That's enough now, internet.

I found a whole pile of graveyards sorting sites, today. I thought if I had the stomach for it I could sort through all of my odd, disparate, silly, self-pitying old places I have been to maybe get it all in a place. 

I thought for a minute I wanted to share myself. 

But there's so much in there I don't want to share. Some of that is shame. Some, maybe a lot. Some of it is just things I don't think anyone knows and they don't need to. 

And sadly I have written far more of it down than I care to or should-a. 

I found this on an old site - a list of things my wife would like to do in her life from over ten years ago:

learn how to knit

play chess

make a stained glass window

take a wine tasting class

go to italy

speak spanish fluently

visit the louvre

get a pygmy goat

have a fondue party

drive manual transmission

build a darkroom in my house

play piano

salsa dance in mexico

And there ain't nothing I know about trying to touch another person or know another person and just having that stain settle on me is poisoning. 

I was in for a couple of those things. I aim to help a few more of those come true. And I know I haven't done enough setting myself aside and working on her, so I missed a few. A few she doesn't much care about anymore. I never can keep pace. 

I guess the sting in all of it is how poorly I know how to love. How poorly I have approached love, with such poverty and such selfishness. 

I plan to schedule a fondue party and order the stuff for her to make stained glass and hope she still wants some of that. 

See, Jenny is my heart. It's such a tired thing to say, but she is. I'm bad at being me and so damned often it hurts us. And I couldn't begin to imagine a life without her. I fought her so hard and so long to end up here in this space where I have made marriage harder than it had to be when all along I just love her. I keep mistaking what I would do or what I think is good for me and applying it to her when none of that matters. I just need to help her be her.  

This was written on 4/30/19 but scheduled way in the future. I hope everything is better and I've learned a lot. I hope this doesn't make me cry. 

If there were words here they have gone away.

I clicked on this draft and found it empty. I was hoping to find out what the fuck I had been thinking about some months ago and maybe correct it, maybe re-discover it, maybe shame myself for how wrong I was such a short time back: but I came up empty.

And maybe that’s a good thing.

I spent a little time yesterday and today reading things I wrote when this love was younger, when I was younger, and a good chunk of the time it makes me sad to see how sad I once was. I mean, I still fight some of the same dragons, but I feel like a better fighter and I feel like I have a better sense of what the actual fight is. I mean, the dragons are always me. And I’m not longer ashamed of that mistake. I’m just down for the fight.

It seems some sort of shitty way to think about it - that I am in some sort of internal, eternal war - but I know my head isn’t really my friend much of the time. It may be chemical or programming. I really don’t know, but I do know that I have to do this.

See; I have to look at these two selves. There is the guy waiting this who seems to try to drive the machine. Then there is the machine which has complaints I can’t control and idiosyncrasies of transit that I can’t ever seem to anticipate. I don’t know this machine. I don’t identify as this machine and I don’t much agree with it’s ethics and tactics. It’s scary to be trapped in a machine that can turn sour and drive off the road without a whole lot of warning and to know that I’m permanently paired with it - driver and machine - and I will always have to go to therapy and read and do strange self-care rituals in order fo the machine to stay in tune and function with even a low bar of usefulness.

But I am gong to be okay. I might be alone or full of regret, but so long as I spend enough time doing the daily maintenance, I’m going to be okay.

A Great Shame

A week or so ago I passed a car that was stuck in the middle of the road.

I knew I should stop and help. I saw someone I know stop and help and rather than tell myself the story that "Oh, they have this" I knew that I should pull over, get out of my car and help.

I knew it. I knew at the time this was going to haunt me, I knew driving away that I was diminished a little by my failure to get out of the car and help.

I hate that feeling and I really do not want to continue to have it. I want to not miss another opportunity to get my hands dirty.

I got to work on time.

And I'm ashamed of that. 

So, here's my "Holy Shit" of the day.

https://brenebrown.com/articles/2019/05/31/what-being-sober-has-meant-to-me/

I don't consider my self addicted to much beyond my own sadness and cigarettes, but still . . .

The idea of a turtle without a shell. Holy hell. Seems time to get out of this here briar patch, right?

I have heard this, I have said this, I have written this and I may well have claimed it as my own:

Nothing hurts us or helps us for very long.

And new meanings unlock as time slides by.

Today I heard this from a surgeon, a bee and a junkie. It's still true.

Parsing our own evil will continue to be the hardest part of being alive, I suspect.

I do not have answers, but I am constantly striving to ask the right questions. 

Prepare yourself for the thing that made me cry today.

Everyday there are many, many things that seem to cause my face to leak in a strange, unhelpful way which always feels to me that I am somehow losing something. That I am somehow letting something important run carelessly down my face.

Yet I never run out - but this is a miracle for another day entirely.

This morning I was reading a treatise regarding Rebecca Solnit's treatise regarding love and I came upon a link to a paean to Frida Kahlo's fierce brand of love.

I walked away with this terror and beauty I found In Ms. Kahlo's description of her husband:

"I warn you that in this picture I am painting of Diego there will be colors which even I am not fully acquainted with. Besides, I love Diego so much I cannot be an objective speculator of him or his life… I cannot speak of Diego as my husband because that term, when applied to him, is an absurdity. He never has been, nor will he ever be, anybody’s husband. I also cannot speak of him as my lover because to me, he transcends by far the domain of sex. And if I attempt to speak of him purely, as a soul, I shall only end up by painting my own emotions. Yet considering these obstacles of sentiment, I shall try to sketch his image to the best of my ability."

and I leaked more than a little.

