Category Archives: Personal Observation

Important History

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I don’t get political on here. I have opinions on lots of those things, but this is part of the place where I go to make sure I can get away from those things. I’m writing about this because it is of personal interest and it matters to me and to many who are dear to me. I won’t tolerate political nonsense being posted here. It’s mine, I own it, I will chuck you out. You have been warned.

It’s pride month. This doesn’t apply to me, but it applies to many family and friends. It matters. One of the other things that matters is knowing history. Where did some of these things come from? Can you dig a little deeper and learn the real stories behind things you’ve only heard about? You can, and you should.

Last night I took some time and I watched the documentary about a straight Jewish couple that owned and operated one of the most well know, dare I say important book shops and pornography businesses related to gay culture. The documentary is called “Circus of Books”. Yes, it’s been out for a few years now, but there are occasions when it takes time to get back to things on your list.

Check out the trailer here:

As you might have guessed from what I titled the entry, this is important history for the gay community and for first amendment rights. Hearing the story of the owners and the family they maintained while running not just a book / porn shop but also a chunk of the gay film industry for a long time was fascinating. The access was absolute since the film maker is the daughter of the owners. She interviewed her parents, her brothers, her parents friends and even some of the employees. It was shocking to hear how they fell into this business and just kept going.

Hearing the portion of the tale from the 80s and the AIDS crisis was jarring. It’s one thing to know history. It is quite another to live it, and have those around you die during it.

That was one of the things that leads me to a small point of criticism for this show. I believe the film maker pulled some punches because it was her family. Yes, she had the access, but I think both the portion of the story during the AIDS crisis and the ending really lacked… something. I wanted there to be more umph with the story or more of an emotional wrap up and point at the end. Yes, I think it could have had pointy bits about freedom of expression as well – but in all it was a slow watch. It felt all of the hour and 40ish minute run time. It left with this note of, “well, that’s it, the store is closed” and went to the credits. I felt like there could have been more.

Seeing the business itself, in bits and pieces, it also looked like an operation that failed to adapt. It’s not that a shop like that couldn’t survive, it was more that it would take an investment of time, money and innovation. Even from the glimpses in the film there were swinging doors that looked like one wouldn’t want to touch them (just worn and old, I’m sure) and the filing ‘system’ was a drawer filled with handwritten notes and pages taped to walls. It felt like a place that needed to change and just didn’t. Perhaps the owners were tired and just wanted to retire. It was put forward as the owners just not making enough money to call it sustainable.

Having said that – I still recommend it. Go and check out the history because it matters. Watch and see what has come before and who those people are. The show ends with the closing of the store, but I have gone out looking on the web, just to see, and the shop appears to have been sold / reopened and looks like it’s going strong with an online presence. From their site:

“Book Circus opened in 1960 and with the very cruisy Vaseline Alley behind the store quickly became the epicenter of the gay community at that time. In 1980 and through the AIDS crises it became the iconic Circus of Books, WeHo’s version of Stonewall. In 2020 it has been reimagined and reopened with the addition of Circus of Books West. Both Stores also feature The Gallery @ Circus, an upscale gallery representing LGBTQ+ artists.”

There is history, and there is hope. That’s a great message for Pride Month.

Unispired

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This is when the real work of writing happens. When there’s no muse. There’s not a ‘special thing’ going on or any sort of ‘hey – look at the shiny distraction’ moments.

Putting words on a page isn’t an easy thing… or more correctly it’s not an easy thing to do well. Like any other muscle, the ability to write efficiently and effectivly requires practice. Anyone can splash words acorss the empty screen, but it’s a challenge to create.

I’m certain I’ve talked aobut this before, but I will again because that post was likely lost here (but my irritation clearly was not). There was a time when I was reading the ‘paper’. Not technically on paper anymore, but same idea. There was a column – written by a PAID columnist – that basically said “I’ve got nothing to say” in about 500 words or so. It was infuriating. That’s absolutely terrible – a columnist holding a position and potentially bumping some other important story and having NOTHING to say, and writing exactly that.

