An Acquaintance Reveals Her Emotional Behavior and I See Myself

So, there’s this woman I know. She’s more acquaintance than friend. I’ll call her Georgie. This is not her real name. Georgie is an…acquired taste. She believes what she believes and believes that it’s the truth. For instance, it doesn’t matter that she doesn’t know if the willow trees alongside the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. were cut down with permission or without. She believes they were cut down because the Orange Fool, as she calls the current President of the United States, doesn’t care if he has permission. So, it makes sense to her that he does whatever he wants, everyone else be damned. 

 

I’ve glimpsed a little of Georgie’s personality, but I was curious to know more. On a recent reconnaissance mission, we meet for an afternoon cocktail at a bar on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. Georgie’s a smoker so we sat outside at a café table after confirming she would be allowed to smoke. The manager on duty brought out an ashtray and gave us both a conspiratorial wink as he placed it in the center of our table. A comrade-in-smoking, I thought to myself. And don’t bombard me in  the comments section for the name and location of this rule-breaking restaurant. I’m not going to tell you.

 

Thankfully, the day we meet up is beautiful. A rare cool summer afternoon. While waiting for our drink—Georgie an Aperol Spritz and me a French 75—Georgie reveals to me, rather freely, that she looks at the world through anger-colored glasses. 

 

“What color is anger?” I ask her. I need her to elaborate.

 

She thinks for a few seconds then a smile relaxes her face. “It’s a murky greenish-gray. Like…a cloudy eye. But it’s crystal clear.” She’s eerily convincing. I nod, internally debating the conundrum of murky and crystal clear. “And sometimes, if I’m particularly angry, there are toxic-yellow flares—brain cataracts, I call them—that obscure my thinking.” I couldn’t help but appreciate her metaphorical prowess.

 

She further explained that she knows she’s probably going to get angry when she reads the current headlines on any given day, admitting that sometimes she reads them for the express purpose of doing just that. She said she rarely reads the articles attached to those headlines, choosing instead to stay uninformed.

 

She then tells me she recently began to feel ignorant. Not from a lack of  higher education. Georgie has a college degree, and I personally wouldn’t consider her ignorant and I tell her so. She clarifies that she feels ignorant due to her lack of knowledge regarding current events in the country, the world, which she avoids by not reading those above-mentioned articles. She does not like feeling stupid, her word not mine, but she has chosen willful ignorance. And you know what, I understand that. Sometimes knowing can wreak havoc with my own anxiety.

 

“I have somehow found comfort in my anger,” she says to me while lighting another Marlboro Light. “I can’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t angry. When I wasn’t playing some sort of victim role of my own creation.”

 

I ask Georgie to explain how she how she is playing a victim of her own creation.

 

“I’ve spent a great deal of my life believing that my perceptions about something are the truth.” She takes a drag from the cigarette. It feels like a moment of deliberate pause instead of a need for nicotine. “I don’t have conversations where I seek to understand why someone believes what he believes.” I notice the change in her body language as her hands become more animated. I hope the ashes don’t hit me as she gestures. The cigarette smoke spirals away as she exhales. “I don’t try to understand the why of the differences. I avoid them. Yet I have no problem recounting the actions of this person or that family member to likeminded friends with a woe-is-me tone in my voice.” She shrugs and looks at me matter-of-factly. “It’s victim-y. I can hear it. I can feel it. But I don’t stop doing it.”

 

I ask her to connect the dots between the ignorance and the victimhood. But before she can, a man walks by us playing music loudly on his phone, filling the world with his choice of music. Georgie turns to look at him as he passes, staring like she’s trying to burn a hole through the back of his head. As she returns to me, I can barely discern, “I hate people.”

Georgie fascinates, and annoys, me. But I don’t disagree with her. People are awful. Especially those who think the world belongs to only them and their iPhones.

 

She took a drink then began to connect the dots.

