Greetings from The Road

A friend, a slight delay

Greetings, dear readers. I make this cross-country drive twice a year to see my daughter, who lives in Ohio. It usually takes about 6 days if I drive all day. I’ve only ever done this drive solo. That gives me lots of time to think. It means getting off the internet and either listening to podcasts or audiobooks or existing in the headspace a person like me needs to formulate thoughts and ideas that I can then put down in writing.

In other words, I spend a lot of time in silence just thinking. It’s a weird way to exist, but I couldn’t write as much as I do if I did not have that kind of headspace. I realized that on this trip, since my friend of over 30 years, Michael Grei, is traveling with me for the first time. He thought it would be fun since he spends much of his time taking care of his mom.

The biggest change for me is a lack of headspace, or thinking time, and that has meant giving you all the short shrift, and for that, I apologize. I also caught a slight bug, which has left me feeling tired in the mornings. All I want to do is spend a whole day in bed, but we’re up, packing, and driving within a few hours of waking.

All of this to say that my podcast, which I’d like to have posted by now, will be slightly delayed. These travel diaries are meant to be behind the (phantom) paywall. I will probably do that once I add all of the names of those who have kindly donated (thank you), so that they will not be locked out.

My Travel Companion

I first met my friend Michael many years ago, back in the 1980s, when I was hired to work the counter at Main Street Video in Santa Monica. He was the manager, and I was an employee. He was raised Catholic and grew up as a black gay man in Los Angeles with a traditional nuclear family that was socially conservative. He remains a Democrat and leans Left, but we just don’t talk about politics.

Here are some old photos of us from the 1990s, though we were already old friends by then.

And here is Michael now, as he was last Thanksgiving when he attended my daughter’s boyfriend’s family’s dinner.

And here he is now, on our trip, wearing his “you are enough” sweatshirt.

Michael is one of a kind. He is someone who gets along with everyone, and he somehow accepts me as his friend, no matter what else is going on in our lives or my political beliefs.

In a week where we are to be giving thanks, I give thanks for my good friend Michael. He’s become a stand-in father figure for my daughter, shows up at family gatherings, and vows to walk her down the aisle should that fateful day arrive.

Our conversations are mostly silly and don’t go that deep, but we did talk about religion yesterday, and I realized how much he knows about the history of religion. He had been a member of the Church of Christ but had a negative experience of it and has since drifted away from his faith.

Being the only gay person in his immediate family has meant living a lonely life. He’s never found the relationship he has longed for, but then again, neither have I. And in that way, we’ve found in each other what might look like, from the outside, an old married couple. I guess neither of us has been able to figure out that part of life.

The thing that connected us in the beginning and still does to this day is movies. He has been attending the Telluride Film Festival with me for the past 10 years to watch movies and hang out in the mountains. Now that I’ve been “canceled’ and no longer attend, he feels that loss more than I ever would. And for that, I am sorry. He is trying to figure out how to attend on his own, and maybe he will.

Our mutual love of movies is what brought us together at the video store, though it was swallowed up by Blockbuster, which was then swallowed up by streaming. I remember those days fondly, a time we’ll never have back.

Michael is also how I ever found my way to the Oscars and built my website. He was the first person to spark my interest in them because he knows even more about the Oscars than I do.

He and I know the lines from some films that we can quote to each other, like The Thing, or The Exorcist, or Body Heat, which is somehow his favorite film of all time. It’s a great movie, so why not?

In our own unconventional way, we’re growing old together as friends. It would never have occurred to him to stop speaking to me because of how I vote or what I think.

Anyway, I hope to post a podcast soon. In the meantime, I hope you are all doing well and preparing for the big feast.

Davenport, Iowa 8:43 am