Every Wednesday I shoot a little video excerpt of the novel-in-progress I’m working on.
It’s for Instagram reels, but I share it to my Facebook and heck, here on the blog!
This week the b-roll behind the words is from North Hollywood Park in (you guessed it) North Hollywood, CA which is adjacent to Valley Village, where I live.
The End of Her: Racing Against Alzheimer’s to Solve a Murder by Wayne Hoffman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is a deeply affecting work. I sank slowly into the literary seduction constructed here. There are so many layers – the horrifying and emotional toll of Alzheimer’s on an individual and on a family, still balanced with humor and love. The mysterious conundrum of an unlikely murder in a small pioneer town. The underlays of Jewish culture and Old West history (Canadian Prairie and Canadian Old West?) which color and inform the two major threads.
I wondered if the story of someone else’s family past would be of interest to me. Especially since the unsolved murder happened so long ago–but it was. Wayne Hoffman paints a vivid picture of these places from the early 1900s – Winnipeg, Canora (Saskatchewan) – and the people who lived there, the immigrants to whom he’s related and their fellow citizens, whether they were Polish housekeepers, illiterate laborers, befuddled cops or others. Through what must have been painstaking research, we get a sense of how lives were recorded there. Even more importantly for this story, how crimes were investigated (or not investigated) with the “primitive” tools law enforcement had at their disposal back then.
There’s lots and lots of names and relatives. Bravo for the increasingly complicated family tree graphics that start chapters. Most of all though, reading a son’s account of how his mother loses him as he also loses her due to the disease course of Alzheimer’s is just devastating to read, while also being detailed and unsparing. There’s just something about non-fiction as a genre that a writer can have a profound intimacy with, particularly when the subjects mean so much, as they obviously do here. Highly recommended.
I don’t always plan ahead for eating on the road. When I do, I’m rewarded, financially and health wise. Often, during the Wanderslut 1996 Road Trip, I would not plan in advance and be at the mercy of the “food stores” attached to gas stations.
We know at least a couple of things about these stores: 1) they are expensive and 2) they have virtually no fresh food save a bunch of unripe green bananas or heavily waxed apples on the checkout counter. So, do yourself a favor and take some time to plan ahead.
Here’s an ideal list for what I put in my road trip cooler.
When I set out to complete my “circumnavigation” of the lower 48 for Wanderslut 1996: A Gay Road Trip Across America, one of the things in the back of my mind was to evaluate stops as possible future places to live.
Not that I was specifically looking to leave L.A. It was more of an answer to a question, “If I were to move someday, where might be a good place to go?”
The criteria were pretty basic back then: a city, a city smaller than Los Angeles (not hard to find), and a city with an arts community that was welcoming to LGBT-type folks. Another thing that was a plus: a warm climate.
These are the three towns that I liked the most in 1996 (listed by order of encounter) :
I spent very little time in Tucson but my memory of that particular trip is colored by having a local friend tell me what it was like over dinner. It’s so great to have a familiar face who can show you around a bit when in unfamiliar territory.
I loved the Spanish/Mexican heritage, the pace, the warmth (literal) and the fact there was a major university right in the middle of town.
“A few years older than me, Charlie was primarily in the friend-of-a-friend category, but I knew him tangentially, and liked him. He had a welcoming smile and great big teeth. He picked me up at my motel after the end of his part-time shift at Foley’s (department store), where he shilled furniture. It seemed he was also relieved to see a friendly face.”
Maybe it was his easy re-entry to his hometown made it seem like a place where I, too, would be welcomed. No real research was done – I just got a very nice vibe from the time spend there.
It was my first time (first of many now) in Austin and I also had an internet “friend” I was to meet who was going to show me around a bit.
That really helps, when one is a stranger and doesn’t know where to go or even how to get around. The guy showed me Austin’s music scene venues, such as they were in 1996, and the nearby gay bars.
I guess I was kind of surprised that the gay scene in Texas’s state capital was so big, or at least, bigger than I anticipated.
Also, I remember thinking Austin was a really pretty town. State capitol, another huge university, rivers, lakes, trees. . . even a nude park at Hippie Hollow.
However, when the body runs out of ways to compensate, or the compensating mechanisms finally give up, the white flag goes up in the cheap canadian viagra http://www.heritageihc.com/articles/20/ eyes of their parents. The magic of Kamagra for the users: The medication is similar cheap online levitra to the magic for a man. If order cialis online http://www.heritageihc.com/options they do not work, other solutions include injections, suppositories, vacuum pump usage, and implants. Antidepressants, oral contraceptives usa viagra no prescription and medicines taken for heart or chest relief like amyl nitrite, isosorbide mononitrate, nitroglycerin etc.I even enjoyed (or didn’t mind too much) getting lost:
“Then I got lost jogging around what they call the “Town Lake” in Austin. It wasn’t a lake, but a wide part of the Colorado River (also, not that Colorado River, i.e., the one that created the Grand Canyon and that forms the border between California and Arizona, this is a different Colorado River). How could one get lost running in what basically was a circle?
