I love things

I love Neil Youngs music. I have loved it since I was boy. One of the first vinyl records I ever listened to was Harvest by Neil Young, it belonged to my dad. Actually, I'm listening to it now as I type this, tens of thousands of feet up in the air, flying back home from San Jose California. I also love California, specifically, the "silicon valley" area of California, the area I am in the process of flying away from at his very moment back to my heart and soul, my wife and kids and my home back in Detroit.

Whenever I'm in is part of California, which is at least 2 or 3 times a year, more if I can manage it, I make a point to drive up into the mountains that separate silicon valley and all of the technology and the Pacific ocean. Up there on a winding mountain road named Skyline Blvd is a cool little restaurant named Alice's Restaurant after the restaurant from the famous album by Arlo Guthrie. While driving that crazy winding road I take solace in knowing that Neil Young's sometime home, Broken Arrow Ranch is also nestled in up inbetween the redwoods and cypress trees on that very road. I can't see the ranch, I can't get into the ranch, I dont see Neil Young walking around or anything, but somehow I feel like I'm communing with the soul of music that is area has inspired Mr Young to write.

They say that up there in those hills of La Honda, Jack Kerouac sat and wrote, inspired by the same feeling and aura I'm often inspired by when I'm there.

As I said, I'm on my way home now, to the Midwest, to Detroit. Ive spent the better part of my adult life trying to get back out to northern California, through business or by making friends out there could return to visit. I'm drawn to that place like no other place o earth. But it's not home. It's an idea. It's a connection o a part of me I wish I had held onto. It represents my creativity, my dreams, my aspirations that so often get replaced by the realities of adulthood, of parenthood, of mortgages and college funds.

I know I think that if I could just relocate my family to northern calironia, somehow the stresses and pressures of life would be lessened, somehow the same intangible feeling of positivity I get when I visit here would insert itself into our mundane and stressful lives. I also know that's probably just a dream.

Real life  has a tendency o be stronger than ones hopes and aspirations and it usual wins in a fight between it and ones dreams.

I think i need t learn how to bring the peace and inspiration I find in California back with me to Detroit, and not the other way around.

The Forever Liar.

I've always thought of myself as an artist. I am not an artist. I have always, in my mind, thought that I was creative and artistic and yes, smart. Egotistical as it may seem, this is how I've always viewed myself. I've always thought I was different than the average man. Unique. Somehow this has given me comfort and made me feel like making all the choices I've made in my life, normal choices, common choices, those every day choices, were special. I wasn't doing it as a average man, I was doing these things as an outsider secretly posing as an average man. This frame of mind has always allowed me to live the way I've lived without regrets.

It's all another lie.

What isn't a lie, is my depression. My self loathing. My lack of self confidence. The perpetual quiet hum of sadness that murmurs inside my head like a tiny machine that never turns off. Being an "artist" somehow makes that all have purpose, admitting otherwise just means I'm mentally ill. 

So now, at 41, I have to consider how long I allow myself to continue to wrap myself in the warm comforting blanket of this lie I've been telling myself. This self-sustaining fabrication that makes me feel  like I haven't somehow given in to the drudgery of normal life that every other man I know has given in to. 

A trick I like to play on myself is to joke about how average my life is. To offhandedly remark how much I like my Subaru and my Polo shirts and my dinner parties. I'm only doing these things and making these decisions ironically. It's me being sarcastic at my on existence. 

Yet another lie.

It's safe to say we all thought we would be someone when we grew up, we had an idea in our minds of how our lives would wind and turn and where they'd end up. It's also safe to say that aside from the very few, lucky individuals, no one gets to be exactly who they thought they'd be. Often, Life takes over as we slide over into the passenger seat and stare out the window at the view.

I have this theory. You know how sometimes when someone suffers a traumatic physical event, a horrible accident or something and their friends and family ask them what they remember and they respond with, "I remember getting into the car, turning onto the road...and then...waking up here in the hospital". Our brains remove that tremendously stressful memory from our heads and simply skip ahead. What if that's what happens when we die? What if our all powerful mind simply erases our memory of dying and our sub-conscience just caries on with life, creating our future based on our life before dying? We just continue to live, forever, within our own consciousness. 

One final lie, to last throughout eternity.
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my dad

Growing up my dad made me believe my mom was drug addict, my uncles and aunts were alcoholics and losers and my grandparents wanted to turn me into a girl. He used lies and manipulation to dismantle my tenuous relationship with my mother and simply did not allow me to see my mom's side of the family. Ever. I was convinced that everyone was out to get my dad and he was the only one on earth who truly loved me or knew what my best interests were. Secluded. Segregated. Isolated. Family I thought loved me did not, they were liars trying to take me from him. Friends I thought liked me, did not, they were using me.

All the while this was happening, he was also making me sure I knew what a failure I was. How stupid I was. How I was embarrassing. How much better he was than me. What a total failure I was. I was bound to end up in prison or dead in a ditch. I was just like his brother Gary, that was one of his favorite lines. According to my dad his brother Gary was an abusive drunken loser ex-convict and I was exactly like him. Now, I doubt any of my dad's descriptions of my uncle Gary were true, but as a kid, I believed my dad always.

When I would get home from school I just prayed I could make it from the front door to my bedroom without being stopped in the hallway by my dad for giving him "a look". He didn't like the way I looked at him often, and the wrong look could end up badly for me. Apparently some of my looks meant I thought I was tough. I wasn't.

When he wasn't emotionally, verbally or physically abusing me, he simply wasn't there. Girlfriends and step moms were always more present than he was. He always had something else to do or somewhere else to be.

Once I became a teen, he added saboteur to the list of my horrible, horrible traits and I was clearly trying to destroy his family, which now didn't include me. At 13 I had joined the list of the others out to get him, my little brother and his wife/girlfriend of the moment.

Luckily, at 18 years old, he threw me out of the house, and we were done. There have been brief periods of time in my adult life where he has been present, but all ended poorly and I refuse to give him another chance.

My dad never did anything an actual father would do aside from teach me by example of what NOT to do.