So, as a writer striving to be an author of a published novel (someday), this is where the work is. There’s no muse here. Just a blank page looking for more words in the story.

There is work in progress, but writing there means not neccessarily writing here. We shall see how it all shakes out…

What do you do when you’re not feeling inspired? How do you push past it?

Getting Away

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I absolutely recommend taking whatever chances you can to go someplace new. Travel, see things, meet people and experience what a new place has to offer. I understand the trip my family took isn’t something everyone could afford to do, but this applies to any sort of travel. IF you have the chance, go.

We’ve taken two trips recently – both of them out of the country.

Our first trip was thanks to dear friends who invited us along to Niagara Falls when the eclipse happened. The weather wasn’t great and we didn’t really get to see the eclipse, but the trip itself was worth the effort. We got to see a true natural wonder and spend time with friends. There were very few time commitments and allowed us to just go and enjoy time away.

Our second trip, not long after this journey to Canada took us all the way across the Atlantic to Switzerland and France.

My daughter was an exchange student in France for a year. We took the opportunity to leverage her language capabilities and go to see some of the places she had been. We went to visit people we knew as well – our exchange daughter lives in France, so visiting her was added to the route. We flew to Geneva.


We stayed and toured there, then took the train into France to meet the host family where my daughter lived. Next up was the train across the country to Le Mans to see our exchange daughter and her family. Along the way we got to experience life less like a tourist and more like somebody living there. We didn’t go to any specific tourist destination, but rather took in various places and experiences along the way. We didn’t rent a car, we took the train. We walked and learned some of the public transport systems. We got to tour both the modern aspects of the cities we were in, and the older parts of the cities.

Cathedrals were two stops that were absolutely worth going to see. We went to both the cathedral in Geneva and the cathedral in Le Mans. Standing inside those structures, getting the true sense of scale was wonderful. It’s easy to understand how people would be in awe of these towering places and the beauty they delivered. Not major tourist spots. No planned tours, but absolutely worth the effort to go.

And that’s really the point. IF you have the chance, GO. Get out. See something new. Add weird things to the list of things you’ve done. Now I can say I’ve had McDonald’s on 3 continents – and I can say I’ve eaten actual ratatouille in France. Run the gamut, see all the places, and do all the things. You’ll be glad you did – and maybe, you’ll make some friends along the way.

Gaps and Dumps

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I didn’t realize the gap I’ve had since the last time I was on here and posting. I really wish there were a way to tie the things I post to my other social media here… that I understood and could easily use.

There was one, very early on and that functionality was taken away. I don’t understand how to make it work – nor do I particularly want to. I already do so many things I absolutely do NOT want to add “web developer” to that list. I really hate programming and program languages.

Yes, in the day job there have been more than one time that I’ve needed to learn LISP routines or some variation on visual programming or… I think the new one is python? I don’t know. I really hate doing them. They’re terrible and I am not meant for that kind of creation.

So – this is the ‘lump’ of things that will follow the huge gap. Hopefully the gaps will be smaller and the lumps less lumpy, but I’m certain I’ve said that sort of thing before.

At the Top?

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I got an email from Goodreads stating that I was in the top 25% of readers for the year last year. I’ve been logging my books on Goodreads for a number of years now and I’ve always had at least a passing interest in the tally for my previous year. When I looked back I was a bit surprised that I’ve been logging books on Goodreads since 2009. I didn’t realize this was year 15 for me.

Recently, as in the past couple of years, I’ve had a great deal of trouble achieving the level of reading I was previously accustomed to. There are a lot of factors involved there, but in the end those factors combined to stop me from reading as much as I really like.

2023 – 23 books

2022 – 9 books

2021 – 17 books

2020 – 39 books – this is actually a peak year for me

Being in the top 25% with less than two dozen books is, not surprising but a little disappointing I think. Not for me, but for the general statement that makes on how much people read (or more correctly, don’t read).

