I've done some different writing over the past two days.

I wrote a letter to the editor of the Seattle Times yesterday in response to an editorial they published. Their editorial expressed opposition to the estate tax, or as they insist on calling it, the "death tax."

I got a response saying they wanted to publish my letter, but it was too long. They asked if I could edit it down.

This is the final version:

Dear Editor,

Your editorial, "A death-tax rate we can live with" is misguided and disappointing. The estate tax is among our fairest and most progressive taxes.

Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican President who proposed the estate tax, said, "The man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the State because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government." Wealthy business owners in this nation earn their fortunes thanks to people who are educated in American schools, who drive to work on American highways, and who are nourished by the products of federally-subsidized farms.

The estate tax enables those who have benefitted most from the services our government provides to pay back some of that debt when they die.

You suggest that the estate tax is a punishment to the inheritors of wealthy businesses. But those who inherit vast wealth should have no grievance when they accept their bounty minus a large percentage to repay the nation that made their wealth possible.

The greatest benefit our nation achieves by aggressively taxing large estates is to prevent our political, social, and economic life from being dominated by upper-class families who pass their large fortunes down to each succeeding generation. The estate tax helps preserve the American way of life.

Then today, after hearing about the upcoming vote in the US Senate on the flag burning amendment, I wrote to Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell.

Dear Senator ________:

I'm writing with regard to the Amendment to outlaw burning the American flag. Please do all you can to prevent this desecration of our Constitution from taking place.

What makes the flag a powerful symbol is the very fact that we can legally burn it if we choose to--and we choose not to. To take away that right is to weaken the symbol.

The Bush administration and his supporters in Congress have already attempted to steal the flag from us. They have tried to make it a symbol of support for this misguided war they are fighting in Iraq. John Kerry, in his speech at the Democratic Convention last year, reminded us that it's our flag too.

Please don't let them take it away from us.

Thank you.

I feel that it's important to be involved in the political fight to save our country. This is my small way of doing it. I'm going to try to do more. I've also signed up to volunteer to work on Maria Cantwell's reelection campaign. The Republicans are going to make her a target, and I feel compelled to pitch in and help her.

I'm now an Ordained Clergy Person of the Church of Spiritual Humanism! I can perform marriages and all sorts of other rituals.

I was thinking about being single. I used to think that loneliness was the worst thing about being single, but generally speaking, I'm not lonely. And if I get lonely from time to time, it's as much a factor of being away from family as it is a factor of being single. At holiday times I miss my family if I'm not there.

But I think the real enemy of single people is couples. Single people and couples don't mix well. Couples like to hang out with other couples. Single people don't get invited to a lot of things that couples do with other couples.

Many of my friends who are married or partnered I don't get to see unless the spouse/partner is off doing something else.

It took time to learn to enjoy doing things on my own, but the more I do it, the more I enjoy it. I'm really looking forward to traveling on my own next month.

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I'm getting excited as my vacation gets closer. I love going places I've never been. I just wish I had more time. It's tough living so far from family and having to take so much time out of every year if I want to see them. As it is, I've decided to skip Thanksgiving in New Jersey this year because I'll probably go next spring for Max's Bar Mitzvah. And I'll have to skip Jamie's, because it's so close to Max's, I don't think I can do both.

I get to Portland on Sunday, July 24th, at around 12:30 p.m. I leave on Monday morning, August 1st. Not a lot of time to drive around into Nova Scotia. I suppose it would have been smarter to concentrate my time in Maine. But I'm more eager to see new places. So there it is.

Yesterday after I got home from my writing group meeting, there was a message from Joy, and we ended up spending the afternoon together shopping for garden stuff. We went to a place out past Redmond that specialized in water features and rocks. She wants to make a fountain out of a rock with a hole drilled through the middle. I think she got a dose of reality as far as what it'll take to accomplish this.

Then we went to Flower World. This was the first time I've been there. It is huge. The biggest garden center I've ever seen. I got some new plants to replace the dying liriope I pulled out last week. It's a shady spot and a very narrow area next to the house alongside the path, so I was limited, but I like what I got.

