Leave of Absence

At this point, with the changes in my personal life, I find myself unable to create posts for this blog.

I do not want to delete the blog in the hope of restarting later.

So this will be a hiatus, I hope.

I thank those that are reading this for traveling here. I appreciate it.

Crazyman Bob

The "Earliest Memory Game"

I was tagged to do this from Fiery here.

THE RULES
1. Describe your earliest memory where the memory is clear enough to provide at least 3 details.
2. Give an estimate of your age at the time.
3. Tag some other bloggers with this thread.

Early memories. They are a bit of a minefield for me. But lets give it a shot.

I remember being in my living room with several giant people around and mom. I kept running around the room and back to mom. Mom kept telling me to get my hand out of my pants. I assume this is a really early memory based on the relative size of the adults, but I don't know how old I was. And it doesn't qualify as I don't remember details.

So, next I can remember sharing a bedroom with my brother. This was before we moved to the basement which was rented out at this time. What I remember about sharing a bedroom with my brother is laying there in my bed as quiet as I could be scared he would come over and hurt me if I was too loud. He was three years older than me. I don't remember him actually hurting me at any point but that is my earliest memory of sharing a room with him. I don't know the age here either. Though still pretty young. Still no good details.

I remember a young grade school memory. I went to a small grade school for christians. So I didn't have many classmates. There were like 9 or 10 other kids in the class. My hair was cut all through grade school by my dad who literally put a bowl over my head and cut my hair around it. He gave me and my brother one choice. Did we want our hair to cover our ears or not? We always chose to have it cover our ears. I don't know why as the old photos show that to be a hideous look. Though maybe we were worried about the safety of our ears. A possibility.

All the other kids in my grade school class liked to make fun of me to their delight. The most popular was to make fun of my hair. My hair is straight. It likes to stand up in the middle even if long. So the hair would kind of fan straight up with static electricity on the top of my head.

One of the kids decided to call me fern because of it. It stuck as a nickname for the next 6 or 7 years till I went to High School. I hated that nickname. This was in 1st or 2nd grade.

I try not to remember things from when I was young. The memories, even when they start out fun, do not remain that way when I dig a little deeper. Childhood sucked for me on many levels.

As for who I will tag... No one. I do not have many readers anyway and I would not inflict this assignment on any of them.

Life change

My life mate wants to leave me for an internet lover and move half way around the world to be with him, taking one of our two children with her.

We have been together, though I admit not happy all the time, for 15 plus years.

I can’t sleep. My health is in the pisser. I am an emotional wreck.

For 15 years we have stuck it out through thick and thin. Through a lot of shit.

I always thought that we would somehow work it out. It would turn into what we both wanted if we tried hard enough, long enough.

I was wrong. Maybe I was silly. Or stupid.

All I know is that it is over now. All that time, all that effort, all that sweat and tears led to this. Failure.

I guess it was over years ago and I just didn’t know it.

I will admit that I have been miserable for many of the years we have been together. And so has she. I couldn’t give her what she wanted. I was inadequate. I was a fool.

I still don’t know how to emotionally deal with this. Because even though it is “over”, it isn’t.

We have tons of details to work out. If she stays until the plans are all ironed out, she will be with me in my house for months, or a year. Always there, causing pain just by being there.

But if she leaves immediately and goes to her parents until the big move, I lose my son that much sooner.

Do I get an attorney and fight in court for custody rights for both kids? I don’t have the money for the attorney and I am unsure of my abilities to single Dad two kids. Especially when I want them to continue to be home schooled. I have to keep working. I don’t know how to keep income coming in, raise and educate both kids by myself.

Life is hard. It just got harder.

How do I move on with my life? How do I get through this?

I don’t know what to do.

“What would you change in your life if you could go back in time and change it?”

Starhawk’s answer is that he wouldn’t change anything. “I would never give up those experiences. Good or bad, right or wrong, it’s those experiences that have made me who I am.”

In my life, though there have been lots of key decisions, there was one major turning point. There was a point where a different decision would have guaranteed a completely different life path. A path where I wouldn’t have ended up in the Midwest. One where I wouldn’t have kids. At least not kids by the same woman. My life would have been fundamentally different in every way. This turning point was about 17 years ago.

But that is as far as I can see. I can’t see down that path to see if it would have been a better choice. Many times in the past 17 years I have assumed it would have. But there is no real way to know.

The things I do know.

I would never have met my wife. Or my kids. I would never have held my babies in my arms. Or ended up home schooling them.

I would not have discovered Ayn Rand and Objectivism. Which led me down a philosophical path that completely changed me as a person.

My current life path is not perfect. There are many changes that need to be made to improve quality of life and create happiness.

But I have to agree with Starhawk. I couldn’t give up this path. I worked to hard on this path to throw it all away.

