The Daily Prompt: 19 March 23

How would you rate your confidence level?

I am supremely confident. I learned two things: If you don’t have confidence, you don’t have anything and if you’re not going to be confident in yourself, no one else will be confident in you.

I’ve been told that my confidence borders on cockiness, but I’ve always known that being cocky is a very slippery slope and I’ve seen cocky guys crash and burn big time. I know what I know; I know what I can and can’t do. And, I think, part of being confident is knowing what you can’t do and admitting that you can’t.

My mom would tell me and my siblings to, “Never write a check your ass can’t cash.” The first time she told us this, we were on the floor laughing hysterically… because she said “ass.” She let us laugh for a few then told us that she was very serious, and we had to take it seriously. I’ve felt that part of being confident is knowing not to do this or, don’t talk shit that you can’t back up.

Mine’s a… quiet confidence. I know it; I feel it; there’s no need to tell people that I’m confident and at every turn; to me, those who do this aren’t really all that confident. If I can do a thing, I can do it and I’m confident that I can; if I know a thing, I know it but in either case, if I can’t or I don’t know, I’m confident enough to say that, nope, can’t do it or, nope, I don’t know it… but I might know who does, you know, if you really want the answer.

The other thing my mom taught us was to never let someone else take your confidence in yourself away. She said that there are people who do not like confident people because they aren’t all that confident and misery loves company. She said that we had to confident that we won’t let someone take it away from us. She said that there will be people who will challenge your confidence in yourself and… you don’t have to accept such challenges but, sometimes, you can’t let someone get away with doing this.

Mothers are so wise, aren’t they?

Another person told me, “If you don’t toot your own horn, no one else is going to.” He was right because it takes confidence in yourself to be able to toot your own horn. He’d told me this in response to my response to my performance review and one that I wasn’t happy about and… I “lit into him” about it; pretty much ripped him a new one because he had the audacity to question my ability to do a job that I could do with one hand tied behind my back and, as such, I earned a raise and promotion and wasn’t happy to keep being overlooked and my dedication and skills dismissed.

I got the raise and the promotion because I tooted my own horn. He’d said that if I hadn’t responded the way I did, no raise or promotion and he would have concerned in my apparent lack of confidence in myself.

I’m bisexual (for those of you who don’t “know” me via my blogs) and I’ve mentored other guys in the ways of male bisexuality and one of the first things I tell them is… if you don’t have confidence, you don’t have anything. You’re screwed and not in a good way. That they have to know that they can be this way and stand tall in the face of the real backlash they will face and then, be confident that they will strive to be the best bisexual they can be. You can do this; be confident that you can and never let anyone tell you that you cannot or should not be what you know yourself to be.

If you lack confidence or it’s low, well, something’s wrong and this needs to be addressed immediately if not sooner. Those who would prefer that you not be confident aren’t going to be happy about you becoming more confident in yourself and you must be confident that you can stand in the face of this and not whither or be in fear when they try to take it away from you.

I am supremely confident because if I’m not, I have nothing and no one will have confidence in me… and I’m not ever feeling that.

Ever.

 

The Daily Prompt: 17 March 23

What activities do you lose yourself in?

That’s easy: Reading and playing video games.

When I read, I immerse myself in the story and if it’s written well, oh, man, I can easily get lost in it… and wind up getting “yelled” at for not hearing something my lady said.

Same with video games. I play on the Xbox Series X and I play the type of games that, for one, require me to pay attention and, for the other, they’re so… involved that there have been times when I’ve been sitting still for hours being immersed in the game’s world.

And wind up getting “yelled” at.

I can get lost writing a blog and depending on what happens to be on my mind and then all the “related stuff” that shows up… and wind up getting “yelled” at.

Being honest, I… lose myself giving head. Getting yelled at for different reasons. So much fun.

 

The Daily Prompt: 09 March 23

What is one question you hate to be asked? Explain.

Oh, that’s easy: “Are you gay?”

