On the incommunicability of political conversion

Two years ago I got a phone call out of the blue from an old college friend Cassius, to tell me that K—a mutual friend back in the day, with whom I had absolutely not kept up any contact—had recently died. Cassius and I went on to have a long talk about a lot of things, catching up on 37 years of past history. (Besides this post, see also this one.) During this talk (among a lot of other topics) Cassius filled me in on what had happened in the interim with K and Mrs. K. 

K and Mrs. K had gotten together while I was still a student. K's previous girlfriend had been a good friend of mine (but never my girlfriend), and the woman who later became Mrs. K had been a radical political lesbian. (I remember one spring festival on campus where she wandered around topless; her overall frame was small and her breasts were proportionally sized, but they were beautifully formed.) But somehow she and K hit it off … and then fell into bed together … after which K ended things with his former girlfriend to focus on one woman at a time. Not long thereafter K and his new girlfriend moved in together, and in due course they married. That's how far my knowledge went before I talked with Cassius.

What I learned was that since then, K had found work in some lucrative corner of the computer industry, and was able to retire at around the age of 50 (so roughly a decade before I did) to a life of elegant leisure and collecting art. Also, some time during the intervening years the K's had migrated from the left-wing politics which had been conventional on campus (back when we were all undergraduates) to something that Cassius characterized as right-wing. He didn't go into a lot of detail, but I assume this meant that they voted Republican rather than Democratic.

Cassius did say that once—only once—he asked them about their political migration, but that the conversation was not informative:

Cassius: I don't get it. You used to be on the Left. What happened to you guys, anyway?

Mrs. K: We finally opened our eyes!

Gender dysphoria and transition

I told you that Cassius suffers from gender dysphoria, and wants to transition to life as a woman. When Cassius told me this in our long phone call, he said, "I don't know what you think about these things," and I said I hadn't thought about them much.

But in fact I had already thought about them some, and these days I am thinking about them more. Since these are general philosophical topics rather than strictly personal ones, I'm posting them over on the Patio. I start with this post here, and then proceed with the next few posts after that.

     

What was wrong with us all?

I've wanted to write this post since I spoke with Cassius back on New Year's Eve, but I've had no idea how to start or what to say. That's still true: I still have no idea. But instead of trying to work this out, I've just spent my evenings drinking too much and browsing the Internet. So I may as well make a stab at it. I can't promise not to drink too much tonight, but I can try to explain what is irking me. Solvitur ambulando.   

Back when I was growing up, in the 1960's and 1970's, there was a pretty common idea of what adulthood looked like, at least in certain basic respects. You went to school for a while (through high school or through college), started working at a job, got married, and had kids. Marriages might not be perfect, but they provided islands of stability in an uncertain world, environments in which it was safe to raise children. Once upon a time, there was even an assumption that they were permanent, though that became obviously less and less certain as the 1970's wore on. But long-time readers know that even when I started out this blog in late 2007 I still believed that marriage should be permanent -- see, for example, this rant from early 2008. 

Anyway, of course intellectually I understood that just because a huge number of cases averages to X, that says nothing about individual cases or about tiny sample sets. So if you had asked me, back when I was in college, "Are you mathematically certain that the lives of you and your friends will fit the Standard Narrative?" I would have known that I could not answer Yes. But at an emotional level I would have thought I should be able to answer Yes anyway, or else I would have thought that any deviation required some kind of systematic explanation beyond random chance. I never was very good at understanding statistics.

How did it turn out? Let's look at my sophomore year in college. During that year I was part of a well-defined group of seven friends. I mean, of course we all had other friends too, but the seven of us regularly ate together and hung out together. How well did the seven of us fit the Standard Narrative?

