A Thought…

“I applied my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also was a chasing after wind. For in much wisdom is much grief; and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.”

– The Holy Bible: Ecclesiastes 1:17-18

Pretty interesting quote coming from me, eh? I think I can get away with a quote from the Bible every now and again. I’ve always had an interesting time with this one – you could say that this teaches that you should be ignorant: that seeking to understand, question and know more will only bring you pain. Perhaps, but those of us who spend a lot of time in such endeavors know this line is pretty accurate: I perceived that this also was a chasing after wind. We won’t know, but we want to know – we want to understand and be understood. But, quite often, it is in this quest that we lose sight of the simplest truths that anchor us; those that keep us from being swept into the depths of reason, perception and subjectivity.

If you think I talk a lot, ramble or seem long-winded, I don’t know if you can imagine what goes on inside my head at any given moment. Whenever someone asks me what I was just thinking about, I try to pick what is most relevant to the conversation or situation at hand to answer, because it’s usually a lot of things. Correlations, complications, variables, emotional consideration, logic, influence all of these things seem to insert themselves into every thought that runs through my head and I wonder very often if such things really carry more positive than negative. Thoughts can be very mutinous things as well, as I’m sure you can glean either from personal experience or just by reading previous posts. I’ve never quite found a good balance for not over-analyzing or over-thinking things. Every now and then I manage not to do this, but it still remains a constant thorn in my side. As such, except in certain situations, I find it infinitely difficult to act without far too many considerations, which is an up and down sort of thing.

I think far too much. My thoughts often involve more information than anything you’ve seen me write. It comes with the ADHD, the constant search for knowledge and plenty of other things. Interestingly enough though is that I have too many words and, more often than not, I never seem to get out exactly what ‘m trying to say – sometimes to extreme detriment, but I think that’s a problem for all of us who have too many words running around in our heads. I’ve been out and around today – I ran into Cassie and Steve up at Jupiter house after talking briefly about music with a nice girl whose name I sadly cannot remember – then dropped off the kids and now I’m out again. There’s more to write, but I’d rather not jump from one topic into the next, so I’ll tackle that later in the evening, perhaps. I didn’t feel the need or want for some long explanation on this – just that I think that too much contemplation and consideration often leads to me sticking my foot in my mouth.

Good Day

Tonight I finished reading a book to the kids that my son had brought home from the library. The book is called Frindle, by Andrew Clements and I think you should read this one, whether you have kids or not. I haven’t read a juvenile fiction book this exceptional in quite a while. It’s about a fifth grader who, in a witty attempt to spite his vocabulary-nazi English teacher, creates a trend of replacing the word “pen” with the word “frindle.” Wackiness ensues, but there is a lesson about the rewards of free thought and originality, the importance of teachers in our lives and language. It’s a great read and very well-written. I loved it and, if I were a reading teacher in the target age range, I would read it aloud to students or recommend it at the least.

I haven’t written up here in a bit – I’ve been busy with this or that or writing in a screened fashion on my livejournal, in which I whine about my life and quote Bright Eyes lyrics. Well, alright I try not to quote them so much anymore. Nonetheless, finally ending my somewhat shameful stubborn streak, I decided I would rather talk to Cassie than sit around pulling my hair. I mean, I have a lot of hair, but not that much. It wasn’t really a decision. Whether or not there remains any future of romance or anything near it for us, I think as humans we fundamentally need to be understood. Those of us who are raving lunatics I think need someone to understand our madness as well and maybe balance us out. Cassie is both to me to a large degree and I’ll risk saying that perhaps, even though I have an open-mouth-insert-foot curse of some sort, I do a bit of the same for her. I really couldn’t hold up not talking to her, not out of some weakness, my stubbornness and resolve generally are pretty steady, but for the fact that maybe I just needed to let go of a few things and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing the last month. Above all things that in two months passed of anxiety, feverish questioning, worry and frustration

today was a good day.

For amusement – some good jazz with quirky lyrics:

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Today is Today

I think my eyes are getting considerably worse. I spend quite a bit less time sitting in front of a computer compared to what I used to, but when I take off my glasses my vision is a hell of a lot more blurry than it once was. Honestly, my vision didn’t used to be blurry at all – just a bit dodgy here and there. Combine this with the fact that I got one of my worst light-headaches in a while and it equals the need to get some new glasses before I start school again.

The kids came back and we took the kite out to the park across the street – it was very cool. I actually haven’t flown a kite since I was about twelve or so and it was a hell of a treat. The kids enjoyed it a lot as well. They’re looking forward to Arts & Jazz next weekend – both will be dancing with their school group and Izzy will be dancing with the greenspace dance group on Sunday. I went in and took a spelling, punctuation and grammar test up at UNT as a preliminary for tutoring kids in tech writing and comp classes for the English department up at school, which was a breeze – even having not taken an English class and years and, in a geeky sort of way, was sort of fun. I’m going to try and actually finish The Descent in the next few days without putting it down and get back to the classics. I keep putting that book down – it’s a good story, but not terribly gripping. Not too much going on these days really – it’s an odd place to be in. Not a particularly easy weekend, but that’s the way it goes sometimes.

