Month the Twenty-Seventh

5.21.25 Think Long and Hard

Think long and hard about what it is you want to say. About why you are upset. Is there even a reason or are your emotions just riled up and you don’t want to feel any more? Why have you been having thoughts of suicide? Is it just because you aren’t getting your way at the moment? What even is your way? What do you want? Are you just threatened by the unknown? There it is again with the questions. But really Richard, what is it that has you on the verge of tears? Are you really losing anything or does it just seem that way? Is it because they said mean things about you? Did they even? Does it matter? Why is this day so much harder than many that preceded it? Why does it feel like this is such a big deal?

Maybe it is because you don’t know what any of it means, and you haven’t been able to discuss it in a meaningful way with the only person who matters. Maybe you are just scared that you are going to once again have empty hours you will have to fill in order that your days pass painlessly. It feels that way today, and tomorrow, well, who knows. I do know that I have been feeling sad ever since the first news of yesterday’s conversation between mother and daughters reached me. I don’t know if that sadness is unwarranted; maybe it is. I just know that everything has been harder today. That I just want to crawl in a hole and die.

That is dramatic, indeed. But so often I find that when life gets hard I am struck by the urge to unalive myself. Maybe that is weakness. Certainly it is fatalism. I do not know why I am so disposed, but in the absence of, or rather the apparent reduction of, happiness, I fold under the pressure. I am a weak man, I suppose, or maybe just a sick one. My parents were scared I was going to get manic and go on a psychotic break earlier, so that feels great. I don’t know what is wrong with me, but certainly something feels wrong. Anxiety, nausea, just general disease. I do not like this sam I am, I do not like it in a car, heaven forbid you find me in a bar. I am not well, but I will not turn to alcoholism to cope. I guess this is my way of coping.

I only wish that writing about it made me feel better, instead of only entombing the bad feeling in ink. I don’t even know why I feel so badly. Maybe it is because I sense a change, a change in the way I am prioritized. Not that I need to come first, always, but it feels dramatic. It feels like a sudden effort is being made to put me in my place. And I have no say in it and everything I do say is just brushed aside with assurances that this is temporary and things will be better in a little while. Only we have gotten here with little to no improvement in relations. It just seems like an intractable or insoluble problem. I do not seem to share Tara’s optimism on any of this. It seems like it got worse overnight and is going to stay that way. Maybe that is the fatalism again.

I do not know what to think, or what to feel. I want to feel differently than I do, I know that. But there is no cure for love, as the bard was fond of saying. Maybe music will cheer me up. God I hope anything can cheer me up.

It is not that the girls want more time with their mom that bothers me. It might be that I have more idle hours to fill that bothers me. It might be some of the things they said about me. It might be that they don’t like me. It might be that I went from having no kids to balancing two teenagers. It might be that I got none of the fun parts of parenthood and all of the terror. It might be that I am in over my head, but what keeps me going is that I have never felt the way I feel about their mother about another. It is a special bond, truly. If it is too much, tell me now, she told me. It is a lot, for sure, but too much, I think not. I am just adjusting and maybe not doing such a good job of it as I could be. I miss being there when she comes home, or shortly thereafter. I miss…what is it that I miss?

I think, when I think long and hard, that I miss the ignorance of how the kids were feeling, the blissful togetherness that knew no bounds, had no guardrails. Now I am living in a world where I feel like a burden, where I feel like an unwanted guest in the house where soon I will be a rent paying resident. Because it is not just that they want more of her, but also that they want less of me. That is what hurts, I think. To be wanted around less. To be more of a bit part and less of a main player. In the life where you were comfortable in the limelight. Where you were comfortable spending every possible moment trying to make her smile. Maybe you just have to change your tact, and in your absence you can bring more smiles than you ever did with your cloying affectations. Maybe you can build a relationship’s bedrock stronger than it ever was. Maybe this is what you need.

You see me trying to look on the brightside. Maybe this has helped me, to write it down and get it out of the stormy brain that has been with me all day, from the bloody cross at calvary to the beach at malibu. To the fourth green at petoskey bay view country club where today I carded a seven. Oh joy, oh lord, I am loose, I am okay, I am not in so bad of shape as I have been all day. My mood has been in turmoil since I woke up this morning. I have been sad, angry at turns, frustrated more often than not, but now there is something like a quiet peace. Maybe that is good enough, maybe I will need more. I do not know, I am a victim to these moods, a passenger on their iterations through what can only be attributed to the manic depressive gamut. Maybe my parents were right to be worried, but having people worry about you is as annoying as just about anything. I want to crawl in a hole, but only because holes are cozy. I think I’ll save dying for another day.

