tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90425642024-03-13T06:43:56.608-05:00Planet Dre: The World According To MeA look at the world through the eyes of a person who feels like he's from another world.Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.comBlogger322125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9042564.post-2903272415557411762023-12-22T05:46:00.006-06:002023-12-22T05:49:48.116-06:0048 Years Of Perseverance<p>I'm not the "keep pushing 'til you make it" type. Anyone who knows me knows that I get frustrated and defeated when I don't get my way. This year I had occasion to apply for different job opportunities since my day job keeps losing business year to year. It didn't go well this spring and summer. I got scammed by a job posting on Indeed, and by the time I figured it out they had already shipped me a check in my name for over $6,000 that I was supposed to use to "buy" supplies for the job. That was not going to end well. I sent it back. Then I applied to a couple of different companies that were looking for people to watch college football games and do some basic scout work for them, including the company that I worked for doing scorekeeping for minor league baseball before they went remote. I was humbled by the depth of questions on the interviews and embarrassed that I didn't know certain play calls or formations or even who won the football national title last year. I don't watch college football, mostly because I worked on Saturdays. But still, when I didn't hear back from one group and the other sent me a form rejection email, I was very down in the dumps. But the group that I previously worked with when it was Baseball Info Solutions was now starting up the same type of position going to college football games. So I persevered, swallowed my pride, and applied for that one too, and I did much better in that interview because they weren't trying to drill my football knowledge for 45 minutes. They mostly wanted to know about my real life job record and responsibilities. They also said something to the effect of "We already know about your accuracy and dedication because of your work with the baseball side, we just want to get to know you here on the football side." It seemed like a formality that I would be selected to work the University of Memphis football games. Then weeks went by, all the way into the beginning of August, and I heard nothing. That was a very tough stretch. If I wasn't good enough for this gig with all of my prior experience, what would I do? Go back to applying for scam data entry jobs? Finally, finally, they one morning sent me the contract to sign for the gig. And my perseverance paid off. I greatly enjoyed working with what is now Sports Info Solutions, even accepting the chance to work Arkansas State football games 85 miles away, and now I wait for them to develop a similar program to work college basketball games. I will certainly be applying for that too. I know now that I can't get discouraged when I don't instantly get rewarded for my efforts. The blessing will come. I just have to wait for it sometimes.</p>Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9042564.post-34363960134019566492022-12-22T22:14:00.002-06:002022-12-22T22:14:50.147-06:0047 Years Of Weirdness<p>I saw a random Facebook meme this morning before work and decided to share it as my theme for the day. It said: "I'm Different. And I Like That Shit." I captioned it: "Happy 47 to me. I'm learning to embrace my weirdness. As if I wasn't annoying enough." What that means simply is, I'm not trying to hide my quirks like I always used to. I am what I am. Whatever that entails, whatever social awkwardness, whatever inappropriate comments, whatever abrasive, aloof, sometimes confrontational front I put up to get through the day, it's me. Not everyone likes me. Hell, most people probably don't. And that's fine. I find that when I'm trying to be someone else, trying to fit in and be likeable, it may work and it may not, but I don't like how it feels because I'm being someone other than me. It can take years for people to feel even a little comfortable with their traits. I feel like I'm slowly getting there. And it's not fooling myself into thinking that I'm actually the normal one and everyone else is the problem. It's acknowledging that some things I do are fucked up, some aren't, but they're all MY things. When I wear my normal khakis and collared shirt to work on Halloween and declare that I'm dressing as a big fat nerd, or when I shake my considerable backside to the music at the bowling alley while waiting my turn, or when I make a bad pun joke to my wife knowing she won't find it funny at all, I'm being me, which is different from everyone else, but what would being like everyone else accomplish? Nah, I'm going to enjoy the things that make me me, and I'm going to have days where I feel down about me and wish I was better, and I'm going to have days where I feel like I'm awesome, and everything in between. It's all good. I've always been different. Finally, I'm kinda starting to like that shit.</p>Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9042564.post-77637089964961586662022-08-17T09:17:00.002-05:002022-08-17T09:27:31.762-05:00I Socialized And Made Friends, And Pigs Do Fly<p>If you know me, then you know that I don't play well with others. Eight years ago I took a leap and joined a bowling league here in suburban Memphis even though I didn't know a soul. I did it because I missed bowling and I missed competing although I'm not a very good bowler, but I also did it as an attempt to socialize and be around people besides my wife and co-workers. I may not be the friendliest, but I did want some interaction with people, especially here in a new city where I know nobody and wasn't going to have any chance to hang out.</p><p>The team I joined was kinda perfect for me, but kinda detrimental too. The team captain was Richard, who was an oddball with a limp and a weird sense of humor. He would express mean opinions about people, usually minorities or women, but in a "You get what I'm sayin' man?" chuckling kind of way. So we got along with not much more in common than dark jokes and sports talk. Fine for my comfort zone, but didn't help me as a person. The other guy was Charles, and he hardly said a word. He was pleasant but he was basically a mute. His voice was extremely gravelly, so that may have been why he didn't talk, but he seemed very introverted besides that. Fine for my lack of self-confidence since I didn't have to talk to him, but again, didn't do much for my growth and wasn't really much fun. This is a four-person mixed league which means that at least one person on every team must be of the opposite gender, and we filled our female opening with a lady who, like me, walked in and joined a random team with an opening. Bobbie was an older lady originally from Chicago, so we bonded over that. She brought her high school grandson occasionally, and I called him Youngblood because he reminded me of me: Big guy, quiet, kept to himself, had a girlfriend who was probably as important to his self-worth as "Giselle" was to mine at that age. So I offered advice to him sparingly and thought of him as a play-nephew. We were the worst team consistently every year. Our handicap was so high that, at my request, our team name was "Handicap Team" the last couple of years we bowled. (Hey, I wanted to call us "We're Handicapped," but Bobbie thought otherwise.) We finished 5th out of like 20 teams one year just because we would win so many games using that high handicap. We were one of the longest running teams, and we were used to each other's personalities. Then Richard started to change.</p><p>Richard's jokes became even darker and more cruel, making fun of people in the news suffering tragedies or people in the bowling league slipping or bowling bad. This despite his limp and his occasional fall on the lanes. Honestly, I chalked it up to more people, mostly white, being more and more aggressive and eager to share their opinions last decade since Obama became president and certainly since Donald Trump succeeded him. But this was more than that. Turned out that Richard had a tumor in his brain. He had a huge knot surgically removed, but the cancer returned. His behavior became more erratic, including going to bowl when it wasn't his turn, or taking even longer to get his gear on and off than usual. One time he started bowling on the wrong lane, and when calling his name didn't stop him, my patience wore off and I shouted out "Hey IDIOT!!" Another time, there was a Chinese church league that started after we were done on Wednesday nights, and they had to wait because we were often the last team bowling due to Richard's slow play. He turned to me one night and said out loud, "How does anyone know what those people are saying?!" followed by stereotypical Asian language mocking sounds that would make Shaquille O'Neal proud. I told him to knock that off, and he legit seemed surprised by my chiding him. "Why?" he asked, and I told him because it's ignorant.</p><p>All this came to a head right around the time coronavirus upended everyone's world. Early in 2020, Richard told us he would need another surgery for his brain tumor and he probably wouldn't be back that season, which was supposed to end in April. He tried to sound optimistic and vowed to be back the next year. But multiple brain surgeries didn't sound good, plus a bowler who knew nurses at his hospital told me that they said it didn't look good. Honestly, I think Bobbie and I were happy to get through the rest of the season without waiting for him to get out of the bathroom or hoping he knew which lane to throw on. And Charles just showed up and bowled every week. Nothing seemed to faze him. Most every public leisure activity started to shut down due to COVID, including our bowling alley, and our season ended early in February. I retrieved our prize money a couple of months later and mailed it out to Richard and Charles. Bobbie came to meet me at a gas station near her home in Mississippi so that she could tell me in person that she wouldn't come back to the league next season. Her drive to the alley was 45 minutes each way, and she had finally wearied of it. Richard and Charles got their money, and Richard thanked me via text. That was the last Richard and I would communicate. A league officer in August 2020 e-mailed me to ask if I had found new teammates to replace Bobbie and Richard, since Bobbie wasn't returning and Richard died. I had no idea until then that Richard lost his cancer battle.</p><p>I actually had a hard time dealing with Richard's loss for a couple of reasons. One, I don't handle loss well anyway, as depicted by me not attending my own mother's funeral. But two, I really didn't treat Richard with much compassion his last year alive. His breaking down was inconveniencing me, and his personality made me regard him as a pain in the ass more than a human whose health was failing. I didn't put his often awful choice of words and his brain tumor together until it was too late. It wouldn't have changed his speech, but it would have forced me to recognize that some of it may have been beyond his control. A counselor suggested that I write Richard a letter getting my feelings out, and that helped. I still have the letter. Richard can't ever read it but I feel like I shouldn't throw it away.</p><p>I did not return to the league in 2020 or 2021. I needed the time away so soon after Richard, and my wife was extra wary of me going somewhere social after we both caught COVID. But I decided to go to the meeting last week to get ready for the new season. Just like eight years ago, I was going without a team and hoping to catch on with a team that had a male opening. Unlike eight years ago, I knew the people in the league, and I was going to be happy to see them for the first time in two years. There was a scenario I imagined as the best-case, but my nature is to assume and prepare for the worst, so I just went to the meeting with my new ball ($72 for drilling, fucking inflation) trying to be ready for whatever.</p><p>The scenario was this: There was a team throughout the years that was comprised of a woman and her daughter, Margo and Missy, and they seemed to have different partners filling out their team all the time. I always had the most fun bowling against Margo and Missy because their averages were low compared to the rest of the league and they didn't take it seriously at all. They were quiet but friendly, and we developed a rapport because I feigned fear whenever we bowled them since they had even more handicap than we did. "OH NO, we're bowling Missy and Margo! Y'all always kick our ass!" They would smile and chuckle and swear that they didn't always beat us, and then every time one would throw a strike or spare, I would raise an eyebrow and yell out, "Oh, there they go!" And they would start laughing. It was always a blast playing them. I hoped that they would still be around and they would have an opening, but I started thinking of reasons why it would be a longshot: The mother, Margo, was in her 60s or maybe even 70s, so why would she still be interested in coming out to a bowling league post-COVID? And even if they were still in the league, would they have a random opening this year? And if they did, would they want me on the team? Just because we made each other laugh didn't mean that they would want me as a teammate necessarily. Well, it all came together, sorta! </p><p>See, Missy and Margo were there last week, along with Al, who has been their partner for the last few years. I asked them if they had a fourth, and they all said they did last year, but they didn't know if he would be back. So I said, if they need a fourth, I was available. After some discussion, they called me over and asked me to come aboard. I was thrilled. There was a small issue that I knew nothing about: Their fourth from last year had shown up at the meeting. I never met the guy, so I didn't know he was standing there until he asked them about his spot, and Missy told him, "We got someone else. We didn't know you were coming back." I kinda felt bad about it because it then felt like they kicked him off to make room for me, their old buddy. But later it was explained to me by a third party that they didn't like him as their partner last year. Evidently, he didn't have etiquette as far as watching out for other bowlers before he rushed up and started throwing, and also, he was a bad teammate, often not showing up for league play and not calling or informing anybody. (When I looked at last year's standings and scores, I saw that he did indeed miss seven weeks of bowling out of a 34-week season.) Poor guy, reminded me of Richard.</p><p>That's when it dawned on me: I was being invited by Missy and Margo because I wasn't a bad teammate, because I made each matchup fun when we played against each other, because I was genuinely happy every time I saw them. And I made a good impression on them so that when the chance came, they eagerly brought me aboard. Wow, I can socialize and make friends after all. This third party told me that Missy and Margo were happy to see me when I came to the meeting. That was so wild to hear because I was so happy to see them. They were my ideal team to join, and it actually happened. I'm so used to looking at the dark side of things and dismissing any good fortune as happenstance, but I have to accept the reality of what happened. A team didn't really have an opening but made one just for me because they like me. That's dope. We may not win many games, but we'll smile and laugh and have fun, and that for me is winning.</p>Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9042564.post-59518016698221936262021-12-22T06:55:00.001-06:002021-12-22T06:55:26.466-06:0046 Years Of Compassion<p>Be gentler to yourself. You matter. Allow yourself to be a human. Don't be a slave to your tongue. Remember to enjoy. Your past is your past. Your mistakes have happened. They're OVER.</p><p><br /></p><p>I wrote those phrases on index cards and taped them around my home desk a few months ago. It's the result of counseling I received during this trying year, the second stressful trying year of COVID for all of us. I think everyone could use some counseling during such crazy times, or at least have people who listen and give intelligent feedback in your lives. This counselor didn't necessarily say anything brand new, but I suppose at this stage I was ready to listen.</p><p>It took almost half a century, but I finally learned to stop being quite so hard on myself. That is a lesson I had to learn in order to stay alive. The stress of being a perfectionist know-it-all was affecting me and my relationships such that I didn't know how much more I could take before I started breaking down. Who knows how much damage I've done to myself to this point. But I've begun to look at life in a different manner. The old way of beating myself up for every shortcoming was not getting it done.</p><p>The result is that I don't take every angle of life and see it as a failure on my part. That's not to say that I don't recognize when I don't measure up or when I make a mistake. But I've tried to make the effort to stop seeing every mistake as some horrific personal failing that needs to be examined over and over. This life is one of examining and ruminating over mistakes constantly, as you can tell reading this blog. So it's not easy and more than a little weird to not beat myself up over errors. But it's a relief, and it allows me to enjoy life more.</p><p>Part of the adjustment is recognizing the voices in my head that try to bring me back to self-flagellation and just letting those voices happen without freaking out. For example, I received an error at my data entry job last week. I take great pride in not making errors. This was my first one in a long time, more than a year I think. I saw what it was and I know how I messed up--going too fast and overlooking a procedure. Normally that would ruin my whole day. I tried to forgive myself and let it go. But later that day I was chiding myself in an unfamiliar way. I was double-checking my work and this teasing woman's voice in my head kept saying, "Of course you're double-checking. You got an error. Mr. Perfect, who never makes mistakes, got an error. Ha ha ha." It wasn't aggressive, but more like a person taking joy in the misfortune of others, and I never heard that voice in my head before. It was the manifestation of my psyche needing to chastise me for a fuck-up, and since I didn't do it in my normal way--ruminating and cursing myself all day--it found a different way. But I recognized it and let it happen. As my wife has been advising me, I sat with my feeling instead of fighting with it or wrapping myself in it. It's such a different method than I'm used to. But I recommend it. Beating myself up didn't accomplish what I thought it would. I really did think all these years that those who are great at what they do kill themselves for every mistake in an effort to train themselves not to make the mistake again. And maybe some do that, but it didn't work for me. I would still make mistakes, and sometimes the same mistake, and I bet most everyone else does too. The sooner you learn compassion and self-grace, the less stress your spirit carries around. And take it from me, that shit's heavy.</p>Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9042564.post-3830970691658327412020-12-22T01:30:00.065-06:002020-12-22T01:30:01.906-06:0045 Years Of Hate<p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p>Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9042564.post-54520733991877365942020-12-02T14:52:00.001-06:002020-12-02T15:05:53.310-06:00I Bought A Car! Wait, What???<p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p>Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9042564.post-11050408993923517582020-11-08T13:51:00.000-06:002020-11-08T13:51:08.321-06:00For The Love Of Music<p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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: <a href="http://blogtalkradio.com/inmuchlessdetail">blogtalkradio.com/inmuchlessdetail</a></p><p>Politics: Fuck Donald Trump.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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!</p><p>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."</p><p>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.</p>Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9042564.post-81921236586964980382014-07-26T19:53:00.002-05:002014-07-26T21:29:57.785-05:00Watching Death From A DistanceI had to watch my beloved mother-in-law die in Murfreesboro, TN, three hours from the home my wife and I share in Cordova. My wife was there for her mother in her last days. I stayed here to watch the house, although if the vehicle we're using these days wasn't her uncle's aged pickup truck but rather something sturdier, I would have made the drive to be there. It wouldn't have been easy for me, because I don't deal with death well, but I would have done it.<br />
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I'm sure I've talked on this blog somewhere about my emotions when my mother died in 1986 when I was ten years old. I basically shut down emotionally, refusing to go to her bedside for her final days and refusing to go to her funeral. Pretty immature, even for a ten-year-old, but I guess I just wanted to pretend it didn't happen or that it wasn't a big deal, even though it was the most shocking moment of my life. I haven't had to deal with much death since. My grandmother raised me after my mom died, then she kicked in 1994 right after I completed high school. She had been sick, so it wasn't a big shock, and I was able to absorb that loss much easier. I've attended two funerals since--my grandmother's two brothers around a decade and a half ago. So my reaction to seeing my mother-in-law dying had I been there probably would have been some version of an emotional shutdown because it was a sudden and swift illness--an ovarian cancer and kidney failure combo--and I would have been in a position with which I'm not very familiar. My wife said she wanted me there to support her during that very stressful two weeks, but I'm not sure if I would have provided anything besides a shoulder.<br />
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My wife had to watch it happen right in front of her, and she's been dealing with it predictably, sobbing at Outback during our first dinner after she returned home. I basically got a play-by-play over the phone for that two-week period--the hospital stay, the surgery, the complications, the digestive system breakdown, the dialysis treatments, the doctor's conflicting diagnoses, the eventual decision that it wasn't going to work out and the in-home hospice care that wasn't very caring on the final night. My wife was the last voice she heard. "Don't be afraid to walk into Jesus's arms," my wife whispered to her, and seconds later, she stopped breathing. I was asleep when she died. My wife called four times, then finally gave up and texted me, "Mom just died." When I saw all the missed calls the next morning, I knew before I even read the text.<br />
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It was a rough couple of weeks for me. You may not think it would be seeing that I wasn't there watching it happen like my wife was. And I'm not saying it was anywhere near as rough as she had it. But I had shit going on inside of me as well. I had a lot of guilt for not being there for my wife, and also not being there for my mother-in-law, who I'm sure would have liked to have my support. I had a deep sense of loss because I just gained a new mother three years ago when I married her only daughter, and before I could really have a bonding conversation or some kind of intimate talk where we get beneath the surface and really get to know each other, she was gone. I had a nagging guilt for signing up for scoring Memphis Redbirds baseball games once I knew my wife was going to be in Murfreesboro for a while, before we knew her mother was dying. The night she died, I was asleep because I was tired from working a baseball game that day and then driving to a wrestling match that night. I guess I felt like taking advantage of my bachelor status to enjoy myself to the fullest, but afterwards, I always felt like a little turd, running around like a kid whose parents left town and left him the car. And naturally, there was the mortality that everyone contemplates when someone close dies. I've had issues with my mortality ever since I almost passed out during that cruise last summer, and almost every day, I choose to eat bad foods and not exercise and I beat myself up for doing it and I wonder how many days can I waste doing that before I pass out permanently, and then I do it again the next day. Yes, that's a really crappy way to live, and I'm going to see a therapist next week.<br />
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The memorial service was very nice, but the moment that got to me emotionally was a little odd, which is perfect for me since I feel a little odd every second of my life. It was seeing a poster board at the entrance of the church where well-wishers could write messages for the deceased, and the first message was from two women who were longtime friends of my mother-in-law. They dubbed themselves "The Three Musketeers." When the minister asked for volunteers to share memories, one of the Three Musketeers was the first to stand up, before any family members or other friends, and something about hearing her speak made me think about the only friend I have, "Jacob," and what he's going to say at my memorial (probably some off-color stories). That touched me. Seeing friends cry hard and talk about how much they missed their buddy reminded me of how fortunate you are if you have friends who love you that much. Or maybe I was affected by the thought of how many people I knew during my time on Earth who wouldn't be at my funeral because we have lost touch. Or because they don't care about me. I try to be a tough guy on the outside and act like I don't give a fuck about anyone who did me wrong, but I guess I'm not as tough as I try to be. I hate that "Ronnie" and I spent that much time together and we won't be there for each other now that we're older and hopefully more mature. I hate all those moments I spent with "Karen" and "Torrie" and "Sarah" and The Co-Worker Who Shall Remain Nameless and "Giselle," none of whom I anticipate ever seeing again. I hate that I'm nowhere near my family and Jacob and "Drew" logistically, so if I do keel over after another chicken tender at Gus's, they wouldn't be able to make it down here in time to say goodbye. All those thoughts flashed before me during the service. I stood up and spoke about my mother-in-law, about how nice she was to me, as she was to everyone, and how she had four pictures from our wedding on her shelves, which is three more pictures than we have of our own wedding. Then we sat around at the church for a few hours sharing stories and fellowship and, for some of us, bringing the excruciating last few weeks to a close.<br />
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We'll be dealing with the aftermath for a while emotionally and in a tangible way. My wife has to slog through a lot of paperwork in settling the estate, and soon we'll have to drive back to the home and clean it out in preparation to try to sell it. We have her mother's car, a Honda Accord, and my wife bequeathed me her mother's laptop computer, so there are daily reminders of her here at home. We'll be planning a trip to Florida to scatter her mother's ashes into the ocean. What my wife has told me she has really taken away is how loved her mother was. People came through to wish her well during her illness, and no one had an ill word for her ever. "I have big shoes to fill," my wife said. We should all have such a legacy.<br />
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Rest in peace Mama Howell.Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9042564.post-46528667533165191712014-06-04T17:30:00.000-05:002014-06-05T16:44:48.288-05:00Four Words For The Next Elliot Rodger: They're Not Worth It<i>That could have been me.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
