Category Archives: Gay Mid-Life: Musings

The Girl at the Bodega

not the bodega in question, but a famous one at Las Palmas and Fountain.

And why the future belongs to her.

I was at the bodega across the street from where I work part-time in East Hollywood. I go there on my work days to buy a soda, usually (OK, I can’t be Mr. Healthy all the time! at least it’s always diet soda) before repairing over to the LACC quad to eat my bag lunch and watch the college boys.

On Saturdays there’s a different, younger girl working behind the counter. A younger relative of the reticent, older woman who works there during the week? Who knows.

The future belongs to this Saturday girl because:

she is bilingual if not more, with no trace of an accent when she’s speaking English
she is multi-cultural, clearly comfortable relating to the neighborhood kids in Spanish and joking around with a middle-aged white guy in English
she grew up with agency in both a traditionally American world (probably through the public school system) and an old world immigrant one
Her beautiful brown face of the future of Los Angeles, and the future leadership of Los Angeles

I imagine she’s only here on Saturdays because she’s in school the rest of the week. She won’t be working here at the bodega forever; her job will be downtown or in one of the other centers of creative work.

For all of the naysayers who decry the myth of the American Dream (and with good reason), this the real deal, the real American Dream, or some small part of it, made manifest and human and standing right in front of me.

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The Stages of Grief Apply Here — to the Long Term Unemployment issue

thus resulting in life change.

I guess even the cops can go out of business.

I just realized they apply to this situation, there is a definite “grief” process – when you lose a job, can’t find another, resulting in major changes in the way you think.

What am I talking about?

These are Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief:

anger
bargaining (if only)
depression
acceptance

Nobody exactly died, not physically anyway, but certainly the old self, employed in the way I was, doing the things I did, is no more. So that really is a kind of death, isn’t it?

How these played out for me:

Denial: Although I did not deny the fact that it happened, that I was laid off, I did likely deny it’s seriousness, its implications. The last full time job layoff for me occurred in November, 2009. I do remember thinking “well, might as well take the holidays off, as no one will be hiring between now and New Year’s, anyway. . .” I also didn’t think it too odd when my resume was not responded to, as in, not responded to at all. . .when that had never happened before. (this time, of course, it’s different: both the economy and the job market)

Anger: I can see this in two areas: 1) intense anger at the non-profit I worked for, which laid off an entire department (3 white gay men and one African-American straight woman, 3 of us over 50, all of us over 45) and the perceived age discrimination there (of course, it didn’t help that the person who laid us all off was herself gay and over 50) as well as the perceived age discrimination as the reason for the above-referenced non-response to any job I applied for.

Bargaining: I can see this most clearly as I looked at my previous jobs and some decisions I made: would I have resigned from that great tech PR job if I knew that the economy was set to implode? Of course, I would not! Why did I take long periods off between work, not even to do freelance? This was coming back to haunt me! Surely, if I’d had a more traditional working career, I’d be snatched up by now. I’d changed emphasis or industry in my 20s, in my 30s, in my 4os, and here it was again, in my 50s. Woulda-coulda-shoulda, over and over and over. And it’s still going over and over and over (these stages are not linear or easily abandoned, it seems!)

Depression: This has also been a long, ongoing slog. Depressed that work life as I knew it was over, depressed at frightening visions of never having an income, or a forced retirement and what that might look like. There were periods of lightness, where there’d be hope of going in a different direction or that there would be some other kind of life, then a return to depression. During this time there were a couple of real deaths in our family, which, of course, didn’t help much (but certainly put the rest of it all in perspective). In retrospect, I do see that much of this was necessary, that long night one must go through to get to that next place. So, finally,

Acceptance: The world has changed, the work world has changed, and I along with it. Now, I don’t even want what I had before, though it’s certainly not available to me if I did. The past four (four plus, now) years have changed me. I hope it’s for the better, for the depth of experience, that makes one a richer man. I am older, more ornery (if that is even possible) and have come to see the advantages of where I find myself along the work/not work/whatever spectrum. With that comes a certain resilience. We’ve (that’s the royal we) all survived thus far, there’s no reason to think it won’t continue, and that it will be an adventure.

No doubt.

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How I Answer the Question “What Do You Do?”

oh, this minefield!

Copyright All rights reserved by evan-etc

What people really mean is “what is your job?” But so often we take it to mean “What are you?” In America, it’s how people define themselves. Particularly men, but also increasingly, women.

What they really want to ask, is “who are you?” And here in the U.S. especially, we equate our self-identity with our paid employment.

So what if you don’t have that anymore? Or what if you never did? Or what if it changed, significantly?

