Retired And Less Tired

 I have neglected my old pages. I'm retired now and have long felt I needed to write more. I used to click away much more often than any time in recent memory.

I looked back over some of my old posts going way back to the first one. It seems like such a long time ago and so much has changed. I'm really glad I wrote what I did and kick myself for not keeping up. 

It's a diary of sorts. A journal of the events that shaped who I am. More permanent than social media but less so than an actual paper book although I did write a great deal in green felt-tip when I was in real trouble. 

But now, the page has turned again and without all-night train trips and odd-hour phone calls, I believe it's time to revisit the old Wayward Home. 

As Paul Harvey used to say, "Stand by for news".

The Failing Light

 Let me tell you a story. It's the story of someone who has spent most of his life living with depression. He's felt invisible and unwanted for months at a time with occasional manic bright spots in between bookends of sadness. It's led to some really awful places over the years. It's cost in wasted days has no measure.

You know it's me and I've had a number of proverbial 'one of those days' days of late. I've been here before and know the signs. Over the years, I've learned some ways to keep the struggles mostly at bay and I can usually hang on and function at least marginally through such times. But every so often...particularly in November and December, the thread breaks, the monster roars and I collapse inside. Sometimes there's a hangover into January and sometimes even as far as March before I can stop 'gazing into the abyss'. These are when every hour is a slog. Most of the time I bury it under being busy or working or or doing. And then there's days when I just can't. My coping strategies can't keep up. It's a feeling of hopelessness and helplessness. 

I fell apart again in a bad way you see. My old enemy, The Black was hovering in the background waiting for a shot and then I spilled coffee on the couch. Next thing I know, I'm sobbing. I'm on the floor staring at nothing. It's like that. A little trigger or a tiny push and I'm gone. It only takes a casual word sometimes...something that a normal person wouldn't even notice. But it crushes me. The next few days got sucked up in fighting off paralysis. Plodding on through the minutes just to keep going. Put your head down and just keep going.

The "Holiday" season in particular is always like that and always the worst. I've written about it before and it hasn't changed much. It's isolating, sad, exhausting and dark. 

Thanksgiving 2022 was another one where I wondered why I was even there. I would have been better off working and not inflicting my loneliness on everyone...not that they noticed much anyway. Everyone was busy and I felt like a complete outsider in my own home. I don't speak TikTok or Snapchat or football or really much of anything that interests anyone. Nobody cares about trains or bicycles or rockets or skating or pretty much any of the oddball things that interest me. Attempts to talk about anything that matters to anyone else fall flat and awkward. I can't stay out of the way in the kitchen and there's nowhere to fit in the living room. As is so often the way of my world, I am surrounded by people and completely alone. 

2023 was the second year in a row that it was awful. I was actually hoping to be working knowing what was coming but made it home at two in the morning. I woke up after 5 hours dreading it so much I couldn't fall back asleep. 

People started showing up at noon and off we go. Hardly anyone said hello to me when they walked in. They know each other and it's a big family reunion that I don't fit into. The chatter quickly got so intense that I couldn't hear anything but white noise. Just layers of loud and snippets of conversations I wasn't part of. I felt like running. No one noticed. I just made excuses that I was tired and tried to be invisible. Standing by the corner out of sight and out of mind. I felt like sobbing. No one cared anyway. I hid upstairs with wine when it became too much to stand. I'm just being ignored and in the way. I sat at the dinner table in a blur of lonliness. Sitting next to Kellie all alone again. Awkward. Miserable. 

It doesn't help that I miss my kids. I saw posted pics and videos of my granddaughter laughing and playing in Florida with my ex. The granddaughter I don't know because she can't come here for some reason. I suspect I'll never know her. 

My sons are with visiting my ex and I'm here because she puts on the big show and pays airfares and is ever the better grandparent I guess. It cuts deep but I can't say anything because it might make someone feel bad. Wish that one time I mattered enough to put ahead of inlaws, exes and everyone else. Just once. 

But then I'm not so I stand and take it. It hurts so much.

