PUBLICATIONS | ARCHIVES
Stories, Poems, Articles, and Miscellany by Steve Alexander 🌈🇺🇸
Published Stories
● A Little Tour Through One Gay Man’s Life, pinned to profile
● Five Years Old and Gay in Rural, Western Kansas in Illumination
● Hello? Past? This is me calling Michael, in Illumination
● In Another Dimension with Michael, in Prism & Pen
● Sex, Drugs, and Spirituality, in Prism & Pen
● The Hilarious Thing My Mother Said On Coming Out to Her, in Prism & Pen
● Only A Writer Would Have This List, in Illumination-Curated ( → Slack #post-your-own-writing-here)
● The Proust Questionnaire Answered by Steve Alexander🏳️🌈🇺🇸 for Tree Langdon in Illumination ( → Slack # post-your-own-writing-here)
● Tyler — The Man I Met Naked on the Quaking Ground, and Came to Love in Prism & Pen
● What Caring for Somebody Dying of AIDS Was Like, in One Gay Man’s Perspective…
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
I’m new on Prism & Pen. This is my way of saying hello to Prism & Pen’s and Medium’s interested members. I hope it will be an entertaining and insightful introduction to a man who’s been on the planet a long time and has a chest full of adventures, triumphs, and defeats to relate.
Thanks for noticing.
Steve Alexander (alxfyv.Medium@gmail.com)
Some Biographic Facts:
I’m a retired attorney. (The lawyer is the short-tempered, surly, mealy-mouthed, little SOB on the other side.) I love the English language. I love writing. I was a word mercenary beating up horribly on horrible people. Society not only approved but also paid me well. …
RELATIONSHIPS | REGRET | FATHER AND SON
These Are Two Potent Memories of Our Fathers, Good and Bad, Present and Absent, That We Carry with Us Day by Day
Sabana Grande and Steve Alexander🏳️🌈🇺🇸
RELATIONSHIPS | MOTHER & SON | I MISS YOU
A Thanksgiving Story
First Things First
Hello, how are you, and all that jazz?
Second Things Second
I miss you.
Third Things Third
Marcia (that’s my sister, your daughter, in case you forgot in your Alzheimer’s) misses you.
Fourth Things Fourth
Grandma misses you. You remember Grandma. You told her you wanted a box of Godiva chocolates in your casket.
She said, “I don’t see why. Where you’re going, they’ll just melt.”
Fifth Things Fifth
When are you coming home?
Sixth Things Sixth
How the Devil are you?
Seventh Things Seventh
I got covid-19.
Marcia tested negative the same day I tested positive. Symptoms started for me on Friday last. By Sunday, it was serious. I went to the Regional Urgent Care clinic. That’s where I tested positive, and Marcia negative. Wonder of wonders. The doctor said I was severely dehydrated. He said that dehydration and covid are a foolproof recipe for a visit from Thanatos. He sent me to the ER for blood work and IV fluids. I slept until noon Monday, woke up, and had no symptoms. I felt even better Tuesday. …
U.S. POLITICS | THE SENATE | GEORGIA SENATORIAL RUNOFFS JANUARY, 2021
An Open Letter to the Georgia Voting-Eligible People Who Supported Joe Biden
If Georgia returns the incumbent, Kelly Loeffler (R), to the Senate in the January runoff, it will have negated its Biden support and neutered the Biden presidency. Your vote for him will have been for and meant nothing.
The message is simple. In the Loeffler v. Warnock runoff in January 2021, vote for Raphael Warnock.
If Georgia returns Kelly Loeffler to the Senate, Biden’s agenda will be stillborn.
What a shame it would be for Georgia to have voted for a Biden presidency and then to be the one state to render it impotent to change anything by giving the Republicans a Senate majority.
In both Congresses in his second term, Barack Obama was saddled with Republican control of at least one house of Congress.
In the Congress in his second term’s first half (Jan. 2013–Jan. 2015), the 113th Congress,
● Democrats held the Senate (Dem. 53, Ind. 2, Repub. 45), but
● Republicans controlled the House (Dem. 201, Repub. 234). …
POLITICS OF THE UNITED STATES | 2020 ELECTION | A DIVIDED AMERICA
Trump may be leaving. The deep and deeply consequential 50/50 divide in U.S. politics continues to haunt American dreams.
In his Medium article “America’s Long National Nightmare Is Coming to an End,” Jay Sizemore advances the twin propositions that:
(1) America’s “long national nightmare” is coming to an end and
(2 ) “the people” have spoken and elected Biden.
I find these disconcerting. Each is representative of a kind of unsupported, generalized overstatement that may have value as a rally-round-the-cause battle cry or as propaganda-speak, but little benefits sober public discourse. They give the wrong impression. They misstate reality. …
LIFE | LIFE’S ADVENTURES | AUTOBIOGRAPHY | THE CONSEQUENTIAL and TRIVIAL, HUMOROUS and TRAGIC, and SPIRITUAL and WORLDLY
The Many Adventures of a 72-Year-Old Fat Fart
This story responds to the writers’ challenge prompted by CR Mandler MAT.
So, here we are — my life in a list of stuff both consequential and trivial, humorous and tragic, and spiritual and worldly.
That’s what this list is supposed to be, right? An introduction to my life through a list of lifeless stuff:
- I’ve had five cats; four are dead now. Jackson is a hoot.
- The longest time I lived in any one place before I was 58 was 10 years in San Diego.
- The shortest time I lived in any one place before I was 58 was eleven months in Ithaca, N.Y. …
MEDIUM | WRITER’S TIP | IMAGE & SOURCE CITATIONS
When writing on the Internet and Citing Image or Internet Sources, there Are Various Formats One Can Use.
Note: If you find the figures below too small to read the information, use your browser’s zoom feature to enlarge the display.
Crediting Images
You can see the method I’ve developed for myself in the caption of the featured image above. It’s in this format:
<Image Name> | credited: <photographer’s name> | <source website> ([licensing rights])
Text enclosed in <> is a hyperlink. Image Name is the name I choose to give the image. In my use, it relates in some fashion to the story or article I’m writing. <Image Name> is a link to the image itself. <photographer’s name> links to his portfolio, website, or email address¹ if neither of the former exists. …
LIFE | SELF-REVELATION | AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Honest Answers to Eighteen of Marcel Proust’s Questions About Oneself That Might Reveal More About One Than One Would Want
SELF-IMPROVEMENT | SCHOOL | STUDY HABITS
It’s a simple formula. Success requires work. Work requires time and concentration. Put in the time. Do the work. Success will follow.
There are study habits and techniques available to any student that will increase his performance and grades if only followed. But, the techniques take time and discipline to develop into habits. Once in place as study habits, they take time and discipline in their application every day.
Time implies work. These techniques will be unsuccessful without the work. Work implies effort — brain effort — much of it. Concentration, which you will note is the first among the techniques listed, is hard. Extended, hard concentration is what is required.
Concentrate intensely.
In elementary school, beginning in first grade, we had homework every night. In the small apartment where I lived, my desk was in the dining room, open to both the kitchen and the living room. There were five of us, my parents, me, and my brother (four years younger) and sister (six years younger). While my mother prepared dinner and washed up afterward, while my father watched TV, while my brother played noisily and incessantly, and while my sister (1-year-old) burbled and gurgled and cried at times, I had to do my homework at that desk. …
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