“I don’t do anything” is not an appropriate answer, as it could just as easily mean you live in a luxury apartment on a trust fund or live under the freeway bridge. Or certainly, a million other scenarios.

For those pursuing artistic endeavors, especially those that do not pay enough to make a living at (and very well never will), we still don’t want to be defined by our day jobs which have no relation to how we think of ourselves. Always a conundrum!

Say, if you work in the typing pool (or, excuse me, the word processing/admin pool) but you’re using your breaks to memorize the Shakespeare lines for Saturday’s showcase, the last thing you want to answer when someone asks that question is “I’m an administrative assistant.” (Not to denigrate the admins out there, but this person has other aspirations that need to be respected.)

There are those who would kill your dreams and insist that you are what you do for money. They may feel they’re realists, but I think they suffer from a lack of imagination and a soul sickness of advanced consumerism.

I’ve found this puzzle is exacerbated when one gets to, what, well, semi-retirement, or is it just classified as self-employment or part-time work as a result of long-term underemployment? Certainly, one doesn’t want to just blurt out: “Ever hear of the Great Recession, underemployment and age discrimination? Huh, buddy? Well lemme tell you a little story. . .”

Because, well, that would sound like you’ve become Debbie Downer, like you had a lot of self-pity (even if on the face of it it’s pretty darn accurate for millions of people in this country and around the world and god knows you must remain chipper at all times) but there’s also the stigma of the word “retirement.” Eeek.

That old definition just screams visions of ill-fitting shorts and golf, cocktail hours with Hawaiian shirts and leis, hours of television in the afternoon. None of which sounds like something to look forward to, at least not to me.

So we avoid that word right now and say instead: we’re moving on to a new chapter in life, which will likely include some work, some creativity, and some leisure. We don’t know exactly what it will look like yet, but it will be different from what came before, and probably endlessly changing.

So, I am a writer. There needs to be no qualifiers or caveats (i.e., “I used to have a long career in PR” or “But I have a part-time job in the design sector” or whatever). This stands on its own.

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Jason Jenn does James Broughton: Ecstasy for Everyone

James Broughton, 1987

A little plug for friend Jason Jenn‘s one man show celebrating the poetry of James Broughton, “Ecstasy for Everyone,” playing at Spirit Studio in Silver Lake this February and March — with further dates and cities to be announced.

Was so happy to go and hear these words as spoken and sung by Jason — I did not know much about Broughton before and certainly still don’t know a lot, but I got a great introduction. From Jason’s program: “The sacred and the profane, united and whole, with love. What spoke to me so profoundly about James’ work was its unabashed sense of spiritual and sexual liberation. It may have taken most of his life to come to the full extent of that expression, but the themes are played with throughout his life’s work: that spirituality and sexuality can co-exist harmoniously as well as our masculine and feminine energies within — and that they must or we merely perpetuate the terrible war of duality. So here we are this evening, tucked away in a dark corner of the searchlight skies and marquee-light boulevards of Los Angeles, inside an intimate spiritual community center to celebrate both aspects of our human nature, the divine heights and the earthly delights.”

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Go! (to find out about more/future performances, check out HiveWorld.org)

EcstasyForEveryone

Teamplayer Hell

Herewith: an introvert’s experiences with the teamplayeritis that infects Corporate America.

I’m not aware of any research that suggests teams are the optimal way to organize work or businesses – please enlighten me if you have them, send them my way, and I will link and then apologize, for perhaps not being a team player or just being lazy. (Which, no doubt, is probably a big sin in teamplayer land.)

Why was I thinking of this? I was probably ruminating on the benefits of the current part-time job I have, which is for a small business, as in really small, one owner and several part-time consultants — and how different that is than places I’ve worked in the past.

WTF is it with the sports metaphors, anyway? Management types must know in their dark hearts how even the thought that our work is going to be organized like a high school sports team will only elicit nausea in a not insignificant portion of the evolving “team.”

And they will hate your sorry ass for it. Never ever forgiving you.

And the language they use to pepper the day with: “touch base;” “Mary hit one out of the park;” “That’s a slam dunk;” “do a hole in one with this project, guys” and my uber-hated favorite of all time: “at the end of the day” — which always seemed to me to be default language that makes a conclusion sound “true,” whether it is or not.

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Please. These are jobs, not teams. The only reason the vast majority of your people work there is that’s what they must do to pay for food and a roof over their head. Nobody with a life outside of work really gives a flying fuck about your team.

Teamplayeritis deleterious effects:

Staying late. Nobody wants to be the first to leave for the day! Whether you have to make it home to feed the kids (or the dog), go to sports practice, a movie or just a few blessed minutes to take a short nap, the first to leave is invariably thought of as NOT a TEAM PLAYER. Cause they wouldn’t leave if they were.