He only gained custody of my brother and I to "win". He didn't want us, and once he had us, we were an annoyance to him, his life and most of all to his wives.

I am constantly putting out in public forums statements about how much I hate him so that there's no chance he'll decide to come back around and if I ever am stupid enough to seek him out, he won't talk to me because he's seen my public declarations of hatred towards him. I have built in my own failsafes against my possible future sentimentalities.

Father's Day always reminds me, I didn't have a dad, I had a captor.

My Big Fancy Leaking Problems

It's been a long time since I last wrote here, or anywhere. A lot has happened.

My 5-year old daughter was found to have a large mass inside of her skull. She underwent extensive inter-cranial surgery, survived, and is now 100% deaf in her left ear. THAT is for another post though.

My lifelong best friend is here visiting from California (where he's lived the last 15 years) and when he's here, I always see a lot of people I knew when I was growing up. In addition I'm making some changes with my company and career. Unrelated events, but combined together, even the issue with my daughter, they polarize something for me, something that as usual, depresses me.

I've been spending my life crying and trying to clean up spilled milk, and ignored the continually leaking milk bottle. I've been trying to put out all of these little fires that always reignite and never been very successful at permanently snuffing them out. I think a lot of people do this, seeing people I've known since I was 5 (I'm 41 now) and seeing how their lives have gone solidifies this belief and makes me really look at all of this bullshit.

I, we all, have one or two real problems. Just a couple issues, personality/character flaws, emotional/mental issues and those one or two real problems are the mother of all of the other little bullshit problems that I (we) spend most of each day trying to fix. Trying to solve. Trying to move on from only to see them reappear in some other vaguely similar form because we never really ever try to fix the leaking milk bottle.

I know that accepting and acknowledging what these issues are and realizing where they were born is important, but not as important as actually coming up with a plan to solve them, and thereby, hopefully, solving A LOT of the day-to-day bullshit problems that spin out of the original big bad mother-fucker problem.

I'm realizing what my real problems are. I think number one is I'm scared shitless. I know I speak my mind probably more than anyone you've met. I realize I act like I don't care about upsetting people or ruining relationships and usually come across as not being very afraid of the consequences of my verbal explosions. What I'm scared shitless of is being a disappointment. I don't even know for sure of who I'm afraid of disappointing. My kids? My wife? Me? I don't know. But that fear of fucking up and letting "whoever" down keeps me paralyzed to some degree. I don't act. I talk. A LOT. I talk a good game then do nothing then I talk some more. I've really become excellent at talking BECAUSE it has kept me from having to actually take a risk and take a leap. 

I used to think my inaction was born out of my fear of losing everything and everyone around me. I used to think since my dad and mom split up virtually the moment I was born and  my mom left me at 12 year old and my dad threw me out at 18 and because he went through a parade of step-mom's who all left, that I had some abandonment issues that spilled over into my psyche and created this huge fear of loss inside of me. But I was wrong. Although all of that could have contributed to my problems, the reality is that my psycho father also taught, maybe "trained" me is a better word choice, "trained me" to be alone and be ok being alone. He trained me that no matter what happens, I can walk away and be ok. I don't like knowing I have that ability inside of me, but I know I have it. I know tomorrow if it all went sideways, I could survive with nothing and with no one. Deep down inside of me, in an old, old portion of my brain, I know I'm not even afraid of it. In fact, I expect that to happen someday. Which leads me to me other BIG problem.

I'm going to fuck it all up. I'm tempting the fates every day to see if I can bring on the big fall, I'm doing it intentionally. Again, I think I know why I do a lot of it, I learned it from watching my con-man dad. I don't think I could exist without secrets in my life. I don't think I could exist being honest. I don't think I could exist without the potential for all of it to possibly come to light and pull the world down crashing around me. The shit I do, the problems I volunteer to bring into my life, they're ridiculous. The stuff I get myself into knowing it would be harmful to me if ever it was exposed, they're pointless. They really don't benefit me and only really stand to harm me and my way of life. I don't need to have the secrets I keep. I intentionally do this. I do this because I'm  a nutjob who needs these problems. I don't need problems. 

So. I'm scared and yet I'm constantly creating potential problems that I know if  ever got out, would maybe possibly ruin me. I think EVERY other problem I have in my life comes out of these two issues. I think I've identified my base, root of the problem shit. So what? 

I don't know how to stop doing either of those things. I mean, I "know how" but for whatever reason, can't. I see my friends, my wife, people around me, I know they all have their one or two problems too that literally control their lives. In some instances that ruin their lives. I know all of our complicated and messy lives would be better without these core problems leaving their crumbs all over. I want to stop. I want to change. I want to...poop. Sorry I gotta run....

35 Minutes and a Car Ride.

My oldest daughter is a good kid. She has not given us very much of the teenage angst we were expecting to get from our teenage kids, but I guess there's still time, she's only on her way to 15. 

She get's A's and B's although last marking period she did get a C. We actually really came down hard on her because of it, and not because she got a C really, but because it coincided with a trend of  general "I don't really give a fuck" we had noticed. Honestly though, she's a wonderful daughter, sister and person.

This weekend she had one of her life long friends stay the night, another girl who my daughter has known since they were both in preschool. Where my daughter doesn't wear make up regularly, has never dyed her hair and prefers jeans and t-shirts this girl's face is thick with make up, she wears flowing dresses, often with skulls on them and currently her hair color of choice is lime green. All of which is fine. I dyed my hair when I was a teen and wore skulls and all of that, we're ok with artistic punk rock kids, we can relate. Her friend also doesn't have a lot of parental supervision. Her dad always seems to be away on business and from what I can tell her mom works a day job AND is in a wedding band on weekends. The girl has a 3 brothers, 2 younger one older, but she often seems to be "on her own", which again, both my wife and I can relate to.