Shelving

I spend a lot of time playing the guitar lately. Since I’ve been in the cleaning phase I’ve backed off of the music studies a bit, though I’ll return to them soon enough. Primarily I practice songs and improvisation, which I’ve always loved. I contemplate things a lot. There’s been a lot to do with the game (Cycle of Existence) lately. It’s sitting in limbo for more reason than the fact that I can’t promote it. Aside from tabletop role-playing dying a slow death to the world of the MMORPG, I found not too long after I returned from the original tour that I secretly was beginning to come apart from the game. After nearly fifteen years of living with it I didn’t know what to do. I had (still have, actually) a wealth of material that could be written for the game, but no particular motivation to write it. I had to deal with the realization that even if I were to sell the rest of the books I had I would never turn enough of a profit to pull off another book of the quality of the first and hope to actually market it, nor would I have the capital to market the first without actually sinking a lot of money I don’t have into it. More than this, however, the motivation lay as the greatest issue. I fought a few months attempting to run the game – I even had one amazing session. But, for the most part, I found that my interests had shifted more to literature and music. Will it come back? I can’t say – there is a lot in my life right now that seems alien, different and uncertain, which is probably a good thing. This isn’t actually a lament – it’s simply a contemplation.

There are a few fans out there of my book who follow it that I may sadden at this, but I cannot say for certain that I’m done with writing role-playing games. The first or second guys’ night that Felix and I had – the one where it turned out just the two of us, I mentioned to him, for the first time directly, that I didn’t know if I wanted to write games anymore. He looked at me a moment and said he understood. There was a point before Cassie left that I talked to her about where I wanted to go after the computer thing, and that I didn’t think I had room for school and the game, time-wise, while trying to take care of the kids. I chose school in the end – to move a different direction. The idea that would become Cycle of Existence consumed more than half my life and, in the end, I would not call it a wasted endeavor, but nonetheless without sadness in my cleaning I packed up my gaming materials, dice, character sheets and books. For a lot of people the game seems synonymous with me and I get asked about it all the time, but the reason the game was so well done was because it held the reflection of life – one actually lived and melded into fables. I always said that I could be happy just knowing the book was there and I think I can now. It’s not necessarily the end, but it is a transition, a part of the pattern of my life that has to shift.

The gaming books on my shelf have been replaced with music theory, Conrad, Eliot, Yeats, Matheson, Miller, Shakespeare and leave room for what more will come. My room is about as Spartan as I can get it and it feels calm. I never would have even begun to consider the idea of shelving the game a year or so ago, indeed, I even fought tooth and nail to defend its need even last year in a sort of defensive grasping defiance, but all-in-all I think I first started to feel it at Gen-Con SoCal in 2006 . If I had to fight for one thing to remain in our culture between literature and role-playing games I would choose reading and lit every time – RPGs would never have been without it. The cause of reading strikes me as more important. There are steps I plan to take to eventually get my book out to the distributor so that people can still get it, and I will eventually publish an electronic version of it as well and probably maintain the site when I can, but at least for the time being, everything is moving in preparation to go forward.

If it’s a shock it shouldn’t be – the time spent with the game was important, but what the game came from was more life, reading and such than anything and I have all those things, so there is little that I’m giving up here. I worked for some fifteen or so years to achieve a dream of publishing a role-playing a game, of telling its story, and I did just that; I succeeded. This is a thing many people will never do, so I’m a step ahead. Whatever happens beyond, in that I always will have succeeded. For now I’ll sit back and read – The Descent is still owed reading after being put off more than any book in a while.

Closing

First, given the title, I’m not actually doing another closing out of the site and whatnot. It refers to something a lot deeper. What this is about is doing one of those cathartic things they always tell you to do, but generally  goes completely against who I am. I have my past – my hurts, my sad stories, my hauntings and it’s my thing, or it has been for a good long while. A lot of it comes down to the things I keep in this medicine bag – items that generally remind me of some of those key moments in my history. This particular thing represents the closing out of those things, of my reliance on or addiction to them and signifies the main end of my minimalizing process, in which I cleaned the skeletons out of the closet with the old shirts.

