On The Run From A Vast Government Conspiracy

I was supposed to be home this week, curled up with my wife and my dog and my daughter.
Instead, I’m holed up in a Pricelined hotel in downtown Cleveland, listening to the cold winter wind whistle past our eighth-floor window, my sweetie Fox in my bed, living on cold cuts out of a hotel refrigerator.
Life’s a little weird.
The reason for this escapery is because Fox was scheduled to visit me this week, and Fox has two highly relevant traits:
1) Fox is an opera singer, with a show they’re going into rehearsals for in two weeks;
2) Fox is highly immunocompromised.
Neither of which would be an issue if not for the third problem:
3) My daughter came down with strep throat while we were in New Jersey picking Fox up, and the doctor says she’s going to be contagious all week.
So I was faced with a weird choice: see no Fox at all, as we really cannot risk this gorgeously-voiced opera singer missing their role as a villainous chocolatier in the Steampunk opera Absinthe Heroes – or run away, away, away from my home and hole up with Fox for the week.
And now I am holed up.
And this is oddly like being on the run from a vast government conspiracy.  I cannot go home until our house is not a plague of viral contagions, so I am missing my wife fiercely, missing my dog fiercely, missing my daughter fiercely.  I am frantically trying to finish a book and cannot go to my usual basement retreat to pace in my library and frantically mutter as I plot out what happens next.  I can’t watch movies on my gigantic TV screen.  I am desperately trying to adjust my work schedule to program remotely in an only-slightly-uncomfortable hotel chair.
This is not my home.
Yet we are, intriguingly, building a culture.
Fox and I have only spent snippets of time together – a day here, a weekend there, always riven through with some other distraction.  We’re at a convention.  I’m visiting for a day.  They’re visiting me at home, where my daughter lives, and as such we can’t smooch at a moment’s notice.
Here, however, we have a full week to take this awkward rented space and discover who we are together.  And already a rough schedule is coalescing: cuddle in the morning, slog out of bed to get to work, exchange music with each other all day while I program and they mark up their copy of the Absinthe Heroes script, finish at five, write for three hours, go out to get dinner in fine downtown Cleveland, return home for Steven Universe and kinkiness.
I am getting a gift I rarely get with any of my partners:
The gift of boredom.
We cannot devote this time entirely to each other, and so we are discovering what we are like when the tedium strikes.  The day is laced with the mundane tasks of showering and chores.  We are finding our spaces – this chair is mine, the right side of the bed is theirs.  I learn to be quiet while they’re napping in the afternoon.  They learn to stay quiet while I’m pacing the room and plotting. I learn to deal with their chronic illness and brain fog, seeing them work through neck cricks due to their Ehlers-Danlos syndrome; they learn to deal with my endlessly discussing Mah Book and the analyses I am continually subjecting my prose to.
This is a ludicrously small space. We cannot get away from each other; even the mirror on the wall reflects images of the bathroom into our eyes.  And neither of us have the foods we’re used to, Fox living on Giant Eagle tea and me making very small glasses of chocolate milk in cardboard cups.
Yet there is intimacy in figuring out what portions of our space we work with.  Debating where we’re going for dinner tonight.  Discussing bills and living quarters.  The silence of texting others and refilling our introversion meters.  The small gossips of sharing funny things we found on Twitter.
And there are moments where I miss Gini so keenly tears sting my eyes.  I saw her this morning for all of three minutes and I still quiver from the need to hold her; I couldn’t.  She pushed me away, correctly, an act of love for all involved, as strep has a three- to five-day incubation period and she will not infect Fox.
I returned, shaken, to my hotel room, missing my wife’s touch.  Fox told me, quietly, “You know you can go home at any time.  It’s okay.”
I think of the love that surrounds me – Gini letting me go for a week to protect someone we both cherish, Fox willing to live alone in a strange town so I could be with my wife.  And yet the curse of this is that this outbreak means I can choose only one, and I choose the person who is more transitory.
I will not get this experience with Fox again.
And all the while, there is the awareness of this liminal space.  Things are strewn about like a hotel, the messiness of dishware in a space not designed to hold it.  The endlessly fending off maids who respect no “Do Not Disturb” sign.  This will be packed up and stored away and the room will be reset and the next visitor will never know what we had here.
Still.
Still.
I slide into bed with Fox at night.  Fox is a snuggler, holding me tight even in their sleep, and when I wake they have rubbed their scent all over me.  We kiss in the mornings before my eyes are fully open, Fox purring as I touch their back.
This is such strangeness.  This feeling of being on the run from our normal lives, yet forming something alien and yet simultaneously completely normal in the center of it.  Drinking orange juice in bathrobes and watching the storms come in. Both of us separated from our support groups, transforming this distance-separated relationship into the casual intimacy of roommates, threaded through with loneliness, and lust, and labor.
Spending time.
Peering into each others’ lives.

