Musings

Planet Earth is more like the village green in Hyannis than it is like the Wianno Club, despite being named after the same Sachem. I'm from Hyannis, but I went to church people that lived the Wianno Club lifestyle.

One is a small field, not even a city block, but adjacent to the Post Office, Public Library, JFK Museum, and Town Hall. It is close to the bus station, train station, and harbor. At night, the howls of the landlocked reverberate off the exterior brick walls of public service.

The other is an estate of morbidly rich people that brag about buying their land for two brass kettles, a bushel of corn, and a half of a fence for 30 acres. A private inlet allows easy yacht access to and from Martha's Vineyard. At night, the gaggles of the bored seep into gaudy wallpaper.

I had to move away. The price of not only land, but also rent had gone up. I never wanted to go back anyways. My pastor ambushed my friend for being gay. He staged an intervention with my friend's parents and other members of church leadership.

My friend called my mom to ask why she wasn't there to protect him. She didn't know about the ploy.

I wasn't there, because I was tricked into paying for my own conversion therapy. I had sex, didn't want to go to hell, got engaged, and went to college in a place called Lynchburg. The school's history dates back to being founded as a basis for religous exemption for continued segregation.

I was surrounded by some serious Wianno Club energy.

I called off the engagement, flipped the bird to the administration, but could not actually leave because I had invested all my life savings into getting a bachelor's degree. While I lost a lot of my personality there, I never betrayed Bill Nye.

Growing up with television, you can pick your own parents. I picked Bill Nye as my week-day dad. My grandfather was Mr. Wizard. Uncle Steve, a time-travelling Captain America that formally retired as Mister Rogers.

I have a vivid imagination.

Being raised in church by a single mother, you didn't really get to be friends with a lot of heteronarmative families. Like, picture perfect Disney families. Two straight parents, a boy child just slightly older than a girl child in a row on Splash Mountain filling a boat with four other families just like them.

My mom was from the hood and they all knew it. One even said my mom should abort me because she wasn't fit to raise a dog. I think my mom kept me just to spite her.

So in college I clung to my Papa Bill. Deniers shouted at me from all angles about his blasphemy. I took a science course proving the earth to be 10,000 years old taught by a professor that wrote the very same book the course was based on.

I got an A; it was fill in the blank after all. But I didn't agree with any of the one word answers I wrote and got right. That's what most of the blatant indoctrination classes were like.

The actual biblical studies classes were interesting though. The Bible itself is a fascinating instrument. If you listen, you can hear it say, “I am a book of liberation. Terrible things have happened and will happen again if we give into the idea of oppression. Resist.”

My biblical interpretation was unpopular in the homophobic homes of Osterville and Lynchburg.

So I graduated and moved to California. I was free. A lot of people think moving to San Francisco turned me into who I am. The truth is, I've always been here, but could never afford to challenge the status quo as my entire economy was tied up in lies.

I regretted going to Liberty University for a long time. I concluded I'm glad I ripped the band-aid off. I could be eighty years old, laying on my deathbed, like you dear reader might be now, finally realizing my closest friends were only my friends so I could protect their terrible ideas in the name of a higher power.

I'm a deeply spiritual creature. I believe in the universe and the infinite and something intangible existing just beyond our veil.

I discovered this piece of me was being abused. A deeply intangible part of me just below my flesh but above my organs. A layer of soul wrapped around my heart was hurt.

In what I thought was an eternal struggle, I found I was just an ephemeral pawn.

The truth was suprisingly simple. I was raised in a culture war.

My best man's ancestral father, Giles Corey, was the only man that died in the Salem Witch Trials. The Puritan's believed the church should wield power through policy. The majority of victims of the trials were widowed women targeted for their land.

As the hysteria grew, abusers became more emboldened and Giles Corey would not let them execute his wife and he was crushed to death in turn.

My high school mascot was a native american labeled as a Red Raider. My village was named after Sachem Iyannough, who died at 26, exposed in early Spring of 1621, while hiding to avoid raids from starving colonizers.

The first Thanksgiving took place in the fall of that year and Sachem Iyannough's tribe was federally recognized in 2007, the year I graduated high school. In 2017, some Wianno Club energy revoked the recognition of their existence from within the throes of the federal government.

When I say I didn't like Donald Trump when I saw him speak at church in Lynchburg in 2012, it was because of his Wianno Club vibe, not because I've been brainwashed by the libs.