When I wrote “Why I hate Breakups” and managed to make Cassie amazingly mad at me she mentioned that any hope of a future was gone – that she had buried it in the backyard by the fence. I’m not sure it’s possible to bury the future, but as I went through pages, pictures, trinkets, journals and whatnot over the last few days I came to grasp what influence the past had on my life and the terrible realization of how much history I have repeated. A lot of things went into the trash this week – a lot got boxed up to be out of the way, but the finality of it comes in the form of an old metal box that I put those essential representations in and, you guessed it, buried in the backyard – by the fence. Along with these things was supposed to go this letter I wrote, a reflection of sorts:

15 April 2008

The medicine bag was bought at a store in the mall sometime when I was around 16 or so, if I remember. It’s a simple light deerskin piece that I used to wear about my neck. Eventually it would collect memories: trinkets that serve as reminders of memories past. These are little things – if you looked at them you would think them fairly insignificant, but each carries with it memory powerful enough to drive me to my knees when I hold it. Perhaps it is for that reason above all others that these things need to move on, as do I – I’ve gained little from them other than reminders of a past that nothing can be done for.

There was an acorn in the bag once that I found around the first day of fall, but it passed along some time ago – I’m not sure when. It had fallen off a tree near the back entrance of Cypress Creek high school and I picked it up. It used to be that the acorn itself reminded me of those years -the fever years of post-adolescence in that strange moment between childhood and adulthood where everything exists in an exponential height of emotion. It won’t be going into the ground, but perhaps it left beforehand because I had passed over the longing for those years.

There is a perfectly smooth quartz in the bag -a shard. It recalls a search for faith, magic (or, to some degree, magick) and theology. It brings into memory years attempting to understand the great thereafter question: what next? It reminds me of the time I spend studying, reading, thinking and attempting to understand the nature of religion, belief and the passage into my own ideals, which have molded here and there. I think the names that I placed on such things have been fading over the last few years, giving way to a contentment with the passage and pull of that force which all religions turn to: the answer to the why. Most of my altar has dismantled and placed in the memory box: the faith and understanding remains, but the ritual never involved the incense burners and oracle cards – all exist as a way to try and communicate with, or understand, something higher, as is the way of belief systems. This object of that journey passes smoothly and without sadness, but rather with greater understanding and a contentment that nothing will ever be fully understood, but will remain.

Here we have a shark’s tooth necklace – the leather for it lost long ago. It is a gift from Christine, a pen pal who, for a moment in time, was something more. A girl I barely knew in Jr. High (7th Grade) who I would begin writing back and forth with when she moved to North Carolina. The story told in those letters resembles a lot of the plots of films or romances – a journey of two people beginning with little knowledge of one another and traveling through the coming of age. We talk, we have an intimacy of knowledge, I watch as her life changes as does mine. We fall in love, to a degree and await being able to see each other, but we change – we begin to have different ideas and our lives become a chasm that the writing won’t cross anymore. When she comes to see me, we barely spend time together. After that years pass before a final letter comes nicely, then fades away. I talked to Christine recently – she seems well. Her story is one that speaks to me of idealistic youth and understanding that people grow into who they will be. The shark’s tooth passes its bittersweet memory of years with only a minor bite, one we all must endure at some point, I think. It also is unique in the reminder of the fact that our little friendship and fleeting romance was possibly one of the last few of our age in this society to be carried on through post – these days, whith email, webcams, voice over IP and no long distance charges it would never have drawn that longing anticipation for a letter that was the nature of things in years past.

There are two for the next story: a famous one among my friends, or perhaps a notorious one. This one is about Alissa, a girl I became very close to in the middle teenage years of my life. A girl troubled, suicidal and running a phenomenal downward spiral for her age that I attempted to help pull back for a moment in time. To a degree I succeeded in this or, rather, I succeeded in letting her know that someone cared enough to pull back for a time. We shared a moment in time of happiness brief but compounded into absolute glory by that fire that can only exist in teenage years. No sex there, folks, it was only a kiss. Perhaps in my previous romantic nature this is what made it even more fantastic, but it might have also been my undoing. It was shortly thereafter I found that a friend of mine was with her and had been for a while – that she had deliberately deceived me. In the end I had to forgive him – he was just as surprised, to a degree, to find that she and I spent time together, but I did not forgive her and I would not for years. I completely cut contact with her, not even to express disappointment, and selfishly scoffed when I further heard that her situation once more worsened at a more alarming rate. Eventually she switched schools and I no longer saw her at all, but I always wondered. In later years I felt a fool for acting as I did and sometime would attempt to find her. It wasn’t until nearly seven years later that I got an email out of the blue from her apologizing for all those years ago – asking if I could ever forgive her. I forgave her immediately and perhaps I had a few years before, but did I forgive myself? I think not. I apologized to her, she said that I had every right to act that way. We exchanged emails, she seemed well and generally better. All the while, she continued to ask my forgiveness. That winter, she had planned to be in Houston during the same time I would be – she wanted to meet Misty and Malikai (Isabella was not yet born at this point). To hear her voice was a ghost talking out of years past and sounded as such – perhaps hind sight is 20/20 in that. She still talked about the old days, thanked me for always caring, and apologized. I tried to tell her everything was alright. At some point she cried. We never saw each other. The people she was staying with apparently had booked her plans too tightly and she had returned to stay with her boyfriend in Seattle. I told her that was alright – there would be another time. Before she hung up the phone, she said “Thank you for loving me.” – I can hear it right now. After not hearing from her for two months I emailed her to see if things were alright. It was her boyfriend, if I remember, who called Misty on a night I was working and told her he had just gotten my email and that Alissa was dead – that she had killed herself. The funeral had already passed.
The objects of Alissa’s memory, the only ones that I have, are a rock – perfectly smooth. It’s slashed and speckled in greens, reds and blacks. Alissa had brought it for me from the Rocky Mountains – she said she had found it above the tree line amidst many other dusty and otherwise plain looking stones. Sitting there, different than all the rest and shining, she said it had reminded her of me. The other is the last cone of an incense I found that was the exact scent she and I used to burn in her room – a scent I do not know the name of that instantly invokes memories of tears, laughter, stories and self-deprecation. Not for one moment have I ever forgiven myself for not remembering who Alissa was; for not knowing on that phone line why she wanted to be forgiven, for not seeing the signs of a farewell. Whether I know rationally that it was not my doing, I have carried her ghost for more than ten years now. The stone passes with the weight of the mountain it came from. The incense I will burn and say farewell – I cannot carry it any longer.