I’ve been bisexual all of my life and people who find out that I am tends to ask me this… and it infuriates me because if I confess that I’m bisexual, um, why are you asking me if I’m homosexual?

In my younger days, this question would flip my switches and I’d go off on the questioner and hit them with a question about their intelligence or lack thereof, but I learned… not to do that once I realized that bisexual wasn’t something a lot of people knew about – but they knew homosexual.

No, I am not gay. I enjoy sex with men because it’s sex. I’m not into men and as so many seem to think, i.e., romantically even though I did have a very gay boyfriend who I loved; otherwise, if I’m into men, it’s the having sex part and, lest one forgets, I am and always have been very, very much into women.

Which, sometimes, those who know me tend to forget that part. I hate being asked that question but one of the things I learned from those who asked it was… perception. A man who has sex with men has to be gay, right? Nope. But I’ve felt that due to the spotlight being shined on male homosexuals and for as long as I can remember, some find it “inconceivable” that there are men who have sex with men but they’re not gay so that “makes them” focus on the thing they do know about: The “gay” part of being bisexual.

People asking if I’m gay. Asking if I’ve ever been gay. Asking why I’m gay. Being asked if I’m in denial of being gay. I have grown up hearing questions like this and, after a while, you just hate hearing them and hate trying to explain the difference between bisexual and homosexual and beginning with “bi” meaning two, “homo” meaning the same. Being asked if I like men more than women and if I emphatically state that I like women more than men, then being asked why I don’t like both equally… and now I’m trying to explain to them that it doesn’t really work like that. Yes, it can work like that for some people but not for me.

Being asked if I’ve ever been screwed by a guy and trying not to roll my eyes. Yes, I have been, and I don’t have a problem with it because it’s part of the deal, you know, if I feel like it. Have I screwed guys? Resisting the urge to keep rolling my eyes or saying, “Duh!” and, yes, I have screwed guys. Yes, I have sucked dick and swallowed cum and I’ve had guys do the same to me. A long time ago now, I made an important change in my “methodology” talking to people: Don’t ask me questions you don’t want to hear the answers to.

I had a guy I worked with ask me if I was gay… because I’d gotten my ear pierced. Since I did learn to not be offended being asked this, I explained to him that, no, I’m not gay: I got my ear pierced to keep a promise I’d made to my deceased brother. I told this guy the story of the day I ran into my brother, and he had his ears pierced. What the hell, dude? He says that I should get my ear pierced, and I told him that I wouldn’t get it done as long as he was alive.

He died two years later. I got my ear pierced. The guy was mortified and apologized for making assumptions. I understood it since a lot of gay men were wearing earrings and to the extent that, yeah, if a guy had his ear pierced, he must be gay. Also at this time, a lot of musicians were wearing earrings and I allowed that despite the promise I made to my brother, I have always been a musician – and the people who know me knows this and didn’t find it unusual that I now wore an earring and they didn’t ask me if I was gay.

I know that “hate” is a very strong word and one not to be taken lightly but, yeah, I hate being asked that question or any question that remotely sounds like asking if I’m gay. I’m not gay. I’m bisexual. I like men for the sex but after having a boyfriend, I wouldn’t dare say that I wouldn’t be romantically involved with a guy again but I’m not looking for romance from or with a guy but this, as I understand it, isn’t “gay” either but I have a different understanding of love, sex, and relationships than most people do.

 

The Daily Prompt: 05 March 23, 1733 hours

What experiences in life helped you grow the most?

That would be growing into and learning about… my bisexuality. One of the things I’ve always said about being bisexual is that it… changes you. It gets you to see things in life the way they can be and can disabuse you of the way things are supposed to be. Being more than willing and able to have sex with both guys and gals taught me a lot of things that helped me grow and understand a lot about… people.