So once again, it all comes together and I'm not sure why I worried about being home from work at all. I guess I'm supposed to. You'd think I'd know by now. My presence is neither needed nor noticed in the rush. I should learn that it's better to just miss these things and pretend that it matters to anyone. The world goes on as it has for so long without me being there. People get used to the idea that I might be away and so they make plans for that. If I happen to be around, it's just weird because they weren't really expecting me anyway. Nobody even knows what to say to me when I do appear because I'm such a stranger to everyone. It bleeds me out. I want to run somewhere but the garage hides horrors of it's own and my hobby bench or office is within earshot of laughter and fun that I'm not a part of. Just try to smile and keep pushing. 

I saw myself in the bathroom mirror. I saw that face again. Kellie says she knows the look when it's like this. I do too. I saw my father wear it often. It's just blank. A far, far look in his eyes. I have photos of him behind it and I know what he was feeling. A flicker of a smile on demand and then nothing. Oh yes, I know it well...it's baked-in empty with a layer of sad and frosted in lonely with a single candle on top of the cupcake. That tiny little flame is all that's holding the world together and it's so very fragile...struggling not to be blown out by a whisper of breeze. 

The failing light that you fight so hard to hang onto because if it goes out, there's nothing left at all.

Idle Thoughts

 I have a thought. Let's just pretend for a moment that a couple of things happen on down the road a ways...

First, the Evangelicals and their sort get their wish and the "Right to Life" under any and all circumstances becomes the law of the land. No more abortions for any reason because "All life is sacred". They win. Every baby conceived is born and all is well in Gilead.

So where do they go from there? What's the next morality battle in the fight against the heathens? Well, one might propose that the next logical step to preserve all life could conceivably be the even more prevalent catastrophe...gun violence. After all, 45,000 or so gun deaths in a year is pretty significant. Since all life must be preserved at any cost, wouldn't it make sense for the same bunch to have a change of heart on 2A now that they have a victory under their belt?

Picture this: An emboldened hyper-religious segment with connections, lobbying power and a base that has typically agreed with their ideology in the past has an epiphany. God speaks to them and they decide that firearm violence must end now that the battle of abortion is over. The same group that espoused 'God, guns and guts' when they needed firearm owners if not necessarily be on their side, at least not to oppose them, has a change of heart on the guns part. 

Using mass shootings, domestic attacks and suicides in the news cycle as evidence, the call for regulation goes out from pulpits and city halls. Children especially must be protected at any cost. 'Well regulated' becomes a rallying cry. Key law enforcement and political leaders fall in line. Red Flags and confiscations become speakable subjects as even the NRA and manufacturer lobbyists come under condemnation as purveyors of sin. God is no longer on their side.

Everyone who is sick of hearing about weekly or daily shooting attacks hails it all as long overdue common sense and a giant step further than 'thoughts and prayers'. Public opinion, already leaning away from ever-increasing numbers of weapons and weary of government inaction, coalesces into votes. Congress, smelling a change in the wind and sensing where the religious power is heading becomes a springboard for restrictions unheard of in recent times. Sizeable campaign donations grease the skids. Along the way the religious minority takes a page from their playbook and using the power of the same Supreme Court that bent over backwards for them on abortion, begins chipping away at yet another supposed 'right'...just as they did with RvW. 

With over 400 million guns in private hands, the Christian Nationalist movement calculates that it's far too risky for their future to have so many independent minded people so well armed. A Godly country can tolerate random violence very little after all and organized resistance even less. So the long-predicted "they" who will be coming for your guns shifts quietly from the left to the right.  Unregulated access to firearms subtly becomes impermissible and before long the very thing that was intended to prove 'Shall not be infringed' turns into the vehicle to prove that it will. 

Stranger things have happened.