There is a blue press-on fingernail and a slightly bent band of white gold that await next. The nail was given to me by Misty in the first day or so that we knew each other – a fierce roller-coaster tumble into love, into the acceptance that would give me my children. The nail, an insignificant thing, I think speaks to the nature of my view of the small things – that something given is never trivial. The band was given to me on my birthday to be worn as a wedding band because we never had a wedding. I wore that band until around two weeks or so after she left, then I put it into the bag, vowing to return it to my finger when she returned to me. After years, I did let go completely of Misty, though, being the mother of my children, she has not left my life. There is a melancholy that comes with these things – a memory of years spent too much on wishful thinking, of being an “insufferable optimist” – with no regret. My children came from these things and while the memories and fetters of them may pass to the earth, the children continue to be a joy. Along with these passes a letter, a poem called “Secrets” that Misty wrote to me or to herself when she first felt that she loved me and told me secretly.

Next comes a woven band of jasmine or some other fragrant plant given to me by a free-spirited girl named Melanie, a squatter who blew in and out of my life like the wind during one of the darkest parts of it. It reminds me of her, and it reminds me of that time – a dark spiraling period of feverish months spent in and out of obsession, insanity, pain and self-degradation. Years later I still feel the aftershocks of that feeling, that dark panicking anxiety that has ruled my life in the months following every loss, every betrayal that I have endured. Ever since Alissa, I have found myself staring into that abyss again, given only a reprieve here and there for a time. The hooks of black steel from those depths have gripped me these past few days every step of letting these things go. This band passes to bind that darkness away and to help me forgive myself and, with hope, starve the beast back into the abyss.

We come to the final story. Two things here that will be listed out of order. The first is a letter written to me by Cassie from her visit to her grandparents’ house. She had asked that I write her a letter to take with her and she had written this to me over the period of days she was there. It’s a wonderful letter, with the understanding that we needed the break, but with hope for the future, excitement with one another and love. I’m not sure she had even said she loved me by then. She says she sleeps with the letter that I had written her and the sappy valentine I had given her – longing for that goofy fluffy pink unicorn. Reading over this letter closes my airway and makes my skin seem to burn. I haven’t seen her in three weeks since I told her I couldn’t see her. I tried to look at the history of our relationship and tell myself that I had improved in many ways, but in cleaning things out I came upon a journal I had written during the time of my breakup with misty, reflecting on our relationship and found that many of the mistakes I made in both were too similar. I some fashion I managed to upset Cassie to the point of her stating there was no hope for a future – that she had buried it in the backyard by the fence. I have often wondered since if she was stating it literally; if there was some representative object of a memory, like that unicorn, that she might have physically buried. At least it was an inspiration for this idea. I don’t think I’ve improved much – I still try and check her online pages – when I see a new picture my heart jumps into my throat event though I’ve never thought her pictures really looked like her. With the letter is an object somewhat like that blue press-on nail, a trinket given to me by Cassie in the very early days of our relationship: a milk tab. She collected them and happen to bestow one upon me. At the point in my life I was, I was jaded and had a very poor opinion of relationships – still not being fully past Misty. Feigning an love of the single life that I would carry long into our relationship like a shield to protect myself from the fear of being hurt again, still as much as I believed that nothing more than a few dates or so would come of it, I found myself keeping the milk tab because the ring attached to it fit Cassie’s ring finger perfectly – a thing that scared me to death, that hit me in a place I felt too close for comfort whether I liked it or not. Today is two lunar months passed since she left and one day from two calendar months. As far as I know she has come to the place where the negative wins out – she has moved on.  I never know anything that goes on with her and she has taken steps to make sure of it, though still I don’t look too deep into that abyss: I already know too well what will be looking into me. Through these cleaning days that began last weekend I have seen the echoes of my past, heard the ghosts whisper and re-read a collection of stories that all end the same way with the same moral that I never seem to learn and it is for this reason that I put these things into the ground with the greatest weight of all, greater even than Alissa’s stone – that I, stubborn and unwilling to go against my own personal beliefs on how I presume to think things should be handled in these situations, always manage to say the wrong things, to act on the wrong instincts. So I place them in the ground with a resignation to the fact that I don’t know – that maybe I never did, but that either way whatever comes in the future cannot be marred with black marks from the past.

