It’s been a looooooong time.
What is it my grandmother always lamented?
“I don’t know where the time goes”.
Well, she was more than a little nuts, so I don’t know if she could read a calendar.
Well, I kinda do know where the time went, and where my energy was expended.
We sold our house in Southern Florida and, in doing so, finally escaped possibly the worst, most disagreeable and confrontational neighbor ever charted in historical documents. Everyone has, or had, a crappy person or family living next door. Their yard is especially unkempt…they throw parties late into the night…they park rusty, unlicensed heaps with three wheels at the curb…unsupervised children routinely wander on to your property. We’ve not been exempt. We’ve dealt with inconsiderate, loud and disrepectful folks.
Backstory is warranted. After relocating to Fort Lauderdale, we were greeted by this female neighbor with “I hope your realtor told you that the former owner blew her brains out in the guest bathroom”. Yes, we knew. Every house has tragedy, and this was one especially sad: she actually rented a portion of the house, worked as a server at a nearby buffet and had been notified of deportation. She chose suicide. But our grinning neighbor, in a terry tank top that did nothing for her pendulous bosom, chose the most reductive way to summarize it and it also stunk of “Gotcha!!” as in “Oh, did your realtor NOT disclose that?”
Within weeks, the first complaint came. Our pool filter was “too loud” and was keeping her up at night. Could we lower its volume? We replied that pool equipment has no such control. It was brand-new, not malfunctioning and well within noise volume levels permitted by the city *yes, we took multiple readings). After that, they were reliable and swift. Motion-detector lights, mounted for security and specifically directional toward OUR home, were disorienting her; a voice mail told us she felt as though “aliens were landing” in her yard. On and on it went. We just wanted it, like a blender full of stones, to stop. I told her to quit addressing me, that I would not engage, so she turned to Greg, texting him in the dead of night to tell him people were on our roof…that someone had played the theme from ‘Halloween’ into her cat door…that an inspector had found piles of human feces and decapitated iguanas on her own roof.
You kinda get it, right? Hers was a toxic salad of of abject loneliness, isolation, mental health issues and what we think might have been excessive use of alcohol/prescription medication, heavily dressed with envy and resentment. Putting the FOR SALE sign up filled me with glee, yet knowing the new owners are probably the target of her venom bring me no joy.
We ventured to New York for theatregoing, catching up with friends,not knowing that this little thing called COVID-19 would happen, upending Broadway until at least early 2021. We regard this trip with great melancholy. Isn’t hindsight always so perfect? The places we would have visited, cafes we would have lingered in, the simple act of walking down 44th…we would have savored every step.
We — and three confused and pissy cats — moved across the country over almost 6 days to Southern California, to Rancho Miragem, CA. My general takeaway: Texas is very large and yet offers nothing of visual interest…Alabama and Mississippi were precisely what I thought they’d be, with one gas station even bearing front door signage declaring that masks WERE NOT welcome inside, FORBIDDEN…New Orleans is the only interesting part of Louisiana…and Arizona needed a good moisturizer.
All of the rights of my literary works were finally wrestled away from the thieves known as Dreamspinner Press and a new publisher, JMS Books, embraced my catalog. It was quite gratifying to have one's work found to have enough value for 2nd editions…especially after the ongoing drama at Dreamspinner Press.
For those who don’t know, Dreamspinner — an LGBTQ+ publisher — has been swamped by financial difficulties and startling management missteps, which include delaying or non-payment of royalties to dozens of their stable of authors. Because of this financial quagmire, authors rapidly left the imprint — authors with far larger fan bases than mine, like Rick Reed and Tj Klune — and rightfully demanded their rights back due to breach of contract. I am horrified for those wronged authors literally in danger of losing their home, or missing another car payment, or going without prescribed medication, because they are owed thousands of dollars. It’s a complicated chronology and would bore the shit out of most people, but the bottom-line is this: any royalties due an author should have been escrowed and untouchable, then fully distributed per the contract. It should NOT, as they explain, have been used to “grow” the business, to broaden distribution, to explore new digital avenues. That is what THEIR profit is for, not the money due authors, nor did they ask permission to use “our money” to invest in “their company”. What they did amounts to creative theft and their contrition, from weekly E-mails to authors that contain false or vague detail, seems non-existent. I am thrilled I was able to soar beyond this revolting mess and that my work is not in any way encumbered by the intricate legal implications of some of this.
Black Lives seemed to matter less, and then they mattered More. A fractured country began to break completely apart into irreperable shards.
COVID-19 strengthened its python-like grasp.
I discovered a Snapchat app of a genderless, wizened face and became obsessed with it.
I continued work on ‘Silver’, my proposed TV series for a network unfettered by conventional broadcast standards (think Netflix, Amazon). I generated query letters for ‘Silver’, only to discover that most production companies and even agents are terrified of plagiarism charges and refuse to even read a pitch (that’s what a one-or-two sentence summary is called by the industry).
And now it’s mid-Summer. It was over 120 degrees in Palm Springs this weekend. I have it on good authority that people spontaneously catch on fire if they step outdoors, so I have largely remained behind pulled shades, beneath ceiling fans and under shower heads splashing lukewarm water,
I truly believe that an author’s blog should, within reason, be a politics-free zone. There are so many rant outlets — Twitter, FB, Instagram, Message Boards — that it just struck me as tired to also splash anti-Trump invective on this space.
But, with all that’s happened and how it worsens in huge increments every day, that self-imposed dictate has pretty much shit the bed.
None of us knows how this will all conclude. I hope that the monster currently squatting in the White House with the homunculi he calls children and the pudgy, white grifters he calls advisors are given the hook in November, but voter repression/suppression, technology tampering, foreign influence and general deception don’t generate a ton of confidence. I want to install one of those steel security bars on our front door, plant a mean-looking, hand-lettered CLOSED sign in the front yard (or sand) and ignore all of it.
Fuck those self-impressed gym photos I see posted daily by gay men desperate to do battle with age so they can compete in bars no longer open and on hook-up apps that reek of danger.
This is what being 59 looks, and it’s mostly exhausted, afraid and compliant.