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Once Again, John Pavlovitz Nails It

To Our Loved Ones,

To Our Grandparents, Parents, Uncles, Aunts, Cousins, and Older Siblings,

We’re aware of what you think of us, either because you’ve told us during explosive, room-clearing conversations, over terse Cold War text exchanges, or in second-hand words passed through the people who now serve as the sole intermediaries between us.

You believe that we’re lost.

You believe we’ve changed.

You think we’ve become radicalized.

You think we’ve abandoned our faith, our families, and our nation, and you’re disappointed with us.

And we need you to know that you’re largely responsible.

Much of this is your fault.

You say that we’ve changed, and we have: we’ve become the people you taught us to become when we were growing up.

people who are deeply offended by inequity,

people who look out for the underdog,

people who grieve the suffering of others,

people who find the beauty in the diversity around us,

people who want others to have enough,

people who are aware of how fortunate we are to live here,

people trying to love our neighbors as ourselves,

people who detest liars, predators, and con men,

people who abhor bullies and bigots and braggarts,

And the people that we’ve become, in large part because of the wisdom and compassion you poured into us as children, can’t fathom, as adults, how you’ve voted for Donald Trump three times and how you still support him now.

It would have been unthinkable to those younger versions of us (and the younger version of you, for that matter), that you would have embraced this man: his cruelty, his depravity, his petty, vengeful, unloving heart.

That’s not the way you raised us, and so whatever issues you have with us now, you need to understand:

You made us this way.

You have radicalized us into loving, compassionate human beings, and we can’t fathom how that can be a problem for you.

We’re really proud of the people we are today, and grateful for the time you spent with us; the lessons you taught us about seeing all people as inherently valuable,

about being a person of your word,

about telling the truth even when it’s costly,

about admitting your mistakes,

about taking responsibility for your actions,

about valuing people over money,

about how we treat people, being what defines us,

We were paying attention in history class.

We were paying attention in Sunday School.

We were paying attention around the dinner table.

We were listening.

We believed you.

We did what you told us to do and became who you told us to become—and so now we care about the world, and we despise evil, and we live open-hearted and open-handed.

And that’s why we’ve found ourselves standing here wondering how you’ve become people we no longer recognize, how you’ve embraced the embodiment of the ugliness you warned us to avoid, how you stopped taking your own advice somewhere along the way.

You say that you only support the party or the policies and not the man—but we remember you telling us that we are known by the company we keep, that the ends don’t always justify the means, and that we can’t gain the world (or a Supreme Court seat) and lose our souls. Back then, you wouldn’t have tolerated those flimsy excuses for aligning with someone horrible, and we won’t tolerate them from you now.

As children, we looked up to you, and that part of us will continue to love you dearly and be grateful to you.

But as adults, we now see you eye to eye, and we grieve the loss of the people we imagined you were when you were teaching us how to be good human beings.

By continuing to support this man, you have gone against everything you told us was important growing up: decency, honesty, fairness, maturity, and empathy.

Either you were lying then, or you’re wrong now.

Which one is it?

The children we were and the adults we’ve become both want to know.

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I Could Live There

I rather like this one.

This is one plan I’ve seen where the Maid’s Room actually makes sense. Downstairs, I’d move the wall between the Maid’s Room and the Dining Room about a foot further into the Dining Room, adding a little extra space to the Maid’s Room because that 8-foot dimension is a very tight fit.. With it’s own semi-private entrance, that room could serve today as an in-home office or a bedroom for a (trusted) teenager or young adult returned home. I’d also punch a doorway between that back porch and the Dining Room and ditch the basement/stairs and tuck a half bath under the stairs.

Upstairs, there’s more than enough room for two full bathrooms, even if both aren’t en-suites. There’s no need for a single Jack-and-Jill bathroom to be shared between the two bedrooms..

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Afternoon Dance Party

Disco Discharge – European Connection (2010)

I had never heard this track before (weird, I know, right?) but I absolutely love it. It plays me.

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Back Home

I was discharged yesterday afternoon. While I was in the hospital they fitted a mid-line so I can continue the intravenous antibiotics at home.  Apprently a particularly nasty bacteria has taken up residence in my lungs and has now officially been served with an eviction notice. It was ignored, so the sheriff has been called to remove the bastard.

The IV routine isn’t all that difficult; certainly no more difficult than any of the other medical adventures I’ve gone through since 2004. It’s just very time consuming. (The pharmacy that’s supplying the medication did not have the 200 mg dose available that was requested so they provided two 100 mg doses each,  effectively doubling the infusion time. ) Still, it’s better than being stuck in the hospital for the next five days.

And though there’s no proven correlation, I can’t help but think that these recurring pneumonias are related to the cellulitis-like skin rash I’ve been fighting for the same length of time. All this time I’ve been referring to it as “Keytruda Rash” but it may in fact be caused by the same bacteria that’s squatting in my lungs. Keytruda didn’t cause these maladies; but it sure as heck opened the door to the bugs via the compromised immune system it is responsible for.

It will be interesting to see if the rash clears up more quickly than it had been with this new therapy. If it does, then I would say that confirms my hypothesis.

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Released 40 Years Ago Today

James Cameron – Aliens (1986)

“Get away from her, you BITCH!”

Opening night, as I was wont to do back in the day. Came home to my apartment and turned on every light in the place.

