45 Years Of Hate

No shock to anyone who has ever read this blog, but I hate myself. Like, I've never really liked myself, not for longer than a little while anyway, and most days, I hate who I am. I hate being fat and ugly, I hate switching between needing attention and quietly pouting, I hate being a needy momma's boy who lost his momma when he was ten, I hate being just smart enough to realize that I should have been much more successful in life if only I had motivation and direction, I hate the way I hate all men because I'm jealous of them, I hate not being able to satisfy my wife, and before I met her, I hated chasing pussy and valuing women only by whether they were willing to fuck me. 

In this year of coronavirus, I was in the midst of very slowly establishing a routine to get healthier physically and work on the most enduring aspect of my self-hatred, my obesity. I started working out at a gym a few years ago along with my wife, who had a couple of health scares that motivated her to join a gym and drag me with her. She had stopped going regularly because it's hard and because she was dealing with her own food and life issues. I haven't gone to the gym every single day since we joined either, but I was hitting the treadmill about once or twice a week while hitting the weights every weekend, in addition to my Wednesday night bowling league. When I really hit the gym and started eating better and dropped about thirty pounds in 2018, I noticed the change, and so did people around me, and I felt good. I mean, what obese person wouldn't feel good about losing weight and getting compliments? But we went on a cruise for Christmas that year, and I went cray cray at the buffets and really took the opportunity to relax and lay off the workout routine, and I found all the weight I lost by next spring. 

I was working back into a routine I could handle without wearing myself out, and the weights were a big part because it gave me better strength bowling, which lowered my handicap ten full pins. And I was starting to pump up the routine a little at the beginning of this year in anticipation of a family trip to Mexico in June. I wasn't trying to lose thirty pounds again, nor was I eating as restrictively as two years ago. I just wanted to be in my best shape so I could enjoy the trip without feeling worn out, and if I lost a noticeable amount of weight and started getting random compliments again, awesome. Then COVID-19 stopped everything. The gym closed because of local restrictions, the bowling league canceled the rest of the season because people weren't going to come, and suddenly I was left with self-motivation and home workouts if I wanted to keep my routine. But without a high level of discipline (and also I had a swollen ankle for a week), I fell off. I've been keeping a log of my workouts, and I didn't do a damn thing for five weeks after COVID hit our country. Then I got coronavirus myself, which ironically pushed me back to exercising regularly because my doctor said not to let the virus settle in my lungs. But I haven't been back to the gym, so my strength is wasted away, and I don't work out very hard here at home because I guess at the gym I'm motivated to really go for it since I made the effort to drive there and all, plus the circulation and A/C is much better. Or maybe those are excuses I hide behind to avoid how lazy I am. After all, in case you missed the top of this rant, I hate myself, and I always have.

I want to say that in this, my 45th year, I will do a better job of forgiving my shortcomings and trying to improve those areas where I can improve. But I know who I am and what I am. I'm a chickenshit afraid of my own shadow, and I'm mired in a lifelong routine of lying down wanting to get up and do for myself but not able due to some sort of emotional paralysis. Let me explain what happens most times when I want to do something. Take my wife, for example. I can't make myself be forward with her. Next year will be ten years of marriage, and yet I still cannot take her by the hand and lead her to the bedroom, not without an extraordinary amount of courage which takes me forever to build up. I feel like a man with confidence in himself can easily make his moves on a lady. Not me. I have to pretend I'm The Rock or some other sex symbol. It's a very taxing feeling. I don't think my wife feels like I love her very much, but I've always been like that. If you talked to "Karen," she would laugh recalling how I sat on her couch until 2 in the morning holding her hand, refusing to make a move on her until she went to bed and took off her own clothes. Same with "Grace," the one night stand who had to announce to me that she was going to kiss me as we sat on her couch. And "Sarah" had to pull her own bra off after being in my apartment, and The Co-Worker Who Shall Not Be Named had to pull me into her body with her legs while we were horsing around on my loveseat. You get the drill. It works the same way with exercise. Most days I think long and hard about getting up and putting on my cross trainers and putting on a workout video, then nightfall arrives and I get in bed and watch TV. And every time I do, I hate myself. And every time I think about grabbing my wife and showing her the physical affection we all crave and I fail to do so, I hate myself. I will never know how disciplined, motivated people do it. I mean, I guess I did it for a year working out and eating better, but then I broke and went back to my old habits.