Farewell and Goodbye

 I said my goodbyes. The ashes of my mother, father and brother were buried side by side this week. Not one of the three of them wanted any of this. I stood on wet grass with my jaw clenched trying to hold it together. A man said words. A few people sang some hymns over canned music. I guess I was supposed to pray for something. It all just blurred. The man in the collar asked for memories but how do you pick anything out of a lifetime? Most of what we remember is wrong anyway. Colored by years and distance and retellings to the point they probably never even happened...at least not the way we recall them. Is that better or worse?

But each of them are now nothing but memories. Some good, a few bad. Isn't that what everyone is in the end? Fading light and failing recollections. A generation or two and it's all gone except the stone. 

I wanted desperately to be alone with them for a last little while. I tried to take a couple minutes as everyone was leaving to put my hand on each box for the final time...trying to know what to feel. Remembering. Wondering if I could ever grieve enough. Even that got cut short.

There was lunch afterward but I couldn't do it. I've been away so long. So much water under the bridge. I wondered if Dad would have pushed through it like he always did at big gatherings. Doug would have laughed. Mom would have understood I think. Why do we do this to ourselves?

Far wiser people than I have written volumes about grief and loss. Quotes by famous people are abundant. There's a lot of platitudes and Kalil Gibran/Hallmark nonsense. Religion tells tales of life everlasting. Thoughts and prayers. None of it makes sense and I can't add anything deep or meaningful to the collection. All I know is that each of us gets through it in our own way. 

There are things we are supposed to say and ways we are supposed to act when we lose people. Painful formality and rituals. "It's for the living", is the cliche'. Maybe, but if that's so, it's a travesty of anything remotely comforting. Dress up in your best black and bring a dish to pass. Say the words and wonder when it's your turn. I guess that's just how it is.

I wonder sometimes when a song comes on or a picture pops up or a random reminder comes to mind...will it ever get better? If getting easier means I remember them less, is that how it's supposed to work? When the stone is all that's left and all the memories are gone, what then? I know this isn't very original thinking. I don't care. It's my thinking right now.

And I miss them. I miss them. As an uncountable number have before me, I miss the ones who've gone. I'm dancing around the holes they left in the world. The hammer will fall one of these days and I'll collapse for a while I imagine. Every tear I gritted my teeth to hold onto at that awful cemetery will come loose. I'll figure out how to grieve. Then maybe...just maybe...it'll be ok. 

Mom. Dad. Doug. It'll be ok.

Back When

Seems like nobody wants to live here anymore. Or live now anymore. I mean, my social media is overrun with posts lamenting 'Back when we were in school...' and 'Kids these days...' and fill in the blanks.

Most of it is about how much better everything was X-number of years ago depending on the age and 'Gen' of the poster. I will admit it's a little tough for me to hear 20-somethings talk about 'back in the day' when I have a pair of Technics speakers twice as old as they are but it's all perspective. Objects in their rearview mirrors actually are closer than they appear.

Maybe it's just nostalgia for what we like to think of as easier, happier days but if you really take a hard look and admit it, nothing much really changes. The crisis of the moment is different and the names change but life is and always has been complicated and confusing in contrast with the carefree and happy-go-lucky daydreams so many seem to wish for and claim to remember. Everyone's past is filled with good and bad even if they choose not to remember it that way. 

My own rear-view mirror is pretty cracked and I've lied to myself about enough that unarguably true memories are hard to come by. I suspect we all do that to protect ourselves from all that junk back there that would hurt if we poked at it too much.

It's just human nature to look for simplicity amid complexity. 'Back when we were kids' seems understandable when so much of the present seems incomprehensible. Us 'Boomers' are very susceptible to this.  

The music was better. The cars were better. Everything was better. Except it really wasn't. Cars that 'lasted forever' didn't. 50 grand was high mileage and on top of that, a whole lot of them had a tendency to kill their occupants in a crash. Elvis was a societal menace as was all that rock-and-roll 'devil music'. The Beatles were the end of civilization as we knew it. Hendrix was evil incarnate.

