I would kill for a Frappuccino.
Which is my gay, overly dramatic way of saying that I am sick to death of banging around the inside of this house and am ready to re-embrace my life in the real world.
Sadly, the real world isn’t quite ready to embrace me yet. Not safely, anyhow.
On Monday, Mark and I hit a milestone – 12 months since we last put gas in our car. And two weeks or so after that, we’ll pass the year mark on our personal lockdown. In the last twelve months, I have not entered another building besides the post office, once a week, masked and distanced to grab our business mail.
As I write this, we’re watching RuPaul’s UK Drag Race, and they’re doing the Rusical episode – this year’s show is Rats. It’s fitting, as Mark and I are like a couple rats trapped together in a cage waaaay too long. We’re handling it with grace and mutual care, but I can tell he’s as ready to be done with it as I am.
Last Saturday we took our second trip into Midtown in the last six months. It’s just three miles from here, but somehow it’s a world away in the age of Covid. We made the trip to drop off some eWaste at Capital Stage’s offices, and although it was wonderful to see Michael and Keith and Misty, it was bitterswee roo – a reminder of the life we had in the before time – before the Great Pause.
On the way home, we were saddened to see that one of our favorite local gay-owned stores, Peradice, was gone. We’ve only begun to see the wreckage this whole thing will leave behind once it’s over.
This last year ha been a time for retrenchment. We’ve taken stock of many things in our business and personal lives and have made changes which we hope will bear fruit over the coming years.
And as a writer, I’ve been reinventing myself too, moving from gay romance to diverse speculative fiction, and taking the rights back to my novels, and putting out my first new novel-length work in a year and a half.
Spring is coming, and the world is thawing, and we hope that it will be enough. That this long slog will end soon.
Will we be back to normal later this year, or some time in 2022? No one knows. All we do know for sure is that our new normal will probably be markedly different than the old one.
Still, if I can get out of the house and sip a mint java chip Frappuccino in the chattering company of other people without being scared for my life and health, it will be good enough for me.
Scott lives with his husband Mark in a yellow bungalow in Sacramento. He was indoctrinated into fantasy and sci fi by his mother at the tender age of nine. He devoured her library, but as he grew up, he wondered where all the people like him were.
He decided that if there weren’t queer characters in his favorite genres, he would remake them to his own ends.
A Rainbow Award winning author, he runs Queer Sci Fi, QueeRomance Ink, and Other Worlds Ink with Mark, sites that celebrate fiction reflecting queer reality, and is a full member member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).