I watched a couple of Saturdays ago, ironically the weekend of the tenth anniversary of me spending Memorial Day weekend in a psych ward, as CNN reported on the shootings near the campus of California-Santa Barbara carried out by a male teenage virgin frustrated at emotional and sexual rejection by girls, and I had to think about my own mental frailties when it came to women. There have been many killings over the years by people who were pushed over the edge by the treatment of others, but this and the Columbine killings spoke directly to me. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were bullied and punished daily by high-schoolers who felt they didn't fit in, and the result of that was Columbine, and I almost got their names tattooed on me when it happened because I could identify. I don't necessarily condone killing people who make you feel bad, but like Chris Rock would say, "I understand." The same goes for Elliot Rodger. I don't condone stabbing guys and running over random people before opening fire on more random people, but I get it. Rodger felt like the last guy in the world that girls would desire, and living with that thought was too much for him. Nobody gets that more than me.<br />
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Even before the situation with "Karen" made me decide to check myself into a mental institution in May 2004, I had thoughts about women and society and rejection that could have morphed into me going homicidal if I wanted access to firearms. I can't pinpoint where in my childhood I went off the rails, but I still remember the names of my kindergarten (Laurie), 1st grade (Petra), 2nd grade (Margaret), 3rd grade (Kyra), 4th through 6th grade (Lisa), junior high <a href="http://planetdre.blogspot.com/2011/10/my-history-9th-in-series.html">(Tammi)</a>, and young adult crushes, all unrequited, and how disappointed and angry I got when I didn't get what I wanted. I've learned from the media coverage of Rodger that there's a name for what I was feeling--Entitled. Funny, I never felt like I was entitled, but if the experts say I did, I guess it must be true. Anyway, I endured puberty with the raging hormones and active imagination of many males my age, but I also had obesity, a penchant for overdramatizing, a lack of class, and an obvious desperation, probably stemming from losing my mother at age ten. So it's not surprising looking back that I wasn't successful. But the pain of being what Rodger and certain chat room occupants of his ilk would call "InCel," or involuntarily celibate, hurt very badly.<br />
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I didn't have a manifesto exactly, but I have a black folder of poems and songs and short stories that I wrote over the course of my twenties, when I was coming up with writing ideas and being creative, before gambling and depression and everyday living sapped me of the energy. Here's a small sampling of the anger and resentment of women that pumped through me back then:<br />
<br />
<i>Untitled</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Thought you were a nice girl</i><br />
<i>Then I saw you drunk</i><br />
<i>Thought you had good taste in men</i><br />
<i>Then I saw you with that punk</i><br />
<i>_________________________________________________________________________________</i><br />
<i>My Last Endeavor</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>...Why do so many feel the need to hurt me</i><br />
<i>When all I'm looking for is hope?</i><br />
<i>If I open up to many more users</i><br />
<i>I may reach the end of my rope</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>This is my last endeavor</i><br />
<i>I can't take much more pain</i><br />
<i>This is my last endeavor</i><br />
<i>Think I'm gonna go insane...</i><br />
<i>_________________________________________________________________________________</i><br />
<i>Untitled</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>...I discover that women are brought up with the notion that the intelligent kid with the innocent qualities and physical flaws is the worst available. Beat up women? More desirable than me. Do drugs? Smoke? Hey, that's sexy today. Have a horrible personality but work out? You can't keep the girls away from you. Sometimes I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe. This world makes no Goddamn sense.</i><br />
<i>________________________________________________________________________________</i><br />
<i>What's It Like?</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>What's it like to be beautiful?</i><br />
<i>To look good and be adored?</i><br />
<i>What's it like to receive attention?</i><br />
<i>I'd like to know</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>What's it like to be with someone?</i><br />
<i>Someone who is there for you?</i><br />
<i>What's it like to have an actual partner?</i><br />
<i>I'd love to know...</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>They say you must love yourself</i><br />
<i>Before anyone else can</i><br />
<i>But they don't say what it's like</i><br />
<i>When no one else cares</i><br />
<i>When you don't matter</i><br />
<i>To the rest of the world...</i><br />
<i>________________________________________________________________________________</i><br />
<i>Self-Loathing: The Remix</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>...Where's my soul mate, where's my love</i><br />
<i>Women want to use me and then drop me from above</i><br />
<i>Step on my broken heart with their six-inch heels</i><br />
<i>And no one else in the world knows how it feels...</i><br />
<i>_________________________________________________________________________________</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
And there's so much more: The rape fantasy short story about a woman who rejected me in real life (she falls for me and has real sex with me at the end), the outline for a longer story, or maybe a novel, called "The Greatest Summer Of My Life," which was about a fed-up young man seeking out every woman who scorned him and going on a killing spree...yes, it was that bad in my head for a long time. I haven't actually found any of Elliot Rodger's manifestos or videos and watched them because, frankly, I'm frightened at how much like me he might sound. I don't need to be confronted with precisely how sociopathic I might have been at the apex of my anger at the world. I'm legitimately surprised at how much of my writing was just that angry. I mean, I knew obviously, but I didn't realize to what extent.<br />
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Again, I'm the guy that blew a gasket at a woman secretly running a sex club even though I was cheating on her, so my irrational anger at women is already very well-documented on this here blog. There are other recountings of my dealings with girls and women through the years, but I don't want to list them on this post. My point is, if you didn't think you knew of a man carrying the kind of nuclear hatred that it took for Rodger to do what he did, look around. You may be surprised. And if you're male and you didn't think other guys understood your struggle, well, most of them don't, but I do. And I've come out the other end of that shit to tell you that eventually, believe it or not, no matter how lonely you are, it turns out alright.<br />
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Ignore the fact that I'm married to a sweet, intelligent woman who's way out of my league in terms of how good she is. It started to get better before I met her. Going back to my blog postings in 2006, after the "Shelley" experiment in which I dated the most vile, mean woman in the world just to see how long she would treat me like shit, I was showing signs of figuring out that whole "Love yourself" thing that I referenced in the above poem "What's It Like?" That was the whole key. I had to finally realize that I have to take care of myself in this world above anything else, and if I meet someone along the way, fine, but that's not the purpose. In other words, the pussy ain't worth the struggle. Now, figuring that out came at the same time as passing age 30, which now, at age 38, sure feels like I passed some threshold where my testosterone has dropped off drastically and took the edge off. So perhaps it goes hand-in-hand with mentally coming to grips with the fact that no one else was going to give a fuck about me. But I know this: From puberty to about that same age 30, I was a ravenously horny young man, willing to screw anything that moved, and my pursuit of sex consumed me and made me make some incredibly shitty decisions, and that cut off after "Grace" the one-night stand, which happened two weeks after my 30th birthday. I must admit, I don't miss feeling like getting pussy is the beginning and end of my existence.<br />
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But I actually feel terrible for the guys who are still sort of prisoners of their own cocks, unable to see their lives past the asses of the girls walking in front of them. It sucks. From what I've heard of the guys who got laid regularly, it still sorta sucked because without meaning, it was a series of empty endeavors. My problem was, once I got a nice run of empty endeavors, I put meaning behind them where my partners weren't necessarily looking for that. So what would I suggest for the young men who feel like me and like Elliot Rodger?<br />
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This three-step process: First, no matter how hard it is, tell yourself that they're not worth it. If you're being driven crazy by ladies choosing other guys over you, I empathize, but you need to stop. Women will do what they want with their bodies and their hearts, and if you do what you can to persuade them and it doesn't work, that's not the be all and end all. It's their loss. Some will even use your lust of them against you and tease you. It's okay. You're going to listen to your lovers and please them in and out of bed and treat them as well as possible, and if you keep striking out, that's just a long list of females that missed out on an opportunity. Second, you have got to keep steppin' and do your thing. I had to talk to myself in a mirror for a full hour in order to start the process of living my life for myself and not for the pursuit of pussy. Whatever you have to do, do it. But at the end of the day, you have to come to the realization that there is a world out there chock full of things that bring you pleasure, whether it's sports, art, music, food, television, movies, or sitting in a park looking at petunias, or cars, or the clouds, or whatever. You have your career, your education, your health, your living space--you have a plethora of things on which to focus and improve yourself and be the best you can be. The pussy almost definitely will come once you focus on those things--"love yourself"--because people are more attracted to those who are not desperately seeking love. Seems a little cruel and unfair, but that's how it works. Third, there is a media assault on libidos for the sake of selling things, and I think if you're frustrated by girl problems, you should avoid images and news that throw it back in your face. It's in our nature as men to find beauty in women, so it's very difficult to take our eyes away from them, but you may have to. Use the information that men respond to visual stimulation to your advantage and avoid that stimuli. Nothing drove me crazier than seeing couples walking around because to me it was a gaggle of women choosing someone other than me and telling me to fuck off by parading in front of me. They weren't doing that on purpose, of course. But if it hurts to see hot women because you want them so bad, then don't look at them. The knockout in your classroom every day that gives you a hard-on just walking through the hall? You control your eyes, not her. Look somewhere else. The porn star in your dreams every night? If you're starting to obsess, find a new hobby. Can't believe Kim Kardashian married that prick Kanye? Don't go to TMZ.com looking for the latest updates. That red-headed hottie in the car commercial? She's there to sell cars, dumbass. She doesn't care about you. It's not easy to avoid beautiful women, but if they're driving you nuts, then they're not worth the short-term pleasure of looking at them.<br />
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And finally, you can add this as a last step because it's made a big difference for me: Stop caring what women think of your thoughts and desires. You're never going to arrive at a stage of enlightenment until you're honest with yourself about what you're going through. I hid a lot of my frustration because I was afraid of what women would think. I didn't hide all of it, but I've only let two people sift through that black folder full of my innermost rage--an older woman who acted as sort of a surrogate mother, and my wife. I felt shame for years and years. I felt like I was the only man going through these issues. Only now that I'm older do I realize that if I had spoken more openly about my feelings, I would have found others wanting to have a similar dialogue, and by talking more, I would have rid myself of some of the rage that made me write those hateful things. When I think of where I am now mentally, it's so much different than it was back when I was Elliot Rodger's age. I'm telling all you guys feeling like him, hang on. Life gets better. Navigate those tough waters, as hard as it is and as long as it takes, because life does get better. Even if I were single today, it would still be better.Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9042564.post-64554932842141741492014-03-29T07:01:00.000-05:002014-03-29T07:08:07.606-05:00Can't Sleep, So I TypeEver since I got this CPAP mask for my sleep apnea, it's been a very rare occasion when I have not been able to go back to sleep after waking up in the middle of the night. But this is one of those nights, which is now not night but rather early Saturday morning before I trudge off to work. I've been awake for two hours but it's felt like all night, and I actually don't know why. I didn't have caffeine after my second cup of coffee yesterday morning. I may have been a little amped up watching the two college basketball games that ended around the same time last night after 11P, but I managed to fall asleep within an hour of those conclusions. I just woke up around 3:30A and never fell back asleep. I may have had failed relationships on my mind subconsciously because I ran through them in my mind as I attempted to fall back asleep, but it didn't work to make me sleepy this time, just more and more anxious. So I'm typing out some of my anxieties in an attempt to help the time pass before I have to shower and go to work, and also to try to hash out some of what could be on my mind that made me not fall back asleep for the first time in a long, long time.<br />
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Before the thoughts of past failed relationships clouded my head a couple of hours ago, I had a somewhat stressful past week living the ups and downs of the college basketball tournament, and that certainly needs to be explained by me because the tournament by itself is no reason to stress anyone out. But you may have heard about billionaire Warren Buffett announcing the concept of giving away one billion dollars--$1,000,000,000!!--for free to any schlub who signed up for his bracket challenge and submitted a perfect bracket, that is, predicted all six rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament correctly before the tournament began. That's a 64-team bracket, 63 games to predict correctly, and the odds of anyone doing it are so astronomical that I won't even go Google it again because it's depressing. But I signed up anyway because I always sign up for these bracket challenges, even when the prize is a Best Buy gift card or something else relatively meaningless, because it's always free to sign up for these things, and why can't I have the best bracket someday? I can get lucky, right? Well, the first day of the tournament was last Thursday, and I was off work because it's my normal off day, and so I got to watch live as the first game of the day was an upset that I predicted correctly...then the rest of those first games all went in my favor...then the second slate of games all went in my favor...then I started humblebragging on Twitter about my perfect afternoon...then Dove Men + Care started Tweeting at me from out of nowhere asking for my upset picks for the evening games, of which I only had one...then the evening games played out in unreal fashion with three different overtime nail-biters, including one where the team I picked was losing by double digits late in the game but somehow rallied to force OT, and then all of those picks won, including my only upset pick of the night...then I go to sleep and wake up to see that the late games all went my way, capping off a perfect 16-0 first day. I went to work absolutely flying high. My brain kept bouncing the impossibility of a perfect bracket off the improbability of a perfect first day, and if I did that, why couldn't I keep it going, even though it had nothing to do with me and everything to do with which random team of 20-year-olds would decide not to show up that day and lose a game they should win? And what would my wife and I do with a billion dollars, and if Warren Buffett offered a buyout with three games to go, should I take it or negotiate or let it roll, and...the first game of the second day was Duke getting upset by some school I never heard of, and there went the dream. I had to watch the score slowly updating on my phone because I was on my lunch break, so that made it even more excruciating than if I were watching live. At least watching I can curse at the screen or something. The real stress came when I got home that night and read the rules of the Warren Buffett bracket contest and saw that the top 20 brackets each won $100,000. This money was absolutely within my grasp because I didn't have to have a perfect bracket, but rather just have a bracket better than almost everyone else, and that's still right there for me because I had only lost one game through the first 24 played, and I can pay all my bills and get a new car with that money, and go back to school, and it's still life-changing...and then I lost two more games Friday night, and one of those teams was one of my Final Four, basically fucking up any chance I had of having a top-20 bracket. I took more losses last weekend, and then last night, Louisville lost, and that was my championship prediction, and now there's completely no way I'm going to make anything off of this tournament, even with that perfect first day, and Dove Men + Care isn't Tweeting me anymore, and the podcast I did with "Jacob" the night before the tourney began documenting all of our picks that I thought would be out there as testament to my genius is instead just another set of ramblings by a loser, and I'm back to square one financially, and I don't know if that's the reason I couldn't sleep, but it may have been even though I really haven't thought about the game since it ended. But if you know me or have read this blog, you know that it doesn't take a whole lot to set off insecurities inside me about being a loser in life and coming up short and not being good enough.<br />
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That brought me to lying in bed at 3:30A cycling through all of my failed relationships, not just women, although almost all of them women, but "Ronnie" and even my dad as well. I didn't jump mentally to wanting to cycle through all of my failed relationships, that's just where my mind went hours after losing a big game in which I was invested even though I don't gamble any more. When I lose, I feel like a big loser, and it weighs on me. I guess that's why I was picking through all of my relationships, sexual or not. Speaking of weight, that's another issue I've been battling lately. I mean, I've always been a fat ass, but I had the health scare last year and the diabetes and high blood pressure crap my doctor dropped on me, and I improved my diet a little after that, but I've gone back to eating bad things, salty, sugary things, a lot, like, at least three sugary treats a day even when I don't intend to indulge, and I still feel like I could stop any time I really wanted to apply myself, but the truth is, I probably would fail at that too and cheat. Unless I leave my wallet at home and refuse to bring cookies and candy into the house, I am going to indulge when I get that craving because that craving is almost as strong as a sexual craving that would make me take liberties with a woman because I want nothing more at that moment than that woman. I'm sure there's a simple chemical explanation for it, but the same "I shouldn't but I can't help myself" craving that I have when I buy a sweet snack from the vending machine at work feels very much like the same craving I had when I was dating "Karen" but went on the internet and saw pictures of "Sarah" with clothespins on her nipples and sent e-mails to her telling her how hard she made my dick and how I had to have her. It's the same craving I had when I was dating Sarah yet felt compelled to flirt online with her daughter "Elaine," and the same craving when I lied to Sarah over the phone and told her that my co-worker and I were having an innocent dinner date while that co-worker had her legs wrapped around my waist. It feels like something bigger than me. It feels like if I don't answer that urge RIGHT DAMN NOW, my mind is going to explode, and in one swift motion, I'm typing that e-mail to Sarah, I'm typing that IM to The Co-Worker Who Shall Not Be Named and asking her to fuck me, I'm <a href="http://planetdre.blogspot.com/2008/07/my-history-8th-in-series.html">in a hotel room trying to fuck Susan's daughter</a> and her best friend, and once I get what I want, then everything's all good in my world, until I get that next craving. (Oh, and I've had that craving occur during my marriage. I've stopped myself from indulging other women, but I remember how strong that craving was when I was in my 20s, and I don't think I would have stopped myself.) The problem with answering the food urge is, I'm close to 400 lbs. and feel like shit most days, and I'm going to Chicago next weekend and I have to get around using public transportation because I don't have a car up there, and however lazy I was when I lived there, I'm worse now because I don't have to walk anywhere, and I'm anxious because I'm going to not enjoy my time up there as much as I want because I'm going to be so tired, and it pisses me off. I don't know with all this technology why I can't buy something that gets rid of 100 lbs. and gives me energy and lung capacity in about 15 minutes. Oh, and my uncle has been arranging conference calls with the folks who went with him on <a href="http://planetdre.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-wonderful-terrible-experience.html">that cruise last year</a> to discuss another cruise next May to the Caribbean or maybe Cozumel, Mexico, and what happened on last year's cruise? Oh yeah, my obese ass nearly passed out on the beach and had to be carted back to the boat. So as much fun as my wife and I had, talking about a new cruise brings back in my mind the anxiety over losing weight, and saving the money to pay for it, which brings back the anxiety over missing out on free money because of the college basketball games, and really ties it all together for me. Add in my coffee addiction (honestly, I can't go one morning now without a cup of coffee, and usually two), and my wife and I not connecting well lately between our being tired from work and all of the attention I pay to sports, and somewhere in all of that is the reason I was so anxious that I couldn't fall back asleep three and a half hours ago. And now it's time for me to go to work. This should be some day. I imagine with my lack of sleep and dredging up all sorts of old memories, I'm liable to snap and curse someone out if they get on my bad side. Hope I still have a job next time I write.Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9042564.post-74858020199639851222013-12-22T09:10:00.001-06:002013-12-22T09:10:16.171-06:0038 Years Of GluttonyThe time has come in my life to either change my relationship with food or succumb to its temptations and die of obesity. A couple of weeks after my wife and I returned from that cruise in which I almost passed out from the heat despite not really exerting all that much energy, I was at home alone having some kind of arthritic pain in my foot that made me search for some medicine. I couldn't find any aspirin or ibuprofen in the house, but I came across some Oxycontin that my dentist gave me two years ago when I had some teeth yanked. I actually contemplated taking more than one, but thankfully, I only popped one. I'm still paying for it financially. That one old, poisonous Oxy pill an hour later had me shaking, sweating profusely, heart racing, then it made me vomit, and I'm so dumb that I honestly wondered if I was just having a heart attack, so I called 911 and took my first ambulance ride, which cost about $1400 after insurance knocked $1500 off the top. The emergency room doc concluded that it probably was a reaction from the Oxy that made me go through all that, but I am obese, so he referred me to a regular doctor just to get checked out. That regular doc ran blood tests that revealed me to be a borderline diabetic. We know by now what comes with a diagnosis of diabetes--that list of foodstuff of which you're supposed to restrict consumption. Sugars, starches, cake, cookies, bread, soda, chips, you know, anything that actually tastes good. So for the last few months, I've been watching what I eat as carefully as I ever have, which isn't all that careful, really. Now, a twist in the narrative is that being borderline diabetic, the doctor told me to check my glucose every morning for two weeks and change my diet and exercise a little and see if that dropped me below the threshold where I technically wouldn't be a diabetic, and if I could manage to do that, I wouldn't have to go on any kind of medicine to slow down the way my body absorbs carbohydrates, which is what my wife has to do. And I did it! I've done a ten-minute power-walking exercise that I found On Demand maybe five or six times, but that's more than I usually exercise. And I've made myself stop and think before I take that fudge cookie or Pop-Tart and contemplate if I'm hungry and eating this legitimately or if I'm just looking for a sweet flavor for my mouth, and if I'm just looking for sweets, then I'll deny myself the food totally or go for a healthier option, like an apple or banana or even the fruit gummy snacks, which aren't healthy but are better than a Snickers.<br />