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I Posted This In r/Over60 On Reddit Earlier Today

Any Gay Seniors Here?

Just curious. I knew I was gay since I was in high school, but I didn’t come out until 1977, my freshman year at the University of Arizona. I was lucky to have the support of the GSO (Gay Students Organization) and the multitude of friends I made at “the [gay] table” in Louie’s Lower Level on the basement level of the Student Union while threw open that closet door and made my entrance to gay life.

For the most part, I haven’t really suffered by coming out. My family was accepting (my dad admitted to me that summer that he too, was gay), although my mom (who was an interior designer) had some initial difficulty, not being able to reconcile my “butch” demeanor with the more effeminate gays she’d worked with all her life, but after she met my friends she finally came around completely. “I like your friends. I used to worry when you’d go out, but now I know who you’re hanging with and will be safe.”

I also haven’t (to the best of my knowledge anyway) suffered professionally by being out-and-proud. I’ve always felt that my employers and colleagues treated me fairly and with respect.

I moved from Tucson to San Francisco in 1986, right in the middle of the AIDS crisis. Somehow I managed to survive “the horrible 90s,” attending what seemed like weekly funerals, and coming out of it all HIV negative and without an arrest record.

Never forget that those of us who are here today are survivors. With today’s state of the world, and watching my the friends who survived along with me begin to pass from all the usual old age ailments, I sometimes wonder if those who we lost thirty years ago had the right idea by getting out early. But I wouldn’t trade the last 20 years since I returned to Arizona for anything; I wouldn’t have met my husband of the last 15 years otherwise!

Anyway, just throwing this out there and would love to hear your stories.

This has been somewhat edited for grammar and clarity from the original post.)

Surprisingly, the responses have been completely and overwhelmingly positive, with a lot of folks thanking me for sharing. In the cesspool that Reddit can often be, I’ve found that sub surprisingly free of the negativity and unflinching one-upmanship so common throughout many other subs. It is truly refreshing.

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Holy Shit…Are They Thinking About The People Instead Of The Oligarchs For A Change?

The U.S. Department of Energy has ordered AI data centers to stop drawing electricity from the grid to prevent widespread blackouts.

As temperatures spiked past 100°F across the eastern United States, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued an emergency directive to ease unprecedented strain on the PJM Interconnection power grid.

The order targets large-scale electricity consumers—most notably the dense cluster of artificial intelligence and cloud computing data centers in Northern Virginia, home to the world’s largest concentration of such facilities.

By forcing these high-demand tech centers to temporarily disconnect from the public grid and rely on their own backup energy resources, officials successfully freed up crucial megawatts so millions of homes could keep their air conditioning running without triggering severe power failures.

However, this quick-fix solution highlights a looming conflict between the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure and local environmental goals. Most industrial backup systems rely on diesel or natural gas, which emit significantly higher levels of local air pollutants than centralized utility plants. Furthermore, with the Mid-Atlantic region lacking the robust battery storage capabilities found in states like Texas and California, grid operators remain highly dependent on fossil-fuel-powered alternatives during sudden demand spikes. As the energy demands of artificial intelligence continue to skyrocket, experts warn that similar emergency measures may become a routine test of America’s aging energy infrastructure.

source: Nilsen, E. (2026, July 2). Energy Dept. directs data centers to use backup generators during heat wave, freeing up power for AC. CNN.

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Speaking Of Scouring Through Photos and AI Image Generation…

I was looking through all my old menz photos to locate this picture:

Back in 2001, it spoke to me for a variety of reasons. I liked it; I liked it a lot. So in a fit of creativity in 2001, I painted it and called it, A Man Who Knows His Place.

For shits-n-giggles, the other day, I uploaded the image of the painting to ChatGPT and instructed, “make it photorealistic.”

I would say it did an eerily accurate reproduction of the original photo.

And while I cannot for the life of me locate the original photo that inspired the next painting I did…

Probably my favorite piece from that whole period.

I do like what ChatGPT did to it with similar instructions:

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So I’m Going Through Old Photos…

…trying to track down something specific in my offline Menz folder. I have everything organized by year and month according to when they were originally downloaded, but that’s not helping me find what I’m looking for.

But while perusing the archives, what I’m discovering is a lot of old friendly, um—faces—that I’d forgotten about. I was also reminded that many of my favorite websites—cough—dudesoffcampus.com—cough—are long gone. I also realized that since I wiped everything in my original blog prior to 2011, I can repost a vast majority of these pictures now and if you ignore the date stamps or the year-specific names, no one will be the wiser.

Yes, I’m evil that way. 😈

Anyhow, one of these favorite faces I used to “chat” with back in the day was this cutie, “BryGuy”

I was going to say at the time I could never understand what this 25 year old found attractive in a pudgy 43 year old, but whatever. We both enjoyed our  “chats.”

Getting information out of him was a challenge—although he wasn’t shy about anything else, if you catch my drift. (Out of respect for his privacy I never screencapped those pictures.) As I recall he lived in Ontario and worked for a finance company of some kind. So if he was 25 in 2001, that would make him 50 today.  I wonder how the years have treated him.

Hmmm…

After uploading one of the photos to ChatGPT and using the command, “Age him 25 years,” it  offered up this view of him at 50:

Apple’s Image Playground came up something similar (it refused to accept the shirtless pic so I had to use a different one)

Still hot.

 

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