The things that drives them; the things that scares them; the things that either emboldens and empowers them and the things that can make them feel less confident about themselves and their place in the world. Having discovered bisexuality when I was young, I had the curiosity and drive to want to know why I was the way I was and why those I interacted with were the same way… or not. I questioned… everything. Sometimes got myself grounded for asking questions that, according to my parents and other adults, I shouldn’t have known to ask, let alone ask at all. In those days, parents and other adults weren’t of a mind to talk about sex or even sexuality other than to tell us not to have sex and don’t be a homosexual.

Well, I knew that I wasn’t a homosexual because while I found having sex with the guys to be exciting and satisfying, I did more than my fair share of chasing girls and catching them and, oh, yeah, having sex with them. I’d grow up and look back at this time in my life and saw that having sex was… very social. How sex – and that need to have a girlfriend or just liking someone a lot – either brought out the best in me or others… or revealed the ugly side of things.

My insatiable need to understand this about myself had me often sneaking into the more… adult section of the public library and where I’d learn stuff like anatomy and that, um, storks didn’t really fly in to bring babies. I was able to take what I was learning and associate it with how my peers were behaving but, at the same time, needing to find out why religion said what it did about having sex along with committing the sins of fornication and homosexuality. And what I was learning opened my eyes even wider because I was seeing and learning that while religion said a lot of things about sinning. well, I wasn’t the only one having a grand time fornicating – and I learned to like this word for some reason – and, at least in part, being homosexual.

I had started this journey thinking that I was the only one who as like this but quickly learned that, no, I wasn’t and the adult version of myself would think back and see that not only was I not the only one – and my friends weren’t either, being like this was… everywhere. I was fortunate to do some traveling back then and would come into contact with a lot of guys and gals who were like me and they were from all walks of life. I was beginning to see a pretty big picture that wasn’t as “pretty” as adults tried to paint and it didn’t make the picture look any better given the serious racial tensions at the time and brought to the boiling point when Dr. King was assassinated.

I was taught not to hate or to be prejudiced. I was taught to always try to find the good in someone and, well, um, I learned that having sex was a pretty good way to do this and not just because having sex was fun but because I got to learn what others were thinking and learning and it all kept adding to the big picture but also was teaching a lot about… people and not all of what I was learning was good. As far as being bisexual went, I was okay with it; I… understood some things about sexuality and more so given how ugly society was about homosexuals and right along with the perception that having sex was… bad.

The question I had asked myself right after my first sexual experience with a guy was, “How can something that everyone says is so bad feel so good?” It took me a while to get the answer: It feels good because it’s supposed to! But morality had something else to say about it and the more I learned about the roots of our morality, the more I understood and the more I understood, the more I grew and pretty much teaching myself what kind of person I had to be… and that was to not be hateful or prejudiced and, well, not be a bad person. Becoming bisexual wasn’t just about having sex; it was about being something that society was obviously turning a blind eye to. I had so many questions that needed to be answered and, sometimes, the answers generated even more questions that needed answering and… I was driven to find them so I could not only understand the world I was growing up in but to also understand myself – and to know who I was.

I didn’t struggle with my sexuality, but I saw many who did and who were looking for their own answers in this and I was… compelled to help them and to share with them what I’d been learning because, as my mother would often say, if you can help someone with something, then you should. I’m sure she didn’t have this kind of something in mind but being able to help those who were struggling with their sexuality played a big part in my growth. Again, not just the sex but being able to interact with others openly and freely about the things that our very moral society did not want anyone to know about. I learned a lot about what I’ve been calling “The Big Three” – love, sex, and relationships and saw that my bisexuality was giving me a very different and “unique” perspective of these things and this, too, added to my growth into the adult I am today.

Of course, I’ve had other experiences that helped and lent themselves to my growth, but it was my bisexuality that opened my eyes so that I could… see things; to learn from them and to do the one thing my mother bade me to do: Be the best person you can be and whatever you do in life, be the best at it. I’m… a pretty good bisexual, I think, but that’s only a part of the whole and, yeah, being bisexual taught me this and aided in my growth. Being able to see more than one side of things and being able to think outside of the box were the tools I employed in my growth and understanding of the world I’d been born into.

