Each act of man is the twist and double of an hare. Love and death are the greyhounds that course him. God bred the hounds and taketh His pleasure in the sport. This is the Comedy of Pan, that man should think he hunteth, while those hounds hunt him. This is the Tragedy of Man when facing Love and Death he turns to bay. He is no more hare, but boar. There are no other comedies or tragedies. Cease then to be the mockery of God; in savagery of love and death live thou and die! Thus shall His laughter be thrilled through with Ecstasy. Perdurabo, 34th Lie, "The Smoking Dog" * * * Things aren't as grim as they might seem; at least Tigger can afford booze and cocaine. You know, priorities. Gobble-gobble.
G'Day, people have been looking for you as I'm sure you know Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Were you doing anything interesting, any good stories? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I am very relieved you are back Tiassa (are ya?), please spread your wonderful words around these forums, they are sadly missed!
Glad you asked, actually. It has been a turbulent period, to say the least, but I feel like Brutus after he got the free vacuum cleaner: I win one sometimes. In 1996, shortly after returning to Seattle from Oregon, I found myself cuffed and stuffed alongside Interstate 5 for suspicion of driving under the influence. I blew below the limit, but it should be noted that said limit would later be revised such that my BAC fell between the standards. When I left the police station after being processed, I understood that the District Attorney would review the record and decide whether to prosecute. Fast-forward to spring, 1999. The state of Oregon sent me a letter advising that they would be unable to renew my driver's license due to an outstanding suspension in another state. Whoops. It quickly emerged that I had failed to appear in December, 1996, to answer the charge. Having just secured a job with an insurance firm--those who know me long enough will recall that many of my posts from 1999 through 2001 were written there--I figured to not panic. I had helped a friend get a lawyer in Oregon for all of $500 up front; I figured $1500 would suffice in Seattle. Regardless of the fact that I was short by a factor of three, I never managed to accrue even the insufficient number I projected. What followed was a miserable series of superstitious presuppositions that complicated the matter greatly. Fast-forward again, leaving out many small details--e.g., presuppositions including summons, statute of limitations, and the nonexistence of arrest warrants--to March, 2005. Still running on idiocy, and aware that there is no statute of limitations when one is already in the system (e.g. arrested), I learned through a friend of a friend that there were, in fact, warrants issued for my name, renewed at least once in July, 2003 and set to expire in 2006. As word of that development reached my family, my mother advised me to simply turn myself in. I refused; I had held out for some stupid fantasy of a lawyer, and I wasn't walking into a police station on a nine-year rap without representation. My father, of whom I have spoken and written variously over the years, stepped up and asked, "If I get you a lawyer, will you answer this immediately?" Nobody in my position, knowing what I knew and believing what I believed, could posibly refuse. Within the week, we hired an attorney and started picking through the wreckage of what I had wrought. There were moments of guilt, admitting that we wanted a shark despite a family resentment of lawyers, and the look that passed between my father and I at the prospect that the arresting officer could be anywhere: retired, working another jurisdiction, or even--and here we glanced at each other with nary a shiver--dead. A dead officer would mean everything went away. Yes, it is strange to balance your fate against someone else's life. The police report saved me from hoping for a dead officer. It so enraged me that my one driving enthusiasm was the chance to get a piece of this guy. And here's the thing: People 'round here know a bit about my anti-authoritarian rhetoric. Over the last couple years I've been easing up, though I won't claim my tantrums against the shield went away. But it did occur to me that for all the nightmares I hear about in my proximity, all my dealings with the police have been rather quite decent: when my car was stolen, and when it was recovered; when the Oregon cop pulled me for DUI and I embarrassed him; even my '96 arrest was as civilized as one could hope for. And then I saw that effing police report. The good vibe went away. All of the abstraction felt suddenly validated by a police report that was incomplete, out of order, and grossly exaggerated. It is not just that the keys were put in my hand, but that two other people, in a moment aside, reminded me that I was good