Photo by Max Griss on Unsplash

Two Kinds of Real Life

One on-line, the other in my hand

I got a text last night from an ex-wife. I was told that I was going to be a grandfather. Then I got a call this morning from the wife of a good artist pal of mine. He is going in to see a cardiologist this morning for some sort of significant health issue. On one hand I have an older boy who refuses to talk to me due to some real or imagined boyhood trauma and on the other, I have a good pal who loves his boyhood at 82. Neither one fancies growing up, or, if they are aping it, they are doing good job keeping their partners immersed in the kind of strange glow that goes along with hanging out with Peter Pan, minus Tinkerbell. They are both facing down adulthood, which, I know all too well, is a real drag to have to deal with.

I pick up the news daily and scan for events outside the parameter of what the oligarchically corrupted coastals feed us. I prefer the international papers and even then, take what they give me with a fist sized grain of salt. Reading through the news feeds reminds of when M once asked me to make her crème brulee. I had found a set of ramekins at a garage sale while on a road trip, pretty things, not official dull ceramic looking things, but yellow, fanciful, playful. M took a liking to them and was in the phase of our love affair where I was advancing from being fondly thought about to possibly being lusted after. But for the moment she was lusting for creme brulee and so I was tasked to make something I knew very little about.

What is wonderful about making something new is that you can gather up all sorts of new cooking tools and kitchen toys about you, guilt free. But even more, you find that you can mess about on the internet forever looking up recipes and never seem to find two that are alike. With my head full of stars at the thought of being able to please my new friend, I went along scouring the net for what felt like days, copying down this recipe, then photocopying another, to the point where I had five or seven or so recipes to work with. I took the best points of each, folded them in together, and then proceeded to experiment, and in the end, came out with a fairly lovely dessert that helped to seal my fate with My Own True Love. Well, for the duration, anyway.

What this rich dessert has to do with my news gathering prowess is pretty much the same kind of exercise. I will take six papers or more, European, Asian, West Coast, East Coast, local and regional and then see how they mesh up, see what kinds of headlines they throw out, see what the biases are, and then, thanks to both Heather on my feed and the various commentators here on Medium, come to some sort of understanding of what is happening in the world.

Now, that is the world OUT THERE. There is another world that I occupy, too, one that has nothing to do with passports, escape plans and go bags. I am finding that that little world is as serious as the “real” world is. I am working through so many things right now that have nothing to do with the sordid dealings of Washington, of the manic behaviors of the great soiled one, of his minions, of the league of traitors to our country that roam the nation’s capital. I have no time most of the time to worry about that when my own personal housing crisis looms, when job interviews that were promised don’t materialize, when children, well grown, go on with life without giving two shits about me. I worry about gas, groceries, my health and the state of my mind. I consider all the things I have brought into my life just by the virtue of coming out, by identifying as transgender, by embracing this woman that I have been all along.

Yeah, there is the big news, the kind that adults in the room follow, and then there are the words, worlds and issues that I follow that can’t be avoided because they follow me, like a stray dog will do when you are a kid, the kind of animal you find tied up outside the door of the supermarket by the house, the one that you let loose and then it proceeds to follow you home, only to bite you later on when your back is turned. I am finding that the world that we bicker and worry about in the larger sense is easier to deal with, that I can think about running away from, but that when it comes down to it, I know damn well that I am stuck and will stay here till the black truck arrives, till they haul me away for speaking my mind, like they did to that doctor at that town meeting in Idaho.

In my hand I hold the keys to my life, fictitious as anything I could have ever wished to have when I was a kid. I, like my grown up child and my artist friend who never wished to grow up, all share a similar mind set. We all know what it is going to take to get us to the next level of the game. We just need to embrace that the cost of that next level is a serious dose of reality, knowledge, of self understanding, that, when we take it, when we get there, when we finally embrace that knowledge of self acceptance and adulthood, all the things that we loved about our childhood that we have carried forward into our adult world will all be gone. All we will have left are the headlines. And what a drag that will be. Love, Cat