I think the worse part of hating myself and my bad habits all my life is, I don't allow myself to feel good about anything that happens to me. I've been trying to enjoy my new car in this first month of ownership, but the monthly payments and the fear that I made a bad buy make it difficult. Any carb I eat brings on self-loathing knowing that I'm a diabetic and I need to cut down, yet I remember how much I craved sweets when I cut down before. Any compliment on a haircut or shave or clothes never brings a sense of pride, but rather a sense of envy because I think of guys much more attractive and in better shape and I hate myself for being such a loser that any small change in appearance make people feel like they have to pump me up. And I hate having to get counseling to deal with these issues because I feel awful about needing help, and I also don't think it helps me much. Like the days in my twenties of filling my nights with sex, when it's over I'm still me and I feel worse sometimes. Same with counseling. I'm trying to look forward to 2021 being a much better year like everyone else is. But in certain ways, it's going to be more of the same. Even when I can go back to the gym, or bowling, or on trips and cruises with my wife, every night when I lay down to sleep, I'm me. And it sucks.

I Bought A Car! Wait, What???

In my sheltered life I have a number of things that most people experience earlier than me, and some things I never thought I'd do. Living in Chicago and not needing a vehicle, I didn't even bother to get a license until I moved here. And that was only because Grizzbabe had no interest in driving me to work every day, and where we live, public transportation to my job would be impossible. We existed as a one-car couple for several years. On weekends when I worked I drove the car alone, and when we both had to work, she dropped me off and picked me up. Then I scraped up the bottom of the car and Grizzbabe's uncle came to our rescue in his pickup truck, and he told us to keep it for as long as we needed, so when her car got fixed, I just drove the pickup as if it were mine. The plan was always to save up and get another car, but in the meantime, we put a lot of time and money into maintaining the 2001 pickup. Finally, in November the ABS and brake lights came on and the brakes felt very soft, like, I had to really force the brake pedal down to stop the thing. One repair joint replaced the brake hardware for $1400 and the lights were still on. Another place said they couldn't figure out what the lights signified because the truck was so old that they couldn't read the diagnostics. Then the dealership said that the ABS switch was broken but couldn't be replaced because no one made the part anymore. I asked if the truck was safe to drive, and the repairman said the truck was at risk of locking up since the antilock switch was dead. "I'd get rid of it," he said without a hint of care.

It was easy to drive my wife's car for the last few weeks because she works from home right now thanks to coronavirus. But I know eventually she will have to go back, so I started looking into what it would take to purchase a car. I knew that we had a couple thousand dollars saved because last year my wife made me start throwing $300 per month into a savings account with the purpose of having about $15,000 for a car in about five years. So I had those parameters: I can put $2,000 down and I can handle $300 per month. From there I just had to figure out what I wanted. I think when I started looking that I had the goal of something with less than 80,000 miles on it that cost less than $15,000. But a couple of factors made me come off of that mindset. For one, my wife got a used car a couple years ago that was certified pre-owned, which takes the process of wondering how healthy the vehicle is out of the equation because it's been fully inspected, so I refused to look for anything that wasn't certified. And second, being a big fat ogre, I was keeping all searches limited to not just mid-sized and larger, but only those with good safety ratings according to the Consumer Reports Buying Guide, and it had to have decent gas mileage. Basically, using those guidelines, it became clear that in my price range I was going to have to take cars that either were about five years old with way over 80,000 miles or something from last year or a couple years ago with 40,000 or so miles already racked up.

Then I saw a unicorn in the field: 2020 Altima, 4,000 miles, in my price range. Sent in my credit application to the dealer, traded phone calls, decided to go over there this past Friday after work. I'm three quarters of the way to the place when the guy calls me and starts stammering about "I-I-I got some bad news about your car, man." He claimed that another dealership got the car from them while they were putting together my deal, and by the time they contacted the other dealer, it had already been sold. I didn't like the smell of that tale, and my uncle was quite upset when I told him about it, calling it a classic bait-and-switch and suggesting that I write up a bad review of them. So back to the drawing board and using a broader search engine at the request of my uncle, two more unicorns come up, also in the 3,800-4,000-mile range, and guess where they're located? Yep, that same dealer.

Meanwhile, I had already sent another credit application to a Toyota dealer near the house because I saw a car that I decided would be good enough: In my price range with over 42,000 miles, but it was a 2019 Camry. It had been a rental, which explained why it had so many miles, and its second owner had hit an animal according to its Carfax report, and I decided that I was fine with that because it's still certified pre-owned, so whatever damage was done, it couldn't have been that bad. Looking back now, I don't know why I decided that was my car. When everything you're looking for comes in around the same price, seeing something one or two thousand bucks less must have popped me as a sign that I have to get this car. Smarting over my experience with the Altima dealer, I contacted the Toyota folks and told them I'd probably be there Sunday to talk. By that time, I saw another Camry at that dealership that was the same year for about the same price with maybe 4,000 less miles and no deer dings on its Carfax.