All of these things, sealed into a metal box along with a copy of this should someone want to wonder about these stories years ahead, will sit with me tonight as the children sleep, as Alissa’s last incense cone burns down to ashes and I will let their memory blow out with the smoke and realize that I do not need them anymore – that those memories have been weighed and understood, but can no longer be carried as chains for a ghost. I’ve spent the last months, including those up to when Cassie left, uncertain of many things and making strong changes in my life. So these bits of the past, small and rattling among ashes in a metal box but carrying the weight of some 13 or so years will go into the ground – buried in the backyard by the fence.

– GHosT

I never actually put a copy of the note in there as  I said I would – I forgot. If someday someone happens to dig up the box, they can just guess at it – if they were anything like me they would probably understand. There are a few things to arrange in the garage here and there and stacks of papers to go through and file or throw out, but cleaning up, the most cleaning I’ve ever done as far as stuff goes, is pretty much over at this point, aside from the minimal decorating and eventual changes to some things that would cost money I don’t have. Will I really change? I hope so. I don’t think I can do this cycle again – something had to give. The obsession, the anxiety, the head-circles have to stop here – I sat there on the porch with Alissa’s incense burning down, I said my goodbye and I buried her. In case you wanted to know, I’ve never visited her grave, but I have seen her death certificate. I have never known the circumstances if her suicide, but I didn’t kill her. I was a kid and, even at 21, I wasn’t that much more inclined to know such things for sure.

So I’ll leave you with a blast from the 80s that I’ve loved since I was a kid, which has some bearing on the situation, and I’ll return later.

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Minimalize

“The shit you own ends up owning you.”

- Tyler Durden, Fight Club

Well, I haven’t updated this thing in a while. It’s just been one of those weeks. My daughter was sick all week and so I spent the majority of my days watching out for her and doing things around the house. One of the main things I’ve been doing over the last few days is going minimalist.

When I moved into my house, I had very little stuff cluttering up the place, as is usual for me moving. I’ve always loved moving into a new space, it has this clean, uncluttered feel to it. See, clutter is a bad thing for anyone – it stresses you out, because you see what isn’t getting done and they say things out of place have a certain reflection on one’s life. With ADHD it gets worse because it’s easier to get completely off track at any point. Inevitably, after a while in an apartment I would always wind up with that problem – too much stuff filling the limited space I had. Generally it made me dislike the space, feel crammed and generally stressed – because I’d constantly think of just throwing it all out, but then I’d think “Hey, I need that stuff.”

Thing is, I don’t need it. I really like to have the things I work on or do primarily and have everything else out of sight or gone. Over the last few months I’ve been feeling that way. So I’ve taken pretty much all the furniture out of my room in favor of setting up the closet to organize the clothes and all that. I’ve actually set up the room in as much of a feng shui arrangement as I can. You might think that silly, but I do put a bit of stock in the stuff – there’s research that actually backs it up; not that that proves anything. I’m not doen with all of it yet, but man the house already feels cleaner and has more space. With the minimalist look, cleaning becomes simplicity and distractions are kept very low, which allows me to get more done – accomplishment wise. Some of the stuff out in the shed in boxes will go this week and I’m trying to work up enough junk to do a garage sale or something – maybe turn some of the old junk into cash to put toward some ideas I have for the new design. All-in-all, it’s part of this transition I guess, the process of moving away from the lifestyle I almost wound up resigned to. I should reasonably have things in order to give me the best advantage by the time I get back to school.

There isn’t much ranting in this bit – no super opinions, just an update. With the kids out this weekend I got out and hung around the square a bit Friday, then went to one of Bone Doggy’s shows on Saturday night. Good times. He’s booking me to play sometime in June and July, which should be fun. Perhaps I’ll have something to actually say later this week. For now, I’m just relaxing, listening to a bit of Pink Floyd and winding down from the weekend. Life’s not too bad, all-in-all.