The numbers for 2023 are a good sign for me. I’m trending back up. I’m working hard at mitigating a large number of the factors that slowed or stopped me from reading. I suspect I’ll be able to meet or exceed 2023 with this year’s total. I’m not going to use a goal setting app or whatever – this is supposed to be a pleasurable thing. I should read new and interesting things and tell people about them because I enjoy it, not because some random app or goal is pressuring me to do that. I’m going to keep reading. I’m going to keep reviewing those books and posting up my thoughts and opinions on them. How many will I get to? Who knows? But I will have read a number of good stories in order to get there.

The New Year

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I’ve talked about my opinion of new year resolutions on here before. I made a resolution a long time ago to never make another one. Real change isn’t a gimmick tied to a date on the calendar. I’ve told the story about the old guys at the gym I overheard one time being grumpy and wishing the pretenders would just get over the fact they’re going to quit and get out of the way.

I related this to a guy at the gym the other day, and he had an interesting thought on the matter. Not something I give weight lifters a lot of credit for honestly.

He said, “Part of me absolutely agrees with those guys. There are going to be two or three weeks of being absolutely annoyed that I can’t get to a bench or a weight stack and wishing the quitters would do just that. The other part of me, the one who really loves this, wishes them all the best. I hope they actually stick with it and get healthy or buff or whatever it is they’re trying to do…”

It was so simple and positive. Yes, newbies are annoying and they get in the way and they don’t know the rules (or ignore them) and they’ll probably quit soon. But we shouldn’t want others to fail that way. Going to the gym to be healthy isn’t about winning some kind of competition. It’s not like they’re going to “use up” all the gym and leave none for others when they get there. People of all levels should be able to get in there and do what they do. It’s not like I’m some kind of record breaking work out monster. I’m there to do what I still can in an effort to stay as healthy as I can. I see people there who look like they’re 80 or older. I’ve seen at least two different folks with what are classified as disabilities who are there working hard at the parts they can work. Dude in the wheel chair benches more than I do by far (part of me wants to make a terrible joke about leg day, but I don’t know him well enough). I see a family that’s in there every morning trying to be healthy together.

So no matter how much I don’t care about the whole “new year resolution” thing, I’m not going to put anyone down for trying to get better. I hope you succeed. I hope you get what you need out of the change you’re trying to make.

I’m going to keep doing what I do, only (hopefully) with a little more regularity than I’ve had for a while.

Happy New Year. I hope your year is amazing and wonderful and all the great things you desire.

Driving

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Here we are – old enough to drive.

Yup. The Pretend Blog has been around for 16 years now. It hasn’t always been on my own website, but it’s always been mine, for better or worse.

These days the creativity is still a struggle, but this place contains various parts of my musings, criticisms, art and general nonsense. More than 590 posts in all. That’s not a lot when spread out over sixteen years. That’s about 36 per year (or around 3 per month) on average. Thing is, “average” took a big hit from about 2016 through Covid reaching endemic stages. There was a lot of depression and inability to create during that time frame. That lingers, even now.

Creativity, and the mindset that comes with it take a long time to recover when suppressed for too long. Much like muscles that have atrophied from lack of use, creative things need practice. They need to be flexed and worked out. Sometimes they even need to be taken out and shown off to others.

I’m going to consider it work in progress. I’m going to stick with it and keep at it – after all, I am still pretending people still read blogs.

Happy 16th birthday to The Pretend Blog!

All The Discs

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There’s a meme out there with a picture of Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan saying, “why of course, it’s me…”

I know that’s a hash of a misquote, but you get the idea.