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It's a situation that threatens to drive me bananas, pun intended. My relationship with food is such that I've always gone for the extra portion, the appetizer, the dessert, the side dish, everything I could get my hands on, I consumed it. There's a couple of reasons for that, I believe. One is that I've had an underlying unhappiness with life that had made me use food as a substitute for fulfillment. The other is that being poor all my life, I learned early on to take everything I could get my hands on because I don't want to waste anything. My wife is amazed at the expired or unappealing food that I will shove down my throat just because I don't want to throw it away. So to look at cookies and Pop-Tarts in my cabinet and constantly turn away because I'm not actually hungry has been challenging and difficult. And to choose items on restaurant menus that give me a vegetable as a side dish over mac and cheese or mashed potatoes has been difficult too. The fact that the doctor says my diabetes is being managed by my choices is the only thing giving me hope that I can keep this up as I enter my 38th year on Planetdre. I have to keep making the right choices to stay around and enjoy life, and I have to step it up and exercise regularly as well if I want to go on another cruise and not drop dead. There's all kind of obstacles in my way. Eating healthier is expensive in this country because, like housing and education, it's something earned by the privileged. Exercising in the midst of a workweek that grinds you down is very hard, especially if you've never been disciplined enough to work out before. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Next year, I have to do better for myself. Whether that means going full OCD and making an exercise schedule and diet regime or what, I don't know. But I'm kinda interested in doing that just to see if I could pull it off. There's always the fear of trying something ambitious and failing. That will always be inside me as well. But ultimately, those are all just excuses. I took a motherfuckin' ambulance ride. Maybe because of the Oxy, but maybe not. If I want to avoid the helplessness of that feeling, I have to change. The gluttony and eating as much as I can has to change. I'm not hanging out with the guys at the all-you-can-eat prime rib joint anymore. I have nothing to prove to anyone by seeing if I can take down that footlong sub sandwich with double meat. The six-inch flatbread will do just fine, thanks. There will be nothing easy about it. But it has to be done.<br />
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No more excuses.Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9042564.post-83566833590951840872013-07-31T19:01:00.000-05:002013-07-31T20:56:29.595-05:00A Wonderful, Terrible Experience: The Planetdre Cruise ReviewIt was everything one could imagine, for good and for bad. I had a great time, the most fun I've had probably in any one-week period, and I would certainly do it again. Also, I'm sitting here with a cough and sore throat and chest that I've had ever since the next-to-last day of the cruise, no doubt an illness my wife and I contracted through the unchecked petri dish that is a cruise ship. It will result in this post being somewhat abbreviated, since I've been so sick since getting back that I'm sure I will forget some details. Oh yeah, and I almost passed out from the heat. Let's get this party started!<br />
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Our adventure began last Sunday, July 21. The wife and I packed up our suitcases and carry-on bags and headed to Memphis International Airport, where we watched her 2001 Corolla sputter and shut off the moment we made it to the airport parking lot. Poor Bessie carried us as far as she could. But since the car has cut off before and started right back up, we assumed (and hoped and prayed) that it would be all good for our return trip home in a week. We chose the economy parking lot because picking the lot closer to the terminals was $5 more per day, and we didn't know how much money we'd have left by the time this trip was over. Saving every little penny is what allowed us to take the cruise in the first place, so we weren't going to stop now. The hustle with our luggage through the walkways and hallways was a burden, but we were making great time, so we stopped at Cinnabon, which had a burrito place next to it, and we had lunch. The flight to Miami left and landed on time. The approach to landing in Miami was breathtaking. So much water! And such beautiful looking resorts and swimming pools, especially in Doral, which we couldn't afford to stay. I assumed the place with the huge fountain that looked like an outdoor palace was the Fountainbleau, again, out of our price range. The wife had us set up at the InterContinental, which wasn't a fleabag at all, but it wasn't some $1,000-per-night posh castle. As I expected from a busy cosmopolitan city like Miami, there were cabs in front of the hotel ready to be flagged down, but the first one I tried to hire asked me where we were going, heard InterContinental, shook his head, and drove off. That was a surprise. I didn't think this place was an unreasonable request, seeing that the wife chose it because of its close proximity to the airport and also the Port of Miami, where we would catch our boat the next day. We nervously flagged down another cabbie who decided to take us on our way. Something about our clothes or demeanor or something prompted him to ask, without us saying anything, "So, you're in town to take a cruise tomorrow?" This would become a theme for our stay in Miami, as no less than four different people guessed that about us. I guess nobody in their right mind takes big suitcases to Miami and just stays there. Kinda sad. I loved Miami for the night I was there. Colorful, vibrant, everyone walking around seemed to be engaged in a loud, engrossing conversation, although half of them were in Spanglish and therefore unintelligible. There's one or two apartment buildings in all of Chicago the pink-peach color of most of the Miami skyline. It's awesome. Dancing seductively on the windows of our 30+-story hotel viewable from the outside was a woman's silhouette. A Christmas-color tour boat floated along the water outside, partying and carrying on past 10P local time. A selfie I took of myself outside the hotel captured the overhang turning purple because it turned different colors for no apparent reason other than this is Miami. Oh, and two women walked off the elevator as we were walking on that could not have been anything other than prostitutes based on their attire and makeup. A guy who was with his wife turned all the way around to stare, ignoring the spouse on the other side of him. They were behind us, so yeah, I was turned all the way around, too. "Welcome to Miami, huh!" I said to the guy. He smiled broadly. In related news, I'm moving to Miami if I ever get divorced.<br />
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The InterContinental was first class all the way. The room was gorgeous. The minibar had a note that said they would send in a team and clear the bar out of the fridge if you want to use it for your own food, at a small charge of $25. The tiny Pringles and M&Ms cans were $5. Each. So was the bottle of water. Our room service came out to over $80, and all we had was a salad, a shrimp cocktail, two Cuban sandwiches, and a can of ginger ale. The wife couldn't finish her Cuban, but she couldn't save it in the fridge because that note made it seem like we would be charged just for moving shit around. She actually kept the packets of mayo and Dijon mustard and took them on the cruise because they were so big and flavorful, although she didn't use them. That Cuban sandwich was the bomb. We both loved it. I figured I'd get the best Cuban I ever had in Miami, and I was right, but I didn't think it would be from a hotel. But room service was our best option because a food court more than a half mile away and a pricey restaurant downstairs were the only other food choices, and after the walking and traveling to leave Memphis, we weren't up for the half-mile trek. The bathroom had a two-head shower, presumably for two extroverts to get dirty and clean together. Instead of a clock radio, there was an iPod dock with a clock. Fancy. There were people racing each other on speedboats in the water right outside our 29th-floor room, and we could hear them clearly through our thin windows. We saw a yacht sail in that looked pretty big from our room and absolutely monstrous when we went downstairs and stood next to it. It was so big, it had four tables with four chairs each in a corner of the yacht for dinners. And the next morning, we saw four or five cruise ships pull in across the water, and our mouths dropped. These ships were enormous! And ours was the Carnival Victory, and it was the biggest of them all. Twelve stories, a billion feet long, with this whale's tail design sticking up from the top that made it even taller. We had breakfast downstairs, checked out, and caught a cab to our ship.<br />
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My uncle, who arranged this whole thing, was texting me that morning, as he and his family were staying in Fort Lauderdale, about 25 miles from Miami. But they actually beat us to the boat. Official departure was at 4P, and we got there at just past 1, but they were already on the ship and eating lunch. And we thought we were early. Embarking the boat, we got separated from our luggage. The process is such that you have to give up your big luggage to the crew so they can deliver them to your room later, allowing you to take your carry-on luggage through the embarkation without being weighed down. It went very smoothly. We showed our passports, went through screening, received our stateroom keys which doubled as our on-board credit cards, bought the Bottomless Bubbles program which allowed both of us to receive endless soft drinks for the whole cruise at a cost of about $36 each, took pics, and wound up on the 9th floor, where a pool was already being utilized by early boarders and where food was being served. And that right there is probably why we got sick--the 9th floor, where there were lines for deli sandwiches and pizza and burgers and buffets, also contained swimming pools and whirlpools, where anyone could get half-naked and spread their germs around. One could jump in a pool, pick up something disgusting from a fellow cruiser, and then immediately get in line for pizza, dripping and leaving sweat (and other fluids) on the counters and walls. I almost pulled a muscle walking through the pool area to get to the food because I kept slipping on all the water (and other fluids). Ick, ick, ick.<br />
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Anyway, we found a mother and daughter who used to bowl with my uncle and me, and we sat with them for an hour because they told us that our rooms would not be ready until 1:30. An announcement came over the speakers that said our rooms were all now ready, and it was indeed a little after 1:30. After my uncle and his family found us and greeted us, we made our way to our room on the 1st floor. Great, if this ship goes down, we'll be the first ones wet. The room was a nice size, with two twin beds shoved together to make a king size bed, and also a couch and a chair with footstool facing a mirror. The bathroom was small, with only a stand-up shower, a toilet, and one facebowl. The TV, which was not a flat screen and had a fuzzy display, was tuned to a repeating 10-minute tutorial to prepare us for a mandatory boat-wide safety demonstration scheduled for around 3:30, right before our 4:00 sail. This turned out to be a bit of a nightmare. The tutorial warned us that elevators would not be available during this time, so once we figured out that our section of the boat would have to go to the 4th floor for this thing, I became concerned about climbing three flights of stairs. I wasn't thrilled about the possibility, but I was worried about my 5-foot-3, not-so-thin wife, who really struggles on stairs. She didn't seem to think that the elevators would be out for this exercise, but indeed they were, so there we were on the stairs, climbing to the 4th floor and standing next to other sweaty, out-of-breath vacationers wondering how long this damn thing was going to take. I could feel the sweat dripping off of my head. We stood for a good ten minutes waiting for late stragglers to arrive. An asshole behind us actually yelled, "Hey guys, thanks for coming on time!" I didn't think that was necessary. We get it, you were here on time and now you're being inconvenienced waiting for the others. Who fucking cares. Yelling at them won't solve the issue. We finally watched the crew execute the drill teaching us how to put on life jackets in case of emergency, which took about 15 minutes because there were so many steps. Then we were dismissed by section over the loudspeaker, prompting a big cheer by everyone as if we were 8th-graders who had just been told we had been let out of school for the summer.<br />
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My wife then made the first of several moves that proved once and for all that she is in the better shape between us two and that I am the lazier of the two: We waited for elevators for a couple of minutes to take us to the 9th floor, where we could watch the boat sail off and take pictures, then she started up the stairs. I thought she was just going to the 5th floor to catch that elevator, but she didn't stop. She kept going, floor by floor, stopping to catch her breath at the 8th floor, and when I started walking towards the elevators to get to the 9th, she scoffed and headed up the stairs for one more flight. I followed behind, and our pics of us as we set sail show a perfectly fine wife and a smiling me just drenched in sweat and worn out. I honestly was shocked that she decided to do nine flights of stairs in all. Just on a whim. Between this day and running through the airport the day before, my vacation was off to a very tiring start.<br />
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Our dinners were scheduled in the main dining rooms by time, so we always had a choice--eat dinner on the 9th floor in the cafeteria with the other disease carriers, or join our people in our assigned seats in the main dining room with a classier menu and dress code. We chose to eat with our people every night at 8:15, but the first night, there was an issue: We decided to be early so as to make sure we were seated on time because we heard that the table may not get served if everyone isn't there at the assigned time. However, the staff decided that punctuality was important to them as well. So we stood in the lobby of our main dining room at 8:10 with everyone else, waiting for the doors to be opened. It got humid quick as we stood shoulder-to-shoulder with other hungry people. I could see workers cleaning and setting up tables in the dining room, so it looked like this wasn't just an issue of making us wait until our assigned times, but also, they weren't quite ready yet. Finally they let us in, but the head chef, a native of India with a thick accent, tried telling us all where we were supposed to go according to our table numbers. It was a fail. Almost everyone wound up walking up to him and asking him where to go. This guy was also our personal waiter, as it turned out, so the language barrier continued to be a problem. Many times during the week someone from our party requested something from our waiter, only to have him bring something else. But his overall service was very good, and the food was exquisite. Prime rib, salmon, Mahi Mahi, shit I can't pronounce--it was all good. He even played some magic tricks on us, dabbing some chocolate sauce on the backs of my older cousin's hands, putting a handkerchief over them, saying some kind of incantations, and winding up with the chocolate off of the back of her hands but now on the palms. We decided that we shouldn't criticize the food at that point even if we didn't like it, because who knew what this chef dude was capable of. He also brought out a congratulations cake for my uncle, who got his Master's and retired. He still doesn't know who arranged the surprise cake, but he's going to get that person, because it was a big surprise, with the other waiters coming over and singing "Happy Congratulations to you!" and embarrassing him in a major way. I wish I could take credit, but I'm not bright enough to think this one up. The one other memorable thing about our dinners in the main dining room is that the waiter didn't bother himself with fetching our drinks. There was a clear hierarchy where the other waiters under him got water and lemonade for us, and if we wanted something else, he would send over the bartender. Well, the bartender found out what every other drink server found out during the cruise: My wife and I don't do booze, and we have the Bottomless Bubbles sticker on our card, so not only do you have to fetch us soft drinks, but you're not getting paid for them, and you're not getting tipped. And why aren't they getting tipped? Oh, I didn't tell you that they charge tips to your room key/charge card automatically, in bulk, up front, for every day on the cruise, all at once, to the tune of about $60 per person. Yep, they take the tips up front regardless of service. Oh, they encourage you in the literature to go to the front desk and adjust the tips up or down depending on quality of service, basically daring you to take money away if you have a crappy staff. That bartender in the dining room tried to ignore us the first couple of days once he figured out that we weren't going to be big spenders, but eventually I would get his attention and he would make his way over and take our soft drink orders, and you could see the disappointment on his face every time he found out that we weren't ordering the $10 margaritas or glasses of wine. Hey, sorry pal, but I have to get my Coke from you and no one else, so I'll patiently wait until I can get your attention and call you over. That's just how it goes.<br />
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The next day, Tuesday the 23rd, was the Fun Day at Sea, meaning we would be on the water the whole day trying to make it in time to the first stop, Grand Turk in the British property of Turks and Caicos. So we'd all have to entertain ourselves on the boat all day. There were enough activities on the ship to keep you busy between the comedy clubs and pools and deck chairs and casino and sports bar and spa and gym. After breakfast at the buffet, where we discovered that the omelette station with the real eggs were much more preferable over the powdered scrambled version, the wife and I spent a while in a whirlpool, where the instructions included "Please take your children on frequent bathroom breaks" and "Only spend 15 minutes in whirlpool to prevent overexposure." We put on some suntan lotion and caught some sun. Then I would take out my iPod and find my way to something called the Serenity Deck. When I read about it online, it seemed like this would be a great place for me to go to get away from all the activity on the main deck and escape with my headphones on, watching the ocean go by as I listened to relaxing music. Well, it wasn't as secluded as I hoped it would be. The main swimming pool was about 25 feet away and so was the pool's DJ, thumping bass-heavy tunes to shake your booty. I had to turn my music up so loud that it ceased being soft and relaxing. Also, it was very hard to find a chair. Granted, the wicker chairs were generally more comfortable than the deck chairs (one of which I broke), and the hammocks looked very serene. But the hammocks were always taken, and sometimes so were all the chairs. There was more walking and stairs involved in trying to find the damn Serenity Deck, so take all of this exercise and heat into consideration when I get to the part where I almost pass out. I found out the night before that the casino's poker offering consisted of one measly table, one no-limit cash game, and the table was electronic, meaning no cards or dealers. Bogus. And the tournament had a $150 entry fee, with the winner earning a shot at $150,000...wait for it...at a bigger tournament <b>on a different cruise in November.</b> Bullshit. So no poker for me. The dinner on this night was Formal Night, for which men had to have dress shoes and a shirt and tie. I didn't bring a sportcoat because I thought it was ridiculous enough that I was bringing real shoes and a shirt and tie on a fucking cruise. But I looked pretty good. The wife did too, and the boat's hoping that you think you look really good, because the staff went around taking pictures of everyone individually and as a couple, and they had a whole floor of the boat set up for you to look at the pictures and buy them for $15 a pop. And we actually bought a few, because no one at the table thought to get our own pictures on our own cameras. After I went back to the room and stripped off those clothes, I joined my uncle in the casino, won $60 playing blackjack, and retired for the night.<br />
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Wednesday was our first stop, at Grand Turk. There was a beach where you could set up and enjoy the sand and the water, but the wife and I chose to venture into the souvenir section, which leads to Margaritaville, the Jimmy Buffett-themed restaurant with the huge pool. We got off the boat somewhat late in the morning, so finding two deck chairs to sit on around the pool was a task. We noticed people hanging out in their own private cabanas, but renting those things was too pricey for us. Eventually we sat poolside and had some water and a Coke for me. I even stepped in the pool for a second, but only waist high. Can't risk getting the shirt wet. Then I might have to take it off, and I'm so ashamed of my body that the one thing I knew I wouldn't do on this trip is take my shirt off. We bought T-shirts in 4XL for $10 each, marveled at how cheap they were, and made our way back to the boat. I made another gambit for the Serenity Deck, intent on enjoying what little serenity it offered, and I even had a fruity drink--a pomegranate lemonade. Don't know what was in it, but it was strong. Everyone finds the thing they enjoy the most on a cruise, and mine was sitting in the wicker chairs watching awesome bikini bodies get in and out of the whirlpools and walk by. I managed to enjoy the Serenity Deck even with the swimming pool DJ pumping up the jams. The day set up to be largely relaxing, but the wife had other plans before and after dinner. She really wanted to take part in a Latin dance lesson scheduled for an hour before dinner, so we got dressed and made our way there, where the Dominican instructor worked us up into a sweat for a half-hour before we bailed and went to supper. My relaxed vibe was gone. So what did the wife want to do after supper? A Caribbean line dance on the main deck at 10:30. Whoo boy. And this is out where there's no air conditioning or anything. I indulged my spouse and slogged my way through a couple of dances, then I stood aside and dripped sweat for a few songs. I noticed my uncle and some members of our party on an upper deck looking down at us, and I could have ran up there and abandoned my wife, but I wanted to be a good sport, so I stayed close by. I was too close. The dance turned into the Wobble, decidedly not Caribbean, but a dance for which my wife and I had actually practiced. And so we Wobbled, and I sweat, and then another steppin' dance started and I tried to slink off, but the wife grabbed me by the shirt and made me do that dance too. Have I mentioned that I now see that my wife is in much better shape than me?? And I didn't know she desired to dance this much in public! I went to bed that night sore and exhausted.<br />
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Which brings us to Thursday, when we sailed to Half Moon Cay, described as Carnival Cruise's own "private island," with no other vacationers there except us several thousand occupants of the Victory. There would be a midday barbecue, and beach games, and sand castles, and it would just be awesome on top of awesome. The previous activity of the last four days had me worn out at this point, but the wife was excited to get into the water and enjoy the sand and surf. All I kept thinking was, there's no air conditioning on the beach. We had to catch a "tender boat" in order to get to the island because they didn't want to pull the ship all the way to the sand, for some reason. We arrived the the Cay at 7 in the morning, and because I thought there would be a mad scramble to get on these tender boats, I persuaded the wife to join me in breakfast, and we'd get out there at about 9 or 10. The problem with that was, it was hot as blazes, and there are these "clam shells" (big polyester circular tents) you can rent to shelter yourself from the unrelenting Caribbean sun, but you better get there early, or else you're going to have to walk in that sun a long ways down the beach to find an open one. We had to walk a decent amount to get to the sand, and then we hit that soft white sand, and oh God, it's so soft and you have to have good working muscles in order to slog your way through that stuff, and we both wound up having to stop and catch our breath before we even made it to the customer service booth to see if we could rent a clam shell. I finally made it up there, only to have to take a chair and suck some wind in order to get the question out of my mouth. And the answer, unfortunately, was there were some still available, but they were all the way down at the far end of the beach, and we weren't in condition to attempt that walk. So we settled on a couple of beach chairs, which offered no protection from the sun, and the wife dipped in the water for a few minutes, then she let me go in the water. (We couldn't both go in the water because our beach bags with our money and IDs would then be unprotected.) My trip into the water lasted three minutes because I refused to go more than waist deep, and because my muscles were so sore that I felt I was going to fall face-first with every wave. The wife encouraged me to go farther and get the full effects of the cool water, but I refused. After I walked to the nearby pirate bar to get a bottle of water, we watched a Baywatch Slow Run contest, then we went to the barbecue lunch. I discovered that because the island belongs to Carnival, my card with the Bottomless Bubbles sticker was valid, and I could have free Coke with my burger and chicken. This was not a good idea. I was already feeling dry and dehydrated from the heat. I needed water. Instead, I sucked down two Cokes with my heavy food and carried on.<br />
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While walking back from getting my second Coke and looking for my wife, I came across my uncle and his family, and his wife decided to come hang out with me and my wife for a while. What she didn't know was that I was feeling more and more sluggish and hot, and I wanted to get back on the boat. But she and my wife were enjoying the beach and wanted to go in the water more. I didn't want to disappoint them, and I wanted to go farther into the water, so I agreed to rent a board on which I could float and go into the water. But first, we would have to walk in the noon sun along the beach and find unused chairs, which were becoming harder and harder to locate. We finally plopped down on our towels in a plot of sand. My uncle's wife went into the water and encouraged me to come along, but I was pooped, so I said I'd come later, still intending to go rent a board. But as the minutes in that sun went on, and the effects of the heat and no water and that big lunch took its toll, I started feeling all kinds of bad things. Nausea. Shortness of breath. Very hot. Eventually, I started blacking out, or at least I assume that was what blacking out felt like, where I was looking up straight ahead with my eyes wide open yet things were going black. My wife asked if I needed the paramedics, and at first I declined, thinking this would go away so long as I stayed sitting down. Then I decided that I have no idea if I'm dying right now or what, so yeah, get the paramedic so I can go back on the ship. My legs went numb, but I think that was from sitting on that soft sand. My wife helped me sit up on a chair that a stranger brought over, and I was amazed at how everyone else on that beach seemed to be able-bodied and running around giving up chairs and dragging them over and not laboring at all, and I felt like a beached whale. My whole life of being out of shape had caught up with me in a major way. The men who helped me arrived after about ten minutes, which felt like eternity. They were big, muscle-bound guys, and each took one of my hands and lifted me onto my feet, and just that resulted in a better flow of air through my nose and mouth. They sat me in a two-person cart which had air conditioning, and that really made me feel better. One of them drove me to the tender boat, which would have been the longest walk ever had I tried to make it on foot, and he dropped me off on the hot concrete, where I struggled to put shoes on and wait for him to bring my wife. We then fought the waves of the smaller tender boat, which wasn't helping my nausea, and made it back on the Victory.<br />
