Summer Is

Summer is not my season. Like the snowboard company’s name, I wish it never happened.

Summer is rude. Five a.m. engines rumbling as the early birds in their unnecessarily loud trucks and motorcycles storm off to work. Squealing tires and slamming doors continue well past 10pm.

Summer is loud. Windows down, air currents roaring, large tires and groaning brakes. The dump truck that has to shake the dumpster 20 freaking times. The air conditioner whirring to push too much air past the rough surface of insulation before forcing it to make a 90 degree turn. The leaf blowers buzzing like angry wasps loud as an airplane.

Summer is a wind tunnel. Every fan is on full blast. I can’t hear myself think with them all whooshing. My girl wants one blowing across the bed, and I can’t bury my face enough to sleep comfortably. My skin is dry, my lips crack, and my throat feels like I swallowed an ancient burial ground.

Summer is a sweaty herd of people. Traffic jammed going into and out of town. The traffic going to the beach is jammed all the way back to the city, some 60 miles. Finding a parking spot anywhere is as much a struggle as leaving it. Youth behind the wheel hooning around as swaths of pedestrians stroll casually across the street. The elderly that insist on sitting in the far left lane and going 15mph under the speed limit. Sitting at a stoplight for 3, make it 4, cycles before getting close enough to actually get through the intersection.

Summer is festivals. I remember festivals, vaguely, though it’s saddening to have to remember them. The last several years I’ve either been slave to an employer that doesn’t care about my mental health enough to allow a day off or I haven’t had money to do anything. Sometimes, it’s both reasons simultaneously, even though capitalism would have us believe those two conditions are mutually exclusive.

Summer is expensive. The price of fuel goes up, the price of goods goes up, the price of going anywhere or doing anything is far more than the same activity done any other time of year.

Summer is lewd. Girls run around wearing about 2 square inches of fabric, and anxiety overwhelms me as I fight the urge to look. Sometimes, I’m relieved to catch their eyes scanning me, followed by a sheepish smile. See? It’s natural to look, right? But sometimes, my girl is close by, and my anxiety doubles if I’ve even glanced.

Summer is like living on another planet. You can’t breathe the air unless it has been conditioned. You can’t touch things that the sun is touching. You need to carry water with you like a scuba tank, lest you drown in the hot air. Every commute is like a journey through space, uncomfortably biding your time until arriving at the next habitable destination.

Summer is selfish. I complete another lap around the sun, but a small box of metal doped gunpowder is more significant than that. So much more that contention arises over just which ones to plan the day around. It’s rarely ever my day, and I rarely ever get the honor of deciding what to do with it. It’s the perfect irony to be told what to do on the day that your entire country is flagrantly touting the freedom from being told what to do.

Summer is pretentious. How could someone not like summer? They don’t just ask, they exclaim in shock. Like I’m a defector, a traitor of the human species. As if disliking summer is the most audacious thing a person could imagine. I must be mentally ill. Summer is the only time of year that my loved ones will tell me I need to seek professional help.

Summer is unbelievably not unlikable. Yes, I lost my best friend during the summer. I don’t blame the season for that. But, I do find it appalling and offensive that someone who should know me well points to such a thing as the source of my mood, being in complete disbelief that I could hate summer for being rude, loud, windy, traffic jammed, lewd, selfish, pretentious, expensive, full of festivals I can’t attend, and generally feeling inhospitable.

Meaning, Life, and Happiness

Maybe life is suffering. Maybe our existential dilemma is manifested by our station in life. Maybe, just maybe, we have to feel miserable in some way to know we are still alive. Is it then too far of a reach to think we all suffer the same degree?

To ask what is life in a non biological sense sort of begs the question what is the meaning of life? It seems age old and as far as I’ve ever known, nobody seems to have a clear answer. It seems to me that there is a logical error in asking this question, kind of like how you can’t divide by 0.* The question we should be asking is what is the meaning of my life? Can each and every person on Earth have an answer to that? …

From here, the question is succinct enough to convey the idea that each of us is, simply by existing, a part of a larger whole, yet it lies wide open for individual interpretation. What is the purpose of my life, the role my brain was molded for, the thing I’m meant to do? What is the legacy of my life, the thing that I’m known for, the impact I’ve made, the mark I have left, the decisions of others that I have influenced? What is the effect of my life, the impact I leave on my children, the change I have effected on the world, the difference I made? Destiny, perhaps? Meaning is the function that connects you to the world.

