Last night I went to a candelight vigil for another amazing inspiring strong powerful queer youth who took her own life. Mosey Diaz was an active member of Picture the Homeless - the first young person who ever attended one of our Youth Organizing meetings, an incredible woman who was always full of positivity and always smiling.

The vigil was at twilight, on Pier 45 on the Hudson River, which has such deep resonance for queer youth but also for all queer New Yorkers - it’s where the Pride Parade terminates, tens of thousands of us disgorged onto the waterfront, exhausted and loud and drunk and naked and proud and happy - or some, or none of those things, and a whole lot more besides. Global Action Project had organized the event - Mosey was active there, as well as with the Bronx Community Pride Center and the LGBT Center’s YES Program. Arriving at the event, it was clear from the size of the crowd that Mosey had been an important part of a lot of communities, and that a lot of people loved her a lot.

I arrived with a lot of anger, and a lot of sadness. Specific sadness, about Mosey being gone from this earth, about whatever she had going on around her that led her to such a terrifying decision; and more general sadness, about the world we live in, and the rash of queer suicides and what that means for us, what it means about our society, how it’s more evidence of the injustices that are fundamental to the structure of our world, how race plays into our sense of self, how homelessness and poverty exacerbate all these other issues.

But after just a few minutes, that sadness and anger turned into something else. Hearing so many inspiring queer youth tell stories about how they knew Mosey, how they loved her, how they feel terribly guilty about failing to respond to a text message or a Facebook status update “Like,” how they remember her non-stop smile, how this should be a wake-up call to stop the shade and love one another and really really really love them, and tell them they’re loved, and tell them they’re amazing and inspiring (there’s that word again, but what other one is there?), because you really truly honest-to-Jebus never know (because, of the queer youth that I know, Mosey was pretty much the last one I would have expected to take her own life)… standing there with our candles pressed together, watching the sky over the river turn purple and then darken, watching the spire of the Empire State Building appear and disappear through low-drifting clouds, feeling another October come to an end, another year over, all of us that much closer to the dark, my sadness and anger became something else. Something still melancholy and mournful, but also stronger and more resolved, more - yes - inspired, reminded of why I’m a community organizer, determined to support folks coming together to figure out ways we can fend off the forces of hate and oppression.

One young woman was pretty frank about the ups and downs of her relationship with Mosey, but she used that to make the point that we all need to do a better job of loving each other. Concretely, physically, through specific acts, through saying how we feel. “Look around you,” she said, “because at the end of the day, this is all you have.”

And that, to me, summarizes what was most empowering about last night’s vigil. We are all we have. The stuff doesn’t matter. I half-agree with the Buddha, about the world being illusion, about all things being false, about suffering coming from clinging to false things, attachments to illusions. But as I understand it, Buddhism includes other people in that - that much of our suffering comes from our relationships with others, from the lust and desire and fear and longing and grief and anger that come from our attachments to people. It makes sense to me, to think of the universe as illusion, to think of the cold and the hostile and the cruel elements in this world as components of that. But people are real. People are not illusions. We need each other. This is all you have.*

I had planned to take photos, but of course once I got there I could not. Our grief was for us, for the folks standing in the cold clutching Styrofoam cups that kept our candles from blowing out. For our community; not for anyone else. So this blog post is submitted without imagery.

* - I’m not a Buddhist, and it’s entirely possible that I’m completely misunderstanding this central concept. I apologize. As the Dalai Lama says, if there’s a Buddhist equivalent to the Christian concept of original sin, it’s fundamental ignorance.

Interesting new directions. Especially the angel/cylon in Zoe’s head (a la Baltar’s in BSG). This show needs to tap into its incredible Battlestar DNA/heritage more!

There is Weight Loss Happening
Jealousy Abounds
Drop ‘Em Like You Drop The Pounds

[my hero Saffie Kallon is on a VERY IMPRESSIVE weight loss winning streak. She wrote this haiku to celebrate. I think it's brilliant. I'm blogging it with her permission]

This cat hates haters.