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My wife spent the next few days lamenting having to leave Half Moon Cay early. She says that she thinks being in the water and cooling off would really have helped me, and she was looking forward to also getting back in the water. I was and am disappointed that I messed up my wife having a good time by being such a fat blob. I slept hard once we returned to our stateroom. I felt like I went as hard as I could go for my wife, between lugging the luggage and hitting the stairs on the boat and dancing before and after dinner the night before, and I gave out in the end. I exerted all the energy that I had, but it wasn't enough. Next vacation, I have to be in better shape than this, for my own joy and for my wife's. Dinner that night saw a more subdued me. With everyone asking if I was okay, I felt like the spark was gone and I needed to chill and take it easy the rest of the trip. I played face-up blackjack by myself after supper and dropped a quick $40, then I went to bed.<br />
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Friday began with someone from our party calling our room expecting us to be up and at 'em at 7A as we entered Nassau in the Bahamas. Neither my wife nor I were fully awake, although I was halfway up. My wife decided not to go into Nassau. She had finally hit her limit: A nagging Achilles tendon injury was flaring up. I actually wanted to go into Nassau, not very far or very long, mind you. I just wanted some T-shirts. The Victory staff had put a scare into everyone by slipping a note under our doors warning us to be very careful in Nassau due to rising crime, so I had no intention of going beyond the first place where I could buy a shirt or two. My uncle and his people were looking forward to an excursion to a resort called Atlantis, because there was more blackjack to be played. I wasn't interested. I found a T-shirt outlet and paid much more than the $10 I paid in Turks and Caicos, but I like my polo shirt and navy blue tee. I even got the wife a sky blue shirt (out of her own money, of course). That hour in Nassau was it for me. It wasn't too hot, I stopped any time I got a little short of breath, and I survived the crime threats. My cruise experience was done. I didn't try the whirlpool or the casino or anything else. Five days on that ship felt like five months. It was back to Miami and off the ship, thankful for the experience and at the same time taking some fantastic and horrible memories.<br />
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The adventure didn't end Saturday, though. American Airlines has not been good to either my wife or me throughout the years, and this was an all-timer. They canceled our flight due to mechanical issues, then they couldn't find a flight with a one-stop layover back to Memphis until 5 that evening. The only nonstop Miami-to-Memphis already left at 11 that morning. The wife and I were in the rescheduling line getting ready to have a fight about whether we should come back that night or stay in Miami and take the nonstop at 11 the next day. Luckily, she heard the attendant in her thick accent (everyone in Miami seems to have a thick accent) say that American would pay for the room, which made me relent and stay in Miami. I wanted to go back to work on Sunday to show off my tan and brag about the cruise, but I was already starting to feel sick, so that probably wasn't a good idea anyway. The room was at a Holiday Inn, a step or two or fifty down from the InterContinental, and the wait for a shuttle bus to the hotel was a half-hour on foot, so this segment of the trip wasn't a walk in the park either. But American also paid for three meals at the hotel, so at least once we got there, we had a king-size bed and food. We also had a dusty wall air-conditioning unit, which didn't help my illness. I had another Cuban sandwich for dinner, not nearly as good as the first one, then we had a breakfast buffet and skidaddled. Side note: This guy, a monster baseball fan, was in Miami a few miles from the new Marlins stadium, and they played a game that night, and the events of that week wiped me out so much that I never even checked the schedule to see if they were playing. Only when I saw the highlights that night on ESPN did I realize that I could have been there. You know what I thought about more? What if I were single in Miami on a Saturday night in a situation where I was leaving the next day, maybe never to return? Would I go out on the town and tear it up? This is me, so nah, probably not. But I'd be awful tempted. The adventure finally ended Sunday afternoon as we made it home and predictably our luggage did not. That was delivered to us Sunday evening.<br />
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I covered my big takeaway from the excursion, which is, I recommend a cruise experience in general and Carnival specifically, and man, I need to get in better shape to survive relaxing like that. There's one more observation I had that I didn't talk about, and that's my uncle's oldest son. I guess there were some comments last week about race by Bill O'Reilly while we were out of the country, something about how blacks need to start cleaning their own proverbial houses. My uncle's son has the messiest house you could imagine. With him on this cruise were both of the women who have had his children, his three children whose ages range from about 2 to 3 (that's not a typo), and the teen daughter of one of his babymamas. It was almost comical how many times I heard my uncle's son stomp through the hallway on the ship chasing after one of his running kids or arguing with one of the babymamas. Once, my wife and I were eating on the 9th floor, and we saw one babymama and some kids go by with food, then my uncle's son 15 minutes later looking for them, then the other babymama and kid, then him again still looking for the first group, then all of them as he yelled, "Why didn't you stay where you was??" Unbelievable. I assume scenarios like this happen all the time with white people. But for fuck's sake, I don't see it in front of my face like I do with black folks. Seriously, people. Get your shit together.Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9042564.post-90420110515627872212013-07-16T12:32:00.000-05:002013-07-16T12:32:09.290-05:00Down In The DumpsThat could be the title of every fucking post I've ever written, actually...<br />
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Yes, the Positive Thinker is back, a week before he takes off with his wife and assorted relatives for a cruise to the Bahamas. You'd think I wouldn't be down in the dumps considering I'm about to leave the country for a sun-soaked cruise. But hey, I wouldn't be me if I wasn't thinking about negative aspects of this life I've been given. So no bulletpoints, no checklist, no particular order, what's up my ass??<br />
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I never, <b>never </b>wanted to take a cruise. Before boats started catching fire and stranding folks with no running water or food, I never heard good things about cruises. Fat strangers eating nonstop with whom you must dine, in close quarters with these people no matter what boat activity you want to do, and occasionally someone dies on the boat and you're stuck sailing with a corpse, but hey, maybe they'll pay you hush money as you're leaving so that you don't tell everyone how terrible the experience is. Okay, I'm exacerbating, but this isn't something I want to do. I intend to try and not be the total wet blanket that I usually am, and I'm telling everyone who asks that I'm excited and looking forward to it, but I'm actually anticipating this whole thing to be a pain in the ass. The very first aspect of this trip is flying from Memphis to Miami this Sunday, and the service my wife wanted to use to park our car and get shuttled to the Memphis airport just went out of business. So she was telling me how we're now going to have to park somewhere that doesn't offer shuttle service, and we're going to have to hustle all of our luggage on foot to the terminal, wherever that may be, and this is already feeling like the trip from hell. She also put a lot of effort into finding somewhere to have dinner in Miami for the one night we're going to be there, and I appreciate that, but it's not looking good. The hotel has a hoity-toity restaurant that's probably overpriced, and it appears any other place is going to be a hike on foot, unless we want to cough up cash for a half-mile cab ride to and fro. Same thing for breakfast the next day before we hit the port and board the cruise ship. In a really half-assed effort to build up some wind in my 400-lb. body before next week, I tried to do a 10-minute cardio interval workout this morning. I lasted about 4 minutes. It felt like a half-hour. Pathetic. That put me in a dark mood that has little to do with the trip. Even though I've worked very hard and long to make my body fat and unhealthy, I'm still in a bit of disbelief just how out of shape I am. There's a road to getting healthy, and I've seen several people close to me go down that road successfully, but the finish line is so far away for me that I feel really, really sad about it. It seems like something I could never achieve, which of course stops me from starting down the road, which guarantees that I won't ever get there. You know what else I can't do until I get in better shape? Fuck my wife. Nope, still hasn't happened. Every time we try, my erection only lasts about 30 seconds while we attempt to stick Mr. Happy in, but it doesn't fit, and before we can try other positions, I lose the erection. She insists that I wear a condom, and that has a negative effect as well because the last woman with whom I attempted to use a condom was "Shelley," and go read about how that turned out. But the whole feeling of failure overcomes me every time I try to penetrate, whether with a condom or not, so as much as I want to blame the condom, that's not the problem. I'm relying on my wife to guide it in because I can't see what's going on down there due to having a stomach the size of a Goodyear tire. But she being a virgin isn't skilled in placing someone inside her, so it just hasn't worked out, and I'm really depressed about it. Let's see, what else...I'm feeling pressure from myself to get the equipment needed to start a podcast with "Jacob" so that I can have a voice out there in sports. If I actually want to be in sports broadcasting, I should have some sample of my voice, and so long as I don't have the equipment, I can't share my voice. But equipment costs money, and this computer probably can't handle the podcast applications considering it likes to freeze and crash while doing simpler things like blogging and steaming music. So new equipment and a new computer and football season starts in less than two months and I don't know what the fuck I'm doing and yes, it is easy for me to overwhelm myself before I even take the first step. Hey, just like exercising! At least I'm consistent. <br />
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I did make a bold move toward getting my first broadcasting experience. I went to a women's football game a few weeks back, because it was taking place less than ten minutes from home and it was the WPFL championship game and the Memphis team was playing and because something about watching women play tackle football makes my mouth water. Anyhow, the PA announcer had this very Kentucky Fried hick voice and also wasn't very good at the job, constantly calling false start "illegal procedure" and shit like that, and then he decided to let everyone know during the 2nd quarter that he actually owns the Arkansas team Memphis was beating and that he was only doing the announcing "because the Memphis team was too cheap to hire someone." I didn't know if that was a bad joke or true, so on a whim I e-mailed the Memphis team and told them if they need an announcer next season, I'd volunteer. The great news is that an admin got back to me and said she'd get in touch if they needed me, but the bad news is that many women left the team--sorry, "retired"--after they won the title and they may not have a team next season.<br />
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Oops, forgot I was supposed to be whining and bitching about stuff. I would like to be in water at some point during this cruise thing, either the pool on the ship or the ocean itself, but I'd have to take my shirt off to do that. I really don't want to take my shirt off in public. I hope the money I'm taking with me will be enough to enjoy myself, because all of the tipping and cab rides and extra fees that I can't anticipate because I've never taken a cruise might drain me before I get a chance to play poker in the boat's casino or buy souvenirs or even rent a chair in Nassau or Turks and Caicos to sit on the beach and sunbathe. I don't even know if you have to rent a chair, but the pictures sure make it look like the beaches are preposterously crowded and one may have to pay for the privilege of having space in the sand to lay out. I'm also worried about being able to take a bottle of distilled water for my CPAP machine, because the airports are Nazis about the size of liquids you're allowed to transport, and can I even take my can of aerosol deodorant, and what if our luggage weighs too much and they charge $200 in fees, and what if they don't let us off the boat at the end of the cruise in time for us to catch our flight back home, which is already going to be a bitch because we couldn't get a direct flight to Memphis so it's going to be Miami to Chicago to Memphis, which will take all damn day, and why does my uncle insist that we all have to participate in karaoke at some point on this cruise because don't he know that I can't fucking sing, and in the midst of all this worrying will I ever find a moment to actually enjoy myself??? (Probably more important: Can I mask my worry and frustration when I'm in the presence of my wife and family so that I don't ruin everyone else's good time?) The topper on this post is, the whole time I've been typing this up, there's been a Miami sax music smooth jazz station streaming in another browser window, and that should be putting me in a fantastic frame of mind. Why isn't it? Because when I turn it off, I've got a shitload of house cleaning to do, and errands to run, and laundry tomorrow, and three days of work before the flight Sunday, and I haven't started to pack yet. No matter how much I love the song "Honey-Dipped" by Dave Koz (and if you need four minutes of relaxing and feeling good, then by all means Google that track), when it's over, my life is still there, with all its flaws and tasks. God dammit to hell.Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9042564.post-86529141035088125772013-05-21T08:56:00.001-05:002013-05-21T08:56:27.679-05:00The Closest I've Ever Come To Being A Member Of An Athlete's EntourageThe story's not very exciting, but I want to tell it anyway because it's funny. It's more of another example of the kind of people my father co-mingles with, and why I have always tried to avoid him and them.<br />
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First, some basketball information that's germane to the whole deal: Here in Memphis, the Grizzlies have made it to the NBA Western Conference Finals, where they play the San Antonio Spurs. The winner of the seven-game series gets to play in the NBA Finals, most likely against LeBron James and the World champion Miami Heat. Game 1 of the Memphis-San Antonio series was Sunday afternoon. Being a moderate basketball fan and having a wife who's a big Griz fan, I knew of the Grizzlies when I moved down here, but they've found a higher realm of success ever since I arrived, which has to be correlative, of course. This is the farthest the franchise has ever gone, and two years ago, they beat the Spurs in the playoffs, so the city is quite hyped, anticipating more success and a possible meeting with LeBron and company. But I have heard of most of the players, and I guess that makes me more knowledgeable about the team than the average person.<br />
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So my dad left a voice mail Sunday while I'm working, and there's a female on the line with him. "I got someone here who wants to ask you about someone on the basketball team down there," my dad growled, and then the woman, who sounded cheery and middle aged, started in. "Hi there!" she said. "My nephew's son is Tony Allen, and he plays basketball for the Memphis...uh...Grizzly?" I was already rolling my eyes at the fact that she could barely spit out the correct team name, meaning she probably doesn't know Allen all that well. But I believed she was a relative because I know enough about Allen to know that he's indeed from a rough Chicago neighborhood. She went on to say, well, a bunch of stuff thinly connected to each other, intoning that she believes she'll be invited to Allen's upcoming wedding and that she might want to visit Memphis before then. My dad chimed in, "Yeah son, we might come down there." I honestly don't know how I was supposed to react to this or what I was supposed to do about it, but I went back to work with the intention of calling my dad back later to explain to him that just because I'm from Chicago and live in Memphis and Allen's from Chicago and plays for Memphis doesn't mean that we have ever met or that I could add any insight about him.<br />
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I called my dad Sunday evening, and told him just that, and he seemed to understand that I have nothing in terms of information about Allen or his wedding, which I had heard nothing about before this woman's voice mail. Then, right as it sounded like my dad was going to hang up, he got the idea to three-way call this woman so that she could get the straight dope from me. I thought this was not a good idea because I anticipated doing nothing but disappointing this woman, who seemed very eager to find an "in" to Allen, something I didn't have. But I hung in there while my dad rang her up, and she was very happy to hear from me, as if an appliance of hers broke down and she called a repairman on voice mail and the repairman was actually calling her back with all the answers. She repeated her story about her nephew's son being Tony Allen and playing for the "Grizzly," then she showed her hand by breathlessly stating, "And I heard he's a millionaire!" I told her that I'm sure he is, since he's been playing in the NBA for about eight years, and while he's not a big star, he's a solid role player who probably makes about two or three million dollars per year. She then kept adding layers to the narrative that showed how distant she really is from Allen, such as she's not close with her nephew's part of the family, and she hasn't talked to Allen in years, and the speculation that she's going to be invited to Allen's wedding is just that. She then asked about the price of flying to Memphis, which is a high price due to the ban on discount airlines in Memphis because Memphis is a Delta hub (a ban which will be lifted this summer when Southwest Airlines comes in), then she went to an even lower level when she wondered if a different family member who works at O'Hare Airport as a government travel safety agent could get her some kind of discount. At that point I realized that I was dealing with a loser who latched on to my dad when she found out that his son lives in Memphis, thinking that this son could facilitate a connection to a rich pro athlete to whom she happens to be related. "Maybe we'll come in for like a weekend vacation!" she chirped. "How much are hotels?"<br />
<br />
I got a good laugh out of the whole conversation once we hung up, but then I realized how many talks just like that must occur on a given day for an athlete. This is Tony Allen we're talking about, someone 99% of the world's never heard of. How many calls does LeBron field? Or Kobe Bryant, who's in court because just a couple of weeks ago his own damn mother tried to sell some of his memorabilia? How many North Carolina gap-toothed hilljacks have tried to contact Michael Jordan throughout the years? Some poor teenager tried to put out a YouTube video last year claiming that he's an illegitimate son of Jordan and that he didn't want money, just a father to care for him. Since no one puts out a YouTube video claiming to be a rich man's son without wanting money, the scheme quickly unraveled and it became clear that he wasn't Jordan's kid. But it was interesting to be on the receiving end of one of those calls. There was a sense of desperation in that woman's voice when she spoke to me, as if she was searching for some piece of glory that was way out of her reach, and that she was thrilled to think that I could provide a road map to that piece. It made me feel a little put upon, but nothing like what poor athletes who find themselves instantly rich must feel every single day. No wonder so many of them wind up broke, even after making tens of millions of dollars during their careers. There's a corollary in there about how many of us lined up at the Powerball windows this past weekend looking a piece of glory despite the unbelievable odds, and how it connects to some blonde chick on CNN tsk-tsking us for buying lottery tickets because her father taught her that the lottery is just "a tax on the poor." But I'm not intelligent enough to figure it all out. I bought lottery tickets too. So did my wife. We're still looking for that piece of glory.Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9042564.post-90348278682998807442013-02-26T16:05:00.001-06:002013-02-26T16:05:59.355-06:00I Love It When We're Cruisin' TogetherI'm quoting a Smokey Robinson song from the '80s because my wife and I are going to embark on a cruise this summer! Yay! But we agreed to it before <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/17/travel/cruise-ship-fire">this recent Carnival ship issue</a> with the burned-out engine and the days of floating with no power and few working toilets. Ewww. So, yeah, I never really planned on going on a cruise before this happened because I was afraid of something like this happening, and of course now that I'm going, this happens. Perfect.<br />
<br />
How did I get roped into it? It's all my uncle's idea. He is graduating with his Master's degree this summer and also retiring from his career after over 30 years. He wants his family to all go on this cruise with him as a celebration of his achievements and a way to gather and have sort of a reunion on water. That's pretty cool, actually, but initially, my wife and I were going to politely back out because of the enormous cost of a cruise. Then my uncle dropped a couple of heavy guilt trips on me while agreeing to take on a large portion of the costs: First, he told me that he wanted me to take the cruise because it's the kind of fantastic life experience that my sick mother could never have done. She did not travel much before her death at age 32, that's true. He said his 2 adult sons and I aren't very worldly, and that he really wants us to do this for the experience of traveling outside the U.S. borders. I certainly can't argue that I'm not worldly--he informed me that I would need a passport to do this cruise, and I had no clue despite him telling me the cruise would leave America and go to the Bahamas. And second, he dropped a big one on me that I could have taken personally as an insult if I wanted to: He said that he knows that my wife and I basically stayed home as a honeymoon (we went to Graceland, less than 25 minutes from home, then we went to Tunica Roadhouse Casino in Mississippi for a few nights, less than 30 minutes from the house) because we didn't have money, and he wants us to take the cruise in order to enjoy a "real honeymoon" and get our marriage off right. Well, okay then. Since I'm not man enough to give my wife a real honeymoon...but I understood my uncle's intentions, so I calmed down and accepted his offer. This was about two months ago, before the engine fire shit. I'm hoping that my uncle will have great news in the near future about saving money towards the cost of the cruise since cruise prices are dropping everywhere due to the bad publicity from the "Crap Cruise," but since he's going through an agency, I don't think it's going to happen. I fear these prices we're paying are locked in. And the amount my wife and I are saving every month in order to pay my uncle our share when we see him is a hefty amount. Basically, if this old car gives us any more trouble before July, or any other emergency arises, we are in deeper shit than those people on that boat.<br />
<br />
But we're staying positive and getting ready for what we hope will be a great, great time. We're ordering clothes, we went through the passport protocol and received them last week, and my wife is immersed in cruise blogs and YouTube videos chronicling the experiences of others. As with everything else she encounters, she's trying to be as prepared and studied as possible. We already booked the flight to Miami, where the cruise originates, and she already booked a hotel to stay in Miami for one night so that we're not trying to fly in the day of the cruise, which I totally would have attempted if I were alone and risked bad weather or some kind of flight delay making me miss the cruise. That's not something where you shrug and catch the next cruise departing. You miss embarkation, you're royally fucked. But the thought of paying $100 and up to stay in Miami just to make sure you can catch the boat would have made me wretch, so I just wouldn't have done it. But that's me.<br />
<br />
In other news, I didn't make time to update my experiences being a scorekeeper for Memphis Redbirds minor league baseball games last year. That's misleading, actually. I didn't officially keep score for the Redbirds. I worked as an independent contractor keeping fielding and pitching stats for the renowned Baseball Info Solutions. They have a "private client" who wants that information from all AAA and AA-level minor league games. My experience was fabulous. It was such fun that I've had dreams about getting back out there to do games for this upcoming season. One dream that was very vivid was where I found out that a new team had sprung up overnight a relatively short distance from home, and I convinced my wife to come to a game with me playing that day at noon on no notice. I know exactly why I had that dream. It's because there is a second minor league team not that far from here, in Jackson, TN, about an hour's drive, but a couple of issues stop me from volunteering to score some games there: Being a black man in an unfamiliar part of Tennessee gives me goose bumps, and the car gives us such trouble that we're not confident in its ability to make it there and back, presenting a scene of a black man in an unfamiliar part of Tennessee at 11P on the side of a road with a smoking engine. No, not going anywhere near that one.<br />
<br />
As for last season, like I said, I had a great time. Nothing I experienced would impress anyone--no meeting minor league players who go on to get called to the majors and become big stars, no huge celeb sightings in the stands (unless you think TNT basketball reporter Craig Sager is a big star). Just 17 baseball games where I didn't pay for the ticket and sat directly behind home plate and watched baseball, and got paid for the information that I collected. That's all, and that's awesome. Some things that were memorable to me: <br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>I had some teenagers come to me after a game ended and look at me and then at my blue folder and then at me and excitedly ask, "So, what team do you scout for?" Those of you who know how large my ego can get can imagine how proud I was at that moment, that someone actually thought I was a major league scout.</li>
