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....

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.