Category: Nonessential Thoughts

It has been an absolutely beautiful day in my section of Los Angeles today. I went up to the roof for a while and enjoyed the sun and a very nice breeze, while appreciating the view around my house. Seeing mountains and palm trees all around is still such a novelty for me, and I hope I never get tired of it. There are two tall palm trees (which are perfectly framed by my office window) that have become a symbol of serenity for me.

I should’ve known after my experience with smoking, but giving up anything cold turkey just doesn’t work for me. So instead of being able to change my focus and priorities all at once, I should probably expect sporadic bursts of I Have A Take On Politics That I Must Share With The Internet.

I can’t know for sure, obviously, but I have a strong suspicion that many of the people I spent years aligning myself with online, who’d talk about equality and rejecting classism and capitalism, etc, are people who never talk to their Uber drivers.

That’s not purely a condemnation, by the way. I have a lot of scorn for hypocrites and snobs, but I also need to acknowledge that I’m out of touch with people. In the case of ride-sharing, even if I weren’t an introvert, I don’t think anybody doing their job should be obligated to make conversation if they don’t want to. And it’s inherently a deeply unfair situation, more than a taxi, because the company that doesn’t give them benefits still holds them accountable to driver ratings. You’re unlikely to get a candid conversation that will build bridges. But when I’ve been in a ride with a particularly gregarious driver, or an extroverted passenger, it’s been a reminder that I very rarely talk to people whose jobs and economic situations are different from my own.

Speaking of smoking: over the past few days, my brain keeps asking “What would it even matter?” if I had a cigarette. But I haven’t had one yet. And in the days since I last tried one and hated it, I haven’t been that interested in getting one. I’ve noticed I think of myself as a non-smoker now, too: whenever I do get the urge to have a cigarette, I think of it as a novelty, instead of going back to my default state of always having a pack on me. Plus the memory of my last one is still really gross. I have a ton of sympathy for people battling addictions.

While I was up on the roof today, I was reminded that I hardly ever go up there, and in fact have spent entire days without going outside. Worse, instead of being outside in the sun with a great view, I’m most often indoors on my phone looking at things that make me angry or sad, which I have no control over and no influence to do anything about. It drove home the fact that I’m not actually just being lazy and using social media or the news to procrastinate, as I’ve always assumed, but I’m actively choosing to look at it instead of doing something healthy.

I was reminded today that one of the best TV series of all time, The Good Place, ran from 2016 to 2020. It seems fitting for a series that was all about ethical behavior in a world that made ethics seem like an impossible luxury. The thing that I love most about the series was that it was so full of grace: never saccharine sentimentality, never compromising on its core values, but still understanding that there’s so much complexity in what makes a person good or bad.

Another thing I thought about while I was on my roof was how grateful I am to have that place to go to. It’s a luxury that I’ve been embarrassed to even talk about, since it often feels like I don’t deserve it. And if you spend too much time online, like I have, you’ll be constantly subjected to crucial ideas of societal injustice and inequity being used as a bludgeon, making a convincing case that you don’t deserve anything.

Today I reminded myself that although I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate, benefiting from the hard work of my parents, the incredible kindness of friends, and just plain good luck, that it’s not just luck and privilege. I’ve worked hard, made thoughtful choices, and set priorities. But the most important thing is the simplest: I’ve tried to be humble, kind, generous, and fair, always. And even when I haven’t succeeded, I’ve tried to be the kind of person that people want to work with. It’s always seemed like the bare minimum, but lately as I’ve been filled with despair at seeing arrogance, selfishness, and unkindness succeed, I’ve realized just how valuable humility and kindness can be.

The internet doesn’t need to know the details, but my reaction to the election results last night and this morning were enough — and were physiological enough — to convince me that I haven’t been keeping it together as well as I’d thought. And I’d thought I’d been doing pretty bad at it.

So while it’d be better if I could share something meaningful about resistance and defiance and strength and resolve in the face of evil, that’s just not me, realistically. For about as long as I can remember, people have been yelling that it’s selfish and irresponsible not to be deeply concerned about politics, and I’ve believed them. Social media has amplified that, blurring the line of what constitutes genuine activism, and loading us all with more stress than I think any of us are equipped to handle. Maybe it is selfish and irresponsible, but I prefer to think that it’s simply being more conscious of the tremendous gap between awareness and influence. It accomplishes nothing for any of us to be filled with concern and anxiety over something that we have no control over.

