Still Feeling Maudlin

His Main Bike Looked a Little Like This ~ 1937 HD Knucklehead

There is something that I want to write. I can feel it forming in my brain, I can sense it coming out the tips of my fingers, but I can’t seem to find the words. Anyone who knows me well knows that me being at a loss for words is a rare occurrence. It all started this morning before I woke up. I was dreaming of someone whom I love very much, and will probably love in absentia for the rest of my life. It was not the greatest dream. I could see him, but I could not reach him or talk to him. Something was preventing that. Space, time, maybe? I have not seen him since I got married, and to this day, considering what happened in my marriage, I do not know why I chose my ex-husband over this man who never judged me, never had total losses of temper regarding my mood swings (he just held me, and made things okay)….pardon me, I have to stop and cry for a bit. Damn tears came out of nowhere, I am going to have to buy some waterproof mascara for days like these.

Okay, tears dried up. I have no idea exactly where that came from. It is like the chances of rain in my city; it can thunder and blow and have lightening breaking across the sky and the incredibly dark clouds, and not a drop will fall, or the downpour will be so torrential that flood warnings are issued and we are warned to stay out of the arroyos and run-off ditches. That’s what feeling melancholy is like for me. Sometimes not a tear will come to my eye even when by all rights they should, and then sometimes they come out of nowhere to leave black streaks beneath my eyes (hence the waterproof mascara.)

I am lamenting a bad choice. I think that is what it is. I made the wrong decision, and am now regretting it as it was a decision that left me open to a man that did not really care about me (both as a person, period, and as a person with an affective disorder), was abusive in very subtle ways that left me questioning everything about my self as a woman and as a person, was incredibly critical and considered it constructive while I considered it simply criticizing for the sake of being contrary. The man that got left behind was never abusive, never critical, never judgmental, didn’t need to understand my mental issues to be a kind and loving friend; he just inherently understood me, and that I was different than other people. He loved me because I was me. I would wager he still does as he does not strike me as someone who loves easily or lightly. That is something we have in common; I do not love (or trust) easily or lightly. To this day, I wonder how my ex managed to pull the wool over my eyes until it was too late, and I was stuck with the creature he became after marrying. I did see my lover-friend once after I made the mistake of getting married. It was at a bike run that I drove four hours to get to just to see him one last time. 

There is something that bound us to one another that I cannot put in words. It simply was. I told him one night after we had been out drinking beer and listening to live blues at some seedy bar that I needed to tell him something and he wasn’t allowed to think I was crazy. I told him late that night that I loved him, and his response (here we go with the tears again) to me was ” I have loved you for a long time.” That was the only time we said “I love you” to each other, and it never had to be said again. It was just something that was understood. I do not remember my ex ever telling me straight out that he loved me. It was always round about in some way, but it never came out as “I love you.” It was never to the point. I think that he loved the idea of me, but that he didn’t really love me as a real person with strengths and flaws and quirks. 

The odd thing is the two men were fairly close in age, but they could not have had more different outlooks on life. Whereas one told me the last time he had use for a tie was in 1967 to tie his bedroll to his bike before taking off for Mexico, the other lamented the fact that he had no real reason to wear any of his extensive and expensive collection of ties. How did I make the choice to abandon my true lover-friend for my ex? Or maybe the question ought to be how did my ex convince me he was someone he was not; that he was open-minded, quirky, silly, serious, funny, liked the same things I did, had a similar sense of humor, liked to make me blush with some comment that usually took me a while to figure out completely, liked to tell me when I was walking to “stop fast”, wished he could play blues on the guitar and had since he was a boy, and was basically a complete pervert (but in a good way, not a damaging way?) That’s the question I cannot answer, and that is what I ponder frequently when I wake up dreaming of my lover-friend. 

Old Lovers Enjoying s Quiet Time by the Lake

Anniversaries

What is it about anniversaries of significant moments in our lives; both good and bad and some that are both at the same time? Is it the mind that remembers these times? Is it our heart that keeps these dates close? Or, are these moments so engraved upon our being that we cannot seem to forget? I only wonder as I have in the past when a significant date is coming up or has passed which of these questions is the true question. Or, if they all have correct answers.

On August 29th of this year I will have been divorced for one year exactly even though the process took a couple of months. What is bothering me is how I feel about it. I feel sad, but I also feel a sense of relief, I feel failure as this is or was the only time I got married, but at the same time, I feel the divorce was successful as it restored me to a form of equilibrium, I feel freedom, but also a sense of being shackled as I now have to start the whole process all over again, and I am not the free-wheeling 20-something that I used to be. I am now a grown woman that will not settle as I used to. I have my ways of doing things that will conflict with another’s ideas about how things should work. I have much higher standards than in my college years. I know exactly what type of man I want, and I am afraid that he got away when I decided to get married to someone that I share very little with. Hence, the divorce that I initiated.