to drive that night. "But they were drinking, too," my father pointed out. This was beside the point; I resented the suggestion that a woman who claimed she loved me, a friend whose faith is validated in the years since, and my own brother would send me out--encourage me to drive--if I was visibly intoxicated. The question I ask when explaining this point to people (it really does bug me) is simple: You are accused of a crime. What do you want your police force to do? Perform an investigation? Or bend over backwards to hang you? I made three court appearances, or maybe two, since we did not see the judge at all the second time. For arraignment, I went before a judge who looked tired and read through his script mechanically until he came to me. He asked the prosecutor: "Is there anything the state wishes to add to--and I hate to say it this way--the 'normal' terms of release?" That did not bode well. For pretrial, though, we drew another judge, and this guy impressed me. For the first pretrial conference, I sat around for a while until my attorney finagled an off-the-record continuance that got me out of there in an hour instead of three. While we were there, though, I watched the judge refuse to hear from anyone without counsel until they had been screened for public defense, and also listened to him lecture a woman on "Umpteen reasons why you do not want to take deferred prosecution", and then grant it. I liked the guy after that, and was happy to find myself before him a month later when we came back for pretrial. The continuance was perhaps a saving grace. My attorney did not wish to go forward without dealing with the supervising prosecutor; the underlings had no power to bargain, and thus we had nothing to offer the court. In a fit of desperation, I explained to my attorney what I would accept in order to end this without trial. If they had written tickets for the offenses (speeding and lane violations) leading to the DUI stop, I would have pled on them. But we had nothing to go on, and I would be damned if I would go down on a reckless charge, as who knows ... someday I might want to go to Canada. You know, that sort of thing. Sure, I wanted a piece of the PoS cop for writing that damnable report, but I also come from the age when the courts did not like to question police officers, having actually known a judge to reject a friend's defense for a traffic offense by explaining that it would not be wise for the state to question the veracity of its police officers. And explaining to a jury that they ought to acquit you on the grounds that you're a moron ... well, who looks forward to that? It was, I admitted at the time, an unrealistic expectation. We went to pretrial the second time expecting no movement; the prosecutor was known as a hardass with a reputation to build in the department she supervised. Perhaps she is. But there she was, standing in the aisle muttering to her underlings, negotiating with sharks, and then my attorney introduced us so that she could know who she was prosecuting and I could know who so badly wanted a piece of me. Hardass or not, she is a smart prosecutor. She didn't care about the charge itself so much as the fact that I took nine years to answer. She shook my hand, turned to my attorney, said, "Okay," turned to her underling, said, "Neg, go", and we had a deal. The deal was complicated only in the sense that it harkened back to the laws extant in 1996; since then, Negligence has been separated into two charges. Neg. 1 involves drugs and alcohol, and is a crime. Neg. 2 involves accidents and stupidity, and is a civil infraction. And a civil infraction is what we were now hunting for; the thought of having the whole thing over that day, the idea of getting exactly what I said I would take was too tempting to keep fighting. We agreed and went before the judge. And then the deal fell apart. The judge would not accept it because the point of the deal, as explained and agreed by the attorneys, was to let the state close the file, let me get on with my life, and let everybody put it behind them. This was all fine with him, except Negligence under the 1996 law was the only crime on the books with no jail associated in the sentence. A little piece of what I call Claven trivia (named for the barfly) that saved my ass. We pulled back from the table, sought another charge, and, failing to find it, calculated the ripple effect from accepting a plea deal for a crime. Everything else worked out the same, and the age of the incident was such that it would almost instantly disappear from most records that would affect my life--e.g. insurance, employment, &c. We returned to the courtroom prepared to accept the deal as it was; I was still getting off easy, all things considered. While we waited to appear before the judge, the supervising prosecutor appeared again as she bounced from courtroom to courtroom to maintain influence over