I don’t feel naive, or regret the couple of months I let myself feel hopeful because of the Harris/Walz campaign. I’m grateful for it. It was a great feeling, after years of feeling my hope just dwindle and flicker, to let it flare up again, to say this is what I believe in, this is what I value. They did so much to fight cynicism. And I believe it worked, for me at least, because what I’m feeling isn’t rooted in blame, or second-guessing, or suspicion. I got the chance to declare what I believe in. And there’s no longer any need to give other voters the benefit of the doubt — they clearly chose what they believe in, and they said that the things I value don’t matter.

Unlike 2016, when people like me tried to find sages online who could explain exactly what went wrong, where the Democrats failed, and what we could all do better next time, I don’t feel any need to look at post mortems. Vice President Harris and Governor Walz connected with people, and they had so much support that they’d raised over a billion dollars. And it somehow still wasn’t enough. The message there isn’t to try harder; it’s that the current system simply isn’t working.

And I hope I can finally just come to terms with the fact that I don’t have an answer, and I don’t have to have an opinion. I’ve spent the last few months formulating and clarifying my opinions and putting my money behind the people I want to support, and keeping up to date on the news because it was encouraging again, and it’s been at the expense of everything else in my life, that’s actually important.

My life was so much better before Twitter existed. I haven’t actually used Twitter in several years, but its influence has lingered on, not just in other social media, but in the way my brain is wired now to have a take on everything. I used to make things. I used to spend my free time working on projects, and enjoying movies and television and games and books, and writing about them on here to think in more depth about how they worked. I’ve seen several people today saying that times of crisis and uncertainty are when it’s most important to make art — I agree, although I think that overstates the inherent importance of art works by quite a lot.

There is value in the work, but the greatest value is the part of your life you dedicate to creating it. Pouring yourself into the creation of something simply because it can’t possibly exist otherwise, the diametric opposite of creating “content” to fill the space between ad slots.

So if nothing else, I’m artfully excusing myself from politics indefinitely, apart from giving help to people who are threatened, and concentrating on smaller, more local topics that can actually benefit from my efforts. And I’m pledging to drastically change my relationship with social media. Focusing only on what I control, like this blog; or the parts that actually constitute community.

For most of today, it’s felt like my light was finally extinguished, after years of sputtering in naive hopefulness. I’m resolving to change how I think about it: drawing in and hunkering down to re-ignite it, to be more protective of it, to keep it from being blown out for good.

I realized I’ve been talking about this on Zuckerberg-owned social media, but not on my own website that I (technically) control:

I quit smoking on July 23, 2024. At the time I’m writing this, that’s about 13 weeks ago, or a little over three months.

Three months tends to be the point where I either fall off and start smoking again, or can quit completely. The longest I’ve gone is three years, until a serious illness in the family had me stress-smoking again around 2019.

None of the usual methods have ever worked for me. The only success I’ve had is from Chantix/Varenicline, which is like magic in terms of getting rid of my compulsion to smoke, but has some pretty lousy side effects. The nausea and stomach cramping are the most obvious ones, and the ones I remember most vividly. I’m not used to eating breakfast in the morning, and if you take it on an empty stomach, you’ll be wrecked.

More subtle, at least from my perspective, is it gives me low-grade depression, or possibly just makes my pre-existing depression worse. It killed any desire to do anything whatsoever, even stuff that I knew was urgent. That would cause building anxiety and then spirals of feeling worthless. I’ve been off the drug for well over a month now, and I’m only just now getting my motivation back.

Still worth it overall, but I think on the whole I’d recommend just not getting addicted to cigarettes in the first place.

One of the many gross things about smoking is the tobacco would stain my mustache a gross brown, forcing me to shave it off every time I quit. This time, the mustache survived with only a little bit of strategic trimming. I’m taking that as a sign it was meant to be.

A dramatic development: last week during Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios, I spent the entire night feeling like I’d been smoking. I’m assuming it was due to all the smoke effects and walking through other park guests’ vape clouds. Whatever the cause, it triggered a weird compulsion like a days-long knot in my chest. I had to have a cigarette.