I often wonder if my growth as a person would have been so… all-inclusive if I weren’t bisexual. I can’t say one way or the other but it was my experience being bisexual that I credit as a major part of that which helped me grow the most.

 

The Daily Prompt: 28 February23

Describe the most ambitious DIY project you’ve ever taken on.

That would have been the time I replaced the timing belt on my car, a 1980-something Dodge Colt RS. I’d gone to jump in it and head for work and the moment I depressed the clutch and turned the key, I heard a seriously bad noise and like something had broken. Called out of work and spent most of the day with my head under the hood trying to figure out why the engine was just cranking but not starting. A call to my mechanic who said it could be the timing belt and to check that, he had me remove the serpentine belt and said that if I could turn the bottom pulley with my hand easily, the belt was broken.

Yeah, that’s the problem. In retrospect, I don’t know what made me think that fixing it would be easy other than I’m standing there looking at the front of engine and thought, “It can’t be that hard, can it?” I grab my trusty manual and go to the section for replacing a timing belt/chain and, okay, I have the tools needed so let’s get to work. The hardest part was all of the shit I had to take off the car to get to the timing belt cover but once I got it off, holy shit – that belt was shredded and had broken in a couple of places.

The good part was that top dead center – TDC – was indicated by matching two marks, one on the crankshaft internal pulley and one on the engine block… and they were way off but, okay, the manual explained how to line them up and that’s where things went a little south. Early in the disassembly process, one of the things I had to do was disconnect the battery and, at first, I wondered why but as I struggled to get the marks lined up, I understood why: Cranking on the crankshaft could have started the engine and, yeah, if I hadn’t disconnected the battery and remove the coil wiring, I could have gotten seriously hurt.

But for the life of me, I couldn’t get those two marks to line up exactly. I could manually turn the crankshaft and could feel TDC but when I’m looking at the two marks, they were… really close but, apparently, not close enough. I had to work on this in between going to work so every evening found me doing just that and getting all greasy, busting my knuckles every now and then, and cursing so much that at one point, I thought that if my mother could hear me, she would kick my ass – if she wasn’t laughing at how inventive my cursing was.

The day came when after spending hours and days trying to line those two marks up, I got them lined up. Reassembling the engine went faster than taking it all apart. Once I made sure that I didn’t have any leftover parts, I got in the car, depressed the clutch, turned the key and… it was really trying to start but just would not start! I was dismayed and angry. Part of me was saying, “You should have just called the shop and have them come get the car and fix it!” but I already knew that they were going to charge me over $1,500 to do the job and, not counting the “labor time” it took me to get to this point, I spent less than $50 getting the new belt and timing belt cover gasket but I had to relent and call the shop to come get it.

Damn it. It was bad enough that it had taken me almost two weeks to get to this moment; as I watched the shop’s tow truck head off with my baby on its hook, I felt that if I could have taken vacation time to work on this, I could have gotten to this very disappointing moment in a couple of days but, c’est la vie. An hour later, the mechanic calls me and says I can come get it and I held my breath a little to ask him how much the damage was and… he said, “I’m not gonna charge you for this but I will tell you that you were pretty damned close to TDC; those two marks actually don’t perfectly line up and like all the manuals say they do so all I had to do was pull the cover and give the crank a little turn, re-seat the distributor, and that took care of it. I gotta be honest, man – you did a really good job on this!”

I had thought that replacing the exhaust manifold on my Honda Civic had been the hardest car repair I’d ever attempted and done but comparatively speaking? This was the most ambitious and hardest repair I’d ever done – and that includes a moment when I had to replace both the timing chain and pulley on my girlfriend’s car and after the external pulley just snapped off! I’d learned my lesson from my own car so fixing hers was easy-peasy…

 

The Daily Prompt: 25 February 23

What advice would you give to your teenage self?