What's It Like For A Hamilton Fan To Finally See The Musical?

If you haven’t heard of Hamilton, that’s only because you’re not paying attention.  It’s the biggest smash on Broadway in a long time – tickets are sold out through 2017 – and it’s one of those rare Broadway shows that has a cultural impact, as it’s a two-hour rap opera (or, if you choose, a “hip-hopera”) about the life of Alexander Hamilton.
I have listened to the soundtrack straight through about a hundred and fifty times.  And unlike many other Broadway musicals, which have songs separated by dialogue, every word in Hamilton is sung.  So you get the full story by listening to the soundtrack, because it’s like an audio recording of a movie.
I thought I knew Hamilton.
But when I saw Hamilton, there were differences.  And so for those of you who hope to see the show some day – just win the daily Hamilton lottery for front-row seats, like I did! – I thought I’d write up some of the differences that surprised me.

Biggest surprise about Hamilton on-stage: Thomas Jefferson is TOTALLY Cat from Red Dwarf, gone into politics.

— Ferrett Steinmetz (@ferretthimself) February 19, 2016

But going through in order:
There’s a moment in “Aaron Burr, Sir” when he meets Lafayette and the crew, and the entire orchestra cuts out while Hercules Mulligan provides percussion by beating the wooden table they’re sitting at.  And maybe it’s the miking, but hearing that boom of a real hand hitting a table booming across the theater and damn near drowning out the voices seemed so much more vibrant than the low-key background beat they give in the soundtrack.  It felt rowdier.
The central stage had two concentric rings that rotated, and they used that a lot to keep everyone walking in place.  Things were constantly swirling around, and that led to the greatest moment of the show –
In the break between “Helpless” (which is told from Eliza’s perspective) and “Satisfied” (which is told from Angelica’s perspective), you hear a brief reversing noise.  In the stage show, however, they show the courting and marriage of Eliza from Eliza’s perspective – and then the stage fucking rotates, and everyone moves backwards in slow motion, reenacting the wedding as a rewind until we wind up perfectly in Angelica’s perspective watching the two of them.  It is the second-most beautiful thing in the show.
…we’ll get to the most beautiful thing.
The actors switch up between halves – Lafayette becomes Thomas Jefferson, Hercules Mulligan becomes James Madison, John Laurens becomes Hamilton’s son, and Peggy (“and Peggy!”) becomes the seductress in “Say No To This.”  Which works out quite well, although frankly Hercules Mulligan is wasted by becoming the sedate James Madison.  I would have been happy watching Hercules Mulligan just bursting into various scenes for the rest of the show.
The dancers were on-stage everywhere – and maybe it was the front-row seating, but they were damn near invisible.  The dancers spent a lot of time walking through the background to give the impression of a bustling city, and when they occluded the performers they were expressing a physical form – most notably one dancer representing the shot, crossing the space between the two duellists in slow motion.  I was surprised at how my attention never got drawn away from the lead performers.
The King spit a lot.  Like, a lot.  Like, a Gallagher show of sputum.  Like, to the point where Gini and I wondered whether it was a purposeful thing to show his madness.  I mean, I know it happens when you’re singing at top volume, but still.
The King also didn’t move.  At all.  Well, maybe a little.  But he was stock-still and regal and yet somehow remained absolutely hysterical.  An act of beauty.
The Cabinet Battles were surprisingly jocular.  I mean, I played Jefferson’s part in a public performance of Hamilton (against fantasy author Max Gladstone’s Hamilton) and we couldn’t stop laughing, but I assumed that was a weakness in our performance.  But no!  Jefferson kept cracking up whenever Hamilton scored a good point, and Hamilton sniggered at Jefferson’s insults.  The fight is SRS BSNESS but boy howdy, the actual battles themselves involve a lot of sniggering.
Having Aaron Burr on stage ties the narrative together in interesting ways.  Showing him standing side by side with Jefferson (who gets all the best lines) and Madison really accentuates how Hamilton’s success spurs Burr’s envy spurs Burr’s ambition spurs their duel.  I mean, yeah, he’s present in the songs, but Jefferson always steals the show; the plotline became far more coherent and tight in the physical presence.
The second half is heartbreaking.  That’s pretty much all.  If you thought it was sad on the soundtrack, seeing Philip pass away as his mother desperately sings at him to keep him alive will Kali Ma your goddamned heart.
Okay, now we’re at the end.   And here’s a mild spoiler – not really a spoiler, but an effect you may wish to keep to yourself.  It’s beautiful, though.
 
