So no matter what, for 15 days after our wedding, Ashley and I will be at The Happiest Place on Earth. And we get about five months to look forward to that.

Maybe it’s lame to spend our honeymoon at a place we’ve been to twice in the past two years, but if there’s one thing Walt Disney World excels at, it’s letting you do at little or as much as you want to do during your stay. For two weeks our toughest choice will be How do we want to be entertained today? 

I can’t think of a better way to celebrate us, newly wed.

Another thing is that she’s gone most evenings. When the person you speak to more than anyone else on the planet is suddenly not around as much, you notice. Like the other day. I had to watch our neighbors go through a break-up-and-move-out right in the middle of our shared driveway, and I had to watch this all by myself. As I sat there, peeking through the blinds in the bathroom, all I could think was how much more fun it would have been if Ashley’d been there peeking through the blinds with me. I imagine it felt something like when James Cameron watches his old home movies in regular old 2D: the experience was good, sure, but lacking something indefinable.

Everything is quiet all the time. That’s another thing. Though I’m sure my family will remember back when my brother and I used to make like we were Def Leppard jamming in our bedroom, it turns out I just don’t tend to make a whole lot of noise. I’m not the kind of person to leave the TV on. I might play some tunes, but I do it through headphones because my headphones sound better. Otherwise, reading and typing on the computer’s about as noisy as it gets. I would be shushing monks and librarians, is what I’m saying.

But without a doubt the oddest thing is being on the receiving end of text messages from someone working in the field of organ transplantation. Yesterday, for example, was this:

Going to surgery at 3!!

Now, I can imagine that there are some people excited about going to surgery. People finally undergoing gender-reconstructive surgery, for example, are probably excited about it. Nervous, but excited. But you have to remember that when Ashley talks about going to surgery, she means standing by while doctors removing organs from deceased patients.

So to me her text reads like this:

Me and a bunch of people at work are going to stand in a room with a dead guy at 3!!

Few will argue the necessity of organ transplantation more ardently than I; yet, it’s a good thing that she wasn’t around to see my face when I read her message. To see the courage it took to text her back with an equal number of exclamation points.

Today we had the following exchange:

Me: Our flight is booked.
Ash: Nice. In OR now. Heart is about to come out.

See? It’s already weird as hell. All I can picture is that dude from Temple of Doom being like some team-building-exercise leader.

“And so now I’m just going to let myself fall back and you’ll all catch me. It’s about trust, people.”

To continue:

Me: You’re texting me from the OR?
Ash: Yep.
Me: That seems odd…is that odd?
Ash: No. I’m not sterile so I’m not gloved and we have our phones to keep in contact with the office.

Well okay sure. When you put it like this it makes sense. So I figured since texting is okay in the office, why not sexting? Maybe it’s not the best idea, but few things work better to get me used to something than being just plain silly about it.

Me: Oh. Well then. What’re ya wearin’?
Ash: Scrubs lol.
Me: Oooh. Yeah baby. Papa like.

See? Getting into it a little bit. Trying to work my mojo just a touch. But then this:

Ash: Lungs are about to come out.

And we’re done.

Turns out I can’t have a conversation, salacious or otherwise, while I know that organs are being removed in the relatively near vicinity of my fellow conversationist. I never knew that about myself, so I guess there’s just one more thing to get use to.

According to my buddies John and Neil, this is fairly accurate. Neil says that really you only need that last panel, but, you know, leave it to Neil to say something like that. I’ll have to take the piss out on him later at the pub.

This comic is great because it explains succinctly why I’m not a novelist. And since everything else more-or-less fits, we only have to examine panels 6, 7 and 9.

Panel 6: Loyal Pet

Oh I have pets. I sure do. As I write this sentence there are eight pets within six feet of me. The problem? They’re all cats. And while cats make wonderful companions, they aren’t exactly the first in line when it comes to swearing oaths of fealty. So obviously before I can be a novelist I need to get a dog. Or I don’t know; I hear horses are loyal. Basically any animal I don’t have to worry would stab me in the back for a huge bag of catnip would suffice.

Panel 7: Neglected spouse

I  don’t have a spouse at the moment, though of course Ashley’s agreed to take the job. The problem is that she’s not neglected.⁽³⁾ In fact, she probably gets way more attention than she wants from me. And, frankly, if that’s the price of being a great novelist, I’ll settle for being a horrible novelist. Or even mediocre. I’ve been a neglected spouse in the past and let me tell you: the loneliest feeling in the world is when the person who promised to love you forever will still love you forever but doesn’t like you at all. No way is Ashley going through that. Not on my watch, not for any reason. So writing and I will have to come to a compromise on that one.

Panel 9: Years of boring hard work

Neil’s right, of course. This is the only panel that really matters. Being a great fiction writer requires an enormous amount of hard work and, ironically, it’s also the easiest thing in the world to not do. Oh work was rough today. Oh I’m so worn out. I really need to spend more time with my meth lab. Excuses are cheap and easy to come by, to precisely the same degree as bad writing.

