If the Devil is in the details, then I don't have to worry about the Devil

I don't remember where I was coming from. I remember I was in the passenger seat, but I don't know who was driving. I know I was 18-years old. I know I had graduated high school, but can't recall if it was a week after I graduated or two months after. I know it was summer. I know I was being dropped off. I know I was being driven to where I lived, my dad's house...I realize most kids who have yet to leave the nest would refer to that place as "their home", but that's not how I was raised, it wasn't my home, it belonged to Steve.

I know my car wasn't running, it was in the driveway, broken down, I don't know exactly what was wrong with it. I don't know why the person who was driving me dropped me off and left, in hindsight, that was a bad move on my part.

I know that as we drove down my street to the house I began to make out the shapes and forms of items on the lawn, big items, small items, a lot of items. I remember looking out the passenger window as the car slowed in front of the house, I remember Steve, my dad, sitting on the porch.

All of my life my dad told me when I turned 18, I was out. He beat it into my head (literally). My 18th birthday had come and gone in January of that year without any acknowledgement whatsoever by my parents, so although I was a little bothered no one noticed, I was also a little relieved I wouldn't be homeless with 5-months left of high school. When my high school graduation rolled around, and neither of my parents even asked about it or acknowledged that their was a commencement ceremony, I  didn't bring it up, I didn't attend it and they didn't care. Again, I didn't get tossed out of the house, so I counted my blessings.

My luck had run out that day. That day, everything I owned was on the front lawn. My entire life to that point was strewn across the grass as if a micro-tornado hit just my room, just my life.

I had no car to pack it up into and in 1989 I had no cell phone to call anyone. My dad simply said, "I changed the locks" got up, went in the house and shut the door behind him.

I stood there, stunned a bit and turned and walked away...from it all. From my things, my clothes, my life.

I had no siblings out there in the world to call, no friends or relatives to take me in. When I called my estranged mother from a pay phone her response was, "So, wow, where are you going to go?". Exactly what a boy in trouble wants to hear from his mom.

I wasn't a bad kid. I wasn't in trouble. Never got suspended, never got so much as a parking ticket. I just wasn't what my old man thought I should be.

That's the day I learned that no one will ever have my back.

On my way to Waiting

My life is slowly slipping by. I think when you have kids, life moves faster then when you don't have kids and the more kids you have, the faster time flies...because they have so many mile markers along the way to remind you of just how frickin' fast time moves forward, "Oh look she's walking!" "Oh look she's talking!" "Oh look she's in high school!" "Oh look she's picking out our coffins!". Your kids milestones polarize the passage of time. 

I haven't moved to California. I have been convincing myself to be happy with what I have and where I am. I have a lot. I am in a nice place. It's cold as hell, but it's nice.

I still want to be in California. 
I feel like every day that passes, I lose another chance to move there. I lose another day by being here. 

I can't shake it. I can't shake the longing. The wanting. The pangs of regret of not being there.

In a few weeks I'll be in the bay area, like I am every few months, I'll soak it up, I'll take it in and try to savor my time in the sun. I'll dream of living there of staying there of simply being in my Valhalla. I'll wish my wife was with me so I could show her why I love it there, so she could fall in love with the air and sky and ocean and the soul of it all. Then I'll leave. 

I'll get sad. I always get sad. 

Rambling about my own Stupid.

I've never been fatter in my life. Ever. I'm huge. I'm working out and eating better, but still, I'm fat.

My stress levels are through the roof. I'm working on not being so stressed, but still. Stressed.

My mother turned 60 yesterday, my wife planned a surprise birthday party for her. It was wonderful. Just over 2 years ago I was standing in front of a surgeon in a hospital in the middle of the night as he explained my mom had a leaking aneurysm for about a week now, and it had burst without anyone knowing. She was bleeding out...her vitals were almost non-existent...he was very unsure. She survived.

I have 4 children. I have a wife. I've been thinking about dying a lot lately. I really don't want to die, but I know the way I'm going, I'm not going to last as long as I should. It's sad. I'm sad.

Most of my blogs tell a story, this one doesn't. This one is just me thinking. It's not a very good entry.

Money. Responsibility. Family. Work. Friends. Life. I need to be better at all of those things and worry less about some of those things.

I need to figure this out. I'm running out of time.

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....