I always believed that I would get married once and only once, and so I waited until I thought the right man had come to me. I still believe that I will marry once and only once because of the trauma that relationship put both of us through, the verbal abuse (he saw it as constructive criticism), the emotional neglect has only begun to heal, to suture those gaping wounds left in my heart and my mind. 

As the date approaches, I feel more and more anxious. I am concerned that I will not meet another man like the one I knew. The man who loved me so unconditionally that he even loved my mood swings, my paranoia, my anxiety attacks, and my being prone to fatalistic thinking. He loved me with all my quirks, strengths, flaws, and craziness. Nothing could rattle this man. If I was having a bad day, he hugged me, kissed the top of my head, said nothing and left, but I felt better. I told him one time that I loved him, only once. His response was “I have loved you for a long time”. He said it once, but he meant it with all his heart and soul. We only had to say it once. It did not need to be confirmed. That we loved each other just was. It scares me to think that there may only be one man like this, only one man who fit so neatly into my heart that I loved him without question, and he loved me in return. Here comes the “what if” question; what if he was the perfect “soul mate” for me, and I for him and I lost him to marry another who was anything but?

I do not like anniversaries at all, but at least now I am old enough to have gained the wisdom that time does not heal all wounds, but it does make them bearable. However, right now, with the date looming just a a little less than a month away, I feel like a scab has been picked off and I have become a member of the walking wounded. I think I have answered my question; these dates are engraved upon our being, and as humans, we will never completely forget. Forgive, yes, forget, no. I do not believe it is our nature to forget. I hope I am wrong about that.

A Bit Of Melancholy On A Sunday Afternoon ~ Fire and Rain

This has always been one of my favorite James Taylor songs, and with the learning of a very good and long-time friend’s serious illness, I have been a bit melancholy as of late.

 

I Need To Go Somewhere Else ~ I Shall Go Completely Mad If I Stay Here

Over Now (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

I know it’s bad when I have forsaken my Alice in Chains, Pink  Floyd, and Nine Inch Nails for Marilyn Manson. I think I am slowly going mad. The Christians have a saying that God does not give more than you can handle. That’s a nice sentiment but I am Buddhist, and everything that is good in my life and everything that is bad in my life is all my own doing (or undoing, as it appears to be). I am the source of the answer and the problem, and I have no answers, just problems. I can no longer see any light at the end of the tunnel. It has gone out, or the lantern bearer is on break. I feel like I am in the boat crossing the river Styx with Charon at the helm, and he is taking us further and further down the river towards Hades and away from the light.

My soon to be ex-husband is closed up in his little room with the door shut watching his porn, and diving deeper into his fantasy life. I wish I had a fantasy life. I have always been too practical and logical to have much of an active fantasy life. To me, if it wasn’t something tangible I could touch, it didn’t exist (I know that sounds a little like Kant‘s philosophy that as soon as an object is out of sight, does it cease to exist?), if it could not be proven scientifically, I had no use for it. I do not believe is God, so that is out of the question. It would be so nice to just be able to “turn my problems over to God” and let him/her deal with the hows and the whys. But I can’t see or touch God, therefore he/she doesn’t exist in my realm. I wish I could “Let go and let God,” or whatever that bumper sticker says. But, how can one turn one’s problems over to an entity they cannot prove the existence of? That’s too much of a leap of faith for me. It requires trust in something I cannot touch, see or conceive of.

So, I am becoming increasingly stuck in my own mind which is not a good place to be right now. I cannot seem to achieve the mind-heart disconnect that I have been able to successfully complete in the past. Even though he has taken away my sense of myself as attractive and sexy which are very feminine yearnings. I had that sense once, but that part of me is under deep cover right now. I know I should be mad about that, but somehow, I have decided that everything that went wrong with this relationship is my fault. I wasn’t tolerant of his porn addiction (and it is an addiction, at this point), I did not act or do things the way he expected a wife to do. I am NOT going to clean the house in lingerie and high heels as he seems to have come to believe that “real and sexy” women do. Porn has warped his sense of gender roles and sexuality in general. And, yet he claims to know the difference between the reality of marriage and the “fantasy women.” No, he doesn’t. With addiction came the blurring of the line, just like it does with any addiction. However, I felt very disrespected, and said so on more than one occasion. He didn’t listen. Junkies do not listen to people telling them they are sick. They believe their behaviour is within the realm of the normal. I have been an addict. There is nothing normal about it. 