Given the meaning of one’s life is found, and life is lived to fulfill that meaning, does that in turn satisfy us? Can we be happy by simply living out our purpose? Does this ease the suffering of life? Surely, this isn’t the sole key to happiness in life? “Do what you love and you’ll never have to work again.” Isn’t that it?

Suppose you are fortunate enough to do what you enjoy doing and it somehow still doesn’t feel like work. You may have made peace with your self and your connection to the world, but any number of unfortunate fates await a person. Illnesses and traumas are inevitable, but merely an aside to the consequences of unfortunate connections and best intentions fallen by the wayside. What of happiness then? Can one find happiness in the worst of conditions, perhaps even if most of their life seems stricken by misfortune? What weight do we give the sufferings of life, when those in great suffering can find happiness in so many places and those of immense fortune cannot be happy for a moment?

What is happiness? Again, I think the common way of asking is inherently wrong. Happiness isn’t a thing, it’s how we feel when our mind is positively focused. Perhaps we should be asking, “Where is happiness?” This question prompts active search rather than passive pondering. Where do you find your happiness? That’s a question we can answer. Sure, there’s bucket lists and hobbies, friends and family. It’s easy to think of at least a couple answers to where you find your happiness. I had a friend in Colorado that would insist on playing The Glad Game. Simply take turns stating I’m glad that _ and fill in the blank with something that hasn’t already been used that day. Being as we did construction, it was sometimes modified to The Fucking Glad Game, especially after a few rounds! Nonetheless, it usually cut through the thickest clouds of misery and gave folks a reason to laugh. Maybe focusing on happiness for the sake of a game takes the pressure off of trying to think happy thoughts for the sake of being happy.

Money doesn’t buy happiness any more than love. It can only ease so much suffering. Maybe without financial stress, in a vehicle both sturdy to outside hazards and comforting to the rider, the other sufferings of life are more impacting.

I will wrap up my philosophical soap box speech with one last thought. Maybe what intrinsically ties together these concepts of life, meaning, and happiness is reason. What is the reason I live my life? What is the reason my life means what it does? What reason do I have to be happy? Maybe asking the right questions is the key to avoiding an existential crisis.

*Yes, I remember invoking L’Hopital’s Theorem to divide by an expression that simplifies to 0. Entirely beside my point though!

Moving Forward

I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that my girl was lied to and hosed over by corporate ass fuckery once again. January is getting to be the month of unexpected unemployment for us. In any case, after stressing out of our minds for the last 3 or 4 weeks, she has finally found gainful employment again. I might be getting my hopes up, but the benefits are above and beyond and her initial impression of her new coworkers as ‘bubbly’ makes me think she might just have found a good long term fit. 

As for myself, money problems, not seeing the sun for weeks on end, being socked in with the cold rain, and the holiday season overall was enough damper to make me not want to get out of bed most days. My 30’s have had me down, but after a while I guess you come to the conclusion that you may as well, “get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’. ” (Shawshank Redemption)  Before you get concerned, rest assured that my boy’s bright, happy face and great big hugs  (like his dad’s) keep me grounded through everything. So, I’ve been chewing on this question all month and then some: what now?   

Without reliving too many miserable details, I have to say that I would pin this ‘midlife crisis‘ thing, if that’s what you want to call it, down to having to learn how to let go of your past hopes and dreams that didn’t work out, and find a new meaningful future starting from where you are. I suppose we are sort of guided as teenagers on our course of self-discovery and identity. You have to write all these thoughtful essays on how you understand and feel about the world, and coming out of high school you sort of have some idea about what your life should look like. Your roaring twenties roll around, and you’re full of piss-n-vinegar! You experience your first real world achievements, often your first really meaningful intimate relationship, and you start to set life goals. Then, struggle. Then, getting tripped up. Then failure followed by more failure. Next thing you know, everything you worked so hard to achieve is a damn mess and you start wondering how long it will be before you find yourself pitching a tent under Burnside Bridge! 

