I am a creature of habit.
This is quite evident when I'm in places that are part of my routine. It goes double when I go back to a place that used to be part of a routine.
I'm back at the gym, after a long and, it turns out, conspicuous absence there. It stopped being part of my daily (well, weekdaily) habit around the same time that I started working again. It's easy to go to the gym five or six times a week, easy to get to the gym every day when you have all day to get to the gym.
So I'm back at the gym, having gone each of the last four days, eager to be back where I was, body-wise and health-wise and strength-wise, modifying my work schedule to accommodate the gym. God (of Biscuits) only knows if I'll be able to maintain this schedule after the Boy and I shack up (but I know that either way, I'll be getting aerobic exercise—rrrroar).
While there, while on a stationary bike, it's like the thousands of other days before at Golds Gym, my Big Gay Gym at Brannan and Division. More than that, if I'm not paying attention, it is any one of those thousands of days. Only the television broadcasts betray an actual date.
And this week, of course, the TVs were dominated with the Reagan funeral proceedings. I find myself fixated on wanting to open that coffin, wanting to be sure that he was really dead. It's not a matter of hoping that it's true so much as needing more than just a Reagan-related say-so for me to believe it for real.
Everyone falling all over themselves to get all the misery right: not too much of a personal display...they are politicians after all. Not too little a burden: the State must appear appreciative. Not too much comparison to existing [ahem] leadership. Never enough avoidance of hateful ineptitude of his actual term of office.
I saw Nancy Reagan, looking oddly naked without her Red, but looking surprisingly balanced.
This is the part I understand. This mixture of sadness, of loneliness, of profound relief, of confidence in knowing that all the wondering, all of the gray areas of quality- vs. quantity-of-life are completely, utterly settled.
So there I am, unmoving and unmoved, but utterly empathetic. I know the situational pressures and now lack of pressures that Mrs. Reagan lives with, personally and privately. I know the end at which she finds herself as the survivor of a battle that was not hers. I feel for her; I'd feel for anyone simply because it puts me in the mind of my own experiences.
But empathy is different to sympathy. I do not extend my heart, my soul, my feelings towards her pain. I am not being generous. I give her nothing in this.
In empathizing thus, I find it impossible to be acrimonious towards her. Still, I wonder if she'll ever consider the thousands of people who went through what she's going through, and did so perhaps needlessly. Perhaps many would be alive that aren't, had her husband actually been a great leader instead of a frontispiece for corporate and personal greed, a mouth (if not a mouthpiece) kissing the ass of the then-ascendant Religious Right.
I wonder if she'll ever make that leap. Clearly her compatriots along conservative lines have yet to demonstrate that they get that. No one apologizes: "I was never wrong", "I was responsible", "We have a right to be there", "We were never there".
In fact, this whole thing seems to have further polarized the Republicans to the right. As if somehow, unlike the epidemiological concerns of the 1980s, suddenly the Valor of the Brave is at play. Andrew Sullivan goes as far as to claim that Ronald Reagan did not give him HIV. Goes so far in reaching to praise Reagan instead of villify him that I question his balance, question his sanity in these moments. Andrew Sullivan has always been one of the loudest voices (being the Thatcher-lover that he is) in praising Reagan for being pivotal in bringing down the Soviet Union. If he believes that one man can play such a pivotal leadership roll in changing the fate of Fate, why does he not claim the same in stemming an epidemic? Where are the thousands upon thousands dead from Legionnaire's Disease?
I come not to praise Reagan, but to bury him. Enough already.
Oh, and Dear Mrs. Reagan: Please remember that no everyone has the luxury of dying of old age. Not everyone dies from "acceptable" diseases. Not everyone gets a State funeral and globally-bestowed laurels upon death.
But everyone suffers when the people—when the person—they love are dead.
Everyone.
My neighbors must think that I'm running a halfway house or a shelter for cute gay boys from Tucson. Swear to GoB. It's all good. It's nice to have the house full and lively, or full and mellow. It's just plain nice to not be alone anymore. I never minded it, honestly, but now I don't have to think about minding it (if you know what I mean).
But then there's the self-responsibility thing. His mess, his clean up, and all of my worrying won't change the basic nature of the situation and in fact, the immutability gives me infinite latitude in wailing and kvetching, doesn't it? He's off being self-responsible, and I'm just being self-indulgent.