I really need to mulch, but I so am not looking forward to doing that. I hate lugging the big bags of mulch into the backyard. I should bite the bullet and get a wheelbarrow, if only I had somewhere to keep it.

Even though I didn't really want to go to Pride today, I felt kind of sorry not to be part of the goings-on. I did sign up on the HRC web site to volunteer, so maybe I'll hear from someone about an opportunity to get involved soon.

It's Pride weekend in Seattle.

I went to Pride once, the first year I was in Seattle. Mom and Milton were visiting and we all went. I think they liked it more than I did.

I had a lot of mixed emotions. Yeah, some pride, but mostly I wasn't sure what people were celebrating. What does a big parade and festival accomplish for the gay community? It's a time to be out and be proud, but I just feel like we need to move beyond that. We need to celebrate ourselves every day, but when we come together as a community, we need to focus on fighting the political agenda that is preventing us from being fully recognized citizens.

I need to get more involved in something. I don't feel like I have the moral authority to reject Pride unless I put my energies behind what I believe is truly important.

It's lunchtime, so I'm taking a little break from work to write.

I'm not sure how personal to be here. I know no one is reading this. (I've only told one person about it, and I doubt even if I told more people, they'd start reading it either.) Still, I can't talk about other people on here. And I don't want to talk too much about myself either--that would be a private journal kind of thing, not a blog thing.

Still, I don't want to ramble just for the sake of posting (kind of like I'm doing now).

I guess it seems like this blog ought to be about something, and not just a collection of random thoughts that spill out of me unedited. It's called No Closet: Life Out, so I guess it's supposed to be about life outside the closet. But the thing is, life outside the closet is essentially just life, and we all know how boring that is.

I got a new car a few weeks ago. That's supposed to be exciting. And I got a promotion at work. And I'm getting ready to go on vacation next month. None of those things is any different in the closet or out of the closet or whether there was a closet to have once been in in the first place.

I guess I could write about my short-lived relationship with Arvin. But that feels so personal. I could also write about why I don't want to write about things that are personal.

I went to see Mysterious Skin tonight. It's got me feeling kind of sad. The trauma these two boys experienced, and how differently it manifests itself as they grow up, is painful to see.

It's good to have the opportunity to see films like this. I don't think I'd ever get to see it in Peoria, Illinois!

I just got back from breakfast with my friend Scott. I hadn't seen Scott for something like three years, and then we ran into each other at the Captain Smartypants concert two weeks ago. I emailed him and said we should get together. It was really good seeing him, and I enjoyed catching up.

It made me think about how disconnected I feel from the gay community. (Okay, so going to the Captain Smartypants concert is kind of "gay," but that seemed more like an excursion than a routine event. Tonight I'm going to the Mariners game with Nancy and Mike, and tomorrow I'm going to see "Born Yesterday" at ACT with Mary. These seem like more regular activities to me.

One of the reasons I moved to Seattle was to be in a place where there is an active gay community I could be a part of. After I moved here, I joined the Seattle Mens Chorus, but that didn't really make me feel connected to the community. I'm not sure why. At least a few gay friends have come out of that, including Scott, Mark (who brought me to the Captain Smartypants concert), and the Barcelona Boys Investment Club. A few other gay connections have come from playing bridge. But for the most part my gay friends are people I get together with once every so often, not people I hang out with regularly.

Though now that I think about it, all of my friends are people I get together with every so often. I can't say I have a regular circle of friends at all, just a collection of individual friends.

It's funny how things end up being so different from what I expect. Not that different is bad, or good. It's just different.

It seems as if everyone is blogging nowadays. I'm such a bandwagon-getter-onner.

I'm already writing. I'm working on my novel, revising some short stories and trying to get up the nerve to send them out to some magazines. Why do I need to be blogging on top of all that.

Plus I'm trying to play lots of bridge, practicing for the Grand National Teams in Atlanta in July; planning for my vacation, working on my investments, working a lot... I'm busy enough without blogging.

But the truth is I'm not writing enough. If I work a little on my novel each day, that's a lot. So I'm hoping that this will become a habit that will keep me focused on writing actively and habitually.

We'll see.