For two years, in my hometown of Hudson, I worked as a dishwasher at a mid-to-low-quality restaurant. On Mondays, after work, I’d go to the bowling alley and buy a pitcher of beer and bowl alone until the ratio of gutter balls became inordinately high, usually after three games, either because I was exhausted or because of the beer. The place was invariably empty except for me, and the guys who hung out at the bar; within a year, it would close down altogether.

Now, on the spot where it once stood, there’s a big chain drug store whose name does not merit mentioning. Directly across the street is another big chain drug store.

In spite of all that practice - and in spite of the fact that my punk rock band used to go to the now-deceased Hudson Lanes all the time when we should have been practicing, which is maybe part of why we don’t exist anymore - I’m a terrible bowler. It was more of a meditative thing, a way to tune the world out, or some working-class gene kicking in and compelling me to bowl the way those zombies got compelled to visit the mall in Dawn of the Dead, obeying instincts and socialized norms that no longer had any real meaning for them.

Bowling alleys are following dinosaurs down the path to extinction. Or maybe Panda Bears is a better analogy. Because there will always be a few, kept alive in glitzy expensive places for people to gawk at. Last weekend we went bowling in Williamsburg, or Hipster Ground Zero, and the act is still every bit as fun… it’s just gotten to be so much work. There’s not a lot of places, you gotta make reservations, it’s expensive, you’re surrounded by twats, etc. The pictures posted below are from that evening.

WebUrbanist has an interesting photo collection, of abandoned bowling alleys from around the world. Oddly enough, I can’t find any solid current statistics on the number of bowling alleys in the country, and how that’s changed in the past ten-twenty-fifty-sixty years. All the industry reports I can find are things you gotta pay for. But maybe I’m just not a very good Googler.

So………………..

I’ve loved Nick Swardson for a while. His character on Reno 911 is one of the best, and his stand-up specials have been funny too. Even when I found out he was straight, I still liked him.

So I was super excited to see he’s got a show.

Until I watched it.

Two episodes in, I’d say the overall quality level of the skits is a 5.5 out of 10, with some as high as 7.5, but none that are amazing, and quite a few that are 2.0.

He’s said in an interview “I have this memo thing on my phone that’s packed with horrible ideas, immature jokes.”

And it feels like a lot of these came straight outta that phone memo.

I’ll keep watching, but not forever.

(in that same interview, he was asked about how come he plays gay so much, and said: “It literally just snowballed. It was just a random choice for the Reno 911 character… then Art School Confidential all of a sudden got greenlit, and I was doing Scotty Kangaroojus on The Showbiz Show—but you’ll never see him again… I don’t want to do any more gay characters. I just don’t want to repeat myself. I don’t want my MySpace clips to all be like, “Heeey, guuuys!” … it’s really just a personal, creative choice. None of my characters are gay anymore…except for in Chuck and Larry, where I’ll be playing Jessica Biel’s gay brother”).

Season’s weak so far, but HERE’S the show I love. Hilarious, uncomfortable, inappropriate, and then - suddenly - deeply moving. Michael’s voice mail to Holly is incredible.

My hometown paper (the surprisingly good Register-Star) just ran a solid article about the state of homelessness in the county where I grew up.

The prompt for the article is a forthcoming report on that subject, from William Moon, “the Social Services Commissioner of Delaware County, who has over 35 years of experience in the field.” On principle, I disapprove of this methodology - an “expert” agency bureaucrat who (presumably) has no direct personal experience of the problem he’s studying, developing an analysis and set of recommendations for how to deal with it. Unless he’s incorporating extensive, substantive involvement from the homeless men and women of Columbia County, I believe his report will have a lot of blind spots. But I like a lot of what he says, and he minces words only the slightest bit when it comes to the cause of the problem - rich folks moving in:

“For years there had been an adequate supply of cheap housing in the city of Hudson,” the report states. “In the 1990s, this pattern began to shift as older tenement houses in Hudson were bought by individuals more interested in classic architecture than in using them as rental housing on the low end of the housing market.”