Meetings, meetings, meetings! I think people at corporations hold regular meetings where nothing gets done because they want to create the illusion that what they’re spending their day doing is important, or that it serves some purpose. Usually, I found meetings useless. Then again, it’s a way to fill time if you have to stay at the job all day long. You probably could get the work done in one or two hours, but you had to stay all day. Why, again?

Agreeing. People agree with you (in corporations) for all sorts of reasons. They may want a raise (if you’re the boss) or a promotion. They may want to be your friend or hope to have sex with you. They may just want you to shut up and it’s the path of least resistance. Actually agreeing with your position on an issue may not be a part of it at all.

Here we have dedicated and engaged team players about to come to a consensus in their beautiful hotel ballroom meeting area.

Consensus. Like a group “agreeing.” Not valid, know why? Because it’s fraught with attrition. Teamplayers are practically frothing at the mouth to get out of whatever seminar/meeting requires the consensus, so they’ll nod to just about anything. Even if they don’t concur.

The loudest person wins. Now I know there’s science behind this one, I actually remember it from Sociology 101 back in undergrad. If you don’t believe me here, listen to talk radio or watch Fox Hate News. The loudest idiot on the team — not the smartest necessarily or the one with most insights/experience — most often wins. For those to whom teamplayeritis comes naturally, developing a hog-calling voice may be the best advice.

Favors extroverts. See loudest, above. American business values people who have extroverted personalities, and those who are quieter or introverts are pushed aside and often mistrusted. “What is wrong with her? Why is she so quiet? Is he a psycho?” etc. This is simply not fair or good business – introverted personalities are often those who come up with brilliant solutions to problems. On. Their. Own.

False values in hiring. HR departments, and hiring managers themselves, almost always ask the question about giving examples of when you were a great team player and how you worked so well with others. Truthful or hesitant answers to these questions will screen out those lone wolves who may make a great leap forward for your organization – and all because you subscribe to the idea that it’s always a good idea to work in teams.

Meanwhile, in Russia: There Are No Gays in Sochi. . .

or so says the moronic mayor of Sochi. Alas, as always, just because you say something stupid doesn’t make it true. As much as he might like to believe there are no gays in his town, for sure there are, and many, many more are on their way, from around the world. Hope it makes him sad, I really do, when his idiocy is pointed out to him. Perhaps by members of our own delegation, perhaps by Billie Jean King or Brian Boitano!

I was disappointed last night in the State of the Union Address, where President Obama said something about rah-rah rooting for our team in the upcoming Winter Olympics in Sochi, which begin a week from Friday (February 7). It was the perfect opportunity, I thought, for him to condemn the Putin regime’s human rights abuses toward the Russian LGBT community.

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One can always hope but one doesn’t always get satisfaction. If nothing else, please remember to take the corporate sponsors of this Olympics to task as they are complicit in co-sponsoring the hate by their very act of sponsorship.

They are (the 10 major): Atos, Coca-Cola, Dow, General Electric, McDonald’s, Omega, Panasonic, Proctor & Gamble, Samsung, and Visa. They’ve attempted to wash their hands of this ugliness by pointing out their own inclusive corporate policies. Sorry, corps, that doesn’t work. Shame on you all.

Here, if you need a refresher, is how the enlightened country of Russia treats its LGBT citizens. Share widely.

imgres images

The great quiet

The quiet after the woman has gone

Fifty years or more, still the light comes through like it always did

What secrets what joys did the battered ceiling keep in

Mourning redemptive

Playground laughter seeping undenied

Lovers, and lovely places, a man’s voice, a small wave crashes on the shore

Light flickered for a brief instant

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Safe

So many clues

every book, a unique story

and yet, abandoned

life goes on

Photo snaps put through Instagram process. The apartment (of a deceased relative) is in New York. I recently realized I still had these on my phone and thought they were haunting. Photos originally taken August, 2013.

The Reasons I Left Facebook

Yep, I retired from the Facebook like-athon on January 1, my one and only New Year’s resolution this year.

Two weeks later, so, how’s it going? Do I have regrets, do I have posting or “liking” withdrawal?

Have to admit, there’ve been a couple of times when I wanted to “share” something, like a thought about a movie, or the weather, and there was no one to “share” it with — something I would have just typed into the Facebook “status update” box.

What I find most odd about that is how quickly my mind was trained to “share” my life in such an artificial way. It’s kind of frightening. Five short years is all it took and I’m that digital lemming!

