Everyone should have an opinion, but not all opinions count for much

The CNN opinion piece about the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition would’ve normally been right up my alley for a wholesome rant. Frankie de la Cretaz, the author of the piece, criticizes the yearly issue for “glamming up” the WBNA players who appear in the issue, especially the ones who are out and queer. One was “typically femme-leaning, but unfussy” and another who “favors more of a soft butch aesthetic.” Neither appeared that way in the issue. To de la Cretaz, that was a bad thing.

de la Cretaz says “the framing buys into century-old anxieties around women’s gender roles and presentation, but it’s a bizarre misstep for a league that has grown, since its inception, in terms of letting their players embrace a more diverse range of gender expressions.”

My initial thought was that they (de la Cretaz) were criticizing the league and the players for embracing gender expressions in the wrong way. When the players are non-conformist in their presentations, they must be conform to the proper methods of being non-conformist. Or something.

If you can use such a word in this context, de la Cretaz’s criticism seems a little paternalistic.

While the progressive movement has resulted in some positive changes, this is the type of scolding that makes me wince. (In fairness, the right does it, too, usually in the name of God and patriotism and whatever has them annoyed at the moment.)

That was my first set of thoughts, and I consider them largely valid.

As I thought more, my opinion evolved. Given de la Cretaz’s use of the plural pronoun in reference to themself on their website, and the large earrings that say queer in one of her publicity shots, I’m assuming they self-identify as queer. The players they reference are also queer.

I’m a straight white Christian dude who is guilty of all the privileges, including some I probably haven’t thought of.

In other words, this isn’t my battle. I have an opinion (you just read it) but ultimately, this isn’t my area. My opinion about this issue, awesome though it may be, is largely immaterial.

If de la Cretaz were to chastise me for how I appear as a straight white dude, one of my first thoughts would be “What’s it to you? Stay in your lane!” It being a free country, they’re entitled to their opinion, but their opinion is largely immaterial.

Like mine in this case.

I’m as straight as can be. Have been since I felt something I couldn’t explain the first time I saw Yeoman Rand on Star Trek. My views on non-straight culture and how people represent it don’t count for a lot. Nor should they.

So there’s my opinion on this topic. Feel free to ignore it, as millions of people in the US alone have done on a daily basis since this blog was published.

War is sometimes necessary, often stupid, and always costly

I’ve been past Arlington National Cemetery before; you have to if you work at the Pentagon. It’s enormous. Row on row of dead Americans who served. Many of them–probably most of them–didn’t die during service. And that’s what Memorial Day is for. It’s not for those who served, but for those who died during service.

I can’t imagine what it’s like, being young and scared as I walk through unfamiliar land a long way from home. Or flying over that land. Or facing battle someplace where all there is, is water for as far as the eye can see. I’d have to imagine that feels especially confined. There’s literally no place to go.

I don’t know what it’s like to go on a mission and know there’s a very good chance that I won’t be around when it ends.

But I can consider the number of people who faced that circumstance and didn’t return.

It’s fashionable today, on Memorial Day, to quote John’s Gospel, where Jesus says that no man can have a greater love than to lay down his life for his friends. Or his countrymen. But that seems to romanticize the death.

Commemorate the sacrifice that so many have made for our country feels hollow when there’s so much death around us. Sure, there’s Ukraine. And Uvalde. And downtown Chicago. And last night Chattanooga.

All of it is war of some form or other.

The majority of the people we recognize today died young. Too young. They didn’t get a chance to come home and live out their lives, to make or watch families, to grow old. Some of them died in terror and some probably never got to realize they were dying. It just happened.

Santayana is supposed to have said that only the dead have seen the end of war. It’s unfortunate that he’s right. Some of the people we memorialize today have been dead almost 250 years, their names and existence long forgotten. They died as part of an attempt to preserve freedom–either ours or others’.

Whether it’s Iraq or Vietnam or the Spanish-American war, we can debate the merits of fighting those individual wars another day.

But today, as we look at the cost of war over the centuries, as we consider the more than one million men and women who didn’t come back, one major thought rings to mind.

Sometimes war is necessary. It’s often stupid. And it’s always costly. Death is an inevitable byproduct of war. And we see so much of it right now.

War should never be entered into lightly. And those who start unnecessary wars should be held to the highest standards of justice.

Our hands may not be as dirty as other nations’ in this regard, but they’re hardly clean.

