48 Years Of Perseverance

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.

47 Years Of Weirdness

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.

I Socialized And Made Friends, And Pigs Do Fly

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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! 

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.

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.

46 Years Of Compassion

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

45 Years Of Hate

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

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

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

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

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

I Bought A Car! Wait, What???

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For The Love Of Music

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

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

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

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

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

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

Politics: Fuck Donald Trump.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watching Death From A Distance

I 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rest in peace Mama Howell.

Four Words For The Next Elliot Rodger: They're Not Worth It

That could have been me.

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.

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 (Tammi), 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.

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:

Untitled

Thought you were a nice girl
Then I saw you drunk
Thought you had good taste in men
Then I saw you with that punk
_________________________________________________________________________________
My Last Endeavor

...Why do so many feel the need to hurt me
When all I'm looking for is hope?
If I open up to many more users
I may reach the end of my rope

This is my last endeavor
I can't take much more pain
This is my last endeavor
Think I'm gonna go insane...
_________________________________________________________________________________
Untitled

...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.
________________________________________________________________________________
What's It Like?

What's it like to be beautiful?
To look good and be adored?
What's it like to receive attention?
I'd like to know

What's it like to be with someone?
Someone who is there for you?
What's it like to have an actual partner?
I'd love to know...

They say you must love yourself
Before anyone else can
But they don't say what it's like
When no one else cares
When you don't matter
To the rest of the world...
________________________________________________________________________________
Self-Loathing: The Remix

...Where's my soul mate, where's my love
Women want to use me and then drop me from above
Step on my broken heart with their six-inch heels
And no one else in the world knows how it feels...
_________________________________________________________________________________

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Can't Sleep, So I Type

Ever 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.

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.

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 in a hotel room trying to fuck Susan's daughter 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 that cruise last year 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.

38 Years Of Gluttony

The 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.

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.

No more excuses.

A Wonderful, Terrible Experience: The Planetdre Cruise Review

It 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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 on a different cruise in November.  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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.