<li>It took a while, but I started finding spots to park for free, which were blocks from the beautiful stadium but it was worth the walk because of the exercise and because saving $10 in parking should never be sneezed at.</li>
<li>While making one of those walks back to the car after a game, I came across a black barber shop where three or four old men were still sitting there in the dark watching TV at 10 o'clock at night, laughing and enjoying each other's company, and that struck me as poignant. There are endless jokes about the stereotypical black barbershop with old men firing inappropriate commentary and bullshitting all over the place, and we're the first to make those jokes, but we really do find a certain kind of male bonding and community in those places. And the state of the black man in this country made me take even more pride than usual in finding a group of guys not drinking, not shooting, not setting the worst kind of examples of how to behave, but simply living and enjoying each other.</li>
<li>I attended so many games that one day I found myself playing the role of Deacon Frye on the TV show Amen, going through the people I normally go through and being recognized on my daily way. I approached the same young attendant at the ticket booth, and instead of waiting for me to pull out my business card that indicated I was with BIS and needed one of their paid tickets from Will Call, he smiled and said "I gotcha!" and grabbed the ticket for me without me having to say a word. Then I had the ticket scanned at the gate by the same tattooed woman who was there several times previously. I nodded at the funny beer vendor who has his unique cadence in his call that makes him sort of a local known figure: "Cold beer here, I got 'em ice cold! They need to be sold! Too cold to hold! Cold beer, it's hot out here!" The best part is, he'll keep the line "It's hot out here!" as part of his schtick even when it's 60 degrees. Then I approach the aisle where the BIS seats are always located, and the elderly white usher was so familiar with me, he shook my hand and said "How's it going today?" I took my seat and smiled at the concept that I now knew what it felt like to be a VIP. It was pretty fucking cool.</li>
<li>The one time I convinced my wife to come out to a game with me, the second BIS scorer (there are two assigned to every game) had a friend with him, and they were going crazy over how many minor leaguers they were getting to sign shit for them. So if my wife thought that we scorers were anything but fat sports nerds reveling in the whole experience, she amended that thought on that day. I may get her back out there this season, though, because the Redbirds are introducing Two-fer Twosday, where hot dogs and sodas are 2 bucks each. Hard to turn that down, even though I find myself addicted to the BBQ-smothered nachos at the ballpark, which run $9 but are so worth it.</li>
<li>The game where Craig Sager was in attendance because TNT was in town to broadcast the Memphis Grizzlies in the NBA playoffs? I didn't recognize him but my scoring partner did, hardly anyone approached him, he sat right in front of us a section to the right with a guy and a couple of hotties twenty years his junior, they all drank beers for about three innings, and then they left. I may have gotten the nerve to say something if I wasn't busy scoring the game.</li>
<li>There was a small controversy on Education Day, which is a daytime game where evidently area schools purchase or are given a bunch of tickets so they can drag their snot-nosed classes out there. Some black female teacher just knew we were sitting in seats her class was supposed to have, even though we were shoving our tickets in her face in order to show her that we were in our correct seats. It turned out that she did have that whole row, with the exception of those two BIS seats. So we had to sit squished in with loud urban kids who were hardly paying attention to the game, hiding under the chairs and playing tag and being general pains in the arse. They didn't stay the whole game, but even so, I avoided scheduling Education Day on this year's calendar. Not doing that again unless I'm really, really desperate to do as many games as I can.</li>
<li>A sense of independence grew throughout the year as I drove myself to and from these games after my wife came home from work and dropped the car off to me. I took down dinner for myself after the games, usually at the Wendy's or Arby's on the way home, instead of always eating at the ballpark and burning through a big piece of the $25 I was being paid for the game. The last two games, I even found a quicker highway to take to the park, making me feel even more independent. That's a big part of what I miss about doing the games, that feeling of taking charge of something, something that I'm doing all by myself, something I don't have to rely on others to take me there or help me get it done. I do the games with minimal help from my scoring partner, I put the data into the system the next day and send it off to BIS, and if there's an error in the official scoring found on milb.com, then I e-mail BIS and let them know. I'm a big boy now!</li>
<li>I enjoyed seeing players who were highly touted, players who used to play in the majors, players who I never heard of...I just loved watching guys playing pro baseball and showing what they got. I can't remember all of the names I've seen who will be heard from in the major leagues in the years to come, but there are two who jump out in my mind: Sluggers Wil Myers, who was in the Kansas City organization when I saw him last year, and Anthony Rizzo, the Chicago Cubs 1B. Those guys weren't just strong, they had approaches at the plate that made you believe they knew how to get a hit under any circumstance against any pitcher, and I really look forward to what they're going to accomplish in the majors. The Redbirds have a handful of guys who are highly rated prospects, and I will look forward to seeing them this year before they get called up to play for the St. Louis Cardinals. I'm nowhere near a major league scout, as those teenagers believed, but I can't wait to get out there and get better at it. And I appreciated seeing Cards starting pitcher Jaime Garcia come through for a rehab start as he recovered from injury, because he showed me why he's a major leaguer. His curveball was magnificent. All the other pitchers I saw all year were garbage compared to him. And he's not all that in the majors, so it just makes you appreciate how great they are in the big leagues.</li>
<li>And finally, I appreciated the other scorers. They were absolutely from Central Casting, and I really appreciated that. They were all white, mostly doughy, mostly in need of tanning, mostly four-eyed, mostly annoying voices, two of them were a father-son duo that have been doing this for over a decade, one is an official scorer for the Redbirds and Grizzlies and a local college in addition to the BIS duties, so he's the uber-sports nerd among us. And I needed them to be as nerdy and dopey as I imagined, because I'm nerdy and dopey and have very low self-esteem, so I needed these guys to be like me in order to show that I wasn't being a complete geek choosing to do these games out of love for the game. They were just like me. They got me. I got them. I found a sort of family that I've been looking for, in a sense. Not too close, mind you; I haven't had any contact with any of them since the season ended. But a bunch of like-minded guys who all laughed and understood when I approached each of them in the middle of the season and asked which of them had the misfortune of scoring the game that had a final score of something like 22-16. And when I finally found the poor saps who did score that game, all they could do was smirk and say, "What can I say, it was torture." But with that smirk that said, it was baseball, so of course it was orgasmic, but we have to pretend it was torture so that we don't seem quite as geeky as we know we are.</li>
</ul>
<br />
<br />
On my agenda are three different trips out of Memphis. The wife and I are spending this coming weekend in Tunica, and I already have my money for poker tournaments set aside. "Jacob" and "Alice" are also spending the weekend in Tunica, as they do a little vacation with their daughter, who celebrates her 1st birthday this Friday. I'm thrilled to see them all for the first time since they visited last year shortly after their daughter's birth. The cruise takes place at the end of July. At the beginning of April, I return to Chicago for the first time as a married man. I was able to get a couple of days off so that I can join Jacob for the draft in the big-money fantasy baseball league we're in. I'll be crashing at my uncle's house. I'm also taking in the 2nd White Sox game of the season, so hopefully I won't need my winter coat to do so, although "PPD-Snow" has happened in the Chi in recent years. It will be a solo trip, so for the first time since marriage, the wife and I will be dwelling separately, and as much as we love each other and are happy in wedded bliss, I think we're both looking forward to certain aspects of our four days apart. But I will greatly anticipate my return home. I already miss her.Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9042564.post-12077528060690917122012-12-22T06:55:00.000-06:002012-12-22T06:55:06.555-06:0037 Years Of UnderstandingMarriage is hard work and takes a lot of patience and understanding. That is the understatement of the millennium. The wife and I have seen our reverend several times since my last post, talking out a lot of differences we've been having. It was something we needed, because we were grinding on each other's last nerve trying to communicate and not believing that the other person was listening. Having that third party decipher our desperate screams really helped. The wife may still think that I've been hiding things from her, but she hasn't accused me lately, so that's some progress. We're trying to fit a sex life into our schedules, which was hard enough when she was searching for work, but will go back to being a real task once she starts working again on Jan. 2. I feel guilty about it because I've spent so much of my free time on my football blog (inmuchlessdetail.blogspot.com) that I've neglected her. So maybe that contributes to her feeling like I'm being dishonest with her. I don't know. Other life stressors may also contribute, such as our messy house, our general lack of money, and the car needing thousands of dollars of repair work in the past month and still not running right. In this Christmas season, we've done well to make time for each other and try to keep smiling and not piss each other off. Hasn't been easy, but we've done it. As our marriage gets some age to it and we get to know each other better and better, I think we will have no choice but to understand each other better than we did last year, our first year living together. Although we fought this year as well, for the most past we kept the peace. Keeping separate bedrooms helped, because no matter how still I try to stay while sleeping, I just can't stay still. So giving her a peaceful night of sleep has made a big difference in her demeanor. So on this, my 37th birthday, I must double down and commit myself even more than I already have to understanding my wife, communicating with my wife, and making sure that I am attentive to my wife's needs. There have been times when she seems truly unhappy, and I hate that look on her face because it's the look you get before you call the divorce attorney. It will be my fault if she does, because I've neglected her so much already, but it's time for me to start focusing on what she really needs from me to make our marriage worth it.Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9042564.post-59642503896982950692012-10-29T13:43:00.000-05:002012-10-29T13:43:31.151-05:00Karen May Have Been RightThroughout my campaign to paint "Karen" as a whore who lied and kept her secret sex life private on purpose, I relied on all of the circumstantial evidence to affirm my accusations. The facts as I saw them were, she was on the front page of a swingers website topless posing with her also-topless friend who Karen told me was a remorseless woman who cheated on her husband; she was named on the website as a moderator of the swingers club; she had her own portfolio on the adult photography site owned by the large black man who took the pics; she said on her own personal ad that she was partial to large black men; and a different woman told me that the photographer often took pussy from his subjects as a perk or payment. All of that added up to Karen being a swinger/slut/liar, although I never actually saw her having sex with someone else. I always thought that Karen took some perverse pleasure (or "pure bbw pleasure," as was one of her handles) in denying everything to me in subsequent e-mails despite all evidence to the contrary. She didn't explain why she hid the pics and the club from me, a man she was supposed to be in love with and dating exclusively. She said that she was only a moderator for the swingers club, not a participant, and she claimed to have never cheated on me. But the things happening in my marriage have made me admit something that I never wanted to admit: Maybe there's a sliver of a chance that Karen was telling the truth.<br />
<br />
When I last talked about my marriage, I was stunned to find myself being accused by my wife of jacking off in bed next to her and disturbing her sleep. No matter what I did, I couldn't convince her that I was not doing that. Eventually, I had to concede that maybe I was doing something resembling that in my sleep, but I only gave that concession because she kept insisting that she saw my dick hanging out multiple times and that she wasn't imagining things. But I never took my dick out on purpose, nor could I remember waking up with my dick out, and that's something I think I would remember. Well, a few months ago, my wife informed me that I would have to start sleeping in the guest bedroom because she couldn't get a good night's sleep with all of the activity happening on my side of the bed. So we have been switching off between one of us sleeping in the bedroom in the queen-size and the other sleeping in the guest bedroom in the twin-size. We go three or days in our respective rooms, then we switch off for three or four days. It's not my idea of a great arrangement, but I agreed to it in order to keep the peace.<br />
<br />
There have been several incidents recently that once again make my wife believe that I'm being dishonest and hiding things. She pointed to a time where I held up a t-shirt in an awkward way while she spoke to me, which made her think that I was in the midst of jacking off and trying to hide it from her. She believes that there have been several times where she entered the room while I was on the computer and I made a sudden movement to try to hide something that I was viewing. And she thinks that I can hear her footsteps on the carpet and that I've been getting up and blocking the doorway so that she can't come in the room and see what I'm hiding, whatever that may be. I could run down the list and defend myself against every accusation, but the bottom line is, I don't lie to my wife and I don't hide things from her. A few days ago, I decided to put a naked woman as my computer wallpaper, and because I didn't feel like having the conversation and defending it from my wife, I tried to hide it when she came into the room. But she saw it a minute later when she returned. That is the only time I tried to hide something from her. All of her other beliefs that I've been hiding shit are all in her head. I know that if I were in her shoes and saw all of the circumstantial evidence, I'd also be upset and thinking that my spouse is lying to me. But I'm not.<br />
<br />
This morning, she told me how anxious she has been about the whole situation, and that she didn't sleep last night because she couldn't stop thinking about it. She cried and said she didn't know how much deception she could continue to take from me. I went from stunned to angry because this was something I could not control no matter how hard I argued. If truth and honesty is the rock that keeps marriages strong, I'm screwed because I keep offering her that rock and she keeps rejecting it, which is bad enough, but then she gets mad because I don't offer her that same rock. So I offer it again, and she rejects it again, and then gets mad because I don't ever offer her that rock. And around and around we go.<br />
<br />
And it dawned on me in the shower that this has similarities to what Karen and I went through. I could not believe that I was being accused of something constantly and couldn't defend myself even though I knew I was telling the truth, and isn't that what Karen claimed was happening? That I was using circumstances to accuse her of something that she claimed she didn't do? And in that instant, I finally, for the first time since the whole Karen thing happened, had to admit that there's a chance she was being honest. No one in my position would believe what Karen told me, just like no one in my wife's position would be inclined to believe me. But I know what I'm saying is true! I can't make my wife believe it, but I know it, if no one else does. Maybe Karen saw how passionately I believed the circumstances in the four-page e-mail I wrote her and decided to not try to convince me otherwise. Maybe that's her personality. Maybe it was different because we weren't married or even living together, and the effort to convince me of her truth wasn't worth it to her. Better to cut ties with a seemingly unhinged, angry person, she thought. And I really hate conceding victory to Karen because in my mind, she's been the most evil wench on the planet ever since that night that I found her swingers website, and that hatred of her consumed me and drove me to the psych ward, but then helped elevate me and push me to be the best I can be at whatever I do just to shove it up her cunt proverbially and show her that she didn't destroy me with her lies and deceit. But what if it was all a mirage? What if I cast Karen as the evil wench unjustly? What if the worst she did was keep the swingers club and the pictures a secret just because she didn't know how to approach me with that side of her life? What if she really did serve only as admin help for the club? What if she took the pics for her own self-esteem, or just as a lark? What if circumstantial evidence all added up to show me something that really wasn't? Sounds nuts? Sounds like I'm being naive? Well, I wouldn't believe it either, except it's fucking happening to me <b>RIGHT NOW.</b><br />
<br />
I offered a counseling session with the pastor who married us, so we're doing that tomorrow morning. I don't know what else I can offer. My wife's laid down her viewpoints on the issues that are keeping us separate. <b> </b>She doesn't care if I am masturbating, she doesn't care if I am looking at naked pics of other women, she just wants me to be honest about it. It might be easier if I would just do those things instead of continuing to deny the little circumstances that seem to her like I'm lying. That's what's so frustrating. She's the type that understands people and men in particular, and she doesn't want to be the nag that jumps down my throat if I want to enjoy porn, and I really appreciate that because I do like to enjoy porn occasionally. I don't have any problem at all telling her when I watch porn or what kind of porn I like to watch. We're trying so hard to be a dynamic, contemporary couple who let the other live their lives. So why does she keep thinking that I'm hiding things from her? It's incredible, but Karen might understand the issue better than I can explain it. My head is spinning. Seriously. I might owe Karen a huge apology someday, and I never, ever thought I'd say that. <br />
<br />
<br />Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9042564.post-30356557531782536492012-07-03T10:12:00.001-05:002012-07-03T10:12:28.984-05:00No Rest For The Weary<a href="http://planetdre.blogspot.com/2011/10/where-oh-where-does-time-go.html">I wrote last year</a> right before the wedding about how hard it was to deal with a situation where my fiancee thought I was disturbing her sleep while masturbating and I knew that I wasn't masturbating, but rather I always moved around and made noises while I slept because I had undiagnosed sleep apnea. I got a CPAP machine, which forces oxygen into my body through my nose while I sleep, and I thought all would be well. It's not.<br />
<br />
I still move during sleep, although not nearly as much as before, but we're both big people and it's only a queen-size bed, so I'm still adversely affecting the wife's sleep. Last night, she woke me a couple of times by kicking me in the leg, and she also poked me in the back to tell me that my oxygen mask was making noises, meaning it had slipped into a position where air was leaking out. She explained this morning that she kicked me because I had unknowingly kicked her several times, which I do every night according to her, and she apologized for getting so frustrated that she kicked back. I have to understand her sentiment, though; if someone kicked me in my sleep, I'd have a nasty reaction, too.<br />
<br />
But the issue is, I'm still doing things in my sleep that disturb my wife, and she's very discouraged by it all, and so am I. I try very hard to not move or even touch my wife while asleep, but once I fall into slumber, I'm completely unaware of my actions. The only moving I do when awake is shifting my weight or turning over, and that's only because my lower back gets stiff if I'm in the same position for too long. It's maddening to know that I'm always disrupting my wife's sleep pattern, and I'm sure she'd describe it as something more severe while using more colorful language. But what the fuck do we do? I don't want to sleep in separate beds, and neither does she, but there have been several nights during our short marriage where she's asked me to take my CPAP machine into the spare bedroom and catch some zzzs in there. She's tried to be diplomatic about it, but it's still a terrible feeling, kinda like when the dog messes in a part of the house that's valuable to the owner and the owner banishes the pet somewhere else. But that's where we stand right now. She tolerates me sleeping in the bed until she can't take it any more, then I have to sleep in the smaller bed for a night or two. And this is only less than a year of marriage. I'm legit scared of how she's going to feel about it after a few years of this shit.<br />
<br />
We've got other issues, like every married couple, but this one confronts us every night and (in her case) threatens to ruin every day before it even starts. It breaks my heart. I do not want to sleep apart from my wife, but I don't know what to do to stop disturbing her when we sleep together. At least she's backed off a little from accusing me of masturbating next to her, although I get the feeling she still thinks that's what I was doing. I had to concede the point that I can't tell her 100% that I wasn't masturbating if I also simultaneously don't know what I do while I'm asleep. It's true that I don't know what I'm doing while I'm asleep. It's just that there are a million little context clues that should be there if I am jacking myself in my sleep, such as waking up with my whang out, or with my pajamas off, or with semen present somewhere in my shorts, but none of those clues have ever presented themselves to me. The finances, the intimacy, the communication--any other situation in the marriage takes up our time for a little while and then dies down, but this sleep thing persists, every single night, with no end in sight. We are at a standstill, and I don't know what to do about it.Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9042564.post-20463769047488016002012-03-28T15:01:00.003-05:002012-03-28T15:43:39.562-05:00The Wrong LaRocheIf I start a new blog about adventures in baseball scorekeeping, I think I'll have to call it The Wrong LaRoche. Having the wrong LaRoche almost cost me this new opportunity.<br /><br />I'll give you the deets quickly, because it's been a long last three days and I'm ready to go rest before going back to work tomorrow. So about a month ago, I saw a Craigslist ad (yep, Craigslist again...will this work out like my last job in Chicago or will it be another scam like "Shelley"?) looking for minor-league scorekeepers for the upcoming baseball season. Why, there's a minor-league team right here in my new city! They're the Memphis Redbirds, and I went to a few games last year. Good team (of course, since they're affiliated with the St. Louis Cardinals, who only won the World Series last year), great stadium, love the BBQ nachos, but I wonder why they refuse to stock lids for their soft drinks. I don't like flying critters in my Coke. Anyhow, I responded to the ad, and someone replied back with a two-question e-mail interview asking me what numbers correspond to the players on the field when keeping score and how to score a 2nd-to-SS-to-1st double play. Two very easy questions for me, and I tried to give a little flava in my answer by mentioning that my favorite DP is P-to-C-to-1st, the ol' 1-2-3 if you're scoring. He replied that it was his fav too, but he didn't see it at all last year. So I passed the first gateway and was sent to a website that gave me the details of the job, and I almost got scared off by the 17-question sheet that I had to fill out. But it paid $25 per game plus reimbursed parking, so I pressed on. <br /><br />I was mailed a booklet and a couple of DVDs a couple of weeks later. The booklet described in 57 pages of detail what I'd have to keep track of when scoring games according to their specifics. Oh. My. God. This would be scoring a game in a fashion unlike any I've ever even attempted! I'm talking keeping track of every pitch result, every pickoff result, charting the field location of every single ball put in play, as well as the velocity and trajectory of the ball. And those are the basics! Don't even ask about what you have to do on complex plays, like when there's an out made on a base hit or there's an error on a fielder's choice, or when the defense shifts. Man, my head's exploding just thinking about it. One of the DVDs was the guy who runs this operation sitting at a webcam going over real examples of many various game situations. That DVD runs for over two hours. The 2nd DVD is of a game from a few years ago between the Giants and Pirates that they use as a test game. I had to keep score of the test game and send it in like I would a normal game, and only if that test game was scored as decent would I then finally be allowed as part of the Memphis crew of scorers. Well, I sweated and sent that game in last night, even though they provided a box score of that test game and it had a pitcher officially throwing two wild pitches, and my box score only showed one. The thing is, I went back and looked at my inning-by-inning chart, and I had the two wild pitches recorded. But I didn't even care to figure out what I did wrong. I was so exhausted that I just sent the thing in and hoped for the best.<br /><br />The e-mail came this morning that my test game had been scored. The guy in charge started the first sentence with "You made two major errors and nine minor errors..." My heart almost stopped. I assumed that the wild pitch discrepancy would be some kind of fuck-up on my end. Where did these ten other errors come from??? Then I kept reading the sentence, and it said "...which is better than average for our test game scores." Really?? My eleven errors is actually considered kosher?? I couldn't help but smile as I skipped to the end of the e-mail, where the guy in charge welcomed me aboard and said that once I went into the software and checked off which Redbirds games I would be available for, he'd schedule me. Whoooo!! "I'm in! I'm in!" I said to my wife on the phone. I was ecstatic and also relieved.