There isn’t a lot of advice I’d give my teenaged self other than to continue to not let people dictate who you should be. My mom had to kick my father out and, as the oldest, she actually apologized to me for putting me and my siblings in a position to grow up faster. It was little things like more responsibilities, pushing all of us to stay in school and finish but when I became a father at 15, it wasn’t the problem others said it was because my mother prepared me for such a thing and had said that no matter what anyone else had to say about it, stay the course; do not ever shirk the responsibility and learn from it. You got this.

Between the ages of 13 and 19 – the official teenaged years – a lot of people tried to tell me how I was supposed to be, tried to convince me that I didn’t know who I was as a person and trying to drag me down with them and I didn’t listen to them because my mother had “pounded” into my head the need to always to be true to myself and to never let anyone try to change this. I’d give my teenaged self this piece of advice because Adult Me remembers how hard it was to stay the course when everyone else around me was doing anything but. I would remind him that failure isn’t an option but that it’s okay to fail at something as long as you learn from it so you can know how to succeed. I would remind him of the many times our mother said that it’s okay to make mistakes as long as you learn from them and not make the same mistake twice.

I would advise me to keep being… us. Adult Me knows of a few things that, yeah, I could have handled better but I didn’t – but I learned from them so I wouldn’t advise my younger self to avoid those things because if that happened, I wouldn’t be the adult I became. Just do not let other people tell you what you can’t do. I was very sexually active – and bisexual – before I was a teen and that laid a lot of very different problems before me and so many telling me that I couldn’t be what I learned I was; that I had to do things the way they were supposed to be done and like everyone else was trying to do but, thanks to my mother, I knew I wasn’t like everyone else and that I had to figure it out for myself and obeying one of the things she always told me and my siblings: No matter what you do in life, be the best you can be at it.

I wouldn’t have to advise my teenaged self of this – I’d just remind him. Don’t be like everyone else: Be who you are. It’ll be worth it, trust me!

 

The Daily Prompt: 23 February 23

What is your favorite drink?

Well, assuming the question is about alcoholic drinks, my favorite hair of the dog is… Scotch. Once upon a time, I was a rum and Coke kind of drinker until a guy I worked with gave me a bottle of The Glenlivet (18 years old) as a Christmas present. Prior to this, the only Scotch I had tasted was Dewers and… I hated it. It tasted like someone threw up in the bottle and sent it out to be shipped. I’d “broken down” and tried Johnny Walker’s a couple of times but it wasn’t something I’d order as a matter of course.

Until I got that bottle of The Glenlivet. Smoky. Peaty. This was some serious Scotch. I probably drew the ire of other Scotch drinkers because I like it with ginger ale – never Sprite – and lemon. Of course, I’ve drank it neat or on the rocks and even though I don’t do a lot of drinking, if I’m going to drink something, if it’s not The Glenlivet – and the older, the better – I’ll pass on the drink. The Glenlivet isn’t cheap and my friends thought I was crazy for paying the $35+ price for it (depending on the year) and I’d tell them that one of the things I learned about drinking was to never drink or buy cheap liquor. I like vodka – Grey Goose is nice but The Glenlivet remains my favorite. I’ve had the other Scotches that are single malts and, yeah, they’re not bad.

On the non-alcoholic side, it’s Coke or Canada Dry Ginger Ale. Way back in the day, we had a lot of soft drinks to choose from, like NeHi orange and grape, RC Cola, Bubble-Up, 7Up, Dr. Pepper, Cheerwine, Coke and Pepsi. There were other “regional” soft drinks but I don’t remember their names. I think it was the people who made RC Cola that made Sport Cola; man, that stuff was good and even better than Coke! Later, there was a company who made soft drinks without artificial colors, sweeteners, etc., and the cherry soda was, hands down, the best cherry soda I’ve ever tasted. My brain is telling me that Snapple made it but I’m not sure about that. It’s cola version was… divine but, as a long-time Coke drinker, it didn’t have the… pizzazz that Coke had. It was a shame that they either stopped making it or decided it wasn’t selling well in our area.