Found it~

Using a physical DVD to watch a film. Yep, I know that guy, because it’s me. I’ve been one of the red envelope people subscribed to the Netflix DVD service for the past 12 years. It was an easy choice for me. Advertising and unreliable connection speeds meant I could watch what I had on hand without any fear of it failing to work or having the feel of a film wrecked by mid scene advertising… almost all the time. Yes, physical media does have issues. Yes, from time to time there would be a problem, but for the most part it was a fantastic albeit slow system. In all those years I can only think of a handful of times when either the disc was broken or didn’t work, and only once in all that time when I got frustrated enough to just digitally rent a movie when the disc failed – and that was because it failed about 60% of the way through a really good movie.

Now that system is gone.

Yesterday, Netflix DVD made their last shipment. After 25 years (for them) they’re done, and I am feeling a bit nostalgic about the whole thing. The discs have been one of a very few constant things over the years. I was able to pull down a PDF file, created by the Netflix folks, that has my history all packaged up and presented in a report. I haven’t crunched numbers for averages or anything like that, but I have looked at the list of more than 250 rentals I’ve had over that time (quick math, 250/12 = about 20 discs a year or just under 2 per month). I looked at the stats they’ve stacked up for me and wandered down the list of discs we’ve watched, remembering the stories and characters from all those movies.

It’s going to be a minute for me to process the whole thing, but I will miss it. That probably sounds weird, but it has been part of my life for more than a decade. It became something that was just there when I needed it. Recently the streaming services available to us, combined with a more stable internet experience and less available time, in general, have made streaming services far more convenient and my rental rate has fallen off. Sometimes it would be weeks before I could put together the time to sit with a friend or a family member to watch whatever it was we ordered up. Sometimes the streaming service would add the movie before we got to the disc. I’d package up the disc and send it back, eagerly waiting for the next one to arrive. It was there, and it happened when I wanted it to. My viewing experience was not subject to some vague streaming contract a studio made, nor allowed to change based on some other, unknown reason.

The best example I can think of to illustrate that off hand is Monsters, Inc. and how it’s shown on Disney+. My daughter and I sat to re-watch it the other day because it had been a very long time since we watched it originally and we were in just the right mood. We pulled it up on Disney+ and let it roll. When we got to the end we wanted to see the extra bit at the end where the company is putting on the play Mike and Sully improvised during the movie… and it wasn’t there. It was just gone. I was a bit sad, but she was downright outraged. “How dare they? This is unacceptable and look it up on YouTube right now so we can watch it!”. I think that encapsulates the whole thing. The nutshell version – streaming decided to revise history a la 1984 and the modern viewer simply slid over to another streaming service and looked up the part they knew should be there (legality of it all be damned).

So the service is gone, but physical media still exist. I’ll still be watching those, and definitely picking up my favorites in physical form so I don’t need to depend on some company deciding if Ponyo should be available or not. Yes, it takes up space on the shelf. Yes, it’s an outdated method for watching things, but it’s mine and I’ll do with it as I please.

Apparently the folks at Netflix were feeling a bit nostalgic as well. They captured the whole feeling in a quick video… now available from a streaming service.

Defection

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Back in July I had every intention of posting right away about an American soldier stationed in South Korea who had… somehow… gone across the DMZ to the North Korean side of the line. It felt like it was the sort of thing that I could comment on, and wanted to get it out there in some form of timely manner. There was also the idea of recognizing armistice day and giving a little bit of history. Clearly, given the dearth of actual posts over the summer months that didn’t happen, but that actually makes this post hit harder.

A little background. Back in the early 90s I was in the army. It was a single ‘tour’. I didn’t reenlist and got out when my contract was up. I don’t consider myself a particularly good soldier, nor do I believe I should use my status as a veteran for any kind of advantage. I signed up and did my thing and got out. The luckiest part of my entire military life was not being sent to the desert like so many of my friends (Gulf War time). One thing I did do was a year in South Korea. I left the US and headed to Camp Hovey, around ten miles from the DMZ. It was called a dependent restricted tour (no families) and generally meant spending that year with a bunch of dudes. The male to female soldier ratio was about 18 to 1. There were many, many off duty rounds of drinks and more than a little fighting.