TTFN.

5.22.25 What is a bother to do?

I have had a sad day. Psych appointment this morning where I lied on the questionnaire about my suicidal ideation. I do think about it sometimes, sometimes it does feel like it would be nice to go to sleep and never wake up. And then after my appointment I wept for an hour. As I wept last night, feeling my feels. I wanted to get something done this afternoon but couldn’t muster up any sort of coherent motivation. Querying seems like something I shouldn’t do until I figure out what I am doing wrong, but Tara seems to think that I need to keep putting myself out there. Maybe she is right, but maybe I need a different approach than pulling names out of a hat, as it feels like I am doing now. And I wanted to write a poem but what came out was drivel and I threw it away. So I listened to my sad songs and wallowed. Can you blame me when I was fighting back tears as I set up at work today?

And then I went to dinner by myself because Tara didn’t tell me she would want to hang out with me when her daughter went to soccer practice. I guess I didn’t ask, but it didn’t cross my mind that it would highlight the differences between our commitments and responsibilities in such a stark and, frankly, harsh way. She wasn’t quite mad but she was something like mad as I rode along to drop things off at her storage unit. I would have gone on the garbage run and to get the groceries but I walked to dinner, and then to meet her at her house, so I was a liability, on foot.

Some days it seems like everything goes wrong. Like you cannot win for losing. That every little thing you do annoys your partner, and they have little sympathy for the fact that you started your day weeping uncontrollably. That you have been blessed with a sadness that just about nothing can help, and certainly nothing can cure. It is with me in the best of times, but on bad days it is all I see. It overwhelms me and makes my mother look at me with sadness in her eyes. I hate that feeling, of engendering worry in those that care. And the one I care for most just pissed that I went for a plate of pasta without inviting her. Or jealous, or something, but unhappy, and seemingly with me.

Though there are other factors. Like the fact that she feels she has been failing her children. And says it isn’t my fault, and doesn’t have to do with me even as she’s been choosing me over them for months now (her/their words). Has been choosing her own happiness over being there in the way her children need her to be. I don’t want to contribute to that problem, and so I tried to give her space and time to be there for them, only I forgot about soccer practice and that the older one is almost never home. So I am a bad guy, or at least a bad-leaning-neutral-guy. I don’t know, I feel like I can’t win today, like my sadness is contagious, or at least the bad feelings aren’t limited to just me and my little sick head. I don’t like feeling like people are mad at me, least of all that my partner is mad at me. And maybe she isn’t mad. Maybe she is just struck by the fact that I still have some disposable income, and no one to ferry to or from soccer practice, or to feed when they get home from said practice. She suggested that maybe I should find someone at the same stage in life. I don’t know how she meant it, but I asked her if she was trying to get rid of me, because it sounded a little bit spiteful. Funny how going for a plate of pasta can bring out something like a mean streak in the one you love. I can forgive it though, because I really do love her.

I love her so much that to make her upset, even when I have done nothing really wrong, makes my stomach turn. But that love is all sorts of happy feelings too. I love to watch her float around in the mornings after dropping the kids off at school, managing her time poorly until she is curling her hair at 8:48 and racing out the door with a quick but sweet kiss to me to make it to work by nine. When she lies down to sleep at night and looks over at me through those half closed eyelids and smiles ever so gently at the fact that it is me that is there with her. At least I think that is why she is smiling. I know her being there is why I’m smiling. I know even that this new commitment to be a more present parent for her kids makes me very happy. Not because I have more time to myself, as that is really a downside, for I am not good at filling up idle hours; but rather because it brings me joy to see her focus on things that are important, and being a parent is the most important undertaking most all of us will ever embark on. Maybe we will do it together too someday fairly soon, if the stars align, and I will join in the mystery of all that matters to the next generation.