<looking in nervously>

Any one here?

Hello?

<seems to be alone>

Alright. It may be safe.

This morning, in my car, in traffic, politely keeping the volume of my radio at a level so as not to offend neighboring cars, well wrapped and insulated by my steel-mini-van-cage, trying not to pick my nose or sing so someone can hear me. Looking around curiously. Maybe hearing a little Tejano music from an old, maroon Explorer. Maybe thinking about things I've wrecked along this patch of road. A truck once, a relationship another time. Maybe thinking about people I knew thirty years ago and if I could even recognize them inside of their newly grown armor and pads of extra pounds. Wondering if the insides have become creased with the same lines as our faces. If our wonder and our passion is balding, too. Wondering if the over indulgences of our bodies have grown roots all the way to the middles. If that sort of luxury or poor diet has corrupted us all the way through.

I do not know how other people feel. I have to assume they either all feel as soul sick as I do or they feel nothing. I have to guess if maybe everything is amplified by the shape of my head or my heart or the series of bad chemical receptors and poorly firing neurons are only mine. Maybe every one feels everything but it means something different to them. Maybe they don't notice. Maybe the place they had to go back for their wreck of a pickup doesn't make them spiral down into a feeling of absolute failure. Maybe the loves that died don't show up every so often like Dickensian ghosts. Maybe their inability to saddle every failure in their marriages and ride them into something newer and better and healthy isn't performing some painful acupuncture on them.

Maybe they are all judging themselves on the carnage of a life they've created or openly weeping in their hearts for the things they survived without moral. Maybe they haven't noticed the way the weather has added rings to their base but stripped their trunks bare and left dead and dying branches all over them.

I'm just here in the car. I'm just driving to work. Like everyone else.

I don't know what they're thinking or if it hurts like hell.

I only know it does in here.

I only know that I'm no longer brave enough to turn up the radio and sing.

<looks around again>

Maybe no one can see. Let's hope.

Do not mistake my silence for consent.

I'm adjusting to the freedom. Trying to be both clever and pithy is a sort of curse. Some sort of Oscar Wildean disease the internets adore.

I'm not about to be any one's darling and so I'm rubbing myself raw against the freedom of it all. There is, indeed, a freedom of expression that manifests as silence, as well. I think that makes sense.
And even if it doesn't, it remains true.

Enjoy this instead of me:

Over and over again I am visited by the ghost of conflict past. He always seems to show me a way I could have handled a thing better and shows me a sunnier outcome. My brain seems to be wired in such a way that I seek conflict, mis-handle it and finally regret it.

It would seem a little crazy.

What would be crazier would be to dedicate zero time to understanding communication, to stop listening and assume that the things I have to say will still bear meaning, or to use my sad skill set in the precise way that has failed me up until now as if nothing is at all falling apart.

So I read. 

And then I try to summarize some of the take-aways out of the whole thing.

"Your first negotiation is really with yourself, to move from being focused on what I’m right about to starting to be a little bit curious about why we see this so differently."

Wow. I mean, that's such  giant little shift in thinking. I need to be in a place where the outcome means more than my ego.

When my dad died I hadn't talked to him for almost 8 years. I owed him money that I didn't feel like I owed him. I disagreed with none of his words and almost all of his actions. Our relationship had ended and what tendrils still connected us were painful and poisonous.

People have asked me how I overcame that. I really didn't. A lot of me is still angry about things he did. A lot of me is stil pretty sure I was right about many things in that relationship, but he got pancreatic Cancer and we ran out of resolution time. It became clear that we were not going to work things out and neither of us would ever find out who was the good guy in our story. Now, I don't think there was one and finding out more and more that there rarely is has changed everything I believe about narrative, It's changed the movies I like and the books I love.

Not the point. What is the point is that it was no longer useful to decide who was right, I ceased to worry if I was right and I just focused on if I was kind. I could control that.

Now, I fail this same test in daily interactions almost every time. I still want to be right. I don't know a whole lot of things more powerful in my life than my desire to be right.

It serves me poorly. It always damages things. I need to see and end date - because sometimes there is one, some times we're killing the relationship - and work on conversation like I did with my father.

I really don't want forgiving my dad to be the best thing I ever did. 

"If a conversation feels difficult, there’s often something about identity, something that situation suggests about you, that raises the stakes on the whole conversation. That’s part of the anxiety that then drives the intensity of the feelings. Those feelings color our story about what happened, and what should happen in the future."

I think this relates to the above. Perhaps the lesson to walk away with here is that our sleves are usually bigger enemies to our lives than the others.

And yet we always seem to concieve of solutions to our selves as social animals by improving the individual. We always tell each other to take time for ourselves, to work on ourselves. Maybe better advice would be to "try to set yourself aside for a minute."

Americans hate any challenges to the truism that "You need to love yourself before you love anyone else."

I think we need to love ourselves through our love of others. I think we need to see ourselves as social, interdependent entities.

But I'm usually wrong.