<br /><br />At this point, I went back to the e-mail and read the errors that I made. The wild pitch thing was a major error, and it happened because there's a box that you have to check before the wild pitch gets put into the system, and I neglected to check this box the 2nd time, and that's why it never showed up in my box score. The other major mistake? I put the wrong LaRoche into the starting lineup. The Pirates had two brothers on their team, Adam and Andy LaRoche, and without thinking about the fact that Adam was too clumsy to play third base, I put him in as the starting 3B instead of Andy. Yeah, that's kind of a major mistake, starting the wrong guy. However many games I get to score, I'm fairly confident that I won't put the wrong fucking player in the lineup again. But I'm just psyched that I will get to score some games at all. I'm also intimidated at how much detail I'll have to keep up with. I won't be able to take a piss or get a bite to eat unless my wife comes with me to some games and feeds me while I scribble. But it's hard to complain because I'd be getting paid to keep score of a game. How awesome is that? I only wish they paid more so that I could make it a full-time gig. But hey, I may have to pull out those schmoozing skillz that my father instilled in me and make friends and cohorts along the way, and maybe I'll find my way up the chain into a serious-paying baseball executive role. Don't put it past me. I have a lot of failures in my past, but I've been known to come out ahead at times also. And with the cash flow getting a serious setback thanks to all the car trouble the last several months, I'm as motivated as can be to climb any ladders that I come across.Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9042564.post-15181848677376295522012-02-14T15:40:00.003-06:002012-02-14T16:12:21.703-06:00A Little Valentine's AdviceI wanted to check in on Valentine's Day because I was struck by a thought that I wanted to share. I've been keeping busy when I'm not working by blogging on my football blog, which in case you forgot or wasn't aware, is <a href="http://inmuchlessdetail.blogspot.com/">inmuchlessdetail.blogspot.com</a>. Now that football season's over, I'll try to make my way back here to my original blog much more often. Married life is definitely not perfect, but the only thing I'll say about that at the moment is, I still love my wife, she still loves me, we still got married for the right reasons, and we're going to work out our problems together as a team. That's not what I wanted to speak about. I just wanted to share my wife's reactions when her Valentine's presents were delivered to her job. First, she got a delivery from Shari's Berries, which are humongoid strawberries dipped in chocolate designs. She was happy about them, as I figured she would because she likes chocolate and she likes strawberries. Then her dozen roses came a couple of hours later, and she texted me, "You really outdid yourself this time!" She didn't expect the roses and the berries, so I'm glad they got delivered separately, though I didn't plan that. (She actually just texted while I was typing that the berries were a hit with the office.) I'm about to groom myself in preparation for an Italian dinner she's taking me to when she gets home. I have to address the issue of Valentine's Hate, which is not a man-woman thing, as both genders seem to be afflicted with it. Rather, it's an issue where someone is either single and trying to downplay their feelings of inadequacy, which is <a href="http://planetdre.blogspot.com/2006/02/happy-early-valentines-day.html">completely understandable</a>, or in a relationship and trying to shove off the commercialism of it all, as if they're just so above that. You know who I'm talking about. "My significant other and I don't need to celebrate our love on a specified day. We let each other know every day of the week. No corporate holiday can tell us how and when we should be good to each other." Here's my response: I have now sent flowers and candy and berries to my wife on several different Valentine's, and her reaction is always to tell me how sweet I am and how great it makes her feel to be appreciated like that. Why in the blue hell would you go out of your way to NOT make your honey feel special on the one day where it's an unofficial holiday set aside to make your honey feel special? Some folks work so hard to be "above it all" that they lose sight of things. I don't care how many times your woman tells you that Valentine's isn't a big deal to her, it's a big deal to her. While you're busy being too cool to show her any kind of token of your feelings, she's gotta go through the day with red hearts everywhere she turns, and friends gabbing to her about the sweet thing their man did for them, and eventually, it makes her, if not sad and melancholy, reflective on your union, and that's not good. The only thing not doing anything for Valentine's does is give your woman cause to pause and think about how special you make her feel at other times, and unless you're giving her a unicorn every day, you're probably going to come up short in her eyes. "Oh yeah? Well, fuck her then! She don't deserve me anyway!" Keep going, tough guy, see how much good that attitude does you when you <a href="http://planetdre.blogspot.com/2004/11/my-history-1st-in-series.html">find her secret website</a> and discover that she's been getting what she wants elsewhere. My point is, why single your girl out and make her feel lonely and unappreciated on this day just to prove that you're no slave to fake holidays? If it hurts that much to show her love on Valentine's, then either you're probably not ready for a relationship with her or your flame is out so it doesn't matter. Either way, sucks to be her. Drop your pride and get her something or take her out. Your ego ain't more important than your relationship, and if it is, then you need help.Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9042564.post-43652919304083050072011-12-22T22:46:00.002-06:002011-12-22T23:19:03.430-06:0036 Years Of ContentmentSo I am officially a suburban husband.<br /><br />The inarguable signals are all around. My wife and I had to borrow her uncle's pickup truck because the Corolla was in the shop for a few days and neither of us can commute to work without a car. Memphis doesn't have a public transportation system as comprehensive as Chicago, not by a long shot. So getting to work from home is impossible without our own wheels. We dream of getting a second car someday soon so that we don't have to pick each other up from work when one of us has the car. The other smaller signs include the block being totally empty of cars and people when I step outside on a weekday to retrieve the mail, the monthly bills for garbage pickup and lawn care, and the fact that none of the houses on the block look different from each other. It can be described as a mundane, humdrum, dull existence. I call it The American Dream.<br /><br />Hey, where I come from, a house this nice in a neighborhood this nice is something you have to work very hard to earn. And my wife has worked her ass off for over twenty years, and she bought this house not long before she met me, so it wasn't for my benefit or anyone else, it was her reward for herself. I'm just here glomming on. And I'm really soaking up all of the relaxation that comes with living in an area where you don't have to duck bullets on the way home or worry about the neighbors playing loud music or having rowdy children. Hell, we had a next-door neighbor that seemed dangerous, and that family disappeared. Yeah, just vanished. I'm not shitting you. It was an interracial couple, black dude and white chick, and they had at least one mixed toddler running around with (hopefully fake) tattoos and a diaper and nothing else. We wouldn't care less normally, but they loved to fight. I mean, late nights, loud, and consistent. The wife wanted to call the police, they got so loud. One of them ran over our cables with the lawn mower and knocked our internet and cable out for a week. Fucked up, right? Then they upped the crazy by bringing a couple of dogs into the family, and not just puppies, but pit bulls! And if that's not bad enough, one morning I was about to take out the trash through the back door, but the wife called my attention to a bedroom window, which showed our back patio being inhabited by the dogs thanks to a broken gate. They were sniffing around our grill and snooping like they owned the joint. Oh, hell to the naw, we said, and we started investigating which phone numbers we had to call to inform the city of this problem. We had to start driving the garbage around the corner to the cans because I didn't want to risk walking out there and getting consumed. I was even considering going next door and having a conversation with these people, because maybe they would be reasonable and keep those things behind their own walls. But I must admit, I wasn't sure if they would be reasonable because nothing about them suggested that they could spell reasonable, much less understand it.<br /><br />Well, maybe a week, week and a half after the dogs made their first appearance, one day, we noticed that the usual buzz wasn't coming from next door. No dogs barking, no TV blaring, no loud arguing. Sure seemed like the house was empty. And we took note every day, and so far, no one has seemed to be living next door, and this empty house thing started about a week before our wedding. So that's two months now. Just vanished. Poof! Now, the wife says that these people that were living there were not the homeowners, that the actual owners lived somewhere else and were renting out the house. Her theory is that someone let the real owners know what was going down in their crib, and they cleaned it out. Whatever happened, it was kinda awesome and scary how quickly that whole family was, from our vantage point, eradicated from the face of the earth. But it fits with the vibe of this community, which is, nothing too out of the ordinary will be tolerated. The wife has received notes about her garbage can being in the driveway when it should be behind our gate, and she says that years ago, an unapproved flower pot also simply vanished, and she's convinced that someone in the homeowners association was behind the theft. That's a little much, I admit, but I'm also thrilled at the thought of aberrant behavior being policed so vigilantly. Again, I'm from the hood in the Chi, and this is all the stuff of dreams to me.<br /><br />So on this, my 36th birthday and first as a married man, I'm very content with the non-professional part of my life. Make no mistake, I'm still ambitious about getting into sports media as a new career. But at the moment, it's all about working at my (hopefully) secure position with Symcor, which was purchased by Xerox, and making plans along with my spouse to save enough money to go back to school. This personal side of my life was up in the air at this time last year because I didn't know when I would be able to make my move down here to start life with my wife. But I made the move, and I'm settling in to a comfortable existence in the suburbs of Memphis. I really am a very lucky man.<br /><br />And for those times when I want to rebel a little and break out of my humdrum shell, hey, the bass on the Corolla can crank up pretty high. Had to pump out some Heavy D. a few weeks ago in honor of the late rapper. Shed a tear at the beauty of the moment. Driving through a froufrou suburb, doing 40 MPH in a 30 zone, making my little Toyota vibrate with the sounds of the streets. Suburban hubby...still a nigga to the core.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Black coffee, no sugar, no cream...</span>Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9042564.post-9502134983299963882011-11-23T08:50:00.002-06:002011-11-24T11:36:11.212-06:00Tying The Knot, Part 8: The Big Day & The Day AfterNo matter how long I took to make this post, the details of The Big Day will always be with me. It was such a special day, and I will never forget it.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sat. Oct. 15</span><br /><br />The day started early, as I knew it would. My fiancee had already informed me that she had to be up early, about 5:30A or 6, in order to start working on her hair and get ready to go out to her friend's house to get the full makeup treatment. I had already made arrangements with "Drew" to pick up my uncle at his hotel and then come to get me at about 9:30. I was a little groggy at this early stage of the morning watching my fiancee run around, but I wasn't as wiped out as I feared I might be getting back from the casino as late as I did. I spoke to my dad at about 7A. He called from the airport to let me know that he was on his way to Memphis. Oh, not one of the airports in Chicago. No, he was calling from Atlanta! I didn't even ask. My guess, though, is that he wasn't able to find a decent airfare from Chicago to Memphis non-stop, so he jumped on one of the flights that go from Chicago to Atlanta and lay over before going to Memphis. He once again asked if someone would be available to pick him up from the airport and take him to his hotel to drop off his belongings before taking him to the church. I once again told him that we had no one ready to do that and that he'd have to rely on a taxi. He expressed concern about making it to the church on time, but resolved himself to taking a taxi when he got here. Truth be told, Drew was such a good guy this whole weekend, he probably would have dropped my uncle and me at the church and ran to the airport to get my dad, but I refused to put that burden on him or anyone else. After all, I didn't actually invite my dad. He was going to tag along with my aunt, who has a soft spot for him unlike my uncle and me, but there wasn't enough space in my aunt's truck after loading up her husband, their oldest son, and my playcousin and her mother. At that point, I just took the position that he was going to have to find his way here himself, and if he made it, fine, and if not, great.<br /><br />There was another mystery hanging out there on the morning of the wedding. As I mentioned in the last post, my friend Cassandra was already listed on the program as one of our speakers during the ceremony. But I had not heard a word from her since I was in Chicago a couple of weeks before the wedding, when she expressed to me on the phone that she was going to do everything it took to make it to the wedding even though she didn't have travel or hotel arranged yet. I had called and texted and e-mailed, but heard nothing. I was already resigned to having to ask someone in my family to make the reading once I got to the church, but I was also kinda hoping that Cassandra would swoop in and show up in Memphis as a bit of a surprise. So I was cool and calm that morning, but still a bit anxious as to how this issue was going to work itself out.<br /><br />My fiancee left the house at a little before 9A. That gave me the bathroom for a half-hour before Drew was scheduled to come get me. I decided to go for a full bath because I felt it was symbolic of washing all of the other grime and crap that I picked up in my past relationships off of me. Why shouldn't I be fully bathed before I get married? I may not have attained virgin status, as my fiancee had by never dating casually or otherwise before meeting me, but I could at least soak some of the whore impurities from lying down with pigs such as "Karen" and "Sarah" and "Torrie." I said a prayer out loud to my mother and grandmother, who I knew were going to be with me on my big day, then I scraped as much dirt off of my body as I had time to. Getting dressed in sweats and my "I'm Rick James Bitch" t-shirt wouldn't take any time after I got out of the tub; I was worried about gathering all of the last-minute items that I needed without forgetting something. I had to remember my aunt's husband's present, which I re-wrapped that morning; I had to remember toiletries, because I wasn't going to lotion up and cologne myself before getting to the church and putting on the suit; I had to remember my keys and my phone and my wallet and...<br /><br />Speaking of the phone, Drew and my uncle were already sitting in the house waiting for me to run around gathering my shit, and it was past 9:30, when my phone rang. It was Cassandra. My uncle had already started to talk about how rude it was for her to not even let me know she wouldn't be there for me, and perhaps because her ears were burning, she called at that moment. The news wasn't good. She claimed to be ready to catch the nighttime Megabus Friday and make the 10-hour bus ride here, but she missed the bus. She offered lots of apologies and well wishes and promised to get down to Memphis sometime in the future and treat my wife and me to dinner. I was a little patient with her long explanation of why she didn't return my calls, but once she started in on all the things she would do to make it up to us, I had to gently tell her that I was actually on my way to the church right this moment, so I gotta go. My uncle wouldn't have been so gentle. He had some choice words for her once I hung up. I don't blame him at all, but I wasn't all that upset because Cassandra had displayed a penchant for getting wrapped up in all of the things in her life and being unavailable at times. She's not a bad person at all, just the opposite, but her big heart leads her to being occupied with her mother or her sister or her sister's kids or her boyfriend or a friend who needs her help, and she's very good at letting herself get stretched too thin. I totally believe that she intended to be here for me. I hold no grudge against her. I did feel disappointed, but moreso, I felt a little scared because I now had two and a half hours to find a new speaker, and I was going to have to do it by cold-calling the people in town for my wedding and hoping that they wouldn't say no.<br /><br />After I slapped some baby oil on my head, Drew, my uncle and I finally stepped out of the house about 9:45 and loaded up in Drew's rented pickup. Drew and my uncle really like each other, having met at a sickle cell charity bowling event and then again for my bachelor party weekend, and they had some fun when they called me before coming to pick me up. My uncle joked that he and Drew had decided to drive down to Tunica and play some more blackjack, and they would have to miss the wedding. In no way did I believe him, but my incredulous "What?" provided a big laugh. Then, when they got to the door, I pranked them back by opening it, seeing that it was them, then shrieking "I can't do this!" and locking the door.<br /><br />So we were definitely a loose bunch heading out on the road. It was the most perfect fucking day ever. Bright sunshine, not a cloud in the sky, and it was probably about 65 or 70° that morning. I was trying to enjoy the whole atmosphere, but I was still worried about finding someone to speak at the ceremony. My uncle then let me know that he actually rode down with a couple of older cousins, Charlene and Claude, and maybe Charlene would like to speak. This was actually the first time I had known that Charlene and Claude were here. They're important in my past as well. After my mom died when I was ten, I was sulking around the house very inactive, and my fam decided that maybe if I joined a bowling league on the weekends, that would be good for me. It was Charlene who made the drive from her North Side home all the way to my West Side house to pick me up every Saturday morning for a 10A youth bowling league back out near her house at the old Marigold Bowl, which no longer exists. I became friends with her daughter Chonda, who was my age. (I sent an invite to Chonda as well, but she couldn't make it.) And I socialized with the other kids in the bowling league, and it was a big part of my life. Not only that, but one Saturday in mid-December, Charlene kept me at her house for like four or five hours after bowling just hanging out with her and her daughter, and I didn't quite know why, but then they drove me home and let me go upstairs to my house first as they followed behind, and when I opened the door...SURPRISE! My family was there with gifts and food and a cake and candles, and that little get-together when I was eleven years old remains the last time someone threw me a surprise birthday party.<br /><br />My uncle got Charlene on the phone and then handed it to me, and I explained to her the situation and asked would she like to perform this speech, and she said absolutely. Whew! Problem solved. From there, Drew drove to a gas station, not for gas but because my throat was dry and I needed something to drink, and that was where I grabbed the vitamin water that I mentioned in the previous post. The cashier, a cute black girl, chuckled as I paid for the water, and I wondered what the joke was, and she said, "I'm just laughing at your shirt." I had totally forgotten that I was rocking the "I'm Rick James Bitch" shirt. Guess it's a good thing that I didn't go with the "I Have The Dick So I Make The Rules" shirt. But I decided that I couldn't really wear that to a church. The Rick James shirt was bad enough. I threw out a Chappelle-like "I'm rich, beeyotch!" as I left and cracked up the cashier some more.<br /><br />From there, it was on to the church, and a bit of drama that had nothing to do with the wedding. A large white guy was standing in the basement stairwell as we entered the church, and he asked if we knew who had keys to the meeting room down there. We did not. But this wasn't good enough for our pal, and he explained that usually, the basement meeting room is open on Saturdays for the weekly Overeaters Anonymous meeting, but the door was locked, and he couldn't find anyone with a key. He wasn't exactly searching hard because this would require him to, you know, walk. He actually asked us if we could go look around for someone with a key. Stunned at this request, I believe that I told him sure, and then headed to my dressing room with no intention of looking for someone with a key. I mean, even if it wasn't my wedding day, that's not my responsibility. You wanna find someone that bad, go look for someone, bubba. Drew and my uncle and I burst out in laughter once we were safely inside the locked dressing room.<br /><br />(Bubba wound up representing one more woman whom I dated in the past. I've never told this story on the blog before. But before Karen and after the one-nighter with my high school girlfriend, there was a year and a half drought where I had lots of internet prospects and no success at all. During this drought, in the summer of 2002, I started going to Overeaters Anonymous meetings. This was suggested to me by a therapist I had when I was 19 as a way to be around others like me so that I wouldn't feel like I was on my own planet. And finally, at age 26, I saw that there were meetings at a hospital a block and a half from my house on Saturday mornings and decided to check it out. It was an interesting mix of old and young, black and white, thin, medium, and obese, quiet and verbose, almost all women but a couple of guys every now and then. I never felt like I quite fit in there either, but I kept going because at least it was one hour out of my week where I was surrounded by people who I felt understood me a little. I even spoke up a few times to talk about my week of coping with food and people.<br /><br />Well, one Saturday around November or so, this stunningly beautiful white girl with a U. of Michigan windbreaker sat in a meeting, saying nothing, and I definitely took notice, but I didn't want to approach her because this was not a singles bar and I didn't want to be the creepy guy trying to pick up chicks. But I did wonder why she was there. She wasn't fat at all, nor was she anorexic, which a couple of women were--OA wasn't just for fat people, it was for people with food issues one way or the other. She was a perfectly healthy looking woman, about 5'9", 150 lbs. Then she finally spoke at a meeting with a slight accent and explained that in her native Germany, she had two sisters who were much thinner than her, and they always called her fat, and that's why she thinks she needs to attend OA. Her problem wasn't so much food, it was her perception from back home that she was the fat one and didn't fit the mold. I guess if the sisters saw the others in the OA meeting, they'd faint at the sight of how big we were. I felt compelled to approach her after the meeting, as others did, and my words of encouragement were along the lines of, "Whatever your sisters think doesn't matter because you are very beautiful regardless." I will never, ever forget her response. She smiled brightly at me and said, "Aw! That warms my heart!" I could have melted right there in front of her. We exchanged phone numbers, and I bounded home with that same new-love feeling you get when you meet a hottie at a club.<br /><br />She wasn't at the meeting the next Saturday, and I called her to see what was up, and she said something about having to wash her car and run some errands, and I asked if she was busy that night, and she said no, and I asked her out, and she said sure. I don't remember why she didn't pick me up, but she gave me the address of I think her cousin and told me to meet her there that night. I was so nervous because she was so out of my league, but she must have liked me a little just to say yes. I was on the phone with Drew and "Ronnie" for like three hours that afternoon trying to figure out what I should wear, how I should act, etc. I ventured out into the December snow and met her at the address she gave me. Four women were sitting around hanging out when I walked in with a rose that I bought her on the way there. "Aww!!" they all cooed. I took my date and headed out the door, not knowing where we were going or what we were going to do.<br /><br />She wound up taking me a couple of blocks away to a laid-back jazzy club. The date went about as well as I could have hoped. We spent two hours sharing everything about ourselves. She turned out to be a Mormon who didn't drink or smoke, which only made her more angelic in my eyes, and she didn't get very deep into details, but I got the impression that she was either a virgin or had not dated very much. She was in college trying to get into theatre. We sipped on our bottled waters and talked about many things. Then I walked her back home. She wore my gloves because it was cold. It was a clear, crisp night, the stars were shining, and I took her to her doorstep wondering if I should go for a kiss because the date went so well. This is where things went south. She was going to turn and go into the house without giving me a kiss or anything else. Then I reached out for a hug and she actually said the words, "Oh, hug," like it was the most surprising development she'd ever seen. Then she gave me the quickest little hug and smiled and bounded into her apartment. And that was the last time I saw her!<br /><br />She never picked up her phone when I called, she never answered any e-mails, and she never returned to another OA meeting. Trust me, I showed up for the next six weeks straight. I would have seen her. I have no idea why she dropped off the planet like that, but I really don't think it was anything I did because every interaction between us seemed perfect up until that awkward hug. But I found myself not caring about anything happening at the OA meetings, just showing up, waiting until the end, asking the regulars if they had seen her, and then leaving dejected. And once I realized that I wasn't caring at all about OA, I decided that indeed, I had turned into the creepy guy at the OA meetings trying to get laid, and I stopped going.)