True as well that prices were very low compared to now but so was income. You could buy gas for 55 cents a gallon when I started driving in '76 but I only made about 20 bucks a week working every day after school and on weekends. It was still a stretch to fill the tank, go skating, eat and make it till next payday.
Mom stayed home and Dad worked just like the memes tell it but he worked all the time and only had Thursday and Sunday off for years. It took an enormous toll on him and her both but hey...it was the 60's right so it was all good. 

Every generation looks back through rose-colored glasses and wishes for what seems like simpler times. But at least for me there's never been a time when things were as carefree as all that. I'm not saying it was all bad but I do think it's pretty disingenuous to claim the world was all sunshine just because you once were 16.

That's one that comes up a lot...rewinding to your teens. A wish to go back to high school days. Maybe for some that would be nice but if you're being truly honest with yourself, high school is probably one of the most high-stress times of your life. You can tell yourself that it was great being on the football team or going to the prom or partying in the woods or having a hotrod and all the other 'Glory Days' (sorry Bruce) adventures but I wouldn't go back there even if I could. As everyone does, I have tales to tell from those years and a lot of it was great fun. A lot of it wasn't. And I don't live there anymore. 

The flip side is how tough it was for 'us' compared to how it is for 'these kids'. Everyone knows the cliché, "We walked uphill both ways in a blizzard without shoes to get to school so quit whining about your iPhone." 

At least from my point of view, it isn't that is was so much harder when I was young...just a different hard from now. I wouldn't trade my tough times for Gen X, Y or Z tough times for any amount of money. And even if it was true that they have it easy (which they most certainly do not), who do you think made them that way? Oh yeah...that was us. We came up with participation trophies and helicoptering. We decided they had to go to college and signed them up for the loans. We scheduled them and activitied them and mini-vanned them and lessoned, camped, cliniced and programmed them because we thought we were doing the right thing. 

But now it's their fault they don't live up to our collective memory of what childhood should be. Ain't it funny how their music, their cars, their culture...everything that we brag about in our lives is somehow less for them? Give them a chance and a few years and they'll be just like us. Bragging on whatever becomes the next platforms about how the Alphas don't know how easy they have it. But until then, some of us might want to remember how it feels to be looked down on and back off on the toxic nostalgia a little.

I wonder sometimes that if we try to convince ourselves it was always sunny, we can dance around the parts where it was dark. There's no doubt in my mind that it pays to remember the days when we cried. Tears are truly a valuable part of who we grew up to be after all and to forget that we shed them along the way is to lose a little of yourself. The good and the bad make us who we are.

So when the urge hits to wish for all those wonderful things like rotary phones, rabbit ear televisions with three channels, 45rpm singles, Chevys with fins, stingray bikes, staying out till dark and Saturday mornings with Bugs Bunny...smile a little and remember like we all do. But temper it with a smidge of truth. It's fun to look over our shoulder sometimes and pat ourselves on the back for just getting through it. That's human nature and likely won't ever change.

But don't forget about today. If you live too much in times past, you just might miss a lot of times present.

In Absentia

"Non male loquare absenti amico"

Speak no evil of an absent friend
Titus Maccius Plautus (254 BC - 184 BC)

I've been absent. 

Oxford defines absence as 'the state of being away from a place or person' and 'the nonexistence or lack of'

That's how it feels. Like being away. It feels like nonexistence. 

It's coming into the longest, darkest nights again and true to the season for me...it's just flat-out the toughest time of the year.

When the daylight is so short...the world is a harder place. It's been that way as long as I can remember.

Learn to pronounce

 

Pushing through is hard. It's hard to talk. It's hard to engage. You just do and that's about all you can do. 

You put on your face like you put on your coat before you go out the door. You dance on the thin edge between smiling and not. Patience is a virtue you struggle to find. Your fuse is short and easily lit. Everything aches. Sleep is a troubling thing. You find yourself at the window with the 'thousand-mile stare'...watching but seeing nothing.

It's isolating. Surrounded by everyone, you're lonely. You miss people. You miss people forever gone. You miss people across town. You miss people across the room. You miss people because they don't seem to miss you. You wish some old friends would call but you hardly know if you can answer or what you'd say if you did. You miss them but can't bring yourself to reach out yet again. So you wait. There's been so many times...