the cases. Let's count: my attorney, the prosecuting underling, and the supervising prosecutor--the judge had schooled all three by rejecting the deal. She was, I think, embarrassed by this turn of events. She leaned past my attorney, said to her underling, "Forfeiture," and left. It took a few minutes for me to realize what was about to happen. "No," my attorney explained to me. "You're not pleading to anything." The state got its say. In the end, I coughed up $250 for a bail forfeiture, what amounts to a pyrrhic victory for the prosecution and, daresay, a sweeping win for my team. Everybody got a piece; it is, technically, a very happy ending. Is there a moral to the story, though? The bail forfeiture suggests that it does not pay to avoid your problems, but we must consider that fighting in court to achieve a similar result--e.g. the charge goes away--would have cost thousands more. There is no conviction, there is no charge. I avoided my problems for nine years, borrowed some money, and walked away virtually unscathed. Hard to figure what that equals. The flip-side is to wonder how much this whole issue has hurt me over the years; I had no idea how heavily it dogged me until we were well underway. It is actually difficult to think of myself as unfettered on this front; I am accustomed to the knowledge of an unresolved, important issue. And, hey, try getting a decent job when you live on the border between the boonies and the sticks, and don't drive. It was easy enough to ignore the license suspension when I lived in Fremont, Greenlake, or Wallingford (neighborhoods in Seattle), as they were all on major bus lines. But living in an unincorporated area of Bothell ("for a day or a lifetime") it becomes as much as a four-hour transit commute in order to get the jobs I can get that will pay what I need. (I must, in the long run, be prepared to operate as a single parent; it seems almost inevitable.) Don't get me wrong, though; among that list of what would otherwise be called regretful effects of my, uh, disastrous mistakes, Sciforums does not appear. I probably would have written fewer words here over time, but I would be a poor man for the loss. I've missed you all. Even those folks I simply don't like. This evening, reading through old, unanswered messages, it struck me that even the people who act as if they hate me are not without their redeeming affection or, in some cases, devotion. Within these hallowed, electronic halls, the human condition is, at least, accessible. Of course, it's probably for the best that few witnessed the depths of my foul mood over the last five months. As the DUI issue recedes, everything else that hid beneath that dense layer of pollution shows itself anew, and some of those things have some sharp edges. May not be a good story, as such, but it's the one that's been playing. I'll spare you all the tale of how I finally hit my rhythm with the television scripts and then clashed my internal hard drive into oblivion, except of course to remind: Defrag, defrag, defrag. I'll try to hang around more often, but no promises until I fulfill the hypocritical demands of a coked-up drunk. Remember, kids: If it's wrong for a boy or man to do, it should be encouraged in women. This concept is a double-edged sword; if it's something like sex, hey, whatever. But if it's something important, like lying, hinging the financial plan on excess, failing to keep your laundry or dirty dishes under control .. hey, a man just isn't a good partner unless he accepts and encourages these developmental explorations. Feminists were surprised, it seems, to achieve a certain par in the workplace only to discover that the equality they fought for was the right to be treated like shite. It is a work of pure genius, however, to turn that shite into lemonade. Remember, guys: if your woman lies, ignores bills, stays out all night with other guys, and demands that you do what she cannot before she will afford you the slightest human respect, it's your own damn fault. You're not trying hard enough. You need to love her more. And if you have to steal that love away from your children, do it, or else you're not a man. That story, however, is not for today. Nor can it be said to be a good story. Nor interesting. Nor ... well, yeah. You get the picture. "We are born," sings Rob, "and we die. And the waves roll on."
tiassa, The essential lesson then - deal with issues imediately - the stress that results from wondering and hoping is too disabling. I believe I know this well but it wasn't till I was around 40 that I really faced up and dealt with it - the ending of an 18 year marriage was the first major correction - can never fully recover and a financial disaster. But I guess now one of my favorite perspectives is being proactive - avoid the damn issues before they occur. Thought perhaps you had tried to escape sciforums as I tried once a year or more ago.
