The argument against the Republicans is as simple as it can be.

They want to take choice away.

If you voted for McCain, fuck you. You lost.

For those of us on the left and in the center (read: sane) what does choice really mean? Is it always a good thing? Or only when we agree with it? Only when we understand it?

We’re big on understanding, but what if someone else’s choice comes right up against a paradigm we have? What if it’s a paradigm almost every single one of us shares? A paradigm so rooted in us that we start to wonder if we do believe in choice, or at least whether or not choice is a good thing to have.

The easiest choices to make are the ones that make themselves.

Well, no, that’s wrong, because it makes no sense. If these “instinct” choices make themselves, what we think about them simply tells us what our body’s opinion is. Perhaps some auto-mechanism deep inside us which contains all our dna and our experiences since birth, and all the physical experience of every pain, joy, and pang of sex we’ve ever had simply auto-chose from the available menu.

I marvel at how, as humans, we fuss and complain about the choices others make, I do it myself, all the time, and we are inclined especially to judge, with our own little auto-chip as the guide. 

The problem, of course, with my own little auto-chip is that is doesn’t contain any of the information necessary to understand the life of anyone but me. This is the key to what Republicans never learned and refuse to understand, and it is also the reason I spent my life analyzing the human condition, acting, directing, and teaching acting. It was the only thing that fascinated me. (See auto-chip.)

One of my two brothers-in-law is a Republican. He voted for McCain. And I love him. So go figure.

I will never forget him on the day of his son’s wedding. There was some disturbance a day or two before, from some guy, I can’t even remember what the issue was or if he was on the groom’s side or the bride’s, but the bride was afraid he might try to make some kind of scene at the church. (Straight people!) His son, my nephew, had stepped right up to the plate, contacted the offending party and laid it on the line that this day belonged to his bride and surely they could both agree on this as men. He prevailed, or so we all believed, but a series of calls had gone out between the adult males in the family and we were put on alert. When I got to the church, I saw my brother-in-law at the end of a long path coming towards me, and the stride of his gait told me he was ready to take this guy down. He did not have the smile on his face of a proud father, though he certainly was one. He led with his shoulders and upper arms, not with his characteristic, passive accommodation. (My paradigm for his manner was shattered.) I felt I was in the presence of a wrestler about to climb into the ring. As we talked and moved towards the church, the proud dad smile surfaced too. The asshole never showed up, so he never had to punch the guy in the face and drag him up the aisle. But his body was absolutely prepared to do just that.

Is that about choice? I don’t know, but that’s what I love about blogging. I just felt like telling him I love him in public.

Back to choice. If the choice you make is to dig the eyeballs out of puppies with a cocktail fork, then, personally, I think there should be a law to prevent you. But that’s just me. Perhaps you hate puppies because your mother tripped over Trixie when you were five, banged her head on the stove, and died of a horrible contusion right in front of your eyes. I get it. You have a different view. So you’re not going to support that law.

Or perhaps you are. Anyway.

I am a homosexual. I made a decision to insert my cock into the mouths and assholes of men that caused it to fill with blood, become erect, and erupt. I had no choice over which men, my big gorgeous cock pointed me in the right direction, and I obeyed. (I love talking about how hot my cock is. It remains the astonishing bit of absolute divine grace in my life.) Straight men understand this perfectly. Their cocks told them which women to pursue too. Another perfect example of the blindness and retardation of Republicans who think homos can choose women, when we can’t even choose the men we want!!!

The people who are furious at me for leaving aren’t talking to me much these days. They fear I am making the choice to go because I willfully refuse to accept the pain in my body, and to soldier on. I suppose they are right. That’s what humans are supposed to do. They are certain that greener pastures lie ahead.

What they do not know is that the choice I am making is between death and insanity, not death and life. Because death and life are the choices they have, they believe that I have the same two choices. But that’s a terrible mistake to make. My body simply will not accept any more pain, or sustain the level I am at for too much longer.

They are afraid of their anger at me, it is huge and frightens them because it is the forerunner of a terrible loss that will catapult them into grief. They are human. They have every right to be mad at me. Their feelings are natural, and result from their love for me. They feel betrayed by my departure. They must continue on after I’m gone, if they choose, and deal with the loss in whatever way they are able. This of course has nothing whatever to do with me. This is determined by each of their own little auto-chips, and each is filed under the auto-sub class: How I deal with Loss. Or Anger. Or change. Or whatever little auto-chip is running the show.

The people who accept my choice, are, thankfully, in the vast majority, and they are grieving as much, or more, than those who are struggling to remain in denial.  (If that’s not the biggest fucking bite in the shorts about the human condition, I don’t know what is.) My two sisters, Rochelle and Marge, and my astonishing friend Ann Marie, who is my legal wife as you know, are so unconditionally loving and supportive of me that it would make you weep if you heard our ongoing dialogues. I feel passionately that they will grieve less when I am gone, because they are doing it with me, which is why I have chosen this wildly unconventional departure, why I made the choice I have made. We are having wonderful talks where they listen and we laugh, sometimes more profoundly than we ever have, and they get mad, or they cry, (Women! Ya gotta love em!) and I listen, and we talk some more, spending healing time together, and I am sharing their grief at losing me. I am accepting their anger and their love and I am crying for them too, because I know I will leave a hole in their lives that no one else can fill.  But I know that Victor gone will hurt less than Victor in an asylum. And that is surely where I am headed if I allow this pain in my body to continue much longer.

I have seen the doctors. And they have seen me. (Gielgud, Arthur.)

My heart is breaking for the few people in my life who are struggling mightily but have not yet reached Acceptance. I believe their anger will become something much harder for them to manage when I am gone. I want so badly to be wrong about this, but fear I am not. I am not angry at them. I am searching for a way to help them, and this blog is a small part of that search.

I spent my life studying, and then teaching, Point of View. Acting schmacting. That you can’t teach.

What makes an actor great? A willingness, and then an ability to walk in someone else’s shoes. To walk in them. Not to think about walking in them, or to talk about walking in them, or even to understand the walk, but to walk it.