Nowadays, it’s rare that I’ll have a Coke. My kidney doctor suggested that I lay off of Coke which, for me, meant not drinking it as much as I used to. I never liked Pepsi. Ugh. I’ve never figured out why people who love Pepsi has so much love for it. It lacks… the pizzazz that Coke has and where Coke has a nice, “sharp,” clean taste, Pepsi’s taste is muddled and, I’ll say, softer. I “hated” going to restaurants and all they had was Pepsi. Ew. I last drank a Pepsi about, oh, maybe nine years ago and… bleh. It was like drinking water. But it was cold and a better option than drinking a beer, which is something I don’t like drinking.

Funny story about that. When I was in the Air Force, one of the places to really hang out was at the “beer bar,” which was separate from the base club. Plenty of good bar food and… beer. I even got to liking the combination of Miller Beer and tomato juice – a Red Miller. I could go hang out with the guys and put away pitchers of beer like it was water and getting that rather pleasant beer buzz was… nice even though I always made sure that I sat close to the men’s room. Once I got out of the service, I found that I didn’t like beer all that much. Couldn’t stand the smell or taste of it. I kinda liked Heiniken for a little while but even that fell into my “do not drink” category. I’d be around people who were guzzling beer and, well, better them than me. I’d rather drink a Pepsi before I drank a beer.

 

The Daily Prompt

Write about your dream home.

Ah, my dream home! Like a lot of people, I had an “If I won the Powerball for all the money” dream that included contacting an architect and after buying a manageable amount of land and building the house of my dreams. It used to be a four-bedroom affair back when the kids were still at home but I’d revised the dream for a three-bedroom, place, two and a half baths (and luxuriously appointed) living room, a den-like room to just sit and read or watch TV, a kitchen the like I s of which makes my dick hard just thinking about how magnificent it would be and with plenty of room to cook and bake and with all the appliances required for this.

But the house would have a room just for me and built and equipped as a recording studio with all of the instruments I can play so when I want to lay down some tracks, I could. I’d have another room for a couple of servers, a state-of-the-art internet connection and accompanying internal network.

Oh, and other specialty rooms as needed. I would sit and daydream of sitting with the architect and the two of us creating this dream house and for the longest time, I knew exactly what the floor plan looked like. One day, however, it came to mind that my dream home would really be a home that I could be comfortable in; one where the taxes and other costs wouldn’t’ eat a hole in my bank account and I could spend my retirement days doing something simple as mowing the lawn or cooking outdoors or just sitting on my porch and contemplating my navel.

But the dream house would have been built to stand the test of time and the elements and I would have spared no expense. I remember telling my mother about this and she said that I could easily blow my Powerball winnings just having the house built and I agreed that I could – but after making sure I had enough stashed away for those taxes and other costs involved with owning a home went. She’d said that she didn’t see the sense in building a mansion and I had said that it wouldn’t be a mansion but literally a place I could feel at home because it was built to my specifications.

I did have her laughing when I said that there would be TVs in every bathroom. The only thing I couldn’t tell her was where I’d build such a home. In my dreams, where the home would be built wasn’t… revealed to me in any way. I’d told her that I’d “worry about that if it ever happened” because it’s only a dream and I had to pay more attention to the many realities I had to deal with.

But it would be nice if it did happen. I don’t entertain such dreams these days and mainly because I still don’t know where I’d have it built and, these days, that matters. I’m not sure that I’d want to go through all it would take to commission it, dealing with all the legalities and once I really thought about it, um, I wouldn’t want to clean it so that would mean hiring a staff to do all the stuff I don’t want to be bothered with and, besides, I’m not that lucky to be the sole winner of a multimillion dollar Powerball pot…

 

The Daily Prompt: 03 February 23

Write about your first computer.

My first computer was an HP desktop with an i386 processor, 64MB of RAM and… I don’t remember the size of the hard drive off the top of my head. It came with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse and built-in modem and the first version of Windows. My new poly wife had gotten it for me, and, to this day, I can never thank her enough for her generosity that helped launch an amazing career.