'Tis true that things get worse before they get better. Sad thing is that I'm quite sure I have not hit the true rock bottom. As a friend of mine reminded me not too long ago, I've never had a truly bad day. (There's a funny story there, involving stolen vodka, a neighborhood alcoholic, something akin to breaking and entering, and the fact that my family loves me, but ....) In the last several weeks I've put together something like sixty pages of memoranda; maybe there's a novel in there somewhere, but I'm not sure how I feel about such exploitation. In the meantime, I never liked the idea of tracking my partner's behavior because it becomes a full-time operation (see below). The memoranda have been records for an interfamily fight extending from my own intrafamily standoff. Her father got annoyed at me for reasons that have never been accurately related to me--though I can guess, and it is largely trots and the horse's fundament--and things have sort of snowballed from there. Though I never married her, we are over and will be separating come April. It is impossible to explain how this situation has come about. I find myself down to a small number of values--counted on one hand--left intact or unviolated in this relationship. I must, for the first time in my life, decide whether or not to "give up" on a fellow human being. Some inform me that such a development will bring a sense of liberation; I don't believe it. Nonetheless, I will most likely be spared a truly bad day, and, as many hope, rock-bottom. But the problem there is that a common adage of artists says that you must lose your mind completely before you can get down to the serious work. Deciding what is truly at stake is fairly easy; I have a daughter and that fact trumps the necessity of my insanity. In the meantime, a depressing consideration wrought in real life: - Start with a simple premise: "I'm looking for a relationship," she explains, "because Emma Grace deserves a happy mother. I owe her a happy mother." This hardly seems unreasonable, as happy and well-balanced parents are a key ingredient to a happy and well-adjusted childhood. But what does that imply? The 18-hour diaper run - On Friday, I go out with my brother; dinner and a concert. This outing is reserved and cleared two weeks in advance. - On the day in question, my partner suddenly worries about how many diapers we have compared to the fact that we are "broke" (e.g. "down to our last five dollars") - My partner agrees to babysit three neighbor children. This is remarkable inasmuch as she generally says she is not prepared for any more than one at a time, but such is that maternal devotion .... - I return close to 2:00 AM, Saturday, about as expected. The three neighbor children are scattered asleep through the house. Emma Grace is still awake, and an 8 year-old is crashed out in her room. I take her to bed with me. My partner is already in bed, and as the night progresses is torn between the disturbance Emma Grace's activity causes and the bonding of sleeping beside her daughter. - My partner leaves the house around 10:30 Saturday morning under the pretense of getting herself breakfast (we have food; I thought we were near to broke) and getting diapers (with babysitting money). Now, that's 10:30 AM on Saturday morning. I have the diaper that is on Emma Grace and three in reserve. - At 4:30 PM or so, I call my partner; she ran into a friend and decided to stop for a drink. - At 7:40 PM, I receive an SMS that my partner will watch the one-eyed dart tournament and then be home. I inquire as to what that means. She explains the notion of a one-eyed dart tournament. After a couple of attempts to get a time-frame out of her, I give up. - At 12:30 AM, Sunday, my partner calls to say she will be on her way soon. "Do you need anything?" she asks. "You have diapers?" I respond. "Yes," she says, and skips a beat. "Do you need them right away?" Remember that she was aware of the count when she left the house. I am disgusted with the ongoing delays, and tell her, "Whatever." She takes this response to heart. - Just after 2:00 AM, I receive an SMS that my partner is "too fucked up to drive". I presume that this will be like the last time she was out all night, that she will be hanging out with the bar owners after hours. - My partner comes in at 5:15 AM, claiming to have slept in her car. "Did you bring the diapers?" I ask, and she must return to her car to get them. - So what, exactly, is it that she owes our daughter? She is dating a man who is finishing up a divorce from what has been explained to me in terms that equal an immigration sham marriage. But she's really dating someone else ...? O ... kay. But this is her sense of priority. I asked her about it later on Sunday, and, well, it seems that things just kept coming up. - Thus what she owes her daughter includes two and a half years of being out drinking more than she is at home, of days spent incapacitated by the previous night's revelries, dating married men, having sex in the bathroom at a local bar, being hospitalized for alcohol-related dehydration, doing cocaine, and letting whatever comes up supercede the necessities of my daughter's development. A friend and professional educator came by during the week between Christmas and New Year's with the intention of discussing a potential developmental delay called Specific Language Impairment; at three years