So I was in the breakfast nook area and my daughter and her friend were in the kitchen, I won't get into all the details, but at one point I heard my daughter's friend say, "that would make an AWESOME drinking game, could you imagine?". The good news is my daughter's only response was to laugh nervously, and NOT to respond with a wholehearted, "HOLY SHIT LET'S GO INTO THE BASEMENT AND PLAY RIGHT NOW!". Either she knew I was right around the corner and realized her friend's slip up, or she was genuinely uncomfortable with the comment but didn't know what to say.

I didn't say anything. I didn't burst into the room and scream, "AH HA!", I just filed it away and went about my day with the intent of bringing it up when my daughter and I were alone.

So last night my daughter needed to return some stuff her friend had left over our house. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to have some alone time with her and bring up the topic. It went great. I had her crying, or more accurately sobbing, within minutes of broaching the topic.

She didn't drink. She didn't know if her friend drank. She wouldn't drink. She doesn't want to drink. No drinking whatsoever is going on. So I pressed further. Pot? Cocaine? Prescription meds? No. No and no. But she kept on falling onto the fact that she didn't know if her friends were doing these things. She didn't BELIEVE they were, but if they were, they weren't telling her they were or doing it in front of her.

Now, I didn't attack her, I talked. I tried the "I know what it's like" angle, but she instantly burst into waterworks. So then I took her own words and used them as the basis for my next approach. She's too nice for her own good. If her friends aren't telling her they're smoking pot or drinking beer, or popping pills, THAT in itself was bad enough to get her into trouble. If she's in the car with someone who has a dime bag on them and they get pulled over, guess which one is going to the police station in hand cuffs? ALL OF THEM. It didn't even need to be her, it just needed to be in the same car and if she didn't know if her friends were holding, she better damned find out.

I let her know that if she tells us she's staying the night at her friend's house, but they secretly sneak out, get in a car and drive 20 miles away to Westland to see a boy and then it turns out the rest of the kids are also going to get high while they're their...she needs to feel comfortable calling me. Waking me up at 2:30 AM to have me come pick her up from god knows where even though she knows I think she's at her girlfriend's house 2 blocks over. 

I told her tales of me getting arrested for trying to be the sensible kid who would go with my friends on their errand just to make sure they don't get themselves into trouble, but then ended up ALSO getting into trouble just being there. Being the nice friend doesn't always work out. She cried a lot on this car ride. I must have said, "pot, beer, blow job, cocaine, prescription meds, sex and fuck, fucking and fucker" about 3-dozen times each. I most definitely raised my voice. I told her I KNOW all of those things are going on all around her, I'm just hoping my daughter is smart enough and self confidant enough to not make bad decisions. 

I didn't outwardly accuse her of anything aside from being too nice and being afraid to stand up to her friends. I let her know that unfortunately tears no longer convince me she's being honest. This was a big event to me as a parent. I hope it was for her too. I hope she was scared shitless a little bit, her hyperventilating / sobbing / crying would suggest she was. 

About 35 minutes. That's how long this lasted. I love my kids more than life, but at the end of the day, this is really all I have, 35 minutes and a car ride to protect them from the outside world.

random.

This is going to be a very disparate entry.

I am always unsettled. Always. I have a great life. I have a marriage that is more honest than anyone's I've ever known and I don't think there's anything I could do or say that would end it, I have 4 very well adjusted, smart and confident daughters, my wife is supportive, gorgeous and smart. I've been running the same business for 15 years now, make a great living and have 180% job security. There should be no problems, I should be doing nothing but stopping and smelling the overabundance of roses that surround me....and yet, I am unsettled.

I am not good at letting well enough alone or letting sleeping dogs lie. I am the consummate squeaky wheel. I also don't forget anything, ever, especially problems. I am so antsy right now my skin is crawling.

In addition, I think I want to run away. Not from my family, with them, but still...far away. I know there's no way to escape my feeling of being unsettled, because I know it's inside me, but I'm still on the verge of running.

Hilariously I'm always too nervous and too pragmatic to ACTUALLY rock the boat so hard it falls off of the cliff...and yet I'm always wanting to do just that, so it's this perpetual state of uncertainty.

As of today I told my wife we're done talking to or helping my mom. She only hurts me and never helps me. I'm done.

fuck.

I don't talk to my dad. It's only been a few years (this time) but I don't believe I'll ever speak to him again unless we accidentally run into each other. I do speak to my mom, but infrequently, she prefers the conversation of my wife, less baggage I suppose. They were kids when they had me, that's what I've always been told and what I've always told myself. She was 17 and he was 18. They didn't know how to handle life itself at that age let alone being a parent. No coping skills, no life skills, for my mom no parental support, nothing. Kids having a kid. I have always been told that when my mom told her Catholic parents she was pregnant her dad threw her out of the house. She had to move in with my dad and his folks. I've never really asked her if this was true or not but I do know I came home from the hospital to my dad's parents house and that's where I lived until I was about 3 years old. 

I had my first child when I was 27 years old, 10 years older than my mom was when she had me, and I admit it scared the shit out of me. 14 years later and I have 4 children now, still married to the mother of all of my kids. My folks split up immediately after I was born, then did a good 10-years of on again off again, my little brother was born out of this craziness, then by the time I was 11 years old they had divorced for good, soon after my dad remarried and my brother and I were awarded to him, full-custody, her with visitation rights only. 

When my parents were becoming parents, my dad's parents stepped up and took us all in. Paid for us, helped us, supported us. We eventually moved into a house my great grandparents had lived in because my grandpa let us move in for free. They gave us furniture, they gave us food and they watched my brother and I all the time for free. They were totally there to help my parents, ALWAYS.

My little brother and I went from the insanity of living through an unstable marriage filled with violence and absentee parents in their 20s to living with a violent, angry, bitter sociopath. He always used to say he couldn't wait until I had kids of my own, then I'd understand, then I'd know he wasn't crazy, then I'd appreciate everything he'd "done for me". He was wrong.