Sunday turned out to be an eye-opening day. Remember, I never owned a car before, so all of what happened was new and I had no idea what to expect. My uncle had shared his bad experience buying his first car, getting exploited for 22% interest, so he told me that with my good credit I should ask for what kind of rate I would get before I go any further. My plan was to go to the dealer and discuss the numbers before I even looked at the car so as not to fall in love with it before I knew the real price. The salesman was smooth, of course, and brought the car around for me to get a peek. "You really need your wife here before you make a decision?" he asked, and I said yeah, because I never did this before and I was hesitant. He wanted me to take it for a spin, but he would need my license and insurance card beforehand. Insurance card? Why, I don't have driver's insurance. I've been tooling about town in my wife's car and her uncle's truck, and they have insurance, so I never considered needing my own. The salesman was bewildered. He drove me around instead, and informed me that no sale or test drive could happen until I got insured. I went home. I was flustered, so without shopping around, I decided that GEICO looked like they had pretty low rates and just like that, I signed up. Grizzbabe asked if I really wanted to wrap this up, and I said I think so, so she got dressed and we went back up to the dealer. I now had my insurance, but the salesman then informed me that I needed a second proof of address besides my license, and again, because I'm a 44-year-old child, I was caught offguard and couldn't produce any documents. I don't pay any of the bills or mortgage, and I didn't know how to access my pay stubs on my phone. Eventually I figured how to bring up my bank statement, but it look an embarrassingly long time to think of that. I was allowed to take my own test drive, where I noticed the gas pedal doesn't accelerate very swiftly and the inside door on the left felt a little flimsy, but I blew those concerns off not wanting to start this process from scratch. After all that, the finance guy whisked us to the back, where the paperwork was already drawn up on this electronic tabletop. That was what I was afraid of, because now whatever interest rate he gave me would have to be really bad before I got up and left. Indeed, it was slightly higher than what I thought it would be, but I was in too deep now. I signed my life away with my wife silently watching, and the deal was done. It was more of a monthly payment than I thought it would be thanks to the extra insurance I have to pay as well. But I am now the proud owner of a six-year car note. It is what it is.

It had started to rain rather heavily when I finally got the keys, so while Grizzbabe went home, I sat in the car for a few minutes trying to wrap my head around what just happened. It was a whirlwind experience. I didn't know if I had done the right thing or if I should have waited for something else, something cheaper, something with less miles, something roomier...as is my personality, I was swamped with doubt. Then I called my uncle, I guess expecting love and support for this decision as if I was still a kid. He couldn't hide his disappointment at the mileage and the interest rate, then he caught himself and said if I liked it and didn't feel ripped off, that's all that mattered. And you know what? I like the car and I don't think I was ripped off. I nervously babied the car home in the rain.

The stress of that process was what I called "adulting," or doing things that normal grown people have to do sometimes. I'm acutely aware of how un-adultlike I am and how I can get stressed and panicky about things most everyone does, like buying a car or working on my marriage. This Sunday buying the car reminded me of another day of adulting that I did in that six-year hiatus since I blogged. On July 19, 2017, the new owners of the student loan I co-signed for "Shelley" contacted me and offered to bring the loan to a close if I gave them about $3,200 cash. This would be in addition to the years I had spent sending in $100 per month while she paid zero. I was conflicted by the thought of coming up off that much cash to finish a transaction that I never started, but the thought of having the loan dead was very tempting. So without any legal advice, I took a shot at negotiating and I told them that I couldn't give them that much today, so I'd have to go back to sending installments, or I could give them $2,000 to close it, their choice. They conferred with their people and got back to me a couple hours later and accepted my terms. I don't care how dumb it may have been to give that much to kill off an eleven-year loan, I don't care if they may have accepted even less if I offered, I was over the moon that I was able to pull off the end of that long nightmare by calling my own shot. And I was proud of how I kept paying on that debt for years, setting the stage for having the ability to kill it off with only two grand. Not only did I do it because it was the right thing to do as the co-signer, but I did it because I wanted to protect my own name and credit for the future, and dare I say, I couldn't have financed the Camry if I hadn't taken care of that cunt's debt from 2005. So it all came full-circle. And BTW, the iPod with all the dozens of songs that I talked about in my last post? I connected it to the car through Bluetooth, and for the first time ever, I will have the ability to drive to and fro playing my favorite songs from childhood through adulthood as loud as I want. Like an actual grown-up.