old, Emma Grace's communication skills have not focused on speech in the expected manner. My partner stuck around for a few minutes and then left to go ice skating with her boyfriend whom she's not dating (since admitting they're dating might complicate his divorce; yes, it's merely a matter of hair-splitting and rhetoric). - So her boyfriend is the kind who will send her out on the road so drunk she cannot remember her conduct (see below). Or the occasion, while I was out with my brother--and my partner babysitting the neighbor girls--he was too drunk to drive home from the bar, so he drove over to our house. (Apparently my neighborhood has a lesser human value than his own.) And while he was there, my partner helped stabilize him by feeding him food reserved for our daughter. And, apparently, he left her to sleep in her car. (My partner generally fails to think ahead to consider the implications of whatever lies she tells. To the other, my daughter still runs late more days than not, so calling me for a ride should not have been a problem for her. But, of course, it was.) - Try this one on for size: How do we go from not wanting to hear the gory details to wanting to be lied to in response to a direct question? I've asked several times, and if I'm lucky, she just walks away without saying anything. Anything but an answer, that's how it goes. But .... - One day my partner goes out "to get her hair done", and "won't be gone long". This is at about 4:15 PM. She returns, stinking drunk, at about 12:30 AM. She is so drunk, in fact, that she wants me. So she is trying to be all sexy and such, leading me back to the bedroom. As she fondles me and mutters drunkenly, her phone beeps an SMS received. Normally, she leaves the room to deal with notes from her boyfriend, but on this occasion, leaning over my lap, she just grabs her phone and flips it open right under my face. Her man has messaged her: "Off 2 bed. Wish it was with U." With one hand on my member, she drunkenly responds, "Me too", and puts her phone away. Wh-wh-what? So what happened to the story that he was just this barfly she drank with? In her drunken state she does not object as I raid her SMS folders. She left around 4:15 PM, messaged him, "I want you" at 4:20, to which he responded, "Me too." Walks like a setup, quacks like a setup, stinks like a setup. Except she really is that clumsy. The next morning, she asks, "So did you get lucky last night?" and when I explain the situation, she claims to not remember any of it. The sad thing is that documenting her exploits becomes a full-time occupation, and rather a taxing one at that. I never wanted to police her behavior like this. And the three hours spent with her father a bit over a week ago, answering his questions about her alcoholism, relating tales from history, and trying to be philosophically open (it turns out that cussing is from Satan, although that's her mother, and, frankly ... well, amid a discussion with my family about her daughter's alcoholism, the woman frets that Emma Grace isn't getting enough vegetables) .... It was a rough day for everyone involved, to say the least. My partner intends to "prove" that she is not an alcoholic by staying out of bars. Perhaps it is to stay away from "her" bar, or maybe it was wise to not explain the period. After all, it took less than a week for her to catch a couple drinks in secret. And, no, putting your hand in front of your mouth when you talk does not hide the alcohol vapor on your breath. (Budding alcoholics take note.) In the meantime, I'm undertaking a few changes if only to prove a point. And even that is strange. For instance, I have for months been fighting a growing paranoia that I am the only sane person left in the world, which is strange considering that I readily admit that I am, compared to most mundane standards, rather quite bonkers. Nonetheless, having accepted the experimental necessity of allowing my brain to be medicated (SSRI) professionally (I self-medicate recreationally, so why not?) it is puzzling to find that all my family and friends who wanted me on a pill to suddenly validate my sanity. There is something paradoxical about wanting a sane person to medicate. And, there's a certain something about the side-effect somnolence (the worst I have to put up with) that sometimes reminds me of psilocybin, so three cheers to the folks over at Forest. And all of this is in preparation for me to re-engage the so-called "real-world" and prepare to function as a single parent at least part of the time. (Or more, as my partner's heart exploding from one too many lines, or wrecking her car after one too many drinks, becomes seemingly inevitable. I do sincerely hope she can rope herself in here, but the real question at present is to wonder how many people she will take with her on that day.) The effects of this particular antidepressant are remarkable at least. Like the Friday night I went out with my brother; I had the hummus plate at the Pike, which is almost a laughable notion if you know me well enough. And a friend reports that he started dreaming again--or, more appropriately, remembering his dreams--when he stopped smoking dope. I know that this is true insofar as I spent some time away from it last year in prepraration for a potential drug test that never happened. But this particular pill, even at 10 mg, is strong enough that I'm dreaming again