• Hosea: Pretty well. I married two years after graduation. We had two kids. We stayed together for thirty years. But now we are separated. Also, Wife was a bipolar, abusive narcissist, so "stability" was sometimes a question. But I did my best to compensate.
• Cassius: Married a few years after graduation, a woman 22 years his senior. No children that were genetically his own, but two stepchildren from her past: one was three years older than Cassius, and one was three years younger. One way or another, the domestic environment (including the domestic power dynamics) had to have been very different from what you expect from the Standard Narrative. After he was widowed, he started a relationship with an abusive, nonbinary sociopath. He suffers from gender dysphoria and is now considering gender transition.
• Schmidt: Flunked out of college and went home to live with his parents. Never left. Took over the family business after his father died. After some years, figured out that he is gay. Never married. Never established any long-term romantic or sexual relationship with anyone. No children.
• R: Shortly after graduation, he entered a prolonged sexual and emotional relationship with a woman a generation older, just like Cassius. But to the best of my knowledge he never married her. The relationship lasted at least three years, probably rather more. Cassius tells me that R is now living on the other end of the country and has a 14-year-old son. I got no more news than that, so I have no idea whether he also has a wife. Maybe so. A fortiori, I know nothing about their relationship -- if any.
• Mac: No idea. I have no data. I know where he is working now (because the Internet is amazing). But I know nothing about his personal or domestic life. Mac was always kind of wild. It's hard for me to imagine him settling down with a wife and kids. On the other hand, back when we were in college most of us assumed we would end up in academic careers and Mac is the only one with a professorship today. So you never can tell.
• Scarlett: As you know, she doesn't want to talk to me. But I've been following her online (off and on) for over a decade, so I know something about how her life has turned out. She entered graduate school the year I left it -- at the very same school. Then it seems like she was associated with that graduate school from then (the mid-1980's) until only a couple of years ago. That would be thirty years or more. I'm pretty sure she wasn't a student all that time. For a while she was the Director of the English as a Second Language program. She wrote scholarly articles and contributed to at least one book. But so far as I can tell, she never finished her Ph.D. And today she is working in a more-or-less clerical or administrative job in the same city, but in an organization totally unconnected with the University. Now, in fairness this school -- think of it as the University of Hell -- is well-known for feeding on graduate students, chewing them up until all the nutrients have been extracted from them and then spitting them out. But it's sad. As for her domestic life, ... strictly speaking, I suppose I should say that I have no data. But she is still using her maiden name. And graduate students at the University of Hell have a hard time maintaining relationships, to say nothing of marriages. It is almost impossible for me to imagine Scarlett as both a graduate student and a mother. So my bet is that she has had no long-term relationships and no children. Maybe I'm wrong.
• Marie: I've talked about her a lot, of course. But as for the Standard Narrative -- some short-term romantic relationships, but nothing long-term (before me, if you want to count me). No marriage. No children.

In other words: of the seven of us, two certainly married and another two might have; the two who definitely married are no longer so (but there is no data about the other two); three have definitely (or pretty definitely) never married. Also -- again, of the seven of us -- two have children genetically their own, and one has legal stepchildren who are about his own age; three definitely (or pretty definitely) have no children; about one, I have no data. This is a poor showing for the Standard Narrative.

But what's the most remarkable failure with respect to that Narrative? 

• Is it that only two of us begat children (or three, if I should add Mac to the list)? 
• Or is it our track record with romantic relationships, wherein: ... 
• at least two of us (me and Cassius) entered abusive relationships, ...
• two of us (Cassius and R) entered relationships with partners a full generation older (so that the power dynamics were inherently unequal), and ...
• three of us (Schmidt, Marie, and probably Scarlett) managed to avoid any long-term relationships whatsoever? 

Only Mac is an unknown quantity on these scales.

And I wonder, what the hell was wrong with us? Why did we turn out this way? Was it literally just random chance? (As I said, I was never very good at statistics. It might have been.) Or did we have something in common: something that made us choose each other as friends, because we somehow resonated with each other; but which also made us weak or ineffectual in romantic relationships, so that we later sought out partners who abused us or who overawed us with age and experience ... or else we avoided romantic relationships altogether? Is it even possible that any common feature might answer to this description?

I truly don't know. And maybe it's just random chance. But I can't stop wondering about it.

__________

P.S.: If I try to make the list longer, I come up with two other friends I can fold into the mix.

There's Dale: he didn't go to the same college that I did, so he wasn't part of the group I listed above. But I knew him in high school. His marriage ended up being eerily similar to mine.

And there's Fillette: as far as I can tell, her life fit the Standard Narrative pretty well -- stable marriage, two daughters, and lots of friends saying wonderful things about her life after she died. My data is skimpy, but she may have come closer than any of the rest of us to realizing the Standard Narrative. Good for her.

