Category Archives: Personal stories

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We were somewhere around Barstow when the drugs began to take hold.

Birthday Selfie

For some reason, a post on birthday needs to start with that thought from the immortal Hunter s. Thompson. The only other quote I can think of right now that sums things up comes from Keanu Reeves in River’s Edge.

You just come around here to eat our food and fuck our mother. You motherfucker. You food eater.

Hey, this seems like a lot of self-indulgent drivel! It is! It’s my birthday and I am going to indulge in some drivel.

Yesterday, I went around my neighborhood and passed out invitations to my birthday get-together and comedy show. At the end of my block, I talked to my neighbor, Peggy. Peggy has lived on Arbutus Lane for a very long time. She knew my grandmother, Judy. She knew me when I was a kid. I babysat her kids when I was in high school. When I bleached my hair at the same time, it turned green from swimming in her pool.

Since I got back, I have been back in touch with people I have known most of my life. One friend I met when I was three. Another friend came to see me perform at the Broadway Comedy Club. I met her when I was in the first grade.

As I get messages from people on FB from all parts of my life, one story popped out.

I once went to Mexico City to work for President Clinton. We had an event on Cinco de Mayo at the National Palace. We tried to get there by car but the traffic was too bad. We tried to get there by subway but the stops around the National Palace were closed (because of the event we were working on). Being intrepid advance staff, we hopped in rickshaws. At the time, the White House didn’t issue advance staff any kind of ID proving who we were and what we were doing. The security was dubious that the four people getting out of rickshaws in business suits worked for the White House but we talked our way in.

Or there’s the time my boyfriend and I got into a raft boat and hit the West Meadow creek and got swept out into the Long Island Sound only to require rescuing by the Coast Guard. It was midterm season in college and he was sure we were going to die.

Or there’s the time when I was in the Himalayas and we were trekking back and it started to now. We hadn’t seen a soul in hours and came to a corner of the path where we had to climb over a bolder and one bad move would have spelled the end. I did not sign up for this.

Or the time I moved in with my friend Arielle (high school). She played the soundtrack to Rocky Horror Picture Show so many times (over and over and over and over), her father begged me to put something, anything different.

Since your mother cast her spell
Every kiss has left a bruise
You’ve been raiding too much meaning from existence
Now your head is used and sore
And the forecast is for more

Memories falling, like falling rain
Falling rain

James

Like the kids in IT, I had forgotten about my childhood home until I got back here. Since then, it has been like a strange journey through the strange journey I have already taken. It’s all good.

While I was born in San Francisco, this feels like where my life started. So now, I am back where I always expected to end up. I have a few grays now and there are wrinkles around my eyes that weren’t there when I lived here before but I’ve been around the sun a few more times.

So, do come by (August 28) if you are in town. Don’t worry if you don’t know me well. And if you’re a little mad, you’ll fit right in. We’re all mad here.

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If you build it, he will come

Trump

This is the most personal thing I have ever written.

I just rewatched Field of Dreams. I am not sure how many times I have seen it before but enough to know large parts of it by heart. It has always choked me up because it is a beautiful film and I love baseball. My reaction was different tonight was different. For the first time, watching Ray Kinsella reconnect with his father, John, hit me on a very personal level.

My relationship with my father, John Gill, was the most important of my early childhood. I lived and died by what he thought of me. I was a Met fan because he was. I loved the Niners because he did. It is possible that I volunteered on Democratic campaigns (starting at age 8) because maybe it was what I thought would make him appreciate me. I am not going to lie. I am feeling a bit rudderless right now. Who exactly am I?

There is something that happens to you when the one person from whom you get your sense of self and self-worth rejects you completely.

It took years of mental and physical abuse for me to turn on him. I mean years. Even after he tried to kill me, several times, I wanted to go home to his house.

I took the hurt of that early rejection and I mummified it in a coating of anger. Anger is a secondary emotion, hiding something else. That hurt was so deeply buried that I thought my anger was a primary emotion. I had (and have) plenty of real reasons to hate my father. He beat me, tried to kill me, sent private investigators to follow me. He made me feel unsafe in my own head and when I had nightmares about him, I soothed myself with you never have to get married.

This facade fell briefly when I came back to his (and my grandmother’s) house. I found dozens, if not hundreds, of letters from writers he had helped. My first reaction was that old rejection he helped all these people and he never helped me. I went back to hating him almost immediately. How can you feel sad about his death? He was an awful person. He was but that isn’t the point.

When Ray reconnects with his father, I cried because that reconnection was something I have always craved. Something I have always longed for. Even if I didn’t know it. Watching that scene made all that anger and hate fade away.