After hours of talking myself out of it, I finally broke down and bought a pack at a gas station. I went out to the sidewalk and smoked exactly one from the pack, which made me violently nauseated. Nothing pleasurable about it in the slightest. I threw the rest of the pack away, and I haven’t missed it. Have I survived one last temptation, proving that I’m done for good? Or am I cursed to keep doing that every few months until I completely fall off the wagon again? It’s too early to tell, but at least for now I’m not concerned.

On top of all the obvious problems with smoking, there’s a whole host of less important things that make life so much better without it. Going on long flights was a nightmare — getting anxious on the flight itself, and having to go in and out of security just to find a smoking area. Long road trips, days at a theme park or a beach, all of it so much better without the constant distraction. And if you’re addicted like I was, it was a drag having it take up so much of your mental space. Waking up in the morning and deciding to sleep in is so, so much better than having to get up and get dressed immediately just so you can get outside for a smoke as soon as possible.

I’ll never be one of those people who can just have a cigarette on occasion and then forget about it. I know from experience that I either have to avoid it completely, or else I’ll be smoking half a pack a day. In the past, it’s often felt like I was denying myself something, so it’s really nice to realize that I’m so much better off without it, and I don’t miss it at all.

I wouldn’t have made the connection myself, but I was reminded that today is National Coming Out Day, which this year marks 20 years that I’ve been out.¹Almost to the day, even, since the first time I told any friends was in October. It feels like much longer. And I wish it were longer, since I highly recommend coming out in your teens or twenties if at all possible.

Earlier this week, I was trying to find digital photos of an old project I’d worked on, for a presentation at work. I was horrified to discover that for some unknown reason, my iCloud photo library seems to have stopped keeping any pictures older than 2011 or so. My backup hard drive failed a couple of years ago. I believe that I have photo backups on a CD-ROM or DVD somewhere, but haven’t been able to find them. And I no longer even have an optical drive that could read them.

It felt as if there’s been an enormous wall of entropy that’s been relentlessly following me ever since I was born, and if it ever caught up with me it would wipe me out of existence, and I just looked back and discovered it had jumped forward 15 years.

In any case, I resolved to dig through all of the old prints I had stuffed away in my closet, and I ended up finding a lot of photos from the late 90s and early 2000s, when I’d just moved to California and was perpetually overwhelmed by just about everything. Several of them I’d forgotten even existed; for years, I’ve been thinking that I had almost no photos of myself from my 20s. The truth was that I’d hidden them away because I hated how I looked — like a combination of young John Flansburgh and Skippy from Family Ties, but completely lacking the charisma of either.

Looking through them made me sad for that guy, who lived so long ago that he’s basically a stranger. He was smiling in most of the photos, but in others, it seems more like a grimace. I remember he was just a shuffling jumble of insecurities, and I wish I could go back and tell him that it’d be difficult, but he’d make it through, and eventually settle down with a mostly different set of insecurities.

As if the universe were trying to drive the idea home, later in the week, there was a meme going around of posting the oldest photo you have of yourself, next to a current picture.²No doubt to train LLMs on, because hooray for the future. Unsurprisingly, this prompted quite a few gay men online to get introspective about everything they had to go through to change from the kid in one photo to the man that exists today.

What’s standing out to me is everything that happened to the four- or five-year-old kid, sitting shirtless on his front lawn smiling and chewing on flowers, that changed him into the stubbly, sad-looking guy in his 20s, taking a picture of himself in a mirror as if to prove he still exists.

It makes me think about everything he learned in the years between those two photos. He learned to keep his mouth closed in photos, because his teeth are embarrassing. He learned to be embarrassed about being seen with no shirt on. He learned that a photo like this was kind of gay, and that was bad for some reason. He learned not to go around hugging people because it made them uncomfortable. He learned that by several different standards, he was a weirdo, and he needed to keep that shit under wraps and try to be normal.

Comparing sexual orientation and gender identity to just being a weirdo can trivialize the issue, especially when religious beliefs get involved. And it can be just plain offensive as well: obviously, plenty of LGBT people are stultifyingly normal, and plenty of straight people are flamboyant freaks. But for me at least, it helps explain why “coming out” still feels like an ongoing thing, 20 years on, after the traumatic and difficult parts are long past.