Without wanting to, my search for the answer to, “what the hell do I do now?”, led me to wondering just what I’m all about. Maybe I attached my identity to a dream future that didn’t come true. Maybe I lost myself along the way. Maybe I was distracted by the wrong glittery, shining things in life. Maybe that streak of success fooled me into forgetting the simple,  ubiquitous fact that life’s a bitch! 

Whatever the case, I’m starting to regroup and make a plan for moving forward. I’ve had to settle into myself like an expertly made cheesecake (for the love of desserts, don’t fuck with it for at least twelve hours! Why is this so hard?) or since I’m more of a savory foodie who more often than not gets the trial by fire treatment, maybe more like a homemade salsa made with flame roasted peppers. Either way, I’ve had to examine my past to accomplish this, and that’s been half the battle. 

The other half of the battle has been to find affirmation in the way I’ve dealt with my circumstances. See my previous post if you care to hear me rant and split hairs on choice, consequence, and circumstance. My early followers probably know that I have severed connections with my father and though I haven’t refused contact with my mother, still haven’t spoke to her in years. I won’t have alcoholism in my life, and I have neither the desire nor constitution to drag someone into reality that has chosen to be checked out of it. These are my choices, and I made them for a reason. 

Somehow, conversation with my girl last night triggered a chain of difficult memories, and I purged myself of some emotional indigestion over this fact. Sometimes, you just gotta let all that poison out of you to be mentally healthy again. This morning, with the ‘taste of it’ still lingering in my mind, I have this song in my head. I’ve given it a few listens and let it wash over me. There’s a lot behind this song for me. (Graphic content advisory: mild violence in YouTube clip, lyrics at the bottom if you’d rather not or the link doesn’t work) In fact, the movie it’s from, Kelly’s Heroes, is pretty damn classic, too. Even if war flicks aren’t your flavor, (though it’s minimal gore) I would say the all star cast from young Clint Eastwood to Don Rickles makes it worth seeing at least once. It has a lot of clean, old fashioned humor with a gold heist theme. The song resonated with my mother, and it took me until my adult years to understand why. Moreover, the movie stuck with me thanks to Donald Sutherland enlightening me to what it means to be a hippie out of his natural habitat. Come to think of it, I lived out quite a bit of that character’s role in my own service! Ha ha! I’m not even embarrassed about it! Woof, woof! 

Well, there you have it. Accepting who I am, accepting everything that’s happened, and getting the hell on with it. I will leave you with these lyrics and promise to be back soon to share my itchy green thumbs and projects.

“Burning Bridges” sung by The Mike Curb Congregation 

Friends all tried to warn me but held my head up high. All the time they warned me but I only passed them by.

They all tried to tell me but I guess I didn’t care. I turned my back and left them standing there. 

All the burning bridges that have fallen after me. All the lonely feelings and the burning memories. 

Everyone I left behind each time I closed the door. Burning Bridges lost forevermore. 

Joey tried to help me find a job a while ago. When I finally got it I didn’t want to go. 

The party Mary gave for me when I just walked away. Now there’s nothing left for me to say. 

All the burning bridges that have fallen after me. All the lonely feelings and the burning memories. 

Everyone I left behind each time I closed the door. Burning Bridges lost forevermore. 

Years have passed and I keep thinking what a fool I’ve been. I look back into the past and think of way back then. 

I know that I lost everything I thought that I could win. I guess I should have listened to my friends. 

All the burning bridges that have fallen after me. All the lonely feelings and the burning memories. 

Everyone I left behind each time I closed the door. Burning Bridges lost forevermore. Burning bridges lost forevermore. 

The Way Things Should Be

It has taken time and several concerted efforts, but our family dynamics are improving. There is less chaos, fewer meltdowns, and more talking. Oh, and the kids are back in school! I felt for a while the day would never come. It’s some semblance of routine, anyway. 