You don’t forgive people because they deserve it, you forgive them because you do. This anger has been eating me up for most of my life and I just cannot hold onto it anymore.

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Goodbye, American democracy. You had a good run

Please note: This appeared on Addicting Info on January 20, 2018. That site is no longer working but thanks to the wonderful people at The Way Back Machine, I found it.

n 1838, Abraham Lincoln spoke to the Young Men’s Lyceum. In it, he warned that the United States’ fall would not come from abroad, as many feared, but from within. He said,

“Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.”

The actions this week, taken by President Trump, Congressman Devon Nunes (R-CA), Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), and others may be just the latest indication of how right Lincoln was and how close we are to the end of the American experiment.

People often conflate politics, government, and campaigning. That is understandable. The differences seem to become more without distinction every day. Here’s the thing: the agencies in the Executive Branch exist to promote the policy agenda of whatever administration is in power. Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) has different policy objectives than Obama’s. For example, the federal government’s thoughts on legalized pot have changed completely.

These agencies are not there to promote candidates or the political objectives of any administrations, as they seem to expected to do now. Trump has openly asked, why “the Trump DOJ” can’t do what he wants in terms of the investigation into any Russia connection. The reason is that they have a job to protect the Constitution and the rule of law, not Donald J. Trump.

This last year has seen unprecedented attacks on the American rule of law. So many times have people had to use “unprecedented” that its meaning has all been lost. By firing James Comey, forcing out Andrew McCabe and launching an endless attack on the FBI and DOJ, our president is effectively dismantling one of the things that is so special about our country. Our belief in the rule of law.Subscribe to our Youtube Channel

Now it appears, the Legislative Branch has become complicit. In years past, the Intelligence Committees in the U.S. House and Senate were considered to be “bastions of bipartisanship.” In both, no investigations were to be started without both sides weighing in. Nunes, who had recused himself from the Russian investigation last spring, ended that fine tradition by starting an investigation into how the FBI handled their Russian investigation without consulting Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA). Once again, that move was unprecedented, but does that mean anything today?

Apparently not because Ryan has said he is “letting the process play out.” No, this is not doing that at all. Now, Nunes’ committee will release a memo, he wrote about the Russian investigation (you know, the one he “recused” himself from) without putting out the other side of the story. PS. It is worth noting that Russian bots have been pushing for the Nunes’ memo to be released. It is also worth noting that changing the rules for how the committee conducts investigations without input from the minority should get Nunes booted from his chairmanship. Ryan is abdicating his main responsibilities as Speaker of the House.

Many believe that the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, will be the next to go (he was hired by Trump but ok’d the extension of the Carson Page FISA warrant). His replacement may either fire Robert Mueller or just make it impossible for him to do his job.

When we start destroying the foundations of our government (the DOJ is not alone, the State Department is also being decimated from within), we are participating in a kind of cannibalism. When our government acts only to get one side ahead of the other politically and we live in a time when each side lives by a different reality, how can anything positive come from that?

For decades, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union sought to weaken, if not destroy, the United States. Lincoln was right. They should have saved their money. We are going to do it for them.

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I stand with Naomi Osaka

Naomi Osaka

Tennis superstar Naomi Osaka shocked the world when she dropped out of the French Open. She should be applauded, not torn down.

Yesterday, I wrote this piece for Medium about Osaka and her decision. Would love it if you checked that out.

It is long past time that we started treating mental illness with the same seriousness that we treat physical illness. No one would ever say, “You have Diabetes? Just get your pancreas to work harder! That should do it!” That would be ridiculous. “Oh, sorry about your cancer! Can’t you just will it away?” No, no you cannot.

But, it is not unusual to tell someone suffering from depression or anxiety to just “cheer up!” I have people in my life who say things like, “I don’t understand how people get addicted to drugs, I mean, just go for a walk. There is so much beauty in the world.” Then they take a drag from their cigarette. Right, how’s that working out for you?

My experience in this area has done a lot to my life

For most of my life, I have suffered from depression and anxiety. It is impossible to overstate the impact this has had on my life. A lot of that has been because of where I put self-care on my “to-do” list. If it made it on the list, it was at the very bottom. So much to do!

Now, I take it all more seriously. I make more of an effort to listen to my body and to how I am feeling, eat better, try to exercise (it’s progress, not perfection!). I also lean on my support network more. This has made a huge difference for me.

We all should thank someone as high-profile as Osaka and remember, mental illness is a physical illness. There is no and/or here.

PS. If you are on Long Island and want something to make you feel better and laugh, come to Coasters in East Meadow on Saturday. You’ll thank me later.