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.

She makes my heart thump...

Denis Leary impersonating John

Thick Skin

Often the worst things turn out to be the best things.  I went through a terrible time in my life, from 2001 through 2005.  I was stalked and harassed by a psycho and those she could provoke to assist her.  It made me tough.  It made me resourceful.  It forced me to find skills and abilities within me that I did not know I have.  It forced me to address my faults and repair them.  It made me fearless.  It prompted me to study more about human behavior, about human body language, and about the nature of people.  I no longer fear anything.  I know I can meet any challenge.  I am no longer easy to deceive.  Yes, I lost some of my faith in the goodness of humankind, but in its place I won faith in myself.

Herpetology

My career has spanned 30 years now.  I've worked in many different offices.  I've seen so much in my time that déjà vu is a frequent experience.  I seem to be meeting the same people over and over again, though they have different names and look different.  There are far fewer types of person than there are people.  With so many examples of each type, life has trained my brain to quickly identify instances of these types.  The accuracy by which I can map new acquaintances to their proper type is uncanny.  I can see trouble coming from a mile away.

Not long ago, I correctly pegged a certain man as a lizard.  The way he dressed was certainly a clue, but such an identification takes much more than an assessment of his clothes and the way he wears them.  I can see that he spends a great deal of money on his hair.  His every word is loaded with disguised promises to fuck over everyone around him.  The hollowness of his suit proves that the suit makes the man.  He is the man the Kinks referred to as a “Dedicated Follower of Fashion.”  Confident in his sense of entitlement and authority, completely unfettered by the normal mammalian proclivity towards empathy, shallower than silver plating, and selected for his position by his closest friends, there was no doubt that this hollow man was out to kill, as psychopathic suits do kill.

Since making this identification, he has proved me spot on.  He is hated by those that actually produce and he is no more trusted than a famished snake.  His every word and email drips with his cold-blooded inability to understand those upon whom he feeds.  If he floats above, it is only because he is full of hot air.  Someday, his ego balloon will go down in flames.  Karma promises.

While I Wasn't Watching, You Died

For various reasons, I withdrew from my old friends for decades.  I'm not exactly sure why.  My life has been adventurous, but it has also been complicated and somewhere in that whirl of living my focus failed to keep an eye on many people that I loved or at least liked.

I have trouble comprehending time.  It is one of my defects.  I've written about this before.  One day, one week, one month, one year, one decade... they all seem the same to me.  My view of time is not linear.  It is more like the event horizon of a black hole, where the image of everything that has passed into the hole is forever frozen in space/time.  The whole past is just yesterday.  Given this, I lack the sense of urgency over how long ago I last saw someone and when I see them again, aside from the physical changes that time has wrought, I see the same person as if no time has passed.  It is debilitating in some ways, for every passed injury feels like it happened yesterday, not years ago.  That makes it harder to move on from things that did not go right.  I have compensated for this by becoming more detached in general, learning to quickly and immediately let everything go, much in the way Buddhism teaches unattachment.

Recently, becoming increasing aware of my own mortality, I decided to find those people I love but haven't seen for many years.  I already knew that my first girlfriend had passed back in 1991.  I still miss her and love her and always will.  I looked up several other women I loved, and to my horror I found that they had passed on several years ago.  I cried when I found out that Maria D., a romantic interest in college, had died of cancer in her forties.  Though I had not seen her since 1985, I always saw the world as a place that contained her wonder and beauty.  Knowing that she was now gone deflated my world some.  I then looked for another that I had a crush on in High School.  She too died in her forties, also of cancer.  I began to fear looking back into the past and finding people.  Three women I had cared for are dead, long before their time.  With the loss of each one, the world I love seems less what it was.

I also looked for my male friends.  My best friend Paul is still alive and I had the pleasure of visiting him last weekend.  A mutual friend of ours, Carmen, died just a few months ago.  My Father died last year.

I visited my first girlfriend's mother to help the two of us remember her daughter's life.  She shared with me photos of my first girlfriend and I scanned them.  I read with her my diary from the time I first met and fell in love with her daughter.  I had written poems about her.  I had notes from our phone calls.  I showed her a dimension of her daughter that she never experienced herself.  I felt as if this lost beloved was with us a moment.  I also very much enjoyed letting her mother know that her daughter is remembered as well as having the opportunity to fill some of the loneliness in the mother's life, even if only for an evening.

Life is short.  Every life is precious.  I will take the time to let those still with us know how much I love them.

This song and video remind me of her.

The Fall

Life is like falling from one hundred million miles above. It starts out slow and the destination seems so far away that it is easy to believe you will never arrive, but the descent accelerates all the way to the end, as the Earth looms ever larger, until it is no longer the Earth, but a continent, and then a field, and then a hole in the ground. In those final fleeting seconds, the whole thing begins to make sense, but by the time it does, it's over.