I get it, okay? I know that nudity is not always sexual. Heck, it usually isn’t: babies are born naked, toddlers run around naked, medical exams sometimes involve nakedness, prison involves nakedness (so I am told) and people bathe and shower naked.

Nakedness is not inherently sexual. In the gym locker room, men are sometimes naked as they come back from the shower, or even go to the shower. They’re naked in between changing clothes. Some guys in the gym stay naked when they dry their hair or clip toenails.

And let me add something else that I get: I get that just as nakedness is not inherently sexual, a man being naked around other men is not inherently homosexual. It’s part of the same kind of thing. I can and will go further: men touching other men is not inherently homosexual. A man giving another man a high-five, or a hug, or even a kiss is not, by itself, homosexual. A man telling another man he loves him is not inherently homosexual. 

No, nakedness is not inherently sexual, and man-on-man contact is not inherently homosexual. As a society, we simply have to be mature enough to be able to discriminate between situations where sex and sexual orientation matter and when they don’t. I think this is especially true for men. If men can’t discriminate when nakedness means something sexual and when it doesn’t, they’ll be forever uncomfortable. Imagine such a man needing a prostate exam from a female doctor. If such a man were unable to separate medically necessary nakedness from sexual nakedness...well, you can see what might happen. Along the same lines, a man who can’t separate, say, medically necessary man-on-man contact, especially in the genital area, might not avail himself of medical checks he needs.

Worse, men who can’t discriminate between homosexuality and honest expressions of nonsexual affection will, sadly, refrain from telling one another how they feel. And what a sad, sad world that would be.

So, in short, I get it. I get that nakedness need not be sexual, and man-on-man nakedness need not be homosexual. Because of this, I ought to be able to encounter such situations and be completely non-reactive. 
​
But for God’s sake, does this mean that at the locker room at my gym you HAVE to make sure when you drop your towel that my face is near your scrotum?

Be seeing you!

So I posted a little blurb on Facebook about starting over in a novel I'm working on (the one I did NaNoWriMo about) because I was writing the wrong story. A friend of mine asked--in all caps, so I know she was serious--how that could happen.

To her, then, and to anyone else who's interested, here's a little more on that.

What I meant was that I'd created my protagonist and had her pretty well fleshed out (not quite where she was always writing herself, but close) and had done a lot on world-building to where I was satisfied. I had the end line all worked out, and the main beats of the story plotted.

But I was almost 60,000 words in and I wasn't interested. I myself was bored, which would mean the reader would be very much bored. I wasn't telling her story--or rather, I wasn't telling the story that needed to be told. I was telling (which was key right there: it was really telling, not showing, which I know is trite but it's still true) her background, her circumstance, everything that I knew about her that had gone into making her who she was but wasn't actually giving her anything to do, other than just live her life.

I told myself, "it'll get good once I get through all this stuff. I have to tell it, because it sets up some stuff later."

What I forgot was some advice I usually give out to my own students and fellow writers when they ask me questions. The most interesting part of your story is the part you're working on now. The best page of your story is the one your pen is on. And so on. You get the picture.

It's not all bad news--all the work I've done is valuable, since it goes to her character and backstory. But that doesn't mean it all needs to be written out. I need to know it, and I need her story to inform the parts I'll show the reader, but I don't need to show Captain Kirk filling out personnel reports. Sure, he must do that, but that's not where his story is.

I hope this makes more sense now, my friend!

​Be seeing you!

At the risk of getting into Forrest Gump territory, I hereby postulate the title as a truism. Imagine if you will, that every year, you're dealt a new card from the deck of life. You might get a good one, a bad  one, a useless one, or a vital one, depending on what hand you're trying to build. Or perhaps you don't know what kind of hand you're trying to build, so you just wait and see what cards life offers you and make the best of it. Some of us are dealt good cards, some are dealt bad ones, and that's unfair. I'm not one of those to shrug off unfairness and repeat the tired cliche "who said life is fair?" Why not? Because life is what we make of it, isn't it? Life isn't something imposed on us from the outside that we all have to deal with. Life is within us. Hell, life IS us. Saying that "life isn't fair" should be followed up with, "you know, you're right. Sometimes life isn't fair. Can we do something about that? If not change the fairness/unfairness, maybe mitigate the injustice? Treat those who were dealt poor hands a little better, give them a little leeway, maybe a bit more help?"