So, actually, the world did not really need to know that the wind is knocking over plants on my balcony, or that isn’t it funny that two closeted gay actors both have lead roles (as straight men) in “American Hustle” (you figure it out), or, whatever else it was I was thinking about that particular day.

This is the last message I posted on Facebook, as a sort-of explanation to “Friends,” both the real kind and the Facebook kind:

Facebook Friends: With the New Year, I’m going to be signing off Facebook. My decision is a combination of wanting more of my focus to be in the offline (real?) world as well as crucial privacy and business model concerns (Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t need to be making any more money on my digital assets, thankyouverymuch), as well as wanting to devote more time to my own social media outlet, my blog (jimarnoldblog.com/blog)! I’ve tremendously enjoyed all the banter, throwbacks and flashbacks, sharing and reconnecting and hope to continue doing so—just not here. Those who don’t have my contact information already can find it at the blog. Thanks for keeping in touch, and have a great 2014.

A lot of bloggers and others have posted their own reasons for leaving social media, specifically Facebook, and I’ve been influenced by those. Some of my favorites are here and here.

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These are my own top reasons for leaving Facebook, in no particular order:

I really, really, really don’t want to see pictures of your food. I mean gag me, OK? I don’t know why this grosses me out so much, but it really does. Why would you think this is interesting to anybody? We’re lucky to be living in a country that (at least so far) is not starving.
Facebook connections are not real connections. They’re not real friendships. Real friendships involve messy interpersonal actions over time. Anything virtual keeps that human messiness at arm’s length, and I find I want, I crave, the messy. Bring it on.
I began to realize I was presenting to the virtual world a highly curated version of myself, hoping that it would somehow be attractive and acceptable to a large number of people I hadn’t really met or known in the physical world. This is probably pathological. I had to stop it to remain sane. (or at least somewhat sane)
The vast majority of my 800-ish Facebook friends were/are people I had maybe met once or twice. A lot of them turned out to be oversharers, and I found myself finding out way, way more about them then I ever dreamt possible. It was lazy; you click here, you click there, you see an old photo, you find out their politics. Truthfully, this seemed like creepy stalking to me. I supposed that others probably did it to me. Eeeewww.
I read a book. It’s called “Who Owns the Future,” by Jaron Lanier. He presents the idea that way things are going in the digital economy, it will only be those who own the biggest computers (the Facebooks, the Googles, the Amazons) who will make any money in the future and the rest of us will basically be serfs, fighting over the scraps. The trade that’s presented to everyone on Facebook is that you can use the service for free, in exchange for handing over digital rights to your life and your data. This is not in any way, shape or form a fair trade. The only way Facebook makes their money is for you to give them your data. You need to be compensated in some real, monetary way for this above and beyond access to the service for free. Would you like to stop giving Mark Zuckerberg your life?

Facebook increases isolation, rather than alleviating it. By comparing myself to the highly curated versions of my Facebook “friends,” I often felt worse about my own circumstances rather than better. I also could not say one more time to someone in real time, “Oh, yes, I know you on Facebook, we’re Facebook friends!” I mean really, how lame is that?
Time’s a wastin’. I would frequently fall down the Facebook rabbit hole, reading all sorts of links, especially to political articles, etc. I’d look up and wonder where the hour had gone, without a lick of my real work getting done.
Marketing my books on Facebook was a fool’s errand. I found this out, that people on Facebook aren’t interested in reading books, for the most part. Sure, if you’re Stephen King or Anne Rice or someone like that, it might be cool to have them as your “friend.” But I found that in my case, nobody was looking for books to read on that particular platform. My time is much better spent writing the next great book, or possibly interacting with readers on a site like goodreads.com – which is specifically for people who like to read.

I’m sure there’s more, I’ll probably add to this list. Why would you leave Facebook? Or do you love it?

Here’s another for me: name-calling. I noticed it was really easy to get caught up in comments to posts, particularly bickering, partisan political ones. And how easy it was to fall into cowardly, obnoxious name-calling. So I may have called S. Palin a c*** on Facebook. Somewhere, if there is a heaven, my dear mother would not be happy. And honestly, I don’t want to be that guy who calls people easy vulgar names on social media. (Even if she is a c***.)

Those We Lost in 2013

So many people left my earthly circle this year, whether it’s friends’ parents, friends of friends, or acquaintances — it sure seemed like death was hovering over us more than usual. Maybe not, maybe I just paid more attention to it.

There were a few people I want to remember here, even if I did it before in the blog, as we close out the year I want to say goodbye once more.