I Wonder How the Lawn Is…

I exist at an interesting place in the grand scheme of things: I’m a single Dad and I own a house, but I’m 28. This just doesn’t work in the scheme of most people’s idea. Even in this more modern world of ideas generally more liberal than they were in prior years, I’m kind of in an odd place. This becomes apparent just about any time I’m out with my kids or I’m out doing something the domesticated world at large considers normal, provided you’re over 30. I think it’s a combination of the two factors, to be honest. I’ve noticed several times whenever I meet some parents and I mention that the kids playing over there are mine, they do a very good diplomatic job of smiling and complimenting me, but, often I can detect that bit they think about saying, something to the effect of “But you’re young enough to be one of my kids!” This is infinitely amusing, but generally happens with those older than me. I meet quite a few parents that are closer to my age range (say only 7-10 years older than I am) who seem to be just fine with all this, but get an odd click when they find out I’m a single Dad. There really aren’t near as many single Dads out there as there are Moms, after all – we men seem statistically more likely to run like hell, perhaps staying in our kids’ lives just enough to make things much worse than if we had left. This generally leaves other kids’ parents with almost an instant respect for me – which feels slightly odd, and some of the girls I meet within my age range to look at me like I’m the greatest guy in the world and I should marry them, which downright scares me. Between the two, I find myself in an odd space.

I finally got a lawnmower this weekend and a bike so that I can get around town and up to the University without the need to spend extra cash on gas or parking. My folks are in town and my daughter Izzy went off to church with them, while my son, who takes on more of the spiritual but not religious classification, stayed with me. We took our bikes out, rode around the neighborhood and out of it, ending up a few miles up the road. He pushed himself for speed and I enjoyed riding along. I taught him about bike safety and traffic rules and all that, laughed with him going up and down hills, then we came home and I took care of the lawn, which, being overgrown was getting to me to a great degree. I think I fit that age range where people get the idea I’m probably not the kids’ brother, so there’s always this funny look (I got it about four times that I can remember today) where they think to themselves Is that their Father? So I sit in this weird in-between spot.

For lack of ability to get out save every other weekend or so, I decided to take some (probably ill-advised) advice and look again on a few of the match sites here and there. Surprisingly, I actually managed to find a few women that didn’t completely scare me – within my age no less who are into the same books, movies and all that, and who have an actual profile that includes a semblance of personality. This does not particularly excite me or anything – I think these sites are crap. I’ve been asked by a number of people withing the last few weeks if I’ve considered dating again, to which I generally explain that what little time I have to myself is generally not occupied by crawling bars or attending whatever awkward singles events might be organized. Then they generally say something about me meeting people when I go back to school, at which point I generally explain that my classroom peers are likely to be late-teenagers who probably aren’t really looking for single dads and, well, I’m actually attempting to do something in school, so I really don’t see it as much of a place to pickup chicks. I’d probably do better if I were to start looking at women in their mid to late thirties, but seriously, no. It’s an odd thing. When I met my last girlfriend, I was already a dad, but I only had my kids here and there and still got out a lot. I had a decent time, but mostly I just didn’t want to sit around the house by myself. Now I really don’t get much time without the kids and I would generally prefer to spend it sitting on the porch reading a book or cranking my guitar among other things.

It’s not really a sympathy vote or anything, it’s more an explanation. I love the time I’ve had with my kids. I draw pictures with my daughter, I ride bikes with my son. I laugh with all the kids who come over to play and, among the kids, I’m something of a novelty – a rare in-betweener close enough to them to seem worth laughing with in a childlike way. I read the kids books and tell them fairy tales and we talk by ourselves over dinner. They tell people I’m the greatest dad in the world, but I didn’t feel that way for a while. Being stuck in the grind I was in last year had me separated from everything I cared about and locked into it. By the beginning of that I was dealing with all of it and trying to adjust to my medication, it was like losing sight of a lot of things at once while feeling somehow like I was taking care of it all. Now, things are better. I sit up at night by myself and read or practice music or simply sit back and listen to it. I hardly do anything with computers anymore beyond the general work of the average end-user and I’m very alright with that. I’ve gotten to the point where I can mess with the computer if it acts up without seeing red.

I let my daughter know I love her and I’m proud of her, but sometimes I don’t think I understand or deal well with her fragility; her femininity. It was one of those things Cassie always cited she couldn’t handle well either, but looking back, she did a wonderful job. Tonight, Izzy was running 101 fever and we all went out to eat, but she wouldn’t drink soda, she only wanted water, which surprised my mom, who asked why – “Sugar makes you more sick,” She replied – something learned directly from Cassie, one of many things – it made me smile. Those years of our lives may be passed on, but it’s always nice to see the effects when the people who slip in and out of our lives leave an impression decidedly positive.