While we honor our dead today, we should take every step possible to not unnecessarily add to their number, now or in the future. Our military exists to kill people and break things, which means it should always be used as a last resort or when its use will prevent larger breakage and death in the future.

There are things worth fighting for and dying for. This country is one of them. But we should never take those sacrifices lightly, or for granted.

Power made perfect in weakness

Crap has been hurting lately and I’ve been struggling a bit. The Fibro is kicking my ass a little*. Work is work and I’m excelling at it, but outside work, it’s walk through the mud–which is fun if you sign up for Tough Mudder, but a pain in the ass if you do it all day.

Last week’s message at church was about leveraging the power of God. According to Ephesians, We can leverage the same power that raised Jesus from the dead. Without even a small delay, my first thought was–if that’s true, how weak is my faith? Why am I not harnessing that mighty power? If I have the power that can raise someone from the dead, why can’t I go for a five-mile run or get through the day without feeling pain and exhaustion. Why am I constantly struggling?

The answer, of course, is that nothing’s wrong with me. Fibromyalgia (or cancer, or anything) isn’t there because I lack faith. Shit happens. It happens in every life. Sometimes it happens in neat little bunny pellets and sometimes it’s a giant steaming pile.

Jesus said this himself. According to John’s gospel, in this world we will know trouble. Jesus came to earth at a time when there was no central AC, and he came to the Middle East, not Hawaii. There weren’t health inspectors checking the sanitation in the place where food was prepared. There wasn’t indoor plumbing.

Jesus picked a time when there was discomfort. I don’t want to walk in Jesus’ shoes because Jesus’ shoes sucked. It was 2000 years ago.

If Jesus came and suffered, why would we not expect the same? It’s part of the job description.

If anyone deserved to have an easy walk based on faith, it was Paul. No one knows exactly what it was, but Paul had a thorn in his side. He begged God to remove it–pretty boldly, if Paul stayed in character. He begged three times. And God’s response was that his power is made perfect in weakness.

There are times with the Fibro that I feel weak. Evenings where I get done with work and spend the rest of the night on the couch or in bed, fiddling around on my tablet or watching Farscape or the Mets. Last week I didn’t exercise three days because of pain.

The Fibro makes me feel alone. It makes me feel less-than. It makes me feel stupid for not being able to do even half of what I could do last summer.

If there’s solace to be taken, it’s that I’m not alone. Even on long, hard days where I feel like crap, people are up my butt, and everything turns into a flaming dumpster fire on wheels, I’m not alone in my weakness.

There’s a plethora of verses about God being with us (starting with Jesus being called Emmanuel [God with us]). The one that I take solace in is Psalm 56:8 which says, “You keep track of my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book.”

God notices every tear, even the ones I don’t cry (because I’m a manly man who isn’t watching Field of Dreams at the moment). He knows my pain and fatigue. And if he doesn’t choose to take it from me, He’ll be with me through it.

Maybe God has a plan for this. Maybe he doesn’t. I don’t know.

I know this is the hand I have. The bad Fibro days aren’t a bug; they’re a feature. If this is what God chooses for me, it’s stupid to cry how unfair it is. My job is to do my best to accept it with grace and faith and to let it soften my heart and build empathy. It’s not just the time, talent, and treasure God wants us to use. He wants us to put the bad things to use, too.

That’s how his power is made perfect in weakness.

* — I get by with the Fibro. A lot of people struggle a lot more than I do.

It won’t be, but next time, it could be any of us

Robb Elementary School could be any elementary school here in Florida. The schools hare aren’t big brick buildings like up north. They’re typically one-story and spread out a little. Instead of the indoor hallways I remember, there are outdoor walkways, some of them covered, some not.

It’s flat in that part of Texas, Florida-like in it’s flatness. The neighborhood isn’t that different than the street just outside the east entrance to our subdivision. There are trailers and older houses. Not much in the way of sidewalks. Low metal fences in the front yard, the kind that would keep smaller dogs out of the road.

Ironically, there’s a funeral home directly across the street, which seems an odd juxtaposition. But the kids who attend there probably didn’t question it. It’s just what’s there.

It’s in the middle of a residential neighborhood, across a back field from a fireworks store. There’s a sno-cone stand about a quarter mile away that every kid in school probably knows about and begs their parents to visit during the summer.

If there’s anything remarkable about this school, it’s that it’s completely unremarkable. And there’s the rub.