I do not know how to express how much I care for that woman. Even now, with her slightly miffed, or in a bad mood, or whatever, I write with her in mind, with her smile at reading that last paragraph, or me reading it to her rather. I am not perfect, I make mistakes, I say things I don’t mean, but even on days when I start out weeping, I try to find the strength to end my day smiling. I try to find the little things, like the hip hop barbecue radio that she listens to sometimes, like the way she will look at me later when we lie down to sleep. Like the way her lips felt when I kissed them, reluctant for the cigar on my beard to get so close to her face. Yes I am not perfect, I am a man with weaknesses and vices and sometimes I wonder what it is she sees in me. Maybe on nights like tonight she wonders as well. Maybe that is why I am feeling slightly neurotic.

Or maybe it will all be fine. Maybe it is just a disconnect borne out of a lack of communication. I like to think our relationship is stronger than to be jostled by these minor little things that leave us occasionally at odds. Not that we are even at odds, she just seemed a little mad, a little off. Not super happy with me and the way I conducted my day. But I am doing the best that I can. I am trying to be happy on a day when I bawled my eyes out in the shower. I think I can have a little cacio e pepe, as a treat. And a glass of wine, and a nice walk up the hill that got me to the dollhouse just in time to ride along to the storage unit, even if she was in a bad mood pretty much the whole way. I guess that is the price you pay for treating yourself sometimes. I guess that is the price you pay, or rather just the thing that happens when you aren’t on the same page.

I guess I don’t know what the rest of the evening holds. I don’t know if we will end the day on better terms than we were just on. I don’t know much of anything about what the future holds, I just know I am trying my damndest to be happier than I started the day, and to try not to drag anyone down in the process. Happiness is best when it is shared, and I don’t like it when the ones I love aren’t happy, especially when it is because of something I did. So I will shed no more tears today, my eyelids are already too heavy from the ones I’ve cried. I want it to be tomorrow, but I don’t know what that will bring either. I’m adjusting to spending less time with her on the weeks she has her kids, but I guess today I should have expected to spend a little more than I did. It is an imperfect science, isn’t it, and I’m the imperfect scientist, and hopefully she can forgive me my splurge dinner and not think that I need someone else to match my lifestyle, or whatever she was going on about earlier.

Because I don’t want anyone but her. With all the issues that come along with being a divorcee and a parent to three kids and having to balance all of the things, I want it all. I want to spend the rest of my life putting as many smiles on that beautiful face as I can. I want to be a good partner and then a good husband and perhaps even the father of her last children. As I missed the boat on the first batch, having been twelve when the first one was born. Maybe that sounds bitter, but for all the differences, the age gaps, the freedom that allows me to go out for pasta when she feels the need to prep dinner to make after soccer, I would trade it all to have her by my side through all the tribulations that come with living in the world. I just want her, and I’m willing to give it all up for her, to cook ramen noodles as many nights in a row as necessary to make ends meet should we ever fall on hard times. This time now, when we’re poor and happy together, are the good old days. These are the times I will always remember. Maybe later too, when we grow older together, and maybe raise a child; those will be good times too, but these are the old days, the early days, the days when our cares are few even if they have grown more numerous in the last few days. I still think I would trade everything just to lie down beside her tonight.

That is enough for now, we have rambled on about all of this far beyond the point where the average reader lost interest. I am happy, even if we didn’t exactly connect the last time we saw each other. We will do better later, or we won’t, and either way I will know that I tried. Tried to have a better ending to my day than I had a start. Hopefully we can share in that, and enjoy some closeness as this day draws to a close. Hopefully we can remember the love that we share and forget about the speedbumps that came about today. Hopefully she can think that I’m not just a lazy unmotivated glutton but a man who had a hard and depressive day and wanted a plate of comfort food which he brought to share with her except she didn’t want it. Hopefully she can see me how I see myself, in this instance, and we can smile at each other and kiss goodnight and snuggle each other to sleep. If I had one wish it would be that. So goodnight, L&G, I’m off to charge this beast and then wait to hear when we can reunite. Sorry for the boring entry, I am having a strange day, for the weeping and the conflict. I just want it to be over and for everything to be alright. I love you all so much,

TTFN.

5.23.25 Morning again

Love is a funny thing. Sometimes it sneaks up on you, but I find it always bludgeons you over the head with a blunt object until your brains are splattered and you’re bleeding. It makes everything seem better, or worse, depending on the day, but always more significant. It is feeling like you would like to see someone forever, even after death if such a thing was possible. It is wanting to spend all the time in the world making someone smile, making someone laugh, and feeling sad when you can’t get them to. It is everything, and it is imaginary.