That’s the part that makes a “national coming out day” worth observing and celebrating: encouraging people to take that difficult first step. Not because it’ll suddenly fix everything, but because it’s the only thing that will make fixing everything possible.

At the moment, it feels like I’m still trying to unlearn all the things that weren’t an inevitable part of getting older and wiser — as I kept telling myself — and were actually all about keeping that weird, overly emotional, overly earnest, undeniably gay kid stuffed away in a closet and out of sight.

It’s been nice rejecting all the excuses I had for hating myself throughout my twenties. Not because I got better glasses and a better haircut and realized that I’ve been cool and impossibly attractive this whole time, but just because I stopped giving a damn about any of that.

Or I guess I should say almost any of that. The best conclusion to this blog post would be 53-year-old me recreating that photo, sitting shirtless and smiling on my front lawn while chewing on some flowers. But I’m not eager to share that with the world just yet. Maybe in another 20 years or so.

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  Almost to the day, even, since the first time I told any friends was in October.
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  No doubt to train LLMs on, because hooray for the future.

For the past few years, I’ve tried to make some kind of acknowledgement at the beginning of Pride month in June. But it’s usually a kind of generic “love is love” type of thing, an earnest-but-not-especially-deep acknowledgement of how much better my life has been since I came out, a resolution to keep speaking out in favor of equality and respect, the kind of thing that makes for a perfectly suitable sentiment on a rainbow T-shirt.

This month, though, has hit different. I don’t know if it’s because it coincides with my birthday, so I’m growing deeper into DGAF territory. Or if COVID has kept me isolated in one way or another, with a lot of time to myself to think. But June 2024 has really sunk in as part of an ongoing process I’m calling The Great Unclenchening.

Which means that even through I’m fully out and growing gracefully into my bland, Buttigiegian lifestyle, there are still all of these things that I’ve been holding onto as something I should be embarrassed about. Even though they’re completely inconsequential. Like having crushes. Or conforming to stereotypes. Or even being shallow.

I’ve offhandedly mentioned before how Instagram had an overly large impact on me. For better or worse, but mostly better. As lousy and downright toxic as the platform is, it undeniably helped change how I see myself. For the first 40 years or so, I thought of myself as being gross and ugly, and I felt like there was so much wrong with me. Then I started getting attention from bear dudes on Instagram. All of a sudden, strangers were giving me compliments, and I hadn’t had to do anything to win them over!¹Except maybe grow a beard? I was finally being properly objectified!

Is that narcissistic? Hell yes it is! But it’s also rippled out to make a subtle but profound difference. Just this morning, after I took a shower, I saw myself in the mirror and I didn’t give a dejected sigh. Instead I thought, “that’s me, and I’m fine with that.” I don’t have to immediately shut down anybody giving me a compliment.²I’m still bad at that, but trying to get better. I don’t have to try desperately to make people laugh to get them to like me. I can just relax.

And it wasn’t lost on me that I was making this observation on the last day of Pride month. How it doesn’t just mean flags and parades, but shedding any sense of shame or embarrassment over the millions of harmless things that make up you. It also made me feel a step closer to understanding what transgender people go through, finally being able to have an outward appearance that matches how they feel on the inside.

Obviously I don’t want to underestimate the significance of coming out, or the importance of political activism and solidarity. But I feel like Pride month reduces a ton of ideas to symbols, flags, and cliches, so that it’s easy to forget it means a complete rejection of shame, embarrassment, and fear. Refusing to listen to anyone who’s getting in the way of your pursuit of happiness, even if — or maybe especially if — that person is yourself.

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  Except maybe grow a beard?
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  I’m still bad at that, but trying to get better.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been thinking a lot about being gay. I feel like I’d be pretty good at it. Should I give it a shot?

We have fun here but seriously: what prompted this was when I realized several weeks ago that it had been a long time since I’d thought at all about being gay. It’s almost as if once straight people stopped shoving it down our throats, we could go on about living our lives.