I remember not being able to wait to get home with it so I could set it up and put everything I had learned about PCs to work at home. Booting it up and watching Windows load, going through the setup steps and, oh, my, I was so into that moment that when I had to pee, I didn’t want to move from the computer but, yeah, my bladder had other ideas. It came loaded with both AOL and Prodigy and I knew about bulletin boards and how to connect to them.

The World Wide Web, as we know it, was in its infancy; searching for stuff meant being able to use “search engines” with interesting but familiar names: Jughead, Veronica, Archie and Betty although Jughead was the better tool to use but compared to today’s engines that use fuzzy logic, using these tools was often frustrating and required precise syntax but this version of Windows came with something called, “Internet Explorer” and “HTTP” and I was overjoyed to, again, be able to use the stuff I’d learned in school about computers, programming and, oh, yeah, MS-DOS.

Spending an ungodly amount of time loading programs via 3.5″ diskettes, which was an improvement over the IBM PCs and PC-ATs we were using at work that required loading with the bigger floppy disks. Its internal modem blazed at 9600 baud but I knew how to make it faster and I remember that computer with great fondness. I had upgraded it as much as it could be, boosting its RAM to 256, which gave Windows fits but I was learning how to make Windows sit up and beg at my command; I changed out the smaller hard drive for a bigger one and thinking of how much of a pain in the ass that was makes me cringe because I had to spend hours reloading all of the programs I’d spent hours loading onto the original drive.

Other than being online and chatting with all the new people I got to meet via AOL (“You’ve got mail!”) and Prodigy – and beating the shit out of Windows to make it do what I wanted it to do or when it decided to give me the finger, my most used program was… WordPerfect. I had written an erotic story on paper but now I could use the same word processing program I used at work and I was off and running writing erotica for a while and getting published and paid to write it.

Sadly, my poor HP couldn’t keep up with how I was using it and the rapid changes in PC technologies and I had to replace it with a Dell desktop with the newer i486 processors, 4GB of RAM and a 512MB hard drive and pleased beyond belief when Microsoft overcame that MS-DOS limitation on memory that had made using the computer for things that were requiring more memory a serious pain in the ass.

I’m writing this and thinking that the Apple Watch I’m wearing has more computing power than that first computer did. I became an expert in the hardware, MS-DOS, and Windows. I was making money fixing the computers of other people, installing and setting them up, writing intricate batch files to make doing certain things easier and I know that if I hadn’t gotten that computer when I did, the career I was able to retire from… wouldn’t have taken off the way it did.

From that first HP computer to having my house networked with multiple computers and even my own server and, again, none of which would have been possible had I not been gifted that HP that was, at the time, state-of-the-art in PC computing…

 

The Daily Prompt: 20 January 23

If you could un-invent something, what would it be?

I would un-invent… homophobia. I was born in the mid-1950s and my earliest “sex education” memory is of my parents telling me to not have sex until I was old enough (but they never said what that meant) and to especially never have sex with another boy because it was dirty, filthy, nasty and if any boy asks me to have sex with him, I’m to run away as fast as I can and be very afraid to this boy because if I didn’t, if God didn’t punish me by striking me down from heaven, they most certainly would and even if they suspected that I’d disobeyed them.

Well, in 1964, I had sex with a guy. It was both amazing and eye-opening and because I had already disobeyed and “let” a girl take my cherry, I had both pieces of the puzzle… but how could something everyone says is so bad feel so good? I would learn two things and in no particular order: It felt good… because it’s supposed to feel good to have sex. And the reason why everyone was afraid of homosexuals was because, according to the bible, God did say it was evil, a sin, and one punishable by death. I would come to understand that the social conditioning we all get and as soon as our parents think we can understand it – and our minds are still malleable enough to be “programmed,” homophobia was part of that conditioning.