Whenever I am going through something with one of my four kids, I think back to how I was raised, or not raised, I am dumbfounded. We have a teenager, a middle schooler, a kindergartner and a baby...we know stress, we know frustration, we know kids. What we don't know is how anyone could beat one, could tell them they'll murder them, tell them they're less than worthless and will amount to nothing but filler for state prison. In addition, I don't know how my mom could take the abuse from my dad like she did for all of those years and then eventually give up and leave us to him and his anger. I was 11, my brother was 7, she knew who my dad was, she knew what he'd do. She had every excuse in the book why she couldn't fight it, couldn't win. I have kids of my own now and I don't get either of their behaviors at all. By the time they were in their 30s they weren't kids anymore, that tried and tested excuse had run it's course. 

I don't know what having supportive parents (or now grandparents) would be like, so I don't know what I'm missing. I don't know what kind of hole in my kids lives exists because there is not doting grandpa or grandma. I'm not complaining, I simply have no idea. 

Right now I am dealing with a health issue with my 4 year old, not life or death, but life altering none the less. The stress this event is exerting on our family is immense, yet it's making us all be more supportive of each other, not more angry with each other, and I certainly am not taking out my stress on my kids. 

I'm pretty sure the next time I see my dad and utter a word to him he'll be laying motionless on his back in a suit in a fancy box I'll be getting the bill for. As a parent, I can't believe this is how a parent would want his or her relationship with their child to be.  

Y You're Nothing Special.

So my mom.

I realize so many of my blogs are about her effect on my life, and no shock, so is this one, but in a different manner. It is because of my mom, my lack of relationship with her as a child and her total coldness and lack of emotional attachment that I have developed the way I have in regards to how I feel about women. I think that's fair to say about all men, we learn how to treat women and what to expect from women from our primary female role model that we had while we were growing up. In my case, that means women have a lot to prove.

First let me say I love women. Women are my best friends and the sexiest creatures on earth. I relate, for the most part, more with women than men on almost every level.

Secondly let me say that I was raised by a man who told me daily that I was a worthless piece of shit who would 100% end up in prison or in the military if I was lucky. He did nothing but beat down my self esteem and my body continuously. I was stupid and worthless and a failure, he literally told me this from the time I was 8 or 9 until the day he kicked me out of his house at 18. I am saying this here because I was not raised to think I was god's gift to women, I was raised to think I was a stain on the fabric of life in general and should be discarded.

Now, I need to say I get very frustrated with women who think they deserve a man's love, who deserve to be treated like princesses, who think they're a prize to be won and right all of the time and shouldn't be contested. I don't like women who think that men should come to them.

I feel as though anyone is lucky to find and have anyone else, I am just as much a prize to my wife as my wife is to me. She is sure as hell is lucky to have me and to keep me. I don't really care what women reading this may think, good PEOPLE are hard to find, not good men or good women. 

 

I also think that women lie, cheat and are all around untrustworthy just as much as men. There is no difference. People are people and a soft and pretty doesn't equal unquestioned faith and honesty. The moment I hear a woman say anything along the lines of, "but I'm a woman" or worse, "I'm a girl" I cringe. You're an adult human like me, we are equals. 

I do not think women get taken advantage of more in relationships, I do not think they're helpless and I think any problems they've faced with men are of their own makings. "Men" aren't out to get them, we don't have meetings and come to a consensus to ruin the self confidence of carefully chosen targets. You make the bed you lie in, as with anyone, most of the time if you're experiencing reoccurring issues, take a look at the one constant, usually that constant is found in the mirror.

I do not treat women special, I treat them exactly the same as I treat my male friends. Women get my honest opinion on everything, they're not emotionally retarded or incapable of hearing the truth any more a man is, people just act like they are. I don't. Some women don't like this approach because they're used to being treated with kid gloves, usually for some very negative reasons; either people actually treat them differently because they're a woman after all or men treat them differently because they're trying to get into their pants.

Some people are stupid, some are mean, some are insane, some are unlikable and some are insufferable. These are human traits that apply to women and men and should be acknowledged whether it's a woman or man, you shouldn't get a break on being a demanding entitled asshole because "she's my princess", that's bullshit, she's an arrogant douche, and should be treated as such, who gives a shit about her nice tits, there are other nice tits out there and if you're going to put up with her shit because you think those are the nicest tits you'll ever get to touch, then you're an idiot as well.

When I'm watching a TV show or a movie and I see an older couple and the man is kowtowing to his long time spouse by saying the equivalent of, "yes dear" to everything she says,  it just reinforces my frustrations with how our society has presented "the battle of the sexes", someone wins and someone loses. That's bullshit. If you have a partner, you're equal or it's not going to work, "battles" don't lend themselves to long term relationships, "battles" end and someone loses. Always.

I will never treat a grown woman differently simply because she is a woman. I will never pull a punch with my observations because you're a lady. I will never treat you any different than I treat anyone else, everyone is equal. Women should get no special treatment because of a chromosomal difference determined during gestation, just because you don't have the Y.

The Unsympathetic Man

I am an unsympathetic man.

Chalk it up to whatever you want, my parents, my upbringing, my life in general. I am unaffected by your dilemma, by your situation, by your trials and your problems.

We all have problems. We have all had tragedies in our lives. All of us. We have all faced adversity. Some of us have let it stop our lives in their tracks. Some of us have let our experiences stop us from experiencing more. Some of us pull up our pants and get on with it.

I guess you'd call me cold. I'm too direct. I'm an asshole. I don't know when not to say something. I always have to say something. 

Even though this in itself is me bitching, I can't stand you whining about your life. Set aside the blatant triviality of your complaints, set aside the amazing self gratification that comes along with your squeals of just how unfair the world is, focus in on the pure ego it takes to howl to the world of your misfortunes while your friends struggle with Herculean trials you've never had to deal with. 

If you are an adult, over the age of 18, I am going to scrutinize you and your decisions if you so chose to put them in front of me. If you're over 18, you're an adult, on your own, 100%, how you deal with your problems is your own fault and the consequences of your actions is your own fault, period.

I know it seems much easier for me to judge you than it is for me to judge me, but believe me when I tell you I am 10,000 times harder on myself than I am on you.

Excuses mean very little to me, your excuses me virtually nothing. Seriously. We are all adults here. You get what you deserve, so do I. 