 

“I live with a lot of fear. Fear of the truth especially. I realize anger is a byproduct of that fear. And now I feel like I’m allowing my willful ignorance to mix with the fear and increase my anger exponentially.” Here she turned her face away from me and sighed deeply. “I don’t even know if I’m making sense.” She ashes the cigarette in the ashtray but doesn’t wait for me to respond. She makes eye contact and holds it. “I have lived with my fear and my anger for so long that I’m comfortable there. It’s safe. I know how to navigate the world.” She takes a final drag and presses the cigarette into the ashtray. It lies bent atop a bed of gray ash next to its stubbed and crooked sibling. Her exhale dissipates in my direction.

 

A breeze blows past us in that moment, and the ashes begin to disseminate proving to be as fragile and fleeting as I imagine Georgie to be behind her protective wall.

 

“I think I’m arrogant.”

 

She seems proud of this statement. She takes a drink so I do too. 

 

“I think my opinion is the correct opinion.” She lets that gem sit between us. I was nodding at her, a sign that I was listening. But I will admit I was surprised. I wanted to say Really? or Why? but kept my mouth shut. Thankfully, she went on. “I believe I’m a good person. I think about right and wrong, yet I don’t take the time listen to another person’s point of view nor do I create opportunities to do so.” She contemplated another cigarette but seemed to decide against it. “I struggle with empathy. I’m a rule follower and I don’t understand why people can’t follow the rules. I don’t like living in the gray area. It makes me feel out of control. Being angry and fearful seems black and white to me.” She absentmindedly took the previously avoided cigarette from her black-lacquered cigarette case. “I struggle,” she said, then lit the cigarette. 

 

The conversation with Georgie tapered off after a bit more bitching and moaning, a little more venting. She seemed to have done what she admitted she does. She played the victim. Before she left our table, she gave me a look that all but asked me to console her. I did. 

 

After I paid the bill, the waitress took away the empty glasses and the ashtray. Anyone passing by at that moment would have thought I had been there alone. All traces of Georgie were gone. 

 

I strolled along the sidewalk, contemplating what had been shared, and my thoughts about what I’d heard. My ear locked on the sound of singing. I saw three street performers ahead of me. One with a guitar. There’s a hat on the sidewalk at their feet. The closer I got the clearer the harmonies became. I recognized the lyrics: “I went sky diving / I went Rocky Mountain climbing.” I knew the song—“Live Like You Were Dying” by Tim McGraw. Isn’t it funny how the Universe works? Giving you something you didn’t even know you needed? I hadn’t heard that song in years. And I didn’t stop to listen to it then. But I could still hear the singers belting the chorus as I turned the corner to walk in another direction.

I share some of Georgie’s traits. I can be sullen. Why am I saying, “can be?” I am. And my expectations run high. The political divide also makes me angry. And there are things from my past that I know I should let go of. And my own fears make me crazy. I don’t want to be like Georgie. Sure, I think she’s a good person. But I also think she’s stuck, unable to move forward. Maybe by choice. 

 

The first thing I did when I got home that afternoon was listen to “Live Like You Were Dying.” (If you don’t know the song, give it a listen. I’ve linked it here.) Anyway, I thought about how difficult it must be for Georgie to be Georgie. I thought about my own issues. Silly, most of them. I smiled when the song’s key changed and Tim soared right along with it. I thought about the man in the song choosing to live. Then I sent my sister a text asking if we could talk.

American Politics: Whatever Happened to Class?

This cover is fake

There’s a song in the musical Chicago called “Class.” It’s a comedic lamentation performed in earnest by the characters, Velma Kelly and Matron “Mama” Morton bemoaning society’s loss of decorum and manners.

 

The fact that Velma is in jail for murder and “Mama” is the warden who will scratch your back if you scratch hers makes the song even funnier.

 

These are not paragons of society. They are a murderer and an extortionist, respectively. Yet there they are singing:

“Whatever happened to fair dealing? And pure ethics? And nice manners?”