I cannot decide how I feel. I am decidedly not manic, nor am I particularly depressed. I am extraordinarily stressed out, and I am sad. I can tell because I am dropping weight like I was actually dieting. But, the truth is I cannot eat. I cannot sleep for more than 4 or 5 hours a night. This is going to drive me mad. Not nuts, I am already there, but completely mad. The kind you may or may not come back from in the same form you had before. There is no going back, anyway. Every experience shapes you for the better, the worse or both. This is a both situation. I have changed for the better in some ways, and for the worse in others. Like my trust factor is shot right now. I entrusted him with my heart and soul, and he broke my heart. There is nothing on this planet that I will likely experience at this point in time that will break my soul. I have already been through that, too, and lived. It took a while to pull the pieces back together, but I did it, and came out stronger.

Okay So I Am On An Old Childhood Song Kick Today

Cover of The Beatles (The White Album)

 

I tend to have better memories of my “formative” years before things got all weird in my family, and between me and my Dad through music and the lyrics. I am in a reminiscing mode. Sorry  🙂 My Dad loved the Beatles, and I happen to really like The White Album, so here we have “Dear Prudence”

 

Dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play
Dear Prudence, greet the brand new day
The sun is up, the sky is blue
It’s beautiful and so are you
Dear Prudence won’t you come out to play

Dear Prudence open up your eyes
Dear Prudence see the sunny skies
The wind is low the birds will sing
That you are part of everything
Dear Prudence won’t you open up your eyes?

Look around round
Look around round round
Look around

Dear Prudence let me see you smile
Dear Prudence like a little child
The clouds will be a daisy chain
So let me see you smile again
Dear Prudence won’t you let me see you smile?

Dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play
Dear Prudence, greet the brand new day
The sun is up, the sky is blue
It’s beautiful and so are you
Dear Prudence won’t you come out to play

 

I Am Not Sure How I am Feeling Today…….Somewhere Between Completely Pissed off and Sad (Warning: contains profanity)

i have had it. I have reached the end of my rope. I cannot stand people today. I tried to

Ever have a day/week/life like this?

do something that I thought would be appreciated by an certain individual yesterday. Turns out the road to hell really is paved with good intentions, but I had no idea it came with undeserved criticism, and a 15 minute long chastising discussion (one sided) about how what I had done was completely wrong. WTF!!?!?!??!

Then, to add insult to injury, said person said they recognize that our thought processes were different: first and foremost because of my “illness,” it is always my fucking illness first, then other reasons such as different backgrounds, different life experiences, etc. But, always the “illness” first and always foremost. Yeah, I have had a much harder life than said individual. But, I, in many ways “chose” that lifestyle based on things that happened to me when I was much younger. Much, much younger. Like barely 16.

I did not ask for the event that occurred and I was in no way old enough to process it. So, I buried it with drugs and alcohol. I did not know what else to do. (There goes the fucking phone again. I am going to rip them out of the wall). When I brought up that snorting speed and cocaine for about 6 years isn’t real healthy for the lungs either (not to mention you tend to chain smoke while high on stimulants), said individual says to me: “You know you always try to compare your experiences like they are similar to others’.” Snorting coke and speed is not good for any part of the body involved. You snort the stuff up your nose…..not good for septum and sinuses. Since you are snorting it, it goes straight into your lungs. That’s fucking healthy, and then you chain smoke. How is that different than smoking for 40 years? Fuck this person. Who the hell do they think they are? Who the fuck died and made them capable of walking on water while the rest of us drown?

So, said conversation (again one sided) basically went something like this. No thank you for trying to do something nice, just you know I cannot smoke commercial brand cigarettes because of the additives. I have to smoke pure tobacco. Said individual has been smoking since I was born, maybe they should quit if brand name cigarettes are going to have such a negative effect. Smoking any cigarette is going to be bad for your throat, lungs, mouth, etc. Then said individual pointed out that when they bought cigarettes for us (yes, I took up smoking after then “incident when I was 16”), that they always got the ones with no additives even if it meant driving further. Well, as people who read my blog know, I totaled my car for the New Year (January 5th). So,I have to drive another car that I am not entirely comfortable with (it is huge compared to my old car.) So, I went as far as I could before the anxiety set in.