Dennis Bogorad

Dennis Bogorad

Dennis died unexpectedly in his sleep last March. It was a great shock to all who knew him, and so devastating for his partner Mark and his other family and close friends. Dennis was one of my first fiction fans – someone who reached out into that internet ether and not only complimented me on my book “Benediction,” but wanted to get together to talk about it. What a way to flatter an author! So eventually we did meet. Dennis had also suffered through prostate cancer (a main theme in that book) and went on to found a number of discussion and support groups for gay men with those health concerns. He was a TV producer, sure, but he also brought those skills to his passion as an activist. He was one of those people who knew how to make things happen, and he leaves a great void in Los Angeles. You can read more about Dennis here.

Linda Palmer

Linda Palmer

Whenever I think of Linda I just can’t help but smile. She was just the most fabulous, bubbly, interesting, smart and wonderful woman! I just adored her. She’d been a studio exec, a wildlife photographer, a teacher and a writer. Probably many more things I don’t even know about! I knew her best as a writing teacher and then a writing colleague. She had such a way with students, so supportive and encouraging. Just the right amount, and not sentimental. She was, in a sense, very girly, but also very strong and independent. She was also someone to live her life on her own terms — something that so resonates here.

Joan Arnold

Joan Helen Arnold

Finally, my aunt Joan Arnold, who died in August at 92. Here’s a link to her obituary on this blog that I wrote earlier this year. What more can I say about her? One of a kind. Another great example of someone who lived life on her own terms, fiercely independent, definitely a role model for me as yet another single person in a big city. She definitely proved that not only could you work and go to the theater and out to dinner and pretty much do everything you always did well into your 90s: She also seemed to prove, to me, anyway, that in a big way the numerical age we all have is just some “idea,” to which we ascribe certain prejudices of what we should or should not be doing. Whenever I think of myself as that weird old guy on the bike with the blue lights, I think of my aunt going to work everyday at 92 years of age (and being a respected and valued member of the staff while there).

“You are remembered for the rules you break.” — Douglas MacArthur

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Obamacare – my journey so far with the ACA, health, and the healthcare industrial complex

Oh but where are we headed? It looks dark. I hope not.

So I’m at a totally unrelated-type doctor appointment (eye, of all things), but what do they always do first? Always! You got it – the blood pressure reading.

148/94. Sheesh. This is not a good reading. And it was the second time, the first time the first number was over 150. Technician: Are you on medication? Me: No. Technician: Take a deep breath. Me: Breathing. Technician: Take another one.

and so I do, and so she takes the reading and it’s 148/94.

And I am so disappointed and feel like such a failure. I do more cardio than anyone I know. I lost 20 lbs. earlier this year, though that’s settled out at about 15-16 lbs. since. My BMI is 23. I don’t smoke or drink and haven’t done either in decades! I am a fixture at the Farmer’s Market. Yet my BP readings have only steadily climbed over the past few years.

So there’s nothing I can do about my age (58). Or my genes, what I’ve inherited from a family with a history of heart problems on both sides.

Salvation in technology, right? As Jesse Pinkman might shout, Yay Science! So I go to Amazon.com, and buy a BP monitor. This way I can torture myself by doing self-readings every day. Or maybe I’ll find out it was the coffee and the nervousness/busyness of going to the doctor, not something I do very often.

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Because, while I do have health insurance, the plan I have is a high-deductible one (catastrophic, perhaps) and I can’t afford to actually go to the doctor much, though I do pay the c. $300 per month hedge against total financial ruin (aka as the monthly health care premium – though it has nothing to do with care, really, now does it?)

All this is a roundabout way of saying that yes, Virginia and others, I do benefit from the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare!). How so? See my list:

I live in a progressive, forward-looking state that wants to make huge changes in the way health care is delivered to its population, #1. So, we have an Exchange (where you can buy a plan – coveredca.com) that’s been working since Day 1.
I get a better plan. My old plan with the Kaiser HMO did not include prescription coverage. Under the ACA, you can’t do that anymore, you actually have to have a plan that, you know, covers you.
The plan costs less. Why? Because I work only part-time (self-employed), I get a subsidy. So it’s about 2/3 less than what I was paying before. And even more if you consider that the premium for the same plan (now with prescriptions) went up about 60% from what I was paying in 2013.
Copays are slightly less, as is the out-of-pocket maximum for the year, which is a small benefit, but one in the right direction. I believe it’s $4,500. Which, while a lot of money to be shelling out if need be, is a whole lot better than financial ruin, bankruptcy, etc.
While not a perfect solution, this is a detour on the way to single payer – which we’ll eventually have, I predict.

So those are the specific benefits to me so far. Better plan, lower cost, no impossible to work through bureaucracy. I wanted to post this, as prosaic as it may be, because of the shrill voices in the media only finding disasters. There are successes — and there will be many, many more — you just have to look.