I didn’t need to have a bunch of imaginary conversation trees always at the ready. I just mentioned my fiance, so I need to include a gendered pronoun sometime soon to make it clear, but I don’t want it to be so blatant that it sounds like I’m making a coming-out announcement, and if they say “she” or “her” before I get a chance to, I need to make a firm but polite correction and be ready to follow-up with an assurance that it’s fine and I’m not offended. I didn’t need to keep an additional tape loop¹On top of the one I already have as an over-thinking introvert, of course of every conversation running in my head, mindful of whether I’d said anything that would “out” me and introduce any awkwardness into the conversation.

Since I’m a white guy living in California, working for a company with explicit policies about diversity and inclusion, it’s all very minor “social lubricant” stuff instead of coming out of any concern for my own safety or job, but it’s still a relief to be able to turn all of it off. It’s like when landscapers have been working outside your office all morning, and it takes a few minutes to register that they’ve stopped. When you get accustomed to constant noise for so long, the silence seems alien.

In fact, the only reason I noticed the quiet was because I went onto social media and immediately saw a bunch of the familiar discourse. One post that stood out was in response to the “controversy”²Scare quotes because I’m never sure just how much of it is genuine controversy vs. social media posturing around displays of leather or fetishes at Pride events. The poster was complaining about “assimilation,” and they used the phrase “ghouls like Pete Buttigieg,” which actually made me laugh out loud.

Don’t get me wrong: I supported Buttigieg in the last election, I still think he’s an excellent and insightful statesman, and I look forward to his taking a prominent role in the Democratic party as it settles into a more youthful centrism. (While a more genuinely progressive party develops outside the DNC). But it cracks me up to think that anyone anywhere would have a strong enough opinion about Pete Buttigieg to call him a “ghoul.”

And I mean, I kind of get it. The whole idea of Pride demonstrations in the first place is to reject the social pressure to be ashamed about not conforming to limiting and old-fashioned ideas of gender/sex/propriety in general. A lot of LGBT people go through a phase of wanting to set a level of conformity they can get away with — I’m okay as long as I’m not like those people — and that’s largely driven by internalized homophobia.

But it’s also exhausting. As somebody who went through a long coming-out process relatively late (in my early 30s); and who would probably be content to settle into a bland, Buttigiegian level of gayness myself, I’ve always felt like I’m being bombarded from multiple sides of conformity. Some people say I’m too gay, others that I’m not gay enough. In my case, it’s rarely explicit, but it occasionally is: I have at times been called both the f-slur and a “self-loathing closet case,” neither time by anybody whose opinion I give a damn about, but enough to stick with me.

For most of my life, it’s felt like having one hand on the “Gayness” dial, carefully scanning the crowd for their reaction as I tune it to exactly the acceptable level. It’s all about external validation, and the pressure of conformity around something that’s supposedly all about self-identification.

It’s still weird to me that anyone would assume I’m straight, since it’s been about twenty years since I stopped trying to hide my orientation. Did you people not see the rainbow flag emoji in my Mastodon profile?! It also feels obvious to me, because every time I see a photo of Women In Love-era Oliver Reed, I turn into a Tex Avery wolf. And I swear, no exaggeration, the other day I saw some production stills of Toshiro Mifune from various points in his career, and I felt light-headed as if I were about to faint. Still, it’s as true now as it was all during my adolescence and my 20s: nobody genuinely cares as much about my orientation as I do.

I absolutely understand that visibility is essential. I’m just concerned that instead of actually promoting self-expression and self-identification, we’re falling into lazy patterns from the past, substituting one brand of conformity for another.

(In retrospect, I think a lot of that pressure is unique to San Francisco, which in addition to all of its great aspects, has its own brand of performative tolerance. The most memorable example to me was when a city councilman was trying to introduce a bill to put the slightest limitations on public nudity, along the lines of “you can be naked, but just put a towel down first.” It was described as having opposition from “the gay community,” even though I couldn’t imagine how being part of the gay community would make me eager to stare down a man’s withered, leathery junk while I’m eating in a restaurant).

Recently I saw a comic from Sarah Shay Mirk titled “Why Did I Think I Was Straight?”, about their experiences identifying as queer and nonbinary. It significantly changed the way that I’ve thought about all of this, the questions of self-identification, visibility, and conformity.