 
 
 
I’ll give you some space.
 
 
 
 
Okay.  On the soundtrack, when the show is over, “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story” fades to black after Eliza tells about establishing the orphanage.
But in the show…
Goddamn, the show.  I’m tearing up.
In the show, Eliza is at the front of the stage.  Everyone has moved to the back, having faded into history.  And Eliza stares out into the unknown, having told the story of her life, and…
She lets out one anguished shriek.  Her death-gasp.  Which is both pained and somehow astonished, as her life fades in the split-second of a gunshot, and then…
Blackness.
Silence.
Applause.
 
 
 
 
 
 
It’s beautiful.  You should go see it.

On The Supreme Court, And Scalia's Vacancy.

For once, I have a lot of sympathy for conservatives.  Yes, they’re threatening to lock out Obama for his final year in office.  Yes, they’ve been a bunch of big whiny babies, shutting down the government as the equivalent of “I’m gonna hold my breath until I turn blue if you don’t gimme what I want!”
But Scalia’s seat?
That’s the first time I looked at it and went, “Yeah, that’s worth risking everything for.”
Look. Scalia’s been the only thing holding up some pretty tenuous court cases.  A 5-4 liberal court would have ramifications for conservatives way beyond what Bush did, and it would go on for decades.
If you are a conservative, finally, you have found a sword worth falling on.
…not that the hype they’re generating around it is anything but a cloud of toxic lies.  Obama is well within his Constitutional rights to appoint a nominee, and it is historically unheard-of for Congress to delay the appointment for three hundred goddamned days, and I hate that the media is treating this as “Well, both sides have a point” as opposed to “One side is doing what Presidents have always done, and the other side is rising up in an unprecedented rebellion to try to stop him.”
(As someone asked of Ted Cruz on Twitter, “If elected, when in your presidency would you abandon all power?”)
And I like to think that if the positions were reversed, I would allow the appointment to go forward but start causing gridlock if the Conservative President tried to appoint anyone but the most dishwater middle-of-the-road guy he could find.  (Who would still be rightish, of course, we all know that, but some rightish people waffle – as see John Roberts on Obamacare.)
But who knows?  I’m not in that position.  They are.  And I think what they’re doing is slightly scummy, and I disagree vehemently with the rollbacks they want to accomplish, but good God strategically speaking this is the time to pull out all the stops.
That said…
I’ve seen my conservative friends posting, “Well, Obama filibustered Alito!”  Which is true; he did.  Obama, ineffectively, tried to take part in a Kerry-led rebellion so Alito could not get on the court.
There are huge differences, though:
1) He disagreed with “a specific person,” not “Anyone who Bush might ever nominate ever ever ever.”  This is a massive change.  Idiots who are crying that they’d filibuster anyone are basically stating that “This President will never choose anyone I agree with” before the process has begun, and my God I hope he chooses Elizabeth Warren just to piss you off.
2) This was in 2006, not in 2008, and Obama was not claiming – as many do – that the President had no right to appoint someone in his final year in office.
3) At the time, Obama acknowledged that the merits of a filibuster were arguable, and – my words, not his – this was a moral choice he was using to promote an edge rule, not some grand tradition he was carrying on.  (He voted on Roberts, though negatively.)
Those three things make his actions very different from what the Republicans are doing now.  Don’t let them tell you otherwise.

I'm Busy Fixin' THE FIX, So… Ask Me Anything?