Now, the premise of this question is obviously flawed. Even if I would go back in time to change things, I obviously couldn’t. There is no time travel.

This is it. Whatever life path you are on is the only one you have. But you are not stuck with it. Peter McWilliams said that everything you have done in your life up till this moment is nothing but a prelude in the book of your life; your story begins now.

You can change your life path. You can change where it is going in the future. You can throw it all away and try a different path. You can change it radically or desperately. Or you can modify your life path and change it for the better incrementally. Keeping what you have already built that is good and adding elements to your life that you need to improve it.

The trick is to not turn into a zombie and just stagger through your life unthinking. Letting the irreplaceable years drift by with no plan to improve your life. With no goals. That is the tragedy too easily seen all around. People who have given up.

I don’t believe acceptance is a virtue. It can have it’s time and place. But blanket acceptance is a cop out. It’s giving up.

Don’t give up. Never give up.

Four Years

My daughter is 14. In other words, she just started High School.

Now this means something a little different at our house than most because we are home schooling our kids.

The final four years of home school. Finally!

This is what I have been waiting for her whole life. For her to be mentally capable of learning all the stuff I want to teach her. And she is ready!

Now I can teach her all the science, philosophy, history, literature, writing, and logic courses I have been itching to teach her for all this time.

Here is where you might expect me to take a sharp turn in the direction of this post and say something like: Now that the time has come I am terrified or unsure what to teach or something to that effect.

Nope! I am just excited. Giddy even. I keep reworking the curriculum order. Tweaking it.

All the lectures I have waiting for her, all the books I can’t wait for her to read, all the great figures in history for her to discover. All the intellectual discussions waiting.

Now it begins.

Hospitals and Clinics

Starhawk made a comment a while back about near death experiences and how they can change the course of your life.

I have been thinking about that. Especially after my latest extended hospital stay.

During this ER – hospital visit (five days) I was told at one point that I had congestive heart failure and was bleeding into my lungs. That’s the kind of thing that can really scare a guy! At least it scared this crazyman.

I later found out that that statement was not accurate. (a kind way of saying that the doctor lied to me) But the shock and fear that this pronouncement produced in me is still with me.

I am no longer confident in my health. I have to admit that until now, I never truly believed I was vulnerable to major health problems. If I am to be honest, and honesty is important to me, I still don’t truly believe I will die. Not really.

But the possibility of living in a severely crippled miserable state close to death has come down on me like a ton of bricks.

I still distrust the methods and motives of the big pharmaceutical companies but I no longer feel I can avoid taking the pills from them to deal with my severely high blood pressure. I now feel the urgency of taking those pills day and night.

I still think they may be a slippery slope for the drug companies. Pills for original problem. Followed by more pills for the side effects caused by first pills. Followed by even more pills for side effects of second set of pills.

But I am now on that slope, twice a day. Alarms set so I don’t forget.

I don’t like seeing the doctor at the clinic regularly and modifying my doses. But I like the ER and the hospital even less. So to avoid more ER visits, I will visit the clinic regularly.

I don’t want to go the ER anymore. The novelty has worn off.

Childhood Dreams

I am almost 40 years old. Time for a midlife crisis.

Actually I have been having a midlife crisis for the last 10 years or more. Unfortunately, it does not seem to be going away.

I made plans for what I wanted to do in my life when I was 18. I even set dates for certain accomplishments. One for when I was 25. One for when I was 30. And One for when I was 32. These were not necessarily good plans, mind you. I was 18 and not a very good thinker. But I had a great passion for my goals.

I stayed "on track" until I was 21. At 21 I hit a road block. I could have gone around it. I could have taken a different route so to speak.

Instead I just stopped. To my shame, I just stopped. Looking back, it is obvious that the road block didn't have to stop me. It wasn't even very big. But I never even tried to continue on.

Well, thats not quite true. I did make one abortive attempt to go on years later. But by then it was no longer the moral choice.

I didn't get into the specifics because this is all just background info for what I wanted to write about.

I don't understand why I can't let this stuff go. It is all old news. All childhood dreams. I have been on a different path for many years now and all I can think about is how I screwed up my life because I didn't stay on that first path. And it isn't even a BETTER path. Not really. Not when I really think about it fairly. It's all just a grass is greener thing.

But it doesn't matter how much I think about it, and try to accept it. It builds up inside of me until I can't take it anymore. I just lose it emotionally. I know I have the rest of my life ahead of me. But I don't know how to reconcile the past. Or let it go.

The Doctor

A couple of Fridays ago I had to leave work suddenly in an ambulance to go to the emergency room. Everyone thought I was having a heart attack. I was just confused at the time.