On the topics of bi- and pan-sexuality, and being transgender or genderfluid, I’ve long considered myself an “ally” — for whatever that term is worth — instead of feeling as if I had any genuine place in that community. I’m basically a Kinsey 7, and I’ve never had any real feelings of gender ambiguity, so it would be extremely presumptuous for me to pretend that I know what it’s like for transgender or nonbinary people. But so much of Mirk’s comic felt so familiar to my own experience. It made me appreciate how much self-identification isn’t about finding the box that you fit in, but finding circles of intersecting commonality with other people.

I think I understand the problems inherent in a white guy asserting his right to be As Heteronormative As I Wanna Be. It can come across as Peter Thiel-esque selfishness: I’ve got my own level of comfort, so I can pull up the ladder behind myself, and everybody else can fend for themselves. But after seeing just how much of the persecution of trans people is just a lazy repetition of the same “arguments” that were made against marriage equality and gay rights in general — they’re so lazy, they didn’t even bother to change the playbook — I’m motivated by the opposite. We’ve already fought this battle, and we won it. I’ve finally gotten to see what it’s like to live my life without being constantly othered, and I think everybody deserves the same!

I clearly don’t have the answers to what will stop the political and cultural persecution of trans people. But my hope is that we can put a stop to it without having to turn back progress and fight the same battles all over again. Simply refuse to treat the issue in 2024 as if it were still 2000, as if we’ve learned nothing over the years, and have such short attention spans that we can’t remember we’ve already debunked all those lazy-ass arguments long ago. Stop treating each letter of LGBTQIA as a separate protected class that has to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, and instead get to the heart of the issue: letting people define their own “normal.”

When I was younger, I adopted the mantra “Being gay is the least interesting thing about me, so why should I be forced into making it a key part of my identity?” That, I believe, was largely driven by internalized homophobia. In the decades since, that’s evolved to: “Being gay is probably still the least interesting thing about me, but it’s still an important part of who I am.” An important part of that is learning not to give a damn whether anybody else thinks I’m doing it wrong, and defending everyone else’s right to do the same for themselves.

A crucial part of Mirk’s comic is that for a lot of “queer” people, everything “queer” about them is their “normal.” Mirk uses the example of being in a society where men didn’t exist, and it never occurred to them that some people (in particular: straight women) wouldn’t find that awesome. The thing I like best about But I’m a Cheerleader (which, again, I wish I’d seen when I was younger) is that it doesn’t even occur to the main character that there’s anything weird or wrong about the thoughts she has about other women. And I’ve regularly heard the claim that “everybody is at least a little bit bisexual,” which sounds like inclusivity on the surface, but is still othering to those of us who aren’t.

Part of the reason I don’t use the word “queer” to describe myself is because I’m only “queer” as defined by other people. To me, it’s all perfectly normal. Didn’t everyone have the same thoughts I did when watching The Empire Strikes Back for the first time? Isn’t everybody else a nerd who defines their own sexual orientation largely in terms of celebrity crushes? It was only after other people started telling me that I was weird or shameful that it even occurred to me that I was different at all. (And many decades later, I gradually discovered that I wasn’t even all that different).

So as Pride Month 2024 starts, I’m hoping we can stay politically conscious. Because for as much as I believe in simply refusing to jump through the hoops that right-wing bigots and opportunists keep setting out for us, it’s clearly going to take some work to ensure equality is legally defended. (Even with marriage equality a “done deal,” it’s still not legally guaranteed as far as I’m aware). But I’m also hoping we can stay socially conscious and acknowledge that self-identification means having the freedom to be as boring and “normal” as we want to be.

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  On top of the one I already have as an over-thinking introvert, of course
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  Scare quotes because I’m never sure just how much of it is genuine controversy vs. social media posturing

I just got back from a long-anticipated vacation, starting with a cruise to the Bahamas on the Disney Wish, three days at the Yacht Club resort at Walt Disney World, and culminating in a week-long solitary stay at a vacation apartment in Kissimmee Florida while I recovered from COVID.

If you were thinking about testing positive for COVID the morning of your flight home after a long vacation, I cannot recommend it. It’s absolutely no fun and as an added bonus, is extremely expensive.

