It Has Been a Good Year

This year will be unlike any other. Valhalla awaits.

It’s that time of year again, when I post about how this year has gone. Inevitably, I will get a reply saying “you sound crazy” from the most feeble-minded person, the life of whom has intersected with mine, Bridget O’., so, preemptively I have this to say to her: “Shut up bitch.” That said, I now begin.


This has been one of the best years of my life. 2013 was utter Hell. My father passed away. My cat passed away. My wife’s health problem reached a point of inflection, in the worst of ways. I was stuck in a shitty job with a shitty employer, though I did not realize it at the time. Honestly, it was the year from Hell.


However, this year was completely different. My wife, unwilling to get help for her illness, left. It was painful, but for the best. That alone improved my happiness by an order of magnitude, though it now meant I was truly a single father (thought I had been nearly a single father the entire life of my daughter). Perhaps offsetting that happiness to a degree has been my sadness for the condition of my wife. I continue to support her financially because I do not want her to become homeless. I hope and continue to offer support for her recognition of her illness and subsequent search for assistance.


I came to the epiphany that I do not want to be married at all anymore. I never want to be married again. Life is short and there is much I wish to accomplish. Having a wife would prevent accomplishing my goals, especially the more dangerous goals near the end of that bucket list, unless, of course, I find someone that would accept that I will seek to attain these goals, something I find unlikely.


After our cat died, we acquired two more cats. They are siblings. We adore them. They are wonderful in every way that cats can be. Even better is that they love each other. We live in cat-bliss.

My daughter continues to impress me with her artistic talent. My pride in her has no bounds. She is brilliant, creative, and anti-authoritarian. We share much in common.


I paid off all of my debts.


I also came to terms with many of the negative I’ve experienced in life. Some of it was karma. It is difficult to realize how much one deserves punishment for the mistakes one makes in life until one is old enough to comprehend that mistakes have been made. I accept my punishment (that is, the suffering I've experienced because of those choices). On the other hand, I also acknowledge that some of the greatest losses in my life were the greatest gains.


The divorce with my first wife ached my heart for decades, but now I see, as I did in the early days of that process, that it was the right thing to do. I was unable to achieve my full development while being her husband. The things I needed in life were not things I could achieve as her husband. Additionally, she is shallower than I am and she deserved a shallow husband and that is what she attained. I believe she is happier with him than she would have been with me, just as I am happier without her than I would have been with her.


Without the loss of my first wife, I would never have become a father. Fatherhood was a necessary precondition of my maturity. Until I became the father of a daughter, I could not fully understand proper respect for women. I wish it had come naturally to me, but it did not. Seeing a woman develop from infant to womanhood and feeling that bond of pure love for her was essential to my emotional development. It also opened my mind to the failures of my pre-fatherhood life. I’ve said it before and I will say it again: a man is not qualified to be a husband until he is already a father. It is a cruel contradiction, but it is true.


I discovered that I am a very good father. I have no regrets about anything I have done as a father. I have never hit my daughter. I have never treated her with disrespect. I have raised her to be an independent and strong woman, without a trace of racism, without a trace of homophobia, and without a shred of bigotry.


I continued to make good friends. I added to my list of friends several coworkers, one of whom has been especially supportive of me and whom I too have been supportive. He inspired me to lose weight, and I did. So far, I have lost more than 80 pounds. In fact, I AM NO LONGER FAT. I am proud of that accomplishment.


I took my daughter on the trip of a life-time. For a month, we circumnavigated the USA. I took her to more National Parks than most people can list from memory. We camped under the stars across the continent. We saw wild bison, mountain goats, sheep, horses, road runners, snakes, lizards, coyotes, birds, elk, moose, deer, and many more the names of which I cannot recall. We crossed plains, mountains, deserts, waste lands… We went to some of the highest places in the country and to the lowest. It was a trip, by land, of more than 10,000 miles and it was worth every second of it.


I am a happy man. My happiness comes from within. I thank the universe for being so kind to me.