The Tops Friendly Supermarket in Buffalo is just a supermarket. This is just a school. The next place will be just a church or just a mall or just a restaurant. It’ll be a place the locals know, but few others. It’s one notable factor will probably be just how mundane it is.

Until it becomes the center of our attention for a few days.

Kids should be safe at schools. They should be able to go there without having to worry about today being the day someone decides to open fire on them. They shouldn’t have to endure active-shooter drills on the off-chance they’re necessary.

Kids young enough to still believe in Santa do active shooter drills. So much for believing in magic.

The majority of Americans have never been to the World Trade Center or Pentagon. As jarring as September 11 was, it wasn’t an immediate threat to most of the country. It couldn’t have happened at their school, church, or place of work.

This is different.

The odds of any individual person being a victim in a mass shooting are functionally zero. I’m not going to get shot next time or any of the times. Neither are you.

Two teachers and nineteen kids probably thought that, too–if they gave it any thought.

I’m a classic conservative because I value liberty. I should be free to do as I will as long as it doesn’t harm others. So should you.

But it’s hard to believe that a country in which you’re advised to find the closest exit when you go to a crowded place is truly free.

That’s the issue. Uvalde could just as well be your town. It could be Bend, Oregon or Galway, New York or Lutz, Florida. The school could be where your kids go (or went). The church or supermarket or workplace could be yours.

In that sense, we’re all potential victims.

If nothing else, that should jolt us out of our standard arguments to stop using these horrific attacks as a framework for posturing or political theater. There’s no them here. To the extent that any of us are in these crosshairs, we all are.

It’s the guns. But it’s not just the guns.

Mental health was the pretty much all they talked about at Wednesday’s news conference in Uvalde. You’d have thought the entire thing would’ve been prevented if they added Zoloft to the drinking water. It was a ridiculous cop out–a weak-stream bait and switch to avoid talking about the elephant in room.

While mental health didn’t shoot the victims of Uvalde, references to it aren’t entirely wrong. Aside from being dudes, one of the primary common attributes of mass shooters is that they’re loners. The loneliness pandemic isn’t limited to them. A recent Cigna study reported that 61 percent of American adults feel lonely.

When I spend too much time alone, my thinking starts to warp. It bends back on itself. The shadows become darker and a little bigger. That figurative rumpled up shirt in the corner turns into a figurative monster. My figurative belt becomes a figurative snake.

I have people around me. I can talk to my wife. I can get on a call for work or go write at a place where other people are.

I’m also relatively mentally stable and self-aware. I can tell when the darkness starts to encroach and take steps to push it back.

The men who become mass shooters aren’t mentally stable and self-aware. They’re loners. When the darkness encroaches, they don’t have someone to talk to.

Pervasive loneliness can generate anger. You look at other people–people with friends, who get invited to things–and you start to envy them. And then you look at the reason you aren’t invited–the asshole in the mirror.

You can only direct so much anger at yourself until it spills over. You need a place to direct it. Sometimes it’s them, people of color, gays, women, the libs. Sometimes, it’s whoever’s handy. But you can’t direct that much anger at yourself. It would destroy you.

And there’s no one to help you rein it back.

The shooters aren’t the victims here. But while we argue about guns, we can’t use mental health as a diversion. It’s too easy to go online and find an easy target for that anger you can’t direct at yourself. And there are too many people eager to amplify that rage.

And the rage makes you fit in, to have people who value you, just like everyone else.

Mental health didn’t pick up a gun and wipe out a classroom of children and their teachers this week. A man with a gun did that.

But intense loneliness and isolation for a mentally unstable man contributed.

It’s the guns, but it’s not just the guns.

On thoughts and prayers and shootings and stuff

Full disclosure: I’m a practicing Christian (which means someday maybe I’ll get good at it). That said, I’ve prayed a lot about what happened in Uvalde, Texas this week. And about my responses to it.

I prayed for the victims and their families. About 600 kids attend Robb Elementary School, which means about 3% of them were murdered this week. The disclosure that the victims were all in one classroom, I expanded that prayer to include all the kids, particularly in the fourth grade. These are kids who started school, then couldn’t see their friends or have a normal routine for a long time. Then they came back to school to a mass execution. That has to leave a mark that will follow them through their entire lives.