It was being reinforced big time; I can remember the old men who used to hang out in front of the apartment building I lived in telling us horror stories of hobos running around everywhere and looking for young boys like us so they could rape up and turn us into faggots, queers, homos, and other euphemisms of the day… and don’t even think about doing anything with another boy. For myself and many of my male friends, that ship had already sailed and we’d talk about what we were gleefully doing and the consensus – driven by kid logic – said that adults were crazy because doing it with another boy wasn’t bad at all and about the time when puberty showed up to give us a huge kick in the balls, it just made sense to have sex with each other since girls were being told to avoid us like the plague and given their own horror stories to reinforce things.

Growing up as a bisexual male, homophobia was a problem. I would learn that a phobia is an irrational fear of something, and I’d realized that homophobia might be irrational, but it was a fear that was given to us and all because of what the bible said about it. By the time I started junior high school, homophobia had taken hold in my peer group and those afflicted with it were coming out of the woodwork to bully, terrorize, and victimize anyone they even suspected was a homo and that included anyone, male or female, who didn’t want anything to do with having sex like that. Even then, a great many people didn’t know the difference between a bisexual and a homosexual because all they could see was the homosexual side and the side they had to be deathly afraid of and, if and when they could, take it upon themselves to “do God’s work” and punish homosexuals, real or suspected by rumor. And to hate even if they had no reason to. Told to. Taught to.

It didn’t make sense to me to be afraid of something that… I wasn’t afraid of. I was digging into everything I could get my hands on so I could understand being bisexual – and a word I hadn’t learned until I accidentally read it in a dictionary and almost got kicked out of the public library when I blurted out, “So that’s what I’ve been doing!” It was what I’d been happily doing having sex with both the guys and gals and, importantly, what I was: Bisexual. But not homosexual. I… wasn’t what everyone was so afraid of; well, in a way, I was but, still, I liked/loved girls and having sex with them but boys were fun to have sex with, too.

Homophobia was epidemic. So many people giving into a hatred because they were told to. Passed down from one generation to the next and I would sometimes ask someone why they hated gay people and, over the years, would hear the same old religion-based dogma being parroted and, the funny part was that a lot of people were firmly of a mind that their decision to be homophobic was their own idea when, in fact, it never was and, even funnier, many people had never actually met a gay person but that made sense given that they were supposed to avoid gay people like the unholy plague they were.

We let our fears make us foolish. We are hypocrites because we can agree that sex is natural, normal, and healthy but gay sex… isn’t. I would learn that this fear was instilled and installed in us via religion because they already knew that if a man lay with a man, no babies could be born and they came up with a way to make it stop. Tack on the misbelief that masturbation was also a sin and my learning that, no, it actually isn’t but people are… just like that.

I would actually understand why they did it and why they instilled homophobia and as a part of religious beliefs. Having seen and been subjected to it, it’s… humanity at its worst and once those early peoples started losing their lives – and even if they were only accused of or suspected to be homosexual – homophobia spread like a virus that makes COVID look like a bad cold and one that still runs rampant in our societies but not in the societies that aren’t “subscribers” to Judeo-Christian beliefs and dogmatic rhetoric. I would learn that there were cultures who allowed homosexuality and, um, under the “pretense” of teaching young boys about sex and preparing them for manhood and having sex – and making lots of babies – with women and, yeah, talking about the famous or infamous Romans and Greeks but they weren’t the only cultures who “defied” what the Christian bible had to say about it.

We know this yet homophobia still exists and runs rampant. Man said that God said this and I – and many others – could not figure out why (a) God would give us free will but then (b) command that we be punished for exercising this aspect of free will and (c) why would God even care about this and if Jesus died for our sins to be forgiven, why are we still ranting and raving and being all homophobic over something that was pretty much “removed” from the list of sins because our sins were forgiven.

Homophobia needs to be un-invented but since you can’t, we need to get rid of this irrational fear and that’s not likely to happen anytime soon because all it takes is for one person to be homophobic to allow this virus to continue to exist and spread.