But so are the most important things in life. So is money, so is God. And yet they are all real because we believe in them. It is a matter of faith, of belief that leads us to create the world we have made from the chaos of the jungle. I look out the window at the birds and wonder if they will ever know anything sweeter than the joy of flight. Will they know what it is like to have your partner take you in their arms because they can tell you are sad, to have them squeeze you and then give you a second round of kisses because you said something about the quality of the first round? I think this is an entirely human pleasure, if it can even be called a pleasure. To an extent it is needs being met, it is comfort at an hour when things seem to be bad, when you feel yourself despairing. I have done a lot of that these last few days, and I’m not sure why.

At first it was because of the misunderstanding about what was going to happen on girl weeks. And then it became something deeper, something more existential. Sadness for being alive, for having to go about my day as if I wasn’t sad. And then the compounding sadness of seeing my mom worry about me, that look on her face that was pain at my apparent numbness, or maybe even my pain. I think I can’t figure out why I am sad, but I am exhausted at having been so for a few days. I want to go to sleep and wake up in a few days. I want to know what it is like to be neurotypical.

Not that I am autistic, I don’t think. Or even ADHD, or maybe I am. I don’t put a lot of faith in the diagnostic systems of the world. Maybe it is just the depressive end of the manic depression that is afflicting me now, nothing more than a chemical imbalance driving me down the track to further and further tears. I am sick of crying, I am sick of being sad. I want to smile a little more, I want to feel like we aren’t on a road to ruin as a society. I want to feel like it is all going to be okay, and to actually believe that. The world is a madhouse, has always been a madhouse, and I am feeling it acutely, feeling the ins and outs of all the pain that sweeps over our collective. And I am even in love. Fancy that.

I just want to feel like I belong, like the world cares about my art. I want to look in the bookstore and see a hardcover staring down off the shelves at me. I want to know that everything is going to be okay. I just said that, but I’ll say it again. Why must I struggle, why must I weep? Can’t it all be unicorns and roses, with the thorns stripped by the deft blade of the gardener? Can’t I be the gardener with the deft blade? I am running out of time, so I’m going to go. I don’t know if anyone cares what I have to say. Often I think that they do not. That I am orating to the vacuum, hoping that someday there will be an audience because clearly it is just me myself and I for the moment. But if I successfully keep myself occupied, wouldn’t you say that that is something? I will do anything for you, who has spilled coffee on her car seat. I will do anything to see you smiling. Nothing I have ever known has given me such great joy as that. So carry on, all of you, this morning is for sadness, and coffee, and music that I listened to every day a few years ago.

TTFN,

Richard

5.28.25 Procrastination while waiting for a loved one to come home

There are so many things I could be doing, but this is the one I have chosen. It has been almost a week since I chose to update this, and much has changed. I am no longer sad, I am just tired, a real sleepy head sitting here in the sun as the wind blows the trees around on this beautiful spring day. Summer is coming, long nights and brutally busy days. I did not get to play golf today, but I suppose that is okay. I have played the last few days, even if not particularly well some of the time. Now, instead, it is watching the grass grow and the trees leaf out as the warmer season arrives, and without the rain that was forecast for today. Isn’t it wonderful when they are wrong about things like that? Isn’t it lovely to be alive on a wednesday when baby will be home any minute?

I’m sorry for all the sadgirl entries, and that I got so lost in the sauce of my own emotions that I couldn’t see how good I had it. I still have it good, and I’m lucky for that. It is a beautiful thing to be feeling gratitude for the beautiful and the painful things in this life. It takes a little bit of both to bring fulfillment, I have found, and today as I sit and think about what thai food I am going to order tonight as ants scurry around on the bricks beneath my chair, I am just happy that I am not dead by my own hand as seemed an inviting contingency just a few days ago.

It is remarkable how much can change in a week, or even in a day, and in just a few days we will be moving out of this dollhouse and into a bigger place across town. This is cause for celebration, and I am happy to be along for the ride. It always seems that this is the way it is for me, seldom am I an actor for all the talk of main roles and bit parts in those last entries. Who knows what I was feeling, it feels like ancient history even if it was only a few hundred words ago. Now as I stare at my beat up buick, as I watch the cars pass on the street, I feel only the few hours I laid in bed last night trying to sleep and not being able to. The coffee was not strong enough this morning, nor this afternoon, and it is all I can do to keep myself vertical as I sit here idly waiting for the woman who makes my life complete to come home. 