despite the good will and good faith of my green-tinted friends who have done much to make sure I don't go without for too long. (Incidentally, my physician, who prescribed the pill, is aware of my habits and has chosen to say nothing to me about mixing the two, and when I reported the psilocybin effect and explained that I actually like that little twitch in the brain, he nodded and said, "Well then, sounds good.") And boy, howdy, am I dreaming .... Four dreams stick out over the last three weeks. One a fragmented spy dream in which I was shot in the head, a "school dream" in which I failed a math test because none of the problems offered enough information to determine a solution (one of the cheat formulae prominently included f(H)M, and I don't even read the magazine), a strange dream involving church culture (unknown Christian denomination), and, most significanty, a spirit fantasy in which I was on a strange ship and we were pursued by shadow demons of a sort. This last, which was actually third in order and thus overshadows my recollection of the church dream, has the potential to lead to the solution to a spiritual abstraction I first encountered when reading T.H. White's Once and Future King as a high school sophomore. Imagine that: psych-grade pharmaceuticals helping develop my understanding of religion and spirituality. If I can milk the novel out of this one, I can literally change the world. For now, I am not encountering what are traditionally my two most prominent recurring dream matrices. Seems a positive development, or maybe it isn't. The dream in the bayou maison likely has a significant relationship to either my sexuality or the foundations of my religious outlook, and possibly both. And here's an interesting bit for men to consider: - It took my partner eight years and a child before she told me she never liked me and never liked the sex. Sad, since those issues, coupled as such, were put before her six years before she gave up that ghost. Apparently, the original problem (and you're free to chuckle as I do) is that my penis is too large. (Yeah, like I said, go ahead and chuckle; I do.) Now, I'm not ashamed of myself by any means, but it's not the kind of beefy hunk you whip out and slap down on the table as a means of propositioning a woman. So if you're ever in a situation like I am, remember that you have a bigger cock than the next guy. And, hey ... that explains the Mustang, the sham marriage, and his thing for Ayn Rand. See? I can be tawdry, indeed. And I can enjoy it, too. The whole thing makes "one-eyed dart tournament" sound more like debauchery than one would ordinarily presume of removing a man's depth perception and then putting sharp projectiles in his hand. So maybe there is an unforeseen upshot to medicating. And, hey, if you're going to criticize someone for using antidepressants, isn't that enough? Or is there some necessity of lying in order to exaggerate the situation? Not only did she tell her boyfriend that I was "back on meds", when I called her out on that one, my partner cited my mother, who in turn has no clue what my partner is referring to. Is the guy so tiny that antidepressants aren't enough to make him swell to respectable pride? Is she really so stupid as to claim a situation in which, were she accurate and true, she would also be admitting to intentionally interrupting a psych patient's medication cycle? (I was once prescribed Wellbutrin, an ADD drug that is also indicated for my purposes, quitting nicotine. I hate the drug, and will live longer on nicotine than its cure. Never give a suspected or diagnosed depressive an ADD drug. Talk about morbidity and suicidatlity ....) And this is all between Christmas and now. It's every day, which is why I'm lucky that it's "all the same fucking day, man". But I'm still perplexed by the bit about my sanity: How is it that, now that I'm medicating, they're telling me I'm sane? Isn't this the time when I'm supposed to be reshaping myself, tinkering around to repair whatever is damaged or align what is askew? I mean, yes, I'm exhausted, but that alone is not the entire problem. Right? I mean, how could it be? Of course, that's the nice thing about antidepressants. They softened the blow of the Super Bowl loss, and if my exhaustion really is the problem in and of itself, I am unable to get angry or frustrated and shake the living shit out of a few people and ask why they didn't listen before this. After all, I've been saying I need a break since I was ... um ... nine or ten. Should I be frustrated at twenty-three years of nobody listening to me about the most fundamental point hampering my existence? I'm not. And it's because of this brain candy. Hello, 'tis me. Soon enough the chorus will get to sing ... .. but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Springtime brings hope. For once. I mean, it's better than rain, right?
tiassa, I'm right there with you dude. Though I don't have a child (thank dog) and haven't had a real girlfriend in years (thank the same dog), I'm pretty much right there with you. Have you ever taken Lamictal? It's the one that can give you the deadly rash. I haven't smoked weed or drank in months nor done anything harder in years, but I do relapse from time to time. Stretched is right. You should right a book. Have you had anything published? I noticed in your bio that you say you are a writer. Hang tough man.