As I’ve mentioned on here several times, I love the whole Crescent Lake area near Epcot, and the Yacht and Beach Club hotels are my favorites on Disney property. I’ve been extremely fortunate to get to stay at most of the hotels at Walt Disney World over the years, and while the theming, history, and views around the Polynesian can’t be beat, the Yacht and Beach Club narrowly win out for me due to vibes and convenience. Convenience because you can easily walk or take a pleasant boat ride to Epcot and Hollywood Studios. Vibes because they instantly and relentlessly pummel you with the feeling I am having a very nice and relaxing deluxe vacation.

On top of a few memorable vacations with my family, I also got to stay there several times for work. I have a vivid memory of one of those trips, when I’d been feeling a little stressed out and felt it out melt away with one supremely relaxing morning. I got up early, went down to get some coffee and a blueberry muffin — the Yacht and Beach Clubs have the best blueberry muffins on earth — in the Solarium, and then took a short walk around the grounds while it was mostly empty.

There’s a constant loop of easy-listening background music playing quietly around the resort, and one song came on that felt like a wave of peace crashing over me. I later Shazamed it and discovered it’s called “Linwood Road” by Billy Joe Walker, Jr.

It’s a nice piece of music, but more than that, it’s one of those songs where hearing it will immediately take me back to that exact place (just a few feet away from the photograph above) and moment of peace and calm.

Fast forward to my most recent trip, and it was kind of rough going. I’d deliberately scheduled only a couple of days in the parks so as just to get a glimpse of the new stuff without overdoing it. But I found myself getting more irritable and dissatisfied as the heat grew more stifling, all the walking became more and more exhausting, and my “allergies” grew increasingly severe. By the time we got to the Magic Kingdom, I was coughing more often, blowing my nose into napkins, and just generally miserable.

Getting sick in the Magic Kingdom is its own kind of misery, because I’ve got so many good memories tied to the place, and I always think of it as being designed specifically to make me happy. But here I was, trudging around feeling awful and looking forward to nothing more than being home. By the end of the day, I just went to bed early in a nice room in my favorite hotel, confident that I’d feel better in the morning.

I didn’t, and the “I want to go home” feelings intensified until I was on the verge of becoming a 52-year-old man having a full-on meltdown that would rival any toddler’s. I went out for a cigarette — a great addiction to have when you’re fighting a respiratory illness — just thinking about how my favorite place in the world had let me down, and I just wanted to be home.

And as I was standing in the Designated Smoking Area at the hotel, a familiar song came up on the background music. It was “Linwood Road,” instantly taking me back to happier times, a kind of reassurance from the Universe that no matter how bad I felt now, everything was going to be fine. Disney World would still be there waiting for me to come back refreshed and renewed, but for now I was going to be home soon.

Then I got back to the room and tested positive for COVID, and had to cancel my flight and reserve a rental car and condo to isolate in for another week. A condo which, I didn’t know at the time, would be right off the highway in constant view of signs reminding me that I was just minutes away from Epcot and the Magic Kingdom, but couldn’t go in.

My first reaction was The Universe Lied To Me! Sending me a sign that everything was going to be okay, just before pulling the rug out from under me. Then, as the monotonous days wore on, I had a more realistic and mature reaction: there’s no such thing as getting signs from “the universe” or any other equivalent, obviously. I’d spent years wallowing in nostalgia. Instead of having proper gratitude for the people I’d been with and the things I’d been doing all of those years as the source of my happiness, I’d been attributing all of it to a place. A place that would naturally have diminishing returns as I got older and life changed around me. It was time to finally grow up and pay attention to the things that actually matter.

But… here’s an interesting observation: it’s a week later, I’m safely at home, and everything is okay. I’m still waiting for a negative test before I go back to normal, but for the most part, things are returning to the status quo. If the lesson is about gratitude, then I’m more aware than I’ve ever been how uniquely fortunate I am to be able to just hit pause on everything, to spend a week in comfort doing nothing. That’s never been true before — I have to remember all the times that having to change travel plans would’ve been devastating, both financially and for my job.

So maybe The Universe was telling me, using the medium of acoustic guitar-driven light jazz, that everything was going to be fine eventually. And instead of doing anything drastic like adapting a more mature and realistic world view in the face of minor adversity, I could go on being generally optimistic, sentimental about theme parks and hotels, and content to find omens in the most inconsequential things.