I don't need friends, I don't need fans, I don't need sympathizers.

I jokingly complain about everything I can. I bitch and moan about the most mundane things, the every day things. This, is called, "mockery". I am mocking those you out there who truly take your bullshit "problems" so seriously that you paralyze yourself and you convince yourself your issues are real, they're valid.

I don't know what to tell you, life isn't that bad. Life is an experience that everyone should be fucking amazed with, everyone, always, until they die.

Sticks & Stones May Break My Bones but Whips & Chains are Old News (Part 2)

So my new routine was pretty awesome; I would work in the daytime, go to Community College in the afternoon, then a few times a week after 6 PM, I'd become a chauffeur. 

The arrangement was simple; she'd page me and say she had an appointment, I'd pick her up and drive her to the location, she'd go in and I'd find someplace close by to either eat or sit and study for school, in an hour I'd come back. She would either come back out and we'd leave or she'd come back out and say she'll be another hour. She never worked more than 3 days a week and never more than 3 hours a night, but I was getting paid $75 an hour cash, under the table, so best case I was puling in $675 a week, or $35,100.00 a year in 1989 and her? She was making triple that.

We never talked about what would happen if she had a problem, we never talked about what I would do if there was a problem. Occasionally she'd say, "In an hour I need you to come knock on the door and get me", and I would. I'm not a big man, and back then I was probably 135 lbs and 5'8", but it was my job, so I did it. 

In addition to all of this, there was her and I. I don't think we were ever boyfriend and girlfriend. We never held hands, we never acted like anything more than best friends aside from the random sex acts. Sometimes, after the appointments for the night were over, she'd have me reach over and masturbate her until she came while I drove home. Sometimes, she'd blow me while I drove her home, one time, we tried to fuck in the car...but I don't think we actually accomplished our goal. 

While this was going on, she lived in her house in Detroit with her roommate. Her male roommate. Her male roommate who practiced nude yoga, shot up heroin and was always in the house. They had been friends since high school apparently, and although she said there nothing more than friendship between them, I don't think he felt the same way, and boy did he not like me. IN addition to him not liking me, there was her ex-girlfriend who also DID NOT LIKE ME, in fact she wanted me dead. There was a lot of hate going around for someone who wasn't even dating the girl.

I, was still dating my high school sweetheart all this time, she was away at college and non-the-wiser. I was pretty sure she was getting her rocks off with some college boy up at school all the while so I didn't feel too bad not telling her, we both had our secrets.

The Girl and I kept this arrangement going on for a year, I even took on other girls (just the driving, not the masturbating) at the agency that set up the calls. I was making good money, I was falling in love with the girl, everything was going great. That's always a bad sign.

In the summer of 1990 I got accepted to the University my girlfriend was attending. Suddenly, I was moving away to college. My band mates didn't take it well, my friends didn't take it well and the girl? If I said she didn't take it well, that would be an understatement. She left over 100 messages on my answering machine describing how she was going to kill me and mutilate my corpse if I left her, every call not returned angrier than the last, every threat more detailed, every gory scene more psychotic. Until, they stopped. They stopped, I moved, and that was that. 

I didn't talk to her again. We were over on every level. That is, until 1997.

In 1997 I was flipping through a coffee table book of fetish girls, I drew fetish girls, and I loved these bog glossy photo books. In this particular book, deep within its pages, I found a memory. There, in her dreads, with her piercings, posing with a man in bondage, was The Girl. I was literally dumbfounded. It had been nearly a decade and here she was, right in front of me.

This was before we all had cell phones, before there was Facebook and email, so I made a decision to draw The Girl from the book and mail her the drawing with a letter to the address of the house she lived at when I knew her all those years ago. I included my phone number. I didn't speak of the past.

About 2 months later, she called me. She called me, and when I heard her voice I was so happy I laughed and she in turn giggled. I had an art exhibit coming up and she agreed to come to it. I was so happy. She was so happy. This was all so fucking bizarre.

The night of the show I was nervous as hell. She showed up. I didn't even recognize her. She had short pixie like hair, she was thin and tone and not at all the vampire she used to be. She explained that her roommate, her best friend from high school had died of a heroin overdose, lots of her friends had died. Now, her body was a temple. She was a personal trainer. She was happy. 

We are still friends to this day. Not hang out kind of friends, but friends still. We run into each other at local art events occasionally, we're keep track of each other on FB (she is blocked from all of this) and we've both moved on and grown up. She is still amazing, she is still awesome, and she was part of one of the most memorable periods of my life. 

PS: She never actually dominated me :) 

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Sticks & Stones May Break My Bones but Whips & Chains are Old News (Part 1)

I've written about this before, but not on this blog and I'm feeling nostalgic today, so here goes.

In the fall of 1989 I began my illustrious collegiate journey at the prestigious Henry Ford Community College.  Being of the scholarly mind set, among my plethora of intellectual challenging course studies, was Art 101. I needed an easy A. 

I attended class with my closest and dearest friend, let's call him "Bob". The class was filled with a wide array of people, lots of very run of the mill normal looking folks of all ages, Bob and I were of the "everything we wear is stone washed denim and hey look at our mullets" school of fashion and then there was "the girl".

The Girl was something I had never witnessed before. She was petite, no taller than 5'4", very thin, pale white skin, with very long black dread locks. Her clothes were all black and either skin tight (like her tights) or too big (like her black leather biker jacket and army boots that made it look like she got into her dad's clothing, and her dad was Andre the Giant). She was gorgeous, seriously, simply beautiful. 

All of these features though was not what made her stand out, no, she had something else that I had not seen before in person, it was 1989, so I don't think many people had seen it in person; she had piercings...everywhere. Each ear had a half dozen or so rings plus ones through parts of her ears I didn't realize you could pierce and her nose was pierced, which, back then, was not common. This was so exotic and so beyond the norm for me I had no choice, I didn't know her, and she wasn't exactly exuding the "hey I want to make friends with you people" vibe, but I had to talk to her. So I did.