“Even though I thought I looked cute in my little black running shorts and nothing else (it was at least 90 degrees and humid) it wasn’t so much fun just having the key to my car but alas, no car. Eventually, I realized I was on the wrong side of the lake/river, and crossed and retraced my steps.“
Though even back then I think Austin had started it’s growth – I remember thinking there was way too much traffic for these narrow two lane streets in town.
Of the three small cities, Fort Lauderdale was the one most obviously with a substantial LGBT presence. It even had the beginnings of a gayborhood, had a great bathhouse, and of course, world-famous beach and proximity to the excitement of Miami.
From my perspective at the time, I thought of it kind of like a “Palm Springs with a beach.”
Didn’t hurt that frisky fun was had there:
“Finally, after enough swimming, sunning, whirlpooling and working out, it was back to the steam room to see if anything had changed. It had. There I met Eric in one of those little inviting alcoves, emerging from a cloud of steam.
“He was a man of few words. However, what Eric lacked in the verbal department he made up for in the physical presentation: another 30-ish guy, shaved head on top of the most perfect little V-shaped body, dark hairy pecs and a delightful spider tattoo on one shoulder. “
I was sure to have even more fun if I moved there, I thought.
But I didn’t move there, or to either of these other two towns. When I did move, it was to San Francisco – a place I really did enjoy living in for the five years I was there.
Twenty-five years later, the only one of these three towns still left on my internal “maybe move there someday” list is Tucson. Austin’s too big, Fort Lauderdale is, well, in Florida. No thank you. Not that I’ve made any decisions to go anywhere. But I do think about it a lot, and run the numbers.
Life has changed in the past 25 years. There’s probably dozens of things I did in 1996 – the year I took the Wanderslut 1996 road trip – that I don’t do in 2021.
Off the top, here are five of these things:
I have a bunch of photos from that road trip. Without exception, I took them with a real camera. I’m painfully aware of this because every time I want to illustrate something from that trip, I have to scan an old print because they’re not digital.
I still have a great camera that takes awesome photos, but the truth is I don’t use it that much. Like most people, I suppose, I use the path of least resistance, which, of course, is my smart phone. It’s also a great camera.
For as long as I can remember, there’s been the gay “gym requirement.” The expectation that any interest by an attractive male in one’s direction was directly proportionate to the time one spent in the gym.
This is ridiculous, not to mention exhausting. Yet I dutifully followed this “requirement” for decades. Eventually, age catches up with everything. Also, I discovered I enjoyed other forms of exercise more than lifting weights (including hiking, biking, yoga) – especially things I could do out in the fresh air and sun.
Since the pandemic began and the subsequent addition of workout equipment for my home, I often wonder what the point is in going to the actual gym, even a few times a week, still having to deal with crowds, waits, traffic and parking. I could so easily set up a mini-gym in a corner of my apartment for comparatively little investment.
Stay tuned on that! But in 1996, really, I went. I showed up. Every. Single. Day.
I used to have a bunch of subscriptions – Premiere, GQ, Out, Time, Daily Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Spy – and more – that dovetailed with my work in public relations/publicity. I loved reading the mags and thumbing through them.
Honestly I never thought I’d be one to prefer the screen to actual paper, like so many futurists predicted. I swore I’d resist. I did, for awhile. But inevitably, the convenience and immediacy of digital was a lure I couldn’t resist.
For those that survived, I still read them online, of course. I do miss turning the pages and discovering something, though.
If you can even find one! It’s another loss, for sure, because there was always the chance of a great discovery which is not as likely to happen with algorithm-mediated browsing on sites like Netflix.
Erectile Dysfunction (ED) is one of the most common purchase viagra slovak-republic.org sexual conditions in today’s time. So it is possible, but you have to break out repeatedly. viagra prices canada Using that analogy you can see how important it is to look again at my old certainties, because that’s the way we continue writing viagra buy uk new endings to our old stories. But, their days have passed and now the new kinds of viagra 25 mg are in the market.What the algorithms fail at is the human possibility of discovering a totally new interest – something you see from the corner of your eye that you think you might like – randomly, not based on any previous behavior. So we’ve lost that.
I miss the Friday night ritual of going (with my boyfriend at the time) to the various video stores to stock up on regular movies as well as gay porn for the weekend. Now I scroll Netflix, HBO, Amazon, GayHotMovies, what have you, alone in my living room.
It’s certainly more convenient, but I’m not sure I’d call it better.