Right now, on my laptop, I have a book that is not quite yet awesome.
I have six weeks to inject all the awesome into it.
So every night after work, I am descending into the basement to bash my skull against my laptop for four hours, attempting to end the family ‘Mancer saga in a way that honors everyone in it.  But that leaves me little time for thinkin’ about blog posts in the evening, which is when I usually write these suckers.
So!  As is tradition here every four months or so, ask me a real question I can answer, that you’d like to know the answer to. On any topic: novel or kink or bees or otters. I’ll do my best to answer honestly.
(Fake questions like “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck?” are neither clever nor useful. You can do it; it marks you as the kind of person who doesn’t realize the joke is so obvious it’s been done a hundred times before, and I’ll think less of you for being tedious. Hey, I told you I’d answer honestly.)
(And the bees are alive last we checked, but we have become bee-havers, not bee-keepers, and as such they’re pretty much on their own.  Two years of cancer pretty much pounded our beekeeping out of us, alas.)
Anyway.  Ask!

The Stories We Tell After Death

A relationship dying is like a person dying, in some ways: a unique thing has vanished, and can’t be recreated. Even if you manage to get back together again, you’ll both have been changed by the experience of walking away.
And I think of the stories we tell ourselves after death.
After a relationship dies, we enter the “grave dressing” segment, where we ask ourselves the question: *What did that person really mean to us? Where did things go wrong?* And we look down into the coffin, bringing our friends over to help us conduct the autopsy, asking, “What have we learned?”
Sometimes we learn that your lover was the enemy.
Or – more accurately – that you can’t survive without turning your ex-lover into the enemy.
And what frequently happened was that the ex had the wrong communication style – which happens. Two people often speak different love languages, but hardly anyone talks about how bad translations can wreck your self-esteem. There’s a reason they call them “toxic” relationships, because what you need is nutrition and what you keep getting looks like healthy food but you’re getting poison.
This relationship is killing you.
And what people frequently need to do is to turn an unwitting provider of bad food into a poisoner. This couldn’t have been a mistake: They knew you were strong, and were trying to destroy you. They were unhappy, and you were happy, and they made you unhappy so they must be bad.
The ex attains near-mythic status, a supervillain sent to ruin your life. What had once been a troubled relationship between two equally fucked-up people becomes the shining beacon of What Must Never Be Done Again. You think about how you’re done with that person’s bullshit, and you’re glad, because you’re never falling for *that* again.
They led you away from the One Truth.
And like all grief, I can’t condemn someone for working through it in their own way. People change inevitably change facts in the aftermath of a breakup – I know I do it – and I think, Whatever you need to get through this. And there are definitely people out there who are purposely trying to undermine your well-being to foster their own comfort.
But sometimes, what happened is this:
They were happy, and you made them unhappy too.
You didn’t set out to make them unhappy as part of a nefarious scheme – you simply had a well-defined set of habits that you needed to function properly, and your needs were at odds with theirs.
That happens all the time. Someone needs financial stability to function while another could live happily in a slum so long as they felt like a priority. Someone needs their partner to act independently, while the other needs guidance to feel good about where they’re going. Someone needs to never open up because they can only feel strong if they conceal their weaknesses, while the other only feels comfortable when they lay all their concerns out in the open.
There’s all sorts of personalities that unravel each other.
And when those two get together, they slowly pick at each other, because their fundamental needs are in conflict. It looks like a purposeful undermining of their One Truth – but what’s actually happening is that there’s several One Truths, a.k.a. “Whatever gets you through the night,” and sometimes those two realities cannot coexist.
And bad things happen.
Then you’re staring down into that casket, looking at the shards of a relationship that cut you deep. And it’s useful to make supervillains out of that, sometimes: if you learn the lesson that ANYONE WHO WANTS TO HIDE THEIR FEELINGS FROM ME IS EVIL, then hey, you won’t date the sorts of people who undermine your self-esteem. And it works.
But there’s another lesson you can learn, sometimes: this person poisoned you, and it hurt, but they had a way that worked for them. Their crime was that their way didn’t work for you.
Some days, people ask me, “How can I stay friends with my exes?” And I think that’s a terrible question, because often that question is a variant on “How can I keep myself wedged into their life until they agree to fuck me again?” and yeah, the answer to that is “Don’t.”
But if you really want to stay friends, recognize that supervillains do exist – but they’re much rarer than, say, people whose fundamental chemistries don’t allow them to survive in your environment. What they offered was poison to you, but it’s manna from heaven to others.
If you can keep that in mind, you can remember what not to eat. And you can be friends. Maybe. Some day.