They’re not stupid, and we must not condemn them for making a stupid choice. Our future doesn’t just depend on us; it depends on them.

Let’s reach out to Trump’s followers with respect.

Let’s not talk about ‘democracy.’ ‘Democracy’ may be our holy grail, but to others it is just a word, a concept, and in their embrace of Trump, they’ve already turned their backs on it.

Let’s talk about right and wrong. Let’s talk about humanity.

Let’s talk about kindness. Security for our world. Safety for our families. Decency.

Let’s welcome them back.

We won’t get them all, but we can get enough to end the nightmare of Trump and fulfill the mission of this ‘Stop Trump Summit.'” — Robert De Niro

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Richad Foster, The Foster House, Wilton, Connecticut, 1967

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Not my work, but certainly entertaining.

Via Reddit:

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…portrayal of Leto Atreides II on his royal cart that I’ve ever seen.

This is what I would expect of Denis Villeneuve if he ever got around to filming God Emperor of Dune; sadly, that’s something I think will never happen for a variety of reasons. Firstly, he would have to film Children of Dune—another book requiring two films to fully flesh out—and perhaps more importantly, God Emperor is an especially dense (as it concentrated and convoluted) story. It took me several tries to initially get through it, and when I finally did, I was left hating it. Now, of course, my opinion is completely reversed, and I think it’s one of the best in the series, but I will readily admit finding a moviegoing audience who would appreciate it enough to justify a film would be difficult.

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And lastly…

Please Leticia, let this be true!

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