Don't get me wrong; I didn't know I wasn't having a heart attack. I just knew something was wrong but didn't know what.

I was sitting in my office doing my work as always. The night was going well actually.

Then suddenly I was losing concentration. Every thing seemed more dreamlike and unreal. I could feel my heart pounding away and something about it seemed off but I wasn't sure what.

So I called in a co-worker. Let's just call him Dan. "Dan, could you come in here for a moment?"

He came into my office and looked at me questioningly. "Dan, you were an EMT right? Could you check my pulse? Is it going as fast as it seems it is or am I imagining it?"

"Sure." Dan tips his head down and checks my wrist for a while. Then he straightens up and grabs the phone and immediately dials 911.

I start to protest but Dan just reassures me that everything will be ok and to just sit back and relax. Don't move too much. I didn't want to go to the hospital but I listen and sit back.

The Fire Dept. shows up first. Then the ambulance. They hook up the sensors to my chest. Then seem to really panic but try not to show it. They roll me out to the ambulance and take me to the ER, setting up IVs and spraying under my tongue with nitro and giving me chew able aspirin on the way. The aspirin was a tasty orange i remember. The nitro tasted bad.

They got me to the ER and rolled me in.

I don't remember much about the next couple hours. It was basically a blur. I just remember shorts bits.

Like everyone around the bed looking at the heart readout and being confused. Then I remember them telling me they were going to inject me with something that will briefly slow down my heart.

Oh and you might feel something. Feel something. Might. Well, I sure did feel something. I felt a huge pain in my chest and I thought I was going to die for the first time that night! I felt like they must have screwed up cause this was it! The end. Then in another second or so, it passed and I felt better. I tugged weakly on a nearby nurses sleeve. "Can we please not do that again?" I asked weakly. She assured me that they wouldn't but that it was a good good thing they did. And that they had learned a lot. I felt better then. I don't know who she was, but I thank her for the moment of reassurance.

I was then told that I was not having a heart attack. (Later I was told again that according to their tests I had never had a heart attack. I have no idea how they can tell that but it was nice to hear!) I had an... elevated heart rate. Which sounded like no big deal until they told me I had a resting heart rate of 168. Holy crap! My heart monitor would go ballistic if I got even close to that when I exercise!

They were able to bring the heart rate down with drugs. Then they slowly (it took about 2 hours) eased off the drugs and my heart stayed normal. And is still normal to this day.

So gold stars all around to the EMT's and the entire ER staff that night. Thank you very much!

The part that really unsettles me is that I don't think I would have gone in at all on my own. I really don't like hospitals. I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't gone in. Maybe it would have self-corrected after a while. ... Maybe not.

So what it really boils down to is, I am pretty sure Dan saved my life that night. He didn't ask, he just picked up the phone and did the right thing.

Thank you Dan.

Family

What is a family? Something you are born into? Something you create? A burden to bear? A source of joy?

Is it different for everyone? Can one choose what it is or do you just discover what yours is as you go? Why do people choose to have a family?

What if you don't choose and one happens anyway? Then what? Run? Hide? Bear the responsibility as best one can?

Does one mistake have to destroy the rest of ones life? Or does it take two mistakes?

And what about the bastard that make those two mistakes? Is he forever doomed to a life of hell?

After a certain point, the "what if" of the past is no longer worth pursuing and yet, the pain has not left yet. The debilitating pain that leaves one crumpled in the corner.

Why does it always end in tears. Not a man. Not a soldier. Just a wussy boy crying in the dark. Embarrassed of himself and the worthless fat slob he has become.

Nothing to look back in pride at. Nothing to look forward to being proud of.

Just more pain. and more pills. and more embarrassment.

Faking through one day after another. Making people laugh to stop the tears from flowing.

Always aware that he is just one step away from disappointing someone again. Its just a matter of time.

It is always just a matter of time.

The Sentence

A twenty-five year sentence. Fifteen years in. Only ten to go. The hardest ten. I thought it might get easier. Just accept and let the time flow. But instead it feels like I am in solitary and it just gets worse and worse.

I can’t do it all. I can’t do all the responsibilities by myself. I never could. I wasn't ready. I'm still not ready.

My rock is crumbling. When I couldn’t handle it, she was there. She said we would make it.

My rock is crumbling and there is nothing I can do about it. Now it feels like solitary.

Without a rock to lean on.

So I try ativan. Sorta works. Sometimes doesn’t. Not even when I up the dose. It’s not the same as my rock, that’s for sure.

I’m just getting older.

By the time the sentence is up, what is there left?

Where are the answers? I have looked and looked and looked for answers for fifteen years. Where are the goddamn answers?

aaaahhhh.

It is finaly kicking in. About damn time. 6 mg this time. More than usual.

But at least it worked.