For The Love Of Music

Been a minute since I've posted something. Here are very short updates on everything else before I get to the topic of this post.

Marriage: Coming up on ten years next October. A struggle at times, as Grizzbabe and I are still fiercely independent and at times unyielding, but the true love is always there and will always shine through.

COVID: Unfortunately I caught COVID-19 and brought it home and gave it to my wife in June. My job forced me to keep coming into the office along with my other co-workers because our jobs being financial in nature caused us to be labeled "essential." I still believe we can do what we do from home, but our employers won't allow it for security reasons, so we're still going in, just masking up and staying as clean as we can. Thankfully, my wife and I did not suffer from coronavirus and we were both able to let it run its course without hospital visits.

Job: The one good thing about my job is that the parent company switched my data entry function to a pay system where I don't get an hourly set salary anymore. We're paid by the keystroke. I make several dollars more per hour as a result, and on a busy week, I can really rack up the numbers. It has allowed me to start taking some online classes and finally start the slow climb towards a bachelor's. It also allows me to travel with my wife and not be choked off by the expense of it all. My wife has begun a side career as a travel agent, so once the country starts finally turning things around and getting this COVID shit outta here, we'll be back island hopping. We're scheduled for an Alaskan cruise next May, fingers crossed.

Health: I started feeling very weird in July 2017, very tired, very thirsty, couldn't stop urinating. Completely peed myself on the way home from a baseball game one night. My sugar finally went over the top and I was diagnosed as diabetic. Then my wife went through a couple of scary episodes in 2018 that were diagnosed as possible mini-strokes. The scares made her sign us up for a gym, which I resisted because I didn't want to end up paying for a gym membership and not going. But we went regularly for a year and lost some weight. I lost about 30 pounds, in fact. But our habits and lazy lifestyle caught up, and we found all the weight we lost, and now because of COVID my wife doesn't want me going to the gym. So, yep, we're paying for a gym membership and not going. I'm trying to do some cardio videos at home, but it's very hard to motivate myself. When I make the effort to drive to the gym, I get in intense workouts because otherwise I'd feel like it would be a waste of time and gas to go there. But here at home it's much easier to go until I start getting tired and then just call it a day. I'm very ready to hit the weights again.

Podcast: "Jacob" and I are still doing our football podcast. We're in our eighth season and we're still having fun doing it. Check it out: blogtalkradio.com/inmuchlessdetail

Politics: Fuck Donald Trump.

Scorekeeping: Volunteered to be the point person for Memphis, meaning I was setting the schedule every month in exchange for an extra bonus at the end of the year. I had a sense of responsibility, I loved arranging the dates in a way that was fair to all the scorers, and I even enjoyed coming to the rescue and going to do a game myself when no one else was available. I was very proud of my work. But just before the pandemic in March, the stat company Baseball Info Solutions informed us in certain cities that they were no longer using on-site scorers if they had the technology to score the games remotely. Memphis has enough cameras to do that. Jackson, TN, an hour's drive away, does not, so if I ever score another game, it would be out there, but more than likely, I have scored my last game for BIS. Damn, I enjoyed that side hustle.

After all that, here's why I wanted to write today. If you love music like I do, you may enjoy the way I've been listening to music lately. You will have to swallow hard and take some risks, but I'm doing it, and it's been an emotional experience the last few years.

It starts with the football podcast. Like any good "morning zoo"-style show, I was looking for different sound drops to put on our board to use during the show. I had no experience pulling sound drops from websites, but eventually, I found some drops on Youtube and then I searched for how to get those drops from Youtube to the sound board. I found some websites that allowed me to take the URL of the Youtube clip and put it through their process that then turns the drop into an mp3 on your computer, and from there I can move the mp3 to the sound board. The risk is that these sites seem to be sketchy and unsecured, and some of them have tried to launch malware-type attacks on my computer that my anti-virus software has caught. If that scares you, I totally understand, but I trust my antivirus to protect my computer. Besides, there are many websites we visit every day that may pose similar threats. I then searched for ways to clean up some of this audio, because some of these clips had static or sound at the beginning or end that I wanted to get rid of, and that's how I found a program called Audacity. If you want to trust the makers of Audacity and take another risk, you can download it to your computer and it allows you to do all kinds of things to your mp3. You can clean up background noise, slow the sound down, speed it up, sweeten the bass or treble or tone it down, record your voice over the sound, and the list goes on.