Then as stories came out, I prayed for the parents. One girl was murdered after she said she didn’t feel well and the parents told her to go to school anyway. It’s something parents go through, deciding if your kid is sick work just working the system. The person responsible for her death is the person who shot her. But there’s not a parent on this earth who wouldn’t feel a crushing weight of guilt, on top of grief. If only they’d listened to her…

I can’t imagine hell being worse than that.

I prayed for the rest of us, that this could be the beginning of some sort of meaningful discussion. This wouldn’t have happened without the guns, so we need to talk about them—and offer more than just bromides. How about background checks for all purchases? How about a consistent red-flag framework? But it’s not just the guns. We need to discuss why it’s always boys–and do so in a way that doesn’t conflate toxic masculinity with traditional masculinity. We need to talk about mental health. And social media and kids. And the effects of psychotropic drugs on kids’ brains. I prayed that we could reach beyond the well-worn discussions and follow the threads wherever they go.

I prayed for all the kids–especially the ones who already felt left out. It’s been 100 years since kids have experienced something like the last two years. These kids don’t remember 9/11. The most pressing threat in their lives is whether someone will kill them at school. The school shootings hit closer than 9/11 ever did. How many of us work in the Pentagon or in or around the World Trade Center? How many kids go to school? We can’t understand what they’re feeling about this.

And kids can be horrible to each other. I know what it’s like to feel like the guy who doesn’t fit in. I know what it is to be ridiculed, demeaned, and to have my ass kicked at school–then feel shame all over again when I take that home. I prayed that we get better at seeing that when it happens, and helping the square pegs.

I prayed for the shooter, too. I’m angry. I think very unChristian things about him. But I don’t know that if I were in his shoes, if I’d lived that life, that I’d do better.

And I prayed for myself. I prayed that God would move me to write the right things, say the right things, and then do the right things. Prayer has flipped the script for me on issue ranging from the death penalty to sexual identity–even how I view myself and those closest to me. It has soften my heart and opened my mind.

Gun laws and other measures will make it harder to commit these crimes, but they will never end them. Changing hearts is required for that.

So you can tell me to go fuck myself. You can loudly proclaim that I have blood on my hands and that I’m part of the problem. It’s an emotional time; you get to do that. I understand your anger.

But this is what I know. This is my best route to the humility required to think twice about what I think. It’s affected what I do.

For me, it’s not an excuse for doing nothing. It’s the best route for me to figure out the best thing I can do.

Not everyone who’s angry today wants to take your guns

Yes, there are people who want to take your guns. They want to take all of them and melt them down. They don’t much care about your interpretation of the Second Amendment.

But as we collectively try to make sense of yet another shooting, this time with children as victims, not all the angry people venting their frustration want to take your guns. Yes, they’re angry. Yes, they’re throwing hyperbole at you and blaming you for what some other guy did.

But the more you resist any measure in response to events like yesterday’s shooting, the more you’re driving people who might otherwise compromise with you away from those compromises.

Something needs to be done.

I know that if all guns are registered, it’s much easier to come take them all. And I know that if they were somehow able to take all the guns, there would be a bloodbath that would make The Purge look like Mary Poppins.

But there was a bloodbath at an elementary school yesterday. Nineteen kids whose only sin was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Two adults. And the shooter.

Parents had to endure the hell of knowing there was a shooting and knowing there was death, but not knowing if their child was one of them.

And in defending your freedom to feel safe, more people feel unsafe at schools and churches. There was a bloodbath earlier this month at a supermarket in Buffalo. Both places had guards who couldn’t prevent what happened. That uniformed cop at your church isn’t there just to direct traffic. He’s a deterrent–and armed security.

This isn’t a rage-filled diatribe. It’s not a statement that everyone from Kirsten Sinema rightward has blood on their hands. (I’m one of them.) And it’s explicitly not a request to take away your guns.

It’s a request to look at things as they are. Look at the amount of money being pumped into the political system by the NRA and who’s taking it. I know there are special interests on the left who give tons of money, too, but that’s another topic for another day.

Look at the fact that these shooters learn from each other–that the mass shooter in Buffalo specifically called out Dylann Roof, Anders Breivik, and Brenton Tarrant, previous mass shooters. Look at the fact that the last two mass shooters had body armor. If the next one doesn’t, the one after that will. Look at the damage done and the speed with which it’s done.

Compromising doesn’t mean you give up all your guns. It doesn’t mean you lose the right to defend yourself. It doesn’t mean you have the duty to retreat if someone breaks into your home with evil intent.