            

The news from Cassius

In the first few years of this blog, the posts were urgent and angry. These days they are mostly a lot more sedate and reflective. Some years ago I wondered about that and decided it was because Wife was no longer a major character. Or at any rate, Wife-as-she-was-back-in-the-day was no longer a character, partly because we had separated and partly because she is no longer the dynamic, brazen bitch she was back when I met and married her. In one respect, the blog really lost something when it lost her as a central character.

But after my long phone call with Cassius on New Year's Eve, I think maybe the whole problem could have been avoided if only I had let Cassius add posts of his own. Of course, literally speaking that would never have happened, because I was totally out of touch with him. But what he told me to fill in the history of the missing 37 years made his story sound just as exciting as mine.

It's late tonight, but it has also been a couple of days and I haven't posted any of this yet. So let me post the details briefly. Then maybe later I can discuss some of them at greater length, at least to try to wrap my head around them.

Cassius mentioned that he had been diagnosed with ASD, and he then explained further that this is The-Syndrom-Formerly-Known-as-Asperger's. That news didn't surprise me much. I mentioned before that Cassius usually sounded scornful and acerbic when I knew him back in college. If he were somewhere on the autism-spectrum -- somewhere well towards the high-functioning end, but still on it -- that might explain why he would routinely speak in a way that risked alienating people. It's just a thought, and perhaps wrong ... but it did mean that I wasn't surprised by this particular piece of news. That makes this point stand out, in a conversation that largely had me raising my eyebrows ever higher.

Then he told me his wife had died a few years ago. Nothing strange in that, right? Only his wife was 22 years older than he was. She already had two daughters at the time she met Cassius, girls who therefore became his stepdaughters. (He has no children with his own DNA.) One of his stepdaughters was three years older than Cassius, and one was three years younger. I remarked that this narrow age gap must have made his relationship with them rather ... umm ... unusual, if not actually strained. But no. He said that the girls told him that the years their mother had with him -- the 28 years their mother had with him [damn near as long as I was with Wife!] -- were the "only" happy years of her life. I'm left thinking that this must be a remarkable story, although Cassius didn't go into it a lot. He did mention that the age gap gave her a level of power in the relationship that could almost turn abusive, though he didn't dwell on this point. (He had more dramatic things to talk about later. See below.) 

But I do wonder what the story looked like from his stepdaughters' perspective? ("Oh look, Mom has married a boy our age! And it sure seems that things are better for her now than they were -- say, just for example -- all the time we were growing up!" I'm just saying that it's probably a hell of a story.)

Some time after his wife died, Cassius entered a relationship with a nonbinary individual that I'll call M. I'm not sure how long this relationship lasted, but apparently it ended only about a year ago. 

With Cassius getting a restraining order against her ... sorry, them. 

A restraining order issued some time after M had threatened his scalp with a machete ... and smashed a plate glass window with something they were throwing at him ... and ... oh gosh, there was more but I don't remember it all. 

But in the course of the account, Cassius definitely used words like violent, sociopathic, and narcissistic. Also the word abuse. He used that one a whole lot, actually.

So he and I spent a while discussing what it is like to come to the realization that you are being abused, long after the events themselves.

But there was even more after that. Or it might have come before, ... I don't quite remember. This post is a logical reconstruction of the call, and not a chronological one.

On top of the rest of it, Cassius explained that he has been in therapy recently (no kidding!); and after deep reflection, he has come to understand that he suffers from gender dysphoria. And so he is currently considering (or perhaps planning) whether to transition to being a woman.

Honestly, I had not expected this last point. Even with all the rest of it.

This evening I talked with Marie over Skype, and I brought her up to date on the news from Cassius. (We had all been friends together back in college.) She said the gender dysphoria didn't surprise her, and she reminded me of one Halloween when Cassius decided to dress elegantly as a woman. I remembered the occasion, but I thought he had just dressed up like that for the hell of it. Marrie said yes, of course once Cassius had established his character as scornful and acerbic, anyone would naturally interpret his choice to dress up as a woman as no more than a way to tweak everyone's expectations. And that was certainly how he played it at the time. But she added that just because he played it that way doesn't mean that was his real or only motive.

I've mentioned before that Marie is really smart. Right?

