Key West, in Penury

"I'm not touching it." Jerry McGuire's motto against my varied efforts to penetrate and burrow.


Wherever this post is going, I am writing it 2/3's brain dead, but for the pedestrian in you, I enjoyed myself in group last evening, and if I was 28 years younger, would have lept off my chair, kissed Lance, kissed the archive librarian who I troubled with my arcane preoccupations, and the old man from from the Saturday half who said hello to me kindly, and the Camden group mate, though I would have left out the blonde. Call it the bitch radar. And there! This is what you say, was that so hard? Grasp these small pleasures. What is vengeance and a Valentine's Day massacre in comparison? It is vile, poor spastic, what you force yourself to carry, and your curiosity about Herlihy's demise is a case in point.

Allow me to qualify that all I am after is facts in evidence. In 93 I was in fact thirty and had no idea who Herlihy was, barely knew that Midnight Cowboy was Voight's signature vehicle, and I am cognizant that no one truly understands what motivates life taking, whether they involve Capone's pecuniary interests, or an aging homosexual who could not recapture the vitality of the Keys, and that even under the guise of Wallace's selfishness, and my anger over it, cognizant that his suffering was a piss in the wind, and he had everything I feel that I secretly deserved (and what is that adverb dear, secretly, when you bray loud and clear?), that these things are mysterious, and the intrepid academic has been there and back, enough already, all you have is indignation. True, but I am stubborn, and plow on with my own dialogical efforts. In David's case, the pedestrian can only point to the medical model, and that his clinical depression went off the rails, and yours has not, stronger in failure. In Herlihy's case I think there is more damning evidence, and that is what I seek.

Regardless of my militant stance, I pity the BSA, and while not sure I have fully digested Lillian's analysis, she is right that dodging is not a solution. Democracy may not be easy, to quote Obama, but when faced with the possibility that now something as pedestrian as your local scout troop will be hit with a gay rage scandal, this basically leaves innocence with no safe havens. Intolerable to idealism and honor that goes with it.