One of the reasons I’m keeping my journal as a blog this time around, rather than as word document to be published later, is that I seem to thrive on the immediacy of it – the momentary excitement of an idea that drives me.

Knowing, previously, that my writings would have to wait what seemed like an interminable time in order to be made available to others was a real motivation killer.

So, I went to my Facebook account and spent several years throwing myself into posting and curating all the wonderful things I wanted to share. But as we learned in the video I included in my previous post – NOTHING! Not a like, not a share, not an included link clicked – NOTHING!

I tried, I really did. I wasn’t craving an audience or a following. I just wanted to know that of the friends and followers I did have, the art and insights I developed were meaningful.

But, as it turns out, most folks just want to hear about your cat and your grandkids and see the funny meme you reposted. Nobody wants to consider your original music, your artistic photographs, your philosophic epiphanies – NOBODY!

So, the more they resisted, the more I persisted. The less they commented, the more I posted until even family and friends had enough, blocked my notifications and just dropped by my page from time to time to add a polite like or noncommittal comment.

In truth, I drove them out. I have the never-ending rush of ideas within me, often to the point I feel as if I’ll explode. And only by writing a song, a poem, posting a new photograph or explaining a new insight can I avoid the endless screaming of the Muse. (“Tell me, Clarice, is the Muse still screaming?”)

So here I’ve come, a place where no one else goes: my blog. And in it I shall post my endless journal of experiences, concepts, and creations – I will cleanse myself of the debris of past inspiration to make room for the next batch and send it down the pike as quickly as I can before I am smothered by my own thoughts.

Here’s some music I composed and recorded some twenty-odd years ago but never got the mix right on it. Just went back to the original elements and nailed it (within the limits that my tawdry tracks could, in their insufficient original form be nailed, even with a good mix).

Posted under my musical performer name of Tarnished Karma:

It’s been more than ten years since I kept a personal journal. To be perfectly honest, I thought I was done with that format. Yet here we are again.

Why again? Why now? Damned if I know. But more precisely, I don’t think it is one thing but rather a multiplicity of influences that draws in my Muse and guides my hand.

Among these are the end of the Covid pandemic. After fifteen months in self-imposed exile, venturing not into any store or building other than our own home, disinfecting every surface of every food item delivered to our door by the supermarket, and even quarantining our mail and packages for three days in the workshop out back until the three-day life of Covid has been exceeded – after all that – life is opening up once again.

Like mammals cautiously venturing forth after hunkering in their subterranean nests while the dinosaurs died, the three of us here – Mary, Teresa, and myself – are finally returning to the edges, the outskirts, of what were once our normal lives.

But perhaps the greatest driving force that has led me to return to this format was the death of my step-father from Covid just a year ago.

He raised me from age seven when he married my mother who had divorced shortly after I was born. He was a wonderful father and, though at times we lived far apart and seldom spoke save on holidays, I always felt close to him, and him to me.

And, generously, life allowed us an extra span of communion during his final four years when I moved back down to my childhood home and could visit him nearly every week at his nursing care facility.

I would share the latest about family and friends, reminisce with him about our early days together as a family before my mom passed on nearly a third of a century ago, and I would bring him his favorite foods, videos to enjoy, music in which to become lost, and listen with eager attention as he spoke of his own childhood and his adventures in the years before I knew him.

His loss made me reassess my own scant time remaining to walk the planet. And as I turned my attention to dozens of boxes of family mementos stretching back to the late 1800s, which I have preserved as their conservator for decades and now feel compelled to sort and organize before passing on to my children, as I lift every lid and embrace the memories and moments each contains, I find myself struggling with permanence – not as one might attempt to fashion a legacy (though I went through that phase) but more philosophically as I try to understand where the meaning truly resides: in the acts of kindness or anger we ripple out into the world, in the insights and experiences we capture and send to anonymous others as messages in bottles, or is the pure organic essence of bling alive and becoming one with the immediacy of present experience the spark that ignites the blaze of self awareness that illuminates the universe so others might find their own way?

And yet, it might be far more simple, that which compels me to once again keep a journal. It may be no more than my inherent need to express myself, even if no one is listening, even if there in no one else in the room.

I am sure I will revisit all of these issues time and time again as I continue in this new incarnation of an old habit. But for now, as a means of wrapping these thoughts in a more complete context, I offer the following video from my YouTube channel, recorded live not yet a month previous:

Here’s the prologue to my Facebook page where I share my diary:

I transitioned in 1989 and had surgery in 1991. Folks call me a transgender pioneer because I created the first online trangender chat room, the first online transgender magazine, the first transgender support web site on the planet, as well as the first “how to” video for developing a truly female speaking voice. I also was the first to publish an online daily diary of my transition, surgery, and post-op life, ending up at more than 1200 pages.

Me – I just fell into a vacuum and filled it. The time was right and I was focused, so as a creative thinker, I pushed full speed ahead. But now, all these years later, I’ve moved on, as one might expect. In the intervening decades I’ve created (with my partner) a whole new theory of mind, a new model of narrative psychology, software that implements the model for the structuring of best-selling book and award-winning movies, and I’ve even worked for several years for government intelligence agencies, using our model to analyze the complex motivations of terrorists and to project their likely future behavior in alternative future scenarios.

And so, TG issues have faded out of my life, much less being a focus. In fact, it is usually weeks or months between moments in which they even come to mind, as if it never happened.

But every once in a while, something that happens pops up and for an instant, I recall how it was. And then, just as quickly, the notion fades away again of its own volition.

Of late, however, I’ve started organizing my archives of all my scientific and creative writings, my musical compositions, my artistic photographs, and more. And when I come across some of the materials I put forth on transgender topics, I post them here – partly to document my contributions as an artist, scientist, and philosopher, partly to share with others any value they may have, and partly to finally put them behind me for good, knowing that I no longer have to curate them, as they have a safe and useful home here.

So, browse through, copy or repost anything you like, as long as you give appropriate credit, and may your life course take you to wonderful places beyond your imagination.

Most important, no matter what you seek or what you suffer, never forget that “Dreams are the stuff reality is made of,” as I concluded most of my transgender writings, so long ago.

As a professional analyst I never take anything on faith, especially when it supports my own beliefs. If I am to truly have an open mind, which is essential in order to see the truth, I must constantly question those things that most support my point of view, for those are the things easiest to gloss over and accept as fact. In analysis, the first thing you learn is that everyone is biased, no matter how open they try to be. We all have blind spots, and the best way to minimize the bias within ourselves that we cannot see is to be most skeptical of any data that agrees with our predisposition.

From an early age I had a bent toward revolutionary politics. In my youth, however, I was more focused on giving love, meeting my responsibilities, and avoiding harsh or abrasive emotions.

Now, such inhibitions are gone, and as a senior citizen I find myself becoming the young radical I always should have been.

I’ve often fancied that dark energy is self-awareness. As I understand it, dark energy was not present immediately after the big bang. So perhaps, it came into being as the physical manifestation of the actual, tangible self-awareness of the first thinking creatures. And as more and more sentient creatures came into being, the force of dark energy increased, leading to the accelerating expansion of the universe we have measured today. Probably poppycock, but an interesting notion nonetheless.

I’m as annoying as Charles Dickens. I’m just not as popular.

When you start out, you practice being annoying in the hopes you’ll prove to have the talent and the breaks to be another Dickens. Sure, that’s the dream… But as I approach my 67th birthday without having achieved any of that success, I’m on the verge of being forced to admit to myself that, in the end, I’m just an asshole. And you know, I can live with that.