She was amazing. She was friendly and warm and most of all she was giggly. She had a Bettie Rubble style laugh that I shockingly didn't annoy me, but just added to her charm. Within a day she had invited Bob and I stop by her home in Detroit to "check out her beat off mags". Yes, you read that right. I was in heaven.

The day we supposed to stop by the girl's house, Bob had something come up, so I went alone. I was nervous. I was 18 and from Redford which meant "suburbs". My self image as a long haired guitar player in a rock and roll band meant nothing here, I was so blatantly NOT cool or cutting edge it was laughable. She was the real deal. I knocked on her door, she opened it, smiled and let me in. The smell of incense filled her house, it decorated in gothic horror which again, in 1989 wasn't in the media, wasn't on MTV and wasn't seen ANYWHERE. There was a nice naked man practicing yoga in the living room, we walked right by him, I wasn't introduced and his presence wasn't commented on. She took me right up to the attack and we sorted through an old box of Cherry and Hustler magazines as we talked and I tried harder than ever before to make her giggle, we were just getting to know each other and hanging out over some nice beaver shots. Suddenly my life seemed beyond perfect.

Over the the next few weeks the girl and I hung out more and more, we became really good friends. One day she called me and asked if I could come over and drive her somewhere, I asked if her car was broken, she said no, she just needed to be dropped off somewhere I said, "of course". 

When I got to her house she was waiting, she came out and got into my big old blue Buick looking more bad ass vampire chick from hell than ever before. She had black thigh high lace up boots on with what looked like 17" heels, she had make up to rival Elvira, a tight, tight, tight, tight latex corset on and was carrying a large black purse/sack/body bag. We hugged, I smiled, she giggled, we drove off. She pulled out paper with directions on it.

When we arrived, she casually, without looking at me, asked if I could come get her in an hour. One hour exactly. I said sure, but what are you doing? She smiled, leaned in and kissed me, just a peck, but a kiss still, smirked and got out of the car without answering. One hour later I was back in the exact same spot, she got back in the car, fumbled around a bit, then handed me $75 cash and said we could go back "home" now. 


So began my year-long adventure as a driver (and  occasional lover) for a professional dominatrix.

More to come in part 2 of the series, "I've Done Every Job on Earth Except Worked in Fast Food Because I have Standards" 

Stress Just ripped Me in Half.

So I've actually managed to keep to my new year's resolution and have been exercising every day, quit drinking pop all together and been eating healthy. I feel better and sleep better and all around CAN see and feel the improvement. 

I still would like to loose another 35 lbs but I think with this regiment it's possible by summer. 

Aside from losing weight (about 15 lbs so far) and maybe stopping myself from having a heart attack, the other goal of this lifestyle change was to reduce stress. I am a stress monster, I worry about everything always. I worry about things that are happening this very moment, I worry about things that just happened, about things just about to happen, about things that will happen and about all the things in the world that MAY happen possibly maybe at some point. I always worry, I am always stressed and I'm sure it's slowly killing me and that in itself worries me and stresses me the fuck out. Fuck.

I realize I need to calm down. I realize I need to not stress myself out or I'm going to stroke out. I realize I need to learn to just accept things and live my life. I am trying, but the world is working against me, my entire life up until this point is working against me. The reason I am who I am, I believe, is because I've worried about every possible situation and because of that I've been able to have a plan in place to handle nearly any situation that presents itself. It SEEMS like a successful approach to life, "hope for the best but plan for the worst". So I plan for the worst case scenario in every situation I can imagine, and I have a vivid imagination. 

I feel like people rely on me to be prepared to deal with every problem, I feel like it's my job as a boss and I feel like it's my job as a dad and as a husband. I have to be able to solve problems QUICKLY and without panicking. When people come to me with an issue or a problem and are upset or freaked out if I simply responded with, "Sorry, I can't help you, I don't know what to do here and am not going to worry about it" I feel like my family and my business would fall apart around me and it would be my fault. I can't just not know how to handle problems, I simply can't.

Right now I know my mother's situation is going to have an atom bomb effect on my life within the next 2-months or so, I know it's coming and I'm worried about it because I don't think I have a viable solution. I'm not just the "what do we do now?" solution guy, I'm the money guy, if I don't make enough money, everyone suffers because no one else makes any money. I'm not complaining, I'm just stating a fact. Eventually, very soon, yet not at any specific time frame, my mom will be homeless with no income and that means I need to have a solution and I need to have enough money to implement that solution. I know this will absolutely happen and I can't stop stressing about it. No amount of exercising or healthy lifestyle has been able to stop the worrying either. This is real and I don't know how I'm supposed to not stress out about it. 

So how do I stop the stress associated with that? 

Take the Time to Smell The Loser Roses.

"Facta non verba"; Deeds not words. That is one of my favorite sayings. If you pay attention to how everyone acts around you, you'll learn more than if you listen to what everyone is saying.  

Regardless of what we tell our children, everything is really about "winning". I hate it, I hate that I have to admit that is a fundamental truth, but it is. We can say it isn't all we want, but look around, it IS all everyone strives for; people want to win, people want their group to win, they team to win, their company to win, they're kids to win. Winning IS everything. 

We all know deep down that winning, at anything, is a temporary boost at most. That win goes away, that feeling of jubilation does not last, someone else comes along and wins over you eventually. Winning doesn't really fix anything and really shouldn't be your goal in life, being happy and healthy and stress free should be your goal...but still, we strive to win. Striving to win causes stress that manifests itself in unhappiness, physical problems and can cause damage to existing relationships around you, but still, we strive to win. 

We strive to win so much that not winning has a negative connotation in the world. If you didn't win, you've lost. If you didn't win, you're a loser. Now, I'm not one of those people who think everyone should get a trophy at the relay race, I think teaching kids that winning is everything is actually way better training for living than feeding them the BS that everyone counts, I just find it funny that even as adults, we bullshit ourselves into believing that winning is not the goal in life.