I walk this odd line between mainstream society and the eccentric – I always have. I seem to earn the respect of peers among the parents of my children’s friends easily, I bike around with my son, take the kids to the park, take care of my lawn, clean my house and do domestic things. I sit and play music, I write here and there and I read. It’s a life that continues to astound me – it’s never what I remotely considered ten years ago, perhaps even five. Perhaps the house bears some reflection on it – I’m the last on the street with virtually no neighbors – sort of at the edge of the community.

I went out to see Rae, who was in town this weekend. I met her and a couple of friends (nice girls) up at this hookah lounge just off the square called Natalie’s (I think), which really seemed to be the hip place to be on a Saturday night of you’re an awkward upper-teen. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why people wanted to hang out in this dive (there are better dives in Denton, even for the under-age), but it’s always good to see Rae. They headed off to the Boiler Room so I headed back home. I sat around listening to Jazz and read – a good Saturday night. I suppose I should be out there on the night the kids are out, I am still young enough after all, but the old haunts are gone now or leave me wanting, with too many of those too young talking about things they’ll be laughing about in a few years – a consistent, thick undertone that speaks of monkeys squealing for dominance or to impress a female. It’s a world of betas and it didn’t used to be as bad, Perhaps I’ll find someplace again sometime, but I don’t find too much wrong with a porch and a book or Prairie Home Companion on the radio, followed up by Selected Shorts, where they read you amazing short stories on NPR.

The simplicity of this life often amazes me, as do the overwhelming complexities we place upon it. As Felix sighs, seeing a rant coming after I’ve already filled minutes, I’ll leave you there, I think you can come up with your own. Suffice to say it’s a nice night. There’s Miles Davis on the speakers and a cool breeze coming through the windows.

Music

“Well it goes like this: the Fourth, the Fifth, the Minor fall and the Major lift…”
Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah

It really does, actually – it goes just like that. When Cohen (or Buckley if you prefer) hits that melody it goes F (the fourth to C Major), the fifth (G), the minor fall (Am) and the Major lift (back to F major). When Buckley plays it he capos the 5th fret, keying the open to A D G C E A, which Buckley plays like G to Em, but actually comes out in C to Am so that his version keys as Cohen’s, though Buckley uses the higher sounds of the upper strings and some work in the progression to make the song sound very different.

When I started taking Adderall for my ADHD, it was a lot like taking off glasses you’ve been wearing your entire life, ones that have never been washed and look like building windows from a David Fincher movie. Not only was I able to get work done better, sit for longer periods, but I actually considered that I might really be able to pull off going back to college. There was one other thing I hadn’t expected though. I had picked up my guitar, as I do just about every day and was noodling about when I started playing a finger exercise, one of those that helps your dexterity and gets you scale and improvisation positions more into muscle memory and all that. See, I used to do these every now and then, maybe two or three times before I would play something else. At the point I looked up I’d been doing it for around an hour and was barely thinking about it. I thought it amusing, put the guitar down and went about my day.

By a week of doing this instead of running the same songs over and over I had to learn new exercises because the others became too easy. I started working on scales again, harmonic minors, major modes and all that. By a month I was playing progressions that I had considered to be out of my league. By the time Cassie and I split I was putting together chords that I didn’t think my fingers would make.

Now I’m sight reading for the first time since I was in choir when I was 12, working on sweeps and jazz progressions and picking up new material by the hour. Aside from that I’m able to tell you why the chords work here and not there and whip a solo with some accuracy even over some of the stuff I hear in KNTU. I started readin Berklee Press’s Modern Method for Guitar and deciphered the theory material in several of the books. It’s like having been telling stories your whole life as an illiterate, then suddenly learning to read and write.

It’s entirely possible that my love of music sits on par with my love of literature: my digital music collection alone exceeds 35,000 tracks in all genres – it took me 25 double-layer DVDs to back it up last week. I love the stuff, I consider it among man’s greatest achievements. I suppose it goes well with literature as well – both exist to evoke emotions in the listener/reader and, often, to tell a story. I started memorizing songs when I was two – I’ve always had a big thing for it, but I never thought I might really do anything with it. Over the years my tastes shift in favorites here and there, but it all comes back to a love of the form itself, from the Beethoven’s 9th to Fat Boy Slim’s Weapon of Choice, from N.W.A.’s Gangsta, Gangsta to Waylon Jennings’ Honky Tonk Heroes, from Operation Ivy’s The Crowd to Louis Armstrong’s A Kiss to Build a Dream On…I could go on for months according to my playlist. Right now it’s Joe Cocker on the speakers, wailing a gritty voice that seems like it barely could belong to him through I Shall Be Released.