And if Hudson takes this guy’s advice in one important area, it will be light years ahead of New York City:

“Moon does not recommend the county open a shelter, citing capital costs and staffing/support costs to run it that may actually increase costs per person…  “…homeless persons should be provided emergency housing in a congregate setting leased and/or owned by the county.”"

The “shelter-first” model in New York City has led to the creation of a big, bloated, expensive shelter-industrial complex - spending $856 MILLION last year, to house an average of 38,000 people a day. New York City is a very different landscape than rural Columbia County, but one important factor is absolutely identical: people want housing, not shelter.

…. massive amounts of perfectly-good delicious terrible starchy sugary treats, salvaged from the garbage.

One of our Board members, who spends a lot of nights in Grand Central Terminal, frequently comes in in the morning dragging a big sack of pastries from Zabar’s and Junior’s and Hot and Crusty and all the other vendors in the station, who have to throw their leftovers away at the end of the day, even though it’s in really good condition.

And I always say I won’t eat any. And I always do. And it’s always delicious. And it always makes me feel fat.

The first season of Rubicon is almost over, and I’ve been meaning to write up my thoughts. I’m glad I waited, because my thoughts after three episodes were a lot less positive than my thoughts now, after ten episodes. Solid from the start, but the first few episodes were not as strong as the recent ones. Here’s my high- and low-lights…

HIGHS.

1.Katherine Rhumor (Miranda Richardson): I’m such a sucker for a character who’s 40+ woman who is having to re-create her life. Especially when they’replayed by someone as amazing as Le Miranda.

2.Will Travers (James Badge Dale): HOT AS F*CK, in a weird way I keep trying and failing to put my finger on. I think it’s his lips. There’s something sullen and childish about them.

3. With a couple of exceptions (Grant Test (Christopher Evan Welch)), most of these characters are interesting and appealing in a broken damaged kind of way.

4. Truxton Spangler (Michael Cristofer): I just like this guy. I’m scared of him, but I like him.

LOWS.

1. For the first few weeks they were trying a little too hard to substitute breathy silence and meaningful stares and weird pauses for real tension… they still do it from time to time, but not as much.

2. Atlas MacDowell.  I’m sorry, but as a big evil corporation, this doesn’t cut it. We know barely anything about it. We’ve gotten no actual evidence that they’re bad… just that a bunch of roads lead back to them, but so what? They’ve got offices in Tribeca, for crying out loud. Of course they’re evil. But I need to see some more development of this.

A suddenly warm day, after a week of frigid rainy October, and I’m at work on a Saturday, and there’s Mister Softee, with his music off, as if he knows it’s past his time and he doesn’t want to push his luck.

Next Magazine has a great interview with my friend Tom Cardamone, and Tom’s brilliant as he always is, but the real eye-opener here was something the writer tossed off as an aside at the very beginning… the fact that Chuck Palahniuk is gay.

Wait, what?

So I went and researched it, and sure enough, it’s true.

Shit. Now I have to go read that crap again, and see if maybe I was dismissive of it because of all the hetero-testosterone love for Fight Club that fueled all the boys around me in college. I projected his fans onto him - and maybe not even his fans, but the fans of a movie made of one of his books, which we all know can be light years apart from the book itself. Maybe his writing is mimicking patriarchy so as to brilliantly dismantle it? I didn’t get a glimmer of that from actually *reading* him, but hey, books are half in the mind of the writer and half in the mind of the reader.

So… Caprica’s back on.

The season premiere was better than most of last season. Stuff is happening. Conspiracies. Assassinations. Whatever. The show just doesn’t do CHARACTER well, so as long as it focuses on moving the narrative forward everything’s okay. But good shows have to do both. And since it’s inevitable that this season will settle into another groove of “let’s spend five minutes of every episode talking about getting to Gemenon - but never actually going to Gemenon - and then five minutes talking about making a breakthrough with adapting the metacognitive processor - but never actually making a breakthrough with the metacognitive processor” I don’t have very high hopes.