On another delightful note, I woke up yesterday morning and upon whipping the blanket off, was greeted with a snappy chill. Oh, man! I can’t wait to not have that fan in the window all night again. The cool weather is right around the corner, and that combined with back to school means one thing: germ season. Kiley stepped outside in her dress and started shivering immediately, and like a bad PTSD trigger, the image of her sneezing all over herself and opening doors flashed through my brain. I returned home from dropping her off and besieged the place with soap and bleach. I had other things to do, but I couldn’t let it go any longer. 

We have managed to get the kids to keep their toys more picked up. The living room got organized and things are much tidier overall. I clean like crazy because it improves the quality of life for everyone. Regardless what living space you occupy, even if it’s a tent or your car, your quality of life will be far better if it’s kept clean. In my mind, that’s the way it should be. 

Unfortunately, I have to exist in reality for a majority of my life. In reality, a house is very difficult to keep up with, especially with kids. Nothing is the way it should be, pretty much any time, ever. It doesn’t matter that I have been groomed to 5S the hell out of things or scrub a room to white glove perfection. I live in the real world with real cohabitants. 

I also have real bills that I have to share in paying. It doesn’t matter if I can balance a budget. I cannot be in two places at once to make two incomes at the same time. Hell, earning the one income is taking its toll on me. I should be able to pay all my bills every month. In my mind, that should be entirely possible. I should be able to afford a vehicle, not necessarily brand new nor high end. Just a vehicle to safely get me and the kids around. 

These things that should be, they bother me because these things are not. It’s not just my expectations of myself, is it? My debtors expect to be paid, the government expects to be paid, baby’s momma expects to be paid. Really, the downward spiral of it all, the eternal source of stress, is that all these people expect results. Hours of my time, abuse to my knees, back, hands and otherwise, nights spent on a ladder instead of bed, hours and fuel spent in traffic, all condensed down to a green sheet of printed fabric. 

I should be free to let my mind explore the world, the most succulent and delectable morsels of knowledge oft overlooked. Instead, I’m bound to expectations. I shouldn’t be bound to a life of poverty after working so hard to escape it. However, to be otherwise should not require I be bound to a life of corporate servitude, resorting to stealing my life back in a lunch break here or concocted excuse there as neither my weekends nor holidays are left sacred. 

These things that should be. I struggle to accept the reality that things are not the way they should be. I can accept the reality of the past, or at least I’m working on it. What bothers me is the reality of my future as there has so far been no indication of it being vastly better than the recent past. 

How do I ‘let it go’? How do I build ‘mental flexibility’? What can I do to make tomorrow at least marginally better than today aside from giving the home a field day cleaning? 

More Doing

In trying to shake this funk, I have come to realize that I no longer have a space in the house to claim as my own. There is a desk with a computer, but said computer is about to give up the ghost as well. I don’t really get quiet time to sit and do anything productive, either. 

Still, I have to make something. It’s just what keeps me able to wake up day to day. I shouldn’t imply that my family doesn’t do that for me, but I really lose the wind in my sail being little more than a babysitter day in and day out. I have to do stuff, keep my hands and my brain busy. 

I’m wishing I had a shop space again, as power bumps screw with the machine and usually makes it freeze. I also have just barely enough room to walk around the thing. Nonetheless, I finally got what I was after. 

I’ll take any kind of success I can get right now! 

Finally, back to making sawdust! 

That’s really all I have wanted out of life for a while. To stop this thing from being something I’m working on doing, and to finally say it’s what I do. 

Joe Gotta Go

I quit once, so I can do it again. It’s not really an addiction if I don’t let it control me. [Paraphrased from the low budget flick Coffee and Cigarettes ]

I have quit a lot of times. Haven’t most smokers? I slipped into it again. What is it, really? I admit that it came back to me when I was driving. I would go to the airport queue for my lunch period, see a few folks enjoying their nicotine and before I knew it…

In retrospect, I can see that I only wanted the company. Every other driver seemed to sit in their car and zone out into their phone the whole time. I just wanted some small talk and maybe to hear someone else bitch about their misery. I picked up a pack and enjoyed my social time. For a few weeks, that was my routine. 