I am so fucking sorry I tried to do something that I thought would be appreciated. Won’t happen again. Trust me. I may make mistakes all the time (due to my “illness”), but I do learn from some of them. This one I learned from. Good intentions are not appreciated. I feel taken for granted, I feel like I do not ever want to try to do anything nice for this person ever again.

Oh, and then there is what I found in my email yesterday from my Internet company. Apparently, I downloaded a “film” back in December from some company DBA as “Devil‘s Films”. First of all, I would not be looking at “films” produced by such a company: I find that I lose interest in about a nanosecond, and they are not my preferred viewing material. Apparently, this was a niche film involving two “grannies” getting down with each other. WTF would I be doing watching that kind of crap? I am 41 years old. Not 65. Were I not to be completely bored by the genre in general, I would prefer younger people, with a plot that actually tells a story….. not just two or more people doing their thing with each other. Now that I have finished raving and ranting about that, here comes the real problem. The account is in my name, with my email, my address. I “own” the account. It doesn’t matter what someone else does with it, I am the responsible party. I am the one who could get fined, I am the one who could be criminally prosecuted. Not the dipshit that downloaded the “film” in the first place. And, then said jackass says, “I don’t even have the video anymore. It was boring so I deleted it”.

Does not matter if the “film is still on the computer or not. The point is that it was downloaded in the first place. And the Internet company knows it. It came from my router’s IP address, it has my router’s MAC address, it has everything associated with the router’s configuration. My router and my IP and MAC addresses. That’s how it was traced in the first place. I am not a techno-idiot. I know how to trace people from their IP addresses and the MAC address of the computer. I can pin it down to a physical address, in whatever town, city, state. I can pull up satellite maps of the area. This is how the company discovered the copyright infringement.

For crying out loud, if you are going to risk the fine and/or jail time, why download two grannies getting it on. If that’s what you are into, you are married to a person in the wrong age group. Even at 41, I am considered in this realm as “mature,” meaning I am not 20 something. Find a new fucking hobby (pardon the bad pun). Like, oh I do not know, paying attention to your wife who is very close to leaving you, or at least, getting what she doesn’t get at home somewhere else.

I have never cheated on a lover before, but I am getting damn close. I get no attention, no affection, it is a given that I will clean the kitchen and cook dinner. No thank you’s. Those are implied. It may be implied, but it is nice to hear once in a while. I am so close to ending this relationship so I don’t end up cheating because I have very strong feelings about that. My father cheated on my mom with a family “friend” for about 6 years until they both divorced and then married each other. So, I have a thing about cheating. It is wrong. Break up first if you think you are going to the dark side. That way  no one gets seriously hurt, and there is no having to forgive and forget. I am that close. But, considering what my mom went through, I just cannot do it. I will divorce first. It’s not like this is a marriage anyway. He sleeps on the couch and has for about 3 months. I sleep in the bed, and I won’t let him sleep there anymore. It has been about the same amount of time since we had sex (I know, overshare), but it is relevant to my wanting to cheat. I don’t understand.

My “illness” has not popped up recently which said person claims is why they are sleeping on the couch and we are not engaged in “normal” marital relations. I am 41 freaking years old. I still have a very healthy sex drive, and I do not even get kisses or hugs. I am talking zero physical affection. And, he wonders why I don’t put on my lingerie anymore. It such an obvious answer. The last few times I have tried that, I got  shot down in flames, and felt like such an idiot. Since I do not feeling like an idiot for trying to initiate sexual relations with my husband, I stopped. No reaction, no sexy lingerie. That’s the way it works. What is the point if you get no reaction? You just sit there all dolled up while he watches PBS Newshour or some shit like that. It is humiliating. I am just going to let him have his “fantasy” amateur porn stars. They seem to do more for him than I can.

Besides, It is not like I am ugly. Quite the opposite. I am not beautiful, but I am very pretty. Coke bottle figure, a little more voluptuous than I would like to be, but not bad. I am well proportioned, I have eyes that change from grey to green, I have a large chest (which he claims he has always liked in women; not me apparently). Basically, I have no problem finding men. Most women don’t because men are, in general (not always), interested in one thing from women, and it isn’t philosophical conversation. Robin Williams once said that men only have enough blood to run one head at a time. True.

So, I am completely pissed off while at the same time really sad. Mixed-episode? I do not think so. I think everything in my little world has collapsed, and I am not handling it as well as I could be. I am getting angry, I am getting depressed, I am feeling unloved, unwanted, undesirable, not sexy (even though I know some guys who would disagree, just not the main one), I do not even know why I spend so much time doing my make-up (unless it is to out-do other women; this is likely. Women are catty like that).