Anyway.

I'm going to press this analogy/metaphor/trope that life is a deck of cards whether you like it or not, Reader, so bear with me. Granting that we are dealt different cards in our lives, and granting that a just and worthwhile society should take steps to try and even things out when possible, we still have an obligation to play those cards. Yes, we should all have the resources we require to succeed. Notice I didn't say "the same resources," because we don't all need the same things. I'm not in favor of issuing reading glasses to every single student, for example--but we absolutely should give them to those who need them. But having done that--having tried to distribute resources to reflect need--it's still up to the individual to actually play the cards.

Why am I pushing this analogy so hard? Well, if you imagine getting a card a year from the deck of life like I said earlier, then I've reached a peculiar moment in mine. I'm 52 today, which coincidentally is also the number of cards in a standard deck. So this seems like a good time to take stock: not of the cards I have been dealt, but how I've played them.

Do I have regrets? Of course. There are things I wish I hadn't done (some which I will carry in my heart forever and never, ever wash away the stain) but mainly, it's the things I didn't do that bother me. The plays I didn't make, the times when I folded (to torture this metaphor to within an inch of its life) instead of went all in, or times when I walked away from the table entirely. 

Here's the good news, though:

I feel like I'm doing a lot of them now. My main one is, of course, writing. I wish I'd tried to enter the professional world sooner. I've been writing for literally as long as I can remember--somewhere in primary school we were tasked with writing a story to reflect Christmas (this was before we had matured enough as an American society to fully realize the diversity of belief in public school). I was so engrossed in the story that I dove into the project with the fervor of a zealot. I asked for an extension so I could complete my Magnum Opus. My brother, God love him, several years ago found the original story and reproduced it faithfully--including illustrations--and presented it to me at a family holiday celebration (remember, Jeff? "Mender, Mender?") 

I wrote in middle school, I wrote in high school, I wrote in college and beyond. But it wasn't until 1996 that I first gathered the courage to send something in for publication. And it's taken even longer for me to try to get into the novel publishing business.

But, dammit, I'm there now. Sure, I sloughed off a lot of cards, and was timid when I should have been bold, but despite taking the long way 'round, I got there.

(I should note that the one time I was bold beyond my character has been the single greatest event in my life--approaching that spellbinding girl from across the gym dance floor at the Homecoming Dance  in 1983 at Newbury Park High School. I performed a magic trick involving a disappearing napkin and thus won her heart. We've been together ever since and just recently celebrated our 28th wedding anniversary)

So. Anyone reading this, it's never too late. But also, don't wait. I know that may seem contradictory, and maybe it is, (I am large, I contain multitudes) but it's my birthday message to you.

Be seeing you!

Hart to believe that we are in the year 2020. 

I recall nineteen years ago when we entered 2001 how many comparisons there were between the reality of 2001 and the fictional picture painted by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick in the motion picture 2001.  Some stuff was pretty spot-on accurate, like the ipad-things Dave and Frank had on board Discovery-1. Other stuff was less so--commercial flights to the moon and to orbiting space station (which was admittedly under construction, but still). Overall, however, I remember the feeling that once 2001 had come, we were now officially living in THE FUTURE-RE-RE-RE-RE...(imagine the echo effect: that's what I'm trying to type out). 

Now that we're in 2020, the disappointment is firmly entrenched. The disparity between where we are now and where we thought we'd be by this time is so great that it's hard to be optimistic at all. I suppose that may be why we don't get a whole lot of utopian sci-fi much anymore: it's all dystopian and bleak and dark and that overused word, "gritty." Hell, even the gleaming chrome of the original Star Trek  (and even the bright optimism of the revival series, Star Trek the Next Generation) is tarnished and grim. Maybe sci-fi has just "grown up" from the so-called Golden Age, but it somehow seems more than that.

Optimism seems to have become passe, naive, even downright dangerous. I mean, honestly--who can look at where America and the world is and think that we're on the brink of some bright, utopian future? I imagine most of us feel like we'd be content to just stop sliding into darkness for a short time.

Ah, well. I didn't mean for 2020 to start out so glum--but there's no point in ignoring the reality. So let's try to work through it as best we can and strive for a future we can all imagine. 

Be seeing you!