Then I quit driving to work on shop projects. For the last few months, I have been trying to quit again. I have a week that’s not so stressful and I just don’t give in to cravings. Then I have a week that stresses me out and I say the hell with fighting that battle. Some weeks are okay, but most weeks this summer have just shortened my life span and grayed my hair. 

The counselor believes that most, if not all, of the intense bickering in our house is the result of my energy. Accordingly, I have been instructed to go for a run when I feel stressed. These moments of stress don’t follow a nice schedule though, and rarely in those moments do I ever have energy to run. I fell back onto construction as I can’t afford shop space right now, and have been on hiatus for anything active since. When the house starts going into nuclear meltdown, I take my loud, abrasive self outside. Since my body hurts, the only thing I care to do is cover the pain with tobacco. The crazy thing is that my body doesn’t even like it at all. One cig and I feel instantly shitty. 

So, it’s been a lot of just feeling shitty. I shared with my girl how I don’t really enjoy my smoke breaks but rather just feel like I’m being punished for shit I didn’t start. Little Kiley acts out, I go outside, and I reckon that in her mind she won the fight. She may have had a time out, but she made me go away. I was banished at her will, all it took was attitude and screaming. 

It sure wasn’t easy, but we had to flip the script. Kiley was informed of the new plan to punish her, and as anyone could predict, she just had to give it a try. This time, we decided that 3 strikes earns her a grounding in her room. One whole day, 24 hours, where she has her bed, stuffed animals, toys, but absolutely nobody to interact with. It was as close to a prison sentence as one could inflict on a child. 

Well, this turned out to be a great solution. Kiley is far more reserved in her outbursts and her tone of voice is less irritable on the whole. The listening skills need work, as do many other skills, but the nuclear meltdowns seem to be contained.

As such, it is time to take my own mental health seriously.

 I’m giving myself this one last lung dart, then I’m on the pesticide free diet. It’s time I get back to the pursuit of the 6 minute mile. I need to give myself that much with everything that’s going on.

I hope to get back in the shop and building things, but getting life on track is the primary focus right now. I need to get out from under the steam roller in any way I possibly can. 

My Painful Scar

I hurt. Really bad. At some point, a given pain is so excruciating and unrelenting that your mind just disassociates from the body. I laid in bed and held my stomach with one hand and my heart with the other. 

“You are well. You are healthy and strong. You are not going to die. Your everything is not over or lost. Be at peace. Sleep is what will heal, do not let your body take it from you.” I tell myself. 

The thoughts come rushing in. Those awful, unsettling words. The evil, hateful, berating words like vomit. The smell alone, like a gag reflex, issues an urge to spill my mental lunch. (It was a tasty little TED talk)

“Be still. Be well. Now is not the time for thoughts. Now is the time to be centered, breathe.” I take a deep, controlled breath. My heart lights up, beats on my ribs, and squeezes battery acid into my guts.

The thoughts come back. And the smell. Like a trickle of water over a dam wall, I feel it in the front of my brain. “You know what, bitch!?” are the words of my father and a hundred drunkards dripping on my tongue. Don’t worry though, I’ve spent my whole life building and reinforcing that dam. 

“Breathe. You are well. You are a great human being because you can feel. You are great because you bring so much to your endeavors. You are valuable. Your words are valuable. Your actions are valuable. Your feelings. They are part of being human, and they are valuable.”

Our counselor poked that scar a couple weeks ago, and I didn’t even know what she poked or why it hurt. It hurts now. 

I was in the 5th grade. I don’t have many memories of that period of my life, so I have to do some math here… I would have been 9, making my sister about 2. I was playing cards with my dad. I suppose she felt left out, so she did what a toddler might be expected to do: kicked me in the back. Continously. I know I told her to stop. Over and over. I imagine I yelled it at her, but I don’t recall. My dad didn’t intervene. The kicking continued. I uncrossed my legs and squished her against the sofa with my back. I didn’t even see it coming. Do you know what a drunken layman’s fist does to a 9 year old boy? Well, nothing that left a permanent mark, though at the time I was sure my arm was broken. It’s what his fist told me in that flight. “You are not valuable enough to deserve not being physically attacked.”

I will let myself vent this hatred though: I hate that “it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it” has suddenly become a trendy way of implying someone simply ought to know what their audience wants to hear. 