People continue to die. Guns aren’t the only reason–but they are part of the reason. And every time the mass shooting is met with thoughts and prayers and little else, more people join the ranks of the people who want to take your guns and melt them down.

Someone needs to go first. Someone needs to be courageous and tell the NRA that all legislation isn’t a threat to the Second Amendment.

Because this will continue until something changes.

What if you’re Nancy Pelosi’s eucharistic minister?

This week, Rev. Salvatore Cordileone, the archbishop of San Francisco, said that Nancy Pelosi need not get in line to receive Eucharist at Mass because of her position on abortion. (She attended Mass in DC over the weekend and received Communion.) She’s also supposed to stop publicly referencing her Catholic faith.

Let’s assume you’re a Eucharistic Minister at a church in San Francisco. (The Eucharistic Minister works with the priest to dispense the hosts and wine at Communion.) You joined this ministry because it makes you feel closer to the Lord to work with his precious body and blood. (Catholics believe that through a process called transubstantiation, the consecrated hosts and wine become the body and blood of Jesus, not just the representation.)

Let’s say you’re scheduled to serve at this weekend’s 5:30 Mass. You go to the sacristy (the room where Communion is prepared before Mass), and help get things ready. When the time is right, you go up to the altar and receive the consecrated hosts. The people queue up and start to receive, and toward the back of the line, there she is. Nancy Pelosi.

What do you do?

When I was a Eucharistic Minister, I was instructed that it wasn’t my job to deny anyone, regardless of circumstance. It’s possible that guidance has changed, or been overridden in the case of Nancy Pelosi.

But overall, if you’re that EM, you’re screwed. It doesn’t matter what you do, you may become a public figure and a battleground in the fight over abortion.

If you deny her Communion, you’re part of the problem–someone firmly on the record as opposing a woman’s most sacred right, the right to choose. Your name is potential fodder for social media. As with a jury, you can never tell with the Twitter hoard. Except there are no judge’s instructions to guide them. They’re fighting for social justice, so they’re right in all that they do. If someone decides to dox you and identify your employer, you could lose your job and every shred of peace and privacy.

If you give her Communion, you face the same thing from the other side. This is the side that considers itself part of God’s army. They’re fighting a war for the future of this country and the lives of more than 600,000 babies per year. And for God. So they’re right in all that they do. You’re now fodder for the likes of Josh Hawley, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, and Tucker Carlson. It’s not beyond the pale that your name becomes part of your message.

Either way, you might go from a private citizen who just wants to serve God in the best way you know how, to a briefly central figure in the biggest political food fight in years.

All because you wanted to serve the God who died so that people who mess up (that would be all of us) would see a tangible sign of his inexhaustible love.

There’s something wrong with this picture.

Southern Baptist Convention sex abuse scandal casts doubt on all Christian faiths

Through my younger years, when I heard people talk about Catholic priests sexually abusing children (particularly boys), I figure it was the typical anti-Catholic crap from people who didn’t like Catholics or their stance on abortion. I’d been Catholic all my life. I’d played basketball in the parish gym in Broadalbin, New York. I as an altar boy. I went to a Catholic High School.

I figured if that abuse were happening, I’d have heard about it. I never did..

I was working at my parish when it came out, helping with the capital campaign for the new church we were building. A lady who had come into the church office for something spoke of how it hurt her to see the Church go through that. I wanted to jump up, get in her face, and say the church was the problem. How about feeling something for the victims?

As part of the cover-up of all the sexual abuse, the Phoenix Diocese would transfer the priests who’d been accused of misconduct to Hispanic parishes because they were less likely to object. Then a priest at our parish–a guy I’d talked to a few times and liked–was charged with abusing a child. He said he didn’t do it. When a second accusation came, he was gone immediately. We never found out what happened wiht him.

And yet, we’d still be attending the Catholic church if my parish hadn’t kicked out the Boy Scout troop. My son was a scout at the time and we supported him in not wanting to attend a church that kicked his troop out. I still attend a men’s small group there because I’ve known some of those guys twenty years.

Over the weekend, a bombshell report was released showing the same patterns in the Southern Baptist Convention. The same sexual abuse, the same coverups, the same shaming of victims to get them to go along. This Christianity Today article from a guy named Russell Moore spells everything out.