Anyhow, it really didn't dawn on me that I could find a song I like on Youtube and turn it into an mp3 for my iPod until like a couple years after I was converting mp3s just for sound drops. This is another risk, maybe the riskiest, because I'm pretty sure it's illegal to take whole songs and convert them to mp3s on my computer instead of going to iTunes and buying them. It was illegal to do that with those sound drops too, I bargained to myself, so what the hell. Besides, I'm old and I like mostly 80s music, and some of it is obscure and not available to purchase, so if Youtube is the only way I can get it, so be it. Then I started feeding those mp3s into Audacity to juice up the bass on some of those funky disco hits, and it was like hearing the songs in a club. Then I started playing with the tempo and "pitch," which is how high or low you want the notes to sound. Ever since I was a child, I have always enjoyed certain songs at a higher pitch than what they sound like normally. I can't explain why they sound so great to me, but I know my uncle had a turntable that was equipped with pitch control, and it was intoxicating to hear records played a little faster than they're supposed to. I then had portable cassette players throughout my youth that played tapes a little faster, and then I bought a JVC cassette deck with pitch control when I was 19 that I still own today. Some dance songs are euphoric to me when played faster, and some slow songs sound heavenly to me when sped up, particularly angelic voices like Mariah Carey and Celine Dion, and some jazz songs when the notes are juiced up sound even better to me.

The last part of this grand project of mine came about by happy accident. The two iPods I owned were relatively low in memory space, 2 GB and 8 GB. When my wife's mother died in 2014, my wife gave me an iPod her mother owned that had a whopping 32 GB on it. Out of some odd sense of not deserving it because I didn't buy it or it wasn't gifted to me by the owner herself, I kept that iPod in the spare bedroom and didn't use it. But a couple of summers ago, I lost the 8 GB iPod that I was using every day to listen to podcasts while I work, and it's very hard to do data entry every day without listening to something to block out the noises in my workplace, and I'd become a bit of a podcast addict, and the 2 GB iPod couldn't hold the podcasts I wanted to hear. So out of necessity, I started using my mother-in-law's iPod. (I found my 8 GB iPod in the closet months later.) Then it dawned on me: With Audacity, I can take these songs off Youtube and make them sound EXACTLY the way I want them to and then drag them onto this megasized iPod without worrying about filling it up. As a way of keeping track of how many songs I'm getting using this method, I put them in a playlist on the iPod called "It Came From Youtube." That playlist is now at 1,023 songs.

That wasn't a typo. Over one thousand songs from Youtube through a conversion to mp3, most of them then through Audacity so I can pump up the bass or turn up the tempo or smooth out the noise or all of the above, then onto the 32 GB iPod. And that iPod is still only about halfway full!

It has been an unbelievable experience. It's not just juicing up songs, although that part is fucking awesome. But it's finding songs that I never thought I would hear again. It's hearing new music from Spotify or Music Choice and running to Youtube and finding it and playing with it on Audacity and molding it into something almost of my own creation, like a remix of sorts. It's playing old cassettes of stuff off the radio from 1992 and catching the title and artist thanks to another awesome invention for music lovers, Shazam, and being skeptical that something that obscure would be on Youtube and being constantly surprised and delighted. I've been taken back to days when my mother was still alive, days when I was so young I can remember dancing in my walker, days in high school sitting in pep rallies, days when I was dating "Giselle," "Karen," Grizzbabe, days when I was dating no one and trying to find myself living alone on the lake in Chicago...I've had emotional reactions to a lot of these songs. I've had to wipe tears away while working a dozen times. Some songs bring back good memories that hit me a certain way. Some songs bring back awful times and remind me of some terrible decisions I've made in my personal life, but they're my memories, so I try not to run away from them. That's a different playlist on my iPod--"All In My Feelings."

But I want it all. I want to relive all the memories that have brought me here today. Music means that much to me. I can't tell you how exhilarating it is to put on my headphones for 2½ hours escaping in my Prince playlist. Or for three hours in my 90s R&B/Hip Hop playlist. Or six hours in my I Love The 80s playlist. Or chilling for four hours in my Smooth Jazz Brunch playlist. Or (mentally) hanging with the crew in my Club Dre playlist. Or rocking out in my two-hour Headbangers Ball playlist. I love it all. It's the music I love at its highest audio quality sped up and bassed up to exactly my desired levels. At this point, the feds could come knock on my door and lock me up for the thousand illegal songs in my possession and I'd be good. All the feels I've gone through the last couple years will have been worth it.