The flies buzz around, the dandelion seeds float on the breeze. I am delicate as those little puffs, I am sturdy and resilient as the weeds that birthed them, even if I am destined to last a little longer. Flowers and bees, grass and trees. Houses and cars and bare feet beneath the stars. It is going to be officially summer by the astronomical calendar before we know it. It is going to be cancer season before we know it. I am going to celebrate a born day and be another year older, pushing the midpoint of my thirties. And baby is going to be thirty-nine again this year. This will go on for a few more years, won’t it. We are going to have a lot of years to make each other happy, at least I hope. Is that all I have to say, all I have to talk about?

Don’t I care about the state of America, or the state of the world at large? I have never been a big believer in either of those things. Both are founded on fictions that things have ever or could ever be good, I thinks. In fact both have always been bad for most, or at least many. And I doing alright right now even if things are apparently going poorly for some. I do not think I’m at risk of being deported. I do not think I’m at risk of going to prison. I think the world will smile on me and mine for as long as the good God (What is) sees fit. And then it will be deal with it, as best as you can as long as you can manage. It is all not so good even when it is pretty good. The things that feel good are bad for you. The things that feel bad are better. I need to start exercising again, I suppose. Even if it hurts, even if I die. I am going to die, but a little exercise is probably not going to kill me.

Maybe I will find my way into my eighties. Maybe I will grow old and not have to pay for all the cigarettes I have smoked. Maybe I will beat the odds and live to be one hundred and two, as I once predicted. If I even want to live that long. The world could very easily completely go to shit before then. I do not know if we are living through the Christian End Times™ or some other end times, or if things are just looking dicey or if they look dicier than they are, or something else entirely. I am not the judge of the world at large, certainly. I can barely keep a handle on showing up to work on time and not drinking myself to death in my downtime. I can barely handle the emotional distress of being told that I am just another cog in the machine. Maybe I have always been just another brick in the wall.

But that is a depressing thought. Certainly I matter to a number of people. Certainly people care about me, even if they don’t care as much as about themselves. That is natural, is it not? I think I will cut this short and move on with my day, that I will be thankful that I am not as sad as when I last sat to address you. That I can smile at the way my week has gone. Isn’t that a beautiful thing to be able to do? I think so, and I think that it is time to step away and rejoin the living in their rejoicing. I think I will be happy when this week is over and I have to move. I think I will be happy when we sleep for the first time at the new place. Goodnight L&G, I love you all enormously, even when it feels like my heart is breaking.

TTFN,

Richard

6.6.25 Reenter, make light, forget enmity

For we must forgive, must forget the things that made us so wary, must see with new eyes the kingdom of heaven unfolding on Earth. Good God that’s a laugh. This world is becoming more hellish by the minute, even if my little bubble seems to be okay. Just okay, Richard? Isn’t it better than that? Isn’t it a pretty good time, aren’t you happy that you have love in your life and a little money in your pocket and somewhere warm to sleep at night, good food to eat and people around who love you? Could you really ask for a lot more? I contest that you cannot.

You see this world is harsh and meaningless and the big picture thinks itself terribly important and in some ways it is but I told you very early on in this that my world is the cat on the armchair of the sofa and not the news unfolding on the television set. Because the small world is nearer than the big one and the big one is mostly imaginary for most of us. An old friend and I were talking about how poor people just tune out the big picture and go about their little lives with their heads down just trying to be safe and happy and immune to the calamity that the megalomaniacs are spelling out on the world stage. I don’t think I need to be that any more, as I once did, fancying myself God, and so destined to save the world.

You see, in that scenario there are powerful forces of opposition, there are enemies that wish to ruin your life. Maybe I have enemies, I’m not so sure about that. Certainly I have done things that I regret, and wish I hadn’t, and some of those have hurt other people and maybe that has engendered some enmity in them, but I hope it was short lived and everyone can see that I’m just doing my damndest to exist, and to be a good person in the face of all the hard things the world has enforced upon my life. Maybe they haven’t even been so hard, maybe I am being dramatic. But I would say that mental hospitals and up and down mania and depression is not as easy as being totally neurotypical. That I struggle with some things that some people don’t even bat an eye at. Maybe lots of people do, and I do better with some things that are tough for others. Maybe that is just a facet of being human and we are all trying to level the inherently uneven playing field, so to speak.