This musical’s story was originally set in the 1920s, but truly, the action could be any time. The lack of respect for others and the deplorable behavior that these two characters are lamenting has never been timelier than right now.

 

In the current political reality show that is American politics—more tragedy than comedy—there is no class on the side of the Republican Party. Most of its members have crossed over to the dark side and should consider renaming themselves the MAGA Party. But I’ll just call them MAGA Republicans for now.

 

The de facto leader of the MAGA Republicans, those Fox-News-watching conservatives, most of whom also consider themselves Christians, is the wolf in sheep’s clothing that my Sunday School teacher warned me about.

He masquerades as a conservative man, a Christian, a savior trying to Make America Great Again, all while stoking the fears associated with Other and Different. He’s a dangerous man. Willing, without compunction, to lie to his followers in order to incite the desired reactions: fear and anger. He’s a revenge-threatening bully; a narcissist with hateful tendencies as ugly as his combover. And the speeches he gives at his rallies and press conferences often make no sense. There isn’t enough money in the Federal Reserve to buy this man class.

 

He has no desire to be courteous. His followers wouldn’t stand for it anyway. He, and they, only want him to be as nasty and politically incorrect as he can. The MAGA Republicans thrive on meals of mockery and disrespect, leaving the table satiated with ignorance. And blissfully happy. They have no desire to seek the truth, believing without hesitation—unquestioning—just as I was taught to do in the pews of the Baptist churches of my childhood. And if they happen to discover the lies aren’t true, they don't apologize for sharing and promoting the lies. Nor do they share the actual truth.

I recently watched John McCain’s concession speech from when he lost the presidential election to Barack Obama in 2008. The man held up his hands to stop those who supported him, disappointed by his loss, from booing as he began the speech. He didn’t speak negatively against Barack Obama. He commended him for “his ability and perseverance.” And admired him for “inspiring the hopes of so many millions of Americans.” He acknowledged the two had differences and that those differences would probably remain, but he pledged his support for the newly elected president and encouraged his supporters to do so as well.

 

A speech that started with booing ended in applause. It was a time when it seems Republicans and Democrats could negotiate their differences, find a compromise, shake hands across the aisle, work together.

That was 2008.

Now we have a fool that purposefully mispronounces the name of the woman running against him for the office of president. And his MAGA followers eat it up.

Sixteen years later, we are in the shadow of a would-be dictator. In two Obama terms and their subsequent years, how did we get here? In sixteen years, how did decades of political civility turn into January 6, 2020? How did it turn into the least productive Congress in our country’s history? How did it turn into name calling and demands for loyalty? How did it turn into such a deeply divided Us vs Them?

A friend once told me that Newt Gingrich, as Speaker of the House, was the man who used his power to inject divisive division into the Party line, cracking it by telling his Republican colleagues to treat their Democrat co-workers as the enemy and to have no dealings with them outside of work. Did it start there in the late 90s? How was that good for the country? For the People?

Back to the grifting shyster who has risen to power as the leader of the MAGA Republicans. He likes to hurl accusatory barbs at the other side, accusing them—us—of doing the very things that he and his followers are actually doing. He demonizes Democrats, Black people, Hispanic people, science, women, democracy, facts, truth. And let’s not forget how he mocked the disabled and veterans. He is concerned with his own power, not with the good of the country.

As for the elected officials who have brown on their faces because their heads are so far up his ass—Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, Lindsey Graham (to name a few)—they worship at his feet, forgetting all about the first of the Ten Commandments in the Holy Bible, a book they claim to revere above all others: “Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me.”

I don’t get it. I’m dumbfounded that we are here. I shake my head in disbelief. I continue to wonder how this happened. I no longer trust an American populace that could and would elect Donald Trump. Or any of the above mentioned senators and representatives. They are fucking with too many lives. For what? So women can’t get abortions? So gay people can’t get married? So trans people can’t get the medical care they need or use the goddamn bathroom that goes with their gender identity?

