Parting the Sea Change

When I quiz myself, I find I'm a ridiculously, almost embarrassingly simple creature.

It's basically a bunch of plain drives about our kids, my marriage, my family, food, friends, shelter, health, and a bit of media entertainment thrown in. I hope to help our children become healthy, happy and ethical adults, and to, say, build Lego homes with them. I want a strong marriage and, when I kiss my husband goodbye in the morning, to know that I'll lay next to him to watch TV at night. I want nice meals in a comfortable home, and to count on Sunday dinner with my parents. I hope and want to treat others how I want to be treated and I want to be treated fairly. I want to have a long dinner with a good friend once in a while, and a stimulating chat with colleges. I want to conduct research that finds a use in another's life. Finally, I want our garden to produce a carvable pumpkin next year, damn it.

And I'm doing well at meeting all that; it really doesn't take much to punch my happy buttons. Pumpkins and some aspects of parenting aside, getting what I want out of life is not a complicated matter, and I'm grateful for the simplicity in my build. I think it saves me a lot of the grief I see in some of my extended family.

Even for the big questions, I'm nearly never put in a knot. I'm comfortable with the price of admission, with death, as long as it comes after seeing our boys into adult hood and, I hope, parenthood. I'm comfortable having any echo of any effect from my life swallowed up by infinity; I still fell in love, I still crumbled at first sight of our boys, and I still tucked them in all these many night. To me, life means what it says, and I'm more than happy to live with what my life has 'said', mistakes included, while I can.

But there's this other, complicated world of considerations, one that does make me uncomfortable and does cause stress. It is in fact the sole cause of stress in my life. I imagine, if I were to flesh out this metaphor, this world would kind of look like Tina Turner's Barter Town, though gayer, if possible. This place is haunted by politicians, preachers, magic, demons, angels, Elton John and such. There, friends become enemies, people can hardly see each other, and cats sleep with dogs but then feel really really bad about it.

People there want to mess with the simple world; they can't help it. People there want to demean my family, legally degrade us and limit our rights in a way they would not tolerate, all for very complicated reasons most of which have nothing to do with them being bad people; some even want me dead and have told me so. I've watched gay men go insane and to their graves living fully in that world. Gallows humor aside, that has left a mark and an urgency in me. So, no matter how much I want to (and I've tried to) keep in the simpler world, I've both a practical, personal purpose in the defense of my home and a larger obligation to keep a foot in the other gay world, regardless of the fact that battle fields aren't known for their safe or sanitary conditions.

On the other hand--and here's my problem--I don't want to get too entangled.

In short, as I've long ago expressed and put off, I really hope to separate the two worlds as much as possible. So from here on out, I really am hijacking my own blog, honest this time. This blog is now for me to go on about what I love to go on about, my family. The other blog, the blog at isocrat.org (a site in seemingly perpetual state of almost readiness), is now for me (and others) to go on about what I feel like I should go on about, the issues surrounding the GLB and T, and maybe even Q... or some other, heretofore undiscovered letter in the gay community. I hope to see familiar faces there, but absolutely understand if a person prefers the simpler world to the other.

Sure, it will be impossible to keep the worlds from mingling--there will be times when the politics are too local and the effects too close to home---but I'm giving it a shot.