It used to be that I’d spend more time writing than doing anything else during any given day. I got out of that habit in fairly short order and, truth be told, I miss it. I’m not unskilled – I’ll admit it – as a writer; I lack the discipline though. I can control many things in my life, but when it comes to sitting down to write I’m about as disciplined as Hunter S. Thompson’s rapid pet monkey on a bender in Vegas.

This is why I’m not a great novelist. This is why I’m not a novelist at all. I work on this blog to make myself feel a bit more like a writer and, while I love blogging, it’s an ersatz replacement.⁽⁴⁾ I miss the days when I felt like a writer, when I was part of a real literary community. When I sat down and did the work. Just as much as I miss the days when I didn’t whine about not being a writer.

And it is whining, make no mistake.

[I]t is important for me personally to go ahead and affirm that same-sex couples should be able to get married.

In an interview with ABC in the White House, President Obama said he’d always hesitated to voice his support because he thought civil unions would be enough, that he’d overlooked the importance of the tradition of marriage. I don’t know that I believe this, exactly, but I also don’t care.

President Obama, you’ve won my vote in 2012. Just let’s please do something worthwhile with it.

Today we lost one of them.

Mr. Sendak taught me that the Wild Things are just as real as they are scary. And that both qualities depend upon each other.

He also taught me to take care in where I escape to.

So to him I am indebted. I wish you well, Mr. Sendak, wherever the Wild Things find you.

And while it was all good fun, it left me with little time to just sit and chill over the weekend. This has become increasingly necessary as exhaustion – from either the fibromyalgia or the Cymbalta I’m taking to deal with the fibromyalgia – becomes a larger factor in my life.

So when my alarm went off this morning, I didn’t want to get out of bed. I hit snooze once and really really wanted to hit it baby one more time. I forced myself out of bed and, as I started making my coffee, heard the rumble of thunder in the not-too-distant distance.

My thoughts travelled right back to the bed. Because nothing is better than lying in bed and listening to a storm, letting it rain and rain while you fall slowly to sleep…waking later only to remain in bed with a good book.

Oh man. I wanted so badly to climb back under the comforter.

When it started to rain, I could hear it even over the noise of the shower. It was narcotizing, like a soft-noise lullaby, so I kept the shower short in an effort to stay awake. Even after I got to work, coffee in hand, I walked into a large atrium type area and the reverberations of the precipitation almost knocked me out cold, the way gentle, steady waves on the beach will steal you away. I could have sat down right there and fallen asleep happily.

Well, right up until someone found me sleeping.

And now it’s afternoon and my time is my own again and…the sun is out. I am disappointed. I was strongly hoping for a late storm, hoping to crawl back into bed, even all these hours later. Open my book and listen to the sound of the falling rain.

It is not meant to be. Not today, anyway. Stupid sun.

Mitt Romney is the presumed Republican presidential nominee – in case you haven’t heard – who actually hired Mr. Grenell as a spokesman for his campaign. For I believe the first time ever, I gave Mr. Romney props.

Bryan Fischer is the Director of Issues and Analysis for the American Family Association, a non-profit organization which promotes conservative, Christian values. Not too long after Mr. Romney appointed Mr. Grenell, Mr. Fischer tweeted this:

Mr. Romney of course caved to pressure from Mr. Fischer and the like and, less than a week after he was hired, Mr. Grenell resigned from the Romney campaign. This is very tragic in many ways – an openly gay citizen being denied a job because of bigotry, Mr. Romney once again caving to external pressure and flip-flopping on an issue – but I want to unpack Mr. Fischer’s tweet, so I’ll let you ruminate on the tragedy itself on your own time.

For starters, calling homosexuals gays is not okay. It’s like saying Arab with a long-A at the beginning and the emphasis on the second syllable. All it does it let everyone know pretty plainly that you hate. In Mr. Fischer’s case, we already know he hates so this isn’t news. But I’m not the kind of person to let hurtful language go unchecked so I had to get that out there before moving on.

Now we can get to Mr. Fischer’s logical flaw: If personnel is policy, then his message is drop dead.

There are two major flaws in this argument. Firstly, personnel can reflect policy, yes. But in the world of American politics, this is less true than in many other places. In politics people are often given jobs as a reward for some political assist, i.e. typically a campaign manager will become the Chief of Staff after the president is elected. I’m not saying it’s always this way and I’m not saying that the people in these jobs aren’t qualified. I’m merely pointing out that Mr. Fischer is making this logical argument in an arena in which it is perhaps least suited.