<br /><br />Back to the wedding day. I had a vision of all the guys hanging out back in my dressing room before the wedding helping me stay loose by playing cards or just shooting the shit. Drew did stay back there with my uncle and me for the most part. He left for about twenty minutes and came back with donut holes from Dunkin Donuts. I may have been the only one to have some, but that was because I don't think I had breakfast. Drew also presented me with a congratulatory cigar while back in the dressing room, and I still have it, and I still haven't decided if I'm ever going to attempt to smoke it. It's not like I know how to enjoy it if I did decide to smoke it, and it's not like I know exactly how to take off the tip and light it up properly. But the point is, Drew was a mensch. He provided the transportation, he provided the necessary snacks before the ceremony because I may have passed out if I didn't have some food in my stomach, and he even had a cigar ready to light up, not to mention providing a ride out to the casino the night before, allowing me to make some honeymoon cash. And of course, he provided the cash for the bachelor party present featuring "Ambrosia" and Lavinia.<br /><br />I'm not supposed to see my fiancee the morning of our wedding according to some folklore, but not only did I wake up next to her, but I saw her for a split second in her makeup about an hour before the ceremony. Her cousin, working as the wedding day assistant, came to our dressing room to drop off the boutonnieres for me and my uncle, as well as bring over an iron for us to touch up our dress shirts. I answered the door, not expecting my fiancee to be standing right there next to her cousin. I quickly accepted the boutonnieres and the iron and sent them on their way. In that haste, I forgot to have the assistant pin the boutonnieres onto our lapels because we're clumsy men and we were not going to be successful trying to perform that task. So my uncle got the idea to call my aunt and have her make her way back to the dressing room area to pin the flowers on us. But my fam wasn't yet at the church, so we were going to have to be patient. While we waited, unc imparted some stories about married life and words of wisdom, which I knew he would have for me before the wedding. His most important message? Don't let anyone else into your marriage, meaning whatever disagreements we may have, don't run to third or fourth parties trying to rally support behind us. This marriage is between us two people, and no one else.<br /><br />We started putting on our suits just after 11A. I was trying to put it off as long as possible so that I wouldn't be sitting around uncomfortable in a suit forever and ever. My uncle chuckled as I struggled to bend in my suit to tie my shoes, then he bent over and tied them for me. He didn't have this problem he because he's worn suits every day for years, and he has learned to put the shoes on before putting the suit on. At about 11:15A, the officiant, the fabulous Sonia Walker, made her first appearance to check in on us. Drew took this as a sign that the shit was about to start getting serious, and he wished me luck and went to the sanctuary to take a seat. My playcousin's mother arrived not long after that, because my aunt had appointed her to go back and see what this boutonniere situation was all about. She was able to apply the boutonnieres after a few efforts. We didn't have safety pins to keep the sharp part covered, so I made her put the pin in several times until I was sure that the point wouldn't stick me accidentally. We could faintly hear the music that my fiancee chose for the pre-wedding seating. I knew that it was about a half-hour of music, so right at noon, we should hear the song that would be the cue for the family to be seated by the ushers. So I wasn't planning to be in the side hall waiting for that music until about 11:50 or 11:55. Sonia had a different plan. Literally seconds after my uncle suggested that we take off the sportcoats because we were starting to perspire, Sonia came back to the dressing room and said, "It's time." My uncle and I looked at each other wide-eyed, then shrugged and put our coats back on. One last check that everything fit right, and a last deep breath, and we went to stand in the side hall behind a door that led out to the sanctuary.<br /><br />I did not see who was in the sanctuary, so I wasn't worried about who was there, who wasn't there, did my dad make it, etc. I had one thing worrying me over everything else as I stood in that side hall, and it wasn't pre-wedding jitters. It was the fact that I absolutely could not stop sweating. The side hall was warm, the outside weather was warm, the monkey suit was warm, and besides, I was about to get married, so all of those things explain why I was sweating. There was another factor--that baby oil that Sarah gave me that I felt the need to apply to my dome in order to avoid having a dry scalp. All of these things added together resulted in me just drowning in perspiration. Several paper towels were retrieved from the bathrooms by me and Sonia. They helped a little. I tried to stuff some dry ones in my pocket in case this issue followed me out to the ceremony. Sonia thought that standing back there waiting for our music cue wasn't helping, and besides, my uncle is limping, so she opened the door and calmly grabbed a couple of chairs from the sanctuary and set them up behind the door for my uncle and me. This was greatly appreciated. I did seem to control my sweating a little better as I sat there chuckling with my uncle. Sonia declined to take a chair for herself.<br /><br />At about 11:55, we heard a voice. It was a male voice, and it was coming from around the corner where one of the building entrances was located. It was the entrance near our dressing room, so my first thought was, is this Bubba still looking for someone to open the basement meeting area? I heard the voice bellow a short, "Hello?" I know the voice. It's the voice of someone sorta close to me, if you count coming from his loins as close to me. It was the unmistakeable voice of my father. But when I told this to my uncle--who, remember, can't stand him almost as much as I can't--my uncle's response was, "No it isn't," and he just shook his head quickly and turned back to the sanctuary door, almost as if he was hoping to hear our song cue right then and there so that we'd have to hustle out there. He answered so definitively that I guess I believed him and started to ignore the situation. Sonia was on alert because whoever this was had some bad timing and was a threat to disrupt the ceremony if he kept poking around. Then he said a little louder, "Anybody back here?" Absolutely no doubt, it was my dad. I turned to my uncle and said, "I would have lost a lot of money betting that he wouldn't get here in time!" Sonia scurried around the corner to meet whomever this was and make sure that he didn't wander any further. I got up to see if this really was my dad. I had some emotion at this point. The timing was incredible, right when I was about ready to go out there and get hitched, and I was a combo of pissed at the timing, shocked at the fact that my dad made something on time, and sorta happy to see him, since he really should be here on my wedding day after all.<br /><br />I get to the corner and look dead into the eyes of my father. It's really him. I was astonished. When I tell you that the man has never made anything on time except to beat me when I was a child, I'm not even fucking kidding. I was told that he was late for my birth! Yet here he was. Then I noticed some fashion choices that he made for the occasion. What little hair he has was slicked back like a '50s greaser, and I have never seen him try to do that. His "suit" was okay, just a sportcoat and pants and tie, nothing outlandish. His shoes...well, they were a different story. They were some kind of light brown crocodile lace fabrication. Never seen those either. Hey, no accounting for taste. He spoke for less than a minute, explaining that he wanted to see his son before he went out to get married. He wished me luck, and I told him that I was glad he was here, and he said he'd never miss his son getting married, as if he was just a mortal lock to make it here on time even though he's never been on time and several hours ago his ass was in Atlanta, GA. I'd like to think my mom facilitated him making it, because he'd have almost no chance otherwise.<br /><br />He circled back around to the normal sanctuary entrance to take his seat while I sat back down next to my uncle, who was as shocked as I was that my dad was here on time. Then Sonia heard one of the songs that we're on alert to hear as cues that it's about to start. There was a jazzy-sounding song with piano that cued the seating of the family, and that was when Sonia, my uncle and I were to walk out. But with the drama of my dad playing out, Sonia got a little flustered, and she heard another jazzy song playing, which was "In A Sentimental Mood." And she rushed my uncle and me out the door and into the sanctuary as my uncle and I looked at each other a little confused. My uncle followed behind me as I slowly walked out. I was so nervous about making this first appearance that I didn't look up at the people until I got all the way to my standing spot. I adjusted my suit all the way to my spot. Only then did I feel comfortable enough to look up at the people. My fiancee had way more people on her side of the aisle, but the wedding's in her hometown, so that's to be expected. I looked at my side and tried to make eye contact with all of my peeps one at a time. My playcousin snapped pictures. I saw Jacob and Alice and waved, and said a little inside joke to Jacob, the same one he said to me at his wedding. I saw Monica, a lovely woman I used to bowl with, and her boyfriend. Monica was witness to a lot of my craziness from seven and eight years ago. She was there the weekend that I found Karen's website and was consoled by Sarah. I brought Sarah to the bowling alley with me that Sunday to bowl my regular league games, and I did that because otherwise, I would have stayed home and skipped my league. I couldn't have done that alone. I also talked to Monica about all of my drama, so she's another one that's been supportive throughout the years. I saw my older cousin and her husband, the cousin who agreed to speak during the ceremony. I saw my playcousin's mother, who's always been a little insulated and introverted, and I was surprised that she decided to come down from Chicago. But she helped raise me, and I was very happy to see her.<br /><br />The ushers (who were my aunt's husband and their oldest son) started to bring the family members down the aisle to their seats because the groom was already out there, even though this wasn't the song they were supposed to go on. I became a little worried because at rehearsal, the song that the fam and maid of honor used ran a little long, and we wound up standing there waiting for the bride's song to cue up. The guy running the computer where the music was stored was a young adult interning at the church, so I wondered if he would be able to adjust and get right to the bride's song after the maid of honor came down. I reminded myself a couple of times that this was the bride's day and that after everything else is done, I needed to take in the moment when she comes down the aisle and block out anything else. The sweat started running down my face again, and I ignored it as best as I could. The family came down and smiled at me and my uncle, including my aunt and my fiancee's mother lighting candles with an electric lighter. It took them each a while to get the thing to work, so that provided brief moments of levity. Then Judy came down with her black pantsuit, looking very...unique. Then Sonia gave a hand cue to the intern, and he got right to the bride's song, which was "Pachelbel's Canon in D Major."<br /><br />She walked down the aisle calmly, and everyone rose to greet her. I knew that she was going to have a flower in her hair. I had been sitting in this computer room for weeks with the dress sitting on the bed, although she put tissue paper over the front so that I couldn't see it. I had gotten a brief glimpse of the makeup job. Mentally, I thought I was ready to see my fiancee come down the aisle.<br /><br />Emotionally, I wasn't anywhere near ready.<br /><br />I started choking up a little just hearing her song begin, knowing the moment was finally here. Then I actually looked at her. The dress was very slightly off white, as close as you can get without it being totally white. It was cut midway and showing the girls, but in a tasteful manner. The sleeves were all light and elegant. The white flower was the perfect size for her head, not tiny but not too big. The red bouquet was a perfect accent to her entire presentation. She was stunning. She was my blushing bride. And I was her blubbering hubby. I put my hand to my mouth and started crying almost uncontrollably. My uncle didn't help, saying in my ear, "That's your woman." That just made me cry even more. I couldn't even tell if she was crying when she made it to me because my eyes were so filled with tears that I couldn't see much of anything. So the first three minutes of the ceremony were filled with me sniffling and wiping tears and trying to be discreet and pull out some Kleenex to blow my nose during the prayer.<br /><br />The ceremony rolled along, and it came time for my fiancee's friends to read their reading. It was a Bible verse, 1 Corinthians 13, but it was hard to understand. Lots of thous and forsooths and whatnot. My fiancee later told me that they chose a different version of the reading than she was intending. The version they chose was a very literal translation, so it didn't come out sounding like anything resembling today's English. Plus, the readers had soft voices. The ceremony continued, and it came time for my cousin to do the reading that Cassandra was supposed to do. And she got up there and put on her glasses and belted out "Union" by Robert Fulghum, and she killed it. Think of the black police captain on Law & Order. It sounded that good. I was very proud. No pinch-hitter in history has hit a home run that far.<br /><br />Then we walked to the middle of the aisle and took the candles that our families had lit and we both lit one candle in unity as a symbol of both of our families and us committing to this marriage. I was happy to do this because it gave me a chance to walk and stretch my legs. The sweat kept pouring throughout the ceremony, but I just played through it. My uncle handled the ring exchange flawlessly. I don't know how my fiancee felt, but that was a powerful moment to be able to have that wedding band put on. Sonia presided over everything wonderfully. She wrapped things up with, "You may greet your bride," and the kiss is now my Facebook profile pic. Then Sonia announced us as Mr. and Mrs., and we took each other by the hand and strutted down the aisle as "I Can See Clearly Now" played, and everyone stood and smiled and applauded. We were finally, after five and a half years of sizing each other up and imagining a life together and wondering if we were right for each other, a legally married couple.<br /><br />Looking into my wife's eyes after it was all over, I got the sense that she was feeling what I was feeling--glad that it's finally all over. There's such a build-up to that big day that no matter how much you love your spouse, there's a big sigh of relief when it's done. The work of being a married couple immediately takes precedent, and the wedding planning and worrying is now an afterthought. As we stood in the corridor in the receiving line, I didn't even pay attention to our songs playing. I just wanted to get through and take some pics and go eat with my wife. My hurting mouth wasn't even in my mind all day. It didn't matter that I had two teeth removed only three days prior. The receiving line was memorable because some of my wife's family members, specifically her uncle's daughter, decided to make it a picture-taking occasion and held up the line for quite a while. It got a little uncomfortable. But eventually that was over, and despite both me and my wife being ready to have a seat and get off our feet for a moment, it was now time to make our way back into the sanctuary for pics. The camera girl was my wife's uncle's stepson's daughter, if you can keep all that straight. She did an awesome job, but she's a college student, so she had the energy to stand up there and make us pose for several minutes at a time while she found the right angle. It was torture for us, as well as my uncle on his bad knee. It took about an hour, and it felt like a day. The most interesting part of the picture session was how many other people stood behind the camera girl taking pics with their own cameras and camera phones for their personal pleasure. I felt like Tom Cruise posing for the paparazzi. Just a sea of folks with cameras snapping away and yelling, "Hold that pose!" And the whole time, I'm dripping all over the fucking place. They couldn't provide me with enough paper towels for all the sweating I was doing. And it had nothing to do with being married! It was all the standing, the humidity of the sanctuary, and the monkey suit. But everyone had a joke for me after the ceremony--"Sweating bullets there, eh?"<br /><br />My dad veered off course a little during the pictures. One pose was my wife leaning over the end of a piano while I sat at the keys and pretended to play misty for her as I looked into her eyes. It's a very sweet pic. It's also misleading because I can't play piano for shit. So my dad decided that this would be a good time to play a musical piece for us as a tribute, I guess. I wasn't in the mood for his showboating, so I told him no, and he was relentless. He must have asked me around a dozen times! And he was taking it personal, too. "You don't think I can play, is that it, son?" No, dad, that's not it, it's that it's my fucking wedding day, not your gig at Kingston Mines. By the time the pics were over, he and I were the last few stragglers out of the sanctuary, and he was still asking me. I kept saying no. However, I've since seen a pic someone took of him at the piano by himself, so he must have skipped coming straight to the reception in order to tickle the keys. Like a moth to light, my dad saw a musical instrument and couldn't resist the urge to make the day partially about him. SMH.<br /><br />From there, it was upstairs and on to the reception. I enlisted Jacob to be our announcer and introduce the wedding party. There was a little commotion as we nervously looked around trying to find Judy, who had disappeared. But someone located her, and Jacob handled the introductions with a personal flair, saying our last names twice as if he were auditioning for the Yankees P.A. gig. "Now getting married, the shortstop, #2, Derek Jeter. Jeter. #2." I'm sure I was the only one in the room who understood the gag. The wife and I entered the room to a standing O with big smiles on our faces, and our ironic joke song cued up on the computer--"The Thrill Is Gone." As most of the room raised eyebrows in confusion, we headed straight to our tables and got ready to eat. But first, my wife's uncle was going to bless the meal. No problem, except his daughter insisted that Jacob formally announce him by name. A little unusual, but okay.<br /><br />I thoroughly enjoyed the wonderful food provided by Chef Erik Waldkirch of Maximilian's Catering, even with the mouth issues. Everyone else seemed to enjoy it, too. Not long after finishing, my uncle started to act weird. He said out loud as he sat next to me, "Oh, um, okay, guess it's about that time for the speech," as if he was all of a sudden very nervous about giving the best man speech. I was surprised by this because my uncle is very smooth and polished and has had a management position for many years, so giving a speech is nothing new for him. I would be informed later that this was also the doing of my wife's uncle's daughter, as well as the "wedding day organizer." They directed my uncle to get up and do the speech, as if we were on a strict time schedule. I never saw them do this. But his speech was great, very heartfelt and touching. He briefly addressed the number of frogs I had to kiss before finding my princess, and he let my wife know how proud he was to welcome such a classy woman into the family. I said, "My man!" and gave him a big hug. I knew he wouldn't let me down. Judy spoke next about the times she and my wife talked about finding that right guy, and how happy she was that it finally happened. My new mother-in-law said some very nice words, and so did my dad, though I must say that I held my breath when he stood up in anticipation of him saying something totally inappropriate.<br /><br />The music didn't go exactly the way we planned. My wife had three playlists for the reception--dinner, cake-cutting, and dancing--but no one bothered to change playlists when we cut the cake, so at some point we heard "The Thrill Is Gone" playing for a second time, and my aunt asked if I could do something about the music because it seemed to be repeating, and I got up and changed the playlist to dance. I was kinda shaking my head as I did this because I had fended off the urge to say that I would handle the music at my own reception. I felt that was a little too controlling and I needed to let go and let someone else worry about it. But the intern who did the music at the wedding wasn't at the reception, so in the end, my wife and I wound up being in charge of the music. Not long after I changed the music, the "wedding day organizer" struck again and said that we needed to say a speech to our guests, and it had to be right now. Fine. I took the mic and had my wife stand next to me as I thanked everyone for coming out, especially my out-of-town people. I said that they helped make this the greatest day of our lives. I didn't know that my wife would break her shyness and say anything, but she took the mic and thanked everyone who helped set up the big day. I then turned the dance playlist back on.<br /><br />I battled with my wife in the weeks leading up to the wedding about having a first dance. I was all up for it even though I can't dance, and she was totally against it because she "hates to be the center of attention." Um, it's your wedding day. We even practiced a slow dance once, but we were so clumsy and tired afterwards that we never got around to practicing again. So our one dance at the reception was the following: I spontaneously shook my tailfeather when Heatwave's "Groove Line" came on, and I raised the roof a little, and everyone laughed and hooted and hollered, and I grabbed my wife and held her hand while she did one twirl. And that was that. I was sweating too much to keep going, and she wasn't interested. Not long after that, I went to the restroom and had a couple of minutes of alone time to take in the day's activities, then I went to drop the marriage license back in the dressing room, and when I made it back to the reception, my wife was missing, tables were being cleaned off, and people were getting ready to leave. "Come Go With Me" by Teddy Pendergrass was playing when the computer was turned off, so at least my mother's favorite singer made an appearance, but most of the other songs that we fought and argued over never wound up being played. My wife returned dressed in regular clothes, so she was anxious to get out of that dress and those shoes, but not in the honeymoon suite to get busy with me. She just wanted to be comfortable. Can't blame her. I kept the suit on the whole day despite losing weight in perspiration and having to towel off before every single picture. One last bit of drama came when I went back to the dressing room and found it locked up and the lights turned off, meaning whoever shut it down was in there with my wallet and other valuable items. But nothing came up missing.<br /><br />From there, it was off to our room at the Doubletree Hotel mere minutes away, where we already knew no action would be happening thanks to our weariness as well as Aunt Flo. But I still treasure those minutes lying in the king-size bed with my wife, looking into her eyes and reliving our wonderful day before nodding off for an early evening nap. Then we woke up and got some drive-thru Chick-Fil-A.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sun. Oct. 16</span><br /><br />I remember this day as being so perfect because our families met at my wife's uncle's house and we had a big brunch together. And it was just awesome to see my people together with her people hanging out and having a great time. My dad became our responsibility on this day. He was able to hitch a ride back to the Doubletree after the wedding with I believe my aunt and her family. But they claimed to not have the space for him to go out to the brunch, so my wife and I put him in our back seat. And afterwards, we took him downtown to the Amtrak station, where he caught a train back to Chicago instead of flying back to Atlanta or something. At the brunch, my uncle gave me another big hug and just looked at me with a huge smile on his face. I think he was seeing me through the prism of being there when I was first born and watching me through all of life's phases, and seeing how I've become the man I am today. And I made sure to tell him all weekend that he's the reason I am the man that I am. I needed a strong male figure because my mother made an unfortunate choice to father her baby, and my uncle has always stepped in to be that man and show me how things are done by real men. I didn't always apply those lessons, but eventually, I got it together. I hugged everyone in my family individually and thanked them for making the long trip, and they all hit the road directly from the brunch. My wife and I hung around until after 3P because as we were pulling out to leave at 1P, the couple who spoke at the ceremony pulled in, and the wife stopped the car to give them some conversation time. I watched football while they chatted. In the evening, we had a very nice dinner at Carrabba's and enjoyed the Bears whooping the Vikings on Sunday Night Football.<br /><br />The honeymoon consisted of us visiting Graceland and getting the big bus tour of Elvis's estate; eating breakfast at Memphis's most revered breakfast restaurants, Bryant's and Brother Juniper's (both awesome!); dinner at Rendezvous and Gus's Fried Chicken (Rendezvous ribs were great to me and average to the wife, Gus's chicken was great for both of us, but be warned, it's spicy); and a night at Roadhouse Casino & Hotel back in Tunica, MS (room was tremendous, complete with in-room whirlpool, but I lost back the money I won the night before the wedding). The wife believes she got food poisoning somewhere in the middle of all this, but she wasn't vomiting or in the bathroom nonstop, so it was mild. Maybe it was just realizing that she was married to me.<br /><br />And one more funny story of drama: We knew we had received many cards from our wedding guests, but when Judy and my mother-in-law took the gifts back to our house, we had a hell of a time locating the cards. And we were quite panicked about this because, of course, those cards didn't contain just cards, they contained money. I even called my aunt while they were driving back to Chicago to ask if she left a gift, as tacky as that sounded. She wasn't happy about that, and then she was almost furious when I told her that we seem to have misplaced all of the cards. She confirmed that the $250 she was going to chip in for the rehearsal dinner was inside her card, so between Sunday and Monday, it became a scramble inside our home to find these cards or else drive back to the church and hope that someone there found them. Monday morning, we were at our wit's end searching through bags and boxes two, three, four times, and my wife was submitting to the possibility of someone walking through the unsecured reception area and taking the cards, which I refused to believe. Finally, finally, we opened the guest book and found the cards shoved inside. Crisis averted, cash saved, mass murder of innocent churchgoers thwarted.Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9042564.post-62758046823779154692011-11-21T10:11:00.005-06:002011-11-21T14:08:30.352-06:00Tying The Knot, Part 7: The Day BeforeI'm determined to remember the important parts of this wonderful wedding weekend even though it happened over five weeks ago. So without further adieu, let's start with the day before the wedding.