The church played all the same cards the Catholic church did, and added a few, like withholding missionary funding from individual churches who protested, calling the abuse accusations a tool of Satan to distract from the church’s mission, and dismissal of critics as Marxists. God apparently doesn’t love them as much as good Christian American conservatives.

One victim, a girl who was abused form the age of 14 and became pregnant, was forced to apologize in front of her entire church, but forbidden from naming the father. A former SBC president, Johnny Hunt, assaulted another pastor’s wife.

In another instance, 44 women came forward with complaints about a specific pastor. The report says they were shamed for what happened. The pastor was quietly transferred to another church.

The victims in this case were primarily women and children–and the weight of the church came down on them. This is the same church that exiles churches for having women pastors or having women speak from the pulpit on Mother’s Day. This church also opposes abortion without any exceptions, but doesn’t seem to have an issue with contraception.

The response to the allegations was to protect the convention. Unlike the Catholic church, Southern Baptists are a loose confederations of churches. The Convention doesn’t have direct control over the member churches, but apparently had enough influence to move problem pastors from one church to another. After telling people they couldn’t create a database of accused abusers because of individual church autonomy, the Convention did just that–creating documentation to protect itself from potential litigation.

The damage to the people victimized by the Southern Baptist Convention is immense. They were victimized once by the church, then pressured or outwardly shunned for attempting to pursue justice against their abusers. They were considered to be heretics.

Russell Moore has left the Baptist church. He closes his piece by saying it’s not a crisis or even a crime. It’s blasphemy.

It’ll also be taken as proof that Christian churches are at least as corrupt as secular organizations. It’s not helped by Christians in power, from the individual church level to the executive level, who put church above morality. Jesus isn’t served by protecting a corrupt church that abuses its members. The good done by the church doesn’t justify burying the bad.

And the executive committee, through the terms of several presidents, seemed more concerned with protecting itself than with the welfare of its members.

We currently attend a Methodist church that’s vibrant and affirming. I look forward to service each week. Though I doubt there’s a problem, I held the same position once before. I was wrong about that. Could I be wrong about this?

The primary victims of this are the abused. But secondary victims are those who won’t be helped by other churches. And, if you believe in Christian scripture, the people who won’t have the opportunity to know God because of the stench coming from His followers.

Gettin’ by with a little help from your friends (or licensed professionals)

May is mental health month and not just for Jets fans. We all need a little pick-me-up every now and again.

The world has been a bitch lately. Every time we think it can’t get worse, fate, Satan, or general random chance want to cosplay as Barney Stinson.

It’s been a long few years, and we’re not out of it yet. The war in Ukraine drags on, and with it, prices continue to rise and stock prices continue to fall. Inflation is causing people to buy less, which will eventually result in companies needing fewer workers, which will eventually result in the red-hot job market cooling down.

And that’s before you get to the political unrest, the Covid, and whatever else is happening. And that’s before you get to anything going on in your personal life. For me, it’s been nagging health issues and dumb crap that keeps cropping up (like the three and a half hours trying to get the monitor on a new laptop to work before sending it back).

We all have patterns of thinking the emerge when we’re plunging into the dark spaces. Usually, they crop up without a lot of notice, gradually taking up more space until they assert themselves.

They’re stealthy little bastards. Your attention is focused elsewhere, dominated by wading through a hip-deep river of crap. By then, the crap is all over your hands and face and its a bitch to get out.

I don’t remember the numbers, but our pastor recently said that along with the stupid Covid, we’re suffering a loneliness pandemic, in which a significant plurality of people don’t have close friends.

The first step in confronting a problem is acknowledging it. And those are two big-ass problems, right there.

There’s no shame in needing to talk to someone–even a licensed professional. I’ve done it from time to time and it usually helps. There’s also no shame in needing help from the pharmaceutical arts. Personally, that’s not a long-term solution for me, but it can clear the air enough so you can figure things out.

As for the loneliness part, I don’t have that quite figured out, but it starts with getting out where people are. It’s been a couple of solitary years. Most days at work, outside the calls with rotating people, the ones I spend most time with are Gary Hoffman and Shannon Farren, and they work in a radio studio 3000 miles away and couldn’t pick me out of a police lineup.

There’s no shame in admitting that, either.

Then asking for help working on it.

I’m considering church groups and an online writing critique group I spurned a few months ago because I just couldn’t handle another Zoom call each week.

You have to start somewhere. The good news is that you control the response, which means you have the ability to get help, if necessary, and fix it.