As Zero Hour approaches, please know I love you all. I have not forgotten you, nor will I ever. Soon enough, I hope, I shall be able to see you all daily, but in the meantime, remember this legendary quote: "Maybe I drink so I don't fucking shoot you." What? What the hell am I supposed to do about that? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Or maybe just the daughter. I got the first part of what I wanted; the weapon is no longer in the house, and no longer accessible to my partner. Nonetheless, she seems to think that after a three-year bender ... ah, never mind. I'll update as the situation warrants. In the meantime, since my partner has undertaken country music to impress her new boyfriend, there's not much to be done for her until after it all comes crashing down. And I still hope it's not too messy. We do have a daughter to think about. I keep hoping she'll remember that at some point, but she's more focused on me than the child right now. Be careful, my friends, what you wish for. To be the center of the Universe is not all it's cracked up to be. The new feminism: "Give women everything they want, or else everything in the world is your fault."
Having read a significant amount of your almost 12000 posts my advice would be to just do it. Get as far away from Dodge as possible and do not look back...
Don`t forget who YOU are in this scenario Tiassa. If it`s a circus, what is your role? Ringmaster, or clown?
Fuck the Circus! God is the ringmaster Satan is the clown .... (Boiled in Lead) Who, me? I'm nobody. I'm just this guy, you know? The shooting remark was preceded by a dumb argument; she came home, showed off her boyfriend's picture in a dart-throwing enthusiasts' newspaper (apparently from the night of the aforementioned, infamous eighteen-hour diaper run), and I snorted in disgust and reminded her that I didn't care. She went off about ... um ... something. I didn't tune back in until she told me I was "nothing". I advised her that my daughter would disagree with her on that point, to which my partner responded that our daughter is unsatisfactory. I told her if she was unhappy with my parenting methods, she has had three years to get her ass out of the bar and act like a mother. Thus, her observation about why she drinks. I am a number of things: - I am a witness to the face and nature of addiction: Sure, I've seen addicts and known what addiction can do to people, but this is the first time I've ever watched it happen. The whole process is surreal. - I am an agent of empowerment: There is no denying that I have handled my partner's dysfunction poorly. It would take a therapist, a cultural anthropologist, two historians and a political scientist in a pear tree to figure out what the hell happened, but in granting her a presumption of legitimacy, I have only empowered her otherwise-anemic excuses. The Nine Statements of Satan come to mind (see #4, #6); for once it would have been wise to turn to an old friend. - I am the victim of a tremendous lie: In this, I truly do feel victimized, although to what extent it is hard to say. Start with a blow aimed at a man's manhood: "I never liked you; I never liked the sex." Note that word, "never". I suppose I could deal with this, except that the issue arose four years at least before my daughter's conception. I could tell, years ago, that my partner didn't really like me. I even asked her about it. She insisted I was wrong, and when I pointed out her behavior, promised to change. "You don't seem to like me," I told her back then. "You don't seem to like being with me. Perhaps we should just stop with all of this and get along without hating each other forever." Too bad she couldn't have been honest back then. And when I think or the energy she expended to carry on our dysfunctional relationship, quite frankly the only explanation for her behavior I can come up with is psychiatric malady. I mean, why put yourself through it for six years if that's the truth? As Floater sings, "Trust no one, and you can never rest. Trust anyone, and they'll strike while you're sleeping." (Click here for .mp3) All of those vaunted liberal values of mine, trust and human potential, have utterly failed me in this situation. I should have treated her with the intolerance I showed certain of our Christian-advocate posters over the years. - I am the father of Emma Grace de Cleyre: Frankly, this is the only thing that really counts. Everything else can suck itself. My partner may be unsatisfied with her daughter, but I am as happy as can be. This child is something to behold, and I will never make her second fiddle to anyone or anything. "Don't you want me to be happy?" my partner asks, and proves in a day that her Mustang man is just that important to her. I am the father of Emma Grace de Cleyre, and that may equal "nothing" to my partner, but I reject that proposition and its pretentious excuse for a foundation as the desperate lashings of an angry drunk who would rather pick on a child than look at herself in the mirror. Or, as an anthem of my youth put it: "I am, I'm me" (Twisted Sister) Beyond that, I am the Tiassa. Tremble before me if you are so inclined, but I'd rather just drink and smoke with y'all.