When I got sober and stopped drinking any kind of alcohol in 1990, my “drink of choice” became diet root beer, which I had always liked because of the flavor and the fact that generally it never contained caffeine.
It had to be diet because of the sugar and calories. I was going to be sober but I was not going to be fat.
I drank root beer by itself on ice. I drank it with meals. I especially drank it during hot weather to quench my thirst after exercise.
Eventually I came to realize that, in fact, diet root beer is mostly artificially flavored and is actually a chemical stew steeped in carbonation. I was convinced it also made urination more frequent and urgent, which I did not need as I got older.
So now I mostly drink water. Sometimes flavored seltzer-type waters, but usually flat water from the tap. Refrigerated. It hasn’t killed me yet.
Ok, I guess that’s 6 things. But back in ’96 I adored online chatting and the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) protocol conjured up way more interesting guys than America Online could ever hope to.
The thing I liked about it was that it was truly international – I could set up dates with guys from Europe and Brazil which actually then happened in real time and real life. Maybe it was my first sense of how the Internet would really open up the world for me and actually expand my interactions with humans rather than limit them.
Truthfully IRC is no match for apps like Facebook and Twitter. I believe it’s still available, however, and works on PCs (I use a Mac laptop). I used it daily in 1996.
What’s on your list of 5 things you used to do in 1996 but no longer do in 2021?
My obsession over working in Hollywood began when I was a kid. We were a family in love with the movies. My father, a film scholar and critic, wrote about them and taught them. As kids, we went to double features (that was still a thing in the 1960s) on Saturdays for as long as I could remember. Oscar Night was treated with the same reverence as any Catholic Holy Day of Obligation.
The impetus for my road trip chronicled in Wanderslut 1996 was a layoff from a Hollywood job. At the time, it seemed like the end of the world.
It was the reason I moved to Los Angeles. Officially it was for film school, but that was really just a ruse to find a job in the business. And find it I did.
The job I lost was as a Communications Manager (public relations function) at one of the Big Studios. About a year later I traded up and went to work for a well-known entertainment technology company as PR Director. I’d call this Hollywood-Adjacent, though the company had its influence everywhere in this small town.
I eventually left that company for personal reasons (cancer and its existential aftermath!). After that, I worked sporadically as a background actor (read “extra”).
But the obsession I’d had over working in Hollywood was gone. I think these are among the key reasons:
No, really, they do. They can – or at least they can get away with it – because there’s a line of 500 young aspirants waiting around the corner for you. Just waiting for you to abandon your job so they can take it.
Just like me, other movie obsessed people from around the world who had the same dream and moved to LA.
Even though I did end up working for a couple of “screamers,” as they’re affectionately known, I wasn’t ever abused physically or sexually, as so many were. It was more like the ghastly lack of support and training. And, at least at the yeoman levels, salaries were mediocre and there was not much chance of advancement anywhere unless you really sucked up or got lucky.
Specifically, at least for me, the Tech Sector. I worked this job at the intersection of technology and entertainment, and they were heavily influenced (as well as located near) by Silicon Valley and its values.
Which, at least at the time (late 1990s-early 2000s) including loads of inservice training, yearly salary surveys (to make sure you were being paid in line with the location and sector), generous profit sharing and even, in my case and at this company, stock options.
Plus respect – and I’m not sure how to put a price tag on that.
If you can even call it that – but that is a draw, an attraction, and it does have its day. I met and worked with many “stars.” I went to so many parties in the hills I started yawning at the invites. Somewhere there is a photo of me at a party on a yacht in Cannes harbor.
For me, these things were nice to experience, but ultimately shallow. I was never an extrovert, which really helps if you want to be successful in this milieu. At heart I’m a basically quiet person, and I value solitude and the wilderness much more than I do the glitz and noise (which you get a lot of in entertainment public relations).
One day I woke up and realized I didn’t care about any of it anymore. A chasm then opens up in front of you, demanding an answer to the question, “OK, what’s next?”
(more on that in future posts)
Honestly, I think of one or another of these common myths regarding solo travel just about every time I’m set to leave on a trip!
I firmly believe that if we don’t take risks in our lives, we’re just stuck on an endless and monotonous treadmill. It’s best to address these myths head-on:
Crossing the street is dangerous – if you don’t look both ways before you do. I think that while it’s true there is some vulnerability to solo travelers on the road, most of it is mitigated by common sense and trusting your instincts.
Say you turn a corner in a strange city at night and suddenly you’re thrust into the darkness of little to no streetlights. Common sense tells you that it’s safer to go back to the light.
Likewise, if your driving route takes you over a mountain pass and the weather report forecasts a couple of feet of snow, you should probably listen to the experts and go another way.
How often has your gut told you that there’s something off with a person or a situation? Listen to that inner wisdom! It’s there for a reason.