While I was there I learned. I saw things I had never known of, participated in things I had never done before and it became part of the life changing thing that was my military service. One day during my year there I pulled on my full dress uniform and went on a tour to see the DMZ. It was a surreal experience. I got my photo taken inside one of the buildings on the north side of the line. There was a great deal of tension. We were given strict orders not to gesture, make faces or otherwise make any sort of noise or motion that would give the north something they could use for propaganda purposes. I asked when was the last time anyone had actually taken a shot across the line, thinking in my naive way that the answer would be in the 1950s. The corporal leading the tour said, “Two weeks ago. Did you see it on the news?” I shook my head no. He continued, “Then it didn’t happen… did it?” with the sort of emphasis that I inferred to mean, NO, indeed, nothing of the sort would possibly happen.

Yes, that's me on the North side.


For emphasis, the ‘shooting’ part of this war was supposed to have stopped back in 1953. About 40 years before I was standing there. As I stated, it’s a bit surreal.

Fast forward to 2023. For those of you not catching the math, that’s 30 years after my trip there. Guess what? Nothing has changed.

That’s right. Nothing has changed. At the 70 year mark there are still people willing to shoot at each other for things that went on during their grandparents’ lives. It’s not like the veterans from that war are going to be standing out there – it will be the 20 somethings in the military today. The saddest part is, the kids on the US side probably didn’t even get a full lesson on the conflict. That makes the ‘running across the line’ that much sadder.

When I said the story hits harder now? That soldier from the US who ‘defected’ or whatever? That was July 19th. It’s September as of this writing – almost a full 2 months later. Have you heard any more about him? Is it still a headline thing?

No. And it won’t be. That kid is gone. IF he comes back, and I think that’s highly unlikely, he will be physically damaged from his ordeal and you will be able to see it. He won’t be the same in his thought process either, though that will likely be harder to see.

It’s been 70 years. Why aren’t we teaching more about what is happening there? What will it take to get people to change their minds?

Some history:

Recognizing “National Korean War Veterans Armistice Day” – July 25, 2023

Seventy years ago on July 27, 1953, the Korean War Armistice was signed. This ended fighting between the parties and left the boundary between North and South Korea at approximately the same location as when the war began a little over three years before.

A look at the numbers:

  • Over 1.8 million American troops were sent to fight in South Korea
  • 36,000 Americans lost their lives
  • 100,000 came home with injuries from the result of the war
  • 7,500 men and women who still remain missing in action

For reasons that we can only speculate, Korean War Veterans never had victory parades or welcome-home celebrations. They simply came home and were expected to pick up where they left off before they went off to war. Some speculate that there was no celebration because there was no victory, or perhaps the American people were tired of war, this being so close to the end of WW2, and were ready to move on. Or maybe they did not see the importance of war in some far-off land that no one had heard of before June 1950 when North Korea invaded South Korea. Regardless, the Korean War deserves a day of recognition.

By tradition, on July 27th every year, the President of the United States issues a proclamation declaring the day National Korean War Veterans Armistice Day. If you know a Korean War Vet, your father, uncle, aunt, or maybe even a coworker, please thank them for their service. They deserve recognition for their sacrifice.

The Weight of Emptiness

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Sometimes, the most challenging thing to get past is the blank space where your creativity lived. I was reviewing my posts here and realized it’s been about 2 months since I posted. I’d looked at my site and all the things associated with it many times during those weeks between the last post and this one, and every time there was this weight.

How do you deal with the lack? Do you create yet another post filled with reasoning and bargaining and excuses? Do you just go on as if nothing has happened? Do you make radical changes and put that forward as a reason?

In the end, I don’t suspect it matters much. I don’t have many (read ‘any’) fans. I have friends, but none actually comment on what goes up here or doesn’t go up here. I’m genuinely uncertain most days why I keep this site. I suppose that will be something I need to consider moving forward.

Things will pop back up here. There will be more posts. Maybe changes are coming… we’ll see.