Moreover, I hate that it’s used as a gateway to render all context invalid any time the audience is offended, and the words are picked up, balled together with their emotions, then hurled back at the speaker.

I am pressed for words. “You have to use your words. You must speak.” I am not a novice in vocabulary, but I don’t know what words to use to express how I feel. Sometimes (more often than is helpful) I don’t even know for myself what I’m experiencing. But I must speak, because that is what is demanded of me. I breathe. I think. I carefully, cautiously, pick words to assemble the best sentences I can. I draft it in my mind, check the tone, edit out any absolutes, ensure my audience is not being unwittingly included, and do my best to make sure it is completely objective so as to not sound like I’m treating my subjective views as any kind of fact. Finally, I release the anticipated final draft, and I think it just might be NYT best seller material. 

What I said, the context, gets thrown at my feet. How I said it gets thrown in the cauldron, with a boiling hot stew of emotion, before being thrown in my face. If I speak, I get doled out another round. If I remain silent, the cauldron boils over. The words don’t hurt that bad, and I can deal with the third degree burns. What really hurts is that scar. It’s been torn open again by the reinforcement of, “You are not valuable enough to express your thoughts.”

The burning feeling has gone down. I know I may not sleep well, but the least I can do is rest my body, hold my oozing wound, and keep telling myself that I am valuable.

Collecting Thoughts

“I just feel like my mind is racing through thoughts and I’m not in the driver’s seat.” my girlfriend tells me.

“My mind is like lightning. One brilliant flash and it’s gone.” I tell her. 

She worries about her craziness and I try to comfort her in saying we are all a little crazy in some way. I suppose the trick is to figure out what flavor of crazy you are and try to learn from others how to live with it. 

It is in thinking about the furious pace of thoughts that led me to realize something else has been missing entirely from my life. Furthermore, it closely coincides with the point in time that my finances first turned south. In the Corps, we were issued a small notebook, olive green of course, that we kept tucked into a pocket or in the small of the back. We called it a smack book for motivational purposes. These days, I manage to keep myself together in a clipboard and spiral notebook or two. 

In a time of my life when I was single, I felt I was operating at max capacity all the time. Physically and mentally, I pushed myself to my limits. I had much more space than I needed, so an extra bedroom became my office. What I really wanted was a full sized whiteboard, but I didn’t have a way to really accommodate one. Instead, I bought a can of whiteboard paint, and painted each closet door top to bottom. 

Oh, the memories of that ‘whiteboard’! Many, many drunken attempts at deriving fluid dynamics equations or balancing chemical reactions. Tutoring. Strategizing. Motivating. Budgeting. Dreaming. All of that and more happened on those doors. It captured those fleeting, golden ideas. It reminded me of problems I have already addressed and no longer need to store in my already overloaded brain. It reminded me of my priorities and plans as I went through the week. It was an anchor for my very actively wandering mind and helped immeasurably with my productivity. 

It is high time we get a giant whiteboard again, I say. Once again, I have no idea where to accommodate one, but it is needed. We already found we can barely function without the whiteboard calendar, so I don’t know fully why I wouldn’t have gone for at least another small one. 

I am not a big fan of the paint though. It is a two part resin and doesn’t actually apply like paint. I believe a foam brush is the only way to get the coat even enough to effectively write and erase, but I wouldn’t mess with it unless you consider yourself handy. 

It’s something to start with. 😁

Visible Wounds from Invisible Battles

“Where do you go when you’re inside your mind? Is it some place deep and hard to find? 

Where do you look for sweet relief? Is it somewhere quiet, where you can breathe? 

When you can’t turn it off to sleep, do you count secrets you can’t keep? 

When we met, our hearts rejoiced in resounding palpitations. Embracing that freedom, our fears nearly escaped us. 

Misguided minds and greed are upon us. But we’ll still have each other and marijuanas. 😁

So, when you’re feeling broken I hope you’ll see, the perfect man inside & out you are to me. ”

–My Fantastic Girlfriend

“Some of the greatest battles will be fought within the silent chambers of your own soul.”

–Ezra Taft Benson