I watched a few different church services on livestream this weekend. I still can’t stand to go to a church in person, but I wanted to do something for a Sunday. So I tuned in. I turned on a livestream of a Catholic Mass to see how it felt. It didn’t feel good. There wasn’t anything wrong with the parish I was watching; it just felt unsafe because of what I’ve been through. I couldn’t quite get through the whole... Read more
 My former neighbor’s weeds were knee-high. I can’t even describe to you how much my neighbor, the psychotic old woman who harassed us for seven years, valued a tidy lawn. She used to stim back and forth over the same patch of grass for an hour with her mower, complaining, cursing, calling us names for not doing the same. She had the stuffiest flowers in planters all over her yard all the while she despised us for having a... Read more
I woke up in terror. This happens a lot lately. My circumstances are getting better. My car is working perfectly. My stalker is dead. I am no longer codependent to someone who was genuinely in need but then started using me. And I’ve discovered yet again that the thing that comes after a time of extreme stress, is that the stress inside you lurches around looking for somewhere to go. It especially floods me when I wake up in the... Read more
 I watched the throng outside the historic, and somehow redundant-feeling, Trump Arraignment in Palm Beach today. It was even smaller than the one outside his first indictment. I expect the turnout for the third and fourth will be tinier still. They were a sparse crowd of miserable-looking people, sweating profusely in the Florida sun; a newscaster said the heat index was over a hundred degrees. Almost all were white. Almost all were middle aged. I don’t think many came... Read more
 I went to Mass. I’m not saying you have to go to Mass if you’ve got the kind of religious trauma I have. You probably shouldn’t. It was probably a bad idea for me to go, but I wanted to, so I went. Michael and Adrienne sat in the congregation, and I sat in that little storage room off the foyer near the bathroom. That gave me a buffer so I couldn’t hear every word. I scrolled on my... Read more
 It’s not so bad right now. I haven’t been able to say that for the longest time. I still don’t know how to talk about how bad things were in the late winter and the spring. The situation with the Lost Girl got so toxic, toward the end– I was so codependent, so desperate to keep her out of trouble, so afraid of her abusive boyfriend coming back. There were so many desperate emergencies where she needed money right... Read more
 I woke up yesterday morning to find that the loathsome Reverend Pat Robertson was dead. I went to bed, having learned that the former president of the United States, the darling of white Evangelicals and American right-wing Catholics, has been indicted for seven federal crimes including a violation of the espionage act. Those were the bookends of this particular Thursday. People were reminiscing about Robertson’s dehumanizing views on queer people and women as I got up. In the evening... Read more
 On Monday, we went to the pool for the first time this year. We walked, because Jimmy was still working on the car I so naively named Serendipity, and I was too nervous to watch. I hadn’t been swimming in six months. Thanks to the car trouble, I hadn’t had a single trip to the rec center for laps. My arms felt floppy and heavy at my sides; I ended up trudging through the hip-deep water in the shallow... Read more
 If I had to summarize all the outstanding things I’ve been reading my fellow Catholics say about LGBTQ people and Pride Month on social media the past few weeks, they might go something like this: I am a traditionalist Catholic husband and father and this is my wife, Monica. We’d like you to know that all LGBTQ people ever think about is sex. They never think about anything else. It’s just sex all over the place. They have no... Read more
I was cooking Adrienne’s lunch when I saw the notification on my phone. It was my Aunt Beth, the aunt with no respect for boundaries that I told you about last year. \I have her blocked nearly everywhere, but I forgot Instagram. I barely even post on Instagram, it’s just on my phone along with Facebook for some reason. I haven’t checked it in months. The last time my aunt talked to me it was to crash my Disqus comment... Read more
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