I do not know, but the omnipresent sadness that permeates my every day and is punctuated by the joy when it comes, like an exclamation or the rupture of a volcanic vent, a little outpouring that goes back to smoldering magma of melancholy once the smiles slip again from my face. That is my burden mostly now that the psychoses are (largely) a thing of the past and I am no longer worried about the devil and his grip on my fate. Instead it is normal fears, like my lady wanting another, or finding another after I am gone and finding him a better lover. Oh gosh, what a man I am, what a typical man with typical male insecurities, wishing to be the best in the few things that cut to the quick of the ego. Like sex, and not much else.

Because that seems to be the point of the whole trip, and few things are more intimate. Few things reveal to us just how raw and fragile we can be than thinking we are not good enough for another. And I with low self-esteem that stretches all the way back into childhood, probably linked to head injuries that seem to have little lasting effect other than perhaps the sadness that underlies the feelings of inadequacy. It is hard to trust another, especially another who loves you, to tell you the truth about something you are obviously sensitive about. And so even when your lover is satisfied you doubt that they are. Even when you can feel them shaking in your arms, pressed against you, joined to you, so intense is their pleasure. Even then you worry that it is a show for your benefit, that you are just not good. I wish I was not so insecure, that I didn’t have trust issues when it came to these intimate, these passionate things.

Because I want to be fulfilled, want to know that I am in a safe emotional space, one where we can just be ourselves and not have to hold back or posture. I guess that is really the thing I fear with the proverbial faked orgasm, that if she’s willing to lie to me about that in order to spare my feelings, what other lies might be tenable? And yet I am learning to trust, to set aside my fears and enjoy the time we have together; not just intimate time but even domestic time, while she powerwashes the deck and I cook dinner, when she does her hair in the morning and I sit on the toilet fully clothed and watch. All the little things that add up to a life, that once in my past did not seem enough for me, did not seem exciting enough. Now I am just happy to have some peace, both inside and out. The world is at war but I am not of the world. I am just a man who sits and looks in the mirror and then wonders if he can bring himself to like what he sees. A man who always fears the worst even if his limited imagination can only make out a fraction of what would really be the worst. Oh the things that keep me up at night when I should be sleeping like a baby.

I think I’m going to go, I think I’m going to get on with my day. I’ve got to go to work soon and I don’t really feel like elaborating on my fraught manhood any more than I already have. I am weak and I am sad and I am insecure. And for whatever reason people seem to like me anyway. To hell with being perfect, I embrace the future as the flawed and probably less happy than I could be man that sits here on this bed staring at this screen and adding letters to the strings that stretch for so so long already. If you are tired of me then go outside and look for the birds that surely populate your yard, assuming you have a yard. This world is full of dinosaurs if you know where to look.

TTFN,

Richard

6.7.25 Six/seven/eight-nine

Three days after Tiananmen Square, where I once had a vision of a single warrior holding off the tanks and troops with a single infinitely repeating machine pistol. Who knows what I was thinking, I have a penchant for reimagining history when I’m manic. Like nukes over Korea or calculating the manhattan project after the fact and running the info backwards through time over gold telephone wires. You see I have an active imagination and know just enough to get the facts wrong in a compelling way. Like my vision of Christ castrated at Golgotha. Sick man, sick man, to think these thoughts.

But today, with the sun shining on this little side porch, I have no complaints, other than maybe that I should not have drank so much yesterday, nor smoked those cigarettes. I am feeling both of those things today in a negative way, and I am thinking maybe about taking a short break to go get a high noon from the party store up the block. It doesn’t seem like that would set me back terribly much, and it would probably ease some of the ill feeling that mixing beer and wine has left me with. And cheap wine, at that. Oh lordy lord you would think by now I would have learned.

Of course I am a slow learner, and often don’t learn anything at all from my mistakes. It is this imperfect comedy that keeps us moving forward as the spiders climb the siding, as the lilacs wilt in the harsh sunlight that promises to burn my skin. I am sweating out yesterday’s toxins as across town baby resists the urge to buy cute shoes just because they are cute. I am wide awake from all the coffee and I have just the slightest tickle in the back of my throat that I recognize as a smoker’s cough. Everywhere I look I see trees and I am grateful for that fact. It is nice to live in a world where giants are among us and so ordinary as to be considered nothing monumental. We know those fuckers have seen some shit, or rather been witness to as seeing requires an organ that it seems they are lacking. But who knows what it feels like to be a tree? Only someone who has been one I suppose.