Anyway, my conversation with Cassius was really long.

           

Thinking about death in the New Year

New Year's Day. Fresh start, new beginning, ... all that stuff. And it finds me kind of quiet.

Back when I was a kid, our ritual for New Year's Day was invariable. We always drove out to the house of my mother's uncle, where my grandparents and other assorted family would all gather, and we'd have a great big buffet around noon. (Why his house? I guess we always went there because we always went there.) Everyone would watch the Rose Parade on television, and then in the afternoon it would be the Rose Bowl game. Some time in the mid- to late afternoon, my parents would gather up me and my brother, and we'd drive back to our own town, heading for the house of my parents' oldest friends there. They, in turn, had their big New Year's party in the evening, so once again we'd all eat too much and the adults would sit around talking for hours afterwards. Their house was better for kids to play in, though, so all the kids of all the families there would run around until we got tired and then fall asleep anywhere it was convenient. Finally we'd get picked up and dropped in the car, and wake up at home the next morning. 

That was a long time ago. Most of those people must be dead by now: certainly my grandparents and my great-uncle are long-since dead, and the next generation of the family have mostly moved out-of-state. My dad is gone, though my mother is still alive.  As for my parents' friends -- I have no idea what's become of most of them. As for the couple that hosted the evening party -- well she died many years ago. He may still be alive -- he was, the last I heard -- but they moved out-of-state many years ago, back when she was still alive. Probably the same pattern follows the rest of that generation, though I never really knew any of the rest of them. It's likely that many of the kids I played with are still alive, but I haven't kept in touch with any of them. All we really ever had in common was that our parents were friends.

So here it is New Year's, and I'm thinking about death.

I guess that's for another reason, too. Yesterday I got a phone call from a friend I used to know in college, and whom I lost touch with shortly after that. I'll be talking about him for a couple of posts at least, because there are a couple of different points from his phone call that I want to discuss, so I had better give him a name. Let me call him Cassius, remembering the line that William Shakespeare puts in the mouth of Julius Caesar: "Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous." My friend Cassius always looked lean and hungry, and he thought a lot -- usually in scornful and acerbic tones. So it's not a bad choice. (Cassius has shown up in only one earlier post -- this one here -- where I called him "A." He was romantically involved with Scarlett for a while.)

Anyway, Cassius telephoned me out of the blue -- as I said, we hadn't spoken in something like 37 years -- to tell me that another common friend had died. This other friend (I'll call him K because it's very unlikely I'll ever need to discuss him again) was about our age. Cassius tells me that K was very healthy; specifically, he said, "K was a lot less likely ever to have heart trouble than I am." But K had a massive heart attack in early December and died four days later.

I talked with Debbie on the phone this afternoon, and said I guess I'm starting to get to the age where I can no longer be shocked if one of my contemporaries dies. At first Debbie didn't want to hear this, because she's seven years older than I am. But I'm sixty now. When I learned that Lisa had died back in 2014 (and I learned it a year later), it really startled me. That seemed too young for anyone my age to die, unless it was in a freak accident. But then a year ago it was Fillette. Now it's K. And if someone dies in their sixties, maybe that seems a little on the young side but it's not crazy. It's not bizarre. You don't expect people in their sixties to be dropping like flies yet, but nobody will be stunned.

So what does this tell me?

It seems to me that some time ago, I settled in my mind -- without ever really consciously deciding it -- that if I ever knew I had only a short time to live I would quit my job, stop whatever other things I was doing, and write down all the ideas that have been stewing in my head for so many years. Over the last year, now that I have been thrown out of work, you have heard me mull whether this is now the time for doing exactly that -- without, let me hasten to add, any sign of actual productivity on my part. I think this answers that question. Forget my increasingly feeble attempts to land a job. Sit my ass in the chair and start writing. Maybe I can work towards that in a fragmentary way by posting bits and bobs on the Patio. We'll see.

I may regret this decision if I live to be very old and outlive all my resources. But at least I will have my ideas out of my head and into some other medium. If they all turn out to be stupid ideas, at least I will have helped them into the air. Socrates always told people he was the son of a midwife, too.

Oh ... in case I had no other reasons for thinking about death? Betty White died yesterday as well. Damn, I was starting to think she was immortal. Guess not.