Obviously, we can't all win, in any given situation, there is but only one winner. So that means we are intentionally setting ourselves up to lose, statistically speaking, very rarely will you be a winner. I guess chasing that top spot provides some people with that drive to succeed, which is a good thing, but winning is not the only reason people are driven to succeed, you can simply want to do your best or be driven to understand something better, those can be very motivating factors. Realistically though, it's usually about winning.

Oddly enough, I can't stand people who do not work hard to do their very best and accomplish all they can. I despise the unmotivated man who simply sits back and watches life instead of getting his hands dirty and really working, but to me that's always been more about hard work, character and the experience of life than the goal of being on top. I think working hard and striving to win are not intrinsically tied together. 

As I've gotten older, I've come to the conclusion, as MANY people have when they age and gain more insight and wisdom, that being happy in the here and now is far more healthy than winning is and far less stressful. Some people, especially young competitive people would categorize this feeling as "giving up", but to me that just polarizes their immaturity. 

Being happy, really, has always been the goal...everyone's goal whether they realize it or not. Because our society subconsciously trains us that winning is everything, we are raised to believe that winning will bring us that happiness. The problem is, and you don't figure it out until you've been though it, that all of that effort and stress you go through while trying to win takes time and it takes years and when you ultimately do win IF you ultimately do win, you look back and see that you've been stressed out and unhappy all the while and somehow you're not happy now that you're a winner either.

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I really Need to Stop Talking About This

I hear my friends complain about their parents sometimes. I see movies where middle aged people are having problems dealing with their difficult parents. They're all soldiering through helping their parents deal with life all the while being shit on or yelled at or badgered in ungrateful ways by the very people they're trying to help.

It doesn't seem odd. It seems commonplace. Parents get old and need the help of their kids and apparently, often, they are not very nice about it.

All of this imagery confuses the hell out of me, because I simply don't feel it. I am not compelled to continually lay myself bare for my mom in an effort to help her and be slapped in the face each time. I don't have the, what, the connection? I don't have the familial innate urge to hold on to that relationship at all costs. I feel guilty about it too, I really do, until my mom makes me feel justified in my actions, like she always does. 

My mom is in horrible condition now as a result of her burst aneurysm and resulting emergency surgery to save her life. She barely weighs 98 lbs, she sounds like she's 80 years old and she's only 58 years old. She has no spleen so she can't fight bacterial infection. The worst part is that somehow, and they can't figure out why, she has lost the use of her right arm completely. It is dead. It hangs lifeless at her side or resides in a sling now, unusable and more of a hindrance than a help. Her left arms is starting to lose feeling as well. She's had a spinal tap, she's seen  neurologist, she's doing what she should to figure this out but no one can tell her exactly what happened. 

Add to this that she is also trying her hardest to reconcile with her husband who in turn will not tell her if he is or isn't still planning on divorcing her. He's a charmer. He keeps telling her he'll decide in February and that's a long time away, which it totally is since it's only the second week of January. 

She can't make a decision without asking his permission, we can't stop by she has to ask him, we can't take her shopping she has to ask him, she can't see the grandkids she has to ask him. It's beyond frustrating.

Part of my moms reconciliation process is that my wife and I treat her husband nicely. I hate him. He's a 50 year old mama's boy spoiled brat who resorted to alcoholism because, in his own words, my mom paid more attention to their daughter than to him. This is the man I am supposed to just welcome back into our lives with open arms; I usually tell this sort of people what assholes they are right to their faces, I don't know if you've met me, I can be a tad abrasive.

So now here we sit, we KNOW she needs us, we are certain he will indeed leave her with that distant date of "February" rolls around. We know she has nothing but $100,000.00 hospital bill and some clothes from 1987 to her name and we know we are her only family. We know all of this but she is apparently not aware of any of this. I don't know what the fuck she's thinking and I can't ask her because I can't stress her out. If I push, she could lose it and end up back in the hospital, the one that doesn't take her insurance (all of them).

I want to walk away from this. I want to leave her to take care of herself so badly, like she did when she left us to the monster that is our father. She's a grown god dammed woman.  I want to never return her calls and never call her back.

I wish the movie would end now and we would reconcile and the credits would roll.

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The Unbearable Uncomfortableness of Being

So in 1994, after 5 years of not speaking to my dad, I decided to reconnect with him. I have no idea why, but that story is for another blog entry.

When I reentered my dad's life, I regrettably, went to work with him. At the time he was a manager at a real estate office and I was a licensed Realtor, so there you have it. As a young man desperately seeking my psychopath father's approval, it seemed like the right thing to do; amazingly enough, it turns out it wasn't.

My dad was in one of his transition phases of his life. This means he was living in the house that his soon-to-be ex-wife USED to own with her husband before she met my father and wisely left her spouse for him. He was, as usual, living in the house alone, because he had left his wife. When this event happens, when my dad leaves you, whether you're his wife or girlfriend, the first thing you realize is that you don't get to keep the house...even if you owned it first. First he gets his name on the deed, then he mortgages it up to the limit, often OVER the limit and who wants to be the one to get "the house" in the divorce settlement if it has 125% of it's value mortgaged? My dad, that's who, and he always stayed in it until the people showed up from the bank to physically move him out.  It must be a horrible feeling realizing that the man you thought you loved is actually a conman in for the long con, and you were little more than a 'mark'. 

Oddly enough, this time, my dad didn't seem to have a new woman in his life yet, not a 'mark' at least. He had a couple of close friends though, one of them was a younger guy that was a bookie/collector who loved to fight and one was a 40-year old woman who seemed to be a grifter just like my dad. Most importantly, both of these close friends believed my dad's current line of bullshit without question. That is where the real problems lies with my dad and his family; if we're around, we MIGHT, intentionally or accidentally, spill the beans about my dad's real past and 'poof', suddenly his mystique and his power over his friends would be gone. Awesomely, I have a big mouth, that's why he loves me hanging out with his pals so much :)

So my dad's friend friend works at the real estate office too, I'm going to call her Edith (because it's sexy). She has a normal 9 to 5 job, but during the evening she tries hard to earn extra money as a Realtor and of course she gets to hang out with her friends. I become a fringe member of this group of friends, I seldom hang out with them without my dad, he wouldn't really allow that...at least not at first. 

