Birthday thoughts of Bud

This has been bugging me today.

Bud's birthday is in less than a week. He's dead. Yet we're getting together to observe the occasion. This is not fun nor good for me. Well, not for anyone, really. But everyone else has good memories to be had from Bud. Obviously not me.

Kim is hurting. Text from her to the family: "Should we do ribs or is that too close? Should we do a cake or is that too morbid? I need advice on this one guys, I think it's hitting me in the feels. Should we all write a memory about Papa? I miss him."

Yeesh. Write a memory about Papa. Here's what comes up immediately for me.

• The time I wrote my first editorial for the Lion's Roar, the high school newspaper, about the uselessness of the homecoming elections and how they were nothing more than a popularity contest. Since I was coming off my national spelling bee victory high—and, yes, admittedly, enjoying the popularity myself—my dad took it upon himself to write a great note to me criticizing my editorial, ending it with an underlined and very firmly and doubly penciled "HA HA YOU HYPOCRITE."
• The time he was taking me to the airport after Thanksgiving 1999 to fly back to Portland and indirectly threatened to punch my then-boyfriend in the face after hearing about something he had said around my sister (and possibly had been misinterpreted).
• The time when I apologized to him about the way I had come out—it was very bad timing on my part—and he threw it aside, saying "Well, talk is cheap. Actions speak louder than words."
• The time when I came home with super high PSAT scores that qualified me for a National Merit Scholar scholarship, and he didn't recognize it until I pressed the issue, and he basically said, "So what? We knew this was going to happen. Fine. Congratulations. Happy?"
• The first time he met Bill at lunch. When Bill told him he had worked on United.com, Dad said "I hate that website." Then he proceeded to say, "I hope you can talk some sense into Scott. I don't know what's wrong with him." I was reeling from that for months.
• The time he uninvited Bill from Christmas 2014.

I'm not having to dig hard for these. These are the salient, most conspicuous memories I have from our life together. This is his emotional bequest to me.

Incidentally, let's take a tangent into me being gay and—yes, I'm going to own it—being on the spectrum. Even if only mildly so. This has been a brutal combination to deal with for years. Socially I'm already not the most adept person. I can't always communicate what's on my mind very well. Yes, I'm overly self-absorbed, but it's because I don't want to appear bad, don't want to appear out of place, don't want to do things wrong. Which ironically makes me stand out, and that cycle repeats itself.

With me being gay, I slowly began to realize that there was something with me that didn't jibe with my family. I had no one to look up to. No role models. No one in my family, nuclear or extended. Who I was becoming in my teenage years was not discussed—or if it was, it was quietly, under duress, and never with positive feelings.

Here's a huge point. My straight peers around me were seeing signs all around them guiding them how to act, how to deal with their hormones, how to deal with social situations, how to pursue things like love, kissing, making out—hell, even sex, when you get down to it. Ads, stories, books, songs on the radio, peers, pictures, TV shows, movies...everything. And by high school, some of my friends were having sex, those lucky ducks. I had no such signs. The signs I got were not helpful, didn't apply to me. It was like hearing a severely out-of-tune symphony every day and being prompted to say how lovely it sounded, how perfect it was, when every cell in my body screamed that it sounded awful. But worse, what I was was reflected back to me in negative signs, when talked about at all. So not only was I not encouraged to develop my psychosexual side at the most fundamental point of my life, I was actively pushed to repress it, to hide it, to stunt it, to poison it if at all possible. Couple that with not being socially adept in the first place—or at least putting forth a tremendous effort to try to be adept—and you have the recipe for one severely emotionally and sexually immature kid on your hands. (Of course, multiply my story by the millions, and...gee. You ever wonder why gay men are seen as emotionally and sexually immature? It's precisely because of this. I'd like to hope that things have been changing since homosexuality has begun to be viewed as one of the many human variations on love.)

Hmm...I'm going to let this sit a bit for now. Will address more later.