If this show wasn’t set in the Battlestar Galactica universe, I’d have stopped watching by now.

One super awesome highlight: Meg Tilly as “Mother” was amazing… like a timid, awkward, dangerous lady pope.

… was far and away the most amazing thing about last night’s episode of America’s Next Top Model.

How did Tyra Banks suddenly get so much star power for this sagging, sad show? Matthew Rolston last week? Patrick Demarchelier next week??!

(photo by Christina Steel)

Last night I had a fabulous reading with Alexander Chee and Lee Houck. They’re both such amazingly talented writers, and it was a joy and honor to be reading some gay shit with them (the title of this post comes from the excerpt Lee read; it’s in his BOOK, the one you should go buy) If you’re on Facebook, you can click HERE for the full photo album from last night.

I read a truncated version of my story “The Last Sleepover,” which was published in the latest issue of Gargoyle. Here’s a teaser… you can buy the whole issue HERE.

The Last Sleepover

by Sam J. Miller

By the time I got to Hettie’s house, most of the blood in the seat of my briefs had dried. My watch said midnight. I crouched on her porch, hands in pockets, ear against the door. A pane of ribbed glass rang alongside it, so you could see inside but only make out light and shapes.

“Temperatures will continue to fall as the storm moves east,” said Hettie’s television. “Record snowfall tonight, so plan on staying home tomorrow. And don’t venture out unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

Snow covered me. I rang the doorbell and the weather man went dead. Soon Hettie came towards the door, ghostlike, a bright glob.

“Hello?” Fear smeared her voice.

“Hettie, it’s me,” I said. “Shane. Timmy’s friend?”

No one makes dolls that look like old ladies. Babies and toddlers and buxom Barbie businesswomen, but never the aged. Yet the woman who opened the door was a doll—a tenth the size of the Hettie I remembered. Could Alzheimer’s erase body mass along with brain function? Cold wind hit her face, and she flinched. “Hello,” she said, and smiled. “What an ugly night!”

“Can I come in?” I asked. “Timmy’s still at work. He’ll be along soon.”

“Of course,” she said, and reached out to touch my shoulder. Maybe to make sure I was solid. Coming to her door at midnight and covered in snow, weeping, hooded, my face bright red from windburn and weeping, scarecrow skinny, I could have been the Angel of Death. I’d never have let me in.

Hettie shut the door behind me. Her home still had the scent of onions frying in butter, like ten thousand pots of goulash across fifty years, but that smell had grown faint. Pine-Sol and baby powder and shit held sway. I sat down on the bottom step of the staircase leading to the second floor. I’d never realized what a miracle it was, that human beings can build homes that hold heat. I’d never realized how hostile the world really was, how those pretty twinkling stars can smirk at your agony. My mouth was full of blood. My throat ached from running. I tried to take a deep breath and collapsed into coughing.

“Are you okay, honey?” she asked from the couch.

“Sure am. I just talked to Timmy. He’s working late at McDonald’s. He said he’ll be home in a couple hours.”

“Okay,” she said. Her head nodded gratefully. People with Alzheimer’s are constantly confused by new information. They’ll believe whatever you tell them. “Why don’t you wait here for him?”

“I think I will,” I said. “Do you mind if I go upstairs and freshen up?”

“Go right ahead,” she said.

She listened to me climb the stairs, then turned the TV back on.

Hettie’s husband was three months dead. Her Alzheimer’s was so advanced she really should have been in a home somewhere, but no one in her family seemed to be in a hurry to come make all the arrangements. They lived in other cities; they had problems of their own. So Hettie was held in limbo, haunting her own house, kept from complete collapse by a half-assed home health attendant. She’d live like that until a stroke or a tumble down the stairs took away her last shred of autonomy. Timmy lived in Providence, or possibly New Haven, and I hadn’t talked to him in months.

(Photo by Marco Rafala)