Eventually I begin marketing with Edith. We make pamphlets and fliers and go out on occasion and blanket neighborhoods with our names, trying to drum up listings. We get along, she's almost twice my age, I'm 22/23 at the time and she's 41/42 (my memory sucks when it comes to exact dates), but she's a goof off kid at heart and thin, pretty and has a filthy mouth too, which is pretty cool. 

One afternoon after passing out fliers, she decides we're going to hang out. This is odd because we never just "hang out", we always have some work related stuff to do, this probably isn't a good idea. She decides she's going to come over to my house and we're going to watch a movie.

So she comes over. We put on a movie, I have no fucking idea what movie. We both sit down, on my couch, opposite ends of my huge couch, but clearly we're both on my couch. The movie goes on, she asks for a blanket. I give her a blanket, all the way down on the other end of the couch which started out being about 30 feet long but now feels to be shortening itself as each minutes passes. The movie goes on. Our toes touch. She doesn't acknowledge it. I don't acknowledge it. They stay touched. The movie goes on. Suddenly, she announces she should go and laughs an uncomfortable laugh. Moments later we are feverishly making out with each other, me on top of her on that tiny couch, as if we're both sixteen years old. Tongues in mouths, hands on (fake) tits, mouths on necks, we are slowly becoming the beast with two backs...but then it stops as suddenly as it began. 

She jumps up, gets her clothes in order the best she can as she darts towards the front door, she HAS to leave, she just has too. I pull the traditional guy move and ask why while engaging her in more heating making out with her against the wall next to the front door....it gets heated again against that wall and then, she slips out the front door, she is gone, she doesn't look back as she says over and over "I gotta go".

I am left standing there with a rock hard cock and a pit in my stomach. This was a huge mistake, this was a huge mistake and I didn't even cum. Fuck. This isn't going to end well (aside from the part where I jerked off, that ended splendidly).

The next time I see Edith, and I hate to be so trite, but it was if nothing ever happened and believe me when I tell you I wasn't going to be the one to suggest we discuss what happened. It just went away. What didn't go away was Edith or my dad, in fact, soon afterwards Edith won a lawsuit she had been involved in for the past 5 years. When she won the suit, she got a settlement. When she got the cash settlement, she bought a house. When she bought a house, well, lets just say my dad needed a place to stay since he had been recently, forcibly, evicted.

It wasn't long before Edith and my dad were officially "Edith and My Dad". She stayed with him for many, many years. In fact, she lasted long enough to be close friends with my wife and even long enough that my first child called her grandma Edith. All the time Edith and I had that thing in own past together, just sitting there. Eventually, I stopped talking to my dad again and apparently not long after, my dad carried out his standard operating procedure and Edith lost her house to my dad, and soon after vanished from my dad's life all together.

The moral of the story is; It's a weird thing knowing you've been sexual with a woman your dad considers his wife and that you children call grandma. 

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New Year's Resolution: Don't Open My Email

So my brother called me the other day and left me a message. The last comment he made before he hung up was, "oh yea, I got an email, from our dad...give me a call". 

That sentence made my stomach drop. Life seems easy and carefree when my dad is not involved in it, but just that little comment is enough to start the anxiety that everything is about to fall to shit. I didn't even know what the email said, and I knew I didn't get an email so it wasn't directed at me, but still, anxiety. 

My dad lives in a world of manufactured insanity, that isn't to say he is sane and just acting, he is most likely a by the book sociopath and paranoid schizophrenic but he's also an asshole of the highest degree, and that isn't bad brain chemicals, that's just pure asshole shining through.

I never realize just how calm my suburban life really is until he tries to reenter the picture and remind me that he thinks he's in the mafia and thinks he's a super criminal and thinks he's connected and portrays himself as a secret millionaire and a war hero and  blah blah blah blah blah blah. As his kids, we weren't impressed by watching him lie about being a bad-ass crime boss, we were simply keenly aware that our dad HATED who he really was so much that he had to pretend he was always someone else; eventually we learned to hate him as much (or more) as he hated himself. It's because of him that I've always wanted  a boring, non eventful suburban life and I have that as long as he stays away.

But back to the email; I called my brother back and he read the email to me over the phone. It was silly as hell. It wasn't my dad asking to see us, it wasn't my dad asking how we were, it wasn't a pleasant holiday greeting. It was a typical insecure bullshit fishing expedition trying to get my brother to respond to him. 

We figured out that the reason for the email was rooted in the fact that my brother has a show of his photographs going on at the Detroit Institute of Arts right now. On Christmas day, our aunt brought over a coffee table book from the DIA that had some of my brother's work in it. She explained our dad (her brother, who she still speaks with) got the book for her, because he went down to the DIA to see my brother's show. We figured that the sole reason for this inane contact with my brother was all part of some bullshit bragging to whoever he was dating/married to now about his famous son; He probably took this person to the DIA show,  proud of his son's work, bragging of his famous son, and was asked, "where is your son?". Instead of answering, "we don't talk because I'm batshit crazy and physically, mentally and emotionally abused my children" he probably said something along the lines of, "Oh he's really busy and travels a lot, but you'll meet him". Then hastily put together an email to my brother under the guise of, "oh I found this old picture I thought you might want" hoping to get a response from this ice breaker and possibly introduce his new partner to his famous son. 
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It may seem nuts to anyone reading this that we would read so much into this, and infer such a wild back-story, but that's because you probably didn't grow up with a crazy conman as a father. To my brother and I this seems more than reasonable, it seems to be the most probable scenario.

So my brother said he's not responding to the email, and I said good. We agreed unless he comes back to one of us in order to apologize for everything he's ever done to us, we're never responding to any of his approaches, it's for the best for everyone. 

It's wild how one little 3 sentence email that wasn't even sent to me can get my mind spinning like this, but it obviously can. Oh well, I need to go take my Paxil and Prozac and Valium now.

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