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Fri. Oct. 14</span><br /><br />On this beautiful morning, I found myself in my fiancee's car trying to find a jeweler whose coupon I have in hand. It's a coupon to take two bucks off a watch battery replacement procedure, and this was important to me because in my warped way, I felt the need to have the women that I previously dated or screwed represented as part of my wedding day, and the watch that "Shelley" bought for my 30th birthday with the money from the student loan for which I co-signed had a dead battery.<br /><br />(Quickly, the other women represented were as follows: "Giselle," my high school sweetheart, and "Karen," as well as a co-worker I dated, had songs in our reception playlist that reminded me of them. Tammi, my 8th-grade crush, who I thought for years that I would end up marrying one day, also was repped by a song or two, although we never dated. "Sarah" gave me baby oil for my shiny bald head while we were dating, and I still have that very same bottle, and I splashed some on my head before I left the house Saturday morning. Also, I still carry in my wallet the ticket stub from the comedy improv show Sarah and I attended the day after I found Karen's swingers website and Sarah drove three hours just to console me. The stub is totally blank because the ink has rubbed off after seven years, but I carry it anyway. The Co-Worker Who Shall Not Be Named made a big deal of wanting cheap costume jewelry for her birthday, and I bought something for her thinking she would reciprocate for my birthday, and she did nothing. So the cheap wedding band I bought for myself was sort of a tribute to her. "Torrie" was represented by the fact that I wore one of the dirty T-shirts that I bought while shopping with her in Minnesota to the church the morning of the wedding, the "I'm Rick James Bitch" shirt. And it's very weak, but I tried to rep "Grace" by buying some vitamin water before the wedding that was branded XXX, which made me think of the nature of our one-night stand. No romance, no holds barred, just straight fuck. There was even a tenuous connection to "Adrienne," a woman I dated a couple of times but never got to first base. She was a smoker, and "Drew" gave me a congratulatory cigar before the wedding, although I didn't smoke it. And the most important women in my life, my late mother and grandmother, got a shout-out in the privacy of my home before the wedding, just a holler to let them know that I knew they were proud of me on such an important day.)<br /><br />Anyway, my mouth was still very sore from the teeth removal, but I needed to eat. I was planning on picking up something soft while I was out after I got the watch fixed. So I'm driving towards Germantown Parkway, which is where most of the restaurants and businesses are here in the sleepy suburb where I now live. My mind is relaxed and enjoying the sunny weather and taking in all the feelings of anticipation that I'm having. I'm just feeling really good and blessed that I'm in this position at this point in my life. I go to Walgreens and grab a bottle of sparkling cider for the toast, since I'm not supposed to be boozing it so soon after the teeth surgery. Then I arrive at the jeweler, and dampening my pride at getting out and doing this early and arriving at about quarter past nine is the sign saying that the jeweler doesn't open until ten.<br /><br />Not a big deal, I figure, because this gives me time to find something to eat and relax while eating, not just scarf it down. The first thought when I contemplated soft food was mashed potatoes, and that leads me to the KFC, which also is not open until ten. What the hell? Are we in Amish country and nothing gets opened before noon? I eventually settle on Sonic, and the softest thing I could find on that menu was the French toast sticks, which were delightful. I was thrilled to get a text while eating that said one of my guests from Chicago, my mom's best friend Barbara, wouldn't make it but was sending cash to my Paypal account. Sweet. But that knocked out a potential speaker at the wedding. My fiancee has two speeches for the ceremony, one read by friends of hers, and the other by someone I wanted to stand up for me. My first choice is Cassandra, who worked with me at CBOE during those Karen and Sarah years when I ran around chasing ass and wondering why the world hated me, and she was always supportive and helpful with advice while gently reminding me that I had no shot with her because I wasn't man enough. The woman trusted me enough to sleep with me when we attended the Kentucky Derby, and by sleep I do mean sleep, because we were never intimate. No first base with her, either. But she means a lot to me because she was telling me truths about myself that I didn't hear at the time but remembered and realized that she was right later in life. The problem with having her speak is, Cassandra had not been available for a couple of weeks. No matter how much I call or text, she wasn't responding, and I had no idea if she would be able to make it, and her name's already on the program, and I was starting to feel a little panicky. If Cass won't make it and Barb is already out, who the hell am I going to have speak?<br /><br />I put that drama on the back burner and hoped that it would work itself out, and I made it back to the jeweler who took notice of my shirt that said something about Chicago and prompted him to ramble on about a hellacious flight to Chicago he once took, and yada yada yada, and finally the watch was fixed and I was back home. My fiancee's maid of honor, Judy, was now at home, and they took off to pick up some last-minute items, and I chilled by myself for thirty minutes or so after showering until my fiancee's mother showed up. Once my fiancee and Judy got back, it was time to load up the cars and head out to the church and get ready for the rehearsal. Everything's going smoothly thus far, but at this point a glitch would occur that we wouldn't realize until later.<br /><br />My dad (he's not the glitch) called during all of this scrambling, trying to convince me to pick him up at the airport two hours before the wedding or find someone who will. No can do, I told him. No matter what, he was not going to mess up my wedding morning. I'm not trying to take time out to do that, and my fiancee certainly wasn't, and we didn't have time to call around to find someone to drive him like he's a foreign dignitary. He was going to have to cab it like a normal person, and if he didn't make the wedding before noon, too bad. I was willing to take bets that between finding his bags after the flight and his general state of mental and physical dishevelment, there wasn't a chance in hell that he would make it in time.<br /><br />We arrived at the church a little after noon, giving us three hours to set tables in the reception area and get ready for my family, who were driving up from Chicago and would arrive sometime around the 4P rehearsal start time. Judy, my fiancee, and her mother worked on the tablecloth arrangement for a few of the tables just to see what worked and what didn't, and I took orders and drove out to Lenny's, a sub shop. I was so scatterbrained wondering what should I order for me and my bleeding mouth that I drove past the place, but I found it eventually and got everyone's order and a huge tuna salad for myself. After I got back with the food, "Jacob" and "Alice" started calling and letting us know that they were coming to the church, and once they showed up, we let them in. Jacob and I started moving tables around while the ladies continued setting tables. Somewhere in this hubbub, we started talking about all the things that my fiancee and I brought to the church in advance so that we wouldn't be bothered the day of the wedding. She brought her dress, and an iron, and other items she would need, and I brought my suit and hung it up in my dressing room already, along with my shoes, and I grabbed the presents that I would give to my family, and she has her gift for her mom, and of course we remembered the computer with all the songs because we're going to need that for this rehearsal...and my fiancee exclaims that in all of her haste that morning, she forgot the computer! So this is after two o'clock, and we've eaten, and I'm stuffed, and I'm hanging out with Jacob shooting the shit, and my fiancee lets me know that because <span style="font-style: italic;">she </span>forgot the computer, <span style="font-style: italic;">I </span>would now have to get in the car, drive back home, and grab the computer, and be back before four, which is when the rehearsal begins. Really? Me? Oh, and I'm still a relatively new driver, and I've never made this twenty-minute drive from the church to home, so she has to hastily scribble out some instructions for me to do this. I'm still not sure why she felt that I had to make this trip to cover for her mistake, but out I head, getting in much more driving experience on this day than I could have possibly anticipated.<br /><br />This gave me an opportunity to pump some more bad '90s music on the cassette player because I'm toting a couple of my homemade tapes in the car, so that part was fun, but the trip back to the church once I retrieved the laptop was torture. It was about 3:15P when I left the house, so I was going to be cutting it close anyway, but I got on the expressway for about thirty seconds before traffic came to a complete stop. I mean, complete stop. No pumping brakes, no gas a little and then stop, I mean we were standing totally still. And it was for quite a while. Then we'd move like a foot and stop again for another three minutes. And it went like this for about a half-hour. Seriously, I had been on that expressway for about thirty minutes and wasn't even a half-mile away from my initial entrance ramp. I was so mad, but I was about to get madder. My aunt, who has always been my harshest critic (and if you read this blog from the beginning, you know that my criticism of myself is scathing and hurtful, and she's always been worse), called me on my cell, and she explained that they all had arrived at the church and were at a back entrance and were waiting for me to come out and let them in. I had to tell her that I wasn't at the church, that I was stuck in horrible traffic, and she should call my fiancee and have her let them in. Now, in no way is any of this my fault. I'm getting the laptop that my fiancee forgot, and I'm totally, helplessly stuck in a major traffic jam, but I was hoping that everyone would understand. Well, as my aunt hangs up the phone, I hear her say in a distant voice to someone right before the click, "The groom ain't even here!" I fumed for the next ten minutes. It just took me back mentally to every other time that I did something wrong and my aunt leveled every criticism she could conjure at me. I have never, ever been good enough in her eyes, and by extension, neither has anyone close to me. She responded to my long phone calls with Jacob when we were kids with the accusation that I must have been afraid of him and that's why I wouldn't get off the phone. Not that he would find me interesting enough to talk to, but I must have been a bully victim. What? And she rarely called my girlfriends by their names, always something derivative like "Chickie" or "Sweetie." They couldn't have her respect because they were with me, you see. My fiancee was no different; she was known as "Chickie" most of the time we dated before I moved down here to Memphis. Honestly, I was this close to ruining the weekend by the time I finally made it to the church, because I was ready to explode on my aunt for that little "Groom ain't even here!" comment. I took it so personal because I knew that she was chalking it up to me being irresponsible and not good enough before she knew any fucking details.<br /><br />Fortunately, I had cooled off by the time I drove past the two accident scenes on the expressway and made it to the church at about a quarter past four. As I rushed into the sanctuary, sweating and stressed, I was greeted by my family and my future mother-in-law and Jacob and Alice sitting there together taking up three rows of seats, and my fiancee and the officiant standing in the aisle, and they all exploded in applause at the sight of me. How could I be mad after that? I smiled wide and greeted my family members with hugs and handshakes, and I remember how good it felt to see all of those familiar faces, people I grew up with and shared so many life experiences, and here they all were sitting in a church in Memphis, TN, all in support of me. The officiant, the great Sonia Walker, explained that they could have done the rehearsal without me or the music if I would have been even more delayed, so I was lucky to get there when I did. We did the walk-through, and I kept trying to crack jokes and dance and keep things light. I remembered that about Jacob and Alice's rehearsal. They were in such a great mood and laughing and having a good time, and I wanted to recreate that. Sonia showed my best man--who is my uncle--and me where we would be standing before the ceremony, and she would lead us out during a song cue right before the fam would be ushered to their seats. My uncle had me worried because he was having a hard time standing up just during the rehearsal. He recently had knee surgery, and it hasn't healed up well for him, so he's gimping around these days despite remaining on his bowling team. I was concerned about all the standing we would do the day of the wedding, because it's not just the ceremony, it's also the standing around taking pictures afterwards. But he said he'd gut it out. The gift-giving after the rehearsal was memorable because I ordered blackjack cufflinks for my uncle (he loves his gambling, and blackjack is his game) and steering wheel cufflinks for my aunt's husband, but I ordered them both gift-wrapped, so I couldn't tell which was which. (He drives a bus for a living, plus he's the one who took me out to practice driving, leading to me getting my license right before I left Chicago.) My aunt's husband wasn't even at the church, choosing to head to the hotel after the long drive to Memphis, so I figured I would open one of the cufflink sets and if it was the set for my uncle, I could give them to him right there a little beat-up on the wrapping but not destroyed, and that would keep my aunt's husband's gift pristine. But I picked the wrong one to open. So I gave my uncle his pristine gift while I took the other gift back home in an attempt to re-wrap it. He hung his suit in our dressing room and put our rings and his shoes in there as well.<br /><br />This brought us to the moment I had been worrying about--the post-rehearsal. We canceled the dinner because both my uncle and my aunt, who were splitting the cost, were not totally on board at the concept. We're clearly not rich, we're doing so much of this wedding on the cheap, we're barely having a honeymoon, and they're being asked to cough up $500 between them for this rehearsal dinner. So we canceled that, hoping they would gift that cash to us for the wedding. But this now left the rest of the evening for me to either hang out with family, hang out with friends, or go home and spend the night before my wedding watching TV or surfing the net or something. And for some reason, I really didn't want to do that. I guess I would have felt like a big loser if I wound up sitting on my ass watching Friday Night Smackdown or something the night before I got married. So I was up for any suggestions from anyone. My fiancee jumped in Judy's car, and they headed to FedEx Forum to watch Memphis Madness, the name for the first official practice session for the U. of Memphis basketball team. This didn't really interest me, so I kept my fiancee's car and was ready to follow anyone who wanted to hang with me. Before I could ask my family what interested them, Jacob and Alice raved about those incredible ribs from Corky's that my fiancee gave Jacob the night he helped me move. He said he couldn't move a muscle in the hotel room because he was so sore, and the ribs were cold from being in the fridge, but he ate them anyway and loved them. So he and Alice were headed straight to Corky's, and then down to Tunica, MS, where their casino hotel was located. They asked if any of this interested me. Hmmm, ribs and gambling? Yeah. Hell yeah. I invited anyone from my family to come along for the ribs, but they were so wiped from the travel that they all headed back to the hotel. So it was me in my fiancee's Toyota following Jacob and Alice to a place in my city, but I had to follow them because I didn't know where it was. But Jacob did. He's the Human Atlas.<br /><br />I called Drew while I drove because I knew he was in town and I figured a night at the casino would interest him. He got the address of the restaurant and exclaimed, "That's five minutes from my hotel!" So he eventually met us at the restaurant, although it took him a while because he needed a shower after getting to his hotel and immediately hitting the sack. I was still full from the tuna salad, plus the thought of a bone from the ribs hitting that part of my mouth where the teeth were pulled scared me, so I wound up eating a BBQ sandwich with a fork. Jacob and Alice ordered a banana pudding for dessert, and they let me have a forkful, and it was so good that I made an "O" face without intending to. I ordered a pudding to go intending to take it home to the fiancee but knowing deep down that it would never make it back to her. Jacob and Alice had to check in to the hotel, so they went ahead and made the half-hour drive to Tunica while Drew and I stayed a little longer in Memphis. He had to gas up the rental and then get me to a SunTrust ATM so I could get some cash. And oh, what a rental! The agency didn't have the economy car that Drew reserved, so they told him, either wait a half-hour for an economy to come back to the lot, or take this other ride at no extra cost to you. That replacement ride? A big-ass white pickup truck! I couldn't stop laughing when we went outside the restaurant and I saw this monstrosity. Drew needed a stepladder to get in the damn thing. And the interior was so roomy that I literally couldn't touch the seat behind me by reaching back. It was a nice bit of good fortune to make up for the horrible trip Drew had from Chicago to Memphis on Megabus. The woman he sat next to was very ill, and at one point she hurled into a paper bag. And it was a packed trip, so he couldn't switch seats. "I'm never taking Megabus again!" he said. That's a shame. My fiancee had a trip interrupted because the driver got arrested, and this happened to Drew, but I still maintain that I've had nothing but pleasant experiences with Megabus. I still couldn't recommend Megabus higher. They should pay me for the great advertisement.<br /><br />Anyway, Drew got me to an ATM and then I parked the Toyota at his hotel and he made the drive to Tunica, where he got gas on the outskirts of the large casino grounds. I would describe it as like a tiny city in and of itself. Drew, having been to Vegas unlike me, said it reminded him of Vegas. Just street after street with casino names waiting for you to turn down that street and drive another couple of miles to the casino of your choice. Nothing out there but casinos once you drive past the businesses on the outskirts. Lots of free land waiting for more casinos and hotels to be built. The smell of money all around you. It was quite the scene. Drew and I stood out front of Horseshoe Casino waiting for Jacob and Alice. They told us to go to Horseshoe because the best slots were there. I just wanted to go somewhere I could play poker. I haven't played live poker at a casino in years, and I made money when I did because I wasn't the biggest fish at those tables. I was very interested in hitting the poker tables again, and Horseshoe does have poker tables. So after standing out front for a long time, Jacob called and said they were here, and sure enough, there they were inside the casino looking for us. Guess there was more than one entrance.<br /><br />Alice hit the slots while the fellas wandered around. Jacob's not a poker player at all, so I don't know if he would have sat down at a table, but Drew and I headed right to the poker room, where we fully intended to play if the blinds were low enough. They weren't. There was a $1/$3 table that was no limit, and there was a $6/$12 limit table, and we weren't interested in either because one can lose his shirt easily in a $6/$12 game or in any no-limit game. I only took $60 out of the ATM, and I could play a while at a blackjack table if the minimum bet was something like $5 or $10. But not a high-limit poker game nor a no-limit poker game. We staggered out of the poker room and headed for the blackjack tables. Most of the tables had minimums of $15 or $25. One table in this very crowded place had a $10 minimum and no one playing. This was very odd. I've never seen a casino where the higher minimum blackjack tables had folks playing, but a lower minimum table had no one. The dealer, a middle-aged black woman, was standing there with a blank expression and the cards in one hand, in position to deal if someone, anyone would come sit down. And we three guys must have stood around that table waiting for one of us to make a decision for a good three or four minutes. Other people actually came up to the table and looked at it for a few seconds, wondering why no one was playing, and then they would walk away. It's probably one of those gambler superstitions--never start a blackjack table fresh, always come in when others are playing so you can make sure the table's on the up and up. Well, I'm not a smart gambler, so finally I told the guys "Let's sit down and play," and we took out our cash and got chipped up and started playing, and sure enough, someone else then decided to come sit down between Drew and Jacob and start playing with us. And he lost his money within two minutes, and cussed, and walked away. Unbelievable. I hope that old man feels better now that he lost his money at a table where others were playing and possibly taking his cards. But at least he didn't play by himself!<br /><br />We played for about 45 minutes, all three of us staying above water but barely. Other players came and went, and some stayed for a long time. Jacob stopped at one point after winning a lucky hand and finding himself up about $100. Drew and I kept going. Then I won a hand where the dealer was showing 10 and I hit to get to 16 and decided that I had to hit again and got a 5. I immediately stood up and said, "I think that's a sign!" I cashed out up $85 and tipped the dealer $5. Drew was up about $20 at this point, and he joined me and Jacob in leaving the table all smiles to search for Alice. She was hammering away at the Wheel Of Fortune slots. It was a little past 11 at this point, so, not wanting to spend my wedding day droopy-eyed and yawning, I made the call for Drew and me to head back to Memphis. We left Jacob and Alice at Horseshoe and laughed our way back into Tennessee. I then jumped in my Toyota and drove home.Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9042564.post-73981332155459597322011-10-18T15:12:00.003-05:002011-10-18T15:19:48.743-05:00Getting Hitched Went Off Without A Hitch!Of course I'll have a big post (or two) chronicling my wedding weekend, but it won't be soon. We're on our in-town honeymoon, and when that's over, it's right back to work. So I'll have all the details next week sometime at the soonest. Just wanted to check in and let those wondering know that everything came off great, the whole weekend was as awesome as it gets, and I am officially a married man. Kinda weird to say it, but feels good. I guess I'll always be in debt to Blogger for creating the forum that allowed two people with no other methods of meeting to meet each other and eventually marry each other. And of course, always a debt of gratitude to SunShyn, the blogger who worked the same job that I did for a few years. She told me of her blogging efforts, and that led to me starting a blog, and my wife saw it and left a comment, and the rest is history. Or her story, if the wife can find the time to sit down and blog about it as well. I'd love to read her thoughts. Anyway, off to Tunica, MS, for a little gambling action before returning home. Catch y'all in my next post!Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9042564.post-77622508840700975142011-10-14T08:23:00.004-05:002011-10-14T08:48:06.952-05:00Tying The Knot, Part 6: Pre-Wedding JittersSelfishly, I have been blogging away the past three days, trying to calm the OCD in me by chronicling things that I feel must be chronicled before I say "I do," such as the debauchery that was my bachelor party weekend and the emotional roller coaster that was my first love in 8th grade. My fiancee has been cleaning house and getting ready for our big day tomorrow. And when she has some free time, she's requested that I come spend it with her in this, our wedding week. And I've said I can't, I have to finish blogging. And what happens when one keeps getting ignored? One starts wondering where she stands and why she doesn't feel excited about the big day approaching and where is our spark. So I shouldn't have been surprised when I saw her get out of bed last night and go into the living room with the lights off. I found her sitting on the couch crying. When I asked what was wrong, she said that it wasn't something she felt she could talk to me about. When I pressed, she admitted that she was worried that she wasn't getting excited about the wedding. I took the responsibility for that because I truly think that she would be more excited had I given her more time this week, not to mention the past five weeks that I've spent watching and writing about football. I've been a dick, plain and simple. I have done a horrible job of balancing my fiancee and my other interests. I don't have experience balancing these things because I've never lived with a woman before. But I've got to do a better job.<br /><br />I left her on the couch with her emotions because I didn't want to smother her. She obviously left the bed because she needed to be alone. She returned to bed 20 minutes later and announced that she had actually been contemplating life without me. But fear not, she decided that she couldn't stand it if I weren't around. She'd miss everything about me, the football, the wrestling, the OCD...everything but the farting. I breathed a sigh of relief that she didn't come back to the bed declaring that she didn't think we should get married. Hey, I have a fear of rejection, and combine that with the way I've been neglecting her, and you can see why I'd be afraid of her calling the whole thing off. Can't say I wouldn't deserve it, either.<br /><br />How are my jitters, you ask? I'm a little numb. Of course, numb in the mouth from getting my teeth pulled yesterday, but numb emotionally as well. I just want the whole thing to go off without a hitch, and I want to do my part to not fuck up anything by forgetting to pack something for the honeymoon or splitting my pants or something like that. I'm trying to stay calm in that respect. But I don't have any fears as far as the actual marriage. She's the right woman, we're doing it for the right reasons, and I'm very happy to make our union official. I was proud to sign the big book at the city office when we picked up our marriage license. And I'm just proud of my fiancee in general. She's been under so much stress, looking for work while planning a wedding, and now working while planning a wedding, which takes more time away from her. But she's been a trooper.<br /><br />And now, it's almost here. Family and friends are on their way into town, we're cleaning up the house getting ready for visitors, and I'm about to groom myself in anticipation of the big day. I'm getting very excited. I'm going to wrap up my blogging here and devote my attention to my wife-to-be and the wedding. We may not be perfect, but we're perfect for each other. And most important, we're committed to working on our imperfections and making our union better and better all the time. We're gonna make it if we try, just the two of us. You and I.<br /><br />I love you, Grizzbabe.Drehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02120143234755653166noreply@blogger.com1