Mark Singer:  

Note: my marriage partner Larry Bauer died on June 15, 2023. We were together for over 34 years. After graduating from Hale and bombing my first year of college, I worked for over a decade training adolescents and adults with intellectual disabilities in Oklahoma, Iowa, Florida, and Texas. During that time, I earned an associate's degree in media communication that led to my working in technical support and quality assurance for a morally bankrupt and marginally competent business processes outsourcer whose name rhymed with Scream. I also, in 1984, quit drinking and using drugs, although I can't claim that I gained some sanity as a result of that until much later. In 2000, my job moved me from Fort Worth, TX, where my partner Larry and I had lived for many years, to Silver City, NM. I heard about the September 11 attacks as I was driving in to work from the mountain village where I lived to the call center in town. One of our center's contracts required representatives to troubleshoot internet devices connected to televisions (remember WebTV?), so I spent that day watching a sea of 80 small televisions all showing the same images of the World Trade Center burning and collapsing. While many people were affected by these events far more than I ...Expand for more