The second – larger – problem here is that Mr. Fischer is taking one aspect of Mr. Romney’s personnel choice and basing his argument upon it. You know how I know Mr. Grenell is good at his job? He’s an openly gay Republican political consultant. If there weren’t more to the man than simply being openly gay, he’d have been run out of D.C. long ago by his own party. Using this same logical flaw, I could say that, since the United States has had women as Secretaries of State for the past seven years,⁽¹⁾ our message to the pro-peace community is: have boobs. Taking one aspect of a person and judging and treating that person based upon that aspect is the very foundation of bigotry and hate. It’s at the root of racism. sexism, ageism, you name it. It’s stupid and mean and makes you look like an impatient, unthinking ass.

Now to the next point: I want to talk about this so-called pro-family community.

For starters, is there an anti-family community? Is there a meh, family, I could take it or leave it community? Are there people our there who really think the notion of family is hogwash? My history with my own family is complex, but I still recognize the need for family, the good that family does. Even many of the inner-city, hard-life people I’ve met and talked to – people who have no reason to be loyal to any part of a society that has forgotten them – would fight tooth and nail and hair and skin for their families.

My point here is that Mr. Fischer is setting up what’s called a false relational binary. By talking about a pro-family community, he’s implying the notion of an anti-family community. By aligning an openly gay politician against the pro-family community, Mr. Fischer creates this:

heterosexuals = pro-family
homosexuals = anti-family

This, in my experience, simply is not true. Part of the difficulty of homosexual life is the desire to be accepted – and the fear of being rejected – by one’s own family. That simply would not be the case if most LGBT citizens did not value family as an institution. This relational binary Mr. Fischer has created is a lie and does not at all reflect the reality of American life in the early 21st century. Furthermore, Mr. Fischer is presuming to know what the LGBT community values and needs, while very clearly himself hating that very community. You cannot speak for people you hate, Mr. Fischer. You cannot attempt to transmit their values when you’ve made no honest attempt to understand them. This is something a friend of mine taught me is called straightspeak, and you, sir, are guilty of it.

I have one more point to make, and that is this: every single thing that has happened in human history -  every single thing - has been the result of heterosexual pairing. Everything from Hitler and Stalin to Gandhi and Mother Teresa. Everything from Crocs and Reese Witherspoon to Legos and Naomi Watts. Everything from me to you, Mr. Fischer, results from millennia of heterosexual pairings and – for the most part – upbringing. Frankly, it’s not going all that well. There are some glorious achievements; there are some horrifying atrocities. There is absolutely no reason – none whatsoever – to believe that a homosexual family would create anything better or anything worse than eons of heterosexual families have.

Even from the standpoint of statistical probability, your argument is invalid.

I would suggest, Mr. Fischer, that you do some real research before you open your mouth again, but I know you have a job to do and I wouldn’t ask you to risk your and your family’s well-being. I would ask you, however, to remember that even people like Mr. Grenell have family, a family that, despite having a homosexual among them, they are still family, the institution you purportedly value and for which you purportedly speak.

A friggin’ Lego R2-D2!

Look how cool he is! I can almost hear him swearing at me in binary!

Oh man. I would almost trade every Transformer I ever owned for this Lego droid of awesomeness. Almost.

The other day I learned of this guitar in a circular I received in the mail that I read over lunch. Ashley and I had the following conversation:

Me: Wow. This guitar costs $6500.
Ash: Really?
Me: Yep.
Ash: For that price it should play itself. And light up. And make everyone around you naked.

Indeed. It should. I can’t even imagine what goes into a guitar to make it cost $6500. I mean sure yes some of that cost is simply Slash’s name, and yes of course it is a Les Paul. But Les Pauls – even good ones – go for more like $2500, so what makes this so awesome?⁽¹⁾

This is part of why I’m suspicious of what I call gearheads. I’ve noticed that when I talk about playing guitar to people they either want to know what kind of music I play or what kind of gear I play. I prefer the former.

I know I have an Ibanez electric and an Alverez acoustic/electric. I have an Ibanez bass. That’s it. That’s all I know about them from a name standpoint. I can’t tell you model numbers or the year it was made. I can’t tell you that it’s a cheaper version of x guitar. Or whatever. I can’t even tell you what brand of banjo I’ve been using on semi-permanent loan for a few years now.

I can tell you I bought the Ibanez because it plays very well. The action’s great. And it’s capable of both more of the Fender-type tone and the Les Paul-type tone. That’s what I look for in an electric. I can tell you my amp is a Line 6, but I can’t tell you anything beyond that other than it sounds how I like a guitar to sound and that I can make it sound sleek and pretty like Pink Floyd or horrible and incoherent like Neil Young.⁽²⁾

If you’re into music, you’re into music. You’re into whatever you need to be into in order to make the music itself as perfect as it can be. To me the gearheads are collectors. If you’re into owning a $6500 guitar, you’re into owning a $6500 guitar. Gearheads tell me about their amps and pickups⁽³⁾ and I don’t even know what else because my eyes have glazed over.

I don’t care about what you play. I only care about what you bring to the song. And I can’t think of a single song out there that would benefit from a $6500 guitar.⁽⁴⁾