(Side note: No one is coming for their churches. Their right to pray. Or their Bible. Although in the 2024, maybe the Bible should be the top challenged book to be banned instead of Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe. But I digress.)

I leave the last word to “Mama”:

“Jesus Christ, ain’t there no decency left?”

Struggling To Transcend The Darkness

Yesterday was a dark day for me. Nothing in particular happened to cause the darkness. Unless, of course, you count the state of the country.

I woke up. I made coffee. I drank the coffee. I read Vogue. I was in a pretty good mood. I even decided to be bold with my eye make up: dark purpled-gray on the lids and a smudgy stroke underneath.

Without even knowing why, I just felt dark. I wore mostly black. And with the salt of white in my beard and the dark eyes, I had a vision of what it would all look like and it came together in reality with as much perfection.

The darkness of the outward soon seeped inward.

I asked a question and participated in a discussion about politics: Mr. Trump's Executive Orders, Senate confirmation hearings, Democrats stalling just to be vindictive or because they had legitimate concerns.

During the discussion I listened but couldn't help but feel like the kid sitting in Geometry class, not understanding, finally raising his hand to ask a question, and hearing the snickers of the students around him making him feel even more stupid because now they know he doesn't understand.

I know that these are my own self-imposed feelings of ignorance. I also know that my dread of each new move by the Trump Administration on the chess board that is our country's political game is real. I know that I shouldn't live in fear. But knowing and doing are two different things. I'm trying to understand. I'm trying to have faith. Both are equally difficult for me to do.

I couldn't shake the feelings of dimness that took hold of me yesterday. I tried to engage in other conversations. I felt the people around me working overtime to lift the mood in the room. I couldn't do it for myself, and they couldn't do it for me. I had spiraled down the rabbit hole where even Alice kept her distance. Too much darkness. I was alone. I finally realized the best course of action for me, and everyone around me, was to remove myself from the situation.

Later in the evening I took to Twitter. Searching what was trending led to a Trump related hashtag. I knew I shouldn't click on it but click on it I did. Three tweets in I saw the word "libtard." That's the word that I've noticed more and more from the Right since the election results knocked the air out the Left. It's a hateful word; demeaning.

I wasn't sure it was possible, but the darkness got even darker. I forced myself to close my Twitter app and then forced myself to delete the app from my iPhone.

We're living in a divided time right now. I am honestly trying to understand how the other side feels. I saw the progress that happened during the Obama Administration. However, I'm trying to understand how what I considered progress was not considered progress by Obama haters. It's so difficult to see another's point of view when that point of view at no point has even a hint of aligning with yours.

I can't understand why my being protected, as a gay man, causes so many such discomfort. I don't remember what I felt more of when the Supreme Court ruled on Equality in 2015. Was it relief? (I certainly was relieved. And shocked. I wept.) Or was superiority that people in a country so superiorly Christian would finally have to accept the Separation of Church and State? (I felt that too.) Of course, that ruling inevitably led to Religious Freedom bills being submitted over many parts of the country.

Fear and hate continue to be carefully taught. And they're thriving. They're thriving equally among the Right and the Left: two sides within the same country so divided that we can't even be civil with one another.

I continue to fight my fear and to try not to hate people who might hate me for the way I was born.

I know that I'm supported by some but don't feel that I'm supported by those from whom I'm longing to be held.

As I made my exit yesterday with Charlie Brown's rain cloud firmly secured above my head I said, "The next time I see you I'll try to be more pink."

Today I am trying to combat the darkness with pink. It's light-hearted. It's revitalizing. It lifts my spirits.

I can't watch the news. I can't read my Twitter feed. I don't even want to look at the headlines on Huffington Post. If I do any of those things the brightness will begin to drain from the pink. And if that happens all I'll be left with is the dingy brown of a watery puddle. And that's just one step away from the darkness, over which I'm struggling to transcend.