And I, despite my mother’s maiden name (Arbour), have never been a tree. I am growing into a leafy exuberance as we speak, but even then I will not be able to photosynthesize. I wish I could develop superpowers and save the world from itself, or at least that was what I wished when I was twenty. I thought I was going to end shortage, as if that was really the problem, and not an issue with unequal distribution of resources. As Ray Kurzweil said, the future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed. And I don’t know how much future I have, but I have a smartphone and that is a pretty good start. Who knows?

There are no rules to delivering the future, but in the sun this computer is getting hot and I worry about getting disfigurations on my legs. I saw photos once of people who had them and it was quite unsightly, and certainly something to be avoided. Where was I going? I have forgotten, as my love came home and distracted me with a monologue about being the boss when it came to watering her plants. And now I am back inside with temperatures in this central processing unit returning to more palatable ranges. I stand at the counter and stare out the window at the neighbor’s yard, at the plants growing there. Baby is not the boss of those plants. I am not the boss of anything, I’m just another cog in a machine. But not a brick in the wall. I hope not anyways.

Enough, basta. There is too much deliberation to make a decision through all of this static. I’m going to lie down with the lamb on broadway. I’m going to stand until I fall down of exhaustion. Yesterday is gone and today is a new opportunity. Why do I punish myself for what I think and do? Why can’t I just let it flow off of me like water from a duck’s back? Can’t it all just be easy and clichéd like a meteoric rise to fame and fortune that leaves us in a perfect position to face the future. Maybe instead of worrying about such things I will have a snack and lie down for a nap. The afternoon is young, and I am still young, and so have a lot of life left to live. So we will rejoice in our youth and the potential of our futures. We will laugh at the lions who threaten our broadway lambs. We will look up at the sky and see not infinity but rather a finite if enormously vast distance to the next star. Oh joy, oh rapture, oh raptors, oh happiness.

Good night sweet princess,

TTFN,

Richard

6.8.25 Where were we going with all of this?

The world is a queer place. A place where things do not always make sense. At least not to us, who seem sentient to judge the happenings that make up the shape of our lives. And so we flail forward, seeking love and seeking also to shelter ourselves from hardship. We seek the easy path that brings us the most joy. Maybe I only speak for myself. Maybe I am projecting onto the rest of you the way that I myself am. But that would be okay, because I am the world even if I am not of the world, and of course too I am of the world.

Which is to say that the world shapes every decision I make. I do not exist in a vacuum where the boredom is sufficient. I do not rely on the world to shape my self-worth, however, as I arrive at the low self-esteem I possess with no help from anyone. Surely, I must singlehandedly construct the narrative where I am the loser, and surely it must be as futile as that jamoke in the tuned Honda Civic racing around this neighborhood. Surely both of us are going nowhere, and at a high rate of speed. No, I contest that my narrative does not always have me as the loser, but rather as one who wins in spite of himself. For all the good things in my life I have a hard time constructing a story where I deserve them. Maybe that is my problem.

Because I have done some bad things. Probably most of us have. Rarely have I been cruel, but often have I been mean. Gotten mean, done mean spirited things, and then a great number done in good faith that blossomed into scenarios, bad scenarios, that I never anticipated. Isn’t that the way of this life: led by our instincts into situations we were totally unprepared for. Like this present one, where I sit on this side porch looking out at the trees that distract me from my meandering mentation, my meandering neuroses that have me wondering if I am enough for the one I love.

All the assurances in the world are not enough, always I will be wondering. That is what it is to love a woman you regard as great. Whom you know could have any one she chose. And though she say the same about you, and claims to choose you you will always be doubting that she does in fact choose you, or rather that she choose you and no other. For when you can have any why would you settle for me?

Again with the low self esteem, again with the beating yourself up, again with the feeling that your shortcomings outweigh anything you might be bringing to the table. And when you feel yourself slumping you lean in, until the table collapses and all those good things mingle with the broken glass on the floor. I don’t need to think like that, do I? What good is it doing me to imagine the woman I have slated to be my wife entertaining the prospect of other men to do for her things that I cannot? Are there even things that I cannot do that she wants? Is any of this fear reasonable in the slightest?