And frustrating. You wish everybody wasn't angry all the time. Smiles without fangs. Laughter without snarls. Conversations without rage. Simple words with nothing underneath. Hoping you can say something...anything without some kind of awful consequences. For a break from absolutes.

And exhausting. Time is relentlessly out of synch with the hour. Little things become big things as fast as flipping a coin. You fear that anything you do for yourself takes away from someone else. You wish you didn't feel like you have to be everything to everybody every day. You wish for a lack of crisis...lack of doubt. You wish you could rest enough to somehow not feel worn out. Weariness walks with you and whispers defeat.

And yet...

Yet still somewhere under all the dark you hope for warmer days and dreamless nights. A tiny hope for quiet and calm that seem so very far right now. For even a few things to be alright.

It's only that little thing that keeps you present perhaps. Small it may be but it speaks to the hard winter and the wind. It says that spring will come. It says you're not completely alone. It reminds you that it might not always be so dark if you can just hang on.

Yes...just hope and hang on. If it's all you can do, it'll have to be enough. Make it through today. Make it through the week. Lean in through the month. And hope that one day soon the sun might shine a little brighter, the ice could find itself in a puddle, the Hope Tree will bud and...with a little luck...absence itself might just be absent for a while.

Casually Cruel

Anyone who knows me knows that the holiday season and I will just never get along. November and December are awful for me year after year and nothing ever seems to change it. I've been down this road before...the fake happiness, the overwhelming capitalist nightmare of Black Friday and Cyber Monday and whatever other commercial madness that comes along, fake friends, fake all of it.

This time around there's another wrinkle that is making me miserable. I call it 'Casual Cruelty' and in the last few months, a wholly depressing number of people have perfected the practice. It consists of just being mean and not really thinking anything of it...hence casual but cruel nevertheless. 

I've heard people in common conversation say things like, "Immigrants should just be rounded up or shot if they try to come in illegally" or "If someone gets in my way protesting something, I'll just run 'em over" and "I'll fight in the streets if anyone tries to give me a shot"...like asking for the salt...casually offering to kill someone for the unconscionable sin of being someone else or disagreeing with them. Not even a thought of what that might be like. Who you might be doing it to. Why you'd even think like that. People just do. Apparently, everyone needs to die for everything. 

Ask someone to wait a minute...get shot or beat up. Forget a turn signal...get rammed. Work on a school board...get death threats. Teach...get death threats. Work in food service...get death threats. Work in healthcare...get death threats. It never ends.

The idea that people 'deserve' what they get is just awful. 

Asylum seekers were just asking to have their kids taken away and lost when they had the audacity to seek asylum here. Addicts deserve to suffer because they 'chose' that life like it was picking a color for the kitchen walls. Women should carry every pregnancy to term because they weren't chaste enough for the Evangelical crowd. Lazy people on public assistance should be cut off and pull themselves up...get a third job, forget medical care and just 'want' to be successful enough because needing a hand is a character flaw. We can't 'afford' to help people because if they were us they wouldn't need it so it must be their fault.

Casually Cruel. Name calling. Bullying. Intimidation. 'Karen' going ballistic over nothing at all. 'Fuck Biden' flags on thousands of front lawns. Petty, adolescent, self-absorbed, entitled cruelty for the sake of it. 

A scowling madman spreading hate and more cruelty nightly to legions of the dedicated. Millions of nodding followers thinking this is all ok. Just say 'socialism' and anything goes. 'They' who are not 'us' must have brought it on themselves.

People deciding it's good to ban books they don't agree with. People who've never read 'Fahrenheit 451' or '1984' and never will because they're gleefully burning copies of them by the dumpster-full. 

Whole swathes of people deciding that we should teach only that which doesn't cause 'distress'...to white people. 

People who've never read the Constitution railing about our 'Christian' country and threatening anyone who doesn't subscribe with execution.

It's evil and it makes me absolutely furious that there's even a debate over it.