I’ve begun treating the guitar as though I’m starting from the beginning, working through all the scales and chord formations in order with the theory and the actual notes on the staff. It’s hard as hell, honestly, especially when I already know a ton of ways to play the C Major scale, but when I turn a page and can count through a few measures without missing a note it hits something inside – it’s like learning to read again and there are some of you out there who know exactly what I mean by that.

Well I’ve done a lot on this page tonight, but I’ll leave you with something to listen to: both versions of Hallelujah that I spoke of in the beginning. Enjoy.

Leonard Cohen’s Original (for Faith)

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Jeff Buckley’s Cover (for Love)

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Cleaning it Up

Well, granted, it is a personal website/blog and whatnot, but all in all it’s not LiveJournal. See, one prima reason I deleted my LiveJournal was due to no small amount of disgust I found when reading some of the whiny, angst-ridden crap I wrote a few years back. If you think I let the Panic Rat out a few days ago, well, I had enough to satisfy NIMH for a year back then. At any rate, some of that material just doesn’t fit with what I’m going on with here so I’ve cleaned it out – I plan to get writing on a bit more of a note that befits more of how I feel on a regular basis, rather than how I feel on an anxiety run.

Panic Rat

“Clay felt a panic-rat inside his mind, ready to burst free of the flimsy cage that held it and start gnawing anything it could get at with its sharp little teeth. If he could make sure Johnny and Sharon were okay, he could keep the rat in its cage and plan what to do next. But if he did something stupid, he wouldn’t be able to help anyone. In fact, he would make things worse for the people here.”

– Stephen King, Cell

I think I mention this one a lot, particularly as of late, so I thought I might give some insight into where it’s from. It comes from Cell, and also a bit from Gerald’s Game, both by Stephen King. Honestly, I wasn’t as big a fan of Cell as I was of his other works – it was a good read, but it didn’t capture me the way It or The Stand did. I did particularly like the metaphor of the Panic-Rat though, it seems to fit so well.

See, rats are intelligent creatures and they can get through just about anything, given the time and motivation. They get what they want. What the Panic-Rat (Rattus Solicitudo) wants, generally all the time, in anxiety: it feeds on not just the negative, but the overwhelming self-destruction of the mind. Once you have one and it gets loose, rationality and any amount of common sense tend to give way to the worst thoughts, spinning in a loop at breakneck speeds. You go from calm or generally alright to a wreck in seconds.

This is the metaphorical animal that I’ve been dealing with and I was thinking about it a lot today. The little bastard has a tendency to leave you severely drained and feeling often entirely remorseful, stupid or shamed. That pretty much sums it up. I figured if I was going to use the little bastard to explain things over and over again I should explain it – not as though you probably couldn’t glean it by context.

The real truth of the matter is, I let the little bastard drive the other day and, as I might have guessed, he wrapped be right around a tree. He always drives angry, after all. I was doing relatively alright, working on things, learning music theory, modes, triads and tons of stuff I never thought I would understand and the next thing I know I’m acting like a loony freaking out. To some degree I suppose I can be defended, but all-in-all I’m not particularly happy, to say the least, when I act that way. I can’t defend myself, I’ve made a point to attempt not to act in such a way. For those of you who read this and think that Cassie is strung out with a new guy every night and heroin needles hanging out of her arm, it isn’t so. I overreacted to a massive degree as I am oft wont to do. I wish I could say I don’t get like that, but I do. So she has my apologies if she still reads this at all – this is the perfect example really of why I cut things off: I try to avoid situations where I am likely to act like a crazy off the meds.

It sort of came into perspective to a massive degree this morning when I woke up, half-asleep and happened to have a look at her livejournal, where she had posted a poem written for her Creative writing class about lovers, which, in the end, refers to authors and books – it’s an amazing poem worthy of praise and with gorgeous emotion, especially if you’re a bibliophile like a lot of us. This, or course, coming from a girl who swears up and down she possesses no skill for creative writing other than enough understanding of literature to formulate a proper story. If you still believe you have no skill, I think you’ve proved yourself wrong. At any rate, reading the poem I became panicky, jealous and otherwise idiotic – until I realized what it was about, at which point I felt quite the fool. I read it over a bit more and loved it deeply.

I won’t post the poem here – it’s not my work, but (without apologies – this deserves to be read) – I’ll link you to it:

Love is at its truest…when?

If she really wants it off this page I’ll remove it, but, as I said, it deserves to be read. Good poetry just doesn’t come around often anymore. I’m a fan of Yeats, Eliot, Browning and the like, but a lot of the stuff in my age range too often resembles the lyrics to an Emo song.

So there it is, the panic rat. I’ll lock the little bastard back in his cage and refrain from the psychosis for a while, I think. Enough is enough, after all. Perhaps I’ll try to record that song I keep talking about.