These are things that I can never really know. I must lean back against this headrest and trust that the pilot will land the plane. That she will be faithful even if she has opportunity not to be. You yourself probably have opportunity not to be, should you be so inclined. Trust that her inclination, as yours, is null. For she is the world, the sky above and each tree that dots this blighted landscape. As the temperature drops with the arrival of this cold front know that she will sleep beside you tonight and maybe even be a little livelier than yesterday when the sun goes down and you find yourselves alone together.

It is a silly thing to be so insecure, and yet it is a near-constant struggle not to be. Perhaps it is shaped by the world after all. Surely when placed in a vacuum, as in mania, I am the end all be all. It is only from all the things I read and am told and feel about how others in the world are better than I am that all these feelings arise. Instead I will look at my baby in my sweatshirt powerwashing this deck and feel powerful. Will feel like Samson must have before he had his first haircut. As the cold front rolls in and the trees sway back and forth in the westerly wind. There is so little to say as I lean back and let the pilot land the plane. There is so much more I could say but I think what little wisdom I have is telling me to stay my tongue.

TTFN,

Richard

6.10.25 Another day in the blue world

The sun is shining on the street outside but my soul resides in twilight, not quite the blackest night as I thought about putting, because the truth is it is not quite so bad nor so dramatic. I feel only a trifling malaise this morning as I sit with my silence and my coffee. As I try to squeeze one out before I have to get ready for work. It is a real bummer that I don’t feel as happy as I could on this Tuesday, that the blues are here and looking to stay as I gaze out the window at the flowers near the street. I have been sleeping a lot, and only partly to avoid being awake. I have also been very tired. I don’t know if that is the depression but I do know that I once wrote down hypersomnia as an early warning sign for me. Surely not savoring every moment I have with Tara is indicative that I am not 100%.

For now she is gone, off to work before me, and I have this big old house to myself as the clock ticks down toward when I have to go in myself. My coffee tastes good, my feet are firmly planted on the floor, my back barely grazes the cushion behind me. What does it mean? What does any of it mean, that I am wishing for something other than the reality of this day? Wishing for a day together, wishing to feel close to her to dispel the questions that have been running through my head as of late. She is right, we have been going through a lot of changes recently, with the kids, with the new house, the one where stuff is still piled up in the living room where I sit and try to ignore the mess.

Of course I thrive in mess, to a degree. And it is more the imagined distance between us than any circumstantial change that bothers me. I feel like…well I’m not even sure what I feel like. I don’t know what I’m feeling, just that it is slightly unpleasant. I need a tool, ladies and gentlemen, I need help, maybe even professional help. I don’t want to feel like I am missing out on the intimacy that for now is really available every other week. When I have her to myself, when the kids aren’t around. Not that I don’t like the kids, but they need their mom too, you know? And I am just a relatively new on the scene interloper who struggles with insecurities that always seem to be cropping up.

So I wonder, and I worry. And I feel less good than I could be feeling. For reasons I can’t quite put my finger on. Loneliness is a symptom of a deeper, darker disease. And one that I have. One that haunts my nights but especially my mornings, when the whole day is ahead and feels like a chore instead of a gift. And I know it is a gift but I can’t help but feel like there are hours ahead that I just have to pass to get to the part that I want. And then I get to the part that I have been waiting for and I squander it. Because I am tired from the part of the day I didn’t even want to endure. And then I sleep and wake up later than I want and barely get to say goodbye to the one I love and do it all over again.

I know I should be happy that the sun is shining. I know I should be happy that the trees, they grow. I know that love in my life is reason for celebration, and that I must cherish it and nurture it lest it atrophy and fall away. I know all these things but it is hard to bear them in mind when you are mired in your own suffering. Especially when your suffering is internal and rooted in the mind. Surely many people have these problems? Or maybe my depression is mine and mine alone. I’m going where there’s no depression, to a better land that’s free from care. Uncle Tupelo said that. And I hope that’s true. That I can make myself feel better. Maybe I need to start exercising? Maybe I need to write more. And more than just these journal entries where I sit and feel sorry for myself for a few minutes.

TTFN,

Richard