“Two can live as cheaply as one.” A corollary might be that “two can travel as cheaply as one.” Certainly sharing gas and motel fees on a road trip are cheaper if spread among two or more people.
I would argue, however, that you’re bound to save money when you’re on your own. At the very least, you’re only going to pay for exactly what you want. When you travel with others, often you’ll do something on their agenda that you would not likely choose if alone, and thus not pay for it.
So what I’d say is that it probably evens out – solo travel is more expensive in some realms, but you save in others by focusing on yourself and your interests.
It’s not necessarily cheaper, but it’s not wildly more expensive, either.
Being alone is not the same thing as being lonely. While I have had “blue” moments on solo road trips or other travel adventures, they’ve been transitory.
Feeling alone has always been more than balanced out by meeting strangers and discovering what these new people add to my life-in-the-moment. It could be a sex hookup (as in my almost-memoir, Wanderslut 1996). It could be a motherly waitress in an empty diner on a rainy night. It could be an enthusiastic college-aged tour guide in a museum. It could be a bunch of friendly guys on a dance floor.
Honestly, isn’t that why we venture out alone anyway? To find some answers – which so often come in the form of new people.
When I was a kid I really internalized the parental advice “don’t speak to strangers.” I think the opposite should be advice for adults: “Don’t NOT speak to strangers!”
“How am I gonna have any fun if my friends aren’t around?”
It’s all about the definition of “fun.” If you limit the definition of fun things to what you are used to doing with friends, relatives, acquaintances, etc., then you’re already handicapping yourself.
Solo travel requires you to get out of your comfort zone and go for the possibility of what might be: Going for a spiritually uplifting hike in the red rocks of Sedona. Taking in a movie on the spur of the moment as the only patron in the theater. Eating lunch at a hole-in-the-wall diner (that your friends would die rather than go to) because it just looks interesting to you.
These few examples are part of a world of experience – fun experience – that you will only know if you push yourself.
This actually speaks to your own insecurities (or MY own insecurities) more than anything else. (Maybe it’s only my common myth about solo travel!)
I went to school with a young woman whose last name was Campellone (pronounced “camp-alone”). When one of our teachers asked her, during a roll call, if she enjoyed that – camping alone – she replied with (I’m sure a well-rehearsed) “I have no choice.”
I remembered that because it was so funny. But that’s the fear – you’re only on this trip by yourself because everyone you know hates you and doesn’t want to travel with you.
The truth is that people will admire you and your “bravery” for venturing out on your own. This goes for the people you meet while on the road as well as the friends and relatives back home, who will often say things like “I could never do that, go on a trip by myself, I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
It takes a certain strength to blaze a trail and solo travelers should congratulate themselves every time they do it.
In my mostly-memoir Wanderslut 1996: A Gay Road Trip Across America my last stop before I returned to Los Angeles was San Francisco.
Seems appropriate as I write this on Gay Pride Weekend to celebrate Baghdad by the Bay, certainly one of the gayest cities in the world and one of my favorites, as well (and – I’m a former resident, too – 1998-2003).
You probably know that it’s one of the most expensive U.S. cities in which to live. Never fear — if visiting, there are loads of things to do in San Francisco for free – and here’s five of them:
Festival Days by Jo Ann Beard
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I guess it was Toni Morrison who said “write the book you want to read,” if that book doesn’t seem to exist yet. “Festival Days” is the book I wanted to read (though didn’t know it) as well as write, but as luck would have it, I didn’t need to because Jo Ann Beard already wrote it.
A tremendous group of essays (maybe some are stories, fiction) which reminded me how much I love reading books of well-written essays. Joan Didion’s work from the 60s-70s like “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album” are also books of essays and are what made me want to write in the first place.
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I haven’t written essays yet. Maybe I will. (So far just fiction, and one memoir.) But for the reader, these are what I’d call real page-turners, from the one that drew me to the book (an account of escaping a fire, the insanely unbelievable, yet true “Werner”) to the title story, “Festival Days,” which effortlessly weaves a trip to India with the death of relationships and a close friend, and so much more. “Maybe it Happened” is a terrifying account of a home invasion attack on a single person home alone – which does seem so real and raw it can’t be fiction. But I don’t know.
In the last year, I have remembered a lot of my dreams, which for me is a bit unusual. Maybe it’s the pandemic, but they’re infused with anxiety/longing about things past, present and most of all, future. I find that Beard’s stories often have this random dreamlike quality to them, and her gift is making a universe that’s so rich with the connections. Or maybe it’s because we’re both Boomers, the same age (if a detail in one of the stories, she being 8 when Kennedy was assassinated, as I was, is true) and there is more past now than future – and the awareness of that colors it all.
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